• The Week #178

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    • ⛰️ It only took me about 2.5 years to get around to it, but I made some basic Brid.gy integration into Tanzawa. Right now it only supports posting to Mastodon, but that's all I use it for right now. I had considered doing a native integration with Mastodon (and indeed, there's an open issue for it), but decided against it because I didn't want to faff around with figuring out ActivityPub...especially when my site already marks things up using microformats.

      The integration manifests itself as a new button that says "🐘 Send to Mastodon". When clicked the elephant starts spinning, the backend sends a webmention to Brid.gy, and if successful, the button transforms to say "View on Mastodon". The button jumps around a bit during the whole process, but I'll sort the fine details "later".
    • 🇸🇪 We went to Idea to pick up another Eket cabinet, bringing our total to three, as well as some frozen meatballs and so forth. Ikea used to be one of the places we could take Leo to and he would not have a meltdown...you'll notice the past tense in this sentence.

      After we ate lunch and did some browsing on the second floor, when we got downstairs where all the small things are, Leo noticed the play area...and had a melt down because he couldn't play there...it's not like we didn't try, but there were 50 kids ahead of him, we would've been waiting 2 hours... how I would like to be able to go anywhere without one meltdown or another.
    • 🏥 I went to the hospital to remove some varicose veins on my right leg. I've had them most of my life (they're from (I presume) from damage done when I was first born and the doctors were poking around to give me a feed for whatever they gave me) and the past couple of years they've been getting worse...and visible when wearing shorts.

      This is notable because it was my first time being hospitalized in Japan, so the entire experience is new. I found over during check in that they decided to move me from a shared room on the 2nd floor to a private room on the 4th floor. I'm no sure why they decided that, but I'm glad they did.

      The surgery itself was smooth and I was awake for half of it. I've never been awake for any surgery, so it was an interesting sensation to feel the pressure of tugging(?) without actually feeling anything. For the second half they put me to sleep and apparently they had to use more / it took longer than expected to knock me out.

      Dinner was really good – though perhaps that was as I hadn't eaten in 24 hours by the time surgery was finished and I was awake. Rice, fish, steamed spinach, and some carrots and peas with ground chicken.

      I shouldn't be surprised but there's no WiFi in the hospital, so I'm finishing this post tethered to my phone. I can walk fine, except my leg is wrapped in a bandage and it hurts a bit. I'm glad it's over and without any issues...and I look forward to being able to run again (perhaps a week per the doctor).

      Cost wise I think my total out of pocket is supposed to be around 14-man (940 usd at current exchange rates)... I don't think I would have gotten this done if I was living in America as I can imagine it being easily 5 - 10x, even with insurance.

      Update: Total cost was 7.2man or about 470 usd.

  • The Week #177

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    • 🤮 The bug got me. Unfortunately it didn't really kick in until I was in the office in Tokyo. I left a bit earlier than usual and rode the green car home. Riding the green car is usually quite nice, but I was miserable the entire way.

      On the way I picked up some ice cream from baskin robbins for Leo...which I won't get into why...but it's ridiculous. After buying ice cream as I'm walking back to the station I felt increasingly worse and got more annoyed with each step at the entire situation. My annoyance culminated in breaking the wa the restroom...worrying that his ice cream will melt and I'll have to listen to a, no pun intended, melt down.

      But the moment I got home, Leo was appreciate and said thank you. I b-lined to bed and slept for 12 hours. At its peak I had a 38.3c  (101f) fever. Thankfully when I woke up in the morning I felt much better. I still have a bit of a lingering cough that's getting a bit better each day.
    • 📸 We got the entire family together for Leo's shichi-go-san photos and family photos.  Leo as dressed in hakama and Yumi, and myself dressed in kimono. As we rescheduled on short notice, the adults didn't have the option of picking any kimono we wanted. Rather, we had to pick from their stock that day.

