Weeknotes #110

We settled on one of the properties I visited over the weekend. There are things about it that aren’t ideal but it generally meets our requirements. Hopefully, we won’t find it too much of an adjustment to go from a house to an apartment. If everything proceeds smoothly, I should have the keys on Saturday 19 March.

The Japanese Government announced that it would relax entry requirements for certain classes of non-resident foreigners beginning in March (NHK). This doesn’t include tourists which is the category that my mother falls in so still no indication of when she’ll be able to visit.

Eri was talking to a mother who drops her daughter off at the same bus stop that Emma uses to get to preschool and the mother mentioned it was relatively easy to get an appointment for a booster with the Moderna vaccine. I checked over the weekend and sure enough I was able to secure a booking for next Friday. Andrew mentioned side-effects from his booster (with Moderna’s shot) that mirror those I experienced when I received my initial two doses. He’d received Pfizer the first time around so I’m not sure if it’ll be the same for me but with the booking being Friday at least I’ll have the weekend to recover.

Linode was acquired by Akamai (TechCrunch). That might not sound like something that makes sense to put in the weeknotes but as someone who just set up a third server with Linode the other week, this will potentially impact me personally. In particular, the thought that I might need to decamp to an alternative host fills me with dread.

I managed to mostly maintain my Japanese study and the time-restricted fasting. That said, both fell off over the weekend and I’m worried that my willpower to continue the time-restricted fasting might be… (wait for it) time restricted.

I don’t know why but I finally started watching Foundation again. While the initial Apple TV experience was less than stellar, I really like the show itself. Unsurprisingly, it’s far more character-driven than the books (at least as I remember them) but since I really like the characters, that’s not a problem. The Cleon clones are especially fascinating and are unlike anything I remember seeing in a sci-fi TV show.

My Big Joel fascination continued and I bit the bullet and became a patron. When I look at the video essays I watched this week, my favourite was ‘Does Moana Work?’. I liked aspects of Moana but didn’t find it landed in the way that it did for others and I thought this essay does a good getting at why.

Speaking of Disney animated movies, we watched Cars again on Sunday after I realised that neither Emma nor John clearly remembered the film. We used to watch it all the time and while it’s not a revelation that children’s memories fade quickly, it caught me off-guard nevertheless. They loved it and it was as good as I remember. It’s easily Pixar’s most underrated film.

I was excited to see that Jamie Cullum released a new album, For the Love, but its a compilation of (I think) mostly existing songs. My favourite tracks were the jazz covers that come from the Song Society Playlist project he put out a couple of years ago. If you’re vaguely into that kind of thing, I recommend giving it a spin (Apple Music).