I attended a technical event all the day. It's on a programming language I used to use. Lisp. Some programming languages have a lot of gravity to attracts engineers than others, and members of the Lisp family are doubtlessly so.

The week has been over at last. It was hard especially because I didn't have time to rest myself the lase weekend. It's also the last day of my son's long summer holiday, except coming weekend. I think we are going to work hard to finish his homework in coming two days.

I bought a new smart phone in Taipei. In Taiwan, you can easily get a SIM-free cell phone at any store. I think it's the way it should be. I want to choose my favorite device from all the available alternatives, rather than from few models some telecom company officially support, even though it's a little bit troublesome to install a third-party SIM into an arbitrary device.

So I came back from Taiwan day before yesterday.

It was my eighth visit there, and was the first visit with our daughter. Bringing a baby to a foreign country is hard and challenging. But actually, there are a lot of fun too. Indeed, everyone made a fuss of our baby and we could enjoy communication with the local people which we wouldn't experience without her. In addition to that, there's often a priority service for people carrying infants. If you prepare well for taking great care of the baby, the joy of traveling with baby certainly exceeds the worry and concern about that.

So, I will be on board within twelve hours. This time I'll go to Taipei with my family.

I woke up four in the morning and cut some discs out of a cardboard for my son's handicraft. Japanese elementary schools give children a bunch of homework during the summer vacation and one of the formidable task is the handicraft and/or study. My son is tackling with a mechanism of gear wheels, so I'm also dedicating some of my time to the aid of it. I think he's really good at exploring some new idea and knowledge, but is a little bit easy to drift his mind when things don't go well. I want him to acquire persistence which I think I couldn't learnt well.

I finally wrote a document which I had to do earlier. Some decisions were required to finish that, but I had been reluctant to make up my mind. The document might lead another decision and I think I was afraid of such a chain of hard decisions. Anyway, I've already taken the last step. All I can do now is preparing for the coming decisions.

In Portland, I drank a lot of IPA, Indian Pale Ale. I drank so much that I finally fed up with their strong flavor of hops.

However, once I came back to Tokyo, soon I've been eager for that. Today I found an IPA at the liquor shop near my house and enjoyed it at dinner. It's less hoppy than those in Portland but was good enough for the family dinner on Sunday.

Today, my son played a video game for the first time in his life. These days he was often watching YouTube videos of somebody playing some video games, and became interested in playing them himself. I don't know why he stated to watch those programs in the first place, but anyway, I promised him that the next time we were going to his grandma's home I would let him play Super Mario with NDS. So he enjoyed it today.

I bought a comic series in ebook form several weeks ago, just after I heard that the title was accused of copyright infringement. I wanted to see what would happen if I posses the ebook version of the title when it's withdrawn from the market. Soon the publisher has actually withdrawn all the paper books from the stores all around the country. They also make the ebook re-seller stop distributing its data. Although I suspected that the data I purchased but hadn't downloaded would become unavailable, I can still get it from the re-seller's cloud server today. Feeling a little bit disappointed at the anticlimax result, I still think that the ordinal thing -- to be able to keep making use of my own purchased book -- is quite vulnerable for now. The future of the ebook market may depend on such an ordinary thing.

The center of Tokyo is almost empty because of Obon. Funnily enough, the commuter train going back to home was crowded with recreational people and messier than usual. A worse problem was that a lot of restaurants in the business districts were closed. I went to a familiar Okinawa food restaurant near the office for lunch. Luckily it was open, but with far few menu selections than usual.

It's harder, of course, to restart something than to start. I've had a bunch of work to do after came back to Tokyo from TUG 2014 the last week. More to the point, I think I'd burnt my energy out there. Anyway, I really enjoyed the days in Portland, where the meeting held, and in Seattle to which I made a side trip after the fascinating conference.

One of the reasons I went to Seattle was to visit the first Starbucks in Pike Place Market. I adore their coffee though, what made me want to go to the original shop was the founder's book "ONWARD". I was touched by the atmosphere of the market, and realised that it's the market that had energized the local coffee shop and brought it up to the global brand.

By the way, I didn't know they ask a customer their name and put it down on the plastic cup. I knew that they wouldn't recognize my name just by ear, but I tried to see what would happen. The string the barista wrote on my cup was "Kho", instead of my actual name "Keiichiro". The next day, once again I tried to tell my name at the other Starbucks, and I had a coffee cup with exactly the same string "Kho" on it! I may as well call myself Kho from now on.

Of course I won't!