Weeknotes #276

I contracted COVID-19 for the first time. At least, the first time of which I’m aware. It’s certainly the first time with symptoms severe enough to keep me in bed for 18 hours or so. I had an elevated temperature on Friday and by Saturday night simply wanted to lie down. I did that in fits and starts for the next 18 hours or so. By Monday evening, the exhaustion had lifted and I’d started to feel like myself again.

While I never got a positive diagnosis, I’m confident it was COVID given that Rowan came down with similar symptoms and he did get a positive diagnosis when Eri took him to the paediatrician on Wednesday. Fortunately, he too has made a relatively speedy recovery.

I mentioned last week that I set up a Minecraft server on the Synology using Docker. What I didn’t mention is that a large part of why I felt comfortable doing that was because I remembered the Synology has an easily accessible RAM expansion slot. I almost fell off my chair after discovering I could buy an 8GB RAM module to supplement the 2GB of provided RAM for ¥1,400. That’s a truly incredible price for those of us who spend most of our time in the Apple ecosystem where an extra 8GB of RAM costs tens of thousands of yen.

Speaking of the Apple ecosystem, I decided to see what it’s like to use the built-in Passwords app as my primary password manager. I exported my current list from Minimalist and imported pretty easily and so far it’s all gone quite smoothly. Minimalist was already pretty good but Passwords is unsurprisingly Passwords is faster for autofill in Safari. I’ve kept Minimalist installed on all my devices and intend to keep it and Passwords in sync (by manually copying any changes I make from one to the other) so that I can switch back if need be.

I discovered a Thai restaurant that serves one of the best plates of pad see ew I’ve had in Japan! The amount is a little smaller than I’d like but that’s to be expected. Really, the only problem is that they’re too good. I went there the other day for lunch and was turned away because they were full. The next day, I made a return visit and only just managed to secure their last table.

It’s a shame this isn’t a more typical video essay but I really liked Michael Swaim’s ‘Why Arrested Development Was Even Smarter Than You Realize’ (which, at least in my case, lived up to its title). The entire 36 minutes is worth it for fans of the show but I’d never heard anyone make Swaim’s observation that Arrested Development pioneered a type of joke he calls the ‘fold out’ (‘fold out’ is an homage to the famous ‘fold in’ covers found in MAD magazines). As Swaim explains it, whereas the ‘fold in’ cover takes away information to reveal the final joke, the ‘fold out’ adds more information to reveal the final joke. Typically this is done by coming back repeatedly to a scene so that what you thought was the joke is actually the setup for an even funnier joke.

I first became aware of indie musician, Cat Power (Wikipedia), in 2000 when Triple J started playing her cover of the Rolling Stone’s ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ (Apple Music). I don’t remember now what led me to discovering it again last week but I’m glad I did. Still my favourite of her songs.