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I forgot to mention in the previous weeknotes that it was Easter last weekend. It was a little disappointing for me (the kids enjoyed it). We gave Emma and John each a Lindt Gold Bunny but I had been really looking forward to giving the kids each a Chococo Ocean Egg for the past year or so. One of the kids’ favourite YouTube videos is Maddie Moate’s entertaining (if, admittedly, commercial) explainer on how British chocolatier, Chococo, makes its Easter eggs. After a couple of years of always leaving the egg shopping too late, I was very disappointed this year to discover they don’t ship overseas.
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I also forgot to mention that John badly jammed his finger in one of the doors the Friday before last. It looked serious enough at first that we were worried he might have fractured the bone but after icing it over night, it looked much better the next the morning. In retrospect, it was very cute that John’s concerns were, in order, (1) that we’d be upset with him for not listening to previous warnings to be careful with the door and (2) that he was going to die.
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This weekend we went to the ice skating rink in Meijijingu Gaien (Google Maps). Emma and John’s Sunday class is only once every two weeks so we figured we’d look at one of the other rinks serving Tokyo. It was a lot smaller than either Eri or I were expecting but allowed ‘free skating’ so Emma had the chance to practise skating around on her own. John went out on the ice with Eri and, despite almost immediately saying he wanted to stop, had built up a bit of self-confidence by the end.
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Concerned I was the only tech-interested person not writing about ChatGPT, I published a transcript of me role-playing as Michael Jordan’s wife while ChatGPT played Michael Jordan. My goal was to get it to speak poorly of the Charlotte Hornets, the NBA franchise owned by Jordan. That didn’t work but I thought the result was still amusing.
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Speaking of blogging, I turned off cross-posting to Micro.blog. Was that done in a fit of pique? Not a ‘fit’ exactly, but perhaps a ‘moment’. I want an RSS feed for my Micro.blog mentions which, given the philosophy of the site, doesn’t seem too much to expect and yet, despite this being requested back in 2021, it’s still just something on the drawing board. I am frustrated for the umpteenth time that Micro.blog is not open source as this is something I’m pretty sure I could write.
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Speaking of fits of pique, I switched mobile providers again! My phone’s connection was painfully slow on the way home for the second Friday in a row and I decided I’d had it with Mineo. This time, rather than try to find the cheapest alternative, I decided to give ahamo a try. That’s docomo’s own no-frills service and while it’s on the expensive side at ¥3,000 a month (Mineo was about half of that), for that you get 20GB, 5G service, eSIM support and it works overseas. Setting it up as an eSIM, I had it working by Saturday afternoon and so far, so good.
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I’ve been a bit disappointed with the video essays YouTube’s been recommending over the past couple of months and while I didn’t see anything this weekend that reversed that trend, I did come across Tom Stuart’s ‘Programming with Nothing’ and it is fantastic (YouTube). If you’re interested in programming, I highly recommend it.
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It’s not quite a video essay but I did enjoy Paul Davids deconstruction of Dick Dale’s ‘Misirlou’ (YouTube). Of course, that makes it the obvious musical selection (Apple Music).