I finished watching Long Way Round while waiting for new episodes of Long Way Up. The adventure travel reminded me a lot of blogs I used to read when I was in high school¹ and college² and dreaming of studying abroad in Japan and living in Japan in general.

In those days, we'd blog, maybe post a bad photo or two, and commented on each others' sites. Nobody knew each other in real life, but, over time, you'd get a real sense of community. You were of course following the posts, but there were also a regular cast of commenters that you'd also get a sense of knowing. It felt authentic...and innocent.

Why can't we have this today - but on larger scale? How would you even find these sites on the modern web? Everything is hidden behind "the algorithms" and or paid for by a marketing campaign. Can you even find them?

¹ Sushicam.com was a great photo blog by a guy living in Japan. I used to have a few prints of his and also bought his old Canon 10D - until my parents said "If you have enough money to buy a camera, you have enough money to pay rent".
² Justin Klein was a great blog from a traveling programmer. Not just Japan, but all over the world.

6 month inspection/oil change. Love this green Freed.

Tech Companies Are Destroying Democracy and the Free Press

The collapse of journalism and democracy in the face of the internet is not inevitable. To save democracy and the free press, we must eliminate Google and Facebook’s control over the information commons.

The digital commons shouldn't belong to any single mega-corp. It belongs to all of us. Help in the fight by running your own domain and POSSE your content to the silos.

7:20 am, Izumi-ward, Yokohama, Japan

Morning walk between the local elementary school and a farm.

micro.blog #ADayInTheLife photo challenge.

Pre-dawn 5km. Was hoping to find a shot for the micro.blog day in the life challenge while about, but it was too dark. Will try again later.

• It rained all week from Typhoon #14. Thankfully it did a U-turn as it got close to Japan and the winds never picked up.


• We've started planning a small trip to Moomin Valley Park next month. It's only an hour and a bit by car from our house. It's the only Moomin park outside of Finland. It will be my first time to Saitama prefecture and first time leaving the Yokohama/Shonan area since February. Looking forward to it.


• Nils gave a thought provoking talk that tries to answer the question:

Is it ethical to invest time into learning and using technologies from companies that pay little or no taxes?

Though I tend to naturally prefer community based tech (python, django, vue.js) compared to corporate open-source tech (swift, react etc..) I hadn't much considered the ethics. The gist is that taxes benefit society as a whole, so we can have collective goods like roads and schools. Also as these huge companies don't pay their taxes, it allows them to amass vast fortunes for an unfair advantage over smaller companies that do pay their taxes. This advantage puts these smaller companies out of business, reducing choice and the total number of good well paying jobs.

In terms of software when these large companies make these open source projects - what actually happens? People (non-employees) spend their time/free time learning and using their tech, improving their tech, and further entrenching the large corporation's advantage.

Rather than learning an evergreen skill, like JavaScript, and improving JavaScript for everyone people spend their free-time working for corporations like Facebook on projects like React by filing issues, fixing bugs, making components for, writing blog posts about and improving the image of the company - for free.

It seems so backwards, doesn't it?

Slow afternoon 30 minutes after a week of rain. Felt good to get back out there. 🏃

Watching trains again while a guy dressed as Spider-Man plays the violin.🚊🎻

Coffee and homemade orange scones are exactly what the doctor called for on this rainy day. 👨🏻‍🍳🧈🍊☕️