• This week was my first full week on burning vacation days With Leo's school canceled it means we've been playing and hanging out everyday. It's been a lot of fun. One good thing that's come of this is he's being exposed to English all day long, so he's trying to speak English more.
• Leo's also developed enough (as you do when you're 3 and a half) to have mostly regular (if not somewhat bizarre) conversations. He sees a knot on a tree while swinging on the swings have we have a full conversation about how it looks like an eye, grandma and how he likes trees. I hope to remember these days for long to come.
• We had a going away zoom-nomikai with my old team. It was a lot of fun to just shoot the breeze. Kai found these games you can do together while on zoom. Simple things like someone has to draw a picture and the other participants have to guess. Or everyone is assigned a secret word that, if they say it they lose, and everyone tries to have a conversation to get that person to say that word. I was skeptical at first, but it was a lot of fun.
• I went to Tokyo (proper) for the first since February 2020. When I got on the Shonan-shinjuku line at the front, to look out the window, the driver closed the screen so I couldn't see out of the big window. At the next stop, I sat down and he opened it back up. Maybe he thought I was going to record it or something and it made him uncomfortable? 
  
  One thing I missed, and I hadn't realized it, was how when walking around Tokyo, you're just minding your own business when suddenly a fantastic smell comes from some little hole-in-the-wall restaurant. You don't get that much walking around my neighborhood as it's mostly residential.
• The reason for the trip to Tokyo was my first (and last) visit to the new BP office to turn in my laptop and pick up some personal items that I had left at the old Shinjuku office back in early 2020.
• Jan reported some bugs in my microformats in Tanzawa, which I've since fixed. Yay!
• I went to the Odakyu Romance Car Museum (just outside Ebina station) with Leo. The Romance Car is a limited express train that runs from Shinjuku to Hakone / Enoshima. I've only ridden it once a couple years ago when we took Leo to Shinjuku to meet some old US co-workers.
  
  The museum itself is a blast. Beyond 4 or 5 real Romance Cars (2 of which you can actually sit in), they've got a huge diorama of the Romance Car route with model trains running up and down. There's even a few that you can drive with real(ish) train controls. Leo drove the Enoden around. Totally worth a visit if you're in the area - or even if you're not.
  

  

I was even more excited to learn that the small web exists today just as it did back when I was a kid. It's just less visible.

Loved this screengrab of Geocities neighborhoods. I love this idea of a collection of sites in a given neighborhood and getting webspace (there’s a term I haven’t used in 20 years).

It may exist already, but it would be neat to have a modern Indie/Small version of web neighborhoods (naturally still on your own domain/site). Which neighborhood would I settle in?

1. Tagged with
2. nostalgia
3. blogging
4. computing