Random Notes

Earlier this year I traveled to Japan. One of the things I enjoyed a lot and that I find myself missing regularly is the amount of nice things. There is a sense that people care about the small things and pay attention to detail. One example of this was this awesome map of the Kenrokuen Gardens that included a flowering schedule. Why is it so good? Not only is the map itself great, but the flowering schedule gives a casual japanese garden visitor like myself an idea of what to look for. The schedule even uses images as bars for some of the flowers. Awesome!

I listened to St. Johns Passion live for the first time yesterday, in the Frauenkirche in Munich. It was something different. Many thoughts ran trough my head. It is fascinating to think that the premiere of this piece was 300 years ago, in Leipzig. People in many ways very similar to us, but at the same time living in a completely different world where heaven and hell were much more real concepts. The piece is two hours long so you really get the time to listen and think about how wild the story of Jesus last days actually is. The last thing that kept coming back to me is how the church architects (and architects generally) are able to create spaces that makes us feel closer to something bigger. When the full choir is singing and the sound reverberates through the church it is hard not to feel something. That it is live and acoustic is also essential. Sure, I can listen and have listened to the piece via speakers, but it is just not the same experience, even if the music and the words are the same.

I was trying to load some .csv export from my bank into a Pandas dataframe to do a bit of digging into my finances. However, I couldn't load it due to decoding errors and none of the typical encodings didn't help. ChatGPT was also not of any help¹. Emacs came to the rescue. I just opened the .csv file in Emacs and checked the buffer variable buffer-file-coding-system, whose value you can check using the keybinding C-h v. Turns out the encoding I needed was UTF-16LE. Fixing that, pd.read_csv worked like a charm.