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In one of the more embarrassing moments of my career, I logged into work on Monday morning and proceeded to keep working until the end of the day. It was, of course, a holiday. In my defence:
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The kids have all started their summer holidays so the fact they were all home didn’t prompt me to wonder what was going on.
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It’s approximately 30,000,000 degrees outside at the moment so nobody had any interest in going anywhere.
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For the past couple of weeks, I’ve noticed connectivity problems with my phone using mobile networks. I can’t honestly remember when it started which makes pinpointing the cause difficult. Was it after I dropped my phone and possible damaged the antenna? Maybe. It was getting frustrating enough that I very nearly switched from Povo (which uses the au network) to Linemo (which uses the SoftBank network). This all culminated in me wandering around in the burning heat on Thursday at lunchtime as I looked for a MOS Burger that I couldn’t find because my phone couldn’t load Google Maps. When I did eventually find a MOS Burger, I decided to disable my Australian e-SIM and—lo and behold—the problem immediately went away. While this is a solution of sorts to the problem, it’s not very satisfactory. The whole appeal of having the Japanese and Australian e-SIMs active at the same time was that I was always available on both lines. Moreover, why did this suddenly start happening? Would switching to Linemo resolve it? I hate troubleshooting network problems.
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Serial was not the podcast that got me into podcasts but I was a huge fan of its first season on the murder of Hae Min Lee. Indeed, I was enough of a super fan that Serial led me to Undisclosed, a podcast started by Rabia Chaudry, a family friend of Adnan Syed. Chaudry began the podcast in 2015 with co-hosts Colin Miller and Susan Simpson to provide details about the Hae Min Lee case that weren’t covered by Serial. Undisclosed went on hiatus in 2022 but restarted in June with new episodes about Syed’s continuing legal travails as well as updates on the Lee case. It took them an episode or two to get back into the swing of things but I’m once again thinking about hiding in the bathroom at work to finish the latest episode.
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I showed the boys 2002’s Spider-Man. They didn’t enjoy it anywhere near as much as Back to the Future. That’s fair enough; I found it clunky in parts and it just isn’t as good a movie as Into the Spider-Verse (which is the benchmark they’re measuring against). After that we started watching 2005’s Batman Begins but they’re too young to really appreciate it.
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Casey Muratori delivered one of the best programming talks I’ve ever seen. He spoke for about two hours on the history of object-oriented programming and it’s obviously not of interest if you’re not into programming at all but if you are into programming, it’s so, so good.
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I was surprised to discover that I’d never linked to Dean Lewis’ ‘Stay Awake’ from 2019’s A Place We Knew (Apple Music). I remember listening to this again and again one evening, luxuriating in the melancholy of the entire thing. Sometimes you just want to feel regret for things past.
