Jun 30: An Ironing Board for my Iron!
This morning I got up and had dorm breakfast of daikon and seemed to be chicken oden with mushroom and potato tempura (with rice and miso soup). I decided against having the tea this morning because yesterday during slime-fest, there was also slime in my tea... It was flecked with black and looked very biotic in nature, so I think I may be staying away from the tea in the future, which is a shame because I liked it. I mean I haven't gotten sick YET, but I don't want to take those kinds of chances in a foreign country. >_< Oh well.
I also got my dorm fees bill today. The meal fees are late by a month, so they were zero for June's bill, putting my total rent and utilities at a whopping 1,710円. Including a whole 30円 for electricity! Amazing! Haha, I'm delighted that my dorm "rent" (if it can even be called that) is so cheap. That means that I can have a modicum of discretionary income while also saving money for traveling and paying living costs. I think I will have to get used to tap water, though, because I totalled it up today and I will be spending more per month on water than I likely will for fibre-optic internet when I get my own connection. >_< It depends on what discounts and extra fees there are, but still, that's crazy talk. I will see if I can find anything out about Brita filters here...
At work today I had a pleasant time doing a tiny bit of coding in the morning to finish up my probability machine (I don't know what else to call it) and then did some more mathematical stuff, deriving MAP estimates for document classification (modeled by a product of several Multinomial distributions) using Dirichlet priors. Kabutoya-san then showed me how to create the "Q function" for document classification using PLSA and gave me the resultant EM-steps for the model parameters that I would aim for in my ML estimation. I am glad that I was given the Q function, because to generate it requires determining the expectation of a conditional distribution of a triple summation with a natural logarithm somewhere in there. >_< I would have been toooootally screwed!!! My stats/probability knowledge is regrettably very, very weak. >_<
After I finished the derivation of the ML estimated model parameters, Kabutoya-san said that the computer I'm going to be using from now on is ready. I was fine with the old one as long as the Internet stuck around, but he ordered the computer a while ago I think. >_< It's a netbook-sized thing; a Panasonic CF-J10, with an i7, 16GB RAM and Windows 7 Ultimate. Jeeeezusssss... And what am I currently using it for? Wikipedia and PuTTY. >_< Perhaps in the future I will be doing more work on my actual computer rather than on the Bolt server. I'm totally excited about having such a sexy computer, even though it's not actually mine and I won't even be using any of its power in the forseeable future haha.
At lunch I had some kind of breaded chicken dish that I've had before, and it was pretty good again. Today's curry I didn't recognize, and they like their non-standard curries hot here, so in the interest of actually enjoying my food I am avoiding eating their curries until I can ask someone else about them haha. Since lunch is my most expensive meal of the day excuse me for wanting to make the most of it! I asked my co-workers where to eat curry rice in Yokosuka, and the general answer I got was "just because somewhere is famous for something doesn't mean it's any good" hahaha. Point taken. I'd do Bengal curry again though, it was good enough. Apparently the most famous curry place in Yokochuu is not very good ahaha. I asked them why it's famous if it's bad, and they said that it claims that it was the first curry rice restaurant in Japan, but so do a lot of people apparently hahaha. So, in short I shouldn't be trying to find the best curry rice in Yokosuka. >_< How odd...
After lunch I played handiball, and it was beach-style due to a lack of people and I really enjoyed myself again haha. Too bad only 4-6 people can play beach-style at a time, because I really do enjoy it more. I think it's also better exercise as well. I think today is the first time I've played on the opposite team as Nishida-san, as I just noticed that he's really damn good at handiball (I didn't know that was even really possible). After we finished playing I asked him if he knew the short story Harrison Bergeron, and he didn't so I summarized the idea of the story for him and told him that I asked him if he knew it because I think he needs to put on some weights or goofy shoes or something when he plays handiball. >_<
In the afternoon I did some more math and then got my next assignment from Kabutoya-san, which will be to implement a recommender system using topic models via PLSA. Hopefully this will go smoothly, as Kabutoya-san showed me how I can re-interpret the parameters I derived EM-steps for earlier in the day to use for recommender systems.
I will start on this tomorrow, and I will also receive some work to do on Sunday, as Kabutoya-san will be taking the day off. Who knows what trouble I could get up to!? I sit right across from the deputy group lead, so probably not much hahaha (like I'd even try).
After work I ate dorm supper of oyako-don (of course the night after I first buy myself oyako-don at LAWSON STATION, but whatever). It was a little salty but overall pretty good. I started some laundry before eating and I changed it over into the dryer afterwards before departing for Yokochuu.
In Yokochuu I bought an ironing board (now that I've had an iron for almost a week haha), more laundry baskets (now I've got 3, because they're really small) and some notepads and stuff. I have been burning through the one I've got with my furious mathing at work, and I want to have more on hand for studying and such. I also got some very small memo pads, because I can't always remember the words people teach me, and I don't want to carry around a full-sized notebook everywhere. I thought I was going to have to buy a Rilakkuma (a bit like Hello Kitty, but a little cuter and a little creepier at the same time) memo pad, because I couldn't find any that didn't have Mickey and Minnie or Tanza Fa'Quin Glitter (read it aloud) all over it. I regrettably found the big kid memo pads and lost my excuse for buying a Rilakkuma one QQ.
After I did my shopping at the Seiyu (I almost got kicked out because they were closing) I checked the bus schedule and then went to the arcade to kill time. Of course I stayed longer than necessary, but I had anticipated this happening and had looked up bus times far in the future ahahaha. I finally actually passed Moon (holy crap!), and you practically need a full combo to do it. That's only a slight exaggeration, as I believe I have failed it with only 11 missed notes before. D:< You can actually start failing again after getting yourself into the green slightly without dropping any notes, because if you get too many Fines as opposed to Cools, you don't amass enough percentage relative to the cutoff. >_< Brutal... I look forward to being able to pass it consistently so I can move on to other songs, damnit. I haven't had this much trouble with a single hurdle in a rhythm game since Butterfly when I was 10 years old haha.
I took the bus back home and folded my now-dry laundry. When it comes out of the dryer is probably when my clothes are the driest, as it's very humid here and everything always feels a bit damp. It makes it very hard to get my hand in and out of my jeans pocket. >_< And they're loose jeans! Haha yeah don't worry I haven't gone skinny-jeaned on you when you weren't looking.
Anyways, I'd best get to bed as I have to get up early for my Co-op site visit phone call, after the other one never came. Night!
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
I'm sorry, but your Nomi is in another Kai
Jun 29: Welcome and Farewell Party
This morning's dorm breakfast's theme was "slime" apparently. There was slimy algae in the miso soup, slime-sauced jellyfish salad, and natto on rice. >_< I can't say it was my favourite meal, but it was very long-lasting evidently, as I wasn't dying of hunger by lunchtime as I sometimes am.
Today at work I did some ML and MAP estimation on paper, and started implementing the MAP estimated Gaussian that I worked out at Kabutoya-san's direction. By the end of the day it was able to generate a number (I don't know how accurate said number is, however) that is supposedly the probability of observing the data that it is given. I will get to testing it tomorrow.
At lunch today I had something I thought was going to be Chinese charsiu, but it turned out to be chicken! Surprise! Oh well it tasted fine (albeit a little dry) so I'm not really complaining haha. Today's curry didn't look exciting either, so I don't think I missed out on much in particular. After eating we played handiball, and my serve was not as good today, but I never actually served a fault, which is a large improvement in consistency. :D Nishida-san has started doing a rather pro-looking serve that I am going to start copying, as he's able to get the ball lower over the net than I am.
In the afternoon, there were different power saving measures in place. The air conditioning is definitely back on, which is nice (unless it's stealing power from like, a hospital or something haha), but from 2 until maybe 4, the lights were out! What the hell!? I understand that most people are using a monitor at work, but I happened to be trying to do math on paper! I therefore had to move my mouse periodically so that my monitor would stay awake and illuminate my maths. >_< The messages over the intercom used vocabulary I don't know, so it came as a bit of a surprise when the lights suddenly went out and stayed out.
After work my projectmates (we are the PIGs, for Portal Imagination Group or Portal Imaging Group or something, don't ask me why they named themselves that) and I went to an izakaya in Yokochuu where we held a party welcoming me and saying farewell to Miyata-san. Having a welcome party 3 weeks after you arrive apparently means sitting there uncomfortably while everyone releases a barrage of compliments at you. I'm very glad that they like me here, but I am very bad at receiving compliments, and I was practically hiding under my notebook by the end. >_< Kabutoya-san got a little drunk and really talked Kurauchi-san's ear off about me. >_< Augh! So embarrassing! (but better than the alternative, to be sure)
One thing I am very glad about is that they said that I'm a good English teacher haha. I try to explain words I use in detail, and they appear to really like it. I'm glad I can be useful to them while my Japanese is still to poor to communicate. They have a thing they do called "nazokake" or something where someone stands up and makes a pun to try to make people laugh. O_O I told them about how the English equivalent of that brand of wordplay is called a "pun", and explained how the "rules" are different in English because we have far fewer homophones. I was unfortunately unable to make any good puns on the spot. Most of the puns I could think of off the top of my head are risque, so I think I will save them for later. Much later (read never). The best I was able to do for the night was when they were explaining that I don't have many fellow co-ops due to the earthquake, and I said "Ah yes, I'm peerless.", which is mediocre by the most generous evaluations (and not even a pun by the worst). At least it gave me an opportunity to illustrate the general structure of how a conversational pun works. >_< I also taught them the word "modesty" and few others.
One thing that worries me a little bit (and is also an ego boost if it's true, which I doubt) is that they also said that my Japanese sounds very "natural", and they say that when they hear it they always expect me to be able to speak a lot more than I can. This may be the source of future problems with other people I need to speak with. >_< However, it could also just be more complimentary lies haha.
We also talked a bit about blood types and Kabutoya-san gave me a pop quiz right then and there by asking me which of the probability distributions I have learned so far should I use if I wanted to model the blood types in Japan, given that they have 40/30/20/10% A/O/B/AB population. I apparently got it right by saying multinomial distribution, which is a good thing, because Kabutoya-san was a little drunk and told me that if I got it wrong, "maybe you are going to hell, perhaps." D: A rather severe punishment!
At the party, which I was told was a drinking party, not that much drinking was actually required. I had some sapporo, some shiso shochu called "tan-taka-tan" (which was really interesting, you could really taste the shiso) and a cassis-orange that I made for myself at the liquor table. I ended up having drink the cassis-orange rather quickly, because almost right after I made it they decided that the party was over. O_O Oh well, I have yet to see anything above 20% alcohol content here, so it was fine.
The food at the nomikai was good, but quite minimal, we had edamame, some tofu salad, some hakusai (pickled lettuce) and some fried rice, so I got some oyako-don at LAWSON STATION when I got home. There was a guy in the LAWSON STATION that was nodding at me like he knew me, but I couldn't recognize him. I must have been giving him a puzzled look, because he said that he saw me at Irori (the izakaya near my dorm). It was friendly-man! I apologized for not recognizing him without his hat or glasses. He said it was ok, and then we didn't have much to talk about, which was ok, because my oyako-don was done heating up and I could leave. Once I got back to my dorm I started writing this blog, and now that I'm done it's time to go to bed.
Night!
PS: At the nomikai, I only got made fun of for thinking Hayashi is comfortable once!!! A new record!!!
This morning's dorm breakfast's theme was "slime" apparently. There was slimy algae in the miso soup, slime-sauced jellyfish salad, and natto on rice. >_< I can't say it was my favourite meal, but it was very long-lasting evidently, as I wasn't dying of hunger by lunchtime as I sometimes am.
Today at work I did some ML and MAP estimation on paper, and started implementing the MAP estimated Gaussian that I worked out at Kabutoya-san's direction. By the end of the day it was able to generate a number (I don't know how accurate said number is, however) that is supposedly the probability of observing the data that it is given. I will get to testing it tomorrow.
At lunch today I had something I thought was going to be Chinese charsiu, but it turned out to be chicken! Surprise! Oh well it tasted fine (albeit a little dry) so I'm not really complaining haha. Today's curry didn't look exciting either, so I don't think I missed out on much in particular. After eating we played handiball, and my serve was not as good today, but I never actually served a fault, which is a large improvement in consistency. :D Nishida-san has started doing a rather pro-looking serve that I am going to start copying, as he's able to get the ball lower over the net than I am.
In the afternoon, there were different power saving measures in place. The air conditioning is definitely back on, which is nice (unless it's stealing power from like, a hospital or something haha), but from 2 until maybe 4, the lights were out! What the hell!? I understand that most people are using a monitor at work, but I happened to be trying to do math on paper! I therefore had to move my mouse periodically so that my monitor would stay awake and illuminate my maths. >_< The messages over the intercom used vocabulary I don't know, so it came as a bit of a surprise when the lights suddenly went out and stayed out.
After work my projectmates (we are the PIGs, for Portal Imagination Group or Portal Imaging Group or something, don't ask me why they named themselves that) and I went to an izakaya in Yokochuu where we held a party welcoming me and saying farewell to Miyata-san. Having a welcome party 3 weeks after you arrive apparently means sitting there uncomfortably while everyone releases a barrage of compliments at you. I'm very glad that they like me here, but I am very bad at receiving compliments, and I was practically hiding under my notebook by the end. >_< Kabutoya-san got a little drunk and really talked Kurauchi-san's ear off about me. >_< Augh! So embarrassing! (but better than the alternative, to be sure)
One thing I am very glad about is that they said that I'm a good English teacher haha. I try to explain words I use in detail, and they appear to really like it. I'm glad I can be useful to them while my Japanese is still to poor to communicate. They have a thing they do called "nazokake" or something where someone stands up and makes a pun to try to make people laugh. O_O I told them about how the English equivalent of that brand of wordplay is called a "pun", and explained how the "rules" are different in English because we have far fewer homophones. I was unfortunately unable to make any good puns on the spot. Most of the puns I could think of off the top of my head are risque, so I think I will save them for later. Much later (read never). The best I was able to do for the night was when they were explaining that I don't have many fellow co-ops due to the earthquake, and I said "Ah yes, I'm peerless.", which is mediocre by the most generous evaluations (and not even a pun by the worst). At least it gave me an opportunity to illustrate the general structure of how a conversational pun works. >_< I also taught them the word "modesty" and few others.
One thing that worries me a little bit (and is also an ego boost if it's true, which I doubt) is that they also said that my Japanese sounds very "natural", and they say that when they hear it they always expect me to be able to speak a lot more than I can. This may be the source of future problems with other people I need to speak with. >_< However, it could also just be more complimentary lies haha.
We also talked a bit about blood types and Kabutoya-san gave me a pop quiz right then and there by asking me which of the probability distributions I have learned so far should I use if I wanted to model the blood types in Japan, given that they have 40/30/20/10% A/O/B/AB population. I apparently got it right by saying multinomial distribution, which is a good thing, because Kabutoya-san was a little drunk and told me that if I got it wrong, "maybe you are going to hell, perhaps." D: A rather severe punishment!
At the party, which I was told was a drinking party, not that much drinking was actually required. I had some sapporo, some shiso shochu called "tan-taka-tan" (which was really interesting, you could really taste the shiso) and a cassis-orange that I made for myself at the liquor table. I ended up having drink the cassis-orange rather quickly, because almost right after I made it they decided that the party was over. O_O Oh well, I have yet to see anything above 20% alcohol content here, so it was fine.
The food at the nomikai was good, but quite minimal, we had edamame, some tofu salad, some hakusai (pickled lettuce) and some fried rice, so I got some oyako-don at LAWSON STATION when I got home. There was a guy in the LAWSON STATION that was nodding at me like he knew me, but I couldn't recognize him. I must have been giving him a puzzled look, because he said that he saw me at Irori (the izakaya near my dorm). It was friendly-man! I apologized for not recognizing him without his hat or glasses. He said it was ok, and then we didn't have much to talk about, which was ok, because my oyako-don was done heating up and I could leave. Once I got back to my dorm I started writing this blog, and now that I'm done it's time to go to bed.
Night!
PS: At the nomikai, I only got made fun of for thinking Hayashi is comfortable once!!! A new record!!!
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
WHUHTUHSSHI NO NAMAY WUH ROWBARTO DEEESSUUU
Jun 28: Pre-Nomikai Training
I got up feeling great today because I went to bed so early last night, and I had the lovely experience of not being sleepy all day (except for when I was reading a paper, then I could barely keep my eyes open). I had dorm breakfast of small fishes in chopped vegetables, and some oden-esque tofu with bamboo shoots and thinly sliced meat (with rice and miso soup as always). I had a relatively successful conversation with Oohashi-san, where she apologized for forgetting to turn on the tea pump yesterday, and where I explained that I was not going to be there for dinner due to "sayonara-party", to which she looked like I had said that someone had gotten hit by a car (which maybe sayonara-party implies? Could just be Oohashi-san), so I explained, seemingly successfully, that the party was for people who are switching labs. I then said gochiso-sama and left for work. My timing was dangerously perfect, as I barely waited at the stop for 30 seconds before the bus came along. If I'm not more careful in the future, I could end up on time for work. >_
At work I reported my finished classifiers to Kabutoya-san and received the seminal paper on Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis on return. He didn't even check my work this time, so I guess I'm making a good enough impression. He was also quite busy today, and so that may have something to do with it (I am choosing to ignore this fact). I am probably not helping his workload with my TEAM FAST behaviour, but I can't really help it...
At lunch we didn't pay handiball, because there were important presentations to be done by the employees after lunch, and they didn't want to be sweaty and gross (or late). So, I went back to my desk and worked for a little while longer. Also going on throughout the day was me practicing my introduction that I would be doing at tonight's farewell party for departing project members. This one was to be in Japanese, so I definitely had to spend some time memorizing it. Kabutoya-san had told me yesterday that he would prepare a "japanese joke" for me to put into the script, which I was a bit apprehensive about, but what can you do? Today I found out that the "japanese joke" was, ahem, well suited to my talents. In other words, after my actual introduction, I was to read some lines that apparently massacre a common saying along the lines of "when in Rome, do as the Romans do" and turns it into something like "when in Rome, I am Buddha" in as horrible a gaijin accent as I could (especially the line that says "MII WA KONNA WONDERFUL TOKORO DE HATARAKETE TOTTEMO HAPPY DEEEEEESU). >_> I wasn't quite so sure about "japanese joke" anymore, but I realized that if I offended anyone, it wouldn't be my supervisor so it was pretty safe to go ahead with, if a little disconcerting...
