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We’ve decided to shift our focus to purchasing a house. It turns out that there are at least two banks, SMBC Trust Bank Prestia and SBI Shinsei Bank, that offer home loans to foreigners without permanent residency. Prestia offers English support but Shinsei looks to have better rates. I’ve already invested a decent amount of time trying to work out which option is preferable without much to show for it.
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We haven’t decided exactly which house to buy, but we did spend part of the long weekend looking at some of the options that are in the area. There are two that we liked and decided to spend more time investigating. We’ll see if either goes anywhere.
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Not coincidentally, I’ve decided not to buy one of the new M4 Mac Minis despite it being almost exactly the machine I’ve been hoping for. The 256GB hard drive that comes with the base model is the only disappointment given the extortionate prices Apple charges for upgrades. I was extremely tempted by the cheapest M4 Pro Mac Mini. It comes with 24GB of RAM and a larger 512GB hard drive. In the end, I decided that as great a computer as it is, I don’t actually need anything more than my refurbished M1 Mac Mini for at least the next few years.
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One of the areas where I would appreciate the extra horsepower is if I ever get around to making iOS apps in SwiftUI. But that doesn’t seem like something that’ll occur any time soon. I have tried to spend some more time working on my various Janet projects—including starting, and then shelving, development of an HTTP client that supported TLS. After learning more about how secure certificates work, I decided it was all too complicated and am trying to do some more work on mREPL.
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My weight had crept back up again to 68kg and so I went back to fasting. By Friday, it was down to 65.9kg which felt good. I did pig out a bit over the weekend so it did jump back up to 66.8.
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I’ve been trying to remain consistent with the Japanese study but it is difficult to maintain discipline. I fell asleep last night while studying, woke up after a couple of hours, tried again to study and promptly fell asleep again.
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During a gripe session about Law & Order, Yoshe suggested I might want to check out the remake of Matlock starring Kathy Bates. I’m not sure why I took her up on this suggestion but I did and was very pleasantly surprised: a network television drama has no right being this well-written. It’s true that I’m biased and will watch almost any halfway decent legal drama and it does feature (of course) an overarching mystery that they’ve strapped to the side of the production like a reserve rocket booster for which I must dock it some points. But the performances are a delight and more than enough to carry the series without the need for an ongoing tease.
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Only Murders in the Building wrapped up season four and while I liked ideas from this season, I thought they tried to stuff too much in and the mystery suffered as a result. It certainly has its moments—more so than season three—but it has become very formulaic and I worry that next season will be more of the same.
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The soundtrack was also released and Siddhartha Khosla continues to fire on all cylinders (Apple Music).