      We were afraid that they'd only have a bunch of light colored kimono, as that's was the majority of the choices to begin with, and that it would make me ghosty. Thankfully that wasn't the case. They had some nice darker blue options. Yumi's had a couple of good options as well.

      Leo did a few different poses in a two different hakama. His favorite was his samurai pose where he got to hold a katana as a prop. Besides Leo's single shots, we also took a family portraits, one with the 3 of us and another with everyone. Each time we take family photos like this, I always think we should do this more often.
    • 🔗 I added a new bookmarks page on my site. The new display of bookmarks is more streamlined giving clear distinction between the site I'm linking to and my commentary about it. I also added tags, which is a first in Tanzawa, so I can better group and categorize the links I'm sharing.

      Under the hood, there weren't that many changes required to enable this. But having this clear difference in styling between different post types is encouraging me to share more links that I find via my blog.
    • ⛰️ Other minor improvements to Tanzawa this week are improved RSS representations for different post types. Mostly it's replacing words with emoji. But the main improvement has been getting my run photos and routes appearing properly in micro.blog.

      Getting the photos and routes to appear in micro.blog required:

       1) Stop using svg when rendering the route for feed readers and instead use img because svg isn't on the allow list for the timeline. This was easy as I already have a url for creating pngs of the route that I use for previews when sharing.
      2) Using absolute uris for my image paths. Relative paths worked fine in feed readers, but not in micro.blog.

      Improved checkin display

      I also added webmentions to the front page, which is quite reminiscent of  following the latest comments on a blog, like people did back in blogging boom. 
    • 👂 Spoke too soon - Leo woke up on Monday with an ear ache 😫 Can't we all just get better?
    • 🤖 I want to end this post on a positive note – I followed the best bot on the fediverse: @hackers_gifs, which shows gifs of the movie Hackers every few hours.

  • The Week #176

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    • 🤮 A stomach bug has gone through the house that has made both Yumi and Leo sick. I've managed to dodge it thus far. I'm not sure how, but Leo's been through almost 3 years of pre-school and hasn't caught a stomach bug until now...and true to the emoji, I don't think he's vomited since before he could eat solids....

      As Leo didn't start showing symptoms until Saturday afternoon, after his local doctor closes, we had to drive him to Totsuka to his backup clinic. 3 minutes into the drive and threw up in new car. I'm happy he felt better after that and I'm also happy that we managed to contain most of it, so there's no stains or residual smells in the car. 

      It's never a good time to get sick, but this week was especially not a good week to do so. You see, on Saturday was the donguri festival at pre-school. This is the one I've probably talked about before where each class has a theme and they use giant cardboard boxes to build seascapes you can walk around or slides and castles. And because he was sick, we couldn't attend.

      We had also planned to get family photos, including the cousins in from Tokyo, with us dressed up in kimono. Alas, we will have to re-schedule this.
    •   ⛰️ With Leo sleeping the majority of the weekend, it meant I could get some time in to work on Sunbottle and Tanzawa. Sunbottle now displays a new data point: how yesterday's generation / consumption compares with last year's.
      A new blue line on the graph showing last year's generation

      Tanzawa got a massive simplification of the plugin system that will make it easier to develop. As I wrote in the pull request, I had to let go of my original idea that people could just upload a python module like you upload a Wordpress plugin. Once I did that, it became mostly a matter of ripping out code and monkeypatches. 

      I also started working on my opengraph meta data. I'd like my posts with photos and my runs to show up with nice previews when linked on Mastodon and such like.
    • ⌚️ Apple released a new watchOS point release that fixes the battery drain issue on some watches. I installed it last night and I think it's working as intended. I took my watch off the charger at 9pm and at 6:30am, it's at 69%. Recently I've been waking up with it in the 50's. My battery health been degrading these past few months (it's currently at 75% health), so it's probably worth getting it swapped out now that  they've fixed the issue.
    • 📷 The Photos app continues to disappoint. I tried to use it to do the most basic task, i.e. import some photos off of an sd card and it couldn't. No previews of  the photos. Clicking import all photos would just take me back to my library top...without importing photos. I've stuck with Photos because syncing with my phone is/was automatic via iCloud, but if it fails at the most basic tasks, what's the point? There must be a better way... Shotwell looks nice (and similar to iPhoto), but it doesn't run on macOS... What do you use to manage your photos?

