Weeknotes #303

It was another long weekend; this one celebrating Culture Day (Wikipedia). We didn’t do anything particularly cultural this year, instead I took Rowan to the barber and then rewarded him being able to sit through it all by taking him to MOS Burger and then on the N700S (Wikipedia) to Shin-Yokohama. The shinkansen leg of the outing was surprisingly difficult. I knew that the Nozomi trains are a mixture of N700As and N700Ss but I didn’t appreciate how many more N700As there are until waiting especially to catch an N700S.

I haven’t been doing a great job with the dieting for the past few months but things have progressed much better over the past week. I’m settling back into the 23/42 groove that Eugenia suggested to me. As of this morning, I’m down to 67.3kg after flirting with 70 a week or so ago.

I was talking to a colleague about writing concise e-mails and how much longer they can take than ones where you just spill your proverbial guts. During the conversation, I referenced the famous ‘If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter’ quote and attributed it to Mark Twain. It sounds like something he would have said but in a fortunate coincidence, Apple blogger extraordinaire John Gruber happened to reference it the other day, correctly attributing it to Blaise Pascal of all people.

As a person who opens LinkedIn from time to time, I very much appreciate Matt Ballantine’s LinkedIn Wisdom Generator (via).

A month ago I declared bankruptcy on my unread RSS items and open tabs. I’m afraid to say that I may need to do the same for podcasts. I now have almost a hundred episodes of various shows backed up and the number keeps growing.

I think I might finally be at the point where I’m ready to go back to do more work on Grapple. I put it to one side while I kept polishing Jeep and Predoc but it feels like those are closer to being ‘done’ (for now). Although as I write that I remember that Jeep doesn’t have a new command and that I did want to add that to it.

This video from Ben Taylor at Thinking Basketball about Victor Wembanyama did very nearly get me to sign up for NBA League Pass. Then I remembered I had almost a hundred podcast episodes not to mention Law & Order, Only Murders in the Building, Slow Horses, Poker Face, Matlock and Murderbot queued up to watch. Maybe when the play-offs roll around next year.

John and I have been playing Minecraft: Dungeons together and it’s been fun. It wears its Diablo influence pretty plainly (if a bit pixelated) on its sleeve but with all the rough edges of the 90s buffed to the kind of sheen you’d expect in 2025. John, of course, has no idea of this lineage and so is slightly dumfounded why I’m so comfortable playing the game when I clearly know so little about Minecraft.

I was whinging to Brandon about Gracie Abrams (I was overly proud of the epithet ‘Diet Taylor’) but then of course I listened to more of her music and ‘That’s So True’ (Apple Music) lodged itself firmly in my brain.