August 30: Super Math Bros.
Today's blog is unfortunately going to look quite a lot like yesterday's, as today was pretty much all about the math as well.
This morning I got up and ate dorm breakfast, which was really small again, but I can't for the life of me remember what was there (other than rice and miso soup). Maybe it was just that small!!! Or not. I got to work on time and started mathing it up for the rest of the day. By the time I left work, I had my joint distribution, my update equations and my parameter estimation equations (the fixings for doing CGS) all set and ready to go. I need to get them checked by Kabutoya-san on Friday before I get to coding, which is fine, because I will probably not feel much like jumping straight into coding first thing after the weekend.
At lunch I ate Java curry again, because their sauce-katsu-don looked a little... under the weather. D: For some reason the Java curry seemed a lot hotter today, and I actually had trouble finishing it due to spiciness pain in my mouth. My resolve to not be hungry in the afternoon held out though, and I ended up being able to eat it all (for nothing though, as I was hungry in the afternoon anyways). After eating I played handiball again, and I was half-decent still. My serves were really good today, and I went on like a 8-point streak of aces or near-aces. It's kind of unfair though, because I'm tall enough that I can just kind of smash it straight forward and it will shoot just past the net and then start wobbling wildly due to the silly ball. >_< Oh well, it works! ;D It will take some getting used to when I come back to Canada and am average-or-slightly-below again. D:
In the afternoon nothing too eventful happened, other than eavesdropping on the lady-whose-job-description-I-haven't-the-slightest-clue-about, who was whooping with laughter. She was speaking a little too quickly (between bouts of laughter) for me, but what I surmised was that she had tried to order a mechanical pencil, and ended up somehow getting 40 boxes (320 individual pencils) of them instead. She may have not even wanted a "sharp pen" (what Japanese people call mechanical pencils), but rather something to do with the word "sharpen". If she was trying to order a sharpener, that would explain why she didn't notice that her "one" pencil probably cost like, 10000円. O_O
I left work at 6:15 due to it being Refresh Day (and due to having finished off my parameter estimation equations), and found that I was actually the second-last person to leave from PIG. For some reason, today people actually took Refresh Day seriously. O_O I have no idea why...
I went to the Yokosan to pick up Akiba supplies for tomorrow, as the Sarushima BBQ (sounds frightening, I know >_<) I had been invited to by Kurauchi-san was cancelled due to typ(em)oon warnings. He sent me a delightful email saying that that the BBQ had been cancelled, and that some day we would "take revenge". I responded with an email saying "I train now, in anticipation of that day". His English is the weakest out of the PIG people, so it was nice to be able to have a short laugh in a medium that's likely more comfortable for him.
Dorm dinner tonight was ramen with a side of pork and green pepper mixture (and miso soup and rice). It was pretty good (I REALLY liked the green pepper dealie), though the ramen was too salty to drink the soup. D: I didn't see other people drinking the soup, so I hope that it's OK not to, and that I haven't offended the provider of roughly 48% of my meals... D: I had a hankering for dessert when I went to the Yokosan earlier, so I had bought a Haagen Dazs Matcha Cripsy Sand (why is their only matcha dessert 270+円) and put it in the fridge. When I went to retrieve it, I found the grapefruit I had put in there this morning for the exact purpose of having dessert on hand come this evening. >_< Hooray for double-dessert! I realize I could have saved either for later, but the calories don't count when you're not supposed to be eating it, right? ;D
It's now time for bed, as I want to try to get up decently early to get a nice, full day in Akiba, since an entire week away has felt veeery long after the vacation. D: Also, I want to try to do some shopping on Jiuna's behalf, and doing so in the morning on a weekday is probably the most advantageous time to do so. Night!
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Monday, August 29, 2011
TL;DR - "I did math all day. The end."
August 29: Werk, werk
Today's blog will be pretty short, as there's really not much to write about at all. O_O I pretty much did math all day trying to get the CGS equations for my new model sorted out. One batch of equations (the largest) is done, and there are two more batches to go (the harder ones).
Dorm breakfast was a harusame mixture (tasty), and some soybeans stewed in a black mess (may have been seaweed, not so tasty) with a couple of siu mai, miso soup and rice. I didn't much like the black mess, but it and the breakfast as a whole was huuuuge. O_O I would not like to try to make breakfast mass predictions, as the sample variance is at present rather high.
At work, well I've actually pretty much gone over that. There were no changes in research direction today, which I suppose is somehow actually notable. >_< The day flew by, or at least it did until 4pm, when I hit a brick wall and ended up with a paper to read when I went to Kabutoya-san for some insight.
