Weeknotes #7

in weeknotes

  • So after thinking two weeks ago that the broad transmission of COVID-19 in Tokyo was about to happen, I was mildly surprised when no drastic action was taken. Well, on Thursday the Japanese government basically shut all schools for six weeks. A good chunk of that overlaps with the upcoming spring holidays but it’s nevertheless additional stress for Eri to have both of the kids at home all day.

  • Pondent was a major focus this week. I spent a long time implementing the individual steps in a Git commit process using GitHub’s API only to discover after I got it working that GitHub provides a single URL endpoint that will do all of that for you. I ripped all that code out but maybe it’ll come in handy at some point.

  • While looking for ClojureScript libraries to help me do what I was looking to do, I came across Tentacles by Anthony Grimes. One of the links in the README went to Grimes’ personal blog and, seeing that it had been taken over by spammers, I looked for a way to reach out to him. Unfortunately, he died more than three years ago. This kind of thing is only going to become more common but for the moment at least it’s very confronting.

  • Technically this happened in the previous week but John drew on my white fluoroelastomer Apple Watch band in ballpoint pen and there’s apparently nothing I can do about it.

  • I got my weight below 72kg. It had been almost at 75kg after Christmas. Would still like to see it get below 70.

  • I spent far too much time trying to get a setup working where I could use the Palaver IRC client on my phone and the Textual IRC client on my Mac. I wasn’t interested unless I could have chat history syncing and push notifications. Supposedly you can with ZNC but for the life of me I couldn’t get it to work reliably.

  • I listened to Julie’s short story, Workers of All Lands Unite, a couple of weeks ago on Radio National. Part of the plot involves a traditional Japanese firemen’s coat (hikeshi banten), an object I’d never heard of before. And then I come across this blog post about them. An instance of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon?

  • Australian hip-hop is great (Apple Music) but I’m linking to Apple’s playlist primarily for the cover art: top stuff.

Michael Camilleri inqk.net