• I forget what I was searching for but I found this fantastic blog (in English) about trains in Japan called Tokyo Railway Labrinth. It has history of different trains and so much more. I love when I find a site where someone is just geeking out about their passion online.


• During the week some co-workers and I were discussing burgers. This gave me a craving for an avocado cheese burger from Kua`Aina. I recounted the story of how, even though in Japan you're supposed to have a nice light Japanese meal the day before the birth of your child, my wife was craving a burger and calories, so we went to the Enoshima Kuga`Aina before Leo was born. It was delicious as always. And since we got there right after they opened, not busy.


• I also visited the Fujiko Museum in Kawasaki over the weekend a.k.a. the Doraemon museum. I've never read the manga, but I have watched a couple of the movies (Leo's going through a mini-boom at the moment). It was pretty great, though I spent most of the time holding Leo watching this giant Rube Goldberg machine move a bunch of different balls across the room.


• I started working on replies in Tanzawa. Introducing Turbo to add some dynamism to admin interface. It's turned into a bigger rabbit hole than expected. I imagine most rails devs are familiar with the basics of Turbo (Links) but as a Django dev, things like Turbo aren't included, so there's a bit of a learning curve for me to implement it properly. That said - it's coming along.

• Covid numbers are down to numbers we haven't seen since November. The vaccine is approved and they've started inoculating people. The weather's warming up and early bloomer cherry blossoms are starting to bloom. I'm optimistic.


• Meanwhile in Texas, it's been the exact opposite with a huge cold front (thanks climate change!) and a deregulated energy industry decided to not invest in weatherizing their natural gas and coal plant despite regulators saying they should caused people to lose power/heat for days in freezing temperatures. Then the (republican) leadership goes and tries to blame the entire thing on the wind and solar farms in west Texas, when those were unaffected by the cold. Never elect a man to office who says government doesn't work, because they might win and prove it. Thankfully my family made it through unscathed (though hopefully they didn't get a $16,000 electricity bill like some did)


• I used to listen to a lot of Japanese music when I was younger. These days, not really. Mostly electronic/punk when I'm working and Josh Rouse when I'm not. Lucky Old Sun is a new (to me) Japanese group I found lately. You should give it a listen. I like the last track on this EP a lot, but they're all good.


• I went to Chigasaki Sagtoyama Park on my four day weekend. It was my second visit. There's this large slide that's above the trees and goes downhill with rollers on it. I usually ride down with Leo in my lap because he wants to ride it, but it's a bit scary for him. As it was a regular work-day and I took the day off the park was fairly empty. So I went down by myself. Take a ride down the best slide in the world.

At the bottom of the hill/slide there's a couple of big white bouncy mounds that the children like to jump and play on. There was an older (double (half)) kid who looked similar to Leo. Which Leo noticed and kept on copying what he was doing when jumping. It was too cute.

• Last week I had forgotten an interesting tidbit about my self-introduction presentation at work. During my presentation I introduced some of the apps I'd built for the Mac – ImageXY and Jisho. ImageXY was popular in Japan for its first couple of years and one of my co-workers actually used to use it all the time! First time I’ve met a random user of ImageXY!


• The covid vaccine was finally approved in Japan and they're starting to vaccinate doctors and nurses this week. Still no idea when I'll be able to get my prick, but I imagine it will be sometime this summer. Speaking of getting the shot, I found out my grandma got her second covid vaccine shot last Wednesday. Woohoo!


• I had my annual health check this week. As nobody is going in to the office, we are free to do our health check anywhere. I went to a a clinic In Minatomirai, as it was the closest to my house. The clinic itself was the top two floors of a high rise. We carried a little rfid card at each station and see a nurse/tech for the test, and finally a doctor briefly at the end to cover the results. Hope I can use this place next year too.


• There was a large earthquake off the cost of Fukushima. It was about a 4 where I live in Yokohama, certainly the strongest and longest quake I've felt in a while. It reminded me of 3/11 in someways as just when you think it was going to stop it just kept getting stronger. I was fast asleep when it started, but you can see my heart rate from my Apple Watch about when it hit.


• This week Leo turned 3. He has his official "chocolate debut" as he picked out a chocolate cake decorated like a panda. He must not have been impressed with the hype around chocolate as he only ate 2 bites.


• I watched this good documentary called Winter in Stockholm. I hadn't realized how much I miss watching documentaries like these randomly on TV.

• As I've been public blogging about 🏔Tanzawa I've had more people emailing me, responding to my posts, or DMing me directly about it than any past project. One of the things I still have difficulty talking about succinctly is the IndieWeb, Tanzawa, and how it all fits together. I think I may be getting better at it though.

This week I was explaining the building blocks of the IndieWeb to my internet buddy Frey. My explanation seemed to click as he's added rss to his blog and joined micro.blog!

• Despite people are moving around more than the state of emergency last year, it appears to be working. Covid numbers continue to drop in Japan. It seems like they're going to extend it until March 7th. They can always decide to end it early, but I hope they don't.


• Tanzawa has been online for almost a month. And looking back at that month it's really improved. Automatic efficient image loading, RSS, and webmentions... and my computer was even out for repair for one of those weeks. There's still a lot yet on the road map, so I need to just take it a day at a time.