During the afternoon Kabutoya-san also gave me a lecture (like a miniature university style one, complete with whiteboard) on Maximum Likelihood estimation, since he could see I was struggling with the PLSA paper, due to me not knowing about a lot of the methods addressed, such as ML estimation, Maximum a Priori Estimation and Expectation-Maximization. He also gave me "homework" to do at my desk, which consisted of deriving the formulae commonly used to for the mean and variance as maximum likelihood estimates. This went swimmingly until I couldn't get rid of a mysterious -2 attached to my result for the variance. It turned out that either he had written the formula for the Gaussian distribution wrong or I had copied it down wrong, as I found a lovely -1/2 waiting for me as I opened the Wikipedia article for it. XD
After finishing my homework, he showed off what I think is one of the most creative and clever circumventions of the language barrier I have ever seen. I showed him my work and he was like "good, good", and then he circled the results I got (the mean and variance) and the formula for the normal distribution at the top of the page, and told me "these are the only things you need to implement this, the parameters and the equation, and also you can understand implementing it with only these. Just like PLSA." It was so cool. Presumably without knowing how to actually express it, he managed to tell me that I needn't concern myself with the details of the derivation of PLSA as long as I understood the underlying probabilistic/statistical model and the basic formulation of the parameters. I will of course continue to worry about the details, but I won't stress over them and I think that I will be able to let go a little more now and let myself learn the details as I get a better pool of background knowledge. The conciseness of his explanation and the minimal use of complicated language made me go "WHOA", and helped me understand why he seems to have 40,000 more meetings to go to than I see the others in our group have, at the tender age of 28.
After that I was left alone to finish reading the PLSA paper and practice my introduction. I wasn't explicitly given time for the introduction, but I finished the paper and everyone in the lab was doing their research proposal presentations in another room at the moment, so I was left with nothing else constructive to do after choosing to read up on Expectation-Maximization on Wikipedia.
At around 6:15 it was time to go to the farewell party. It was in Kurihama, which meant that we took a bus to the YRP Nobi Station and then took the Keikyu line to Kurihama. The party was held at a sushi restaurant that Kabutoya-san told me was famous for its maguro, so I was very excited, considering that Yokosuka itself is already famous for seafood. At the restaurant we were seated, and luckily for the feeling in my legs and my general comfort, western style sitting was adopted by about half the people in the room.
Before the food came I asked Kabutoya-san about the acceptability of beards at the company, since no-one in the entire room of like 40+ people had even a hint of one. He thought I was saying "beer", and said "yes it's ok if you drink". It turned out that he wasn't just mishearing me, but that he simply didn't know the word "beard". I proceeded to teach him about the words "beard", "goatee", "sideburns" and "chinstrap" (the important ones ;D), complete with diagrams drawn on the back of my introduction script. I find it pretty funny that I am able to make Kabutoya-san laugh with jokes like "I am unable to find a solution to the problem of maximizing my work done while minimizing your Expectations", but we have miscommunications about "beer" and "beards". Just goes to show you that you get to know what is relevant to you. Earlier today Nishida-san (one of my friendliest and English-proficient group members) told me that he can read academic papers in English, but can't deal with Harry Potter (books or movies).
The beer came (Kirin), and then some food (Chawan-mushi and tempura, as well as a tiny abalone and a piece of lemon jelly, all very good). This was apparently "practice start" for dinner, and someone did a short toast which I didn't understand except for "kampai!" (cheers). The two groups to left and right of me proceeded to force upon me sake and shochu, respectively, although the sake was 14% alcohol and was very sweet and weak compared to my memory of my limited experience of sake in Canada. The sake camp served me a very reasonable amount, but the shochu camp (of which Kabutoya-san was involved) served me more than half a highball glass full of the stuff (although there was a good deal of ice in it). They were saying what sounded like the equivalent of "oh shit it's way too full who poured that" and stuff and proceeded to give it to me anyways, with a smile of course. I'M ON TO YOU GUYS!!! I was commenting on the fact that I was being attacked from both sides, to which they laughed and said "yes, mixing different alcohol is not so good". I then told them plaintively "that's what you're doing to me! I've practically got one in each hand!" to which they laughed, but kept doing it. >_> Luckily my shochu never got refilled, but my beer and sake did once each.
When the full dinner was ready to come, we had speeches for the departing project members, preceded by me as the opening act. I froze a little in the middle of my introduction, and thus had to consult my script, but the lab members were very supportive and told me all kinds of nice things that weren't true about my ability to speak Japanese. For my "Japanese joke" I decided to go for broke and lowered my voice about 3 octaves (OK OK fine it was more like 8 semitones) and did my best "foreigner fails horribly at Japanese pronounciation" impression, which was ego-crushingly easy. D: All of the people I could see were laughing quite hard once they figured out what was happening, so I guess it wasn't so bad. As long as they like me and continue being as nice to me as they have been so far, I'm OK with looking like a complete tool once in a while. >_>
After the dinner, there was the option to go to a second party, and although I was feeling barely anything (probably due to a good amount of eating) despite my sake, beer and Big Gulp (tm) shochu, I have another party tomorrow night, so I bowed out along with Kabutoya-san who also had a party yesterday along with the one tomorrow. >_< I had had enough adventures for today anyways, with "my" attempt at "humour" and my big gulp shochu and eating something that wasn't very good that Kabutoya-san said "maybe is whale" (he didn't like it either). I had a pleasant ride home on the train and bus, but had decidedly unpleasant beer+raw fish (and maybe whale) burps. D:< EW. Once I got home I ate some senbei to prevent more of those.
I now must go to bed, as this blog has taken far longer to write than I expected, and now I will be tired tomorrow QQ.
Good Night!
I got up feeling great today because I went to bed so early last night, and I had the lovely experience of not being sleepy all day (except for when I was reading a paper, then I could barely keep my eyes open). I had dorm breakfast of small fishes in chopped vegetables, and some oden-esque tofu with bamboo shoots and thinly sliced meat (with rice and miso soup as always). I had a relatively successful conversation with Oohashi-san, where she apologized for forgetting to turn on the tea pump yesterday, and where I explained that I was not going to be there for dinner due to "sayonara-party", to which she looked like I had said that someone had gotten hit by a car (which maybe sayonara-party implies? Could just be Oohashi-san), so I explained, seemingly successfully, that the party was for people who are switching labs. I then said gochiso-sama and left for work. My timing was dangerously perfect, as I barely waited at the stop for 30 seconds before the bus came along. If I'm not more careful in the future, I could end up on time for work. >_
At work I reported my finished classifiers to Kabutoya-san and received the seminal paper on Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis on return. He didn't even check my work this time, so I guess I'm making a good enough impression. He was also quite busy today, and so that may have something to do with it (I am choosing to ignore this fact). I am probably not helping his workload with my TEAM FAST behaviour, but I can't really help it...
At lunch we didn't pay handiball, because there were important presentations to be done by the employees after lunch, and they didn't want to be sweaty and gross (or late). So, I went back to my desk and worked for a little while longer. Also going on throughout the day was me practicing my introduction that I would be doing at tonight's farewell party for departing project members. This one was to be in Japanese, so I definitely had to spend some time memorizing it. Kabutoya-san had told me yesterday that he would prepare a "japanese joke" for me to put into the script, which I was a bit apprehensive about, but what can you do? Today I found out that the "japanese joke" was, ahem, well suited to my talents. In other words, after my actual introduction, I was to read some lines that apparently massacre a common saying along the lines of "when in Rome, do as the Romans do" and turns it into something like "when in Rome, I am Buddha" in as horrible a gaijin accent as I could (especially the line that says "MII WA KONNA WONDERFUL TOKORO DE HATARAKETE TOTTEMO HAPPY DEEEEEESU). >_> I wasn't quite so sure about "japanese joke" anymore, but I realized that if I offended anyone, it wouldn't be my supervisor so it was pretty safe to go ahead with, if a little disconcerting...
During the afternoon Kabutoya-san also gave me a lecture (like a miniature university style one, complete with whiteboard) on Maximum Likelihood estimation, since he could see I was struggling with the PLSA paper, due to me not knowing about a lot of the methods addressed, such as ML estimation, Maximum a Priori Estimation and Expectation-Maximization. He also gave me "homework" to do at my desk, which consisted of deriving the formulae commonly used to for the mean and variance as maximum likelihood estimates. This went swimmingly until I couldn't get rid of a mysterious -2 attached to my result for the variance. It turned out that either he had written the formula for the Gaussian distribution wrong or I had copied it down wrong, as I found a lovely -1/2 waiting for me as I opened the Wikipedia article for it. XD
After finishing my homework, he showed off what I think is one of the most creative and clever circumventions of the language barrier I have ever seen. I showed him my work and he was like "good, good", and then he circled the results I got (the mean and variance) and the formula for the normal distribution at the top of the page, and told me "these are the only things you need to implement this, the parameters and the equation, and also you can understand implementing it with only these. Just like PLSA." It was so cool. Presumably without knowing how to actually express it, he managed to tell me that I needn't concern myself with the details of the derivation of PLSA as long as I understood the underlying probabilistic/statistical model and the basic formulation of the parameters. I will of course continue to worry about the details, but I won't stress over them and I think that I will be able to let go a little more now and let myself learn the details as I get a better pool of background knowledge. The conciseness of his explanation and the minimal use of complicated language made me go "WHOA", and helped me understand why he seems to have 40,000 more meetings to go to than I see the others in our group have, at the tender age of 28.
After that I was left alone to finish reading the PLSA paper and practice my introduction. I wasn't explicitly given time for the introduction, but I finished the paper and everyone in the lab was doing their research proposal presentations in another room at the moment, so I was left with nothing else constructive to do after choosing to read up on Expectation-Maximization on Wikipedia.
At around 6:15 it was time to go to the farewell party. It was in Kurihama, which meant that we took a bus to the YRP Nobi Station and then took the Keikyu line to Kurihama. The party was held at a sushi restaurant that Kabutoya-san told me was famous for its maguro, so I was very excited, considering that Yokosuka itself is already famous for seafood. At the restaurant we were seated, and luckily for the feeling in my legs and my general comfort, western style sitting was adopted by about half the people in the room.
Before the food came I asked Kabutoya-san about the acceptability of beards at the company, since no-one in the entire room of like 40+ people had even a hint of one. He thought I was saying "beer", and said "yes it's ok if you drink". It turned out that he wasn't just mishearing me, but that he simply didn't know the word "beard". I proceeded to teach him about the words "beard", "goatee", "sideburns" and "chinstrap" (the important ones ;D), complete with diagrams drawn on the back of my introduction script. I find it pretty funny that I am able to make Kabutoya-san laugh with jokes like "I am unable to find a solution to the problem of maximizing my work done while minimizing your Expectations", but we have miscommunications about "beer" and "beards". Just goes to show you that you get to know what is relevant to you. Earlier today Nishida-san (one of my friendliest and English-proficient group members) told me that he can read academic papers in English, but can't deal with Harry Potter (books or movies).
The beer came (Kirin), and then some food (Chawan-mushi and tempura, as well as a tiny abalone and a piece of lemon jelly, all very good). This was apparently "practice start" for dinner, and someone did a short toast which I didn't understand except for "kampai!" (cheers). The two groups to left and right of me proceeded to force upon me sake and shochu, respectively, although the sake was 14% alcohol and was very sweet and weak compared to my memory of my limited experience of sake in Canada. The sake camp served me a very reasonable amount, but the shochu camp (of which Kabutoya-san was involved) served me more than half a highball glass full of the stuff (although there was a good deal of ice in it). They were saying what sounded like the equivalent of "oh shit it's way too full who poured that" and stuff and proceeded to give it to me anyways, with a smile of course. I'M ON TO YOU GUYS!!! I was commenting on the fact that I was being attacked from both sides, to which they laughed and said "yes, mixing different alcohol is not so good". I then told them plaintively "that's what you're doing to me! I've practically got one in each hand!" to which they laughed, but kept doing it. >_> Luckily my shochu never got refilled, but my beer and sake did once each.
When the full dinner was ready to come, we had speeches for the departing project members, preceded by me as the opening act. I froze a little in the middle of my introduction, and thus had to consult my script, but the lab members were very supportive and told me all kinds of nice things that weren't true about my ability to speak Japanese. For my "Japanese joke" I decided to go for broke and lowered my voice about 3 octaves (OK OK fine it was more like 8 semitones) and did my best "foreigner fails horribly at Japanese pronounciation" impression, which was ego-crushingly easy. D: All of the people I could see were laughing quite hard once they figured out what was happening, so I guess it wasn't so bad. As long as they like me and continue being as nice to me as they have been so far, I'm OK with looking like a complete tool once in a while. >_>
After the dinner, there was the option to go to a second party, and although I was feeling barely anything (probably due to a good amount of eating) despite my sake, beer and Big Gulp (tm) shochu, I have another party tomorrow night, so I bowed out along with Kabutoya-san who also had a party yesterday along with the one tomorrow. >_< I had had enough adventures for today anyways, with "my" attempt at "humour" and my big gulp shochu and eating something that wasn't very good that Kabutoya-san said "maybe is whale" (he didn't like it either). I had a pleasant ride home on the train and bus, but had decidedly unpleasant beer+raw fish (and maybe whale) burps. D:< EW. Once I got home I ate some senbei to prevent more of those.
I now must go to bed, as this blog has taken far longer to write than I expected, and now I will be tired tomorrow QQ.
Good Night!
Monday, June 27, 2011
Couldn't find TUMS at the drug store...
Jun 27: Uncomfortable All Day D:
This morning I woke up early to accept a call scheduled for 6:45 from the Canada Japan Co-op people that never ended up coming. >_< I had a nice chat with Mom and Jiuna after I gave up on waiting though, which made the early rise worth it. I talked with them for about an hour before heading out to work.
The work itself today was quite good. I discovered that my supervisor doesn't want me to implement the Naive Bayes classifiers that use Gaussians from the paper, which is kinda nice because I was really scratching my head at how one of them was supposed to classify anything... Turns out it's not well suited to document classification, so it's a good thing it didn't make sense haha! I had, unfortunately, wasted the morning puzzling out various bits of those two classifiers, so that's work down the drain. Oh well. However, the difficulty with today was that I was dealing with acid stomach all day which I assume is due to that damn baked good I had in Shinagawa station. I am going to have to eschew all baked goods that are not things I am obviously able to eat like melon-pan or muffins, because one "calzone" (complete with scare quotes) successfully ruined my entire Monday pretty much.
I played handiball at lunch, and my serve is getting much more consistent. I'm still kinda bad at non-serving handiball, but that's ok. As long as I can sit at the back of the court and score points from afar I will be happy. ;D For lunch I had something called "Chuuka-don" which was like some kind of saucy stir fry type dealie over rice. It was pretty good, but a little salty.
In the afternoon I completed my classifiers by adding a way for them to read the training data as well as adding some code to get them to classify a bunch of downloaded e-mails to see how well they performed. As anyone who codes knows, most of the time when you "finish" writing your program, your real problems begin, and that was certainly the case today. I was getting really, really low success rates with the models that were supposed to be better, and I saw that they were almost always guessing "ham" (the opposite of spam, I'm not making this up), even if the e-mail was like ENLARGE YOUR ONLINE CASINO PHARMACEUTICALS TODAY FREE! >_< I changed the amount of training data I was using though, which fixed that. I was being too time-greedy and I liked having the test suite I could run really fast, but 100 documents wasn't enough to teach my classifiers that such words as the ones above were no-nos.
After increasing the training data size, however, I noticed that the rather underwhelming improvement (at least it was guessing both ham and spam) was due to the fact that it was unable take guesses a lot of the time due to the probabilities of ham or spam being "Not a Number". erugghghghh... Long story short, it turned out to be underflow leading to some lovely 0.0/0.0 action, which took me embarrassingly long to figure out, considering how many classroom hours have been devoted to such things in my degree so far. >_< Oh well, that's what I get for implementing a classifier that uses feature selection while ignoring the feature selection part! The good news is that once I fixed the underflow error (thank god Ruby has magical cheater number classes that allow arbitrary precision, or at least claim to), my classifiers all had 95+% success rates in their classifications. I am going to do more testing tomorrow, but from today's results I'm feeling pretty good (famous last words).
I went home feeling pretty gross and made an unsuccessful stop at the drug store in search of TUMS or something like it. I was thinking one of the boxes looked promising, with the right kinds of colour schemes and everything, but they turned out to be enemas. >_< Not exactly what I was looking for... I again found the mysterious pack of medicine that has a picture of a guy holding his stomach, but I still have been unable to determine what it's supposed to do...
I had dorm supper of Hiyashi-chuuka (or would that be Hayashi-chuuka where I live!? Derp), which although nice and very nostalgic, is not necessarily the most pleasant meal to be greeted with when having acid stomach. Oddly enough, as of the writing of this e-mail, my stomach has calmed down considerably. >_> I have no idea how that works.
I am going to be going to bed early early early tonight, as I have to go to a farewell party for the office tomorrow, and I have no idea how late it's supposed to go, or what's supposed to happen. Plus, although I am feeling alright now, I have felt like crap all day (due to a mixture of acid stomach and getting up at 6:15 for no apparent reason apparently until like, 7:30), so I am very much looking forward to tomorrow, especially in the sense that it is not today. ;D
Good night!
This morning I woke up early to accept a call scheduled for 6:45 from the Canada Japan Co-op people that never ended up coming. >_< I had a nice chat with Mom and Jiuna after I gave up on waiting though, which made the early rise worth it. I talked with them for about an hour before heading out to work.
The work itself today was quite good. I discovered that my supervisor doesn't want me to implement the Naive Bayes classifiers that use Gaussians from the paper, which is kinda nice because I was really scratching my head at how one of them was supposed to classify anything... Turns out it's not well suited to document classification, so it's a good thing it didn't make sense haha! I had, unfortunately, wasted the morning puzzling out various bits of those two classifiers, so that's work down the drain. Oh well. However, the difficulty with today was that I was dealing with acid stomach all day which I assume is due to that damn baked good I had in Shinagawa station. I am going to have to eschew all baked goods that are not things I am obviously able to eat like melon-pan or muffins, because one "calzone" (complete with scare quotes) successfully ruined my entire Monday pretty much.
I played handiball at lunch, and my serve is getting much more consistent. I'm still kinda bad at non-serving handiball, but that's ok. As long as I can sit at the back of the court and score points from afar I will be happy. ;D For lunch I had something called "Chuuka-don" which was like some kind of saucy stir fry type dealie over rice. It was pretty good, but a little salty.
