July 22: Clarity is Wonderful
I got up today feeling pretty damn bad, but in a not-sick way (so far, crossing my fingers). I ate dorm breakfast of stewed puffy tofu with peas and some hanpen (and miso soup and rice haha). It has been DELIGHFULLY cool of late (26 degrees in my room right now, but with a cool breeze), due to the typhoon. According to Nishida-san (and the brilliant sunshine, derp) it has actually missed us, so I will not be seeing a typhoon quite yet.
I got to work on time, and worked on my presentation, surprise surprise! I clarified with Kabutoya-san what I should be doing with respect to detail in the derivations in my presentation, which was good, because at the same time I learned that I am not actually be covering the IPLSA papers. Yay! I was kinda worried about that, because I've been spending all my time on LDA and CGS trying to bring that part up to my standards. I still had time to include it, but I was resigned to having it not be as good as the rest.
Apparently next week I will be going to Kyoto for something to do with my research with Kabutoya-san! I haven't the slightest idea what I might need to go to Kyoto for, but it sounds exciting regardless haha. I wonder when next week I'll be going. I hope it's not too near to when Jiuna shows up, but I doubt it will be *knocks on wood*.
At lunch I ate something called like "hiyashi tan-tan men" or something, which was decent. It was a bowl of spicy tepid broth and soba noodles, with some goodies like charsiu and stuff in it. I've liked other stuff better, but it wasn't offensive. After eating I played handiball, and it was beach-style so I had a lot of fun. My shoulder is still slightly gibbled, but it only prevents me from serving, at which I am getting better with my underhand. I wish I knew what was irritating it, because it is being very slow to go away...
In the afternoon I worked more on my presentation, which goes reasonably quickly now that I can just lose myself in writing out the derivations for my models. Or at least I COULD lose myself in it, if PowerPoint wasn't crapping its pants all the time! At one point today I could repeatably crash PowerPoint by typing a "z" in a specific place, though I did not confirm whether or not other characters would get the same result. I don't think PowerPoint likes me triple-nesting subscripts, but it's necessary unless I want to create even more of a nomenclature nightmare. I would use just regular subscripts, but for some reason they don't save properly, so I'm forced to do my triple-nesting. >_< Excel is also SUUUUPER slow when you start stacking up the mathematical formulae, which is kind of dumb, since I'm just doing entry-level derivations on a brand-new computer with a million gigabytes of RAM (16 is a million in base... OK fine I give up, whatever). Hopefully after this presentation Kabutoya-san will let me switch to something that people actually use, like LaTEX or something (although maybe I'll want to go back to PowerPoint after having actually used it hahaha).
The afternoon went by, and my presentation is now like, 11 slides larger, all of which are stuffed with math. At about 6:15 I left the office, as I was getting kind of hungry (I didn't get kicked out). I walked home, and it was an incredibly pleasant experience, because the air was less humid than usual and much, much cooler. It felt a bit like a cooler day in summer in Vancouver, actually. I got home and ate dorm dinner of pork and green peppers over rice, with pork, mushroom and shrimp chow mein. The chow mein actually somewhat resembled Chinese food, much to my surprise haha, and it tasted pretty good too.
After dinner I gave Nishino-san his present and then watched some StarCraft. I unfortunately missed the first foreigner all-kill, where QXC apparently wiped out IM, including MVP in the fourth set (one of the best players in the world). I then typed up this blog and now I'm going to go to bed haha.
Night!
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