• After weeks of sunny clear winter weather, it's been cloudy and cold this week. Just in time for us to start a new billing cycling and for me to discover that my tariff calculation was wrong if usage was less than the max of the first tier. I fixed that bug and now I'm back to enjoying checking my savings page without having a heart attack at the cost.
• We've been planning a bit more for Leo's birthday party in the US. I was thinking Mario themed and literally the first image I see on Party City (a chain store in America that sells party supplies / balloons) is Mario birthday supplies. All of it is great and...surprisingly...not that expensive?
• Growing up I watched a great sitcom called That 70's Show about a bunch of bored teenagers doing things that teenagers did in the middle of nowhere. They rebooted the series with the original cast with a new show That 90's Show on Netflix and it's fantastic. I hadn't realized how much I missed Red, the hard-nosed dad.

James Wheare now gives a quick demo. He’s making a daily physical lifestream. Overnight, it pulls in blog entries, Flickr pictures and twitter messages from his friends and in the morning, he prints out a foldable A4 page. He can fold this down into a little booklet to take with him when he leaves the house.

• This week marked 12 years of marriage. I don't know how it's already been that long, but the dates, they do not lie. I couldn't ask for a better friend and partner in crime life.
• I ran my longest run in a very, very long time. My usual runs are about 30 minutes (especially as of late following Time to run). The last Time to run was an hour long episode running Central Park and it went by rather quickly. In that hour I ran 8.6km, which I'm pretty happy. I didn't have any distance goals for this run, I just wanted to get through the entire hour.
• In birdsite news, they seem to have cut off API access to all big clients. I reckon they're trying to force everyone onto the main clients for the ad revenue. But what a slap in the face, they didn't even give any notice that access was going to be turned off. They just did it and then were silent about it. What a joke of an operation it's become.
• More refactoring on Tanzawa. The "small" change of getting rid of Turbo is forcing allowing me to tackle some hidden tech-debt with how my templates are structured and divided.
  
  Currently users only see one form/one save button on the screen for a post/location/syndication urls, but under the hood (on the backend) it's actually 3. Processing 3 separate forms as 1 hasn't sat well with me since I implemented it, so I'm going to embrace my new yak shaving hobby. My plan is to pull location into the post form and move syndication its own section with its own save button/url. Maybe the first steps in adding native syndication support? Who knows, I'm but a lowly yak shaver.
• Our trip to America is getting ever closer and we're starting to solidify plans a bit more. We've got a couple of dates booked to see friends. While we're staying in the burbs, the place we're staying is walking distance (with sidewalks! and traffic signals!) to a bunch of different restaurants/cafes we used to frequent nearby...so I'm starting to think about all the tacos and sandwiches I'm gonna eat. Assuming there aren't any polar vortexes this year, it looks to be a nice 23-ish out, about 10 - 15 degrees warmer than Yokohama.
• I don't speak Portuguese, but a co -worker shared this Brazilian Samba mix at work and it's incredible. If you just need some feel good, happy (presuming here – I can't understand a word) tunes to groove to - these thems.

But it’s almost 2023 now. The world is different, the online world is very different, and I’m pushing 50. So I think it’s time we all start talking about online gathering places with a more apt metaphor: bars.

• Under the hood, Tanzawa uses django-webmention to support inbound webmentions. As I've been updating all of the backend dependencies for Tanzawa, I noticed that it didn't work with Django 4.0 and so I made a small PR to fix it, which was released as a new major version (as we also dropped support for old, unsupported versions of Python/Django). 
• On the Sunbottle front, I had some inspiration and a few spare cycles so I built a "But, is solar worth it?" page, which breaks down exactly (minus tax) how much solar is saving me. In the almost 3 months, it's over ¥21,500  ¥22,000.
• After using the same 3-fold leather wallet for 12+ years, I bought a new canvas wallet. It's a bit bittersweet, as my old wallet is still usable – the leather's in great condition, fabric inside isn't torn up, the wallet is just too big. It has many features I've grown to love, like the divided coin wallet, allowing me to separate ¥100/¥500 yen coins from everything else, as well as keeping small things like sim cards so as not to lose them. 
  
  Why now? I've been thinking about it and looking (half-heartedly) for a couple of years for a worthy replacement. But rather than looking for the perfect wallet, I decided to that "good enough" will suffice and that over time, I will grown to love this wallet like I did my old one. I went with canvas instead of leather because it's lighter and there's no animals harmed in its making. A small step in the right direction.
• We booked our hotels and car for the upcoming trip. As much as I wanted to do electric, the only option was a Model 3 at 70~ / day, which would have run is about $1,500 for the trip. A wee bit more than I want to spend and about double what we're paying for a small Mazda CX-5. I also went in to the police office and submitted paperwork for my international driver's license. It was mostly painless. Glad I went early as it takes a couple of weeks for them to prepare it.
• Media wise: For the past couple of weeks, I've been reading The BFG with Leo. It's his first chapter book and he's mostly understanding, or at least mostly listening and we're about halfway through. We watched the first Harry Potter on Netflix and Leo didn't get scared or anything.
  
  Lastly, I started watching Ikebukuro West Gate Park, which I last saw in high school. I used to really like Japanese dramas back then, these days I never make time to watch anything. The theme song for IWGP is this song by SADS, and it reminded me how, years ago, I lost most of my music collection to canceling my iTunes Match subscription, including all of my jrock. Worth a watch if it's on Netflix in your country, imo.