#life

Mike· a year ago

Probably pretty typical thoughts on Japan

We just returned from 10 days in Japan, and though I've been a horrible weeb for many years it was my first time. This was a family trip, so balancing some cultural stuff and "endless shopping for the pop culture items the kids really love" was a tough act, but we managed.

What they do well - slash - what I will miss

Trains. Duh. New York and maybe DC aside, the US is not very good at this at all. Thanks, Detroit. Combine the urban rail of big cities like Tokyo or Osaka with the national infrastructure of the Shinkansen and others, and you get a really easily navigable country.
Food on the go. While restaurants aren't always likely to offer to-go meals, that's largely because the other options are numerous: Bento counters at the train stations that offer longer trips, convenience stores with honest-to-god actual food in them, and drink vending machines around every corner. Now, a lot of this is going to be wanting in the "healthy" aspect, as the nation's favorite food seems to be some form of fried pork or another. But it doesn't mean you can't find some.
Food on the cheap. Maybe it's because I live on the west coast and all Americans live in a dystopia, but I'm just used to food being over-the-top expensive. Getting out of a restaurant with a family of 4 (which is really 3 and a half considering the size of one of us) for under $60 is an achievement, but in Japan a filling and delicious meal for 20 bucks is not unheard of at all.
A sense of living in a society. The stereotypes of reserved, quiet, overly-polite people are not off-base, nor are the ones about snooty urban dwellers in the megacity for whom foreigners, bumpkins, and tourists are just In The Way. It really just all adds up to a society that recognizes that pulling your weight makes for a better life for everyone. America has always been about lionizing rugged individualism, but thanks to factors like the modern social-media-driven internet and (to a lesser degree) working remotely, we're more atomized than ever. Seeing a society operate as a whole is not as shocking as you might think — in fact, it's frustrating to see just how little everyone has to contribute to make things just a little cleaner, quieter, faster, more smoothly-functioning. Of course, they have to vote and spend that way too for things to really get well-oiled, and that's probably a pipe dream here.
Urban green areas. Everyone's on this tip in the 21st century. But they seem ahead of the curve. Maybe it's Shinto. Maybe it's because there have been large cities in Japan for many more centuries than some western countries have even existed. But it's nice to have the parks, some of which are grand and impressive like Shinjuku Gyoen and others that are just little escapes.

Things I could do without

Standing. Oh my god, they hate to sit. This isn't just in Tokyo where space is at an ultimate premium. It's everywhere. They have a fetish for standing. Combine this with never letting your bags hit the floor, and your lazy American feet will rebel within a couple days. I suppose this is one of those "how little everyone has to contribute" things for a nice society, but would it kill you to add a chair?
Holding on to your trash. It's counterintuitive, but I assume not having trash cans anywhere probably does contribute to an overall cleaner place.
Humidity. Why does nobody use raincoats, I think to myself. Why do they all use umbrellas? Then I wind up with clothes drenched in sweat, as wet as if I wasn't wearing the raincoat at all. Now I get it. I guess enough years living out here has made me forget what humidity is like.

Pleasant surprises

Great service. You never know what the customer service level in a place is gonna be like. And my standards have dropped significantly since living in Eugene. But though interactions are generally short and polite, there's a basic floor for service that is "pretty decent."
Great coffee. I guess I thought of Japan as a tea country, but it's both a tea and a coffee country. Convenience store coffee, like the snacks and lunches, is just a better caliber. I was worried it'd be like England where the coffee is bad and mostly instant. But let's be real: England's tea isn't good either.
Good beer. Here's another thing where the baseline is "not bad." Asahi, Sapporo, and Kirin are nothing to write home about and you've probably had them at a Japanese restaurant, but as a basic and cheap offering, they are all head and shoulders above our Czech/German-style macros like Budweiser or Coors. Plus, in recent years, craft brewing has made its way through the country and you can get some fun and hoppy flavors even in midsize cities like Nara.
Good English. Duolingo plus years of anime and Akira Kurosawa movies can only get you so far. But even outside of cities there's enough English knowledge that you can at least meet in the middle. As with most countries, a sincere effort to do some interacting in their language gets you pretty far. You have to get beyond the basics to know what the pair of schoolgirls behind you are saying about your sorry gaijin ass though.