• Leo's taken to my old dslr and we went out of shot photos of the Odakyu line for a bit over the weekend. I always forget how much fun it is to shoot with my dslr. The images are so crisp and the depth of field. Portrait mode on my phone is good - but the real deal is soo much better and soo much more satisfying.


• We started a new experiment at work. One day a month we stop client work and fully focus on things that are "important but not an emergency" – as those things tend to never become priority and hence never get done. We're split into different teams. Some are re-working our company Slackbot, others are getting better with frontend tech and so forth. I picked team UX, where we're trying to figure out how, as a company, we can also "do UX". This is perfect for me. I've been wanting to spread the passion for well designed software and forms within the company for years now, but I've never had the time to dedicate to it. This collaboration day finally gives me the opportunity.

• President Biden was finally sworn in to office, allowing me to breath a huge sigh of relief. His first actions have been exactly what I'd hoped he'd do (rejoining the Paris climate accords and the WHO, canceling Keystone XL pipeline etc...) and reversing some of the heinous things I'd forgotten about in the avalanche of bs that came out of the prior administration. I feel like I can watch the West Wing again and have it not feel like a cynical joke.


• Speaking of the West-Wing, I watched the the first press briefing from Jen Psaki and immediately was reminded ow C.J. Cregg from the show. Apparently I wasn't the only one and someone even wrote a column in the LA Times to please stop comparing the two (one being real, one being a fictional character).


• Covid numbers are finally going in the right direction. Yesterday was in the 600s in Tokyo down from 2000+ a couple of a weeks ago. There is a false sense of security in these numbers though as monday is always the lull of the week and due to the surge, they've stopped doing much (all?) contact tracing.


• I got my computer back from repair on Saturday. They replaced the battery, top case, and keyboard. It feels like a brand new machine with the new keyboard. The battery itself was manufactured in May of last year, so there shouldn't be much / any aging from it sitting in a warehouse. The only "issue", and I'm not certain it wasn't like this before, is the rubber seal around the edge of the display appears to have been damaged right where you'd usually unlatch the computer. I don't remember it feeling rough and worn down, but it's entirely likely I just didn't notice.


• I shipped RSS feeds and web mention support in Tanzawa. This now means that Tanzawa can participate in a distributed social web - rss feeds to sending data places and webmentions for receiving comments, likes, and so forth. Tanzawa still has a long ways to go before it's ready for general consumption, but I'm making slow and steady progress.

• I made good progress on Tanzawa this week. Last week I got image uploads working. This week I got the base of what is required for image uploads to preserve privacy and reduce energy consumption.

To preserve privacy, Tanzawa is automatically stripping all exif data. But rather than just throwing it away, I’m archiving it in json in database. Why?

Two reasons: 1) I can’t quite articulate the sales pitch well yet, but I want Tanzawa to become your home on the internet, exif data is your data, and Tanzawa should facilitate you accessing / using your data as much as possible. 2) You could totally build a photoblog or Flickr-like gallery very easily with Tanzawa if only you could access exif data...and you can.

The other goal is to be as “low-energy” as possible. Do as little computation as possible and send as little data across the wire as possible. To that end images are now automatically converted to webp the first time a user visits the page with a browser that supports it. Subsequent visits will get the pre-converted image. No need to introduce background tasks (two extra processes, redis and celery) to reformat pictures that may never be used. 🙌🏻

Once Pillow supports avif (seems soon), it will offer that as well, for even more savings.

^1 despite a state of emergency, nothing technically stopping us from eating out, except for a fear of getting a virus and death.

• This week marked my 10 year wedding anniversary. We got married in typical Japanese fashion, a trip to city hall to fill out the paperwork. For some reason we didn’t think to take a photo when we got married, which I regret. I think it was a combination of everyone looking far too busy to ask and that, at least at that time, you don’t really take photos inside city hall.

I remember the couple after us was what appeared to be a a Russian? woman and this old guy with one of those furry hats with the flaps on all sides. It may or may not have been a marriage for love, but I hope they’re doing well.

• Happy New Year! I spent New Years Eve like I usually do, going to bed early and waking up before the sun, as per usual. It was great. We went to the local shrine around 10am on new year's day. We were planning to skip the visit or wait until after the holidays, but while walking past the shrine Leo wanted to see the koi and since there was hardly anybody there then we decided to just do it. I'm glad we did because there was a long line an hour later. One thing of note is that because of covid19 they took down the rope with the noise maker at the top that you shake when pray.


• Leo started riding his bicycle (the type without pedals/cranks, so he can practice balancing) a lot this week. He rode it to the grocery store and riding the bicycle was easier than walking, which surprised me. Without the bicycle he likes to run the entire way, but since he doesn't look for cars (despite warning him to stop etc..), I end up having to run/walk with him. With the bicycle his pace is consistent and he is more cautious, but he doesn't want to stop riding so we end up making 3 trips to-and-back from the store.


• Last week I talked about a blogging system. This week I managed to get a base version of it built: 🏔Tanzawa.

My goal with Tanzawa is to make it easy to have an energy efficient home on the internet. It will be the place to store your statuses, your blogs posts, your runs, your checkins, your links, whatever you want. And since it's your home you should have easy access to your data that's stored in a clear and logical manner. It won't be for everyone, but I hope that people will find it useful.

Right now it only supports posting of text statuses. Next up is adding support for images. Once that's finished I plan to start on syndication to Twitter and webmentions before finally moving on to posts, checkins, and other types.