After visiting Kourankei, we took a brief break back at the hotel and asked ChatGPT for some ideas of other things to do near Shinshiro. Becky suggested we try Yuya Onsen town and then realized we had exactly 7 minutes to make the only train for the next two hours. So we speed-walked to the station and paid our fare on board the train.

The Yuya Onsen station is not manned. Despite being arguably more beautiful that day than the nationally famous Kourankei, its visitors are almost entirely regional residents getting away for an afternoon or a weekend.

We strolled up to this fabulous onsen hotel and asked if they accommodate same-day (日帰り) visitors at their hot springs baths. They politely told me no.

Fortunately, I didn't immediately fold and declare defeat on the outing. Instead, I thought to ask if they offer any other plans that might include bath access and my phrasing apparently reminded the staff of a special kaiseki lunch plus bath deal. So for ¥4500 per person we got to experience all their baths and have an absolutely wonderful seven-course lunch. You love to see it.

Also, on our way out, we met Kohaku—the hotel's pet owl. He was understandably sleepy.

It has been very fun and very weird to be traveling across Japan using an app that I built doing workouts designed by my spouse, but it's worked a lot better for me than fucking around with Fitbod and other apps ever did.

My friend Junko is from Nagoya, so when I asked for recommendations for where to see the leaves changing color (紅葉) she told me Kourankei in Aichi-ken was tops.

It was too warm too late in the year for the maple trees to hit their peak by our late November visit but it was still a really beautiful place to visit. I just wish I didn't have to leave the hotel at 5:30am to ensure I'd get a parking spot.

Found this really nice park in approximately the middle of nowhere south of Kanazawa near our Airbnb.

I can't remember getting spam issues and comments so frequently at any point in GitHub's run, so I'm not sure what's driving it now.

This morning I woke up to 40+ emails generated by a dozen or so issues splayed across a bunch of Standard Ruby's repos and initiated by five or six accounts. Unfortunately, the GitHub web UI doesn't make it easy to quickly report spam, delete issues, and block users in one fell swoop. Separately, I encountered a number of race condition bugs in their React interface that resulted in validation failures, so I wasn't able to block them all from the org. Alas.

Great way to start the day.

This park in central Akita city is unusual in its scale, upkeep, and beauty. Outside Central Park, I can't think of another park that dominates such a huge percentage of prime real estate in a city and is so well-maintained and relied-upon by locals. If the leaves are changing colors, you gotta go. But even if they're not, you really should check it out if you're ever in Akita.

I have always been willing to suffer Apple Maps in exchange for its tighter platform integration than its competitors, but at least in America and Japan specifically, it has really leapfrogged Google Maps in recent years. Not only in map accuracy, but also general usability. I only today realized I could plan out multi-stop journeys. This allowed me to plan a drive from rural Kanazawa to my adopted hometown of Hikone, an Anytime Fitness in a suburb of Nagoya, a nearby Babyface Planets for dinner (fantastic Omurice btw), before eventually landing at our hotel in Shinshiro.

I'm not super comfortable driving out here, so being able to plan this out in advance to break up the trip was a huge relief and helped me stay off my phone while driving. That's a pretty big UX win.

(The fact that you can't get navigation directions in Japanese without changing your primary system language makes it less than a clean victory, however.)

This Yakiniku place in Akita was so fancy that they charge you full price if you cancel within 14 days of your reservation. It's also got a 4.2 on Tabelog. So expectations were quite high… and they were absolutely met. Every plate in the course was perfectly cut, portioned, and arranged. The quality of the meat was great. Our waitress was still in training but was some of the best service I can remember having.

If you're ever in Akita, I strongly encourage calling and making a reservation.

Noticed an issue with Beckygram yesterday where single-video posts weren't successfully syndicating to Instagram as reels if she didn't also upload a custom thumbnail ("cover") image—which Instagram's API doesn't require.

Even though I'm in Japan with nothing but a phone, a crappy LTE signal from Google Fi (that I can't believe they charge money for), and spotty hotel Wi-Fi, I was glad to find I had the tools to fix it:

1. Log into my Mac Studio over SSH using Terminus
2. Run heroku run rails c to get into the production Rails console to reproduce the error
3. Clone the repository with Working Copy
4. Fix the bug
5. Commit & push
6. Wait for it to deploy

It was a relief this whole ordeal didn't take more than 15 minutes or so to fix and it's encouraging to know that little one-line bugs won't require me to travel with an iPad or a Mac for supporting her app in production. Nice.

(Oh, and check out her little video of Akita being cute while you're here!)

Tonkatsu-fried layered omelette sandwich.

Greatest country on earth. 🇯🇵

If you're ever in the mood for a more interesting experience than Starbucks, consider visiting a high-end traditional kissaten. For about $5 out the door had table service for a fantastic hand-ground pour over and the fluffiest, most perfectly buttered toast one can imagine.

My Tabelog check-in