2021i21, Thursday: shinjirarenai hodo oishii.
Translation: delicious beyond belief. My favourite Japanese delivery place has gone national. And a smart and luminous way of adding randomness.
Short thought: Before the Bug, when I worked in London most days, every so often I’d treat myself to Japanese food - thanks to Waso. It was a delivery service which brought amazing bento boxes to your office, in a half-hour time slot.
Then came the pandemic. It nearly killed Waso as offices shut down. Thank goodness it managed to re-create itself delivering Japanese meals (and indeed other cuisines, too) to people’s homes. I was delighted - but desolated that it only delivered in London. Our Essex fastness was too far out.
Now, at last, they’re starting to deliver nationally. Once a week - but that’s plenty good enough. And I couldn’t be happier. I want to hug its founder, Toshihiro Yoshimura. Unfortunately our freezer is a bit full - but as soon as we can eat it down, I’m bulk ordering.
Ganbatte kureyo, Toshi-san. Your food is wonderful. Your business is too. Consider me delighted that I’m back to being a happy customer.
Someone is right on the internet: quick one, this. And a bit of an old one. But as anyone with even vaguely geekish pretensions will probably know, computers don’t really do random. The best they can manage is pseudorandom: something that looks like a dice roll but really isn’t.
So perhaps it’s not surprising that a company in need of randomness for security reasons will look to something analogue in order to service purposes. And CloudFlare (that’s the outfit that blew the whistle on the Solar Winds fiasco) uses lava lamps.
Yes. Lava lamps. Whole rooms of them.
Go and have a look. It’s just wonderful.
(Thanks to Jason Kottke for spotting it.)