In the afternoon I completed my classifiers by adding a way for them to read the training data as well as adding some code to get them to classify a bunch of downloaded e-mails to see how well they performed. As anyone who codes knows, most of the time when you "finish" writing your program, your real problems begin, and that was certainly the case today. I was getting really, really low success rates with the models that were supposed to be better, and I saw that they were almost always guessing "ham" (the opposite of spam, I'm not making this up), even if the e-mail was like ENLARGE YOUR ONLINE CASINO PHARMACEUTICALS TODAY FREE! >_< I changed the amount of training data I was using though, which fixed that. I was being too time-greedy and I liked having the test suite I could run really fast, but 100 documents wasn't enough to teach my classifiers that such words as the ones above were no-nos.
After increasing the training data size, however, I noticed that the rather underwhelming improvement (at least it was guessing both ham and spam) was due to the fact that it was unable take guesses a lot of the time due to the probabilities of ham or spam being "Not a Number". erugghghghh... Long story short, it turned out to be underflow leading to some lovely 0.0/0.0 action, which took me embarrassingly long to figure out, considering how many classroom hours have been devoted to such things in my degree so far. >_< Oh well, that's what I get for implementing a classifier that uses feature selection while ignoring the feature selection part! The good news is that once I fixed the underflow error (thank god Ruby has magical cheater number classes that allow arbitrary precision, or at least claim to), my classifiers all had 95+% success rates in their classifications. I am going to do more testing tomorrow, but from today's results I'm feeling pretty good (famous last words).
I went home feeling pretty gross and made an unsuccessful stop at the drug store in search of TUMS or something like it. I was thinking one of the boxes looked promising, with the right kinds of colour schemes and everything, but they turned out to be enemas. >_< Not exactly what I was looking for... I again found the mysterious pack of medicine that has a picture of a guy holding his stomach, but I still have been unable to determine what it's supposed to do...
I had dorm supper of Hiyashi-chuuka (or would that be Hayashi-chuuka where I live!? Derp), which although nice and very nostalgic, is not necessarily the most pleasant meal to be greeted with when having acid stomach. Oddly enough, as of the writing of this e-mail, my stomach has calmed down considerably. >_> I have no idea how that works.
I am going to be going to bed early early early tonight, as I have to go to a farewell party for the office tomorrow, and I have no idea how late it's supposed to go, or what's supposed to happen. Plus, although I am feeling alright now, I have felt like crap all day (due to a mixture of acid stomach and getting up at 6:15 for no apparent reason apparently until like, 7:30), so I am very much looking forward to tomorrow, especially in the sense that it is not today. ;D
Good night!
Sunday, June 26, 2011
I think we can safely say I'm an Akiba junkie now...
June 26: Buying an Iron
This morning I got up prior to noon, partially due to the fact that I realized that the entire time I had been dozing (about an hour and a half), a kid nearby was practicing his recorder. On a completely unrelated note, I now feel rage rather than nostalgia when I think of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm". D:<
I snacked on korokke and headed for Akiba for the day with the hope of finding an iron. I got to Akiba pretty uneventfully, though I must say I worry about getting deported for cracking up at the Yamanote line's little "english lessons" that appear on the TV inside the trains. Last weekend the lesson was what a "BA" is, and some example sentences such as "We need someone with a BA", and "I majored in History!". Colour me skeptical on the first one... This weekend it was even more humourous, as the word of the week was "fire". The example dialog was "Why did they fire you?" to which they suggest you reply "It was a misunderstanding!" XD Wow... Learning to be tricky on the Yamanote line... Haha.
In Akiba I checked around a few stores to find one that sold appliances, and I ended up purchasing my iron for about 1800円 after finding a Sofmap store at one end of the pedestrian part of Chuuou street that sold them. I was considering going somewhere I could get one used or something like that for ultra ultra cheap, but I would rather not have to deal with the consequences if said iron were to do something horrid like light my shirts or my entire dorm on fire, and twenty bucks is cheap for something I will presumably use steadily for an entire year.
After buying my iron I went arcade hopping for the rest of the day. Oddly enough I seem to enjoy playing 3rd Strike more than Melty Blood at the moment, possibly because I feel like I'm playing waaay below my ability at Melty Blood, but with 3rd Strike I was never good in the first place hahaha! I played a bunch of 3rd Strike and a little Melty Blood at CLUB SEGA 2, and then played Typing of the Dead (2?), which is House of the Dead (normally a shooting game), but instead you have a keyboard and you have to type the words on the screen to kill the zombies. It was surprisingly difficult, because the words were Japanese in romaji, so the letter combinations were extremely unfamiliar. I made it to the second stage, at least, and it was actually incredibly fun, so I may play it again.
After playing a few other assorted games, I went to go upstairs to check how lined up Project Diva was, and saw that I didn't need to go upstairs to find out. Yes, the lineup for Project Diva was COMING DOWN THE STAIRS. D: Oh my god is that game ever popular! The patch seriously introduces like 6 songs tops, none of which I believe are ultra-hard (so it's not the uber hardcore people craving new challenges), though Just Be Friends is part of the patch, and I know that to be a pretty awesome song in its own right. The CLUB SEGA was super into it though, which was totally awesome. All the staff were cosplaying Vocaloids, and they had some non-staff looking Miku cosplayers wandering around and keeping people in line company. I think if I want to play Project Diva in the near future, it will have to be in Yokochuu hahaha. That lineup would seriously take like, at least an hour and a half.
I had a really early dinner at Time for Homemade Curry, and I decided to try their something-something-black curry, to see if it was more savoury than their regular one. Not a hit. >_< It was edible, but I think I have discovered the first Japanese curry I don't actually like. It was quite spicy and a little bitter. The kurobuta katsu was good as usual though. I still cannot figure out how to make their stupid machine accept my money though, so I always have to pay using Pasmo. >_<
After dinner I went and played DDR. Note to self: after dinner, without having played much DDR in the past SEVERAL YEARS, do not attempt to play twice in quick succession, and most certainly do not play Drop Out to finish your first set, and then attempt Healing Vision (a song I have never beaten, even when I played relatively frequently) to finish your second set. I made it like, 20 seconds into Healing Vision, and then just had to walk off the pad because it was really, really not happening. >_< I wandered over to the actual Taito game station (not the HEY!), and ended up playing Mushihimesama for a bit. I played on normal, and it was actually a very reasonable game. I got to the third stage on one coin, so I was like "why not try the next difficulty up for my next coin?" Mmmmmnope. I got absolutely destroyed in short order, although through copious bomb-spamming I actually did get to the second stage. Back to easy-- I mean "normal" mode (it's the lowest difficulty setting) for me! I wonder if I can get good at Mushihimesama. The Mushihimesame Futari BLACK LABEL machine is like, VERY spectator friendly in the HEY!, so if I do end up getting decent I know where I can show off (yeah right I'm staying miles away from that ego-smashing machine).
After my Mushihime stint I went wandering a little bit and checked out an oldschool console game store. They had stuff like Kirby's Dreamland and Super Mario Bros 3. and stuff, and there is a little thing that appears to be a Famicom (NES) and Super Famicom (SNES) all in one for like 4000円. I looked all around their tiny, packed store at their games, but didn't find anything that called to me. I did find the Dreamcast version of Space Channel 5: Part 2 behind a glass case for 12800円. WHAT!? I guess I'm not going to find a cheap copy of Space Channel 5 while I'm here, although maybe a non-mint PS2 copy will go for less...
Due to my copious DDRing, I was starting to get quite tired by 7:30ish, so I started to make my way home again. My trip home was marred by the bus driver for the #6 bus not waiting for me even though I was clearly running for his bus, and then being forced to wait more than half an hour before the next bus came. In Canada, I'd totally understand, as it's not normal for bus drivers to wait, and our buses are always so late that they need all the help they can get to remain even close to on schedule. Here, every time I've seen someone running for a bus, the bus driver has waited, so I'm a little miffed that this courtesy was not extended to me, even though the bus driver probably knew full well that the next one wasn't going to come for 30+ minutes. Oh well... I survived and got home, buying myself some katsu-don at my local LAWSON STATION, because by this point I was actually kinda hungry again due to my early dinner.
Anyways, I've really got to go to bed, as I have to get up very early tomorrow to accept a phone call from the Canada-Japan Co-op people. I'm keeping my phone beside my bed as my lifeline in case I don't wake up.
Ciao!
This morning I got up prior to noon, partially due to the fact that I realized that the entire time I had been dozing (about an hour and a half), a kid nearby was practicing his recorder. On a completely unrelated note, I now feel rage rather than nostalgia when I think of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm". D:<
I snacked on korokke and headed for Akiba for the day with the hope of finding an iron. I got to Akiba pretty uneventfully, though I must say I worry about getting deported for cracking up at the Yamanote line's little "english lessons" that appear on the TV inside the trains. Last weekend the lesson was what a "BA" is, and some example sentences such as "We need someone with a BA", and "I majored in History!". Colour me skeptical on the first one... This weekend it was even more humourous, as the word of the week was "fire". The example dialog was "Why did they fire you?" to which they suggest you reply "It was a misunderstanding!" XD Wow... Learning to be tricky on the Yamanote line... Haha.
In Akiba I checked around a few stores to find one that sold appliances, and I ended up purchasing my iron for about 1800円 after finding a Sofmap store at one end of the pedestrian part of Chuuou street that sold them. I was considering going somewhere I could get one used or something like that for ultra ultra cheap, but I would rather not have to deal with the consequences if said iron were to do something horrid like light my shirts or my entire dorm on fire, and twenty bucks is cheap for something I will presumably use steadily for an entire year.
After buying my iron I went arcade hopping for the rest of the day. Oddly enough I seem to enjoy playing 3rd Strike more than Melty Blood at the moment, possibly because I feel like I'm playing waaay below my ability at Melty Blood, but with 3rd Strike I was never good in the first place hahaha! I played a bunch of 3rd Strike and a little Melty Blood at CLUB SEGA 2, and then played Typing of the Dead (2?), which is House of the Dead (normally a shooting game), but instead you have a keyboard and you have to type the words on the screen to kill the zombies. It was surprisingly difficult, because the words were Japanese in romaji, so the letter combinations were extremely unfamiliar. I made it to the second stage, at least, and it was actually incredibly fun, so I may play it again.
After playing a few other assorted games, I went to go upstairs to check how lined up Project Diva was, and saw that I didn't need to go upstairs to find out. Yes, the lineup for Project Diva was COMING DOWN THE STAIRS. D: Oh my god is that game ever popular! The patch seriously introduces like 6 songs tops, none of which I believe are ultra-hard (so it's not the uber hardcore people craving new challenges), though Just Be Friends is part of the patch, and I know that to be a pretty awesome song in its own right. The CLUB SEGA was super into it though, which was totally awesome. All the staff were cosplaying Vocaloids, and they had some non-staff looking Miku cosplayers wandering around and keeping people in line company. I think if I want to play Project Diva in the near future, it will have to be in Yokochuu hahaha. That lineup would seriously take like, at least an hour and a half.
I had a really early dinner at Time for Homemade Curry, and I decided to try their something-something-black curry, to see if it was more savoury than their regular one. Not a hit. >_< It was edible, but I think I have discovered the first Japanese curry I don't actually like. It was quite spicy and a little bitter. The kurobuta katsu was good as usual though. I still cannot figure out how to make their stupid machine accept my money though, so I always have to pay using Pasmo. >_<
After dinner I went and played DDR. Note to self: after dinner, without having played much DDR in the past SEVERAL YEARS, do not attempt to play twice in quick succession, and most certainly do not play Drop Out to finish your first set, and then attempt Healing Vision (a song I have never beaten, even when I played relatively frequently) to finish your second set. I made it like, 20 seconds into Healing Vision, and then just had to walk off the pad because it was really, really not happening. >_< I wandered over to the actual Taito game station (not the HEY!), and ended up playing Mushihimesama for a bit. I played on normal, and it was actually a very reasonable game. I got to the third stage on one coin, so I was like "why not try the next difficulty up for my next coin?" Mmmmmnope. I got absolutely destroyed in short order, although through copious bomb-spamming I actually did get to the second stage. Back to easy-- I mean "normal" mode (it's the lowest difficulty setting) for me! I wonder if I can get good at Mushihimesama. The Mushihimesame Futari BLACK LABEL machine is like, VERY spectator friendly in the HEY!, so if I do end up getting decent I know where I can show off (yeah right I'm staying miles away from that ego-smashing machine).
After my Mushihime stint I went wandering a little bit and checked out an oldschool console game store. They had stuff like Kirby's Dreamland and Super Mario Bros 3. and stuff, and there is a little thing that appears to be a Famicom (NES) and Super Famicom (SNES) all in one for like 4000円. I looked all around their tiny, packed store at their games, but didn't find anything that called to me. I did find the Dreamcast version of Space Channel 5: Part 2 behind a glass case for 12800円. WHAT!? I guess I'm not going to find a cheap copy of Space Channel 5 while I'm here, although maybe a non-mint PS2 copy will go for less...
Due to my copious DDRing, I was starting to get quite tired by 7:30ish, so I started to make my way home again. My trip home was marred by the bus driver for the #6 bus not waiting for me even though I was clearly running for his bus, and then being forced to wait more than half an hour before the next bus came. In Canada, I'd totally understand, as it's not normal for bus drivers to wait, and our buses are always so late that they need all the help they can get to remain even close to on schedule. Here, every time I've seen someone running for a bus, the bus driver has waited, so I'm a little miffed that this courtesy was not extended to me, even though the bus driver probably knew full well that the next one wasn't going to come for 30+ minutes. Oh well... I survived and got home, buying myself some katsu-don at my local LAWSON STATION, because by this point I was actually kinda hungry again due to my early dinner.
Anyways, I've really got to go to bed, as I have to get up very early tomorrow to accept a phone call from the Canada-Japan Co-op people. I'm keeping my phone beside my bed as my lifeline in case I don't wake up.
Ciao!
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Theorem: The pull Akiba exerts on nerds is another fundamental force distinct from gravity and the electroweak and strong forces. Proof:
Jun 25: Shopping in Akihabara
This morning (close to noon, actually) I got up and had some korokke and an ika fry from Yokosan (so healthy, I know!) because I wanted to experiment with not having Pain de Mie on a weekend to test if it's the likely cause of the acid stomach I have had on previous days off. I didn't get any acid stomach today, so I guess it's the Pain de Mie. I talked about this before and I was pretty sure that I had determined that it was the Pain de Mie, but this sealed the deal pretty much. Oh well, I will probably still have their stuff once in a while hahahah.
After eating, I talked for a couple of hours to Mom and Kevin about various things, and then I set out for Akihabara at around 1:45. I got there at about 3:30 after an uneventful trip. In Akiba I went straight for the Sofmap to get some shopping done. I was on a mission to buy earphones, an SD card and an iron today, and although I didn't get the iron, I procured many other wonderful things! In Sofmap, I went to look at earbuds, because I thought it would be easy due to the recommendation I had from Jiuna. I went looking for the 4000円 range Sony earbuds, but found none. There were 2000円 and below, and then some at 5000円 (and ones above that, obviously), but the 2000円 ones weren't what I was looking for, and the 5000円 ones had a 0.6m cord, which was kind of my original problem. >_< Also, I couldn't test any of the Sonys for sound quality, only for fit, as they didn't have the jack available. Instead, I went over and looked at other brands, and found a little bank of Audio Technicas, which had the jacks available for demo. I checked out their 5000円 model, which sounded like ABSOLUTE CRAP. They must have been broken, or there was some serious negative synergy between my device and the headphones, because the sound was tinny and empty and had zero bass and weak midranges. D: So, naturally I tried their 2000円 ones! They fared much, much better, and I was pleased with the fit of the buds and with the sound quality, so I ended up buying them.
I also found an inexpensive ethernet cable, so I bought it for when I get internet and could possibly need a cord. Really, I was just falling into a bit of a shopping frenzy, but I mean it's an ethernet cable... They're always useful! I also picked up cheap USB keyboard (I type really hard and the keyboard is right on top of all the nice expensive circuitry on my laptop hahaha) and a set of eneloop rechargeable batteries as well as a microSD card (with adapter) for my camera. I looked for SC2 and asked the guy behind the till, but what I gathered from what he said coincides with what Jiuna said about it not being localized, and that the foreign copies they had were sold out. I left the store and promptly broke my headphones trying to get them out of the box. >_<
Actually I just removed an aesthetic doodad piece of plastic, because the buds were really damn stuck in the plastic shell, and I was apparently pulling on something that is not designed to be pulled on. I put the piece back on, but of course it didn't stay, and it fell on the nice, grey sidewalk, where it blended in perfectly. D:< I did end up finding the little bugger, but I think I'll need glue if I want to reattach it. I love the earbuds so far. The buds are quite comfy and they are in-ear, so they block out some ambient noise, and it's really nice having the 1.2 metre cord. :D
I went over to the other Sofmap to see what they had in terms of PC games, and was again disappointed by their lack of StarCraft (they had a Diablo II battle chest though!). There I bought the Last Bible soundtrack, and laughed at myself for buying a 1500円 CD full of Gameboy music. I was shocked that it was there, and I really liked the battle theme from that game, so I somehow decided to buy it. I wanted to buy the Legend of Mana soundtrack, but they only had Seiken Densetsu 3 and Dawn of Mana. D: Oh well, maybe I can find it in another store somewhere. I went to Toranoana next just to say that I had, and bought something there too. ;D Here's a shot of my haul.
What could that opaque Toranoana bag hold!? Something NEFARIOUS no doubt!
Nope just Touhou games hahahahaha. That's Double Spoiler and UFO, if you can't see due to the crappy phone picture I took.
After Toranoana I went and ate curry at the place that was suggested by the other coops that I met the last time I was in Akiba. The waitresses were all dressed as maids, but they didn't seem to play up the maid bit at all (didn't hear a single goshujin-sama or other such bull), and maid attire itself isn't really that remarkable anymore hahaha. Their curry was cheaper than Time for Homemade Curry, and I liked their roux a bit more, as it was more savoury, but their katsu did not compare haha. I think I will go there when I'm really hungry though, because there is a MEGA katsu curry available, which I did not try.
