July 12: Presentation Time!
Ugh... Last night I checked the clock when I turned out my light and it was 11:00. Three hours later, I was still awake. >_< Bleagh. I felt pretty shitty this morning as a result, but I managed to get to work on time (certainly no running though). I ate dorm breakfast of fake crab salad and pork with stewed (soy?) beans, both of which were pretty good, though I'm still not terribly partial to the flavour of fake crab by itself.
In the morning at work I reviewed my presentation slides and looked over the LDA and Gibbs sampling papers again. My next task is to implement Gibbs sampling to estimate the parameters for my multinomial mixture (instead of EM). I spent some time on a side-task, which was to determine how to use LDA with Gibbs to make recommendations, which is a rather short task to do mindlessly, but I tried to actually understand it, which ended up taking a fair while. I was ultimately unsuccessful, but my efforts paid off when Kabutoya-san explained the conceptual aspect of recommending with LDA and I had sufficient familiarity with the material that I understood what he was talking about (or at least I think I did haha). Amazingly enough, my tests from last night hadn't actually finished by the time I got in this morning. I timed them pretty much perfectly though (totally by accident), as it turned out that by the time I had finished entering and formatting the data that was ready when I got in (trials for latent variables Z=10, 20, ..., 90), the data for Z=100 was ready haha.
At lunch I ate some kind of noodle thing that was cold noodles on the side, which you dip into warm broth that has wakame and an egg brick and some other stuff. It wasn't that great actually, but I can see that if someone other than the cafeteria did it it could be good hahaha. After eating I played handiball with my coworkers, which was silly and fun as always. There were a LOT of people playing today, which makes 4-on-4 better. When there are a lot of people, you're bound to get some jokers in the bunch, and some humour can permeate the language barrier without even trying haha.
In the afternoon I gave my presentation, which turned out to be longer and significantly more stressful than I'd imagined, because they asked real questions at the end! D: Luckily I feel like my answers were half-decent, and some of the people who were asking questions later complimented me on my presentation, but that could just be them being polite. They unfortunately had a lot of fodder for difficult questions, because my mixture model had a really, really terrible result on one of my trials, and I had been highlighting all the minimum accuracy runs in bold red text. I of course got asked "how come your mixture model can have such bad performance?", and unfortunately my answer was essentially that I don't know, but I did offer some credible sources of problems that could have combined for a "perfect failure". When I implement CGS (it might just be Gibbs, not collapsed Gibbs in this case, I'm not yet sure) for my mixture model, I hope for it to work beautifully, as that will demonstrate that the problem was likely a result of the convergence of my EM algorithm on a bad local maximum, and not just some random bug that I couldn't find.
After my presentation I worked more on understanding LDA and CGS, and by the end of the day I was feeling pretty decent about my grasp of CGS (which is the more pertinent subject at the moment). Unfortunately this was shaken as Kabutoya-san pointed out a problem with my derivation of a recommendation from my mixture model using CGS, which involved something I had completely not forseen. He seemed to think that it was fair for me to miss that point though, as the information that changes from LDA (the model that my paper on CGS works on) when going to a multinomial mixture is kind of buried amidst gamma functions and subscripts haha. I only had about half an hour to try to wrap my head around the implications of the change Kabutoya-san pointed out before I needed to leave for the welcome party, so at present I don't know how drastically my derivation will need to change.
When I was getting on the bus with Yamamoto-san and Nishida-san, I had the horrible realization that I had never cancelled my dorm dinner for tonight! I talked to Yamamoto-san and Nishida-san about this, and they decided that Kabutoya-san would have Oohashi-san's phone number, so Yamamoto-san messaged him and got the number for me. I waited until we were off the bus in Yokochuu and then called her, and she was wild and loud as usual, but she didn't seem resentful that I had cancelled my dinner 20 minutes before I'd normally be showing up to eat it (I doubt I get a refund though, as that would be a little unreasonable). Nishida-san and Kurauchi-san said that we were too early getting to Yokochuu, and that we needed to kill 20 minutes before heading to the restaurant for the party. Kurauchi-san suggested we go to the arcade haha. >_< No objections here! I made a mock-fuss about "my secret hobby being revealed" and showed them my Project Diva account card haha. I think they are beginning to grasp the magnitude of my nerdiness, and it's turning out nicely, as Nishida-san and Fujimura-san (the group leader, who is maybe in his 40s or 50s) talked to me about video and board games for about half of the party.
At the arcade I didn't end up playing Project Diva at all, because we first watched Kurauchi-san play Drummania and then Nishida-san invited me to play Guitar Freaks with him. It turns out he hadn't ever played much before, and so he was rather happy that I could carry him through the songs he picked haha. On the last one he was a bit sadistic though, and picked a song labelled as "47" difficulty, when we had been playing ones below 20 previously. >_< Oh well it was fun until we failed miserably, which put us at just the right time to leave for the party haha.
The party was held at a place called 949, for which the restaurant gives the reading "Ku Shi Kyuu", which means something to do with skewers (I couldn't read the second kanji to look it up later). Sure enough, dinner involved some skewers, but not as many as I would expect for a place with a name like 949. The most interesting thing served was a salad dressed with some kind of sesame vinaigrette that had rainbow tapioca balls in it! It made me really miss bubble tea. D: I asked Nishida-san about bubble tea, just in case it had become a thing in Japan since Jiuna last came (and I had somehow missed it thus far), but alas he confirmed that such a thing was not popular in Japan. There was also some chicken with some kind of salsa on it, some beef slices, some skewers and some king crab (just a little, but still delicious!). Fujimura-san asked me whether I had had "tarabakani" (king crab) before, and I told him that I hadn't, and confessed that I'm quite afraid of spindly crabs. >_< I said that eating them is totally OK though haha.
The party was quite enjoyable, as sitting with Nishida-san and Fujimura-san yielded good conversation about university, culture, travel, video and board games and music. I introduced Nishida-san to Scissor Sisters after we talked a bit about Shiina Ringo, and he said that he was going to look them up on YouTube once he got home (which I'm not sure if I believe, though I can hope), but he had a little trouble believing that the person singing "Any Which Way" is a man haha. I guess falsetto isn't something that's that popular in Japanese rock... Iimura-san (the woman who sat across from me who often plays volleyball at lunch) couldn't believe it either, and wanted to hear more, so I put on "Filthy/Gorgeous" haha. I told them that he sometimes sings in a more normal voice as well.
After the party I was still really, really hungry and I had just watched the bus to Ikkidzuka pass by, so I went to the Yoshinoya for a Gyuu-nabe-don haha. It's still 380円 for a large. Hooray! ;D
Once I got back to my dorm I started some laundry and got down to blogging. Tomorrow is my "Saturday", and I am going to call NTT to try to sort out why I don't have Internet. If their call centre is in India as well, I am going to be mad, because that means there is no reason why they shouldn't have better hours! Ah well, it is what it is, and I really REALLY hope that after tomorrow I will have my own Internet connection (or at least that it will be in the works in earnest).
Night!
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