• The Week #104

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    • This post marks 2 years of doing "The Week" 🎉.  As things "open up" (they were never closed) and life returns to normal, I'm finding it difficult to remember to write these posts. But once I do sit down and write them, I am grateful I took some time to reflect on the week.
    • The Rainy season ended this week in Tokyo – 2 - 3 weeks early than it should've and we didn't even get much rain (I feel). It's been hitting over 35C in Yokohama, which is mid-summer temperatures. Hopefully we'll get some good summer rains to help cool things down. As a kid, I used to like summer, but any more I mostly dread it. How much hotter is it going to be this year because we continue to dig stuff out of the ground and burn it?
    • America continues its backwards slide with Roe vs Wade being overturned. We all knew it was coming after the leak, but it's still shocking and disappointing. The Democrat's response to this has also been fairly tone-deaf...reading a poem? Singing "God Bless America"?...and tell us to effectively vote harder? We did. We do. Give is details for how you're going to codify this into law. We can't rely on this court, full of people who lied under oath to secure their seat, to make impartial decisions. The only politician that I see communicating effectively about this is AOC.
    • I played a bit with Fly.io in an attempt to get Tanzawa deployable without running your own server. I couldn't get it running as I kept getting "Command not found" errors, when fly ran the container. This is confusing as the command exists when I run the container locally...another one for next week, perhaps.
    • I found this song by CHOUJI - 奮闘中 (funtou-chu (hard at work)) and I really like it. I used to listen to a lot of J-hiphop/J-reggae when I was in college. I should do more of that. 

  • The Week #103

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    • Regular readers of this blog know that despite me owning a car,  I'm not a fan of them. As such, I try to use my car as little as possible. 

      Each time I drive it, I know I'm making climate change worse and I add another car to the streets, which make the streets, no matter how careful I drive, a more hostile environment for pedestrians and cyclists. I sometimes wonder if I had an EV instead of a fossil fuel burning car that I'd be more willing to use my car (but this would result in a worse environment for not-cars (and arguably cars, too...)).

      But I digress. This week I filled up my car with gas. The last time I did this was February 12th of this year. 4.5 months ago. I'm getting awfully close territory of the gasoline in my car going bad. Makes me happy but also a bit sad (such a waste of money buying a car I don't use...which also makes it difficult to argue to replace it with something electric).
    • Leo's swimming class this week had some survival swimming training this week. Survival in the sense of "what happens when you fall in the water wearing your clothes", so they don't panic. They also practiced using improvised floating devices, in our case an empty 2L pet bottle.
    • Sunday was Father's Day. We went out to Minatomirai in Yokohama and just hung about. Leo played in the water features in front of the art museum and MarkIs. There's signs that say not to, but everyone does it. I think it's just a liability thing. I saw a number of kids slip and fall, a few hit their head and after a cry get back at it. Leo was wearing water so he didn't have any issues with slippage.

      We also rode a few rides at the Cosomo World across from Queen's east. I've never seen / ridden a merry-go-round with 2 stories on it. The ride was quite short (only 2 minutes?), but it takes around 5 minutes for the staff to get everybody on / temperature checked etc... All good fun.
    • Nacho, my jalapeño plant, is absolutely thriving. Really looking forward to having fresh jalapeños. Depending on the number and when they're ready, I may also make some jalapeño poppers (cream cheese stuffed jalapeños) on the grill (my mom sent me a stand used for grilling them shaped like an armadillo years ago in shipment of stuff, thinking it was mine (it wasn't). That stand is currently keeping my compost elevated off the ground).
      Jalapeõs!

  • The Week #102

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    • While Leo was at swimming, I finished reading Digital Minimalism. There's too much (good) for me to say about it in this post. It certainly made me in the right frame of mind when reading technology is diminishing us (thanks Colin for the link), as  I was shaking my head in agreement the entire time.

      One of my main takeaways was to schedule on your calendar explicit time for  leisure. Too often we say we don't have time to do something, but we do, we just don't prepare for it. We often thing "great, I have an entire day to myself", then we don't plan what we're going to do, and end up just scrolling or binge watching one of the streaming services.

