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This was the first full weekend in the new place and the number of boxes littering the house has been dramatically cut down which has me in a much more positive frame of mind. I’m also in a more positive frame of mind now that I have a living room I can use after 9 pm. In our old apartment, Rowan’s playroom/bedroom opened up into the living room in such a way that it wasn’t really feasible to use the television once he’d gone to bed as the light would leak in and disturb him. Not so any more which means I can watch TV or play games on the Xbox!
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Speaking of the Xbox, against my better judgement, I set up a kids account so that Emma and John can play games on it. For John that means Jedi: Fallen Order and for Emma Disney Dreamlight Valley. That’s probably a mistake.
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One aspect of the house that I am not enjoying is not having fixed-line Internet access. The portable modem I’m renting isn’t bad but it’s not reliable and occasionally has truly terrible speeds. This has happened enough during the middle of the day (how many people in our suburb could possibly be clogging up the cellular network?) that I’ve started going into work more regularly to at least have a solid block of time when I don’t need to worry about connection quality. March is an extremely popular time to move in Japan (since the school term runs from April to March) and so NTT has told us that the soonest they can have someone out to run a cable is the second week of April. Cue sad trombone.
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After giving the independent web browser, Orion, and its associated search engine, Kagi, a fair shake for the past month or so, I tucked my tail between my legs and went back to Safari and DuckDuckGo. Orion is rough enough around the edges that it was frustrating to use, in spite of certain niceties (how I wish Mobile Safari had the option for a dedicated new tab button). And while I’d hoped there’d be rapid development—particularly compared to Safari—the actual rate of updates was painfully slow. This does make me feel a bit stupid for having bought a lifetime licence but I guess that means I can always go back without needing to spend any more money.
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The most difficult thing about going back to Safari was the address bar bug that seemed to afflict only me. Well, I’m pleased to report that in the context of describing the issue to Brandon I discovered what was triggering it: my Start Page. That’s the old ‘Top Sites’ page that Safari has used for years now as the default home page. So long as I avoid it being my home page, the focus problem doesn’t recur.
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In addition to getting a lot of our boxes unpacked, I was also able to clear the backlog of e-mail I’d let build up. I’m now back to Inbox Zero! Hooray!
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Unfortunately, I am nowhere near Unread Zero (is that even a thing?) in my RSS reader. It’s currently sitting at 175 as I type this. I’m tempted to claim backlog bankruptcy (also not a thing) and just wipe out everything that’s sitting in the queue.
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My media diet has remained anaemic over the past week. I did really like Trash Theory’s video essay on how ‘Blister in the Sun’ (and the Violent Femmes generally) were the most Nineties band of the 1980s. I remember first coming across an MP3 of ‘Blister in the Sun’ in the mid-90s and being extremely surprised to discover it was from 1983.
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Needless to say, when I’m out walking, I strut myself (Apple Music).
