The Week #142

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  • One of the "mistakes" we made when buying our house in order to save some money, was to not get kitchen cabinets installed (everything is an "option" when buying a pre-built house). Instead we opted to re-use the cabinet we were using from our apartment and get a longer cabinet to put next to it for storage. It works and holds our dishes, but it's not enough. Because there's no storage on the walls, things tend to overflow.

    I started researching getting some proper cabinets installed. So far I've mostly been looking at IKEA as the quality / pricing seems to be about right. They also have some software that will let you plan it out yourself (before visiting the stores proper). It's nothing we'll be doing in the next month or two, but perhaps later this year.
  • Leo's officially no longer a pink badge and in a couple of weeks he'll be a blue badge, the top class. Which also means: spring break started. We were planning to visit the aquarium a couple of weeks ago, but we didn't, so we went this week instead. It was packed. The pandemic is/was the worst, but it was nice how empty these kind of places were before.

    After the aquarium we visited our favorite burger joint and then went to the beach and threw rocks into the ocean for an hour. It was a lot of fun. Also, Leo walked a lot more than he used to (though there was still plenty of time up on my shoulders – I gotta get it in while I still can).
  • Japan lived up to its robotification cred abroad when I went out to dinner at the local Jonathan's. For a while now ordering at Jonathan's is done via a tablet. ( Sidebar: A tablet whose camera turns on afterwards. I always put the menu in front of it we're done to block its view, but I reckon the mics are still on.). When our food came this human sized cat robot with 4 slots rolled up to our table with our food with blue flashing lights where our food was. After we unload it, it went back to the kitchen for its next load.

    There might be a robot cat delivering your food

    Using this robot and tablet ordering, they probably had about half of the staff in the front of the house as they usually would. In-fact, the only time we had to interact with a human was: when they picked up dirty dishes, delivery of dessert (I reckon ice cream needs to go to tables express), and to pay. But even paying, there was a self-checkout. As an introvert, this is a change I can get behind.
  • Greg Jackson, the CEO of Octopus, was interviewed at SXSW. I'm happy that full interview is up on YouTube, Working at Octopus, I know what we do / how it all fits together in terms of the energy transition. But there's always bits and bobs I didn't know

    For instance, on-shore wind turbines must be painted white, so they blend in with the sky and such. Octopus has a "fan-club" (because wind turbines are effectively big fans) where people who live within a certain distance from an Octopus wind-turbine can get 20 - 50% off their electric when it's windy / really windy. To communicate this locally customers that the energy is cheap, they light them up green (for a period I reckon?), which I thought was pretty clever.
  • Media wise - I've been listening to Get On by Anuqram, not quite on repeat, but close enough. Ted Lasso S3 (the final season) came back and it's as good as ever. I also started watching Shrinking with Jason Segel and Harrison Ford. It's written (in part) by Roy fuckin' Kent and it's brilliant.
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