  • The Week #175

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    • 🚲 For culture day we went to the park by the river. This was the first time we went in the new car with Leo's bicycle in the back. It fits! we brought our popup tent and ate the finest of 7-11's offerings for lunch. While we were eating, there was another kid on a bike in just an tank-top undershirt (and pants, of course) that reminded me of one of the kids that Yumi met when Leo was just born and we lived in Fujisawa.

      And since I'm mentioning this fact, you can probably guess, it was them! They played for about 45 minutes together before they had to go off for lunch. It's such a small world sometimes.
    • ⚽️ Leo had his first real soccer match in Hodogaya. They played 3 games at 10 minutes each...and I don't think Leo's going to be a soccer star. He was out there, but he didn't go after the ball, always staying a bit back. But still, he seemed to enjoy himself and being with the team.

      What was hard was listening to some of the other parents (from the other teams) going into full monster-parent mode yelling at their kids from the sidelines. Not friendly "you got it!", but "what are you doing? move! the game isn't over yet!" in really rough Japanese. They're 5...relax...

      It was my first time visiting the park and driving in the general area. Having a smaller car (with instant torque gives me a lot more confidence driving around unfamiliar streets.
    • 🥵 It also happened to be really hot. Not something I was expecting to say in November, but here we are. 3 days this week it's been 24 - 25C out...we've had over 141 days this year above 25C and I'm over it. Makes me think a lot about the saying that goes around, this isn't hottest summer on record...it's the coolest summer for the rest of your life.
    • 📘 I've started a new book - Running is my Therapy (perhaps related to the above 😂). I'm not as brave as Colin to talk too deeply about my mental health online, but since I've been a teenager I've had my share of ups and downs. Thankfully something that passes in a couple of weeks at most and doesn't affect my work. My running matches this, too. My starts are when I'm feeling good / getting out of a funk...and stop when I get into one. One thing  I have noticed is that when I run I feel better. So my theory is that if I can just continue the routine a bit longer, the gap between ebbs and flows will also elongate.
    • 🎶 The Beatles released their final single, Now and Then. John Lennon wrote the song and recorded a demo playing on the piano. Paul, Ringo, and George tried to finish the song in the 90's, but John's voice wasn't clear enough to mix. It wasn't until they developed the technology for the Beatles documentary to extract audio tracks that they could isolate his vocals enough for them to mix and finish the song. Really good.

  • The Week #174

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    • 🍻 I went for a couple of beers with some old-coworkers/friends in Shinbashi. I can't remember the last time I went out for a proper brew. The shop we went to had a variety of craft beers. The first one I had looked and tasted like juice...but it was actually 5%. We finished up at 6...
    • 🚑 ... and on the way home I got a text message from my wife that Leo fell off the monkey-bars and was bleeding from his nose. The principal drove Leo and my wife to the hospital where they gave him a once over and all was fine. My wife asked me to pick them up...but since I had a couple of beers, I could not legally drive (legal limit is 0%), so the principal also drove them back.
    • 🐍 This next day was PyConAPAC 2023. This year I also attended for work. It was a lot of fun. This year I attended a couple of talks – one on Django and HTMX and another on tagging inbound customer inquiries. I also had the opportunity to talk with a number of attendees about Kraken and what we're doing and (most importantly)... we're hiring!
    • 🏉 These past couple of weeks instead of watching the news with my morning coffees, I've been watching rugby. You see, with the the Rugby World Cup in France, the games have been airing at 4am Japan time. This is a bit before I usually wake up, but they show this instead of the morning news.

