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We’re in December. Where did the year go?
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With only three weekends before we leave for Australia, on Saturday I took the kids over by myself to Asobono one last time for the year. Rowan’s been asking to go for weeks and Emma and John are young enough to still enjoy it. John did manage to temporarily lose his little GPS tracker (which led to much gnashing of teeth on my part) but it was quickly found by a staff member, averting the crisis.
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Afterwards, we met Eri for lunch at Big Boy family restaurant near Nerima Station. I have to say I was pretty disappointed. I’m not sure what I was expecting—I mean it’s a restaurant that specialises in Japanese hamburg steak cuisine (or is it German?) and that’s exactly what the menu was chock full of. I suppose I was hoping the menu would include more traditional fami-resu items that I’d find more compelling.
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In more positive news, I bought an iPad Magic Keyboard from 2021 for only ¥10,000 via Craigslist and which, unlike Big Boy, has significantly exceeded my expectations. For those not who don’t remember all the various iPad keyboard over the years, the Magic Keyboard is the ‘real’ keyboard with backlit keys, a functioning trackpad and a magnetic top half that uses a cantilevered design to avoid needing an excessive amount of space to tilt the iPad up at you. I’ve really enjoyed taking it to work as an extremely portable and capable laptop. The cursor support in iPadOS is the very definition of delightful.
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Partly as a consequence of the Magic Keyboard and partly as a way to relieve stress, I’ve continued to spend a fair amount of time most nights working on the Janet programming project I wrote about last week: my implementation of an mREPL server. I’ve got a prototype that at least passes the automated tests that I’ve written for it. What I need to do now is write an mREPL client for Conjure that I can use to test how it works in practice. Fingers crossed!
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In the course of thinking about ways to have an isolated environment for evaluating code sent to the mREPL server, I came across a blog post about structured concurrency that I’ve found extremely helpful in understanding what ‘structured concurrency’ is. I was already familiar with the term from Swift but never felt I had a proper grasp on it.
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Eri finished season four of Only Murders in the Building and shared my sense that they had too much packed in this year. So much so in fact that when the final episode sets up the next season, she was truly surprised; thinking that this was the final season and they were cramming in every idea they had left.
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All my programming has left precious little time as my TV backlog goes. I’m now two episodes behind on Matlock and four (!) episodes behind on Law & Order.
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The beginning of Advent means it’s now officially OK to listen to Christmas music. I’ve been very much looking forward to Laufey’s EP, A Very Laufey Holiday (Apple Music), since it was released at the start of November (!!) and it’s been what I hoped it would be. Nothing truly remarkable; just jazzy Christmas music done very, very well. If I had one complaint it would be that it’s only five tracks and not a full album.