      The other  main idea was this leisure should be active. That doesn't mean it needs to be physical, reading literature is active as it requires you to think. While programming on Tanzawa technically fits the bill, I don't think it should count as active leisure as it's mostly the same as what I'm doing at work. Already this shift in mindset is helping me run more.
    • Speaking of Tanzawa, I gave a tech talk about Tanzawa and the IndieWeb at work. Unfortunately, I forgot to click the record button, so only members of the team that were there that day / in Japan could see it. Preparing the talk made me realize just how far it's come in the past year and a bit...The good news is it encouraged one teammate to resume her site some more and another co-worker is interested in using Tanzawa itself :)
    • There's this German beer chain that I'd been meaning to visit for the past 2.5 - 3 years, but you know, covid. I finally had a chance to go there for beers and sausage with a friend in Fujisawa. I also got to deliver some Marmite as a taste of home for my friend. He asked if I got a jar for myself to try it...but alas, I chickened out.
    • The Yen hit a 24-year low against the dollar at ¥135 per dollar. We keep thinking about a trip back to the US so Leo can meet his grandparents, but with flights being around $6,000 and the exchange rate what it is, it would easily cost $10k just for a week or so back... Hopefully the exchange rate sorts itself out to more regular ¥105 - ¥110 per dollar rates. If it decides to dip to ¥75 per dollar (the rate after 3/11 when my parents were visiting us) while we're in the US, I wouldn't mind, either. 

  • The Week #101

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    • I spent most of this week recovering from jet lag, trying to get back into groove of regular life. After managing to go two weeks without catching the 'rona,  it's all finally caught up with me and I caught a small cold.
    • I finally got around to doing my US taxes this year. Thankfully Americans abroad have a 2-month delayed due-date. Doing my taxes is always hugely stressful. Not because they're complicated, but because the software I was using (TurboTax) isn't designed for Americans abroad, you've got to do all of the conversions from JPY to USD yourself. Which also means finding/picking an exchange rate etc..

      This year I found and used ExpatFile.tax, and wow is it a breath of fresh air. I'm able to put in what I earned in JPY and it handles all of the conversions for me. It seems pretty intelligent about FEIE (Foreign Earned Income Exclusion – where the first $100k or so of income is tax free, but means you can't use tax advantaged things like Roth IRAs etc...) and the FTC (Foreign Tax Credit).

      I've always used FEIE because it's "easier". This year after reading their blog post Why the FTC is better than the FEIE, I was prepared to use FTC..and as a bonus there was a Covid child tax credit I'd be able to use if I did, so I'd actually get a $1000 return this go around. But alas, after inputting my wife's income (as she's still a tax resident), they suggested I use FEIE, as per usual. Maybe next year...I'm almost looking forward to doing them next year. Almost.
    • This post on installing a payphone in your house brought back a lot of youthful memories and how often we used payphones back then. He installs a Pacific Bell phone, the same as I used, so it's hits all of the nostalgia points. Most of the time when I used payphones though, it was just me calling my dad collect and in the space for the name saying "DadI'mAtTheMallPickMeUp" as 2 second gap to say your name. Not Phreaking, but still workin' the system.
    •  Digital Minimalism is proving to be a quick read and enjoyable read. I want to finish the book before I do the 30-day "detox", but the idea of being intentional about when and why we use technology is really resonating with me.

      Particularly about this idea that we let tools and services into our life because they promise some benefit: news,  and so forth. And while they do provide that benefit some of the time, most of the time we use it, it's just mindless usage and time sinks. The actual cost in time/attention for that little benefit is not in our favor.

      This really sounds like me and Twitter. Wake up, scroll to see what the other gaijin are up to in Japan, repeat. It's not focused and it's a huge time sink preventing me from doing things I'd actually like to be doing. Perhaps I can find a way to collect these people into a list and use my RSS reader to catch up on the gossip once a week?
    • If it's not possible, that might even be a nice micro-service. Create a RSS feed that's updated weekly with the tweets (no replies?) of a handful of accounts. This way it acts as a firewall between you and social media.

  • The Week #100

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    • I made it to 100 consecutive weeks "The Week"! The last ~5 weeks or so, I wasn't sure if I was going to make it 100 weeks in a row, but I have. I've done a bit more thinking since last week, and I think I'll continue doing these roundups for a while longer / foreseeable future.
    • I'm back in Japan and it's good to be home. London is great, I wouldn't mind living there for a year or two someday. But your own bed in your own home? Nothing beats it. I will, however, miss the easy access to shawarma and falafel.

      I'll also miss working with the rest of the team in London. We'll still be working together, remotely of course, but it's a good group of people. Getting work done is the main reason for the trip, but building these team relationships in person are another, just as important reason, for having trips like these.

      Expect a London roundup post later this week as a cap-off to the London trip.
    • I meant to include this last week, but forgot. Last week saw the launch of a new tube line, the Elizabeth line, in London. As that doesn't happen everyday, I started searching around and I found this great YouTuber, Geoff Marshall, who makes great videos about all things trains in the U.K. Very good channel and if you like public transport, I highly recommend it.