After supper I went to the HEY! arcade, to see if I was remembering it right, as Jiuna and I had disagreed over whether it was at all interesting or not. I was in the wrong, as HEY! is a rather interesting arcade, and I had gotten it mixed up with the fictional second Taito game station I may have mentioned, as HEY! has Taito game station vending machines. HEY! appears to be the local danmaku and retro fighting game arcade. They have multiple 3rd strike cabinets, as well as Marvel Super Heroes, a 3D Fatal Fury game, Virtua Fighter 2 and Bloody Roar 3 among other things. There was someone actually playing Bloody Roar, so I put in a coin and squeezed into a tiny space between people and proceeded to kick his ass. I knew he knew how to play the game, as he was doing combos and such, but I picked Bakuryu, and Bakuryu is just broken hahaha. I apparently have habits from Bloody Roar 4, as I was trying to do a combo which apparently doesn't exist, but it turned out OK apparently. >_< I really do not think he expected some white dude to show up out of nowhere and kick him off the machine...
After I accidentally hit the "SWITCH GAME" button on the cabinet (it's one of those multiple-game affairs) and lost my credit, I moved over to CLUB SEGA 2, and played a little Melty Blood (losing horribly, but slightly less so than usual) before moving over to 3rd Strike where I actually beat up some Ryu and Q players for a bit with mega-pro Elena footsies (ok I may or may not have landed some unconfirmed supers) before someone picked Sean (the weakest, most pitiful character in the entire game) and absolutely destroyed me. I didn't pick Chun-li after losing, because that's mean, and if I lost with Chun-li (who almost destroyed competitive 3rd Strike in its infancy due to appearing to be totally broken, and as it turns out, she is, but there are a few other characters who are roughly as broken as her), I would not be able to live with myself for losing like a 9:1 matchup. D:
A new song patch came out for Project Diva in the past week, and it shows. CLUB SEGA 2 has I believe 13 machines (they reorganized the top floor, obviously), and there was still a decent lineup. I went over to CLUB SEGA 1 and discovered where they had gotten all the cabinets from hahaha. CLUB SEGA 1 has only one cabinet, and has a poster saying ZOMG GO TO THE OTHER CLUB SEGA WE HAVE 13 MACHINES THERE. I decided not to play Project Diva today, as I now know I have it in Yokochuu, and have no desire to chance having to show half of Akiba me failing to pass Moon AGAIN.
I forgot to take a picture of the Super Street Figher 4: Arcade Edition ranking screen that scrolls by, but rather unsurprisingly, the name listed is うめはら hahahaha.
I left for home after checking back on the Project Diva lineups, as it was getting a little late, and I had a feeling that the one at Yokochuu would probably not be terribly occupied. XD When the limited express to Yokochuu came, the lady in line behind me tried to budge! I was shocked, as I have NEVER encountered this yet in Japan, but it was quite funny how effortlessly I was able to totally shut her out, due to years of rigourous and unforgiving training in Richmond. ;D She seemed quite agitated by the time we actually got onto the train, so I walked a little slowly to the seats, and I considered yawning and stretching, but the people behind her hadn't done anything wrong and I didn't want to deny them seats just to get back at her. She didn't even look at me as she whizzed by after I sat down, so I didn't get the opportunity to smile winningly and say "eat it, biotch!" behind my teeth. :D Really, she was so rude that she totally deserved it, and she wasn't even old or infirm so she had no excuse.
Back in Yokochuu I saw that a bus was scheduled to come soon so I just peeked in at the Project Diva machine, and sure enough it was totally free haha. I didn't want to wait a long time for a bus though, so I didn't play and came direcly home.
Tomorrow I think I'm going to go back to Akiba to try to buy an iron, and to wander around the arcades more. I hope that there are more fellow 3rd Strike noobs to play with tomorrow, as I had quite a lot of fun trying to outfootsie them and their fancy combos.
Write you later!
This morning (close to noon, actually) I got up and had some korokke and an ika fry from Yokosan (so healthy, I know!) because I wanted to experiment with not having Pain de Mie on a weekend to test if it's the likely cause of the acid stomach I have had on previous days off. I didn't get any acid stomach today, so I guess it's the Pain de Mie. I talked about this before and I was pretty sure that I had determined that it was the Pain de Mie, but this sealed the deal pretty much. Oh well, I will probably still have their stuff once in a while hahahah.
After eating, I talked for a couple of hours to Mom and Kevin about various things, and then I set out for Akihabara at around 1:45. I got there at about 3:30 after an uneventful trip. In Akiba I went straight for the Sofmap to get some shopping done. I was on a mission to buy earphones, an SD card and an iron today, and although I didn't get the iron, I procured many other wonderful things! In Sofmap, I went to look at earbuds, because I thought it would be easy due to the recommendation I had from Jiuna. I went looking for the 4000円 range Sony earbuds, but found none. There were 2000円 and below, and then some at 5000円 (and ones above that, obviously), but the 2000円 ones weren't what I was looking for, and the 5000円 ones had a 0.6m cord, which was kind of my original problem. >_< Also, I couldn't test any of the Sonys for sound quality, only for fit, as they didn't have the jack available. Instead, I went over and looked at other brands, and found a little bank of Audio Technicas, which had the jacks available for demo. I checked out their 5000円 model, which sounded like ABSOLUTE CRAP. They must have been broken, or there was some serious negative synergy between my device and the headphones, because the sound was tinny and empty and had zero bass and weak midranges. D: So, naturally I tried their 2000円 ones! They fared much, much better, and I was pleased with the fit of the buds and with the sound quality, so I ended up buying them.
I also found an inexpensive ethernet cable, so I bought it for when I get internet and could possibly need a cord. Really, I was just falling into a bit of a shopping frenzy, but I mean it's an ethernet cable... They're always useful! I also picked up cheap USB keyboard (I type really hard and the keyboard is right on top of all the nice expensive circuitry on my laptop hahaha) and a set of eneloop rechargeable batteries as well as a microSD card (with adapter) for my camera. I looked for SC2 and asked the guy behind the till, but what I gathered from what he said coincides with what Jiuna said about it not being localized, and that the foreign copies they had were sold out. I left the store and promptly broke my headphones trying to get them out of the box. >_<
Actually I just removed an aesthetic doodad piece of plastic, because the buds were really damn stuck in the plastic shell, and I was apparently pulling on something that is not designed to be pulled on. I put the piece back on, but of course it didn't stay, and it fell on the nice, grey sidewalk, where it blended in perfectly. D:< I did end up finding the little bugger, but I think I'll need glue if I want to reattach it. I love the earbuds so far. The buds are quite comfy and they are in-ear, so they block out some ambient noise, and it's really nice having the 1.2 metre cord. :D
I went over to the other Sofmap to see what they had in terms of PC games, and was again disappointed by their lack of StarCraft (they had a Diablo II battle chest though!). There I bought the Last Bible soundtrack, and laughed at myself for buying a 1500円 CD full of Gameboy music. I was shocked that it was there, and I really liked the battle theme from that game, so I somehow decided to buy it. I wanted to buy the Legend of Mana soundtrack, but they only had Seiken Densetsu 3 and Dawn of Mana. D: Oh well, maybe I can find it in another store somewhere. I went to Toranoana next just to say that I had, and bought something there too. ;D Here's a shot of my haul.
What could that opaque Toranoana bag hold!? Something NEFARIOUS no doubt!
After Toranoana I went and ate curry at the place that was suggested by the other coops that I met the last time I was in Akiba. The waitresses were all dressed as maids, but they didn't seem to play up the maid bit at all (didn't hear a single goshujin-sama or other such bull), and maid attire itself isn't really that remarkable anymore hahaha. Their curry was cheaper than Time for Homemade Curry, and I liked their roux a bit more, as it was more savoury, but their katsu did not compare haha. I think I will go there when I'm really hungry though, because there is a MEGA katsu curry available, which I did not try.
After supper I went to the HEY! arcade, to see if I was remembering it right, as Jiuna and I had disagreed over whether it was at all interesting or not. I was in the wrong, as HEY! is a rather interesting arcade, and I had gotten it mixed up with the fictional second Taito game station I may have mentioned, as HEY! has Taito game station vending machines. HEY! appears to be the local danmaku and retro fighting game arcade. They have multiple 3rd strike cabinets, as well as Marvel Super Heroes, a 3D Fatal Fury game, Virtua Fighter 2 and Bloody Roar 3 among other things. There was someone actually playing Bloody Roar, so I put in a coin and squeezed into a tiny space between people and proceeded to kick his ass. I knew he knew how to play the game, as he was doing combos and such, but I picked Bakuryu, and Bakuryu is just broken hahaha. I apparently have habits from Bloody Roar 4, as I was trying to do a combo which apparently doesn't exist, but it turned out OK apparently. >_< I really do not think he expected some white dude to show up out of nowhere and kick him off the machine...
After I accidentally hit the "SWITCH GAME" button on the cabinet (it's one of those multiple-game affairs) and lost my credit, I moved over to CLUB SEGA 2, and played a little Melty Blood (losing horribly, but slightly less so than usual) before moving over to 3rd Strike where I actually beat up some Ryu and Q players for a bit with mega-pro Elena footsies (ok I may or may not have landed some unconfirmed supers) before someone picked Sean (the weakest, most pitiful character in the entire game) and absolutely destroyed me. I didn't pick Chun-li after losing, because that's mean, and if I lost with Chun-li (who almost destroyed competitive 3rd Strike in its infancy due to appearing to be totally broken, and as it turns out, she is, but there are a few other characters who are roughly as broken as her), I would not be able to live with myself for losing like a 9:1 matchup. D:
A new song patch came out for Project Diva in the past week, and it shows. CLUB SEGA 2 has I believe 13 machines (they reorganized the top floor, obviously), and there was still a decent lineup. I went over to CLUB SEGA 1 and discovered where they had gotten all the cabinets from hahaha. CLUB SEGA 1 has only one cabinet, and has a poster saying ZOMG GO TO THE OTHER CLUB SEGA WE HAVE 13 MACHINES THERE. I decided not to play Project Diva today, as I now know I have it in Yokochuu, and have no desire to chance having to show half of Akiba me failing to pass Moon AGAIN.
 |
| Everyone's here for the same thing... |
I left for home after checking back on the Project Diva lineups, as it was getting a little late, and I had a feeling that the one at Yokochuu would probably not be terribly occupied. XD When the limited express to Yokochuu came, the lady in line behind me tried to budge! I was shocked, as I have NEVER encountered this yet in Japan, but it was quite funny how effortlessly I was able to totally shut her out, due to years of rigourous and unforgiving training in Richmond. ;D She seemed quite agitated by the time we actually got onto the train, so I walked a little slowly to the seats, and I considered yawning and stretching, but the people behind her hadn't done anything wrong and I didn't want to deny them seats just to get back at her. She didn't even look at me as she whizzed by after I sat down, so I didn't get the opportunity to smile winningly and say "eat it, biotch!" behind my teeth. :D Really, she was so rude that she totally deserved it, and she wasn't even old or infirm so she had no excuse.
Back in Yokochuu I saw that a bus was scheduled to come soon so I just peeked in at the Project Diva machine, and sure enough it was totally free haha. I didn't want to wait a long time for a bus though, so I didn't play and came direcly home.
Tomorrow I think I'm going to go back to Akiba to try to buy an iron, and to wander around the arcades more. I hope that there are more fellow 3rd Strike noobs to play with tomorrow, as I had quite a lot of fun trying to outfootsie them and their fancy combos.
Write you later!
Friday, June 24, 2011
I need to go back to Dick and Jane or something...
Jun 24: Embarrassingly Bad at Reading
This morning I got up and had dorm breakfast. It was miso soup with wakame and tofu skins and rice with something I couldn't identify and can't really remember now, other than that it was alright. Oh, there was coleslaw made with kewpie mayo and pollock. >_< I could have done without that one. Oohashi-talked to me again this morning, and she was much more understandable today! She repeated meaningful words loudly this time, so I was able to understsand what she was trying to say! :D Hurrah! Basically she was saying that today I was the only one signed up for dorm dinner (FINE ALL THE REST OF YOU GUYS HAVE FRIENDS OR SOMETHING SEE IF I CARE!), and so she was asking me if I wouldn't mind not having it. I agreed, and we confirmed by saying "nashi" in various combinations with "kono yoru" a lot. Oh well I think it worked, because she then erased my dot from the meal signup sheet, which is what I would expect to happen if I had understood what was happening correctly.
I got to work and started reading the paper I had been given on Naive Bayesian classifiers. And I read it... and read it... and read it... I am extremely embarrassed to admit this, but I spent all morning reading a 7 page paper. Seriously. I feel very badly about it, but at least I can say that I was trying to understand the content at an able-to-implement-it level, because that was to be my next task. I prepared some questions to ask Kabutoya-san about the paper (mostly about where some of the terms in their probability equations were coming from), but as soon as I had finished going through the first one with him, the lunch bell rang, and that means all the lights immediately shut off. >_< He had a waza meeting to go to, so I couldn't continue asking my questions over lunch.
For lunch I had tofu, miso soup, rice and katsu. The katsu was pretty good, but not as good as the one at Akihabara station. I mean, the Time for Homemade Curry doesn't seem like a super high-class establishment to me (it's not dingy, but it's still a vending-machine-ticket bar seating curry place), but I somehow their katsu is just... "Viva." (sorry that was a quote that only Jiuna will get, and may not even like due to me abusing it a bit several years ago) Anyways, lunch was pretty good, and afterwards we played a short bit of badminton because we didn't even have enough people for 2v2 handiball. Another person eventually showed up, so we could play two games of 2v2 handiball, and I must say, I really enjoy it. I can rampage around as much as I want without gouging out people's eyes or breaking various bits of their bodies! Having a good time with 2v2 handiball also means that I'm really, really uncomfortable right after lunch though. I even bring a different change of clothes for handiball, but it doesn't matter, since it's quite warm here it takes forever to cool down and my regular clothes get a little... soupy. D: Ugh.
In the afternoon I implemented 4 of the 5 classifiers described in the paper it took me all morning to read. I can see where my strengths lie. >_< There's an undiscovered bug in the Multivariate Gaussian Naive Bayes classifier right now, but the other 3 are looking pretty good (famous last words). I am rather happy with myself, as today marks the first time I consciously thought through how I was going to write my code and decided that I wanted to use a closure, and so was able to use Ruby's lambda expressions to avoid making an ugly, ugly instance variable in my class definition. Unfortunately, it was not necessary by what I would guess would be "Ruby philosophy", but please excuse me if I want to knock down the computational complexity of my code by an entire power of n. D:< I've used Ruby's lambda expressions before, but only because they don't appear to have a more basic way to get behaviour akin to passing a function pointer. Therefore I now feel cool for being like "gee, how do I get the context of this function from here to over there...? OH I KNOW!" I swear it's exciting, you guys... ;D
At 5:15 ish, Kabutoya-san told me he had to leave for a party for a coworker that was leaving a project that he's a part of, so I was left on my own for the last hour of the day. >_< Not that it matters much, because I talk to Kabutoya-san about work maybe once or twice a day, and rarely for much other than demonstrating my work or asking for more. I think that will change quite a bit once I get into material that's more unfamiliar to me. However, this meant that I could work as late as I wanted! BUT TODAY WAS THE ONLY DAY I DIDN'T HAVE DINNER WAITING FOR ME AUGHH... Kabutoya-san totally sniped me! I was almost laughing out loud at the fact that the one day I could work late without him kicking me out was the day that I needed to get my own dinner (and, as fate would have it, I reached a pretty logical breaking point in my work at about 6:15). I'm impressed by Kabutoya-san's elite kenshu-sei (that's me) management ninja skills, and I'm currently making wavedashing motions by myself in my room for you guys. <3
After getting back to Dasaiyashi I went to the Yokosan to pick up some curry-korokke to tide me over until I got to Yokochuu. I hopped on a bus and headed straight for Yokochuu, which of course took forever. >_< With the Yokosan trip and changing out of my work clothes and everything, I ended up getting Pepper Lunch in Yokochuu at like, 8pm. Diuuuu... I walked into a the store, and it was alarmingly full of Japanese people. I was going to start panicking and calling a paranormal investigator or something, but once I sat down a whole ton of black people showed up, and so I knew I wasn't in the twilight zone. The family that was there who had a pretty cute/crazy kid who suddenly yelled at his incredibly disinterested mother "Mom! I'm twitching again!" and then proceeded to go totally wild in his seat at one point during my meal. His "twitching" was incredibly fake, and his mom's reaction was so deadpan it was really, really hard not to laugh, but his dad looked super buff and is probably affiliated with the US Navy, so I refrained from doing anything that could be misconstrued (ok maybe it wouldn't be misconstruing anything...) as laughing at his wacky kid.
I finally went and checked the pachinko/slot place nearest the station that claimed to have GAME in the basement (yeah, and the puppies are in your van, right?), but I did not have high hopes. Of course once I got close enough, I saw their Project Diva poster that I had somehow missed all this time. Derp. And so I found an arcade in Yokochuu that has a Project Diva machine which was all mine for like, 5 rounds. I still haven't beaten Moon on Extreme, which makes me want to put kittens and butterflies in a blender. D:< I'm not trying to get into med school, please do not make me get 80% to pass the damn song! I left because I ran out of 100円 coins (and more importantly self esteem, as it turned out I actually still had one coin left), and because it was getting a little late and I didn't want to get into the period of time when buses take forever to come.
Apparently I was already firmly in that time period, much to my chagrin, as I waited like, FOREVER for a bus to come... Busses with numbers I never even knew existed went by, but none bound for Dasaiyashi... After an eternity, I got on a bus, and we promptly got stuck in construction-related traffic. D:< Needless to say, I was glad that I got a seat, that I had my music player with me, and that the people around me weren't heavily perfumed or anything. I got home after quite some time on the bus and headed up to my room to chat briefly with Mom and Jiuna and check e-mail and blog.
I will probably go to Akihabara tomorrow, as I want to try buying earphones, a micro SD card, an iron and if I can find a cheap one, an ethernet cable. Of course, this is all an excuse just to get myself into Akiba, where I will promptly blow my whole day attempting to beat up virtual moon-princess schoolgirls with my virtual vampire-hunting nun (Melty Blood, for the confused). ;D
With that, I will bid you adieu for now, and get some beauty sleep (gotta look good for the smoky, dimly lit arcades full of other nerds...).
