exo : blah

Friday 29/5 21509 steps

Asaksa jetlagged strolling while waiting for hotel check in. Senso-ji, random park, soba place for dinner. Honestly memory poor, much just random wandering. Foot spa. 7-11 onigiri and pocari sweat lunch by river. Slightly stilted engagement? photo session in Sumida park shrine (koume inari/ushijima-jinja)

Saturday 30/5 17233

Rice with toppings for breakfast, rolled egg, plus bean flakes. Ueno park, market by ueno, national museum, random j pop, great dancing figures in museum, onigiri lunch in park, Korean festival furnace, Pokémon go event, Asakusa pedestrian area and sushi train dinner in evening, automatic sushi place in Rox centre fail. Difficult to open lemonade bottle; Ramune, Codd-neck bottle. Basically just lemonade with a complicated seal. Evening foot spa.

Sunday 31/5 20760

Relaxing Kiyosumi garden in morning, semi lunch fail in Arashi popular bakery, Shinjuku lights and skyscrapers plus not great Italian for dinner. Random local festival.

Monday 1/6 22260

Run in morning, by Sumida river; toasty. Vending machine difficult to open Pocari sweat. Kagurazaka French district but not really. Bakery lunch in park, tasty, very chill, Akaji-jinja shrine, skytree in afternoon, back to soba place and asakusa stroll in evening. Foot spa

Tuesday 2/6 11990

Travel day, Tokyo to Nagano. Shinkansen as pleasant as ever. Train konbini lunch of onigiri and basically crudite plus mono bean paste pancakes. Nagano seems more chill than Tokyo. Free custard pastries in hotel lobby. Izakaya dinner, dumplings, vegetarian! Massage chair in hotel room. Again, free sake in evening.

Wednesday 3/6 15187

Damp in morning so slow start. Nice by afternoon. Edge of storm. Hotel buffet breakfast, two kinds of rice, not the hamburger meat!, good aubergine, pastries, rolled egg of course, lazy morning. Hat and bag shopping, bought a hat, and then Zenko-ji temple in afternoon. Did not go into underground bit, did push round a big prayer wheel thing. Another konbini picnic park lunch and then apple and custard pie post temple. Mini muffins from hotel. Italian for dinner, quite decent. Jet lag bad.

Thursday 4/6 23365

Slept better. Obuse. Weather warm but not stifling, sunny cloudy. Cute train and cuter tickets. Good Hokusai museum with modern stuff in dialog as they say for the 50th anniversary. Lovely art to take away piece. Puzzling Miffy/Hokusai book in gift shop. Then temples, second, Joko-ji, prob better setting but first, Gansho-in, had good mural on ceiling and excellent print of Fuji with a dragon in the smoke. Indoor wheelchairs! Great veg pie/dumpling things (oyaki) for lunch, local to Nagano. Also ice cream. And then excellent soba noodle dinner. English menu but otherwise very Japanese. Also ran, was ok.

Friday 5/6 23471

Slept bad. Glorious weather. Bus into hills at Togakushi for shrine and hiking. Excellent trees. Bought a cute bear bell. Ninja/folk museum. Saw an osprey catch a fish. Pre dinner free sake while waiting for laundry. Back to dumplings place in evening.

Saturday 6/6 19290

Travel day. Much better sleep. Morning stroll round Nagano, warm, more Oyaki for lunch, one baked versus the usual steamed, still tasty, pastries on train from station bakery. Small market in park. Good mountains from the train. Kanazawa station quite full on on arrival. Busy and a lot of announcements. Matsuri in Kanazawa, from right outside the station so we walked immediately into it. Lots of Samurai troops with not really fake battles. Sort of fun. Dance groups in the street after was much better. Clearly loads of company things plus some others. Excellent Yukata. Mostly festival snacks plus free hotel noodles for dinner.