      I've been low-key getting into it. I think I understand more of the rules of rugby (but not as many as if I read an article on wikipedia or similar). On Sunday I woke up later than usual and managed to catch the last 10 minutes of the final between New Zealand and South Africa and I was on the edge of my seat. Full drama until the very last second. Congratulations, South Africa!
    • 👘 Next month we're going to take family photos for Shichi-Go-San. This week we went to the photo studio where we'll rent our kimono and get photos taken to make reservations. Leo had so many choices for his kimono and he picked a cool blue-green color.
    • 📕 I finished reading Ultra Processed People. My kindle showed I was 60% of the way through the book, which made me think I had a slog coming up, but turns out I only had about 10 pages. The rest were acknowledgements, notes and such like. I think I would have finished it weeks ago if I had realized I was about 10 pages from being finished.  Really good book and it's re-shaping how I think about food.

  • The Week #173

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    • 🚙 We took the car to Tokyo to my sister-in-law's house. On the highway I can use the automatic driving features (pro pilot), so it keeps the lane and adjusts speed based on the distance of the car in front of me and so forth. It feels like it's slightly easier to turn on than my old car.

      We left with 90% charge and by the time we go home we had 50% charge remaining, which is about what I was expecting.
    • 🌳 In Tokyo we went to Kinuta park and it was a lot of fun. I really do enjoy that park because not only is it huge with a lot of trees and paths through said trees, but it also has some little shops that sell fried rice / noodles, ice cream, frisbees, and coffee. Just don't get the ice coffee, it was pretty bad.

      At the park we played some badminton. I thought I was bad at badminton because it was difficult to see the white birdy flying through the sky, so we bought some pink ones that would be easier to see and nope, didn't make a difference. I've come to accept that I'm just not a naturally gifted badminton player.

      Mostly at the park I was in charge of watching the kids, which meant following them about, helping them keep balance on the balance beams and so forth. I also took my camera with me, and I should have started doing this 5 years ago when I bought the thing.
      Kinuta park
    • 💦 They're making progress turning the field next to my house into housing. They've dug some big holes in the ground and laid some concrete. They also hooked up the water mains to that area, which meant they had to cut into some of my land to connect the pipes.

      When I bought my house, the road directly in front of my house was too narrow to meet current code for safety for having a houses on both sides of the street. So my parcel if land is split into two chunks: the large chunk where I live and I can do whatever I want that is zoned for 2-story residential...and the 20 - 30cm strip that is an offset that is zoned as common(?) use. i.e. I own it...but I can't really do anything with it as it's an extension of the road. Visually, it looks like a normal divide in the concrete.

      They're running the water pipes directly in front of that land, but to connect to the pipe meant they had to dig into that common concrete...and now there's a nice square of asphalt in my otherwise uniform concrete offset. 
    • 🍂 It's been getting quite cool overnight / in the morning. Recently it's been about 12C in the morning. As the afternoons have been a lovely 23 - 24, you've really got to dress in removable layers to keep comfortable. The humidity of summer is completely gone as well.

