Even if nobody reads them, I’ll always be drawn to the freedom blogs offer. I can ramble about any subject I choose, says music journalist Simon Reynolds

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Love Notes to Newton is a film about what a beloved (but short-lived) pen-based Personal Digital Assistant created by Apple Computer has meant for the people...

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• 🎄 Christmas was this week. We celebrated a couple of days early with the ancient Japanese custom of eating KFC and a nice cake (pistachio cream with strawberries) with my wife and her family. Unlike previous years, because we celebrated 2-days prior, the cake shop, even with a reservation, was not complete chaos.
  
  For Christmas day itself we kept it fairly low-key. We got Leo a Link (Archer) Amiibo and Super Mario Maker 2. Santa brought him a 500 page Zelda: Breath of the Wild guidebook. Happy to say he loves it all. I got an awesome sweat shirt, so I can wear something besides plaid during winter 😀. Yumi got a nice pair of gloves.
  
  We often make a trip to the beach during Christmas / New Years. Not to go swimming, but just to enjoy the clear air and less crowds. This year we went on Christmas day. It's been a couple of years since we brought Sophie with us on these...and she was excited to come along and run around in the sand, dig, and get some sniffs in.
  

  

  
  The city was doing some maintenance and they had made some huge piles of sand on the beach. Every so often there was a kei-truck taking a load of sand and dropping it along the beach.
  

  

• 🗡️ Speaking of Zelda we got the Master Sword in breath of the wild. We finally got enough hearts to get it.
• 🏃‍♂️I went for my first run since my surgery a month ago. It was a lot of fun and I didn't realize how much harder running was because of my leg. Usually even just 5 - 6 minutes in my legs would feel heavy but I'd plod on with mental fortitude alone. This time though my legs felt fine the entire run. That heaviness never came. I thought that heaviness was just my legs being weak or not being used to running...turns out it was reverse flow. Looking back, I'm amazed I kept running like that...but I reckon it was just as I didn't know any better 😆.
• 🏢 This week was my last week of work for the year. I kinda like my new routine of the last and first month of the year is being off. I was thinking about it what all changed in the past year...and beyond the product itself, I went from leading a team of 4 (myself included) and now I'm leading a team of 16 (myself included, divided into a few different squads/regions/continents), which boggles my mind.
• 🇪🇸 I started looking at tickets for a work-trip to Valencia, Spain next month. I'm really looking forward to meeting up with teammates who I don't get to regularly sit down with and some of whom I'll be meeting for the first time. I'm equal parts excited to eat some paella from the birth place of it... scared it will ruin it whenever I have it anywhere else.