At lunch I ate wasabi-lemon-shoyu chicken, which was REALLY GOOD (:D), but also KIND OF SMALL (D:), which is frustrating, because when I sat down to eat it, I noticed that Kurauchi-san, who was sitting beside me, had the same thing, and it was of a more meal-appropriate size. D:< Also, apparently full employees get 7000円 per month for cafeteria meals, which explains why the cafeteria can get away with being not-really-all-that-cheap, the costs are "subsidized" in a manner of speaking. After eating I played handiball with the usual crew, and I was decent again today, which was nice. I also got the opportunity to point out to Nishida-san that some other groups actually have a plan when they play, and that it might be nice for us to have one. He agreed, and said that he and Matsubayashi-san have already started trying to get a basic set-spike plan going. Nishida-san and I started our own set-spike thing today. He's actually taller than me, so if we get it in any kind of working condition with him as the spiker, I have a feeling it will end up being completely broken. >_<
After work I walked home. The weather is really pleasant at dusk now. It's not too hot and it's not cold, and somehow it isn't even that muggy. This morning the sun was actually dizzyingly strong (like it was at Comiket), so going and hiding in the office until dusk was perfect. :D Dorm dinner was an odd kind of saucy beef thing over rice with a small leafless salad on the side.
After eating I talked for quite some time with Yasu-san, one of the new recruits who I have actually spoken with before. He spent 8 months at Waterloo, and his English is quite good. He wanted to know about tangible differences between the US and Canada other than poutine, and I was pretty much stuck. It's easy to talk about how Canadians and Americans are different, or how our cultures are different, but how many foods, activities, musicians, etc do Canadians have that Americans don't? I just now realize I should have mentioned hockey fanaticism, since one can actually go to a hockey game and experience it, rather than just spelling things with the proper number of 'u's. We talked a bit about travel and stuff as well, and it turns out he's going on a 5-day whirlwind trip to Italy tomorrow hahaha. His is for a conference though, so I don't know that he'll be sightseeing like Jiuna and I did on our whirlwind 5-day trip. I warned him that after 24 hours in continuous transit, you start to lose all hope. D:
Anyways, it's 12 again somehow, so I'd best get to bed before I end up digging myself deeper into sleep deficit rather than getting myself out. Night!
Today's blog will be pretty short, as there's really not much to write about at all. O_O I pretty much did math all day trying to get the CGS equations for my new model sorted out. One batch of equations (the largest) is done, and there are two more batches to go (the harder ones).
Dorm breakfast was a harusame mixture (tasty), and some soybeans stewed in a black mess (may have been seaweed, not so tasty) with a couple of siu mai, miso soup and rice. I didn't much like the black mess, but it and the breakfast as a whole was huuuuge. O_O I would not like to try to make breakfast mass predictions, as the sample variance is at present rather high.
At work, well I've actually pretty much gone over that. There were no changes in research direction today, which I suppose is somehow actually notable. >_< The day flew by, or at least it did until 4pm, when I hit a brick wall and ended up with a paper to read when I went to Kabutoya-san for some insight.
At lunch I ate wasabi-lemon-shoyu chicken, which was REALLY GOOD (:D), but also KIND OF SMALL (D:), which is frustrating, because when I sat down to eat it, I noticed that Kurauchi-san, who was sitting beside me, had the same thing, and it was of a more meal-appropriate size. D:< Also, apparently full employees get 7000円 per month for cafeteria meals, which explains why the cafeteria can get away with being not-really-all-that-cheap, the costs are "subsidized" in a manner of speaking. After eating I played handiball with the usual crew, and I was decent again today, which was nice. I also got the opportunity to point out to Nishida-san that some other groups actually have a plan when they play, and that it might be nice for us to have one. He agreed, and said that he and Matsubayashi-san have already started trying to get a basic set-spike plan going. Nishida-san and I started our own set-spike thing today. He's actually taller than me, so if we get it in any kind of working condition with him as the spiker, I have a feeling it will end up being completely broken. >_<
After work I walked home. The weather is really pleasant at dusk now. It's not too hot and it's not cold, and somehow it isn't even that muggy. This morning the sun was actually dizzyingly strong (like it was at Comiket), so going and hiding in the office until dusk was perfect. :D Dorm dinner was an odd kind of saucy beef thing over rice with a small leafless salad on the side.