  • The Week #172

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    • 🚑 One for last week, I have no idea how I forgot to document this. While driving back from the station we saw an old lady walking slowly along the left side of the road...suddenly collapse. We stopped the car and checked on her. She banged her head up against the wall and was bleeding. A couple minutes later her neighbor walked by and noticed the situation and ran to get her grand-daughter...I think she'll be ok. Not sure why she suddenly collapsed or slipped, perhaps it was because she was using an umbrella as a cane...
    • 🍔 Two weeks in a row I've got to Mos burger...but this time I got the Yasai burger (which is basically a burger with lettuce / tomato / a sauce that's probably thousand island dressing). Thanks for the tip, Michael! Burgers with thousand island dressing remind me of my youth in California where it seems that most burger joints served burgers with thousand island. I can forsee many Yasai burgers (with a salad) in my future.
    • 🍕 On a whim I made pizza for lunch over the weekend. Usually I try to make it with an overnight dough to get a bit extra flavor in the dough. This time I just went with a quick pizza dough recipe. One of the pizzas was round and baked in one of our t-falls (on top of some oven paper). The other, I took the wooden handle off my cast iron tamago-yaki skillet, put some olive oil in the bottom, and baked it. It turned out sooo good. With the quick dough recipe,  it's almost as easy as delivery...and certainly better for you (though I wouldn't go as far to call it health food). 
    • ⛰️ I hacked a bit on Tanzawa. Since upgrading my Macbook I've been plagued by a local-dev incompatibility between versions of the Geo-libraries and Django...or something...this is the bug ticket. But it so I can't run database migrations. Running into these issues really hampers my motivation to work on Tanzawa. Even with these issues, I managed to make it so the svgs on my runs page are no longer generated dynamically and held in ram, but generated once and stored in the db. This should hopefully fix the out of memory server crashes I've been getting sporadically. 
    • 🤧 I got a cold or something. I haven't been sick in forever. Thankfully just a bit of a sore throat and a sinus headache. But it ate up my entire weekend as it spread to all members of the household. Thankfully now as I write this (Tuesday 5:30am-ish) I feel 99% recovered.
    • ☀️ It's been exactly 1 year since we got solar installed. I haven't run all of the numbers but we generated almost 4 megawatt hours (4007kWh)! We sold 1 megawatt in total over the past year. In total this past year solar saved us about 10-man, which is about what I was expecting.

  • The Week #171

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    • 🏃 This week had a 3-day weekend, thanks to Sports Day. That means we also had field day at Leo's pre-school.  Like last year I helped hang the paintings that the kids painted above the field like flags. Blue badges had two blue-badge only events: a coordinated dance without the teachers also dancing to lead and a relay race.

      Leo's been practicing the dance about once a day for the past while and he nailed it during the actual performance. For his lap around field during the relay he held his own and maintained his team's position. His team held on to the lead until the very last straight away where they got passed at the last second.

      Looking back over the years of field day it's clear to see his growth as a little human. His first time running during the 30 yard dash (or whatever the length was) and he stopped running as soon as he knew he wasn't going to win and walked nonchalantly. This time, he ran his hardest the entire way, though he didn't win.

      During the tug-of-war his class came in second place. And I could really see him putting in all of his strength and effort into the matches. I'm a proud papa.
    • 🧑‍🍳 With the 3-day weekend we spent a lot of time at the in-laws house as the cousins in Tokyo came to visit. When everybody's in town, I like to cook for the family because I enjoy cooking (just hate the cleanup), and cooking for 8 people is a lot of work in addition to watching kids. I made lasanga for dinner one night and potofu soup with ham & cheese melts for lunch the next day.
    • 🛶 I watched the latest Beau video, a real treat about the making of the episode of How Other Dads Dad that Beau was on. Watching Beau take his kid out for adventures like that makes me want to take Leo out on more adventures. It also made me think about how often I fail to plug-in at Leo's level and just embrace being curious about the world because we got places to be or things that need doing. Both the video and the podcast are worth your time.
    • 💍 Speaking of watching things, Leo watched the final Lord of the Rings movie...by himself! I would have liked to watch it with him (as well as finish the 2nd!)....I'm almost certain he fast forwarded through all of the "boring" parts so he could get to the fighting and final scenes. 

  • The Week #170

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    • 💍 I watched Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring with Leo over two sittings. Perhaps not the wisest parenting decision, as there is a fair bit of violence, but no worse than him playing Zelda, I reckon. I figured he'd get bored sooner than he did, but as it reminded him of Zelda, he was able to get stuck in. The last time I watched this was during the pandemic when I needed a bit of an escape. It still holds up all these years later.
    • 📚 Looking to read a book that isn't non-fiction, I bought the the Fellowship of the Ring book, so I can read it on my kindle. It was less than ¥1,000 on Kobo, so why not? I'm horrible at reading fiction, so we'll see if I can get through it.
    • 🎂 I mentioned it in other posts this week, but I turned 38. I took the day off work, which was my first one in far too long. They're usually a "day off" (day off in quotes because they're usually me taking the day so I can watch Leo because pre-school is closed, which is far more work than actually working). 