Sunday 7/6 17623

Excellent hotel breakfast; soba broth, rice, not jelly. Twig tea! Wander post breakfast while C did some work, department store and market. Onigiri from little place opposite hotel. Excellent. Then contemporary art museum via Oyama-jinja shrine. Good man walking with styrofoam house on back piece. Nice pen drawings of buildings and diary entries. Good photos of multiple views of castle roof in home town. Quite a bit of meh video. Perhaps unintentionally funny paper shaking thing, sky staring room good. Good staff jumpers and bags, sadly not for sale. muji matcha baumkuchen snack in room. Dinner in place above market, tasty mixed tempura, ungood custard consistency savoury thing that I did not eat. Tried mini bar peach thing, like the sweetest pear drops, did not finish

Monday 8/6 16451

Chicken and rice for breakfast, plus soup and potato salad, good yogurt. Twig tea def good. Weather a bit grey. Slept well. Watched weird croquetesque game. Samurai house. Good carp. Bought funny little sweets. Samurai district good, small. Tourist info to buy multi site pass after online process was too Japanese. City wide umbrella borrowing scheme! Did a chunk of backstreet wandering, also good and small. Excellent coffee place with focaccia for lunch. Kenruoken garden in afternoon. Very nice, trees as construction as much as gardening. Lots of gardeners out cleaning dead flowers from moss as far as we could tell. Looked very restful. Rained. Bought emergency 600 yen umbrella. Sat in little shack in garden for a bit. Soba and tempura for dinner in place in mini shopping centre, because close and was raining. Only one other couple in place but tbf seemed more like a lunch joint.

Tuesday 9/6 27104

Woke up early so ran. Slept good though. Slightly lost in places in run but quite pleasant. Roads by river and backstreets. Some good bridges. Many swallows. Onigiri at breakfast, nom. Laundry and train ticket buying first thing. Then Higashi Chaya district, good, fairly busy. Quiche and hash browns for lunch which was decent and then DT Suzuki museum which was great, mostly for the building. Really good entry corridor, dark and long with floor lighting. And the contemplation space with pool was really good. Also nice that some of it is public facing so you can just sit on a bench and stare in. Then failed to go to craft museum, did go to prefectural art museum, was fine. Then excellent pancakes, almost soufflé like in texture. Also a couple of shrines - Ishiura-jinja, and Kanazawa - plus sacred well. Bit of a wander while C had a meeting. Absolutely the best meal so far, Plat Home. Small plates, whole river fish, tuna sashimi and avocado - excellent, aubergine sashimi which was great, deep fried fish, good cold noodles, incredible bonito seasoned rice, everything excellent, nice wine!

Wednesday 10/6

Slept well, back to pork stew, rice, and jelly for breakfast. Lazy start. Much better weather, mostly blue skies. Brief market wander, bought twig tea and cherries. Market quite quiet. Stroll along river backstreets, Germany bakery lunch. Excellent red bean bun thing. Then art museum sky room and back to Kenrokuen garden in the sun. Very pleasant. Stroll back through castle grounds and then twig tea ice cream in department store basement food court. Earthy, slightly gritty, good. Semi sushi train order on an iPad place in shopping centre for dinner after failing to get in to first choice one. Decent. Quite tired by end.

Friday 11/6 5813

Travel day. Rice with chicken breakfast. Rice cracker gift on leaving, staff took a souvenir photo for us in front of hotel. Fast Shinkansen to Nagano. Excellent mountain views from train. Oyaki from station konbini for lunch plus a donut baumkuchen. Express train to Matsumoto, huge windows, lots of up, great views. Also, good view while train sat at platform of salarymen inhaling noodles from a tiny little kiosk at the station. Then hire car at Matsumoto and drive up in to the mountains which was pretty straightforward, although junction in a tunnel was pretty alarming. Then fancy ryokan. Proper take luggage to room place and slippers everywhere. Huge room, so many light switches I had to make a little map of what they all were. Indoor and outdoor onsen, just lovely. Pre dinner soak. Many course huge dinner with cook your own section. All of it great.

Friday 12/6 9040

Slept well. Very quiet. Very comfy bed. Omg, so much breakfast. So many bits. Rice, soup, trout, excellent egg, steamed veg, yogurt, tea, salad!, village morning market come Japanese pop culture museum/collection. walk up hill for a bit till weather concerns overcame valour. Turns out getting to the top was a five hour round trip so fine to turn round. Then excellent lunch in village cafe - miso pork on rice, mild salmon omelet with chicken rice fail, saved by ordering extra rice, green tea. Followed up with excellent village foot spa, then brief fossil museum. Outdoor cedar onsen in afternoon and then sat in lounge while C had massage. Pre dinner free sake. Dinner highlights were make your own soup, duck loin, roast hida beef, tempura asparagus, persimmon and butter cake.

