Jun 16: My First Game of Handiball League
The morning went quite normally today. I shower before I go to bed, so there isn't much of a morning routine to go though as I get breakfast prepared for me by Oohashi-san. I got to the bus stop quite early for the 8:29 bus, so I had to wait around again. >_< Today I was able to use my new ID card to get in and out of the office! I no longer need to report to reception every morning (not that it was a particular inconvenience).
The morning was pretty uneventful; I read the paper surveying recommender systems and did some exercises from the next chapter of Programming Collective Intelligence. Kabutoya-san said he was impressed with my progress so far, which confounds me, since all I've been doing so far is exercises from a book that provides solutions in Python (which is only a stone's throw from Ruby). I'll take the praise though, because I did understand what he said about him being "lucky" because I didn't need to ask him any questions, as my experience with some of my classmates is that they "solve problems" by asking other people for the answer. D: In any case I'm glad that I'm making a good impression, regardless of whether I feel I particularly deserve it or not haha.
At lunchtime I had "tandoori" chicken, which was surprisingly distant from my understanding of any permutation of the dish, given my current increased geographical proximity to its birthplace. OK, I'm lying. I'm not surprised at all, but I am constantly impressed by the capacity of cultures (including Canadian "Chinese" food, though it's mostly extinct in Vancouver/Richmond) to call something totally different the same thing. It was good enough though, and of course I was originally going for curry, but didn't want to pass up the opportunity to find out what exactly Japan had decided to call "tandoori". One of these days I'm going to have curry, and it's going to be an incredibly underwhelming experience. As I'm writing this, I'm realizing that I've been in Japan for 7 days, and I've only had curry once (and it was possibly even boutique curry, not the brick stuff)!!! I'll have to make sure to correct that this weekend. :D
In the afternoon I did some more Rubying. I'm doing an exercise that involves with grabbing a ton of blog data via programmatically reading RSS feeds. As it turns out, the suggested Python RSS library is a bit more sophisticated than Ruby's built in one. I don't know anything about RSS really, so I spent quite some time trying to figure out what exactly was going wrong with certain feeds before I managed to trace the problem back to the Ruby parsing function being able to return (at least) two different types of object representing an RSS feed. I think this might be due to there being two different actual protocols? Anyways, now my code handles it whatever the reason is, and I got to move on to discovering more problems, which led to me learning to handle exceptions in Ruby (super easy, syntax-wise). Did you know that if you publish a book with a list of websites in it, sometimes by the time a person reads it, those links will be outdated or dead? Oh well there's no real better way of doing things, and the exception handling appears to be mostly working, although the whole show's a bit messy, as there appear to be at least three different subclasses of exception that happen while running through the feeds listed by the book.
Today "after" work I played my first game of Handiball league. "After" is in quotation marks, because the games start at 5:30, which means the players have to stop work early, and the people from the same projects (but on a different team) come and watch. We played against the defending champions from last year, and we lost, but at least we took it to game 3. The whole thing is so silly, when I'm not playing I'm laughing almost the whole time. Yamamoto-san, who was beside me in the player rotation, and therefore off when I was off, found either the game or me funny and did a good bit of laughing herself. She was one of the Hayashi-mockers, though, so she could just want to laugh every time she sees me. D:
Speaking of games, and of losing; ugh. That's all. Ugh. D:<
I went home after Handiball and ate dinner at the dorm. Again, it was pretty good. Even though I'm in a foreign country and eating local food, Mom's cooking is still much more exciting, which is pretty impressive. :D Somehow I'm really starting to miss Balsamic Chicken especially. Uh-oh I'm only a week in! D: Oohashi-san uses full-fat ground beef, apparently. I realized when I broke open what I think they call Hamburg Steak (a rather large ground meat blob) that I must not eat the full-fat stuff often, because I was like "what's all this liquid doing here???" and then I was like "OH MY." Not a guilt-free meal haha.
After dinner I did some laundry and hung around in my room for the evening. It's raining here and things close up pretty early. I have found a local greengrocer on a better route to the bus stop, but it's only open if I go for the later buses in the morning, which I don't want to miss by farting around shopping for veggies. I saw biwa in the supermarket, which I kind of want to try, but they only came in a small 500+円 bag. Screw that! I may cave if I can't find it anywhere else though. Or raid the tree that's in the neightbourhood (lol yeah right).
Tomorrow's Friday! I have to e-mail Yuji and Osamu before I forget so that I can start to set up plans to visit them.
Anyways, I left blogging way too late and so now I'm going to be tired in the morning QQ. See you all later!
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