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From the I’m-Feeling-Old Department, I bought socks on Amazon, then in the couple of days it took for them to arrive, I forgot I’d bought them and bought more socks at a nearby shop. So now I have more than enough socks.
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The Summer of Shinkansen continued. Rowan has recently got into Go Jetters, and in particular the episode where they have to stop a runaway shinkansen (BBC iPlayer). The episode prominently features a shinksansen that Rowan decided was the N700A and had been asking if we could go and ride it. If you’re thinking, ‘Didn’t you go on that shinkansen a couple of months ago?’, you’re not exactly wrong. Back in May, I took Rowan on the N700S. The N700A is the model that preceded it. I used it as an excuse to take Rowan (together with John) to an interesting looking MOS Burger in Osaki (Google Maps) for lunch. It wasn’t especially good parenting but I then made John walk the two kilometres to Shinagawa Station in the 35-degree heat while I pushed Rowan in his pram. I think this puts hairs on your chest or something.
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The route took us past Kaitokaku which, unfortunately, doesn’t have an entry on the English Wikipedia (here’s Japanese Wikipedia). It’s a rather large building that was previously a villa of the Iwasaki family that founded Mitsubishi and is now used as an event space. It was designed by Josiah Condor, an English architect who came to Japan during the Meiji Restoration (Mitsubishi has a webpage about him).
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Emma and John were supposed to take the end-of-session test for their swimming classes on Sunday. On Sunday morning, they asked if they had to go and honestly, based on my observations from the past few weeks, I was confident that neither would pass so instead of that, we went to the community pool and I went in the water with them. This is the first time I think I’ve been in a pool in a decade. It was nice. Given the heat, the pool was packed and so I wasn’t able to help Emma or John as much as I had hoped but we still had fun. It has also made me want to get back into swimming.
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I started watching The Good Place (Netflix). It’s all right, it hasn’t reached the heights of the American version of The Office, what little I’ve seen of Parks and Recreation or even Brooklyn Nine-Nine. That said, I do appreciate how conceptual it is and the degree of difficulty of what they’re trying to accomplish.
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I spent more time working on the projects I’m working on in the Janet programming language. The most developed one is Arnie. Arnie is a benchmarking tool that tries to make it easy to compare different versions of Janet so as to be able to identify performance regressions. Writing it required me to learn a lot more about how C compilation and linking work and the subtle differences between GCC and the GNU linker and Clang and Apple’s linker.
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I spend a lot of time complaining about Apple Music but a couple of weeks ago, it suggested that I might like Crooked Colours given I listen so much to Rüfüs Du Sol. It took a few listens but their 2019 album, Langata, is now firmly in my top albums of the 2010s (Apple Music). Good job, Apple.
