Winter break and eight years in Japan

Jan. 5, 2023

As of the end of last month, I've been in Japan for 8 years.
Depending on my mood at the time, that sometimes seems like a short time and sometimes seems like a long time.
I was only in San Francisco for a bit over 7 years so Japan is now where I've lived the longest outside of my family home.

The biggest changes from last year involve moving into a new place and adopting two cats.
As a child, I always grew up with cats and especially with a lot of alone time I've been really happy to have two cats of my own. I may have been a bit naive on the difficulty of being a single (cat) father, but overall I think it has been a positive addition.

Growl and MQTT

Aug. 25, 2022

Many years ago before notification center, there was [Growl]. It was widely supported by many different MacOS applications, and had many nice customization options for the toaster popups. Eventually Apple released [notification center] and Growl slowly faded away, but I still appreciated the ability to send a remote notification and continue to use [prowl] for many of my projects.