Verdict

It's long and expensive to get there, but cheap and easy to be there. If you could get a massive culture shock of a very different place but with all the conveniences and fried pork of a first-world country, why wouldn't you? I wish I'd done it sooner.

Mike· a year ago

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Goodbye, Doof

I sit here in my temporary housing, embracing the coziness of fall weather and its attendant sweaters and cocoas and whatnot, and face the prospect of being in a house without a dog to snuggle for the first time in around 20 years. Today we euthanized Cyrus, our absolute doof of a Boxer/Shepherd mix after a pretty darn long life and a much longer run with cancer than anyone expected.

He was certainly not always a good dog (friends who know about it... know about it), which only makes the feelings more complicated. And of course, when someone's life is in your hands, even a four-legged life, it's always complicated.

But we'll miss him a lot. Here's some pictures, mostly of him doing his one job: looking very sad with his Gregory Peck eyebrow.

Mike· a year ago

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What happened?

I love those kinds of blog posts where people talk about how it’s been a long time since they blogged. These are truly the great cultural moments we miss out on with a boring, centralized internet. I mean, how many people in music have died without me talking about how bummed out I am about it? Ozzy died, for heck’s sake. There hasn’t been one that bad since Prince, and I didn’t make a peep.

Some days you just don’t feel it. There’s no excuse, not even a particularly bad depressive episode or anything like that. Sometimes the lack of a CMS on this static site generator makes the barrier just a tiny bit too high.

And sometimes, you burn your house down.

That’s an exaggeration, of course. I didn’t burn my house down. In fact, looking at it from the front, you might not even notice that it burned at all. But it doesn’t take a very close inspection to notice that it’s in pretty bad shape. We lost the living room and the bulk of the kitchen, while the rest of the place is pretty well wrecked by smoke damage.

It’s not particularly fun thinking back on the morning of. It was a rude awakening if there ever was one. The kids didn’t sleep well for quite a well, and frankly neither did I. But we’re snug in a furnished rental and trying to manage the cleanup and rebuild, which is going to be the number one factor in our lives for the next… almost a year. It definitely could’ve been worse — every couple days we experience the disappointment and low-level grief of some “thing” we’ve had for decades that is now lost, but the truth is most of the important stuff like family photos, valuable hard drives, etc. is safe.

And so, as we settle in to a temporary life I hope to be ready to get goth about the next synth god’s death. Please, let’s protect Roger Linn.

Mike· 2 years ago

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I saw a wiener dog today

He was very grand, and super long. Just the kind you want to see when you want to see a dachshund. Pretty much just like Lazlo was in his heyday.

He is gone, though, and that was pretty tough. He had a good run — by the time we had him euthanized in March due to his being senile, in pain, and generally not happy with life anymore, he was at least 16 and probably older. He'd been an exemplary family dog through two small children despite his breed's reputation, and the most excellent snuggler that you could ever hope for. It was the first time a dog had died on my watch since having kids, and you can imagine what that adds to it.

RIP my friend.

Mike· 4 years ago

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Get things done or die trying

Nerds, creatives, and knowledge workers in general seem to gravitate toward productivity schemes and methodologies. If you're anything like me, and I know some of you are because that's part of why we get along, you might jump from thing to thing over time.

One of the first "named" systems I can remember getting into is Getting Things Done, probably through early tech blogger Merlin Mann (now perhaps more well-known as co-host of a podcast with a guy who later became "Bean Dad"). The system worked well for me for a while when I worked from home, freelanced, and had no kids. What Mann and others who jumped on the train might not have really grasped is that David Allen (not the guy from Gong) designed it for executives with assistants and both the time and power to lock themselves away for effectively days at a time while they did weekly reviews. The book came with a door hanger. Imagine your kid respecting a door hanger that says "Weekly review in progress."