This morning I got up and had dorm breakfast. It was miso soup with wakame and tofu skins and rice with something I couldn't identify and can't really remember now, other than that it was alright. Oh, there was coleslaw made with kewpie mayo and pollock. >_< I could have done without that one. Oohashi-talked to me again this morning, and she was much more understandable today! She repeated meaningful words loudly this time, so I was able to understsand what she was trying to say! :D Hurrah! Basically she was saying that today I was the only one signed up for dorm dinner (FINE ALL THE REST OF YOU GUYS HAVE FRIENDS OR SOMETHING SEE IF I CARE!), and so she was asking me if I wouldn't mind not having it. I agreed, and we confirmed by saying "nashi" in various combinations with "kono yoru" a lot. Oh well I think it worked, because she then erased my dot from the meal signup sheet, which is what I would expect to happen if I had understood what was happening correctly.
I got to work and started reading the paper I had been given on Naive Bayesian classifiers. And I read it... and read it... and read it... I am extremely embarrassed to admit this, but I spent all morning reading a 7 page paper. Seriously. I feel very badly about it, but at least I can say that I was trying to understand the content at an able-to-implement-it level, because that was to be my next task. I prepared some questions to ask Kabutoya-san about the paper (mostly about where some of the terms in their probability equations were coming from), but as soon as I had finished going through the first one with him, the lunch bell rang, and that means all the lights immediately shut off. >_< He had a waza meeting to go to, so I couldn't continue asking my questions over lunch.
For lunch I had tofu, miso soup, rice and katsu. The katsu was pretty good, but not as good as the one at Akihabara station. I mean, the Time for Homemade Curry doesn't seem like a super high-class establishment to me (it's not dingy, but it's still a vending-machine-ticket bar seating curry place), but I somehow their katsu is just... "Viva." (sorry that was a quote that only Jiuna will get, and may not even like due to me abusing it a bit several years ago) Anyways, lunch was pretty good, and afterwards we played a short bit of badminton because we didn't even have enough people for 2v2 handiball. Another person eventually showed up, so we could play two games of 2v2 handiball, and I must say, I really enjoy it. I can rampage around as much as I want without gouging out people's eyes or breaking various bits of their bodies! Having a good time with 2v2 handiball also means that I'm really, really uncomfortable right after lunch though. I even bring a different change of clothes for handiball, but it doesn't matter, since it's quite warm here it takes forever to cool down and my regular clothes get a little... soupy. D: Ugh.
In the afternoon I implemented 4 of the 5 classifiers described in the paper it took me all morning to read. I can see where my strengths lie. >_< There's an undiscovered bug in the Multivariate Gaussian Naive Bayes classifier right now, but the other 3 are looking pretty good (famous last words). I am rather happy with myself, as today marks the first time I consciously thought through how I was going to write my code and decided that I wanted to use a closure, and so was able to use Ruby's lambda expressions to avoid making an ugly, ugly instance variable in my class definition. Unfortunately, it was not necessary by what I would guess would be "Ruby philosophy", but please excuse me if I want to knock down the computational complexity of my code by an entire power of n. D:< I've used Ruby's lambda expressions before, but only because they don't appear to have a more basic way to get behaviour akin to passing a function pointer. Therefore I now feel cool for being like "gee, how do I get the context of this function from here to over there...? OH I KNOW!" I swear it's exciting, you guys... ;D
At 5:15 ish, Kabutoya-san told me he had to leave for a party for a coworker that was leaving a project that he's a part of, so I was left on my own for the last hour of the day. >_< Not that it matters much, because I talk to Kabutoya-san about work maybe once or twice a day, and rarely for much other than demonstrating my work or asking for more. I think that will change quite a bit once I get into material that's more unfamiliar to me. However, this meant that I could work as late as I wanted! BUT TODAY WAS THE ONLY DAY I DIDN'T HAVE DINNER WAITING FOR ME AUGHH... Kabutoya-san totally sniped me! I was almost laughing out loud at the fact that the one day I could work late without him kicking me out was the day that I needed to get my own dinner (and, as fate would have it, I reached a pretty logical breaking point in my work at about 6:15). I'm impressed by Kabutoya-san's elite kenshu-sei (that's me) management ninja skills, and I'm currently making wavedashing motions by myself in my room for you guys. <3
After getting back to Dasaiyashi I went to the Yokosan to pick up some curry-korokke to tide me over until I got to Yokochuu. I hopped on a bus and headed straight for Yokochuu, which of course took forever. >_< With the Yokosan trip and changing out of my work clothes and everything, I ended up getting Pepper Lunch in Yokochuu at like, 8pm. Diuuuu... I walked into a the store, and it was alarmingly full of Japanese people. I was going to start panicking and calling a paranormal investigator or something, but once I sat down a whole ton of black people showed up, and so I knew I wasn't in the twilight zone. The family that was there who had a pretty cute/crazy kid who suddenly yelled at his incredibly disinterested mother "Mom! I'm twitching again!" and then proceeded to go totally wild in his seat at one point during my meal. His "twitching" was incredibly fake, and his mom's reaction was so deadpan it was really, really hard not to laugh, but his dad looked super buff and is probably affiliated with the US Navy, so I refrained from doing anything that could be misconstrued (ok maybe it wouldn't be misconstruing anything...) as laughing at his wacky kid.
I finally went and checked the pachinko/slot place nearest the station that claimed to have GAME in the basement (yeah, and the puppies are in your van, right?), but I did not have high hopes. Of course once I got close enough, I saw their Project Diva poster that I had somehow missed all this time. Derp. And so I found an arcade in Yokochuu that has a Project Diva machine which was all mine for like, 5 rounds. I still haven't beaten Moon on Extreme, which makes me want to put kittens and butterflies in a blender. D:< I'm not trying to get into med school, please do not make me get 80% to pass the damn song! I left because I ran out of 100円 coins (and more importantly self esteem, as it turned out I actually still had one coin left), and because it was getting a little late and I didn't want to get into the period of time when buses take forever to come.
Apparently I was already firmly in that time period, much to my chagrin, as I waited like, FOREVER for a bus to come... Busses with numbers I never even knew existed went by, but none bound for Dasaiyashi... After an eternity, I got on a bus, and we promptly got stuck in construction-related traffic. D:< Needless to say, I was glad that I got a seat, that I had my music player with me, and that the people around me weren't heavily perfumed or anything. I got home after quite some time on the bus and headed up to my room to chat briefly with Mom and Jiuna and check e-mail and blog.
I will probably go to Akihabara tomorrow, as I want to try buying earphones, a micro SD card, an iron and if I can find a cheap one, an ethernet cable. Of course, this is all an excuse just to get myself into Akiba, where I will promptly blow my whole day attempting to beat up virtual moon-princess schoolgirls with my virtual vampire-hunting nun (Melty Blood, for the confused). ;D
With that, I will bid you adieu for now, and get some beauty sleep (gotta look good for the smoky, dimly lit arcades full of other nerds...).
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Observe the meganerd (razorbeak), as it tends the viral meme (fungal bloom)...
Damnit, now I want to play Alpha Centauri... Anyways:
Jun 23: A Registered Alien
This morning I got up in time for dorm breakfast. Hooray! Today it was was some sort of stewed vegetable mixture with tiny whole fish and egg-coated tough beef/pork with rice, along with miso soup. On the whole it was fine, but the fish-flavoured vegetables weren't my favourite. >_< I met with Kabutoya-san at my room at 10 (actually more like 9:45, as he was quite early), and we went into Yokochuu to pick up my Alien Registration Card and to contract a cell phone.
I got my ARC without a hitch, and so we went to the cell phone store and asked the lady for one that had an English menu, a Japanese-English dictionary and a camera, and she replied that I could either get the 0円 ones or the 60,000+円 ones. Um, that'll be the first option, please! I'm sad that none of the middle range phones had the things I wanted, because I was kind of looking forward to paying for features I'd get excited about and then never use. ;D I unfortunately was not able to get the BRILLIANT purple phone, as it didn't have the dictionary. I settled for a pale, steely blue one after I saw that the pink option was a violent, rage inducing variety of the colour, not a soft and sakuramochi-esque one. I am having trouble navigating the menus of my phone, despite it being in English. I shudder to think what it would have been like in Japanese.
The cellphone saleswoman told us we had to wait an hour for my phone, so Kabutoya-san and I got lunch. Kabutoya-san suggested a "yokohama style" ramen shop that was in the same mall as the cell phone store. I had chashuu ramen, and it was pretty good, although a little salty and quite rich. Apparently the salt/oil are parameterized and can be lowered on request, so if I go there again I will definitely specify lower salt/oil. I enjoyed my meal anyways, and because I had bought my meal ticket when he wasn't looking, and because we still had time to kill, Kabutoya-san bought us some iced coffee afterwards. I tried to decline him paying for my coffee, but he told me that he "is much richer than me." I gave him a mock "well rub it in, why don't you!" face and he laughed. It's kind of odd having a supervisor that's roughly the same age as my friends, especially one that's so casual. I don't know how to act in the slightest...
After the coffee, we went and picked up my phone and headed back to the office. On the train I asked him where there was likely to be a large international record store, and we ended up talking about what kind of music we liked. He likes heavy metal and hard rock, apparently. I recognized most of the bands on his iPod, and we agreed that Apocalyptica, Death and Marilyn Manson are good listening. I recommended Marilyn Manson's second album (which shall remain nameless haha), as it was my favourite in high school back when I listened too his music, and he told me it was already on his to-buy list. I told him I'm more into disco and disco-influenced rock/pop nowadays, and so hopefully he won't assume I'm knowledgeable or interested in heavy metal anymore. XD I also asked about the dorm fees and such, and apparently dorm food is not actually free, but breakfast costs 200円 and dinner costs 470円, so it may as well be.
We got back to work at around 12:50, and so I worked on my book exercises until I finished. I went over to Kabutoya-san's desk and told him I was done and he looked at me expressionlessly for a second and then just said "Really?" >_< He told me that I "seem to be smart" at lunch time and so I would probably get to use some of the less basic and more exciting mathematical and probabilistic models in my work. I was glad for the praise, but I'm scared shitless of disappointing him now, so I was glad to get that "Really?", as it means I'm still doing alright hahaha. My next task is to implement some other less vanilla varieties of Naive Bayes classifiers. I'm excited, though it means I have to read a paper in the hot office. D: Today it was actually quite pleasant in there though. It was sunny and hot outside today, so I think the company must have cheated and snuck in some AC or something. Kabutoya-san says that July is often very rainy here, so hopefully that will temper the apparently rising heat a little (or it will just make everything horrid and wet while stiflingly hot). D:
After work I went directly home to get some laundry going before dorm supper. I loaded up my laundry and then went to eat. Supper today was a battered chicken breast with a shoyuu-based sauce, and some oden and something that seemed a bit like zaru-soba in a miso soup bowl. It was really, really good. I had a bit of a frustrating episode with Oohashi-san at breakfast (she probably didn't even notice), when she asked me a question and then when I didn't respond right away she just started repeating "CHIGAU NO? CHIGAU NO?" or something like that really loud while I was going "uhh.. ano..." and trying to respond while doing my best to continue smiling. D:< It's all ok after that meal though hahaha.
After supper I went and checked on my laundry, and there was something that looked like an error code flashing on the washing machine's display, it wouldn't start up again, and my clothes were definitely not done, so I was kinda hooped. I waited in the bathroom area until someone came along (I didn't have to wait long, hooray!), and then I mangled some Japanese to try to ask them what the error meant, to which they replied "Oh that machine is broken. If you load it up too much it'll stop, so you should use the one upstairs." In excellent English, of course. Damnit! I feel like such a North American only being able to speak one language!
He walked over to the Persona-3-music-room, and I was like "oh is that your room? I heard Persona 3 music coming out of it the other night". It wasn't actually his room, but rather his friend's, who told me that he just likes the Persona 3 BGM and he was listening to it on niconico. I was like "oh cool" and managed not start shouting "A! B! A! B! ABB! AB!" (a niconico in-joke) or something equally amazingly inappropriate. He knew my name and I asked him how that was possible, and he told me that he thinks we work in the same room (it's a big room, ok!?). I then remembered that I did an introduction presentation to a room full of people (twice), and that said people might remember me better than I remember them because a) there are many of them and one of me, and b) I'm a little distinctive with the beard and, y'know, BEING WHITE. :P I'm kinda dumb sometimes, eh?
They were apparently playing a German card game (score!), but they said they only had the rules in German and Japanese. I don't know if they were blowing me off as subtly as they could or expressing regret that they couldn't reasonably invite me to join. I wonder if Dominion has been localized. Perhaps if not, someone can bring it over in an empty suitcase...? :D I'm so glad to probably have some massive nerds nearby, it'd be great if I could get in on their gamezzz.
Anyways, I'm just waiting for my laundry to finish, and then I'll head to bed. I need to be as energetic as possible to survive paper-reading tomorrow. I hope that particular weakness fades away, or at least that I'm successfully able to bash it out of myself, as being an undergraduate considering honours with an interest in the theoretical and mathematical aspects of computer science, it's a bit embarrassing to be TERRIBLE at reading papers. >_< Oh well.
Wish me luck, and ciao for now!
Jun 23: A Registered Alien
This morning I got up in time for dorm breakfast. Hooray! Today it was was some sort of stewed vegetable mixture with tiny whole fish and egg-coated tough beef/pork with rice, along with miso soup. On the whole it was fine, but the fish-flavoured vegetables weren't my favourite. >_< I met with Kabutoya-san at my room at 10 (actually more like 9:45, as he was quite early), and we went into Yokochuu to pick up my Alien Registration Card and to contract a cell phone.
I got my ARC without a hitch, and so we went to the cell phone store and asked the lady for one that had an English menu, a Japanese-English dictionary and a camera, and she replied that I could either get the 0円 ones or the 60,000+円 ones. Um, that'll be the first option, please! I'm sad that none of the middle range phones had the things I wanted, because I was kind of looking forward to paying for features I'd get excited about and then never use. ;D I unfortunately was not able to get the BRILLIANT purple phone, as it didn't have the dictionary. I settled for a pale, steely blue one after I saw that the pink option was a violent, rage inducing variety of the colour, not a soft and sakuramochi-esque one. I am having trouble navigating the menus of my phone, despite it being in English. I shudder to think what it would have been like in Japanese.
The cellphone saleswoman told us we had to wait an hour for my phone, so Kabutoya-san and I got lunch. Kabutoya-san suggested a "yokohama style" ramen shop that was in the same mall as the cell phone store. I had chashuu ramen, and it was pretty good, although a little salty and quite rich. Apparently the salt/oil are parameterized and can be lowered on request, so if I go there again I will definitely specify lower salt/oil. I enjoyed my meal anyways, and because I had bought my meal ticket when he wasn't looking, and because we still had time to kill, Kabutoya-san bought us some iced coffee afterwards. I tried to decline him paying for my coffee, but he told me that he "is much richer than me." I gave him a mock "well rub it in, why don't you!" face and he laughed. It's kind of odd having a supervisor that's roughly the same age as my friends, especially one that's so casual. I don't know how to act in the slightest...
After the coffee, we went and picked up my phone and headed back to the office. On the train I asked him where there was likely to be a large international record store, and we ended up talking about what kind of music we liked. He likes heavy metal and hard rock, apparently. I recognized most of the bands on his iPod, and we agreed that Apocalyptica, Death and Marilyn Manson are good listening. I recommended Marilyn Manson's second album (which shall remain nameless haha), as it was my favourite in high school back when I listened too his music, and he told me it was already on his to-buy list. I told him I'm more into disco and disco-influenced rock/pop nowadays, and so hopefully he won't assume I'm knowledgeable or interested in heavy metal anymore. XD I also asked about the dorm fees and such, and apparently dorm food is not actually free, but breakfast costs 200円 and dinner costs 470円, so it may as well be.
We got back to work at around 12:50, and so I worked on my book exercises until I finished. I went over to Kabutoya-san's desk and told him I was done and he looked at me expressionlessly for a second and then just said "Really?" >_< He told me that I "seem to be smart" at lunch time and so I would probably get to use some of the less basic and more exciting mathematical and probabilistic models in my work. I was glad for the praise, but I'm scared shitless of disappointing him now, so I was glad to get that "Really?", as it means I'm still doing alright hahaha. My next task is to implement some other less vanilla varieties of Naive Bayes classifiers. I'm excited, though it means I have to read a paper in the hot office. D: Today it was actually quite pleasant in there though. It was sunny and hot outside today, so I think the company must have cheated and snuck in some AC or something. Kabutoya-san says that July is often very rainy here, so hopefully that will temper the apparently rising heat a little (or it will just make everything horrid and wet while stiflingly hot). D:
After work I went directly home to get some laundry going before dorm supper. I loaded up my laundry and then went to eat. Supper today was a battered chicken breast with a shoyuu-based sauce, and some oden and something that seemed a bit like zaru-soba in a miso soup bowl. It was really, really good. I had a bit of a frustrating episode with Oohashi-san at breakfast (she probably didn't even notice), when she asked me a question and then when I didn't respond right away she just started repeating "CHIGAU NO? CHIGAU NO?" or something like that really loud while I was going "uhh.. ano..." and trying to respond while doing my best to continue smiling. D:< It's all ok after that meal though hahaha.
After supper I went and checked on my laundry, and there was something that looked like an error code flashing on the washing machine's display, it wouldn't start up again, and my clothes were definitely not done, so I was kinda hooped. I waited in the bathroom area until someone came along (I didn't have to wait long, hooray!), and then I mangled some Japanese to try to ask them what the error meant, to which they replied "Oh that machine is broken. If you load it up too much it'll stop, so you should use the one upstairs." In excellent English, of course. Damnit! I feel like such a North American only being able to speak one language!
He walked over to the Persona-3-music-room, and I was like "oh is that your room? I heard Persona 3 music coming out of it the other night". It wasn't actually his room, but rather his friend's, who told me that he just likes the Persona 3 BGM and he was listening to it on niconico. I was like "oh cool" and managed not start shouting "A! B! A! B! ABB! AB!" (a niconico in-joke) or something equally amazingly inappropriate. He knew my name and I asked him how that was possible, and he told me that he thinks we work in the same room (it's a big room, ok!?). I then remembered that I did an introduction presentation to a room full of people (twice), and that said people might remember me better than I remember them because a) there are many of them and one of me, and b) I'm a little distinctive with the beard and, y'know, BEING WHITE. :P I'm kinda dumb sometimes, eh?
They were apparently playing a German card game (score!), but they said they only had the rules in German and Japanese. I don't know if they were blowing me off as subtly as they could or expressing regret that they couldn't reasonably invite me to join. I wonder if Dominion has been localized. Perhaps if not, someone can bring it over in an empty suitcase...? :D I'm so glad to probably have some massive nerds nearby, it'd be great if I could get in on their gamezzz.
