Weeknotes #57

An aftershock from the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake shook Tokyo on Saturday night. I was asleep after putting the kids to bed and only felt the tail end of it but Eri was very startled and rushed into the room to wake us all up and get ready to leave the house. The shaking stopped shortly thereafter but we’re playing it safe and sleeping closer to the front door for the remainder of the week.

In more positive news, the weather is starting to warm up and so I took the kids to a nearby park on Sunday. It was Valentine’s Day and after bringing Emma and John back to the house, I dropped by 7-Eleven to buy some chocolates and a strange, Mario-35th-anniversary-star desert thing for dinner. Nothing particularly special but then in Japan men aren’t expected to do anything until White Day (Wikipedia) so I got brownie points for just doing that. Oh, and while I was in the convenience store, I of course grabbed some Australian-made meat pies (!!!).

This isn’t a recent discovery but I realise that in the past couple of weeknotes I’ve neglected to mention what happened. Back on Australia Day I was lamenting to Eri that I’d meant to track down some meat pies that I could give to the kids as part of an Australia Day lunch. Well, lo and behold, a few days later I was in the aforementioned 7-Eleven and what do I see in the freezer? Authentic Australian-made Four’n Twenty meat pies. I almost fell over in disbelief. I have no idea why but there’s an official Japanese distributor but they’ve got some sort of arrangement with 7-Eleven and for now at least I can buy as many microwaveable mince pies as I can eat. I have no idea how long they’ll be available. I can’t imagine they’re amenable to the Japanese palette but while they’re still in stock, I’m taking every opportunity I can to head over to the convenience store and stock up.

I don’t feel like I did much programming or much reading this week so links are pretty thin. I did start looking into learning a statically compiled language like Rust or Haskell. The one I’m most intrigued by is Zig. It aims to be a better C and as someone who’s always had an oddly positive relationship with C, that’s kind of appealing. On the downside, it has nowhere near the size of the community of those other languages and it’s still pretty early on in its development.

The Pfizer vaccine was officially approved in Japan and health-care workers will begin receiving vaccinations next week (Reuters.). The minister in charge of the roll-out tweeted that elderly foreign residents can expect to receive a coupon in the mail in March that they’ll use to book an appointment in April. Our family is a long way away from being able to receive inoculations but at least it feels like there’s forward momentum.

I continue to enjoy Erased, but our progress has been pretty slow and we’re only up to episode 4. I did watch Tenet again and, as I suspected, it’s growing on me. Robert Pattinson’s performance is the real highlight for me at the moment.

You know how there are sometimes songs that you feel like have always been around even as you know objectively that’s not true. Weezer’s ‘Beverly Hills’ (Apple Music) is one of those songs for me. I believe it came out in 2005 but I have no recollection of ever hearing it for the first time. Very strange.