• The Week #183

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    • 🎉 It's now 2024! We spent new years eve and new years day as we usually do - toshikoshi soba for dinner and osechi for new years breakfast at the in-laws. Traditionally osechi is made in the days leading up to the new year, full of food that will last a few days. Then the first few days of the new year are spent not-cooking, but instead eating all the food. These days though, most people buy most/all of it and there's varieties with western dishes. This year we bought everything and we only made some soup and warmed up some mochi to put in said soup.

      After writing the above, there was  large earthquake and (as I write this, potentially large) tsunami hitting Ishikawa. My usage of the :tada: emoji feels like it might be in poor taste given the situation. There's never a good day for a natural disaster, but the very first day of the year...let's hope this is the worst of 2024.
    • 🐭 We went to Disney Sea, the second park in the Tokyo Disney Resort, and spent the night at one of the hotels. We weren't explictly planning to visit the park, but when we bought our car earlier this year, we got 2 free tickets to Disneyland or Disney Sea...and since we went to last year 2 years ago...we thought it should go to the other.

      Compared with the time we went towards the end of the pandemic, the lines were massive. 2+ hour waits at some of them. As such we only rode rides with a ~30 minute wait. The Disney Resort app gives you real-time wait time information, which is great...but was also caused some pain as we had run out of data before getting massively throttled. So slow that it took 15 minutes to go through the process of adding an extra 500MB of data.

      Leo only had 2 quasi-melt downs and both times it was because he was hungry and waiting in line. I'm going to bring snacks next time.

      One lesson we applied from the last trip to this trip was to eat early and beat the crowds. For dinner we breezed in to the Aladdin area restaurant for some curry. Leo insisted he didn't want curry, but as soon he ate 1 bite...he wolfed down the rest and immediately fixed his mood.

      We stayed the night at the Hilton Tokyo Bay, and it was really nice. Our room had 3 singles...which I guess is a configuration because lots of friends come in groups of 2 or 3? Leo slept in his own bed and around 5am managed to roll off the bed. The champ that he is, he didn't cry, he got back up in his bed and went back to sleep.
    • 😭 Bill Granger, the father of avocado toast, passed away at 54, far too young. I love going to his restaurant in Shichirigahama. The food was always great and the atmosphere makes you feel good. For years we'd go there to celebrate my birthday with a nice ocean view.
      Ricotta honey-butter pancakes from a visit a few years ago
    • ⛰️ I merged a major under the hood change in Tanzawa that removes Turbo  in favor of HTMX. Turbo technically works with any language / framework, but it feels like it's really geared for Ruby/Rails (makes sense given it's made by 37 signals), while HTMX is more agnostic and integrates better into Django.

      The other fun part of this work is I am slowly removing  my usage of Stimulus (a JavaScript companion library of Turbo). Each time I remove a controller I get one step closer to being able to remove a build system from Tanzawa, which I find highly motivating.

  • The Week #182

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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.
      Me holding Sophie and Leo splashing in the water

      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.
      Dumping sand on 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.

  • The Week #181

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    • 🎉 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.
      Cruising along the river

      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.
      Sky tree, as seen from the middle of a river
    • 🎄 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!

  • The Week #180

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    • ⛩️ We went to a local shrine for Leo's shichi-go-san...and like that, the big event is over. We went to the photo studio, where we rented Leo's hakama, so he could change and so we could pickup the prints from last time. As a thank you we could pick one of a few different gifts, including a free photoshoot.

      We were a bit pressed for time, as we were all dressed up and the likelihood of us getting a decent photo at the shrine were slim, we decided to take some photos. Naturally just the photoshoot was free, we still had to pay for prints (which makes sense...but also makes it feel less like a "gift" and more like an upsell). Be that as it may, I'm glad we did take photos because as it turns out every photo was shot at the shrine was pretty much a dud for one reason or the other.
      Boyo dressed in hakama
    • 🧦 I have too many pairs of socks. And yet, I ordered a new pair of nice wool socks from L.L. Bean. These are to replace some cotton socks that I have that appear warm but are in-fact, not so. They're so comfortable and warm. If you haven't ordered yourself a pair of wool socks recently, you should.
    • 🎸 This week marked the 43rd anniversary of John Lennon's death. Coinciding with that, Apple released a new docuseries, John Lennon: Murder without a Trial, which I binge watched. I always get a bit sad this time of year when I think about what could have been and what was taken from the world. I know it's silly, he died before I was born....but the series is well worth the couple of hours of your time.
    • 💈 Leo and I got haircuts at the local barber shop. He has hit hair cut by the person who usually does it and I was across the room getting my haircut eavesdropping. I won't divulge their full conversation, but I'm glad in their conversation about vegetables and primary school, she also told him that tomatoes and other such things he "doesn't like" will appear in school lunches. I can already see see start of a wonder barber relationship between them and I'm excited for them.

