Love Notes to Newton is a film about what a beloved (but short-lived) pen-based Personal Digital Assistant created by Apple Computer has meant for the people...

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• 🎄 Christmas was this week. We celebrated a couple of days early with the ancient Japanese custom of eating KFC and a nice cake (pistachio cream with strawberries) with my wife and her family. Unlike previous years, because we celebrated 2-days prior, the cake shop, even with a reservation, was not complete chaos.
  
  For Christmas day itself we kept it fairly low-key. We got Leo a Link (Archer) Amiibo and Super Mario Maker 2. Santa brought him a 500 page Zelda: Breath of the Wild guidebook. Happy to say he loves it all. I got an awesome sweat shirt, so I can wear something besides plaid during winter 😀. Yumi got a nice pair of gloves.
  
  We often make a trip to the beach during Christmas / New Years. Not to go swimming, but just to enjoy the clear air and less crowds. This year we went on Christmas day. It's been a couple of years since we brought Sophie with us on these...and she was excited to come along and run around in the sand, dig, and get some sniffs in.
  

  

  
  The city was doing some maintenance and they had made some huge piles of sand on the beach. Every so often there was a kei-truck taking a load of sand and dropping it along the beach.
  

  

• 🗡️ Speaking of Zelda we got the Master Sword in breath of the wild. We finally got enough hearts to get it.
• 🏃‍♂️I went for my first run since my surgery a month ago. It was a lot of fun and I didn't realize how much harder running was because of my leg. Usually even just 5 - 6 minutes in my legs would feel heavy but I'd plod on with mental fortitude alone. This time though my legs felt fine the entire run. That heaviness never came. I thought that heaviness was just my legs being weak or not being used to running...turns out it was reverse flow. Looking back, I'm amazed I kept running like that...but I reckon it was just as I didn't know any better 😆.
• 🏢 This week was my last week of work for the year. I kinda like my new routine of the last and first month of the year is being off. I was thinking about it what all changed in the past year...and beyond the product itself, I went from leading a team of 4 (myself included) and now I'm leading a team of 16 (myself included, divided into a few different squads/regions/continents), which boggles my mind.
• 🇪🇸 I started looking at tickets for a work-trip to Valencia, Spain next month. I'm really looking forward to meeting up with teammates who I don't get to regularly sit down with and some of whom I'll be meeting for the first time. I'm equal parts excited to eat some paella from the birth place of it... scared it will ruin it whenever I have it anywhere else.

• 🎉 We had our end of the year party at work. As the team has grown so much in the past year, it's difficult to find a restaurant that can fit us all, so we cruised along the sumida river. We have two traditions in Japan: 1) We dress up nice, and 2) Someone writes/reads a Christmas poem in front of the group. For number 2, the person who needs to write/read the poem is given 48 hours notice.
  

  

  
  Why do I mention the 48 hour rule? Because this year, I was picked 😱. I'm someone that's never understood / gotten poetry (I reckon this is typical of programmers), so I had a bit of a panic when I first heard about it. Thankfully, in this past year, the machines have gotten a lot smarter, so I was able to augment my creativity and write a poem quickly. I'm also happy to say that the poem was well received.
  

  

• 🎄 The following day was Leo's school's Christmas pageant.  We've seen the it 3 times now, each year Leo has been at school. The past two years the pageant had been at the city's auditorium, which made it feel quite special. I thought that was normal, but they only held it there because of covid. This year it returned to being held at the school itself...which made it feel less special and wasn't as comfortable (not enough seating for everyone/3 rows of chairs vs theater style seats on an incline).
  
   Each year his role has changed - and as a top year they put on a play where each kid had a speaking part. When it was Leo's turn to say his line he spoke his line's loudly so we could all hear them.
• 🥳 The next day Leo's cousin came to town and we celebrated his birthday. We ate sushi and for dessert we had the one cake that all of the kids have been wanting since they saw it: a Mario themed ice cream cake from Baskin Robbins. Happy birthday Leo's cousin, 11 years old!
• 🎅 The following day we went to a Christmas party at a school friend's house...and it was a lot of fun. One of the dad's that I chatted with when helped set things up at sports day was there and we got to chat more. We barbecued and drank sparkling wine under the clear blue skies. We also promised to barbecue by the local river next time so we don't need to worry about the neighbors. Looking forward to it.
• 🐙 A small work update this week. In The Week #165 that we were looking for a Senior Product Manager to join the team and this week they started! I'm really excited about this one. The other neat thing that happened is we got a $800 million dollar round of investment so we can accelerate growth and expansion of low-carbon tech. Very exciting times!