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On Sunday, we took the kids to Sanrio Puroland, an indoor amusement park in Tama. It’s less a collection of rides than it is a space for fans of Sanrio’s stable of character (e.g. Hello Kitty) to walk around in. Disneyland without the rides in other words. Well, Disneyland without almost all the rides. Puroland has two: the Sanrio Characters Boat Ride and Mymeroad Drive. Really, though, you’re going for things like the musical performances, the themed food and the ambience. (The Wikipedia article has more information for those who are curious.)
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As my tone suggests, I wasn’t especially impressed with Puroland. It is cheaper than Disneyland but it’s not exactly cheap and while it has a decent amount of detail in the world it creates, it simply doesn’t go to the extreme lengths that Disney does. That said, it does have one amazing feature: it is completely air-conditioned. We left the park to go home at around 4 and even then the heat from the sun was extremely intense. I assume there are people going to Tokyo Disneyland at the moment but it feels like that’s a real health hazard. To have spent a few hours walking around a large space with the kids in air-conditioned comfort was worth the price of admission.
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I spent more time developing Predoc. Most of this week was spent fixing bugs or adding features that I needed as I created example Predoc documents out of existing manpages (here’s one for the venerable
ls). I don’t know that this will ever have wide adoption but I’m enjoying working on it nevertheless. -
I’ve also continued playing Jedi: Survivor. I did finally break down and reduce the difficulty from Jedi Knight (middle level of difficulty) to Jedi Padawan so that I could advance past two of the late-game bosses. I am a little disappointed in myself.
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With all the programming and gaming, I’ve done a poor job studying my Japanese. Is that a coincidence or do I simply lack the focus to persist studying in my middle age?
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I was talking to sogaiu about Gary Bernhardt, a relatively well-known programming educator in the world of Ruby and TypeScript after sogaiu sent me a link to Bernhardt’s Rubyconf 2012 talk ‘Boundaries’ (YouTube). I believe this is the talk where Bernhardt introduces the ‘imperative shell, functional core’ idea. I’ve been aware of Bernhardt from when he was active in the Ruby community and I’ve long wondered where he comes from. Unfortunately, despite both of us doing a bit of digging, we didn’t find much. Bernhardt briefly mentions his background in this episode of the podcast Ship It! but all he really says is that he has a computer science degree and that he began programming while he was still in school.
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Two weeks ago my musical selection was Lewky’s catchy novelty song ‘I Have One Daughter’. The extended version of the song features a vocal performance by sad alex (AKA Alexandra Grace Saad). I looked for more of her music and liked ‘i’m glad that you found someone’ (Apple Music). I just wish it had an extra verse.