  • The Week #179

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    • 🏊‍♂️ After missing 3 weeks of swimming beause of being sick or not 100% better, Leo's started to make up for it. He had swimming twice this week. I took him on the weekend and got to watch his progress...and he's progressing quite well! He's currently using the paddle board, kicking down about 60% of the school. This is helping him get more leg strength while also letting him practice taking breaths while swimming.
    • 🦵 My right leg is healing up nicely. There isn't any pain except for the plastic covers they put to cover the entry points while I heal sometimes feel like they're pulling my skin when I walk. I've already noticed when walking Sophie up / down the hills what a huge difference this has made...before my leg would feel quite heavy. But not any longer! I'm curious how no longer having a backward flow of blood in my leg with affect my running...when I can do that again.
    • 🍫 Leo and I watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I really do like the older version much more than the newer one. Perhaps beause Roald Dahl wrote the screenplay (something I didn't realize until this viewing). Also, the music is much better and Gene Wilder is class. I hope this primes him for seeing the new Wonka prequel coming out next week here in Japan.
    • 💴 The yen looks like it finally might start strengthening up a bit. With the usual exchange rate of ¥100 - ¥108 / USD, this past year with it about ¥150 / USD has been a pain. Most all of my expenses are in yen, so it doesn't affect me directly on a daily basis, but prices have been rising because imports are now more expensive. It's been at ¥147 and strengthening the past few days...I hope this trend continues.
    • 🪟 The sliding glass door in my bed room cracked again. This first happened about a year after we bought our house and the house maker came out and replaced it for free because of a defect in manufacturing ...I reckon this is the same defect, but feel like they're gonna stick me with the bill. As it occurred at a similar time of year last time as well, best I can tell is the sudden temperate change is causing too much stress on the glass?

  • The Week #178

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    • ⛰️ It only took me about 2.5 years to get around to it, but I made some basic Brid.gy integration into Tanzawa. Right now it only supports posting to Mastodon, but that's all I use it for right now. I had considered doing a native integration with Mastodon (and indeed, there's an open issue for it), but decided against it because I didn't want to faff around with figuring out ActivityPub...especially when my site already marks things up using microformats.

      The integration manifests itself as a new button that says "🐘 Send to Mastodon". When clicked the elephant starts spinning, the backend sends a webmention to Brid.gy, and if successful, the button transforms to say "View on Mastodon". The button jumps around a bit during the whole process, but I'll sort the fine details "later".
    • 🇸🇪 We went to Idea to pick up another Eket cabinet, bringing our total to three, as well as some frozen meatballs and so forth. Ikea used to be one of the places we could take Leo to and he would not have a meltdown...you'll notice the past tense in this sentence.

      After we ate lunch and did some browsing on the second floor, when we got downstairs where all the small things are, Leo noticed the play area...and had a melt down because he couldn't play there...it's not like we didn't try, but there were 50 kids ahead of him, we would've been waiting 2 hours... how I would like to be able to go anywhere without one meltdown or another.
    • 🏥 I went to the hospital to remove some varicose veins on my right leg. I've had them most of my life (they're from (I presume) from damage done when I was first born and the doctors were poking around to give me a feed for whatever they gave me) and the past couple of years they've been getting worse...and visible when wearing shorts.

      This is notable because it was my first time being hospitalized in Japan, so the entire experience is new. I found over during check in that they decided to move me from a shared room on the 2nd floor to a private room on the 4th floor. I'm no sure why they decided that, but I'm glad they did.

      The surgery itself was smooth and I was awake for half of it. I've never been awake for any surgery, so it was an interesting sensation to feel the pressure of tugging(?) without actually feeling anything. For the second half they put me to sleep and apparently they had to use more / it took longer than expected to knock me out.

      Dinner was really good – though perhaps that was as I hadn't eaten in 24 hours by the time surgery was finished and I was awake. Rice, fish, steamed spinach, and some carrots and peas with ground chicken.

      I shouldn't be surprised but there's no WiFi in the hospital, so I'm finishing this post tethered to my phone. I can walk fine, except my leg is wrapped in a bandage and it hurts a bit. I'm glad it's over and without any issues...and I look forward to being able to run again (perhaps a week per the doctor).

      Cost wise I think my total out of pocket is supposed to be around 14-man (940 usd at current exchange rates)... I don't think I would have gotten this done if I was living in America as I can imagine it being easily 5 - 10x, even with insurance.

      Update: Total cost was 7.2man or about 470 usd.

  • The Week #177

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    • 🤮 The bug got me. Unfortunately it didn't really kick in until I was in the office in Tokyo. I left a bit earlier than usual and rode the green car home. Riding the green car is usually quite nice, but I was miserable the entire way.