Saturday 13/6 23399

Travel day. Early start for prompt breakfast. Again huge with a few things I skipped. Then off to parking for bus to Kamikochi. Bought another bear bell. Quite a few recent bear sightings, as in within the last few days. Really very nice. Good mountains and excellent forest walk. Skipped shrine pond due to time and 500 yen each for just sticking head in seemed a bit much. Onigiri picnic lunch. Slightly truncated visit as car needed to be back by 4 but still good. Very busy. Monkeys! Quite swift on the return leg to make sure got the bus. Then Matsumoto. Hotel seems decent. Sofa in room, plenty space. Also washing machine. Small but functional bathroom. Sink and bath tap same. Free snack draw, free pre dinner beer. Sadly the recommended pizza place was shut as they were taking part in world pizza champs in Naples so went to pizza place on the same block as hotel. Decent. Another two person tiny place. Then stroll through town. Looks fun.

Sunday 14/6 23850

Slept great. Once again excellent buffet breakfast. Three kinds of aubergine! Many pastry, rice with tiny fish a bit much at breakfast. Pretty much all Japanese staying in hotel if breakfast is a guide. And then used the washing machine in room and little hanger. Stroll towards castle and then round castle. Very steep stairs, no shoes! Good stuff on history of guns. Onigiri from little shop opposite castle, plus konbini pocari sweat. Sat on bench opposite castle to eat it. Then wander to free restored samurai house, very low key. Had left kitchen stuff in place unlike other ones. Then past old priest house, insanely western, and old school which was wooden but made to look like stone, very convincing. Then run. Fairly hot but ok. Longer than intended because, you know. Dinner was supposed to be soba but place we were aiming for was shut so plan b’d to a little cafe we passed for pasta/salad and chips. Post dinner stroll to see lit up castle. Very good. Turns out doing laundry in room is not great smell wise :(

Monday 15/6 21753

Promptish start for train to Yabuhara for hiking. Very cute two car train. Push button to open doors! One driver system where you enter through back door of front carriage and pick up a ticket and then pay the driver and exit through the front door. Hiking good. Excellent shrine on way out of town and then another thick forest walk. Basically no views and pass itself quite underwhelming. Narai very pretty in a slightly confected way. Also very closed on a Monday. Ice cream and coffee in a cafe at end. Nice chill train ride back to Matsumoto, bought Tokyo tickets at station then chill in hotel. Stroll for Soba for dinner. Good. Backstreets wander back to hotel, partly accompanied by fire engine which just seemed to be touring the streets.

Tuesday 16/6 18067

Slept well. Sunny. Brief stationary store visit for gifts then trip to mall to get a Yukata. Excellent fish out the back of theatre. Great yukata success after initial fail. then sandwich lunch from doutor which was fine. Excellent mountain views from terrace of mall. Stroll back to hotel. Then I did a bit of wandering while C napped, got complimented on hat in outdoor shop, finally bought a Kirin loves Sports generic isotonic drink. Maybe slightly more lemony. Also a maple muji baumkuchen which was good. Brief prod of SF section of bookstore. Understandably lots of classics plus Titanium Noir. Covers quite good. Internal bookstore navigation basically impossible even with translation app. Just different set of words which apparently don’t translate. Then fancy fusion dinner which was excellent. Mild earthquake during dinner which is a first. Did the local wine flight to accompany and some good stuff. Chardonnay much fresher, Cab Sauvignon pretty trad, very tannic, rose a bit less successful, first white decent, unspecified grapes. Food excellent, great brioche and boar, veg and pickle course good, also good mushroom course, maybe a little truffle forward at times. Excellent service. Very reasonable price, esp wine flight. And freebie on leaving.

Wednesday 17/6 15960

Travel day. Slept ok. Sunny, warm. Limited express to Shinjuku. Some confusion as 9 car train but we are in car 12, which did exist. Hotel with city views in Tokyo: Imperial park from our room, Tokyo tower from reception. Bit of a post arrival wander round Shimbashi while C napped. Peak Tokyo. Lots of narrow little lanes lined with incomprehensible amounts of food places. Popped in to bike shop; carbon Brompton wheels, lots of Italian brands. Bike parking elevators! Also some pottering under the railway and same. And then a potter to Hibiya park and bit of GINZA before beer in outdoor faux German beer hall and then sushi train dinner in super cheap and fun place. Some people in there clearly more for the drinking than sushi. GINZA fashion great as was architecture. Switch from GINZA to Shimbashi very funny. Hooters! Which I guess fits with some of the maid bar vibe of Shimbashi which is very clearly aimed at office workers.