      I was planning to take the Elizabeth line to Heathrow, but I found out that it's not running on Sundays yet. 
    • After taking Tanzawa trips through the paces these past 2-weeks, I think I'm quite happy with how it worked out. The main pain-point is that when I checkin with Swarm, I use swarm to also post to Twitter. However, that tweet url isn't associated with the post automatically, so I have to manually lookup the tweet url, add it to syndication urls, and then tell brid.gy to "discover" posts.

      For a single checkin every now and again, it's a fine workflow. But for an actual trip, it's a hassle. First, I need to build in some native syndication into Tanzawa (not just to Twitter, but wherever).  Once that's finished, then I can set my checkins to automatically syndicate to Twitter and post my backfed Swarm checkins to Twitter via my blog.

      Third, I think I want to add push notifications to LINE or Telegram when I get webmentions on my blog, so I can tell when the checkin has been backfed or if I get comments via micro.blog etc..

  • The Week #99

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    • This week marked over 1 week in London. We accomplished the main goal of the trip last week – and we didn't even bring down production 🎉. I knew we would meet the goal without any issues, but it was huge relief because sometimes you "know" something then an unknown unknown crops up and you're left scrambling.
    • One of the recurring thoughts I have about London is just how diverse it is. Going down the street there's people speaking every language of every ethnicity, you name it. Compared with Tokyo, even pre-Covid, it's nowhere near as diverse. ( I mean, Japan is kinda know for being quite insular, so it shouldn't be a surprise). I must say I'm really enjoying the easy access to meat wrapped in some kind of flat bread with veg and sauce. Sometimes I want an onigiri...but I'd usually rather have a falafel.
    • At the Tate this weekend I saw the tower of incomprehension, a tower of old and new radios, all tuned to a different frequency playing at the same time. No two visits are ever the same. I uploaded a short video on YouTube.  It made me think of the media and social media and how there's so much coming at you...you can't understand a thing. It all gets jumbled together and is just noise. And when I compare that to my blog, where I get a webmention here or an email there, how much of a calmer experience it is....and yet we still post and add to the noise.
    • Coming up on 100 weeks doing the week and I find myself questioning if I'll continue after I hit 100. Part of me thinks, yes I should continue writing these weekly roundups because they give me an opportunity to reflect on the week every week. The other part of me has been having trouble writing posts...remembering at the last minute and rushing something out. I guess I must continue until week #104, so I hit 2 years.

  • The Week #98

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    • The main event of the week this week is that I'm not in Japan. I flew to London for work for 2 weeks. It's my first time to the UK and my first time leaving Japan since I arrived in Jan 2017. 
    • One thing you notice as someone new to a city is the smell. For example, New York smells like trash. Houston smells like "god knows what but it's probably going to give me cancer so don't breathe too deeply" because of the refineries. London has a particular smell that I can't quite identify. It's almost kind of a sweet smell (mixed with occasional whiffs of trash). Maybe it's the smell of the common cleaners used in the shops/offices? Maybe it's the covid in the air (🤪)? Hopefully I can identify it before I get used to it (or before I lose my sense of smell 🥁).
    • One thing that stands out to me about London, compared to Tokyo, is how many cyclists you see. From bike messengers to people commuting via Boris bikes, to cargo bikes. And I love it.Heaps of people ride their bikes in Tokyo, too, but it feels like it's a higher percentage, at least where I'm at in Bloomsbury. I love seeing the cargo bikes. My favorite (and first!) sighting was a cargo bike in a separated bike lane along the Thames.
    • I made some progress in documenting how to run Tanzawa in a production environment on the plane. Considering I had most of the commands written down already in the packer scripts, it still took longer than I expected.
    • I'm seeing some gaps in my trip functionality that I want to fix, but maybe once I get back to Japan. I'd like to be able to link to a specific post in a trip, sometimes. This way I can share not just the post or not just the trip, but the full context of the post in the trip. This could be done (probably) by including some a id attribute in the markup, I presume.

      The other bit, and more complex, is I think it would be nice change the zoom of the map as you scroll down automatically. So when you're at the top, it shows the full zoomed out map. Then as you scroll down it zooms in to to whichever posts are visible.

  • The Week #97

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    • This week was Golden Week, and we were able to enjoy it a lot this year. We broke in the BBQ, which was great fun and quite tasty. The grill mostly lived up to its smokeless claims as well. I'm really looking forward to grilling some more.
    • Like last year's Golden Week, I took my bike out for a long ride. I think it's been about that long since I last really rode it. This time I went 40km down to enoshima and did a loop back. I tweeted the route I took. Compared to last year there were so. many. people. in and around enoshima. Thankfully I was on a bike and was able to cut through and take the quiet backstreets.
    • We went and got Yumi's and Leo's new passports. It's been a huge relief for Yumi as we got married right after she got her last passport and, although we updated her name, every time we flew there was a huge delay at check in. One time it nearly caused her to miss her flight. For Leo, now if something happens and we suddenly need to go somewhere, we can.