      On the way I picked up some ice cream from baskin robbins for Leo...which I won't get into why...but it's ridiculous. After buying ice cream as I'm walking back to the station I felt increasingly worse and got more annoyed with each step at the entire situation. My annoyance culminated in breaking the wa the restroom...worrying that his ice cream will melt and I'll have to listen to a, no pun intended, melt down.

      But the moment I got home, Leo was appreciate and said thank you. I b-lined to bed and slept for 12 hours. At its peak I had a 38.3c  (101f) fever. Thankfully when I woke up in the morning I felt much better. I still have a bit of a lingering cough that's getting a bit better each day.
    • 📸 We got the entire family together for Leo's shichi-go-san photos and family photos.  Leo as dressed in hakama and Yumi, and myself dressed in kimono. As we rescheduled on short notice, the adults didn't have the option of picking any kimono we wanted. Rather, we had to pick from their stock that day.

      We were afraid that they'd only have a bunch of light colored kimono, as that's was the majority of the choices to begin with, and that it would make me ghosty. Thankfully that wasn't the case. They had some nice darker blue options. Yumi's had a couple of good options as well.

      Leo did a few different poses in a two different hakama. His favorite was his samurai pose where he got to hold a katana as a prop. Besides Leo's single shots, we also took a family portraits, one with the 3 of us and another with everyone. Each time we take family photos like this, I always think we should do this more often.
    • 🔗 I added a new bookmarks page on my site. The new display of bookmarks is more streamlined giving clear distinction between the site I'm linking to and my commentary about it. I also added tags, which is a first in Tanzawa, so I can better group and categorize the links I'm sharing.

      Under the hood, there weren't that many changes required to enable this. But having this clear difference in styling between different post types is encouraging me to share more links that I find via my blog.
    • ⛰️ Other minor improvements to Tanzawa this week are improved RSS representations for different post types. Mostly it's replacing words with emoji. But the main improvement has been getting my run photos and routes appearing properly in micro.blog.

      Getting the photos and routes to appear in micro.blog required:

       1) Stop using svg when rendering the route for feed readers and instead use img because svg isn't on the allow list for the timeline. This was easy as I already have a url for creating pngs of the route that I use for previews when sharing.
      2) Using absolute uris for my image paths. Relative paths worked fine in feed readers, but not in micro.blog.

      Improved checkin display

      I also added webmentions to the front page, which is quite reminiscent of  following the latest comments on a blog, like people did back in blogging boom. 
    • 👂 Spoke too soon - Leo woke up on Monday with an ear ache 😫 Can't we all just get better?
    • 🤖 I want to end this post on a positive note – I followed the best bot on the fediverse: @hackers_gifs, which shows gifs of the movie Hackers every few hours.

  • The Week #176

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    • 🤮 A stomach bug has gone through the house that has made both Yumi and Leo sick. I've managed to dodge it thus far. I'm not sure how, but Leo's been through almost 3 years of pre-school and hasn't caught a stomach bug until now...and true to the emoji, I don't think he's vomited since before he could eat solids....

      As Leo didn't start showing symptoms until Saturday afternoon, after his local doctor closes, we had to drive him to Totsuka to his backup clinic. 3 minutes into the drive and threw up in new car. I'm happy he felt better after that and I'm also happy that we managed to contain most of it, so there's no stains or residual smells in the car. 

      It's never a good time to get sick, but this week was especially not a good week to do so. You see, on Saturday was the donguri festival at pre-school. This is the one I've probably talked about before where each class has a theme and they use giant cardboard boxes to build seascapes you can walk around or slides and castles. And because he was sick, we couldn't attend.

      We had also planned to get family photos, including the cousins in from Tokyo, with us dressed up in kimono. Alas, we will have to re-schedule this.
    •   ⛰️ With Leo sleeping the majority of the weekend, it meant I could get some time in to work on Sunbottle and Tanzawa. Sunbottle now displays a new data point: how yesterday's generation / consumption compares with last year's.
      A new blue line on the graph showing last year's generation

      Tanzawa got a massive simplification of the plugin system that will make it easier to develop. As I wrote in the pull request, I had to let go of my original idea that people could just upload a python module like you upload a Wordpress plugin. Once I did that, it became mostly a matter of ripping out code and monkeypatches. 

      I also started working on my opengraph meta data. I'd like my posts with photos and my runs to show up with nice previews when linked on Mastodon and such like.
    • ⌚️ Apple released a new watchOS point release that fixes the battery drain issue on some watches. I installed it last night and I think it's working as intended. I took my watch off the charger at 9pm and at 6:30am, it's at 69%. Recently I've been waking up with it in the 50's. My battery health been degrading these past few months (it's currently at 75% health), so it's probably worth getting it swapped out now that  they've fixed the issue.
    • 📷 The Photos app continues to disappoint. I tried to use it to do the most basic task, i.e. import some photos off of an sd card and it couldn't. No previews of  the photos. Clicking import all photos would just take me back to my library top...without importing photos. I've stuck with Photos because syncing with my phone is/was automatic via iCloud, but if it fails at the most basic tasks, what's the point? There must be a better way... Shotwell looks nice (and similar to iPhoto), but it doesn't run on macOS... What do you use to manage your photos?