Lately, I've been working with two systems that are more geared toward creative minds: the bullet journal and the second brain.

A friend turned me on to the "bujo" after I asked about the notebook she carried everywhere. The thing that its creator, Ryder Carroll, says about it is that it's a "mindfulness practice masquerading as a productivity method," and that's very true. Sitting down with a paper notebook and doing both your todos and your actual journaling is a great way to focus, be present, and stop farting around with the external for a minute. It's also great for people with focus issues or who have trouble sticking to systems, because you can just pick it back up if you flop for a while. Start journaling again where you left off. No biggie.

However, I have years of notebooks stacked up and one thing they're not good at is indexing and re-accessing information and insights that you've achieved. This is where Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain comes into play. The core thinking behind his system is almost the opposite of the bullet journal: It's only digital tools that can store and search in a way that enables us to truly offload a lot of data from our first brain.

That makes a lot of sense, of course, and it's what tools like Evernote, Joplin, Roam, whatever were originally designed for — but it also brings me back home to a reason that GTD worked for me: David Allen's core slogan was "If it's on your mind, it's not getting done." The second brain philosophy extends that to statements like "it's not able to be accessed," "it's not creative fodder," or more generally, "if it's on your mind, it's not doing you any good."

There's a lot more I love about the method but that's another post. But I still feel like I owe a lot to David Allen and his insane flowcharts designed to take things "off your mind" and turn you into a robot that always knows what to do. in this stupid-ass world where we have strayed pretty far from whatever-you-believe-in's light, it's a gift to be able to stop worrying about stuff for a few minutes.

Mike· 4 years ago

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"Disappointing"

At least once a year we try to get out to Cape Disappointment on Washington's Long Beach Peninsula. It's a beautiful state park where the Columbia meets the ocean. Good to get that sea air.

Mike· 4 years ago

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Dark days ahead

I wish I had any idea what to do. The dems' plan is "vote!" but they don't even really win when they win. So now what?

Mike· 5 years ago

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The great un-googling

They said it couldn't be done — removing yourself from Amazon. In truth, it mostly can't. If you use almost any web-based service, you're using AWS. And if you're like me, stretched out across multiple different platforms, you probably use some of those. But we stopped shopping there, I got a Kobo, and we're on the way to replacing our smart speaker. Honestly? Not that hard. Prime video is about the only true difficulty, especially since they have Star Trek

So, riding high on this pseudo-victory, I have declared I'm going to remove Google from my life.

Hashtag #goals

Here's the deal, though. I've read posts like this from people more tech-savvy and smarter than myself, and I don't think I can go that hard. It sounds... tough. I just want to stop depending on them, stop letting them see everything I do, and generally stop supporting them. There are so many reasons out there for doing so, but that's not what this is about. This is about a quest for alternatives to the company that practically wrote the book on doing stuff in the browser.

The pieces

Once you start cataloging it, there's a lot. And some are just gonna have to slide, no doubt about it, but I'll get there eventually. Here's where I'm at with alternatives.

