Weeknotes #257

T-Pain was on a boat; I’m on a plane. Which is to say that I’m writing this weeknote from seat 34C on a Boeing 787-9 as we cruise along at 35,000 feet and I enjoy the miracle of modern living that is in-flight Wi-Fi. Unlike Louis C.K. my connection was not free and instead cost me the princely sum of US$22. Despite that, I’m unable to enjoy YouTube for reasons that are no doubt intentional so those links come courtesy of a quick search via DuckDuckGo. I hope they go where I intended.

On the same day as we boarded our Christmas flight to Australia, we also squeezed in a trip to the bank to sign the loan agreement and set up the mortgage. For those curious, we did go with the variable rate in the end.

Fulfilling the prophecy that someone in the family must get sick just before we leave, Eri’s respiratory issues worsened. That led to me going to my first parent/teacher meeting. Participating in these kinds of events in Japanese is still a challenge but it mostly went well, I think. The most notable aspect to me was that they conduct the meetings from inside the actual classroom and so have both you and the teacher sit at two of the children’s desks and chairs. But because these are (at least in my case) first- and third-year primary school students, said desks and chairs are ludicrously small for an adult. I’m fortunately short by Australian standards but I did wonder how larger foreigners manage this. Maybe they just kneel?

Other than preparing for the loan agreement and the trip, there wasn’t a whole lot of time for much else this week. A few nights I woke up at odd hours and put that extra time into working on the mREPL implementation I’ve been writing about for the past couple of weeks. I wish I had something more interesting to report but it’s mostly been exploring unintended behaviour (which is to say bugs) as I work through puzzles from this year’s Advent of Code at an extremely slow pace.

I did just remember that I added a feature to another of my Janet projects, Documentarian. Documentarian introspects the code in a project and uses that to build API documentation from the docstrings that are customary to include in Janet function definitions. This worked well enough but didn’t handle the situation where a project used an init.janet file to load the rest (or at least critical components) of a library. Until recently, I didn’t do this much myself but that changed as I developed the ‘one true way’ to organise a Janet project (I plan to write this up some time soon). As a result, I found myself wanting to be able to limit the introspection to a specific file (or files) and to report on functions that were exported. The latest version does just that. Huzzah!

I’ve been playing Wordle for years now and recently added Connections to my daily routine. I don’t like to say this but I’ve had to admit, I’m just not good at it. I can rarely string together more than a handful of consecutive wins. An early sign of cognitive decline?

I did discover a notable downside to having ‘moved’ our Apple accounts to Japan: music licensing. I used to have access to Amanda Palmer’s Who Killed Amanda Palmer, for example, but not any more. DuckDuckGo tells me that it is available (Apple Music) but when I try to follow that link, I’m informed that the item I’ve requested is not available in my country or region.