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It’s now June and we still don’t have a deal between the United States and Iran. I am hoping that these people know what they’re doing but being extremely dubious of this potential. (Related.)
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A couple of weeks ago, I took Rowan over to Yokohama to ride a Keikyu train and while we were over there we went to a large electronics retailer. They had a commensurately large toy section where I was finally able to pick up some toy catalogues. Rowan’s birthday is coming up next week and I’ve been delighted that he’s been picking out the toys he wants from the catalogue. I’m sure relatively speaking, I spent very little time as a child reading toy catalogues but I can assure everyone that my memory has flipped that right around. I am pleased that, for the moment at least, that’s the case for Rowan as well.
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I don’t want to jinx things but I think Crossmate is close to being finished. The last major feature I wanted to add was game replays. I realise that might sound absurd for a crossword solving application. However, since Crossmate is designed to be played asynchronously, I thought that players may enjoy seeing how the puzzle was solved, particularly during the times when they weren’t watching the puzzle. There were a few kinks but I think it’s working well so far. Each device keeps an append-only journal of the moves it takes (this also allows me to offer undo/redo). After a game is completed, each participating device saves its journal to iCloud. These sync down to the other clients and then, once it’s available, you can ‘watch’ a replay of all of the moves in the game.
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I am one of those people who, whenever there’s uncontrolled adulation for the visionary nature of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, bring up his full-throated hype around the metaverse (or as Huang cringily referred to it as, the ‘omniverse’). It will not be a surprise to hear that I greatly enjoyed this exploration of the metaverse fever dream by Nick Heer. Indeed my only complaint about it is that it doesn’t spend any time on Nvidia.
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Stephen Colbert was effectively fired by the gutless wonders over at CBS. After his final show, he went on the public access television show Only in Monroe (YouTube). Fans might remember that Colbert went on this show back in 2015, just before he became the host of the Late Show (YouTube). Surreal Colbert is the best Colbert.
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I finally watched some more of the NBA play-offs. Just in time to see the San Antonio Spurs dispatch the Oklahoma City Thunder to become Western Conference winners and then, unfortunately, lose their first game of the NBA Finals (at home) to the New York Knicks.
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While I take some pride in the fact that I remember both watching the music video for Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ on ABC TV’s Rage and thinking the song was cool, the truth is that Oasis were the first band that I ever really felt were ‘mine’. Obviously things went off the rails after Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? but I’ve always loved ‘D’you Know What I Mean?’ (Apple Music) from 1997’s Be Here Now. I know it’s derivative and repetitive but isn’t that the essence of Oasis?
