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The Albanese Government in Australia passed a significant environmental law after compromising with the Australian Greens. I couldn’t help but compare this to the Rudd Government failing to reach a compromise with the Greens back in 2010. That failure concerned a bill that would have implemented a carbon tax. After failing to reach a compromise with the Greens or the centre-right Coalition, the Rudd Government withdraw that bill instead of using it as a trigger for a double dissolution election (Wikipedia). That’s a decision I view as being a complete betrayal of principle from a man who had called climate change the ‘greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time’. The comparison is perhaps a bit unfair given the relative ambition of the two pieces of legislation (the bill in 2025 does not include a carbon tax, a policy the Labor Party eventually implemented and which the Coalition then dismantled) but I choose to see it as a reflection Anthony Albanese’s style of leadership. Don’t make grand promises that you then abandon, instead make boring progress.
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After taking Rowan for his second influenza shot on Saturday morning, we then went out to Chiba to ride on the Chiba Urban Monorail (Wikipedia). The Chiba monorail’s claim to fame is that it’s ‘upside down’ (i.e. suspended). After taking it to Chiba-Minato, we then went over to Chiba Port Tower (Wikipedia) which is one of the strangest structures I’ve ever seen. From the outside it looks like a solid building but its facade is merely that, a facade around a traditional tower structure.
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Speaking of Rowan, we finally bought a mattress for his bunk bed. We haven’t transitioned him to actually sleeping in it yet but this is the plan in the next couple of weeks.
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An Advent of Code command-line utility is one of the many side projects I’ve never accomplished. On Sunday evening, with less than 24 hours to go until the 2025 competition opened, I decided to give it a shot with the assistance of Claude Code. Lo and behold: Sled, the Seasonal Linear Enigma Device. This isn’t significant to anybody who isn’t me but I am absolutely delighted. I understand people who oppose the use of large language models for programming (or just in general) but I’ve found it extremely empowering.
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I’m probably not doing John any favours by giving him yet another way to play games but YouTube suggested a video about installing the retro game emulator RetroArch on the Apple TV and I’d been looking for a way to show him Aladdin on the Mega Drive. It works extremely well.
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The ‘steamed hams’ sketch of the Simpsons (YouTube) is one of the defining pieces of television in my life. That says more about the way it became a meme than anything else but that’s why I so greatly appreciated this video essay by J.J. McCullough. In it, McCullough spends 20 minutes explaining as much as he can about the sketch and it’s great.
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So somehow the Icelandic pop/jazz artist Laufey, who I raved about in 2023, put out a new album in August (Apple Music) that I didn’t know about until now.
