Weeknotes #204

Both Emma and John had their end of year ‘concerts’ on the weekend. Unfortunately, since they were on at the same time, I had to attend one while Eri attended the other. Although most pandemic-era measures have ended, one thing Emma’s school has kept going is the aggressive scheduling of parental attendance. At both this concert and the sports festival back in October, I was ushered in at a particular time, watched Emma’s class perform and then was ushered out again as a different set of parents came in. This time, it was barely 15 minutes which honestly felt like cheating.

Only a week to go until we leave for our Christmas trip to Australia. After last year’s debacle, I decided we should leave the weekend before the weekend before Christmas. Hopefully nothing goes wrong but at least if it does, we’re not at risk of not arriving in time for the day itself. This year will be the first time we’ll go to the airport in a taxi. In previous years, I’ve always rented a car but after being shocked at how much that now costs, I decided to try a taxi. Fingers crossed it goes smoothly.

So you might recall that at the end of November, I had started working on a collaborative crossword as a side project. Well, that got side-tracked after Eugenia asked me if I was going to do Advent of Code this year and that reminded me how dissatisfied I am with the command-line clients that currently exist for downloading data. ‘What a great opportunity to finally make something in Zig!’, I thought. So I started working on that but then got side-tracked by an ongoing frustration I’ve had that I don’t have a way to import posts I make to my Mastodon account to this blog (the cross-posting only goes the other way). That seemed like a great opportunity to finally make a markup-to-Hiccup converter I’ve been wishing existed in Janet since forever. I still haven’t finished the importing tool, but I have put the initial version of the markup-to-Hiccup converter, Lemongrass, on GitHub. Who knows if I’ll ever finish any of these things.

My friend sogaiu mentioned the other day that he’d just found out about eggcorns (Wikipedia). We’ve said ‘old-timer’s disease’ in place of Alzheimer’s disease within my family for years as a joke but I didn’t realise that this type of malapropism had an actual name.

The New York Times has a story about the NASA ‘worm’ logo making a come-back. I don’t know if this is merely evidence of me being a (sort-of) child of the 80s but I don’t understand how this is even a debate; the worm logo is clearly superior to the ‘meatball’ logo that NASA went back to in the 90s.

I’ve made it through the seventh season of Seinfeld. Only two seasons to go! Speaking of TV, I noticed that episode 1 of season 23 of Law & Order has an airdate (19 January 2024) so that’s something to which I can maybe look forward (I still find the show pretty uneven in comparison to the classic years).

Oh, and Oppenheimer will come out (at some point) in Japan! (Tokyo Weekender) I’m in two minds about whether to wait or watch it at home first.

Some may call it a desperate attempt to appear hip but I’ll link this week to American artist Yaeji’s ‘Submerge FM’ (Apple Music). The song came out back in April but at least that’s April of this year.