• 🔗 A Recipe to Your Own Home-Coded Personal Website

    by
    The personal web, however, lets you authentically share the stuff you like, and customize your own page to your liking, from the usual header and icon to the background and layout and content!

    It's kind of like a home-made website, like a home-made meal instead of getting it store-bought and ready to consume. There's a sort of joy in getting to manually create the site of your own where you have the freedom to add anything you want onto it, much like a homemade meal has that special touch to it.
    Exactly. More like this please.
    1. Tagged with
    2. blogging
    3. computing
  • by
    Playing an indie playlist in the Airpods with a cup of coffee and reading Curbing Traffic brings me Austin coffee shop vibes at home in Yokohama.

  • The Week #85

    by
    • Last week's getting locked out of the house caused some hassle this week, not with the locks or door, but with the car. We were waiting in the car while the locksmith did his work and as it was dark out, we turned on the interior lights (you can see guess this is going).  In the rush of finally being able to get inside / on with our evening, we forgot to turn them off.

      The next time we went to use the car (Friday?) the automatic sliding doors didn't work...immediately I figured the battery was dead. Thankfully I carry a pair of jumper cables in my car (though usually I'm the one giving the jump). 

      Thankfully my neighbor across the road was home and let me connect my my cables and give me a jump.
    • I fiddled around with Minecraft on my switch for a few minutes to figure out how it works. I can see how people sink hours and hours into this game building cool stuff. Leo also wanted to play. The controls are pretty complex, with one control stick being movement and the other being looking around,  so I have to help him frequently while he masters it.
    • Leo turned 4. For his birthday he got two small Lego sets: a 4+ helicopter and since he's taken to Minecraft, a little Minecraft set. We went and picked out a cake together. He picked a simple cream / strawberry cake (though he skips the strawberries).

      We shared cake and pizza at the grandparent's house. While I enjoy celebrating with the family, I am looking forward for Leo having a proper birthday party with friends someday.
    • As I mentioned, Tanzawa got it's first non-me user! Exciting and illuminating of all of the little issues that exist in the back of my head as a "someday" or have just learned to work around. 😅
    • The covid numbers seem to be starting a downwards trend. Most recently we've had 3 days with fewer cases (by the hundreds or thousands) of the same day the previous week. With this trend and constant public pressure, it seems like Japan will finally start letting non-tourists into Japan again. I don't want to count my chickens before they hatch, but hopefully we'll stay open "for good" or at least long enough for the rest of our team to move to Japan. They've been waiting for over a year now.
    • I ordered two books that I'm really looking forward to reading: Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in our Lives and Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World. The first I suspect may just be preaching to the choir for me, but I know I'll learn something from it. The second, I read the sample chapters a month or two ago and I really enjoyed it. I got both of them in print, rather than e-books, as per usual. (I was quite tempted for the Kindle versions, and they're easy to read that way, but I want to spend less time looking at my phone).
      Love the covers!
    • I discovered The Linda Lindas, an all girl punk band from L.A. (the YouTube offers a good suggestion for a change). Really good music. My favorite so far is Missing You, about being stuck in the house during the pandemic. And the line about wanting to eat at grandma's place is punk as f.
    • As part of my reconsidering solar / batteries for the house, I did some searching. And in that search I discovered that a) I can get a Tesla Powerwall in Japan and b) Despite being double the capacity (13.5 kWh), they seem to be cheaper than domestic counterparts (6.5 kWh).

      I've asked a local installer for a quote for a system and I'm patiently awaiting it. My theory is that it will cost a bit more than the all Sharp system I was quoted before, but who knows.
  • by
    Huge milestone that's taken over a year: someone else is blogging with Tanzawa! Shout out to Ricardo 🙌🏻😀 

  • The Week #84

    by
    • I hoped we'd make it a week without Leo's school being closed, but we weren't so lucky. Thursday was canceled because of a close contact somewhere, but re-opened on Friday. It looks like we're in the clear, at least for now. That said, dropping Leo off in the mornings is noticeably quieter as about half of his class is taking off by choice.
    • Relatives in Tokyo managed to get Omicron and thankfully it was just a fever for a night.
    • We signed up Leo for swimming classes at the local Y and he had his first non-trial lesson. We can watch from outside the pool and he looked like he had a blast. I'm sure he'll be swimming like a fish in no time.

      I know I took swimming a swimming class as a kid, but only as my mom told me so. I must have been young enough when I took them as I have zero recollection of the class itself. Swimming has always felt like one of the things "everyone can do naturally", but that isn't the case.

      Basic swimming is such an important life skill. I'll breathe a bit easier when we go to the beach during summer once this is finished.
    • I'm trying not to blog about my runs every week, but this week was notable because I ran 3 times. Since I've been slowing down I've been switching my focus to time more than distance. But since I'm not slowing down that much, an extra 15 minutes adds another couple of kilos. Two of my runs were over  6km, 50% more than my usual 4km course.
    • In one of the episodes of Shinkarion (Leo's favorite train/mech show), they have the Evangelion Shinkansen (since retired) as a guest mech. When it's transforming from a train to a mech they play part of the opening song for the anime. Leo's constant singing of it inspired me to start watching Evangelion for the first time since high school. It's as intense as I remember.
    •  Like most Japanese front doors we have two locks. And for a while the bottom lock has been acting strange. In the mornings it would take a lot of force to unlock it from the inside. But it'd be fine some afternoons. I carry both the card for the autolock and the backup key, just incase the electrics stop working.

      After cycling back from Shonandai, we went to open the door and neither worked on the bottom lock. I got locked out of my house. It sounds like it's getting caught on something. We called our house maker because "that's what you're supposed to do" and they were, as anticipated, useless. You'd think they'd have, at a minimum, a local "lock guy" to recommend, but that's not the case.

      We find a locksmith he comes out about an hour later. I'm glad I didn't lock the car so we could at least sit inside of it where it was a touch warmer. While we're waiting I'm thinking about Sophie, hungry and may not get dinner tonight. I'm thinking about work and how funny it'd be to have to take leave because I can't physically reach my computer. 10 minutes after arriving he manages to jimmy the bottom lock open. I've never been more happy to get inside of my house.

      After he opened it, he took it apart to see if he could deduce what the issue was. It's not the lock itself. It appears to be the hole in the frame where the lock latches on to is slightly off. The lock itself appears to be fine. Who knows. Best ¥5,500 I've spent in a while.
Previous 219 of 710 Next