Hello! from Rick Cogley

Saw Wicked on Broadway a few years ago with A, and now we saw the IMAX movie. Theater buffs will like that It’s chock full of cameos of the original stage performers and even the writers. Casting and performances were on point, with lots of humor. 💚🩷

I loved Think Again by Adam Grant 📚. I’m going to set aside regular time for re-thinking, try to abandon best practices, and “not get stranded at the summit of Mt. Stupid.” 😅

Some of the fam went to Sapporo and Otaru in Hokkaido. I had to work, but they brought some hanasaki crab and we ate it last night. Wow, it’s reaally good! 🦀

Learned about our local evac center’s “Hamakko Toilet” at today’s event. It’s a sewage pipe you fill with pool water at one end, set toilets above opened man holes, and periodically flush by opening a big valve at the other end. 🚽🚽

Had a local disaster prevention event today. A civil servant / volunteer fireman said we should not assume Yokohama city will prepare enough food or supplies, and that we need to ready our own. A sobering thought! 🧯🚒

If you do any system admin and use the terminal, starship.rs is a really easy value add. For instance if you’re in a vps that just has bash installed, running the starship installer gets you a decent prompt in 10 sec.

Web-toolbox.dev is an excellent & convenient bilingual English/Japanese site for web devs by K (thanks!), with various tools for generation, encoding, SEO, text. 🛠️

I want to learn more about storytelling, and The Perfect Story by Karen Eber 📚 has been great so far. The author posted on LinkedIn about a new Japanese translation, which you can find here.

I searched on the word “Hygge” after eating lunch at a cafe called that, and found this cozy little book on the topic: The Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living (The Happiness Institute Series) by Meik Wiking 📚

Our dog goes to daycare with a big unit of a black lab, whose human is French, so I decided to compile a French dog command list, with Japanese and English, to try to communicate next time we meet. Assis! 🐾

Happy Valentine’s Day 😍 special chocolate from Blue Cacao!

I really enjoyed and found insightful I Never Thought of It That Way by Mónica Guzmán. It will give you tips about how to bridge the divide in conversation with those you disagree with, and help you stay curious! 📚

Went to Kanda Daimyojin shrine to receive New Year blessings for my firm eSolia. You fill a fill a form, tell what blessings you want (we chose business success and employee health), wear a special sash around your neck, and attend a 15 min ceremony. Let’s go! ⛩️🙏🏻

If you like design and thinking about design, User Friendly by Cliff Kuang is a home run of a book. Just fantastic. You could follow its threads to study further, for a year. 📚

Interestingly heard via two completely separate conversations, D2’s husband and her best friend both are programming in python now in their careers; the former for data science, the latter for the back end of web sites. All that python setup nonsense gives me a rash, though. 🐍

A few years back I took IDEO’s “Insights for Innovation” 5-week course, and just reviewed the assignment submissions. I did manage to implement what I wanted to, at eSolia, and think this course was worth it. 😄

Renewed my Japan drivers license at the Futamatagawa center. A pretty efficient process for the most part, though I feel a little traumatized after having watched their safety video which contained several actual scenes of cars hitting bicycles! Be safe out there, people. 🚙

Apple’s Image Playground (that I just got access to) would not make a fire-breathing Shiba for me, but it did set a Shiba’s tail on fire. 😜

At Unitora in Senkyaku-Banrai (Toyosu, Shijomae), before we go to TeamLab Planets. It was sooo good. 🍣