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We passed the preliminary stage of the home loan application with Prestia. I think we will probably go with Shinsei in the end but it’s reassuring not to have all the eggs in that one basket.
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I realised looking back over my recent updates that if you were following along at home, I’ve been unintentionally oblique about the housing situation. To bring you all up to speed, the lease on our current apartment ends in March 2025. In August of this year, the real estate agent that manages the apartment got in touch to ask if we wanted to extend the lease for 12 months. This was a rather pleasant surprise as Eri and I had been dithering about looking for another apartment without much luck (we had investigated purchasing a property back in May but had been told I’d very likely need permanent residency to qualify for a home loan). We started negotiations with the agent in earnest only to have them fall apart once we offered two counter-proposals. I then discovered that I could in fact obtain a home loan despite not being a permanent resident and we started looking for a place in earnest. I’ve neglected to mention that we did in fact choose a house (not an apartment) and have entered into a sales contract. I’ve paid a sizeable chunk of our savings as a deposit and we’re now working through the loan application details. Assuming everything goes according to plan, we will own the house in mid-January (I’d rather it be mid-February given we’re in Australia for three weeks over Christmas but the vendor was very insistent that it be mid-January and I didn’t want to blow the deal up so acquiesced). Long story short: I am on track to own my first house at 42.
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As if the universe were straining to demonstrate the correctness of Murphy’s Law, I got an e-mail over the weekend from the real estate agent for our current apartment informing us that the landlord had changed his mind and did in fact want to extend the lease. I have yet to reply.
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We caught up with Ferdinando and his family on Sunday. The kids were mostly well behaved but it still felt like Eri and I spent most of the time running to and fro after the kids rather than talking.
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My Japanese study has once again collapsed as I return to a programming project. This time it’s mREPL, my alternative to the networked REPL protocol, nREPL (this will not be confusing at all). With the help of my pseudonymous friend sogaiu, I’ve got a design for the messages in the protocol that I’m quite pleased with and that is a sufficient improvement over nREPL to justify another standard (obligatory XKCD link). Part of the development process of the protocol has been building an implementation in Janet that could be used with a Conjure client (which was the original impetus for all of this).
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You may have seen other people linking to this but Hank Green has a video about popularism and media disruptions that’s the best thing I’ve watched on YouTube this year. It is over 30 minutes in length but well worth your time.
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Speaking of great things on the web, the website for the Aircraft typeface is pretty tops.
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I felt a sense of optimism about rock when Kasabian’s ‘Club Foot’ (Apple Music) found its way onto one of Apple’s personalised playlists only to realise it’s 20 years old.