Anyways, I'm just waiting for my laundry to finish, and then I'll head to bed. I need to be as energetic as possible to survive paper-reading tomorrow. I hope that particular weakness fades away, or at least that I'm successfully able to bash it out of myself, as being an undergraduate considering honours with an interest in the theoretical and mathematical aspects of computer science, it's a bit embarrassing to be TERRIBLE at reading papers. >_< Oh well.
Wish me luck, and ciao for now!
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Dodging Lateness by Solar Intervention (and a ridiculously late actual start time)
Jun 22: Tennis - Part 2
This morning I woke up on my own at 8:30, which was VERY lucky, as I had forgotten to set my alarms last night! Yikes! I ended up missing dorm breakfast though, so that sucked. I guess that 7-9 am means that you *finish* eating at 9, because I was there at 8:55 and got turned away. I had missed the 8:54 (or whenever it is) bus already, so I walked to the LAWSON STATION and got katsu-don and milk tea for breakfast. I love Japanese convenience stores for having real food instantly available at all times for cheap de la cheap cheap. I caught the bus that I'm "supposed" to catch at 9:22 and got to work at 9:35-ish (lol how is that supposed to be even remotely acceptable!?). The morning felt veeery short hahaha.
At lunch I had fried rice, because the Java curry wasn't available, and the other specials looked absolutely tiny. I played some handiball with my labmates, and managed to suck a little less at everything today (except serving, grr). When I was off the rotation, I talked with Asai-san (yet-another-Daisuke), and in the conversation at some point he said he wasn't playing because he had a handiball game yesterday and therefore wasn't going to play today to rest (he's 30! it's handiball!). I found this quite hilarious (but didn't laugh at him, don't worry), and I told him about how Mom always complains about us trying to kill her on ski vacations, but she's the first one up every morning, and she skis every day of the vacation barring sickness. So I summed up for him the fact that I didn't believe that he wasn't playing because he was sore, and that when I least expect it he's not going to be sore anymore and cause mayhem on the court. He laughed really hard at this, but didn't ever end up playing.
In the afternoon I coded more Ruby and asked Kabutoya-san about getting my ARC, since it will be available for pickup between today and the 28th. I asked him about the hours of the government building to find out when I could go, but I think I must be really bad at posing questions to Japanese people, because he then told me that he'd take me there at 10am tomorrow. >_> I'm a bit of a burden, I think, but at least he seems pleased with how I work. I recall the people at RadiSys being pleased with how I was a set-it-and-forget-it kinda co-op, so hopefully that will balance out how often I seem to ask questions that end with him going out of his way to do something for me. D:
At 6:05pm Miyata-san (the guy who sits beside me, who I played tennis with today and last week) popped up over our divider to tell me that part of our lab culture is that Wednesday is "refresh day", and it is "forbidden" to work past 6pm. Everyone in our little group was still at their desks, but I could see around the office that many people were chit-chatting at other people's workspaces, and that lots of people were walking around with bags that probably contained sportswear or workout clothing. So, I got changed and played tennis for the next couple of hours with Miyata-san and Asai-san, as well as another person who's an old friend of Miyata-san's and said friend's 9 year old daughter. I am really bad at tennis now, as my only good swing previously (forehand topspin) is not really shabby, and the other groundstrokes are write-offs. I haven't even tried serving (my age-old enemy), because even without it I managed to smack a ball over the fence and into the forest. D: Despite all that, "refresh day" tennis was pleasant, and we stopped because eventually only the guy's daughter and I could see the ball anymore. I can't believe we stopped just as everyone started to be as bad as me! (I'm kidding, only Asai-san is really good, and Miyata-san is more consistent than me, but I don't feel outclassed. Yes, I'm better than the 9 year old, thanks for asking) It gets dark super early here! In fact, by quarter to 8, I was waiting at the bus stop in the crepuscule (lol <3).
I got home and had what I call zaru-soba (I could be wrong on what zaru-soba is, as I don't eat it often) for dorm dinner along with halved tiny green peppers stuffed with ground beef. O_O Ok, it must have REALLY been on sale... The combination of ground beef with green pepper was actually pretty good, oddly enough. I think they were baked quite thoroughly, as the peppers were ultra-squishy. I went and bought more discount water at the Yokosan, along with more senbei. >_< I think out of all the things in Japan, my top three expenses are transportation, arcades and senbei. D: I hope I can get someone to show me how to use the machines in the fitness room at the office so I don't get fat beyond belief!
I came home later today, so I wasn't able to go into Yokochuu. I still need to buy a mug at the Seiyu (I was an idiot and calling it the Seiya before) to serve myself tea while at work out of the 2L jugs I can buy. Right now I'm just drinking directly out of the water jugs I buy because it's just water, but the tea is really nice (and sometimes cheaper, oddly enough) so I want that to be an option.
Anyways, I'd best get to bed so I don't miss dorm breakfast again tomorrow. Write you later!
This morning I woke up on my own at 8:30, which was VERY lucky, as I had forgotten to set my alarms last night! Yikes! I ended up missing dorm breakfast though, so that sucked. I guess that 7-9 am means that you *finish* eating at 9, because I was there at 8:55 and got turned away. I had missed the 8:54 (or whenever it is) bus already, so I walked to the LAWSON STATION and got katsu-don and milk tea for breakfast. I love Japanese convenience stores for having real food instantly available at all times for cheap de la cheap cheap. I caught the bus that I'm "supposed" to catch at 9:22 and got to work at 9:35-ish (lol how is that supposed to be even remotely acceptable!?). The morning felt veeery short hahaha.
At lunch I had fried rice, because the Java curry wasn't available, and the other specials looked absolutely tiny. I played some handiball with my labmates, and managed to suck a little less at everything today (except serving, grr). When I was off the rotation, I talked with Asai-san (yet-another-Daisuke), and in the conversation at some point he said he wasn't playing because he had a handiball game yesterday and therefore wasn't going to play today to rest (he's 30! it's handiball!). I found this quite hilarious (but didn't laugh at him, don't worry), and I told him about how Mom always complains about us trying to kill her on ski vacations, but she's the first one up every morning, and she skis every day of the vacation barring sickness. So I summed up for him the fact that I didn't believe that he wasn't playing because he was sore, and that when I least expect it he's not going to be sore anymore and cause mayhem on the court. He laughed really hard at this, but didn't ever end up playing.
In the afternoon I coded more Ruby and asked Kabutoya-san about getting my ARC, since it will be available for pickup between today and the 28th. I asked him about the hours of the government building to find out when I could go, but I think I must be really bad at posing questions to Japanese people, because he then told me that he'd take me there at 10am tomorrow. >_> I'm a bit of a burden, I think, but at least he seems pleased with how I work. I recall the people at RadiSys being pleased with how I was a set-it-and-forget-it kinda co-op, so hopefully that will balance out how often I seem to ask questions that end with him going out of his way to do something for me. D:
At 6:05pm Miyata-san (the guy who sits beside me, who I played tennis with today and last week) popped up over our divider to tell me that part of our lab culture is that Wednesday is "refresh day", and it is "forbidden" to work past 6pm. Everyone in our little group was still at their desks, but I could see around the office that many people were chit-chatting at other people's workspaces, and that lots of people were walking around with bags that probably contained sportswear or workout clothing. So, I got changed and played tennis for the next couple of hours with Miyata-san and Asai-san, as well as another person who's an old friend of Miyata-san's and said friend's 9 year old daughter. I am really bad at tennis now, as my only good swing previously (forehand topspin) is not really shabby, and the other groundstrokes are write-offs. I haven't even tried serving (my age-old enemy), because even without it I managed to smack a ball over the fence and into the forest. D: Despite all that, "refresh day" tennis was pleasant, and we stopped because eventually only the guy's daughter and I could see the ball anymore. I can't believe we stopped just as everyone started to be as bad as me! (I'm kidding, only Asai-san is really good, and Miyata-san is more consistent than me, but I don't feel outclassed. Yes, I'm better than the 9 year old, thanks for asking) It gets dark super early here! In fact, by quarter to 8, I was waiting at the bus stop in the crepuscule (lol <3).
I got home and had what I call zaru-soba (I could be wrong on what zaru-soba is, as I don't eat it often) for dorm dinner along with halved tiny green peppers stuffed with ground beef. O_O Ok, it must have REALLY been on sale... The combination of ground beef with green pepper was actually pretty good, oddly enough. I think they were baked quite thoroughly, as the peppers were ultra-squishy. I went and bought more discount water at the Yokosan, along with more senbei. >_< I think out of all the things in Japan, my top three expenses are transportation, arcades and senbei. D: I hope I can get someone to show me how to use the machines in the fitness room at the office so I don't get fat beyond belief!
I came home later today, so I wasn't able to go into Yokochuu. I still need to buy a mug at the Seiyu (I was an idiot and calling it the Seiya before) to serve myself tea while at work out of the 2L jugs I can buy. Right now I'm just drinking directly out of the water jugs I buy because it's just water, but the tea is really nice (and sometimes cheaper, oddly enough) so I want that to be an option.
Anyways, I'd best get to bed so I don't miss dorm breakfast again tomorrow. Write you later!
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
ツーデイズ ブロッグ イーズ アバウート スナック アンド ランチ
Jun 21: The Internet and I
Today I woke up and had dorm breakfast of clams and assorted vegetables. I wondered if the clams were left out overnight, but Oohashi san doesn't seem to have that habit. >_< And besides, they weren't tempura. I thought I had missed the 8:54 bus today as I was slow leaving my room, and so I started to walk to LAWSON STATION to buy large bottled beverages to counteract the heat of the office, but as soon as I got halfway there, I saw the bus coming in my direction. D: I was glad (for the first time, and maybe the last) that traffic is so slow near my house, because I was actually able to beat the bus back to the bus stop without too much of a head start hahaha.
I arrived at work before I was supposed to be there (like every other day), and since I hadn't had the chance to buy my drinks, I went to the convenience store in the basement. Yes, my company has a convenience store that's behind card-access doors that is larger than my local LAWSON STATION by about a factor of two. XD I was very glad for it today, as I purchased 2L of water and drank all of it over the course of the day.
In the morning I finished off my cluster-based recommender. I found what I think was causing the problem, and it worked like a dream thereafter. However, when I was demonstrating it to Kabutoya-san, I asked about missing data for a cluster (A dimension that none of the cluster members are defined on, so the cluster itself has no go-to value in that dimension), which was the source of my bug, I believe, and he said that the way that it should be done is the way that was causing the problem, but either approach is reasonable, and that I should move on. Hmm... If what I was doing "wrong" was supposed to work, then where did the bug come from...? We'll never know, because now I have moved on to document filtering.
At lunch I finally had curry! The specials for the day did not look at all intriguing, so I actually managed to get by them and get some pork curry (they seriously call it ポークカレー or pooku karee, similarly tsumami-mono are referred to as スナック or sunakku). I then turned around and lined up behind someone who had a much larger, more interesting looking curry that is apparently "Java curry". Damnit! I need to get to know all the tips and tricks...
After lunch I played some handiball. I'm kinda bad at it, and my serve was totally ridonkulously bad in the earlier part of the lunch hour. After a while, the people we were playing against left, including the guy wearing an Eddie Bauer shirt, who I didn't get to ask where he got it. Good thing, because I looked it up when I got home, and Eddie Bauer apparently has a store in Tokyo. >_< After that we played 2 on 2 handiball, and I did much, much better. I think one of the major issues I have with handiball is that there's no room and no coordination between teammates. Since I'm larger than most of the people here, I don't really want to go barreling about, and so I end up just kind of standing in one place. In the 2's situation I had much more freedom and I liked it quite a lot better. Too bad the "normal" game crams 4 people a side onto that tiny court...
After lunch I did some of the exercises from the book, and apparently this is the last chapter I'll be doing, at least for the time being. Kabutoya-san says he's surprised at how fast I am (TEAM FAST), so maybe he won't be ready by the time I'm done chapter 6 and I'll have to do something else from the book haha. That's pure speculation though. I find when I have to read things (like papers or book exercise descriptions, it's very difficult to do and is very slow going. I think it's because I'm no longer focusing on coding and therefore the uncomfortable heat of the office really gets to me. Unfortunately I'm in a research lab, so plenty of reading is likely in store haha. D: Oh well, maybe I'll get used to it (not). Kabutoya-san was telling me about how it gets into the 30s here during the summer, and the office will have no AC for power saving reasons. Diuuuuu. Good thing the Yokosan has 2L bottles of water on sale for like 120円, as I know I'll be needing a lot of them.
At work, just toward the tail end of the day, my terminal that I do my work on stopped responding, and when I tried to close and reconnect to the server it was unreachable. It also turned out that the entirety of my internet was shot too! Yikes. I told Kabutoya-san this, and he said "oh maybe it's time to go home then". Haha. Too bad it's 5:55 and the previous bus just left a minute ago, and the next one is the one I usually catch at 6:30. D: Kabutoya-san determined along with a guy whose name I believe is Kyosuke that it was my computer's fault, and they told me that this wasn't surprising, as my computer is generally nothing but trouble, apparently. D: I regained my ability to connect to the server while they were twiddling away on my machine, and so I went back to work for a bit (with no Internet). At the end of the day (like 15 minutes later) I checked and the Internet was back again. >_< That ain't cool man... I really hope this is not the first of many little presents in store for me... I changed absolutely nothing, and touched absolutely nothing, and my network connection just disappears for like, 10 minutes!? D: And for no-one else, either.
Back at the dorm I had dorm supper, which was... Curry. Yes, the one day I manage to get to the curry at lunch was the one day Oohashi-san makes curry for dinner. Good thing I like curry. >_< There was also some shredded fake crab in a gelatinous sauce served over iceberg lettuce that was good, if a little salty. I told Oohashi-san that I'd be late the next day because I would be playing tennis with Kabutoya-san, and I am still reeling from how quickly and loudly she speaks. Everyone else who has received the panicked look from me when I don't understand what they've said in Japanese has slowed down, pointed, or broken down what they're trying to say into bite-sized, textbook grammar pieces (thank you so, so much). Not Oohashi-san. What she's saying gets reworded (so I don't get a second shot) in the equally ultra-casual style of speech she uses with extra questions tacked on. D: How do you take this "life" thing off of hard mode!?!? Oh well, she's very understanding, if not so understandable, and is very pleasant, so when I just say "uhhh... tabun" in response to the last of a series of about eight questions, she seems to act like it's an ok answer (it's totally not an ok answer). I wonder if there will be caltrops in my bed tomorrow when I come home...
Anyways, I'd best get to bed as I am shy on スリープ (suriipu, as I'm sure it'll be called over here in 3 years), so I'll say bye for now and excuse myself. Ciao!
Today I woke up and had dorm breakfast of clams and assorted vegetables. I wondered if the clams were left out overnight, but Oohashi san doesn't seem to have that habit. >_< And besides, they weren't tempura. I thought I had missed the 8:54 bus today as I was slow leaving my room, and so I started to walk to LAWSON STATION to buy large bottled beverages to counteract the heat of the office, but as soon as I got halfway there, I saw the bus coming in my direction. D: I was glad (for the first time, and maybe the last) that traffic is so slow near my house, because I was actually able to beat the bus back to the bus stop without too much of a head start hahaha.
I arrived at work before I was supposed to be there (like every other day), and since I hadn't had the chance to buy my drinks, I went to the convenience store in the basement. Yes, my company has a convenience store that's behind card-access doors that is larger than my local LAWSON STATION by about a factor of two. XD I was very glad for it today, as I purchased 2L of water and drank all of it over the course of the day.
In the morning I finished off my cluster-based recommender. I found what I think was causing the problem, and it worked like a dream thereafter. However, when I was demonstrating it to Kabutoya-san, I asked about missing data for a cluster (A dimension that none of the cluster members are defined on, so the cluster itself has no go-to value in that dimension), which was the source of my bug, I believe, and he said that the way that it should be done is the way that was causing the problem, but either approach is reasonable, and that I should move on. Hmm... If what I was doing "wrong" was supposed to work, then where did the bug come from...? We'll never know, because now I have moved on to document filtering.
At lunch I finally had curry! The specials for the day did not look at all intriguing, so I actually managed to get by them and get some pork curry (they seriously call it ポークカレー or pooku karee, similarly tsumami-mono are referred to as スナック or sunakku). I then turned around and lined up behind someone who had a much larger, more interesting looking curry that is apparently "Java curry". Damnit! I need to get to know all the tips and tricks...
After lunch I played some handiball. I'm kinda bad at it, and my serve was totally ridonkulously bad in the earlier part of the lunch hour. After a while, the people we were playing against left, including the guy wearing an Eddie Bauer shirt, who I didn't get to ask where he got it. Good thing, because I looked it up when I got home, and Eddie Bauer apparently has a store in Tokyo. >_< After that we played 2 on 2 handiball, and I did much, much better. I think one of the major issues I have with handiball is that there's no room and no coordination between teammates. Since I'm larger than most of the people here, I don't really want to go barreling about, and so I end up just kind of standing in one place. In the 2's situation I had much more freedom and I liked it quite a lot better. Too bad the "normal" game crams 4 people a side onto that tiny court...
After lunch I did some of the exercises from the book, and apparently this is the last chapter I'll be doing, at least for the time being. Kabutoya-san says he's surprised at how fast I am (TEAM FAST), so maybe he won't be ready by the time I'm done chapter 6 and I'll have to do something else from the book haha. That's pure speculation though. I find when I have to read things (like papers or book exercise descriptions, it's very difficult to do and is very slow going. I think it's because I'm no longer focusing on coding and therefore the uncomfortable heat of the office really gets to me. Unfortunately I'm in a research lab, so plenty of reading is likely in store haha. D: Oh well, maybe I'll get used to it (not). Kabutoya-san was telling me about how it gets into the 30s here during the summer, and the office will have no AC for power saving reasons. Diuuuuu. Good thing the Yokosan has 2L bottles of water on sale for like 120円, as I know I'll be needing a lot of them.
At work, just toward the tail end of the day, my terminal that I do my work on stopped responding, and when I tried to close and reconnect to the server it was unreachable. It also turned out that the entirety of my internet was shot too! Yikes. I told Kabutoya-san this, and he said "oh maybe it's time to go home then". Haha. Too bad it's 5:55 and the previous bus just left a minute ago, and the next one is the one I usually catch at 6:30. D: Kabutoya-san determined along with a guy whose name I believe is Kyosuke that it was my computer's fault, and they told me that this wasn't surprising, as my computer is generally nothing but trouble, apparently. D: I regained my ability to connect to the server while they were twiddling away on my machine, and so I went back to work for a bit (with no Internet). At the end of the day (like 15 minutes later) I checked and the Internet was back again. >_< That ain't cool man... I really hope this is not the first of many little presents in store for me... I changed absolutely nothing, and touched absolutely nothing, and my network connection just disappears for like, 10 minutes!? D: And for no-one else, either.
