• I shipped a small project I was working on for a friend to automate some data collection from Texas Commission on Environmental Quality's website. The work itself wasn't too much different than Airbot but instead of being a full-blown django app requiring a server, it's a lambda function that runs for a few minutes each day.


• I rode the train for the first time since February-ish. This kind of blows my mind as one of the things I love about Japan is the abundance of mass transit. But I also haven't been going too far out of a 5km radius from my house on a regular basis either, so it makes sense.


• I did some exploring of the neighborhood behind ours on a long walk with Sophie over the weekend. It feels oddly American, but not. The streets are wide, there's sidewalks on both sides, every house is offset from the curb with a small garden, it's quite nice. But it's also not nearly as American Sanda, Hyogo


• I saw this great ad for the Harris County Public Library. I hope that ads like these help encourage people to use the library.


• I ran my fastest 5.09km to date at 32 minutes 30 seconds. Edging closer to the elusive 5km in 30 minutes.

In Shonandai there's a great restaurant about a minute from the station called New Orleans. With a name like New Orleans, you'd think they specialize in gumbo, or other creole specialties, but you'd be wrong. They specialize in pasta. Tomato sauces, cream sauces, and, my favorite, Japanese-style soy-sauce flavored pasta. The entire street smells like garlic everyday, it's great.

When I go during summer their ice coffee is a particular joy because they serve it in frozen copper cups. Perfect for the heat of Japanese summers.

Today I went with a friend and fellow Kanagawa-ian who I hadn't seen since the beginning of the year, Sam. It don't think I've seen Sam since early February, when covid was mostly contained on the cruise ship in Yokohama. It was great to catch up with same, talk about exploring Kanagawa, blogging, and the indie web. I don't think I've spoken that much English...since the last the I saw Sam, now that I think of it.

New Orleans' chicken and burdock root pasta is my favorite and I look forward to going again.

Only slightly cooler than running on the sun. At 5am. 🌞🏃

This past week was the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. I found this article "Hiroshima" on the New Yorker that goes into detail about the actual experiences of survivors in the days and weeks afterwards and it's sobering. Not just because of single event, as they're all sobering, but the sheer volume.

It's a long read (~100 pages) and well worth your time. What's more is that it's not based on long-ago recollections. This article was originally published in August 1946.

• I gave a presentation about towncrier, a utility to help generate changelog files in Japanese. Summary of the talk is as follows: For each branch that you're working on, you create a changeling file e.g. 12345.feature.rst. When you run towncrier it will group changelog files based on the type (feature, bug fix etc...) and prepend it to your changelog file. Having those changelog files in your branch makes managing multi-branch staging/test branches. And since you can put whatever you want in the content of the changelog file, you can add release instructions, which makes manually/semi-automatic deploys easier.


• On my run on Monday morning, I ran towards Sakaigawa river. I used to live on the other side of it and run along it regularlly. I was hoping to run on it longer than I did, but it was about 0.5 - 0.75km further than I had anticipated to get there. On the way back, one of the houses close to the river's rooster started crowing. I'm sure the neighbors love that.


• Went to Ikea by car for the first time. Still getting used to Japanese highways and learning where lanes come and go, so it's always an adventure. The cafe was as busy as ever, but they didn't have any meatballs :(. Slowly getting used to the ACC (adaptive-cruise-control) and LKA (lane keep assist) on my Honda Freed. ACC and LKA combined and it drives itself down the road. Looking forward for this all to be over so can do some road trips.

First time by car.

Run down to Sakai-gawa and mostly back. Used to run along it when I lived in Shonandai. Miss those summer rice paddies.

Love these Shinkansen videos. Fun to watch with Leo in the mornings while we play trains. Learn new things and get to see the Japanese countryside.

Another hot run. Short so I don’t die.