The Week #107

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  • With the rapid rise in cases of covid in Japan, it's only natural that it hits close to home. Someone in Leo's pre-school got it, so his week ended early and we're back to doing the random closures of school that we did in spring.

    Leo had a 39 degree fever on Wednesday night, so it's possible he got it as well. We tested him, but it came back negative, so maybe it was something else.
  • Europe is having a heatwave reaching temperatures not forecasted to occur until 2050. That combined with a single man (a "Democrat", no less) blocking US federal climate action has made it a rough week. We've got to get off fossil fuels...
  • I made an inquiry to the guys that are installing our solar, as they also do electrification work, to see about what it would cost to get an IH hob and water heater installed at the same time as our panels. My guess is probably 5 - 6k.
  • We have a trip planned for the end of the month with my sister-in-law and Leo's cousin's to a nearby resort hotel for a night. It has a nice pool and I didn't have any swimming trunks, so I bought some.

    I bought a new pair of Quicksilver trunks. Seeing all of the surf brands reminded me of growing up in Huntington Beach. Being a beach town in California, most everyone wore Quicksilver, Billabong, Roxy, or other surf brands. I never wore any of their clothes as it was too expensive for us (though I did have a sweet Rip Curl backpack for a couple of years). Though I haven't thought about these things in 20 years, being able buy the things we couldn't afford growing up without thinking much about it makes me feel incredibly fortunate.
  • I made a new Health plugin for Tanzawa. It's most immediate goal is to provide a way for me to track my weight / and mental health without any fuss. Why not use some app on my phone? There's a couple of reasons and regular readers of my blog can guess:

    1. My data would be locked into some application or service that I'd have no control over.
    2. The interface would likely require more taps and swipes to record 2 small data points. ( Inputting it directly into Apple Health requires like 7 taps and heaps of scrolling)
    3. The data collected would almost certainly be sold off to big tech for additional profiling.
    4. Health can start to becoming the bones of my future Strava / health-related integrations.

    The most important part though is that it's not public in any way, unless I want it to be. My hope is that I'll be able to find trends and course-correct easier. Things like: "Hey, you've had 3 days in a row feeling sad. Maybe you should talk about it?", or "You're down 2kg over this time last month, great job!", or, conversely, "You're up 2kg since the last month. Are you stress eating?".

    I can't emphasize enough how much having a platform like Tanzawa, which allows me to quickly and easily add forms / data to a database without  thinking about design (just match what I already have), or where I'm going to host it (already hosted), or any of the faff with a new project (✅), is so empowering. It makes it possible to go from idea to running in production in a day.