Back at the dorm I had dorm supper, which was... Curry. Yes, the one day I manage to get to the curry at lunch was the one day Oohashi-san makes curry for dinner. Good thing I like curry. >_< There was also some shredded fake crab in a gelatinous sauce served over iceberg lettuce that was good, if a little salty. I told Oohashi-san that I'd be late the next day because I would be playing tennis with Kabutoya-san, and I am still reeling from how quickly and loudly she speaks. Everyone else who has received the panicked look from me when I don't understand what they've said in Japanese has slowed down, pointed, or broken down what they're trying to say into bite-sized, textbook grammar pieces (thank you so, so much). Not Oohashi-san. What she's saying gets reworded (so I don't get a second shot) in the equally ultra-casual style of speech she uses with extra questions tacked on. D: How do you take this "life" thing off of hard mode!?!? Oh well, she's very understanding, if not so understandable, and is very pleasant, so when I just say "uhhh... tabun" in response to the last of a series of about eight questions, she seems to act like it's an ok answer (it's totally not an ok answer). I wonder if there will be caltrops in my bed tomorrow when I come home...
Anyways, I'd best get to bed as I am shy on スリープ (suriipu, as I'm sure it'll be called over here in 3 years), so I'll say bye for now and excuse myself. Ciao!
Monday, June 20, 2011
Kicked out of the office (in a good way)
Jun 20: Back to Work
By the time today rolled around I was quite happy to go back to work, because as much fun as Akiba is, I'm quite ready to be good at things again (at least for five days haha)! ;D Dorm breakfast today was stewed squid and natto. >_< I survived, and I realized, while making my way through the rather hefty pil of the stuff, that natto doesn't actually taste like very much at all, it just smells super gross.
I got to work on time and started Rubying it up. Today I got my first task that isn't in the book! Mind you it's making a basic recommender using K-means clustering, both the recommender part and the K-means part are things in the book. >_< Baby steps though! I was quite glad to be able to truly think (even just for a little bit) about what I was doing today.
At lunch I had "cold shabu shabu", which is basically some thin strips of cooked pork with an incredibly large pile of cabbage and wakame. I was of course on my way to the curry. ;D At lunch we had a rather funny misunderstanding between me using the word "niche" and my coworkers hearing "nishi". Apparently they know the word "niche", but pronounce it so it rhymes with "rich".
After eating we played handiball for a bit. My serve is getting more consistent, but the rest of my play is still kinda crap. D: The player positioning very ad-hoc, which doesn't really help, because that either leaves you right next to a player, or with half the court to cover. Mostly it's just silly and fun though. :D
In the afternoon I tried to implement the clustering in my recommender, but I think there is a bug in my code, because it did not terminate after 100 iterations of the usual k-means algorithm. I added more detailed output, which showed me that the total summed distance between the clusters and the data points was kind of oscillating. K-means is supposed to make this value decrease monotonically, so I'm pretty sure I've done something wrong. >_<
At 5:30 Kabutoya-san invited me to watch his handiball game, in which his team absolutely destroyed the opposition. They have pretty good team coordination, which gives them a very large edge (it helps that two of their players are tall, though "tall" is apparently about my height D:).
After volleyball I went back to my desk to work on my buggy K-means clustering. I wanted to stay late and work on it, but Kabutoya-san literally stood at my desk and watched me pack up after telling me I should go home. O_O He said that in university he would work for as long as it took as well, but in the office this is apparently (strongly) discouraged. How odd...
Back at home I ate dorm supper, which was a ground-meat kind of korokke thing (I guess there's a good deal on ground meat or something...) and some fish, with some spinach with bonito and miso soup with enoki mushrooms and tofu skins. I've noticed filmy particulate matter in the tea that comes out of the dispenser on multiple occasions now, so I think I may stop drinking it... D:
I tried wandering around the building looking for internet, and the connection appears to be much, much better on the second floor! I will have to see if it can hold a good connection in the lounge area there. That may be very useful while I wait for my own to be set up. I will have to test it by trying to watch the Dreamhack SCII finals. ;D For science, of course.
I'd best be getting ready for bed now, so I'll hear from you all later. Bye now!
By the time today rolled around I was quite happy to go back to work, because as much fun as Akiba is, I'm quite ready to be good at things again (at least for five days haha)! ;D Dorm breakfast today was stewed squid and natto. >_< I survived, and I realized, while making my way through the rather hefty pil of the stuff, that natto doesn't actually taste like very much at all, it just smells super gross.
I got to work on time and started Rubying it up. Today I got my first task that isn't in the book! Mind you it's making a basic recommender using K-means clustering, both the recommender part and the K-means part are things in the book. >_< Baby steps though! I was quite glad to be able to truly think (even just for a little bit) about what I was doing today.
At lunch I had "cold shabu shabu", which is basically some thin strips of cooked pork with an incredibly large pile of cabbage and wakame. I was of course on my way to the curry. ;D At lunch we had a rather funny misunderstanding between me using the word "niche" and my coworkers hearing "nishi". Apparently they know the word "niche", but pronounce it so it rhymes with "rich".
After eating we played handiball for a bit. My serve is getting more consistent, but the rest of my play is still kinda crap. D: The player positioning very ad-hoc, which doesn't really help, because that either leaves you right next to a player, or with half the court to cover. Mostly it's just silly and fun though. :D
In the afternoon I tried to implement the clustering in my recommender, but I think there is a bug in my code, because it did not terminate after 100 iterations of the usual k-means algorithm. I added more detailed output, which showed me that the total summed distance between the clusters and the data points was kind of oscillating. K-means is supposed to make this value decrease monotonically, so I'm pretty sure I've done something wrong. >_<
At 5:30 Kabutoya-san invited me to watch his handiball game, in which his team absolutely destroyed the opposition. They have pretty good team coordination, which gives them a very large edge (it helps that two of their players are tall, though "tall" is apparently about my height D:).
After volleyball I went back to my desk to work on my buggy K-means clustering. I wanted to stay late and work on it, but Kabutoya-san literally stood at my desk and watched me pack up after telling me I should go home. O_O He said that in university he would work for as long as it took as well, but in the office this is apparently (strongly) discouraged. How odd...
Back at home I ate dorm supper, which was a ground-meat kind of korokke thing (I guess there's a good deal on ground meat or something...) and some fish, with some spinach with bonito and miso soup with enoki mushrooms and tofu skins. I've noticed filmy particulate matter in the tea that comes out of the dispenser on multiple occasions now, so I think I may stop drinking it... D:
I tried wandering around the building looking for internet, and the connection appears to be much, much better on the second floor! I will have to see if it can hold a good connection in the lounge area there. That may be very useful while I wait for my own to be set up. I will have to test it by trying to watch the Dreamhack SCII finals. ;D For science, of course.
I'd best be getting ready for bed now, so I'll hear from you all later. Bye now!
Sunday, June 19, 2011
I found people worse than me at Melty Blood!
Jun 19: I need to get my own Internet connection...
This morning I got up to voice chat with Mom and Jiuna, but my net connection was so terrible again that I wasn't able to, and had to instead text chat with them. D: I think that seals the deal along with the missed Father's Day call; I need to get my own Internet connection.
After Mom and Jiuna had to stop chatting for dinner, I decided to go into Akihabara again today. :D I am very happy with the service between Yokochuu and Tokyo, as it's quite fast and the limited expresses seem to come fairly frequently. I just wish the bus to and from my house was a little faster and ran more frequently... Oh well you can't have everything, and I think the thing for me to remember is that I'm 10 minutes away from my work, when other people are an hour or more. D:
For lunch today I tried a chicken gobo pita from Vie la France outside Akihabara station. It wasn't terribly memorable, but the gobo and chicken went well together (there may have been konnyaku in there too...). I then proceeded to walk up and down Chuou street for a bit, as the entire road was pedestrian only because it's Sunday. I wandered around looking for LAN gaming centres to see if ANYONE knew what StarCraft was, but the only one I thought looked promising I decided to check out later and then was never able to find it again. I don't have much to say about my walk up and down Chuou street, because I didn't really shop (I have nothing I need to buy, except maybe SC2 once I get my own net or find a LAN cafe with it). Today it really struck home that I'm missing out due to my poor Japanese ability, so I will be studying in the evenings now. Apparently there are also volunteer-run Japanese schools nearby, which doesn't surprise me given the number of foreigners in the area.
I also checked out some more arcades, two Taito ones and one called HEY that I don't recall made much of an impression on me. Apparently the Taito arcades are the place to go for non-Project Diva rhythm games, as they had WAAAY better selection than the CLUB SEGAs. They're also the place to go to play danmaku (top down shooters like Raiden Jet) games as well. I was also relieved to find a DDR machine in the Taito arcades, showing that it's not completely extinct. I played DDR in the Taito arcade for old time's sake, and actually managed to pass Drop Out, something I haven't done in quite some time. They have rescaled the difficulty ratings, which is really stupid and annoying, though possibly a good idea, as 8 feet could mean anything from "you will almost full combo this on your first try" to "you will wish you were never born, RJ". ;D At first I didn't realize there was a rescaling, and I was like "UHHHH" when the guy who was playing before me was flipping though all these songs that were 5~7 feet on basic and 11~16 on maniac. Since one of the songs was Capsule's More More More, I was highly suspicious, since I'm pretty sure you can't make an (old scale) 12 foot song out of More More More. I think Drop Out is 13 or 14 on maniac now for reference, but I can't really remember (some reference). The Taito arcades also had Jubeats and that Reflec Beat game I saw in Ikebukuro.
After playing DDR I moved back to the CLUB SEGAs and bounced between them for the day. I actually won some in Melty Blood today. Apparently on Sunday even the noobs come out to play! I am also getting more comfortable with the arcade stick, but I still can't do my bread and butter (basic combination attack string) consistently. I also played a crescent-moon Ciel mirror and got my face destroyed by the other guy. He "kindly" demonstrated that I need to look up a new bread and butter, as he was doing like, 4100+ per string to my ~2700. D: I do NOT look forward to trying to learn a new bread and butter in the arcade, but playing was so much fun that I think it will be worth it for the sake of winning a bit more haha. I'm actually so bad that people don't want to play me, and after I've kicked whatever poor soul who's worse than even me off the machine, no one ever sits down at the other end again and I end up finishing arcade mode. D: Oh well in arcade mode I got lots of time to get familiar with the stick under no pressure, and I also got to rediscover that I am unable to do Ciel's simplest high/low wakeup mixup. D: For now I'm letting myself believe that it was patched out of the game due to Ciel imba S+ tier shenanigans in Act Cadenza, but since I got the setup to work now and again, maintaining external blame for my inability to perform said mixup is requiring much willpower. ;D
After all the noobs left and I was getting dangerously close to getting triple perfected again I went for Project Diva at CLUB SEGA 1 (adjacent to pockets). CLUB SEGA 1 is also where the better Melty Blood players are, as well as the heavier smokers and the more slovenly washroom users. D: For these reasons I spend much of my time at CLUB SEGA 2. Today, however, CLUB SEGA 1's Project Diva area was smoky, even though it's a non-smoking area and was not smoky yesterday. There was also a lineup much larger than last time, so I ended up returning to CLUB SEGA 2, where it wasn't smoky and there were more machines servicing the same lineup. In a sick twist of fate, I frequently ended up playing on the cabinet that has a rather large TV attached to it and extra speakers. Please, universe, my fellow nerds do NOT need to see me fail to pass Moon 4 times in one afternoon (who the hell requires 80% for a pass anyways!?). Unlike the PSP version, the arcade cabinet has a bar at the bottom to show you just how far you are from dreaming of getting a "Clear" on the song you are currently using to embarrass youself. D: Oh well I enjoyed myself and it wasn't smoky, so I may not even get sick! :D
For dinner I went back to Time for Homemade Curry and had the Kurobuta katsu curry again. The curry itself was again underwhelming and the katsu was again delicious. I didn't think about the possibility that my second observation may lie at the same coordinates on the Euclidean plane, so I may have to go back a third time before I am able to draw the line of best fit, as currently the system does not have a unique solution. ;D
As I was walking back to CLUB SEGA 2 after dinner, I heard someone say "Hey! RJ!" What!? I turned around and there were some of my fellow co-ops! They were all in a group and we chatted for a bit, and I was shown an alternative curry restaurant to Time for Homemade Curry, which is quite a lot cheaper, and also underground. >_> I think the co-ops communicate via mobile phone, so I will not be joining up with them until I have one. They also were all like "Oh man! MAIDS! RJ do you go to MAID CAFES HERE!?" Um no. I was actually quite pleasant, I'll have you know! They weren't terribly concerned with arcades, and I had been to five already today, so I don't know how good of an addition to their group I will be. XD We'll find out I guess. They are startlingly nice people, as far as I can determine, which is a little unfortunate because I remember none of their names (one of them might be Raymond). They hadn't eaten supper yet, so we went our separate ways at the entrance to the curry restaurant.
I spent the rest of the evening playing at CLUB SEGA 2 (I even played Virtua Figher 2! Yes, they have it, and yes it was nostalgic in the extreme). My trip back to my dorm was highly uneventful, so there's not much to say about it, other than that riding in a relatively quiet train in a window seat through Tokyo and its nearby cities at night is a lovely experience. Not glitzy but very peaceful, and it reminded me that I am in a different country, which with my sheltered dorm life is often a little easy to lose track of.
Oh! I thought of something I need to buy! Earbuds. The cord on mine is too short to put my music player in my pocket OR my hand properly, so I have to walk around like the Hunchback of Dasaiyashi or have the left earbud constantly tugging in my ear (which is really, really uncomfortable). I didn't honestly walk around hunched over, but constantly fiddling with how it was seated in my pocket was really annoying. Do Jiuna or Nat have any suggestions on where to look for earbuds? I haven't examined my spending rate yet and compared it to my income, so I haven't got a price target, but are there any places that are good to just shop for that kind of thing in?
Now I really need to go to bed. It was an appropriate time to go to bed when I started this blog. Now it is DEFINITELY past my bedtime. 'Till next time!
This morning I got up to voice chat with Mom and Jiuna, but my net connection was so terrible again that I wasn't able to, and had to instead text chat with them. D: I think that seals the deal along with the missed Father's Day call; I need to get my own Internet connection.
After Mom and Jiuna had to stop chatting for dinner, I decided to go into Akihabara again today. :D I am very happy with the service between Yokochuu and Tokyo, as it's quite fast and the limited expresses seem to come fairly frequently. I just wish the bus to and from my house was a little faster and ran more frequently... Oh well you can't have everything, and I think the thing for me to remember is that I'm 10 minutes away from my work, when other people are an hour or more. D:
For lunch today I tried a chicken gobo pita from Vie la France outside Akihabara station. It wasn't terribly memorable, but the gobo and chicken went well together (there may have been konnyaku in there too...). I then proceeded to walk up and down Chuou street for a bit, as the entire road was pedestrian only because it's Sunday. I wandered around looking for LAN gaming centres to see if ANYONE knew what StarCraft was, but the only one I thought looked promising I decided to check out later and then was never able to find it again. I don't have much to say about my walk up and down Chuou street, because I didn't really shop (I have nothing I need to buy, except maybe SC2 once I get my own net or find a LAN cafe with it). Today it really struck home that I'm missing out due to my poor Japanese ability, so I will be studying in the evenings now. Apparently there are also volunteer-run Japanese schools nearby, which doesn't surprise me given the number of foreigners in the area.
I also checked out some more arcades, two Taito ones and one called HEY that I don't recall made much of an impression on me. Apparently the Taito arcades are the place to go for non-Project Diva rhythm games, as they had WAAAY better selection than the CLUB SEGAs. They're also the place to go to play danmaku (top down shooters like Raiden Jet) games as well. I was also relieved to find a DDR machine in the Taito arcades, showing that it's not completely extinct. I played DDR in the Taito arcade for old time's sake, and actually managed to pass Drop Out, something I haven't done in quite some time. They have rescaled the difficulty ratings, which is really stupid and annoying, though possibly a good idea, as 8 feet could mean anything from "you will almost full combo this on your first try" to "you will wish you were never born, RJ". ;D At first I didn't realize there was a rescaling, and I was like "UHHHH" when the guy who was playing before me was flipping though all these songs that were 5~7 feet on basic and 11~16 on maniac. Since one of the songs was Capsule's More More More, I was highly suspicious, since I'm pretty sure you can't make an (old scale) 12 foot song out of More More More. I think Drop Out is 13 or 14 on maniac now for reference, but I can't really remember (some reference). The Taito arcades also had Jubeats and that Reflec Beat game I saw in Ikebukuro.
