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Rowan recovered well enough from his bout with RSV to come home on Tuesday and, after a couple of days, seemed to overcome the virus completely. Emma and John similarly recovered by the end of the week and my symptoms (which appeared around Monday) have gone too.
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It was two weeks since my vaccination on Friday so hooray to being fully vaccinated! News of the Lambda variant (Wikipedia) being better at evading resistance did put something of a dampener on things but even still—it’s a relief to be at this point. I feel very fortunate.
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Speaking of vaccines, Eri made an appointment for her SARS-CoV-2 vaccination with the local paediatrician (they’re offering it). She has to wait until next month but, Lambda variant or not, it’ll be great when we’re both vaccinated.
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My AirPods are like the venerable family dog that is on its last legs. The microphones stopped working a long time ago so I can’t use them to actually talk to anyone and then last night, the speaker in the right earpiece became very tinny. It was as if I was listening to everything at the end of a very long corridor. I know there are new versions about to be announced next month and I know they know it, too. Do I buy a new pair now, right before the finish line, when I’ve been waiting so long? Or do I just hold out, tinny speaker or not? (Over the course of writing this weeknote, the speaker seemed to ‘pop’ back to normal so I guess the old girl isn’t ready to give up the ghost just yet.)
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I mentioned Pat Finnerty’s ‘What Makes This Song Stink’ series back in #81. He released episode 4 about Train’s ‘Hey, Soul Sister’ (YouTube) and while 40 minutes isn’t short, I loved every minute of it. The thing that really elevates each video is that the song it’s ostensibly about is merely the jumping off point to discuss something bigger.
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Perfectly timed for my sojourn into writing a Lisp interpreter in Ruby is the completion of Crafting Interpreters by Bob Nystrom. The book is available to read online for free but I was so impressed with the website layout (it scales beautifully from a phone to a desktop) that I felt compelled to give Nystrom some money. I bought the Kindle version and, of course, its layout is fantastic as well. I’ve got a couple of programming books on the Kindle and it’s obviously not an ideal platform. I don’t know if Nystrom did it all himself or if he just cared enough to insist upon it being done right but this should be the benchmark against which all programming textbooks are judged.
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It’s been a very wet week so after it being too hot to go outside it’s now too wet to go outside. I don’t know how much of that you can pin on global warming; my sense is that Tokyo summers have always been pretty awful. But it did give me pause to think about Sydney summers. I think it’s almost certain that we’ll miss another one because of the pandemic but I wondered whether we’re past the point at which we want to go back then anyway. The news about summer in other parts of the northern hemisphere fills me with a certain degree of dread.
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At John’s request, I returned to reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to the kids before bed. I don’t think John is especially interested; rather he just wants to avoid me leaving the room.
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It’ll make more sense if you watch the ‘What Makes This Song Stink’ video but I spent a good portion of this weekend listening to Dr. Dog’s cover of ‘Here Comes the Hotstepper’ (Apple Music).
