When talking to a friend today about weeknotes I mentioned that besides me and my friends over at weeknotes.cafe it’s is actually a thing on quite a few personal blogs out there. Just searching for the terms “week” and “weeknotes” in my feed reader already gives me these blogs, sorted alphabetically: Alice Bartlett Anh Ariadne Barry Frost Phil Gyford James Van Dyne Jeff Bridgforth Jenn Schiffer Joel Chrono Robb Knight Roy Tang Walknotes And I’m pretty sure that’s just the tiny little tip of an iceberg of bloggers publishing (semi)regular updates on their life. I’m absolutely open to following more personal blogs, so if you know someone who writes weeknotes, let me know. (You can reply to this post on Mastodon, which is pretty handy. Or send me a Webmention, which is maybe even nerdier.)
The Week #256
by
James
- 🏮 We went to the annual international festival at my alma matter in Totsuka. And like I (probably) blogged last year, this year it hit all of the nostalgia. The campus is full of forest and has a bridge with an excellent view of Fuji, you could really see yourself doing some quality thinking out there. The thing I think I was the most nostalgic for was the amount of headspace I had back in uni to study and think about the problems facing the world.
This year Watanabe Youichi, famous war photojournalist and alumni came to speak. We attended his event, but had to leave 10 minutes in because Leo was bored, but Leo was paying attention. As soon as we got outside he asked why the children had guns, did they just find them? Shouldn't the adults keep them from them? We explained that not everywhere is as peaceful as it is in Japan and that we're fortunate to live in such a place where we do not need to worry about such things.
The informatics majors setup a room to teach kids programming with Scratch, which drew Leo in. They had 4 laptops setup with a half-finished game, then they'd help walk you through how to finish it off. Leo built the last part of an air hockey game. I think having the app in Japanese probably helped, though it was full of kanji he doesn't know. I feel like I'm going to have to get a computer sooner or later so we can do Scratch properly...
Kanachu, the local bus company, brought one of their EV busses for people to see – and it was pretty great. It felt like it was a bit larger inside than their usual busses and there's usb-a sockets at every seat so you can charge your devices as you travel. We got to sit in the driver's seat where they told us there are 11 mirrors that the driver uses to check all of the angles. The battery is also large enough that they can drive it all day on a single charge. But the most surprising thing was that the bus was made by BYD – not one of the Japanese bigs. Though the fact that it's an EV should make that obvious it's not Japanese as they're currently lagging Apparently these usually run along/around Kamakura because there's more/better infrastructure for charging overnight. Maybe I'll make a mission to ride one of these. - 🍻 I went out for dinner and beers with a friend near Tokyo. We messaged at the start of the year that we should hang out, then 5 months passed. Just as I was thinking "man, we said we should hang, we should hang" and he messaged me. I'm glad he did.
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