After playing DDR I moved back to the CLUB SEGAs and bounced between them for the day. I actually won some in Melty Blood today. Apparently on Sunday even the noobs come out to play! I am also getting more comfortable with the arcade stick, but I still can't do my bread and butter (basic combination attack string) consistently. I also played a crescent-moon Ciel mirror and got my face destroyed by the other guy. He "kindly" demonstrated that I need to look up a new bread and butter, as he was doing like, 4100+ per string to my ~2700. D: I do NOT look forward to trying to learn a new bread and butter in the arcade, but playing was so much fun that I think it will be worth it for the sake of winning a bit more haha. I'm actually so bad that people don't want to play me, and after I've kicked whatever poor soul who's worse than even me off the machine, no one ever sits down at the other end again and I end up finishing arcade mode. D: Oh well in arcade mode I got lots of time to get familiar with the stick under no pressure, and I also got to rediscover that I am unable to do Ciel's simplest high/low wakeup mixup. D: For now I'm letting myself believe that it was patched out of the game due to Ciel imba S+ tier shenanigans in Act Cadenza, but since I got the setup to work now and again, maintaining external blame for my inability to perform said mixup is requiring much willpower. ;D
After all the noobs left and I was getting dangerously close to getting triple perfected again I went for Project Diva at CLUB SEGA 1 (adjacent to pockets). CLUB SEGA 1 is also where the better Melty Blood players are, as well as the heavier smokers and the more slovenly washroom users. D: For these reasons I spend much of my time at CLUB SEGA 2. Today, however, CLUB SEGA 1's Project Diva area was smoky, even though it's a non-smoking area and was not smoky yesterday. There was also a lineup much larger than last time, so I ended up returning to CLUB SEGA 2, where it wasn't smoky and there were more machines servicing the same lineup. In a sick twist of fate, I frequently ended up playing on the cabinet that has a rather large TV attached to it and extra speakers. Please, universe, my fellow nerds do NOT need to see me fail to pass Moon 4 times in one afternoon (who the hell requires 80% for a pass anyways!?). Unlike the PSP version, the arcade cabinet has a bar at the bottom to show you just how far you are from dreaming of getting a "Clear" on the song you are currently using to embarrass youself. D: Oh well I enjoyed myself and it wasn't smoky, so I may not even get sick! :D
For dinner I went back to Time for Homemade Curry and had the Kurobuta katsu curry again. The curry itself was again underwhelming and the katsu was again delicious. I didn't think about the possibility that my second observation may lie at the same coordinates on the Euclidean plane, so I may have to go back a third time before I am able to draw the line of best fit, as currently the system does not have a unique solution. ;D
As I was walking back to CLUB SEGA 2 after dinner, I heard someone say "Hey! RJ!" What!? I turned around and there were some of my fellow co-ops! They were all in a group and we chatted for a bit, and I was shown an alternative curry restaurant to Time for Homemade Curry, which is quite a lot cheaper, and also underground. >_> I think the co-ops communicate via mobile phone, so I will not be joining up with them until I have one. They also were all like "Oh man! MAIDS! RJ do you go to MAID CAFES HERE!?" Um no. I was actually quite pleasant, I'll have you know! They weren't terribly concerned with arcades, and I had been to five already today, so I don't know how good of an addition to their group I will be. XD We'll find out I guess. They are startlingly nice people, as far as I can determine, which is a little unfortunate because I remember none of their names (one of them might be Raymond). They hadn't eaten supper yet, so we went our separate ways at the entrance to the curry restaurant.
I spent the rest of the evening playing at CLUB SEGA 2 (I even played Virtua Figher 2! Yes, they have it, and yes it was nostalgic in the extreme). My trip back to my dorm was highly uneventful, so there's not much to say about it, other than that riding in a relatively quiet train in a window seat through Tokyo and its nearby cities at night is a lovely experience. Not glitzy but very peaceful, and it reminded me that I am in a different country, which with my sheltered dorm life is often a little easy to lose track of.
Oh! I thought of something I need to buy! Earbuds. The cord on mine is too short to put my music player in my pocket OR my hand properly, so I have to walk around like the Hunchback of Dasaiyashi or have the left earbud constantly tugging in my ear (which is really, really uncomfortable). I didn't honestly walk around hunched over, but constantly fiddling with how it was seated in my pocket was really annoying. Do Jiuna or Nat have any suggestions on where to look for earbuds? I haven't examined my spending rate yet and compared it to my income, so I haven't got a price target, but are there any places that are good to just shop for that kind of thing in?
Now I really need to go to bed. It was an appropriate time to go to bed when I started this blog. Now it is DEFINITELY past my bedtime. 'Till next time!
Saturday, June 18, 2011
I think people in Akihabara might like video games...
Jun 18: Akiba - Phase One
Today I got up to talk to Dad for Father's Day. We had a nice conversation via text, because unfortunately my internet was the worst it has ever been. D: Great timing, eh? I think I will need to get my own internet, as (sort of) missing Father's Day sucked.
After chatting with Dad, I went and hopped on a bus to Yokochuu, bound for an afternoon in Tokyo. Of course it started raining the second I saw the bus coming, so I was without an umbrella for the whole rather remarkably rainy day. I had brought my camera, but due to being umbrella-less (I didn't see any uber-cheap ones) I didn't take any pictures aside from one of Pockets Plus One, which I was sheltered by the train tracks for. Getting to Shinagawa was pretty fast, as usual. I was a little apprehensive at first when I got on a limited express that was not labeled "Shinagawa", but rather the stop directly AFTER it. I was just plucking up the courage after having pre-formed my sentences to ask the guy beside me about it when the train announcer mentioned Shinagawa in his list of stops. Oh well, I'm sure I'll have many other opportunities to speak Japanese. In Japan. ;D
I took the Yamanote to Akihabara, and realized upon arrival that I had again forgotten to research where I actually wanted to go from the station. I proceeded to wander around the streets nearby the station until I found one that looked more populated, which I then made a beeline for. Sure enough, it was Chuuou street, and I was able to hunt down Pockets for a picture.
For lunch I ate at Yoshinoya because, well, why not? I had a gyu-nabe-don, which was pretty good. I was clearly a Yoshinoya noob though, because as I was eating I noticed many people ordering the same thing, but with a raw-egg side that they mixed into the meal. Yummmm... I'll do that next time maybe, if Mom promises not to get ulcers thinking about it.
Since it was raining pretty hard, I didn't really feel like walking around (or at least that's my excuse, OK I know it's a weak one) so I headed straight for the CLUB SEGA arcade beside Pockets, where I got horribly sick and missed most of my vacation in Grade 11. I'm full of great ideas, eh? A new Virtua Fighter game came out recently, which was evident from the fact that the entire basement floor of the arcade was devoted entirely to that single game. They had maybe.... 50 seats? It was incredible. I kept looking around for other games on the bottom floor, because I was having trouble believing that they seriously had an entire floor of Virtua Fighter. I ceased to have trouble believing this when I remembered that I was in fucking AKIHABARA. Derp.
I'm incredibad at 3D fighters so I went up a couple of floors and found Melty Blood. I watched some people play for a bit and then tried my hand against the player that appeared to be the weakest and got ABSOLUTELY DESTROYED. It wasn't pretty. In other news I'm now BFFs with the left hand corner, and I'm going to be having nightmares about White Len and her magic yo-yo OTGs for the rest of my life. It didn't help that I haven't played Melty Blood on a stick since the last time I was in Japan (oh wait we played a game at Rush, didn't we?), but I'm pretty sure I'd be totally outclassed by the players here even if I was comfortable. So, having being totally humiliated, I naturally sat down at the next machine, opposite a player who appeared to be better and tried my luck again. I actually did alright in some of the matches, getting him down to less than half life off of footsies and pseudo-crossups (I can't do real ones, are they even possible in the MB engine?), with a generous dose of random imba EX-Hieros, but it was still 3-0. I felt very good about my progress with comfort on the arcade stick and all, so I put in another coin, and ended up hitting him once in the third match to deny him the triple perfect. D:
I then went upstairs to investigate the promises of Project Diva that posters all over the place had been making, and I wasn't disappointed. They had four machines in a corner and a lineup the same size as Ikebukuro, who only had one machine. I was going to play, but then I reconsidered, as if I started I probably wouldn't stop until I had to leave for Yokochuu. I went back outside, and to the next block where another CLUB SEGA was waiting for me hahahaha. I took this as a sign and went inside and upstairs, and proceeded to get destroyed at Melty Blood again (though not as badly as last time). I also tried out BlazBlue, where I confirmed that Japan has at least one Nu player that's better than Nathaniel (;D), and 3rd Strike, where I actually fared the best. I never actually won, but I didn't really get blown up either. I must admit it's pretty hard to win at Street Fighter when you can't do Z-motions on command. >_< I spotted MvC2 of all things and beat arcade mode because no one ever sat down opposite me. Hooray my first victory of the day! Not really. D: I went upstairs in this CLUB SEGA and found 4 or 5 more Project Divas, but with a rather significant lineup. They've got a bunch of Project Diva stuff hanging around beside the line, including what appeared to be iroha's autograph. O_O Not that surprising, I guess, it IS Akiba... I went back to the other CLUB SEGA to play Project Diva for the next couple of hours.
An interesting thing to note is that the CLUB SEGA one block away from Pockets has slightly chic, beautifully clean and freshly scented bathrooms, while the one beside Pockets is rife with perplexing, noisome odours (can you tell I'm missing native English speakers a little?), complete with what I really hope was vomit next to the squatter. D:
For dinner I went to the curry place near the station that's called "It's time for Homemade Curry" or something like that. It sounds bizarrely like an indie band's name, but I badly needed to remedy the fact that I'd only had curry once in Japan prior to tonight. I decided to try the kurobuta-katsu curry, and proceeded to try to purchase a ticket for it from the vending machine. For some reason it wouldn't take my money, so I had to beep my Pasmo to pay. >_> It's now under 10,000円 again; I must correct this (Pasmo builds interest right? XD) Speaking of my Pasmo, I think it's levelling up. Bus trips seem to be a little cheaper than they used to, and it definitely couldn't have anything to do with the fact that I take a different line almost every time I go anywhere. Nope, it's probably levelling up...
The curry was decent. It didn't stand out much from places that don't claim to be homemade, so I'm a touch suspicious. The katsu, however, was DELICIOUS. I may or may not have been incredibly hungry at that point, so I will have to verify my findings as soon as possible. In fact, maybe I should get enough data points to do regression and make the deliciousness statistically significant. ;D
After dinner I went back to Shinagawa by Yamanote and then back to Yokochuu by limited express on the Keikyuu line. On the train I saw an ad that abbreviated the line's name as "kq" in a URL. Also on the train, I sat between a black woman with the most amazing hair (it looked like a colourful woven bag perched upside-down on her head) and a Japanese girl who was trying with all her might not to fall asleep against me. It was quite humourous watching her fall farther and farther into sleep as her head drifted closer and closer to my arm, until it would finally touch me and then she'd jerk back up for all of 5 seconds before the scene repeated itself. Eventually after like 4 cycles she got fed up with it and fell asleep ALL OVER the rather older guy on the other side of her who was trying very hard to look like there wasn't a 20-something year old girl probably drooling on him. I really hope she knew him, for his sake.
I got off at Yokochuu much earlier than I expected (I forgot that my 2 hour trip time includes the bus ride to Ikkidzuka), so I wandered around for a bit. I found lots of net/manga cafes, whose counter attendants all looked at me as if I were some sort of alien when I asked if they had StarCraft. Some were advertising online games so I thought I'd try, but apparently no. D: I really am going to have to get my own internet. I also think I may have found Yokochuu's red-light street, either that or the lady that appeared as if on cue when I turned around after seeing how sketchy and dim the bars on the street looked was asking me if I wanted an ACTUAL massage. O_O No thanks. I had to ask her to repeat herself at first because she really really did not look at all like an "adult recreation engineer" and I thought she might be asking a legitimate question. I scurried back onto the main drag and asked around a bit more about StarCraft. I'll have to sashay more as I walk to avoid such encounters in the future.
I went back to my dorm and accidentally pigged out on senbei before writing up this blog. D: I'm going to have to stop buying it because I can't stop myself from eating it. It's too delicious! And the harder kinds destroy the roof of my mouth, ouchie.
Anyways, I'd best get to bed so I can get up to chat with Mom and Jiuna in the morning. Ciao!
Today I got up to talk to Dad for Father's Day. We had a nice conversation via text, because unfortunately my internet was the worst it has ever been. D: Great timing, eh? I think I will need to get my own internet, as (sort of) missing Father's Day sucked.
After chatting with Dad, I went and hopped on a bus to Yokochuu, bound for an afternoon in Tokyo. Of course it started raining the second I saw the bus coming, so I was without an umbrella for the whole rather remarkably rainy day. I had brought my camera, but due to being umbrella-less (I didn't see any uber-cheap ones) I didn't take any pictures aside from one of Pockets Plus One, which I was sheltered by the train tracks for. Getting to Shinagawa was pretty fast, as usual. I was a little apprehensive at first when I got on a limited express that was not labeled "Shinagawa", but rather the stop directly AFTER it. I was just plucking up the courage after having pre-formed my sentences to ask the guy beside me about it when the train announcer mentioned Shinagawa in his list of stops. Oh well, I'm sure I'll have many other opportunities to speak Japanese. In Japan. ;D
I took the Yamanote to Akihabara, and realized upon arrival that I had again forgotten to research where I actually wanted to go from the station. I proceeded to wander around the streets nearby the station until I found one that looked more populated, which I then made a beeline for. Sure enough, it was Chuuou street, and I was able to hunt down Pockets for a picture.
For lunch I ate at Yoshinoya because, well, why not? I had a gyu-nabe-don, which was pretty good. I was clearly a Yoshinoya noob though, because as I was eating I noticed many people ordering the same thing, but with a raw-egg side that they mixed into the meal. Yummmm... I'll do that next time maybe, if Mom promises not to get ulcers thinking about it.
Since it was raining pretty hard, I didn't really feel like walking around (or at least that's my excuse, OK I know it's a weak one) so I headed straight for the CLUB SEGA arcade beside Pockets, where I got horribly sick and missed most of my vacation in Grade 11. I'm full of great ideas, eh? A new Virtua Fighter game came out recently, which was evident from the fact that the entire basement floor of the arcade was devoted entirely to that single game. They had maybe.... 50 seats? It was incredible. I kept looking around for other games on the bottom floor, because I was having trouble believing that they seriously had an entire floor of Virtua Fighter. I ceased to have trouble believing this when I remembered that I was in fucking AKIHABARA. Derp.
I'm incredibad at 3D fighters so I went up a couple of floors and found Melty Blood. I watched some people play for a bit and then tried my hand against the player that appeared to be the weakest and got ABSOLUTELY DESTROYED. It wasn't pretty. In other news I'm now BFFs with the left hand corner, and I'm going to be having nightmares about White Len and her magic yo-yo OTGs for the rest of my life. It didn't help that I haven't played Melty Blood on a stick since the last time I was in Japan (oh wait we played a game at Rush, didn't we?), but I'm pretty sure I'd be totally outclassed by the players here even if I was comfortable. So, having being totally humiliated, I naturally sat down at the next machine, opposite a player who appeared to be better and tried my luck again. I actually did alright in some of the matches, getting him down to less than half life off of footsies and pseudo-crossups (I can't do real ones, are they even possible in the MB engine?), with a generous dose of random imba EX-Hieros, but it was still 3-0. I felt very good about my progress with comfort on the arcade stick and all, so I put in another coin, and ended up hitting him once in the third match to deny him the triple perfect. D:
I then went upstairs to investigate the promises of Project Diva that posters all over the place had been making, and I wasn't disappointed. They had four machines in a corner and a lineup the same size as Ikebukuro, who only had one machine. I was going to play, but then I reconsidered, as if I started I probably wouldn't stop until I had to leave for Yokochuu. I went back outside, and to the next block where another CLUB SEGA was waiting for me hahahaha. I took this as a sign and went inside and upstairs, and proceeded to get destroyed at Melty Blood again (though not as badly as last time). I also tried out BlazBlue, where I confirmed that Japan has at least one Nu player that's better than Nathaniel (;D), and 3rd Strike, where I actually fared the best. I never actually won, but I didn't really get blown up either. I must admit it's pretty hard to win at Street Fighter when you can't do Z-motions on command. >_< I spotted MvC2 of all things and beat arcade mode because no one ever sat down opposite me. Hooray my first victory of the day! Not really. D: I went upstairs in this CLUB SEGA and found 4 or 5 more Project Divas, but with a rather significant lineup. They've got a bunch of Project Diva stuff hanging around beside the line, including what appeared to be iroha's autograph. O_O Not that surprising, I guess, it IS Akiba... I went back to the other CLUB SEGA to play Project Diva for the next couple of hours.
An interesting thing to note is that the CLUB SEGA one block away from Pockets has slightly chic, beautifully clean and freshly scented bathrooms, while the one beside Pockets is rife with perplexing, noisome odours (can you tell I'm missing native English speakers a little?), complete with what I really hope was vomit next to the squatter. D:
For dinner I went to the curry place near the station that's called "It's time for Homemade Curry" or something like that. It sounds bizarrely like an indie band's name, but I badly needed to remedy the fact that I'd only had curry once in Japan prior to tonight. I decided to try the kurobuta-katsu curry, and proceeded to try to purchase a ticket for it from the vending machine. For some reason it wouldn't take my money, so I had to beep my Pasmo to pay. >_> It's now under 10,000円 again; I must correct this (Pasmo builds interest right? XD) Speaking of my Pasmo, I think it's levelling up. Bus trips seem to be a little cheaper than they used to, and it definitely couldn't have anything to do with the fact that I take a different line almost every time I go anywhere. Nope, it's probably levelling up...
The curry was decent. It didn't stand out much from places that don't claim to be homemade, so I'm a touch suspicious. The katsu, however, was DELICIOUS. I may or may not have been incredibly hungry at that point, so I will have to verify my findings as soon as possible. In fact, maybe I should get enough data points to do regression and make the deliciousness statistically significant. ;D
After dinner I went back to Shinagawa by Yamanote and then back to Yokochuu by limited express on the Keikyuu line. On the train I saw an ad that abbreviated the line's name as "kq" in a URL. Also on the train, I sat between a black woman with the most amazing hair (it looked like a colourful woven bag perched upside-down on her head) and a Japanese girl who was trying with all her might not to fall asleep against me. It was quite humourous watching her fall farther and farther into sleep as her head drifted closer and closer to my arm, until it would finally touch me and then she'd jerk back up for all of 5 seconds before the scene repeated itself. Eventually after like 4 cycles she got fed up with it and fell asleep ALL OVER the rather older guy on the other side of her who was trying very hard to look like there wasn't a 20-something year old girl probably drooling on him. I really hope she knew him, for his sake.
I got off at Yokochuu much earlier than I expected (I forgot that my 2 hour trip time includes the bus ride to Ikkidzuka), so I wandered around for a bit. I found lots of net/manga cafes, whose counter attendants all looked at me as if I were some sort of alien when I asked if they had StarCraft. Some were advertising online games so I thought I'd try, but apparently no. D: I really am going to have to get my own internet. I also think I may have found Yokochuu's red-light street, either that or the lady that appeared as if on cue when I turned around after seeing how sketchy and dim the bars on the street looked was asking me if I wanted an ACTUAL massage. O_O No thanks. I had to ask her to repeat herself at first because she really really did not look at all like an "adult recreation engineer" and I thought she might be asking a legitimate question. I scurried back onto the main drag and asked around a bit more about StarCraft. I'll have to sashay more as I walk to avoid such encounters in the future.
I went back to my dorm and accidentally pigged out on senbei before writing up this blog. D: I'm going to have to stop buying it because I can't stop myself from eating it. It's too delicious! And the harder kinds destroy the roof of my mouth, ouchie.
Anyways, I'd best get to bed so I can get up to chat with Mom and Jiuna in the morning. Ciao!
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