I tend to avoid clothes shopping as much as possible, but I really needed a new shirt. I must have been cycling the same cheap uniqlo t-shirts for at least 2 or 3 years now. I've always heard good things about L.L. Bean's clothing. They're an American company who's bread and butter is mail order (since before the internet) and it turns out there's a physical store in Yokohama.
Shopping at L.L. Bean made me feel a bit like my dad (growing up he'd wear their shirts), which I'm not sure how that makes me feel. Not because of my dad, but because am I really getting that old? Answer: Yes.
When I was ready to check out, I walked up to the cashier. She was helping the customer before me and I listened in a bit as she was explaining to the customer "the pants are cut this way because these are from America and American's have big butts". I think she freaked out a bit she saw me standing there 😆. She:s not wrong, but still funny. In the end, I got myself a new casual button up shirt and a hat to replace my Astro's hat.
Leo played in the fountains in front of the art museum. The mall had organized an event with food trucks, various workshops and some vendors. We had a napoleon style pizza for lunch and then went to Blue Bottle for a coffee. At this location, the walls are all glass and they open them up on nice days, and they were wide open.
Leo likes the smell of coffee. I had one sip of coffee left and I offer Leo to smell it. He said it smelled good, so I suggested he try it, thinking he'd refute. He drank his first sip of cooled hot-coffee, and he liked it! Attaboy! I don't expect this to become a regular occurrence, he's still 5.
We went to the Mitsubishi Industrial Museum, which showcases a lot of the heavy industrial/science products that Mitsubishi is involved it, including deep-sea research submarines, rockets, and airplanes. There's even a video about how they manufacture and launch their rockets. I finally understand why there's a lot of rocket engineers in Nagoya, that's where they manufacture them. The second floor was dedicated to electricity and they explainers for how wind turbines, solar and such like work. Really well put together and worth the ¥500 entry fee.
Leo checking out the wind turbine at sea level
I finally got around to deactivating my twitter account. As I said in my status, I haven't really checked it in months and I don't miss it. This post by Scott made me question what I was waiting for and so I did it. Ask me a year ago and I don't think I could've imagined getting off Twitter entirely, but I like Mastodon, the pace and the people I'm following there.
Out with Mario and in with Zelda. We've been playing Breath of the wind almost everyday and it's fantastic. What I like about it Zelda, beyond the escape-ism of roaming around Hyrule, is that I actually get to play quite a bit. Leo acts as a second set of eyes for items and baddies. It's a good bonding activity.
Something interesting to ponder. When we have Textcasting-compatible social media networks, there will be no more wall between blogging and tweeting or tooting. And then we will be able to choose our writing tools and they could be blogging tools as easily as they are the tiny little writing boxes Twitter et al give us. Blogging tools are equipped to deal with titles, styles, links, enclosures, no length limit, editing. These might seem like luxuries now, but once we have them, we'll be amazed that we put up without them for so long when they were very very very very easy to implement.
I am an infrequent SQL query writer. My knowledge of the language is pretty limited, but I'm pretty good at understanding the kinds of things it can do, and since I am an experienced programmer, I can specify my needs in fairly accurate technical terms, they just don't happen to be in the SQL programming language. That's where ChatGPT is very useful!
I wrote out my query in pseudocode, ie English --
I have a database with three tables, feeds and subscriptions and users. If a user subscribes to a feed there is a record in the subscriptions table connecting the two. I want a query that tells me which feeds have 0 subscribers.
In the old days before ChatGPT I'd write a braintrust query, put it on my blog and the odds were pretty good that in 24 hours I'd have the answer, and would feel grateful and proud. That of course would be after putting in a few minutes trying to find the answer using Google and StackExchange.
Now I just feed it to ChatGPT and it translates it for me, to good SQL code, and in ten minutes I have the query and the answer:
SELECT feeds.feedurl, feeds.title FROM feeds LEFT JOIN subscriptions ON feeds.feedurl = subscriptions.feedurl GROUP BY feeds.feedurl, feeds.title HAVING COUNT(subscriptions.feedurl) = 0;
I edited it a bit because it assumed field names where I used slightly different names. And I never said that fields had URLs that identify them, and we must use that, not the unique integer ID that each row also has.
It worked. Turns out there are 872 feeds in feedland.org's database that have no subscribers. I'm looking for ways to make the feed reading part of FeedLand perform better, and time spent reading feeds no one is watching could be a place for savings.
ChatGPT, you have made me a more confident and creative programmer.
Love this from Matt Mullenweg. It’s what we believe at Micro.blog, too.
…it’s not about how many views you have, how many likes, trying to max all your stats… sometimes a single connection to another human is all that matters.
Did my daughter come to visit this weekend to see us, or to take the Switch and Tears of the Kingdom back to her apartment? Who can know. Anyway, we’re busting out the N64 and Ocarina of Time… As soon as we get an RCA → HDMI adapter.
I'm all-in on 
