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Summer grinds on. Eri and I did think about taking some time to go down to Osaka but if we went down, it’d only be for a weekend at most so we decided it makes more sense to wait til the weather is more pleasant.
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So with a whole weekend to fill, it was time for another thrilling instalment of the Summer of Shinkansen. This time, our intrepid heroes left the house on Saturday morning to slay the great red beast, more commonly known as the E6 shinkansen (Wikipedia). John of course is not particularly interested in slaying beasts that aren’t the intellectual property of Nintendo (red or otherwise) but since Eri and Emma were busy with their own thing, I dragged him along, too (mostly by allowing him to bring the 3DS so that he could battle the aforementioned IP of Nintendo). We did the little hop from Ueno to Tokyo, ticking off another train from the list.
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Lunch was McDonald’s. I usually don’t bother getting the toys that come with Happy Meals—believing in an extremely Millennial way that they are vastly inferior to the Happy Meal toys of my childhood and so opposing them out of principle (also something-something environmentally-conscious middle-aged father)—but in this case, I let them get the Pokémon-related toys for this month.
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I almost entirely avoided watching the Paris Olympics—mostly because the time zone just wasn’t very favourable. I did put in the effort to watch the gold medal game in the men’s basketball. I believe everyone who says that the semi-final between the United States and Serbia was one of the greatest Olympic basketball games of all time but as someone who watched Steph Curry shoot those three-pointers to wrap-up the gold medal, I can tell you the final wasn’t anything to sneeze at. As Nate Silver wrote this past week, Steph Curry is magic. (In Japan, the highlights are visible here. Your mileage may vary.)
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I checked into Swarm and was shocked to see a photo of Brandon mere centimetres away from having been hit by a car! Fortunately, he’s all right but it sounds like an incredibly close call.
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Yes, feel free to make your own jokes about being shocked that someone checked into Swarm. It’s the best social network.
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I did manage a couple of days of exercise but probably less said about it all, the better. I’m still trying to find a stable regimen.
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I got Arnie, my benchmarking tool for the Janet programming language, to a point where it’s essentially ‘done’. I then ‘unwound the stack’ as they say to return to the Conjure plugin I was ostensibly working on. Of course, after a month or so, I couldn’t remember what I’d been doing. I eventually realised it was displaying the structured data the plugin receives from the mREPL process with which it communicates. What’s mREPL? I’m glad you asked! It’s a bespoke protocol I’m using for sending messages back and forth, similar to nREPL. And yes, you should also feel free to insert the infamous XKCD comic about standards here.
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An acoustic version of Australian band Spiderbait’s 2004 cover of ‘Black Betty’ became available to stream 20 years after it was apparently released on CD (Apple Music). Isn’t intellectual property great? As an aside, until trying to find the name of the band that originally wrote the song on Wikipedia (Ram Jam), I had no idea it was an African-American work song!
