Weeknotes #71

After 70 posts (give or take a few cheats where I didn’t publish the post until shortly after midnight), I finally missed a Monday. Welcome to the first Tuesday weeknotes! I don’t know why I was so tired last night but I basically collapsed around 9.30 and didn’t properly wake up until this morning.

This of course doesn’t bode well for the period when Eri is in the hospital for the delivery. Japan generally keeps mothers for a week so I’ll be taking care of Emma and John all by my lonesome for five days’ straight sometime next month. And even once Eri is back from the hospital, she’ll of course have the baby so I’ll still be quite busy. Maybe this is just my body pre-sleeping?

I continued building out my independent microblogging ‘stack’. To date that’s consisted of Jekyll for generating the site, Pondent for writing the posts and Micro.blog for cross-posting to Twitter. This weekend, I wrote two plug-ins that allow me to remove the dependency on Micro.blog. In addition, I implemented a feature I’ve wanted forever: cross-mentions. I can now write @pyrmont:twitter.com in my Markdown and have Jekyll translate that into a link to my Twitter profile which, when cross-posted to Twitter, is converted to a proper Twitter @​mention.

I’m studying Japanese again. I mentioned this back in at the start of March (#60). Then I kind of stopped and now I’ve started again. I try to study everyday but it’s definitely slow going.

I was thinking that perhaps a Pomodoro timer would help my productivity but I really want one on the Apple Watch. I couldn’t find one that I liked so I thought perhaps that’d be a good project to work on next? A nice excuse to use SwiftUI in a relatively constrained environment.

I decided to try out Mubi with one of the 30-day free trials you can find via various YouTube channels (in my case, Thomas Flight). So far I’ve watched L.A. Confidential, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and This Boy’s Life. It seems slightly ridiculous to pay for another streaming service on top of the ones we already have but I do, at least at this point, find its simplicity and limited selection helpful in encouraging me to watch something.

I fell right off the dieting wagon again. I know that I said that the next step was to start trying to do more exercise but evidently that wasn’t true. The next step was to go right back to eating junk food. I am trying somewhat to restrict the amount that I eat between dinner and the next day’s lunch but it’s pretty haphazard. Maybe I can make an app for this, too. Or possibly there’s some kind of streaming service…

I love cover versions of popular songs by jazz pianists (more common than you might think) and so was excited to find that there’s a cover of ‘Black Hole Sun’ on the new Norah Jones album (Apple Music).