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John finished preschool. I was a little sad not to go to the ceremony but, realistically, Rowan would have made it difficult to watch anyway. That together with the fact that John’s only been going to this school for a year meant it didn’t carry with it the same weight that, say, Emma’s did. Although, having said that, I had a look at my weeknotes from March 2022 and Emma’s ceremony didn’t even rate a mention. Sorry, Emma.
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Speaking of Emma, she finished her second year of primary school. Only four left to go! In April, she and John will go to the same school for the first time. Fingers crossed that goes well.
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Regular readers will recall that I’m taking Rowan to the English class Emma and John attend on Saturdays as a way to get him accustomed to playing with others. I’m not sure how well that’s going. It’s been almost two months and while he seems to enjoy going well enough, he is very possessive with toys in a way that the other young children aren’t.
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Speaking now of Rowan, Wednesday was a public holiday and I took the midweek break to pop down to Yokohama to ride the Keihin Kyūkō train back up to Tokyo. Because I’m terrible at planning things, I decided on doing this about 20 minutes before we left the house and so missed the chance to see James (assuming he was even free).
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Way back in 2016, I started paying for a subscription to the Financial Times. My recollection is that the price didn’t change much for the first few years but last year it increased to ¥50,000. This year they sent me an e-mail saying that the price wasn’t changing and that it would be ¥55,600. I wrote to them to confirm that it indeed wasn’t changing and so would remain ¥50,000. A polite support person wrote back and told me they were ‘grateful’ for my attention to detail and ‘delighted’ to renew the subscription at the ¥50,000 price. I’m pretty sure neither of those things is true but I’ll gladly take the ¥5,600. At least for another year.
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I thought Benedict Evans had a great write-up of his first month with the Apple Vision Pro. I’ve been thinking for most of the run-up to the Vision Pro’s launch that the appropriate comparison to draw isn’t with any recent Apple product, it’s with the original Mac. I was chuffed that Evans felt similarly:
…comparisons with iPhones are much-overused, but an iPhone was a drop-in replacement for the phone you already had, and it was better than most phones even before it had 3G or an App Store. A Vision Pro is not a direct replacement for anything, and I think a better comparison is with the original Mac, back in 1984. It cost $2,500—over $7,200 adjusted for inflation—and most people didn’t really know why they needed one, or indeed why they needed a personal computer at all.
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Apparently, ‘chuffed’ only dates back to 1957.
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I watched Tenet again and, as I suspected after I first saw it, I’ve come to really like it. This time around it was Robert Pattinson that captivated my attention. In a film that is far too serious, he brings a delightful levity to the entire enterprise. It’s a small moment but I loved this exchange:
IVES: There’s no way of bringing you back.
PROTAGONIST: We find another machine.
IVES: A week ago? Where?
PROTAGONIST: Oslo.
IVES: That facility’s inside an airport security perimeter. It’s impregnable.
NEIL: Mmmm… it wasn’t last week. -
I want to like Apple’s new Heavy Rotation playlist but it doesn’t update reliably (surprise!). I listened to Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘get him back!’ (Apple Music) multiple times over the weekend and yet it’s still not on the playlist.