  • The Week #175

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    • 🚲 For culture day we went to the park by the river. This was the first time we went in the new car with Leo's bicycle in the back. It fits! we brought our popup tent and ate the finest of 7-11's offerings for lunch. While we were eating, there was another kid on a bike in just an tank-top undershirt (and pants, of course) that reminded me of one of the kids that Yumi met when Leo was just born and we lived in Fujisawa.

      And since I'm mentioning this fact, you can probably guess, it was them! They played for about 45 minutes together before they had to go off for lunch. It's such a small world sometimes.
    • ⚽️ Leo had his first real soccer match in Hodogaya. They played 3 games at 10 minutes each...and I don't think Leo's going to be a soccer star. He was out there, but he didn't go after the ball, always staying a bit back. But still, he seemed to enjoy himself and being with the team.

      What was hard was listening to some of the other parents (from the other teams) going into full monster-parent mode yelling at their kids from the sidelines. Not friendly "you got it!", but "what are you doing? move! the game isn't over yet!" in really rough Japanese. They're 5...relax...

      It was my first time visiting the park and driving in the general area. Having a smaller car (with instant torque gives me a lot more confidence driving around unfamiliar streets.
    • 🥵 It also happened to be really hot. Not something I was expecting to say in November, but here we are. 3 days this week it's been 24 - 25C out...we've had over 141 days this year above 25C and I'm over it. Makes me think a lot about the saying that goes around, this isn't hottest summer on record...it's the coolest summer for the rest of your life.
    • 📘 I've started a new book - Running is my Therapy (perhaps related to the above 😂). I'm not as brave as Colin to talk too deeply about my mental health online, but since I've been a teenager I've had my share of ups and downs. Thankfully something that passes in a couple of weeks at most and doesn't affect my work. My running matches this, too. My starts are when I'm feeling good / getting out of a funk...and stop when I get into one. One thing  I have noticed is that when I run I feel better. So my theory is that if I can just continue the routine a bit longer, the gap between ebbs and flows will also elongate.
    • 🎶 The Beatles released their final single, Now and Then. John Lennon wrote the song and recorded a demo playing on the piano. Paul, Ringo, and George tried to finish the song in the 90's, but John's voice wasn't clear enough to mix. It wasn't until they developed the technology for the Beatles documentary to extract audio tracks that they could isolate his vocals enough for them to mix and finish the song. Really good.

  • The Week #174

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    • 🍻 I went for a couple of beers with some old-coworkers/friends in Shinbashi. I can't remember the last time I went out for a proper brew. The shop we went to had a variety of craft beers. The first one I had looked and tasted like juice...but it was actually 5%. We finished up at 6...
    • 🚑 ... and on the way home I got a text message from my wife that Leo fell off the monkey-bars and was bleeding from his nose. The principal drove Leo and my wife to the hospital where they gave him a once over and all was fine. My wife asked me to pick them up...but since I had a couple of beers, I could not legally drive (legal limit is 0%), so the principal also drove them back.
    • 🐍 This next day was PyConAPAC 2023. This year I also attended for work. It was a lot of fun. This year I attended a couple of talks – one on Django and HTMX and another on tagging inbound customer inquiries. I also had the opportunity to talk with a number of attendees about Kraken and what we're doing and (most importantly)... we're hiring!
    • 🏉 These past couple of weeks instead of watching the news with my morning coffees, I've been watching rugby. You see, with the the Rugby World Cup in France, the games have been airing at 4am Japan time. This is a bit before I usually wake up, but they show this instead of the morning news.

      I've been low-key getting into it. I think I understand more of the rules of rugby (but not as many as if I read an article on wikipedia or similar). On Sunday I woke up later than usual and managed to catch the last 10 minutes of the final between New Zealand and South Africa and I was on the edge of my seat. Full drama until the very last second. Congratulations, South Africa!
    • 👘 Next month we're going to take family photos for Shichi-Go-San. This week we went to the photo studio where we'll rent our kimono and get photos taken to make reservations. Leo had so many choices for his kimono and he picked a cool blue-green color.
    • 📕 I finished reading Ultra Processed People. My kindle showed I was 60% of the way through the book, which made me think I had a slog coming up, but turns out I only had about 10 pages. The rest were acknowledgements, notes and such like. I think I would have finished it weeks ago if I had realized I was about 10 pages from being finished.  Really good book and it's re-shaping how I think about food.
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