The Week #120

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  • What a week. PyCon JP was held over the weekend and Kraken had a booth. I've been help coordinate and did the final setup of the booth before day-1 and it was a lot of fun. Besides working the booth, telling people about Kraken, what we do, and that we're hiring, I also got to chat with a number of former co-workers. I also got to meet an old teammate that I'd never met in person before, though we worked together for about a year.
    A co-worker and me workin the booth
  • On Saturday we went camping for the first time with some friends in Nishi-Tanzawa. This too was heaps of fun and I look forward to going again.Β  We had a bit of bad luck with our location because it was mostly covered in rocks. I learned two very important lessons with this trip: the pegs and hammer included aren't worth the plastic they're made of and sometimes you need to muscle things together.
    The river along the campsite

    The plastic pegs and hammer issue was mostly (I believe) a bad luck of the draw for location. It was non-stop rocks so everywhere I'd try to put the peg I'd get rock. Eventually I found it worked better to dig a bit, clear the rocks and continue. Was it the "right" thing? Not sure, but it worked. So next on my list things to buy for camping is some proper steel pegs and a heavy / fat hammer for getting them into the ground.Β  I also learned that Workman, a store that specializes in work-wear and such in Japan, also has camping gear. Coleman steel pegs were about Β₯400 each last I saw them, and they're about Β₯100 from workman. Doable. ( I just checked their site and they have some that you can screw into the ground....seems very convenient,Β  but I'm not bringing my drill-gun – feels like cheating.)

    The other lesson was that, when building the dome of our tents that you're not going to break it when bending the dome to get the roof in place. I think we maybe bought too much tent (a 2-dome tent), but I reckon we're going to always want to some kind of shade to hang out in when we're not sleeping, so it saves us from building 2 different things.

    The mountains and river were beautiful. Definitely looking forward to a second trip, maybe in spring.
  • A year after starting our initial quote requests and 7 months after signing a contract, we finally got our solar and battery installed! As of this writing it's still not 100% finished – everything is installed, but I think there's still a bit of work to do around the breakers.

    When we discussed the layout of the panels, they'd said that the panels would come to the very edge of the roof – and they weren't lying. This is only possible because Sharp makes non-rectangular panels. I'll make a separate post my panels when they're all hooked up and running.
    Panels right to the edge of the roof
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