      For my birthday dinner, I made some fajitas, some killer guacamole, and some pico de gallo. Cake-wise, we've taken to getting 3 individual slices of cake rather than a whole small cake as most people do. That way we can can all get the flavor that we want and there's no left overs tempting you. I went with chocolate mouse, Leo with the usual strawberry short cake, where he eats the cake and I eat the strawberries, and Yumi got a pumpkin tart.
    • 👮‍♀️ During the day on my birthday I went th to the police station to renew my license. Before submitting my application, I went to the building next door and got my photo taken and paid for the renewal. Upon submitting my application with the fresh photo, the police officer look at my photo and asked me twice when I took it as it looked nearly identical to my previous one. We both had a good laugh. He says that sometimes people have a nice photo that they try to re-use, but I'm no so vain. Though I did make an effort to shave that morning.
    • ☕️ After that I went to Kita-Kamakura and went to Verve Coffee Roasters for coffee and lunch. I ate a hummus and eggplant pressed-sandwich which was killer. It reminded me that I need more hummus in my life. While there I made up and wrote my ode to overnight oats. 
    • 🫓 Speaking of hummus, on Sunday I didn't eat any meat, which I'd like to do more of. Breakfast was (you guessed it) overnight oats. For lunch I whipped up some couscous, a ratatouille-like dish with eggplant (including the last one from the garden), red/green bell pepper, onion, and garlic, some pita and a quick hummus. Dinner was rice, miso soup, salad, and atsu-age (fried tofu). I need more days like this. It makes me feel better.

  • The Week #169

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    • 🍂 Autumn suddenly arrived this week. One day the low was 25 and the high was 33. The next day the low was 19 and the high was 27. This summer was very long and we didn't have but one typhoon to bring some relief from the heat. Very very glad it's over.
    • 🏄‍♂️ We visited the Enoshima area for the first time since...March. Leo and I splashed a bit in the still warm water. Afterwards we all went to the aquarium to check out the sharks. Despite us visiting on a regular basis over the years, I don't think we've ever looked slowly at the entire aquarium...it's always a bit of a rush.
    • 🚟 As we walked to ride the monorail home we saw a homeless person. Leo didn't see him. But as we got close, he said "kusai" (stinking/smelly) aloud. After we crossed the street, Leo got small talking to about learning to think things without saying them and that not everyone has a home to go home to each night and not everyone can take a bath every day. He seemed like he understood.
    • 🏮 Our local shrine took out the mikoshi for the first time in since 2019. The last time they did it was actually the day we moved in to our house. Along the road leading to the shrine is a small festival with games and food.
      Vendors selling food on the road leading to the shrine

      We bought some yaki-soba (stir fried noodles), tako-yaki (octopus balls), and some cotton candy. Leo's wanted to try cotton candy for a while so he was very excited to try it. A surprise to no one, he's a fan.
      Father and son making tako-yaki
    • 🎶 I made a great batch of Mexican style pinto beans and found a new favorite YouTuber, ArnieTex. His channel focuses a lot on cooking the food I used to eat in Texas. Why the music note emoji, you ask? I  taught Leo a song that every kid should know about beans*. You know the one, it goes something like:

      Beans, beans the magical fruit.
      The more you eat, the more you toot.
      The more you toot, the better you feel.
      That's why we eat beans at every meal.

      And I'm quite happy / proud to say that he's memorized it and sings it too me a couple of times a day. His small grammatical mistakes are also cute. I kinda like his version "The more you toot, the better the feel".

      * I also learned there's a version where first two lines are "Beans, beans, they're good for your heart. The more you eat, the more you fart" from a co-worker. They'd never heard the magical fruit version and I'd never heard the heart version.
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