-
Top of mind this week has been COVID-19. News came out over the weekend of domestic transmission within Tokyo. I don’t know if there’s really much that can be done. Tokyo’s public transport networks seem like ideal vectors for further transmission and unless the government is planning on telling everyone to work from home, I’d expect the number of confirmed cases to rise quickly. I don’t know if the warmer weather as we approach spring will reduce the amount of time the virus can exist in the environment but I guess you hope that it does. I’m somewhat reassured by the fact that the percentage of infected people who develop critical symptoms is around 3%.
-
In far more trivial news, I got a bit shirty about the merging of an outstanding pull request for Rouge, the syntax highlighting library I help maintain. Among other things, it was a reminder of why I don’t work well on teams. I don’t think I’d appreciated the extent to which becoming a lawyer has meant I’ve avoided having to work together with others.
-
Frozen II was released digitally and I eagerly snapped up a copy. I’ve watched it passively twice but still plan to sit down and watch it properly again.
-
The media that’s dominated my attention this week has been Miss Sherlock, a 2018 co-production between Hulu Japan and HBO Asia. According to Wikipedia, it’s the first major series to cast Holmes as a woman. I really like the way Yuko Takeuchi plays Sherlock, she combines the typical anti-social demeanour with a childish excitement that I don’t remember seeing before.
-
Tuesday was a public holiday and we had over an international family that lives nearby. It was great to have them actually come to our place rather than trying to wrangle our respective children outside. People are a lot more reluctant to go over to each others’ places in Japan than they’d be in Australia and while that’s fine between adults, it’s a real headache with little kids.
-
My new year blog-related productivity continued. For this microblog, there’s now a category for these weeknotes and all the links that used the old URL scheme should work again. On the longer form site, I wrote about technology analyst Ben Thompson’s assumptions.
-
I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time listening to French DJ The Avener’s version of ‘Lonely Boy’ (Apple Music).