Thursday 18/6 20608

Rainy. Lazy start because no hotel breakfast. Then stroll to office building first floor cafe for avocado toast and coffee for breakfast. Quite a few English speaking people having meetings. Asakusa for left in first hotel perfume fetching then lunch in scone cafe. Plain plus blueberry. Quite good. Then more GINZA before mister donut in the park. GINZA full of more fun buildings although if everything is a statement then nothing is a statement. Chunk of clearly pre matsuri stuff happening, floats in office foyers, ropes with paper things etc. Park fine. Bit of packing before beer and edamame and chips in street side izakaya and then back to sushi train place.

Friday 19/6 3000 ish

To airport on the monorail after konbini breakfast in room.

A stream of numbers hit a screen and you’re expected to know what they mean

I think about these Maximo Park lyrics a lot.

They often pop into my head on bike rides where I have quite a lot of numbers available to me, most of which I do know what they mean. At the end of the ride further numbers are available to me. Numbers that tell me how hard the ride was, how effective it was, how effective my rides for the last week have been, how my numbers compared to people in my age group. I look and them and it’s fun to see but with many of them comes the implication that the numbers should go up. That they should indicate my rides have been productive. Tim Garmin is all too happy to literally tell me that my recent rides have been unproductive.

Tim Garmin doesn’t understand the point of bike rides.

Number must go up is a curse. Almost every time I see something talking about how a number isn’t going up I think why should it? There is so much harm done in the name of number must go up because it’s insatiable and it’s almost always mistaking the measure for the outcome. It’s easy to see why it’s used because it’s easy. You have a number and you do things and the number goes up and it’s a success, but what then? For more success the number has to go up more but the number contains no concept of what is enough, or too much or at what point the more up is harmful to whatever the initial goal was.

We should be comfortable with enough. We should work out what enough is and once we get to it we should look around for other things where we have not reached enough and work on those. But more than that we should consider what it is to measure a thing and be prepared to admit the measure has become harmful. The number is bad. What use is a number that has gone up if it is at the cost of making the lives of those responsible miserable? What is the point of productive bike rides if every one of them is a slog where all I do is stare at a screen to make sure the numbers are good?

Yes, I know, it is 2026 and no one needs another AI take but this all popped into my head on a bike ride and I must expel it.

In short, generative AI is not for me. This is not based on extensive, or really any, use, it is more about how I want to do things.

I know you can do good things with it, I have seen good things done with it, things that otherwise would likely not have happened.

I just don’t want to.

For the most part I enjoy my job. It is interesting and challenging in the right ways. Yes, there can sometimes be tedious bits to it but even those are enjoyable in a meditative way and I don’t think ridding myself of them would make me a better developer. I expect for some measures AI might make me more productive but it’s hard to say without putting in the effort to get good with the tools. What I am fairly sure of is it would not make me a happier developer. In the past I’ve managed people and it did not agree with me. I do not think that managing a machine is likely to be an improvement. On top of all this I am very much a figure things out by writing code so having a machine do this for me seems more likely to result in oversight and error.

The same goes for any other aspect that I might employ generative AI for. For me the act of making a thing is partly about noticing. If you are taking a photo it is because something has caught your attention, and in order for that to happen you have to be paying attention. Writing is the same. You have to interrogate your thoughts and in the process understand the reasoning or feelings behind them. To do this requires, for me at least, spending time with things and that is one of the things generative AI is designed to reduce.

There’s some reference to the bicycle for the mind metaphor with regard to these tools and, to me, it fundamentally misunderstands the what a bike is. Yes, it is an efficient means of getting from a to b but it is under your own power; let us ignore e-bikes here. More than that though, it is a machine for moving through the world. You cannot ride a bike without being aware of and understanding your surroundings. There is no setting a direction of travel and leaving the rest to the machine, it is a stream of decisions, some of which may become unconscious with time, but no part of the ride can happen without input. For me it’s this that makes bicycles great. You see so much from a bicycle but at a pace you can appreciate it.

