• This week I have a couple of stitches in my face...thankfully hidden by glasses. Let me explain. For the past few months I've been monitoring a small spot on my face about 0.5cm from the location where I had a basal cell removed over a decade ago. The new spot hasn't been getting better on its own and is exhibiting the exact same characteristics as my first basal cell. I've heard horror stories of people going to the dermatologist (or any doctor in Japan, really) and the doctor ignoring what patients are telling them...so I kept putting it off (Though sometimes I wonder if the stories are partially as people are not proficient enough explain the situation?) 
  
  Either way, I couldn't deny it any longer and went to the dermatologist to get it checked out and...she listened to me , took me seriously, and did a biopsy. I'll have the results in 2 weeks, but I'm fairly confident it is a basal cell. Last time I had surgery to remove it and a plastic surgeon to sew me back up... this time I may go for a chemotherapy cream and see if it clears up before taking another knife the face.
• Which is to say, I'm really happy that the kids as Leo's school noticed that Leo's not getting super dark like everyone else is, despite them both playing outside. This is because we're ensuring he wears his sunblock everyday and re-apply when we're out for extended periods of time. If there's any takeaway from the first two points this week it's please be sun smart: wear your sunblock and keep covered.
• I built out support for backfeeding my runs from Strava into Tanzawa. I put this off for a long time because I couldn't decide how I'd make the actual post in the db. Do I make a new "activity" type and try to microformat that and...ugh. That's when I decided to just make them a note/status post, relate the run to it, and have the template look for extra information (photos, run paths etc...).
  

  

  
  The results turned out ok, so far. This will allow me to save time from making blog posts with the same photos I just posted to Strava and then manually tooting about it. There are some limitations. Strava only makes the primary photo available in their API and there doesn't seem to be a way for me to backfeed likes / comments as webmentions.
• Leo and I took Sophie for a walk after dinner on Sunday, after it started cool down.  I've been looking forward to being able to walk Sophie with Leo for...since he was born. He's got enough endurance where he doesn't walk half a block and get tired / ride my shoulders.  Walks are also great, if not the best, time to talk about life and communicate.
  
  On this week's walk, forever obsessed with Zelda, we were pretending we were walking through Hyrule. As we're walking past creeks there's those little water blobs that throw rocks at you, which we were able to get with an imaginary bow and arrow. As we come along a straight stretch in the road Leo turns to me and says "Oh shit, rock guys!", and dutifully threw a bomb to take care of them. I look forward to our next walk around Hyrule.

Search DSLs can give a user more granular access to searching without exposing an overly complicated interface.

GitHub issues provide a DSL that’s accompanied by UI elements. An example query for searching issues would be:

is:open author:danlamanna

We can create something similar for use in a custom Django application.

1. Tagged with
2. python
3. search
4. django

• This is post #156 of The Week, which means it's the 3rd year of posting this series! I'm happy that I haven't missed a week or been off schedule once during these 3 years, though there has been a couple of point where I questioned if I should continue. This series is the one thing that's kept me blogging regularly, I think. Each bullet point in a The Week post doesn't feel like enough to warrant a post, but combined they do. If you're wanting to blog / blog more, I highly recommend starting with this approach. Here's to the next 3 years 🍻.
• I bought the Nissan Sakura. We picked blue and it's similar enough to our current blue that bystanders passing our house may think we've accidentally put our car in the wash and it shrunk. We won't get it August or early September. That said, I'm really excited to get a smaller, electric, car. If it weren't electric, I don't think we'd be switching. I tooted about it, but negotiations when buying a car is the part of the car buying process I hate the most. Especially when the car isn't having problems selling, because they give less ground. 
  
  In the end I managed to get ¥75,000 off the top and take part in a campaign that doesn't start until next month. In the campaign you get 4 different things: ¥5,000 in Yokosuka city voucher, a ¥5,000 yen gift from a catalog, ¥20,000 if gift cards, and pair tickets to a "famous amusement park" (probably Disneyland)...so probably around ¥50,000 in value. Unrelated to negotiations there's also ¥550,000 cashback from the government (will take a couple months after receiving the car for them to deposit) and ¥80,000 from Nissan to support installing a car charging port on my house. After selling my car ¥1,800,000 and including all incentives I'm only paying about ¥1,000,000 for the car ($6,959.02 with today's horrible exchange rate).
• As part of selling my car, I have to prepare a couple of documents for selling / buying my car. Theoretically I can do this now from the big copiers at 7-11, but I wasn't sure if I could get my stamp registration certificate or not, so I went to city hall. Either it's years of experience or city hall digitizing their systems or a combination of both, but it was completely painless. No long lines or anything. I was in and out in probably 10 minutes.
• I've been noticing more and more EVs on the roads lately, which makes me happy for air quality, noise, and climate reasons. Naturally since I've been looking at Sakuras, I've realized just how popular they've become (over 40k sold in a year). There's also more EV postal vans and postal bikes. The one category of transport I haven't yet seen electrified in Japan is the trucks that visit each combini multiple times a day to deliver fresh goods. I swear you can see the particulates in the air when these things pass. I hadn't seen one until this week when walking to the office and it made me really happy.