Working Hours

This site only renders its contents Monday to Friday, from 08:30 until 17:30 CET/CEST. If you try to browse it any other time you face a maintenance page that prevents you from reading posts like this one. Ironically, you can actually visit that page during working hours^[1].

Why not?

Actually, the idea is not mine. I got it from Kumano Travel^[2], a local, community-managed web page to organize your trip for the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage, where the reservation request has to be done during specific hours of the day. When I did mine back in summer 2025, this time range was normal Japanese working hours, quite horrible if you are living in Europe, although now they have slightly modified the time range for the initial booking request to accommodate other time zones. I highly recommend it if you are visiting Japan and have time.

I was annoyed by this, even more so after going to work on less than three hours of sleep because the booking system was not great. But it made me reflect a bit about the nature of our relationship with technology and the beings behind it. Today, everything must be available at all times for everyone, which in the early days was okay and fantastic, but now that ability has been reframed and imposed as immediacy/urgency, as Terry Godier wonderfully depicts in his blog post The Last Quiet Thing ^[3].

This urgency has side effects. Hardware and software by themselves can only do so much; there are people behind it who need to sustain it. And those sustainers are not the creators. They are the human beings who have to manually review your itinerary and check with the local hosts, who might only speak Japanese, to see if they have room. Or they might be the ones who deliver your package on a Sunday. A Sunday they could have spent with their kids, family, friends, or doing something else. Did you really need that package on a Sunday? In an ever-accelerating world, taking a moment to step back is always good. So, I decided to make this personal decision part of my site.

Yes, I know this works against the premise of the Internet, where asynchronous communication is the goal. And for a personal site, which might serve as a portfolio, it is counterproductive. But I am doing it anyway. Despite the fact that some people might find it annoying, it can generate some reflection on our relationship with technology, or at least leave you with the idea that I am a dork. You could even archive this entire site to the Internet Archive so you can visit it any time you like, but the site would have already achieved its goal: triggering a thought and engraving itself in your brain, forever.