Weeknotes #99

I haven’t heard back from the Immigration Services Agency. That’s not a huge surprise but hopefully it doesn’t take too long.

There’s also not a great deal of confirmed information about the Omicron variant. It has led the Japanese Government to ban the entry of all non-resident foreign nationals (NHK). Prior to that announcement, we were planning for Mum to visit in February. That’s still a couple of months away so who knows what the situation will be then; hopefully it doesn’t have to be rescheduled.

Oh, did you know the reason that Greek has two letters that look they’re the letter O is that one is for a short-O sound (a micro O if you will) and the other is for a long-O sound (a mega O you could say)? And people say the experience of using Twitter is always negative.

After she didn’t miss a single day of school in November, the kids all came down with some kind of respiratory virus over the course of the week. As a result, we kept things quiet over the weekend. To be honest, that wasn’t an altogether unwelcome development. The winter weather is here and I am not especially looking forward to visits to the park over the next couple of months. Usually I have our Christmas trip to Australia to provide a temporary respite from the cold but that’s obviously not happening so I’ll take whatever breaks I can get.

This year’s Advent of Code started and so far, I’ve found time to answer the first few questions. I’m a bit stuck on Sunday’s, though, and since we’re only at Day 5, that doesn’t bode particularly well. The combination of Neovim, Conjure and Jeep has been a pretty good experience. I have found a couple of problems that I might focus on addressing rather than the problems themselves. First, you seem to be able to put the netrepl server into a stuck state by evaluating an unbalanced set of parenthesis. Second, if you start evaluating an infinite loop, there’s no way to cancel that.

I didn’t watch any more of Wheel of Time or Foundation but I did finish the second episode of Star Trek: Discovery‘s fourth season (putting me one behind where things are currently). God, it’s a frustrating show. I was talking to Tom about it and he zeroed in on the central problem: they don’t earn the emotions they want to create in the viewer. Instead of patiently working towards moments of profundity, every episode rushes towards the spectacular. The quality of the cast is such that they often are able to get away with this sort of thing but it inevitably leaves a sour taste in the mouth. That was true in the first episode of this season and it was true again in the second. Indeed, it’s been true since the very beginning. It’s a real shame because I desperately want this show to be great but if these kinds of fundamental problems are still present in the fourth season, it seems foolish to expect them to ever be rectified.

While we’re on the topic of spot-on criticism, this video by the film reviewer David Chen on No Time to Die contains the best critical overview of Daniel Craig’s run as James Bond I’ve yet encountered. The video isn’t exceptionally long (only 12 minutes!) so if you’re normally put off by the hour-plus video essays I’m always recommending this one isn’t like that at all. Thinking about No Time to Die did really make me want to go back and watch Quantum of Solace. Everyone hates it but my sense is that it was judged so harshly because it was being compared to Casino Royale. Seen in the full context of Craig’s Bond films, I wonder if it doesn’t look much better.

I was honestly shocked to discover that Jeff Goldblum is a jazz pianist (Apple Music). I messaged Yoshe at 4 am her time to express how incredible this was but it turned out she was already aware which only succeeded in making me feel even older.