      As the passport center is near Yamashita-park/Minatomirai and that area, we rode the big ferris wheel. It's in the Guinness World Records as the largest Ferris wheel with a clock in the world...oddly specific...🧐
    • The trip I talked about last week to London, UK was made official this week. Tickets and hotel have been booked...and thinking of having to manually update all of my checki ns for 2-weeks made me prioritize trip mode. You can activate trip mode by selecting a trip in your site settings. When trip mode is active trip mode, all new posts made via the micropub endpoint will be associated with that trip automatically. New posts made via the web interface will have the trip pre-selected. 

      There's a lot of fun things I could do with this, like updating the trip list/detail/ site header to indicate that I'm currently traveling...maybe next time...

  • The Week #96

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    • We finally went to Tokyo Disneyland after we had to cancel our initial trip because of catching covid. This was the first trip I've taken since I built Tanzawa and was able to field test Trips in realtime and chronicle my Tokyo Disneyland Trip.  It worked quite well.

      Checkins with Swarm came in nicely. I had to manually associate the posts with the Trip afterwards, so going forward I want to add a "trip mode" which will automatically associate all micropub posts with a trip if it's active (GitHub issue). I still need to add the Twitter syndication links for the tweets that Swarm sent, but it's a pain.

      Long-term, I think I want to build checkins in to Tanzawa itself and syndicate them to Swarm/Twitter. Maybe it's about time I start thinking more about #84, Syndicate natively to Twitter & Mastodon. It fits in more with the POSSE philosophy, too. 
    • I went for coffee (and then a brew) with a friend who I hadn't seen since after the first wave in subsided in 2020. We agreed to meet at 16:30 at Kanai station. By about 16:50, he was nowhere to be seen...which is out of character for him and I was starting to get a bit annoyed, so I called him up to see where he was and he was also at Kanai station...JR. I was at the subway gates. All annoyance disappeared in an instant because of this simple mixup.

      It was really good to have a chat about life and the world. Slowly, it feels like things are returning to something that resembles the before times.
    • We bought a small (by American standards) Lotus Grill XL BBQ. I've been thinking about getting a grill for years, but never did because I worried about smoke. We used this one about a month ago at a neighbor's house and it is, indeed, "smokeless". It does this by completely covering the coals, preventing fat / oil from landing on them. Really looking forward to using it in the next couple of days.
    • It appears I'll be in London from the middle of this month for 2-weeks on a trip for work. Super exciting, but also makes me little low-key anxious. Mostly as a) I've never been to the UK before and b) first trip since/during the pandemic, and c) haven't left Japan in 5.5 years.

      Not entirely sure of my exact schedule yet, but if you're in London and want to grab a coffee to chat Python/IndieWeb email me.

  • The Week #95

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    • Went to the office for the first time this year. Not just because it was a Friday. And not just because there was a social event afterwards (though that certainly helps!). But also because I could meet some co-workers who I haven't met before...including some of the U.K. team who were finally able to enter Japan.
    • We rode our bikes to a local milk farm. This one is muuuch closer than Iiida Farm, but the route by bicycle is so, so much worse. There are no bike lanes (fine)...or even an uninterrupted  sidewalk. And once you're there's it's a complete clusterfuck for all the cars that are jockeying for parking spots. They only have a small area for bicycles, but at least we can zip in and out. I hope people noticed my #BanCars sticker 😈

      Compared to the other place that has bike parking, even for road bike (they hang them by the saddle?, I think?). And is along a great path along the river...you can't compete.

      The gelato itself was good...but I'm mixed if we'll go back. It's close enough and the parking was busy enough that I wouldn't want to drive...and the infrastructure to get there (or lack thereof) is bad enough...
    • Leo had his first full-week of preschool as part of his new grade. Getting him out the door the first day back was very difficult. He threw a fit all day before we left...and the entire way there. I imagine the neighbors could tell our proximity to their house by the Doppler effect. He was coming up with every excuse he could think of trying to get me to stop. "I have a fever.", "I want to watch TV", "I'm sick", "I want to lay down". Then we got there he was holding on to me like a kola and would not let go.

      He must have got it all out of his system on that first day, because everyday since then has been smooth. Carrying his backpack, everything. Even niko-niko days, when he stays late because we both have work. Maybe he's getting used to it and remembering how much fun it is compared to staying at home all the time. Either way, super grateful.
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