• I talked (on the phone!) with Michael about living in Yokohama. It's the first time I've spoken English with a native speaker besides my parents in a bit over a year. I won't disclose the details, but I think living in Yokohama is the bee's knees with easy access to both Shonan and Tokyo.
• I watched the DjangoCon Europe Keynote ( by @DrFJaeger from Octopus Energy(!)). This talk makes me more excited to join them. Learning about how they use django-configurations makes me think it may be what I've been looking for to allow people to customize their own deployments of Tanzawa. I'll have to fiddle.
• I optimized the trips feature on Tanzawa for mobile and built a feature to get your current location. If you haven't, you should see my New York Trip from a few years back. Really looking forward to expanding this area of my site.
• We expanded our bicycle fleet to three bikes: our original 26" E-bike mamachari, my 2015 Giant Escape, and now a small wheeled E-bike mamachari. The main reason we added a third bike to the fleet is scheduling. Leo can't ride on my Giant, so I need a the bike when I pick Leo up from pre-school. But my wife drops him off in the mornings and then goes to work. Coming back to to house and then walking to the station in this heat. We don't drive our car much as it is (maybe once a week? once every couple of weeks – it doesn't make any financial sense), but I think it'll get even less use now.
  

  

• As expected – we're using the bikes more. Took them a few stations overs where we'd usually use the car. It takes a few more minutes on the bike, but it's so much more fun. I never get off my bike without a smile on my face.
• Leo's day-care while we work (during summer break from pre-school) and pre-school itself have been canceled for the next 2 weeks thanks to covid. There haven't been any cases inside the school, but elementary and middle schools have been canceled and they're following suit. Thankfully we’re able to shuffle schedules and get the grandparents to watch Leo so we’re all “on duty” 1 day a week and only taking a day off each.

Leon Paternoster wrote of the IndieWeb:

"I’m nearly convinced that the possibility of a decentralised network of websites talking to each other through comments sections and pingbacks (known as the web) has probably passed."

Colin wrote:

"WordPress may have all of the building blocks available but it's still not native. Plugins, themes, tweaks to get just so and working properly. Micro.blog is the closest we have but it's still a platform with its own way of doing things."

Richard Sapper may not be a household name, but he's on the same level of greats like Dieter Rams and Jonathan Ive.

• Leo went for a haircut this week at a different place than usual. Usually he goes to this hairdresser that we've known a long time, but she has some equipment just for kids setup. Like instead of a regular chair, it's a chair with a car shell on it with a steering wheel. But getting there is a pain (you have to drive) and their parking sucks (the lowered bit of the curb isn't aligned with their 3 parking spots and not 3 spots wide / they're on a corner which gets constant traffic, so timing of when to back in or back out is no fun), but I digress.
  
  This time he went to another hairdresser we've known for ages as well. He's really into his craft, does contests and such, but he doesn't have anything special for kids. But it's so much easier to access (next to a train station) and there's a mall nearby for afterwards we decided to give it go.
  
  Turns out, Leo did great. He didn't care about the car-shell chair. He didn't care that he couldn't watch Anpanman while getting his haircut (which I was apprehensive about anyways). Instead he was chatting up the stylist that was doing his hair. Saying things like, "I have off today, but tomorrow I go to work (kindergarten)", or telling about himself "I speak can English.", and "Densha" is "Train" in English.", or pointing to his Dr. Yellow shoes "Yellow Train". 
  
  Way to go Leo. 🙌🏻
   
• I managed to spend time on Tanzawa this week and I launched a minimal viable version of Trips.  It's not finished (the views still need to be optimized for mobile), but it's good enough.
  

  

• I imported all of my Swarm checkins into my blog (via micropub) using Swarm-Checkins-Import. There's still some data in there that Tanzawa can't import (at all? yet?) that I'd like to add, namely the venue type (restaurant, park etc...). Why import all of your checkins as blog posts?
  
  Having my checkin data as blog posts allows me to go back and collect them into trips, which I'm really looking forward to doing. It also allows me to start building fun maps (though it isn't a cluster map, despite the url).
  

  

• Yokohama had mayoral election and it turned out how I hoped: the center-left (opposition) party took the reins. I'm excited about it not only because the new mayor, Takeharu Yamanaka, is (literally) 30 years younger than the current mayor, but also as he's opposed to turning Yokohama into a casino, he wants extend city covered child-healthcare benefits until middle school and other parent friendly policies, and most of all, he takes climate change seriously. A new leaf for Yokohama, I hope it's a trend for the upcoming general elections this fall. ( Sidebar: I really like his .yokohama domain. I totally want one, but have no idea what I'd do with it...maybe I can find some open-data to map?

Electrifying a bike can be electrifyingly easy