Mommy my objective function isn't playing fair!!!

July 3: Working on Sunday sucks.

Bleargh.  I think I have been psychologically conditioned to experience two days off in a row after a period of working, because it was really, really hard to get up and moving this morning.  It took me longer than it ever has to eat, get showered and out of the door.  >_<  I'm not sure how I feel about that conditioning...

Breakfast today was heavily garlicked eggplants, a bowl of tiny fish with oroshi (grated radish), and some kind of stewed cabbage/wiener mixture (on rice with miso soup).  I quite liked the cabbage/weiner thing; I think it had been boiled in a soy-based broth or something, and it was quite tasty.

Kabutoya-san was taking the day off today, so I was on my own to make my way through the work that he had left me.  Luckily, there was no theoretical aspects to get hung up on and left out to dry, just programming.  In the morning I took a second stab at trying to understand the derivation of the Q-function (which is not a Q-function according to Wikipedia) from the likelihood of the parameters given the observation, but didn't have any success.  I got somewhere kind of close in my derivation, but Kabutoya-san didn't show all his steps, and I got stuck really close to the end. >_<  I appeared to have a product rather than a sum occurring where no product should dare go. D:  It takes a surprising amount of time to try to work these formulae for me, because I don't have much background in probability, so I have to really think and cross-check the substitutions I make.  I gave up and started coding using Kabutoya-san's result after a couple of hours of banging my head against it. D:<

At lunch I ate "murugi" curry, which someone told me was "Indian".  I find it a little amusing that people here may actually think that their various varieties of Japanese curry may come from other parts of the world.  I picked it up anyways and yep, it was definitely Japanese curry (though they had Garam Masala to sprinkle on top hahaha).  Oh well, I like Japanese curry, and it was quite a generous helping, especially given the fact that it doesn't really cost more than the smaller dishes.  >_>

I played handiball with my coworkers today, and it was 3 to a side, which meant it was more fun than 4 to a side, but less fun than 2. ;D  I am getting more consistent, but I am still really bad hahaha.  I think my fast twitch muscles are totally gone after not doing anything with them since tennis lessons in high school.  Oh wait skiing hahaha.  Well there goes that hypothesis; I guess I'm just bad.

After lunch Nishida-san took me to the company library in search of an introductory probability book that will hopefully cure what ails me.  It didn't actually help with the Q-function I was stuck on, but while I was coding I looked back at the last step I had successfully written down on the paper suspiciously, and as it turns out I may just be an idiot.  If my derivation up to that point is sound, then I've got the whole derivation down OK, because that interruptingproduct (tm) was INSIDE A LOGARITHM.  Great job RJ!  Use more brackets next time, hun.  Sigh.  Oh well the good news is that I may actually understand what I'm coding right now.  Of course writing about it here means that I'll go to work tomorrow and see a huge flaw in my work and be back to square one haha.

Today's coding was actually in C++, rather than Ruby.  Kabutoya-san is using this model to introduce me to coding a C++ library to be used by a Ruby script, which is a common and excellent thing, because using Ruby for heavy-duty computation is like telling a snail on Mercury to communicate with another snail on Haumea via (space) carrier pigeon.  Amazingly enough, I actually did not know how to spell pigeon until just now haha.  I wrote it down as "pidgeon" and was like "that looks not quite right..." and so I wrote down "pigeon" and then wondered if I was tricking myself or something.  I had to look it up.  D:  Apparently "pidgeon" is an archaic spelling, so I guess I'm just oldschool.  How embarrassing!

I left work after completing the basic coding of the model, at around my usual time of 6:20-ish.  Once I got to the bus stop, however, I was greeted by the lovely absence of my bus on the Sunday schedule.  D:<  So they changed the bus schedule for NTT's sake, so that people working on Sunday can actually get to and from work, but for some reason they made it so that the :26/:56 buses run from the morning all the way until FOUR.  Great!  So, just when people might actually want to go home, there are less buses (about one every 50 minutes).  Diuuuuuuuuu!!!  I was made rather crabby by this rather ridiculous schedule.  If you're going to do us the courtesy of changing the schedule for our sake, make it one that's useful to us!  "All help is not helpful"!  I sat at the bus stop for half an hour listening to "Jesus Doesn't Love Me Anymore" in my misery (haha it's actually a pretty upbeat song). ;D  At least I got to read some of my borrowed probability textbook.  I had asked my coworkers today at lunch where I could buy textbooks in English here, and their general answer was "don't".  I found this rather mysterious, because they all have a working knowledge (or close to it) of technical English, and the company library had tons of English textbooks.  Maybe they're trying to help me save money or something by withholding information.  >_<

At the dorm I had dorm supper of some kind of delicious fried noodle business. It had nori and beef/pork on it, but I don't think it was yakisoba as I know it.  Oh well it tasted good too, and the chicken and cucumber side dish was pretty good too.  Since dinner I've been flaking in my room catching up on StarCraft and Shoryuken news, because the net connection is pretty good today.  I'm going to brush my teeth and play Touhou for a bit before perusing my Japanese textbook until I fall asleep.  I find that when I'm the one speaking, I appear to be able to communicate *relatively* effectively (although I'm pretty sure I sound like a tool), but when I get replies it's much harder to understand.  I've found that for even very simple topics, people will sometimes use synonyms for verbs I know, which of course totally screws me haha.  Oh well, studying will hopefully fix a *bit* of that, but I am terrible at remembering vocab.  Blegh.

Night, y'all.