I learn so much about my area from riding. I see the shops that close, or open, when the fields are dry, where the flooding happens, which towns are busy, where the paths go and when they are good to ride. I don’t want to skim over all that to get to my destination because it’s in those details that the joy is found.

I want the journey and generative AI does not.

Previously.

cycling

A mixed year. I had an enforced few month off in the middle of the year for boring reasons which was a shame. However it did mean I came back to it while the weather was good which made it easy. A lot fewer big rides though because for most of the time I would do them I was either off the bike or not really in the sort of condition that makes them fun. Good to learn that I miss them though.

As before mostly a year of road and gravel riding and this is fine. It’s a delight to get out on the mountain bike from time to time but I just enjoy the others more.

Not sure I really had any stand out rides. Plenty that were enjoyable and I definitely got better at just going out for a bit and not having to plan huge things which is good. I probably did a better job running in to winter of keeping at it, partly because of the time off.

Moved to Rouvy for the fake riding and I think I prefer it. Nice to look at actual places rather than computer generated ones. Will see how it goes over the rest of the winter.

Once again, running was very off and on again and I am fine with it.

pictures

Bought a new camera (blimey, they went up in price). So far it’s been great. Takes good photos, easy to cart about but enough of a proper camera that it makes me think differently than a phone.

I’d not have taken quite this one with the phone for example because it’s just more faff to get it to expose like this. I’m still only shooting jpegs with it because it’s nice not to deal with processing things. At some point I should see what it can do using RAWs.

Up till then I probably took fewer photos with a proper camera than previous years, mostly because of a bit of a failing to be inspired locally so lugging a big camera around is a chore. Did a decent job on holiday with it though and definitely got some nice ones. As ever, when it clicks it clicks and I love the experience but ugh, it does take up a lot of space.

For a change my fav pick was people. One of those just lucky with the light ones you get every now and again.

work

Even more variety this year. As well as the climate stuff, more TheyWorkForYou, a bit of WriteToThem and a dash of FixMyStreet at the end.

On the climate side a second go at the council climate scorecards and was definitely smoother because we managed to learn lessons. Still more to improve as ever.

For WriteToThem there was a relatively small bit of work which has enabled us to do data gathering that has helpedconfirm some huncheswe already had. It’s nice to see such a quick, relatively, turn around from work to results. There was also the start of making it possible to have a Welsh language version which in some ways is pretty straightforward with a lot of “just wrap strings in calls to gettext” but also pretty fiddly in a twenty plus year old code base across multiple programming languages which gave no thought to being multi lingual.

And then to finish the year I dipped my toe back into FixMyStreet waters. It’s three plus years since I did any work on the site and while I can remember enough that it’s not starting from cold there’s still a lot of asking colleagues and reading code. It does mean I am working on a team again versus a lot of the past year plus as sole dev on projects. There are actual clients and formal processes too.

books

As ever there is a list of books read for the plain facts.

The big thing this year was starting to go to the local bookshop’s reading group. It’s SciFi/Fantasy by woman authors and while some of it was rereads or things that were on my TBR pile there was stuff I would not have read without going. It’s been great. The people are lovely and I look forward to it every month.

This year’s recommendations are The Ministry of Time, The Formidable Miss Cassidy, Blood Over Bright Haven and right at the end of the year The Spear Cuts Through Water which is possibly my favourite of them. Just lovey writing, a slightly novel framing and some cute touches.

Metal from Heaven was also great but it feels like a book some people are going to flat out hate. It’s quite languagey, takes a wild turn at the end, and has some very hand wavy magic but the world is good, the characters have dimensions and it’s the sort of languagey I enjoy. Visceral and elegiac.

I read my first Tchaikovsky I didn’t enjoy — Cage of Souls, just read Heart of Darkness instead — and a couple of literary cross over scifi/fantasy books that just didn’t work for me: Ascension which just felt a bit hollow and The Leviathan which was a decent historical novel wrapped in a bad magical realism one.

There were, I think, quite few more if not cozy then at least lighter books this year mostly because, you know, all this. When done well they’re great and I think I’ve worked out how to mostly avoid the overly cloying ones.

I stalled out on a few books, mostly tombs where I could not face another few hundred pages with the most annoying characters in the world.