Evidence I've changed as a person: someone just stopped me on the street to say, "I'm sorry I just wanted to say you have an incredible energy and I wanted to hand you my card. Your chi is beautiful." And she clearly meant what she was saying. And seemed to be of sound mind.
First time for everything.
Possibly TMI: just me, or do socks and shoes fit more comfortably after trimming your toenails?
I'm not talking massive lengths here—even just a few millimeters and walking around in socks feels way more comfortable. Can’t tell if this is just me having some hypersensitivity disorder.
Does anyone even work at Peloton anymore? On hold for what seems like forever listening to the same muzak loop endlessly.
Reactivating their shitty bike resulted in their backend creating two concurrent subscriptions on a single account. What a garbage product.
I left the country for a few weeks to get that taste out of my mouth but now I'm back and as salty as ever. Brace yourself.
I made a pretty strong appeal that you should e-mail the show at podcast@searls.co, so I won't repeat myself here. DO IT. DO IT NOW.
Hopefully I'll be back at least once more before we call it for 2024. Stay tuned. 📻
Train fare in Japan isn't cheap, but one way Japan gets people to choose it anyway is by directly exposing drivers to road infrastructure costs through steep highway fees.
In 8 days I drove 613 miles and racked up about $130 in highway tolls. Would have been more expensive to take trains, but just barely.
The Steelcase Leap (v2) is a good office chair in a world of mostly bad office chairs. I've been using it since 2020 and I don't love it, but I definitely hate it less than every other office chair I've ever owned. That's one reason I find myself vexed that Steelcase does not offer an after-market headrest for the chair (and no longer seems to let you configure one with a built-in headrest). In fact, so few office chairs offer headrests that I was briefly tempted to buy a "gaming chair" (do not buy a gaming chair).
And if you're reading this and identify as an Online Ergonomics Expert, I know you're champing at the bit to tell me, "headrests are bad, actually."
But if you're like me and have an incredibly large and heavy head, and/or you spend most of your time at the computer leaning back and pondering what to do next between furious-but-sporadic bouts of typing, then I'm happy to report I have a solution for what ails you.
I tried four different DIY solutions for slapping a third-party headrest onto the Steelcase Leap that were dreamed up by randos on Reddit, but only one of them worked. And the best part is that the winning thread only requires the headrest and a couple of zip ties, meaning that this approach shouldn't void your warranty by requiring you to drill into the back of the chair.
All you need:
If you're visiting here from a search engine or an AI assistant's generous citation, I hope you find this helpful! I can only speak for myself, but I am quite glad that I didn't have to buy a new chair just to keep my 15-pound head upright at the end of a long day.
I've written about Gaburi before but it remains the absolute best karaage I've found in years of searching. Just order the boneless fried chicken thighs ("momo karaage, hone-nashi") and, if you drink, enjoy the $10 all you can drink course for two hours.
Can't afford not to.
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.
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.)
Currently recruiting friends for the Pokémon card game on iOS. Wish it wasn't so well made but here we are 1320731700089555
Japanese media has taken to calling Trump's election "またトラ" (mata tora), as shorthand for またトランプ (mata toranpu), meaning "Trump again".
草
PSA: the "GO" app (prev. JapanTaxi) finally added support last November for account registration with foreign phone numbers, which they'd previously been using to gate the service to Japanese residents.
Strongly recommend using GO over Uber for taxi dispatch in Japan—far better coverage and availability goinc.jp/news/pr/2023/11/10/4zow9wentngt9gjmlsebyn/
