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I posted last week as the plane was flying but neglected to mention this year’s disastrous drive to the airport.
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After trying out a private car service last year with a coupon that made it vastly cheaper than renting my own vehicle, the non-discounted price had me running back into the familiar embrace of Toyota Rent a Car. Long time readers might recall that the last time I rented a car it did not go well. This time was nowhere near as bad as that but I did have issues with both Google Maps and Apple Maps sending me to the wrong place. Here’s what happened:
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It all began with wireless CarPlay. I’ve never driven a car that had it, and seeing it as an option, I immediately forwent the in-built navigation system, excited instead to finally live my dream of being Michael from Knight Rider (Wikipedia).
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Fearful that Apple Maps would send me to Sendai rather than Haneda, I started the trip with Google. It went well at first until I noticed that the reason Google kept updating the route we were taking was that it was attempting to get me onto one of Tokyo’s toll roads. Depending on your starting point, these roads can make trips much faster, but in our case provided only a marginal speed improvement compared to the public roads. After the fourth or fifth time I’d had to ‘reset’ the route, my frustration got the better of me and I decided Apple Maps couldn’t be worse.
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You will of course be shocked to hear that Apple Maps could be worse. Despite confidently proposing I set my destination to the address of the Toyota Rent a Car office near Haneda Airport, Apple then proceeded to route me to Tokyo Tower. I remarked to Eri as we drove into Harajuku that this was an unusual route but chalked it up to a consequence of Google’s earlier wayward directions. I honestly don’t understand how Apple is this bad at navigation. I appreciate that Japanese street addresses present a challenge to systems architected around Western notions of named streets with sequentially numbered buildings but this is a company with a market capitalisation in the trillions of dollars.
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In the end, I did what I should have done from the beginning: used the in-built navigation system and got there without any further hitches. Thankfully, after the 2022 ordeal, I’d made sure to budget plenty of extra time and even with all the ridiculous detours, we arrived at the Toyota office with plenty of time to spare. And I suppose if you want to look on the bright side of things, we did get an excellent view of a brilliantly lit up Tokyo Tower.
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Since arriving in Sydney, we’ve done some Christmas shopping, visited the beach, eaten a lot of food and generally just enjoyed being on holidays. After fearing that the bushfires we experienced in 2019 (Wikipedia) were going to be a regular occurrence, it looks like it’ll be another year of ideal weather.
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I haven’t made much progress on Grapple. I did get a change accepted into Janet that should allow for synchronous writing to a socket. This will provide near real-time receipt of messages generated by functions that print to STDOUT and STDERR. My fix to the way Janet dedents long-strings that use Windows-style EOL sequences was also merged in. It must be Christmas.
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Judging from the fact I’d already favourited it, I first listened to Weezer’s acoustic version of ‘Feels like Summer’ (Apple Music) some time ago but I’ve had it on near-constant repeat for the last couple of weeks.
