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Mum arrived on Sunday for her annual-ish visit to Japan. Coming in June means she gets a chance to see the kids every six months: once during the Japanese summer (which coincidentally means she’s here for the boys’ respective birthdays) and once in the Australian summer (when we’re there for Christmas).
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One aspect of the timing that isn’t great is that it means Mum is here during tsuyu, the Japanese rainy season (Wikipedia). We are booked to go to Disneyland next weekend and, unfortunately, the forecast is for it to rain. The winds in tsuyu can cause things to change quickly (it was great weather on Sunday when Mum arrived despite pelting down on Friday and Saturday) so I’m crossing my fingers.
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I’ve been contemplating changing mobile providers yet again. I’ll probably stick with ahamo but I’ve been very disappointed with the connection quality on the way to work. My phone will frequently say it cannot send data even though it reports that it does have decent cellular access. The issue of course is that there’s no guarantee that switching would fix the problem. My hope/hypothesis is that the problem is underinvestment by docomo in their network during the pandemic. Now that the number of commuters are closer to what they were pre-pandemic (coupled with more streamed video in 2023 than there was in 2019), the capacity of the network is under intense strain. I say this is my hope because it at least suggest a relatively straightforward fix: docomo just needs to build more capacity.
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Last week I published my sixth annual list of the podcasts I’m listening to. I was surprised how many of the programming ones I’ve dropped since last year. I guess given how little programming I did, that’s not a huge surprise.
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Ironically, I did some programming this week! After discussing Argy-Bargy, my argument parsing library in Janet, with sogaiu, I decided to incorporate a number of changes I’d made to the vendored version I was using in a different Janet project, Jeep. I’m still in the midst of making changes to both libraries but that might get derailed by a desire to play with the new Xcode betas that have just come out.
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With everything going on, I’m a little disappointed in myself for not watching either of the first two games in the NBA Finals. That’s especially so given that Miami managed to even the series by winning in Denver in Game 2. Like most, I’m expecting Denver to still win but watching Miami repeatedly triumph in spite of everyone’s pronouncements to the contrary has been a lot of fun.
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I mentioned Pomplamoose’s mash-up of ‘Sweet Dreams’ and ‘Seven Nation Army’ last week. If you’re as obsessed with ‘Seven Nation Army’ as I am, video essayist 12tone has a video about it from a year ago that is superb. I generally enjoy 12tone’s videos but I often get lost in the music theory. But ‘Seven Nation Army’ is so simple that 12tone has more than enough time to explain each aspect.
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On the topic of video essays, while I haven’t finished watching Thomas Flight’s video essay on metamodernism, it did prompt me to look up ‘metamodernism’. I mean is it even a real word. It turns out that it is! As usual, Wikipedia has a good introduction.
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I don’t remember now what brought this back across my radar but I’ve been listening to a lot of KT Tunstall’s cover of ‘Get Ur Freak On’ (Apple Music) from 2005.
