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Rowan turned three and John turned seven. Rowan had a cake Mum brought from Australia that you could prepare in a microwave (and which smelt very good) and John had a Pikachu ice-cream cake from Baskin Robbins that he’d requested. He’s not especially interested in Pikachu so I’m not sure why he wanted it but I had a little and it was great, too.
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Over the course of the week, Apple held their Worldwide Developers Conference 2024 at their headquarters in Cupertino. I didn’t have the stamina to last until 2 am for the Monday morning keynote and so just watched the stream when I woke up. The big announcement was about Apple Intelligence but more significant to me was the news that the Vision Pro is going on sale in Japan on Friday 24 June.
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Now that shit has, as they say, got real, I’ve spent the week trying to decide whether I would really spend ¥600,000+ to get one. The most I’ve ever spent on a computer is the ¥270,000 I spent for the MacBook Pro 13” back in 2017 and I never felt like I got my money’s worth with that machine. As I’ve written about before, my expected use-case is watching movies and TV shows and ¥600,000 is a lot to do that (especially when I can—to an admittedly far lesser extent—do that on my iPad).
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One of the factors complicating things is that the developer announcements at WWDC have once again whetted my appetite to do more development for Apple platforms. It’s been a frustrating few years with SwiftUI but it does improve every year and there are a couple of apps I’d like to try my hand at making, most notably a replacement for my beloved Reporter. It hasn’t been updated in years and can no longer collect weather information since the Dark Sky API has been shut down. I also wouldn’t mind making a very simple fasting app so that I can avoid needing to renew my Zero subscription when it runs out.
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I cheated at Wordle. I don’t know how this happened but I somehow didn’t open the site on Saturday at all and by the time I’d realise, it was 12.30 am. I’ve been in this situation once before and I realised then that I could have saved my streak by setting my device clock back an hour. So I pretended to be in Shanghai and then solved the puzzle in two guesses!
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Forgetting on Saturday was especially strange because we didn’t do that much that day. I took Emma and John to Yoyogi Chapters with Mum tagging along but then both kids had a playdate with a family who we used to live near and so as soon as class was over we turned around and came right back.
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Sunday was more action-packed. Mum and I took Rowan to the Railway Museum in Omiya. The pièce de résistance was meant to be a ride back from Omiya in the E5 shinkansen but I didn’t plan the timing well and we would have had to wait 45 minutes. We instead made do with an E7 shinkansen instead (which Rowan has already ridden). This was especially frustrating because as we waited for the E7, I saw an E5 on another platform. I realised I’d mistakenly asked the man at the ticket window about tickets on the Hayabusa (which is the name the E5 has when it does the Tokyo-Shin-Aomori run) but there are other routes the E5 takes. Live and learn, I suppose.
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My Japanese study has not been going well.
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My fasting has been going well. I reached my lowest in years at 67.46kg!
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Every now and then I hear the word ‘calamity’ and sing to myself ‘Holy calamity, scream insanity, all you ever gonna be’s another great fan of me’. I could never remember the name of the song but finally looked it up and it’s ‘Holy Calamity (Bear Witness II)’ from Handsome Boy Modeling School’s 1999 So… How’s Your Girl? (Apple Music).
