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I switched mobile providers again, this time to Mineo from Rakuten Mobile. While I absolutely loved the fact that I was able to use data in Australia on my Rakuten SIM, the fact my phone didn’t function as a phone when inside my house was, unsurprisingly, a deal-killer. Apart from the overseas data, I’ll miss the fact Rakuten supports eSIM whereas Mineo only does that for its plan that uses the au network and, well, after what happened with Rakuten, I wasn’t willing to risk giving that a try. Better to stick to old reliable docomo.
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One thing that almost caused me to completely abandon Mineo was the fact their customer application website appears to have JavaScript that will intentionally crash unless you access it via phone running in Japanese. I tested this across multiple browser engines on my phone, my iPad and my Mac (all of which are set to English) and they all failed. I accessed the same page on Eri’s phone and—voila! No problem. I changed my phone to Japanese and—lo and behold—the page loads just fine. It’s possible this an accident but it was very difficult not to feel like this was pretty blatant discrimination.
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Mineo is a stupid name. Eri said it was silly to complain about this when I’m a native English speaker and we have so many words with unintuitive pronunciations but in a perverse sense that I hope would make Lewis Carroll proud my argument is it’s because English has so many unintuitive pronunciations that it’s perfectly acceptable to add another. Japanese, on the other hand, does not and so no matter how many times anyone tells me that it’s meant to be pronounced ‘my-neh-ohh’, I will continue to say ‘mi-neh-o’.
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Rowan came down with a case of gastroenteritis over the weekend. Fortunately, it doesn’t appear like it was a particularly severe case as neither of the other kids caught it (either that or Eri and I pretending we were in the movie Outbreak paid off).
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We finally got over to see Ferdinando and his family’s new place. Well, I say ‘new’, he moved there a year ago or so I think but things kept intervening. It was nice to see him again and Emma especially had a great time.
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Apple announced new Macs. The M2 Mac Mini is the one that’s of most interest to me but even though they reduced the price from the previous model (!), it’s difficult to justify given my 2017 MacBook Pro continues to work fine for what I tend to throw at it. Or at least it was difficult to justify until I found out on Friday that work is ending a point program they used to run with our old cafeteria. Turns out I have ¥155,000 or so in points which I think I can use on a Mac Mini. Hypothetically.
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Still getting recommendations for Knives Out-related video essays on YouTube. My favourite was ‘Knives Out: A Complex Film about Simple Things’.
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I asked earlier in the week about the last great John Williams theme and my nomination was Catch Me If You Can. That led to an attempt to find the soundtrack on Apple Music. Unfortunately, it’s not there but the search led me to John Williams & Steven Spielberg: The Ultimate Collection (Apple Music).