Gmail. I looked at Proton, which is great if you really want to get into the extremes of privacy, and a few others, before settling on Fastmail. Fastmail won out for its UI, pricing to storage ratio, and inclusion of a calendar. Some friends' recommendations sealed that deal. Fastmail also features alias boxes, which can send or receive mail, and those are helping me get rid of the numerous random Gmail boxes in addition to the main one.
Docs. At the end of the day, I so rarely need a word processor and almost any will work. My personal hangup about docs is that I usually want structure rather than WYSIWYG layouts. It's a big part of why I use ~~Notion~~ Obsidian and frankly in most cases I'll just publish a PDF out of there. I write my post drafts in there since it's Markdown. But Apple's Pages online and MS Word online are totally fine, and more recently I found the hosted version of open-source OnlyOffice. As a bonus, it's a great replacement for the aging and frustrating LibreOffice on the Linux desktop.
Sheets. When Google Sheets launched, it was insane. Zoho had done it, but not well, and that's about it. There are all kinds of great tools out there now that make a spreadsheet seem quaint, but sometimes you just need a spreadsheet. It's still the "killer app." And the originator is still pretty good at it. Excel online is a little more computer-intensive, but it does the thing well and doesn't get into other stuff. Coda is a possibility, but the learning curve is steep, and I've seen recommendations for Airtable but as cool as it is (I use it for a few things) it's really a different animal. OnlyOffice wins again, for anything that needs more math and fewer relationships than I would handle with Airtable.
Drive. My god, it's full of storage. There are so many alternatives out there it's not even worth it. If you want to use the same provider as your docs or sheets, then go with Microsoft or Apple. If privacy is your main value, try pCloud or Mega. I've personally gone with pCloud because of its media capabilities and generous size (not to mention its charmingly rough edges and desktop Linux integration), but my eggs are well distributed among many baskets.
Photos. Unlike email, there just aren't a lot of low-cost storage options for photos. Flickr has been so fucked-with for so long since Yahoo! took over that I can't make heads or tails of where they're going with it, and most services (that aren't AMZ) are geared toward photographers, not regular folks backing up their stuff. So for now, I have nothing except redundant external drives and possibly a larger pCloud plan.
Chromebook. Obviously Google tracking your entire operating system is not super ideal. However, this was easier to resolve than I expected. Crouton makes it easy to install a Linux environment with xfce. I'm still tweaking but it's working pretty well, especially considering my Chromebook runs on a Rockchip, which I think is like an ARM?

The world of technology used to be this way. We used the best provider for each service or application. The idea of going to a one-stop shop is relatively new. Yeah, it makes things simple, but if the price for turning computing devices into dead-simple consumer electronics is all my privacy, I'm going to try to roll my own life.

Mike· 8 years ago

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Familytronica

I sat down with my son (5) and the Alesis Micron that is now anchoring my live set and we made a little track together. It was going to be called "Disco Slash" but for unknown reasons, he retitled it to the less inspiring "Disco Party." I helped with the mechanics but all the sequencing is him.

Mike· 11 years ago

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Smokin'

Shortly after moving, I realized that despite the often-rainy Oregon weather, I was going to need another grill. We'd given the old gas chugger away back in Texas. It was too small, a little persnickity, and basically had one temperature ("hot as it'll go," which was increasingly "not that hot").

After doing some online reading and talking to a couple people, I came to the Kamado style grill and ended up with the Char-Griller Akorn. Last year's model was dirt cheap on Amazon and Prime-ready, so in a day I was up and running. The chief appeal of a kamado, popularized in the West by the Big Green Egg, is that you can get crazy hot with it but also control super low temperatures for long periods. So it lends itself not only to making a pizza with a super hot fire but smoking a brisket.

For the Fourth, I brought some smoked stuff to the neighbors' party — he's a carne asada connoisseur, but she's a vegetarian. So I took it upon myself to see if Real Texas Flavor could be transferred to a mouth without riding on a dead animal.

I read a bit online but not many people were doing it. This person gave me the marinade idea: basically one part rice wine vinegar to two parts soy sauce. As meat eaters who've tried it will attest, tofu doesn't really have a lot of flavor. So slicing the bricks lengthwise in half then marinating them for about a day in this salty/tangy, vaguely Japanese solution gave it a great savory start before it even hit the wood. After that, I got the hickory going as low as it would go, waited for the good thin blue smoke (you do that, don't you? Don't tell me you cook over that white shit), and sat the half-bricks down for about 2 hours.

True to what I expected, they gained a little more chew. I'm not sure where that comes from, but if you've ever had smoked cheese you know what I'm talking about. A little rind, a little denser texture. In the case of spongey-ass tofu, it worked well. It had the texture of tofu that'd been pressed for weeks, not the couple hours I did it.

Results? I loved it, both neighbors loved it, a few people declared it the best tofu they'd ever had. And it really did have a taste reminiscent of Texas BBQ.