After eating I talked for quite some time with Yasu-san, one of the new recruits who I have actually spoken with before. He spent 8 months at Waterloo, and his English is quite good. He wanted to know about tangible differences between the US and Canada other than poutine, and I was pretty much stuck. It's easy to talk about how Canadians and Americans are different, or how our cultures are different, but how many foods, activities, musicians, etc do Canadians have that Americans don't? I just now realize I should have mentioned hockey fanaticism, since one can actually go to a hockey game and experience it, rather than just spelling things with the proper number of 'u's. We talked a bit about travel and stuff as well, and it turns out he's going on a 5-day whirlwind trip to Italy tomorrow hahaha. His is for a conference though, so I don't know that he'll be sightseeing like Jiuna and I did on our whirlwind 5-day trip. I warned him that after 24 hours in continuous transit, you start to lose all hope. D:
Anyways, it's 12 again somehow, so I'd best get to bed before I end up digging myself deeper into sleep deficit rather than getting myself out. Night!
Sunday, August 28, 2011
The winds of change are a veritable typ(h)oon at the moment...
August 28: Actually Working on Work Again
This morning I got up and ate dorm breakfast, which consisted of stewed chicken and cabbage with salted cut of salmon (and rice and miso soup). It was all rather small though. I wonder if the salmon was expensive or something, because I don't believe I've ever actually seen a dorm breakfast that small before. D: For some reason I was fine until lunch though, so no worries there.
In the morning I worked away at the variational inference problem I had been assigned. I was starting to get somewhere on the actual problem itself by 11:50 (not just teaching myself how to solve the problem using a related one with more available information), which was when Kabutoya-san showed up and told me to drop it and gave me something else to do. I can't say I'm terribly surprised, as the variational inference problem was kind of out of left field, and I had just been given a new research direction that it's not really too in line with. My new task better resembles what I understood my new research direction to be, so hopefully I will actually get to finish it... >_<
At lunch I ate hiyashi wakame ramen (why have they been making such nasty-looking other food lately!?). I have no idea why, but I don't get hungry in the afternoon after eating it, even though it's like, buckwheat noodles and some seaweed and that's it. O_O They must marinate the ingredients in lard or something, but it doesn't really taste like that, so I'm not quite sure what's going on...
After eating I played handiball with the usual suspects. I was alright again today, which was nice. When I was rotated out, Kurauchi-san asked me "Are you a person who hates losing?" Haha oh damn. I asked him why he asked that, if I was being too competitive or something, and he said that wasn't it, but I'm not sure if I believe him. >_< I was behaving in a perfectly normal fashion as far as I was concerned, and I'm not even a ballhog like some of the other people in the PIG group are, so I really have no idea where the question came from. Unfortunately that means I can't fix it. D:
After lunch I read a new paper Kabutoya-san gave me, which took an inordinately long time. D:< The authors were not native English speakers, and so their sentences were often kind of... backward, somehow. "Manifold" appeared to be their favourite word, and they used it many, many times, along with a lot of other more-complicated-than-necessary words. Did you know that "manifold" can be a noun, adjective, verb and adverb? Cool stuff. All-in-all, it was a pretty horrible read, which is unfortunate, because the actual content of the paper was good, it was just buried in an excrutiating level of detail, with said detail itself being buried in unnecessarily complicated language. >_< Trying to actually understand what was happening in the paper took a fat chunk out of my afternoon, and it was only like 12 pages long. D:
After making it through the demon-paper, I got to actually start doing stuff for the new model I'm supposed to use. Kabutoya-san just kind of handed the description of it to me and was like "Here, do Collapsed Gibbs Sampling on this", and my eyes kind of bugged out, as the graphical representation takes up like half a page. My previous experience in CGS consisted of working on two models that had one latent variable, one observed variable, two parameters, and two hyperparameters per model. Now, there are three latent variables, five observed variables, six parameters, and six hyperparameters. O_O I guess it's flattering that Kabutoya-san didn't seem to think giving me any help with it was necessary (or he's just too busy haha), but I honestly sort of just stared at it wide-eyed for a while thinking "Oh shi-- Guess I'm getting sent back to Canada now..." As it turns out (unless I'm horribly mistaken), the joint distribution (one of my desiderata, as that jankey paper would say) seems to factorize quite nicely (which is probably the point). I have not yet tried to make anything happen with the factors themselves, but I remember there being a healthy requirement for pyrotechnic mathematics (I am totally going to use that expression for the rest of my life now :D) in my last experience with CGS. D:
One unfortunate thing that occurred today was going back to look at my slides for CGS (they're already coming in handy haha). Looking at them didn't dredge up painful memories, if that's what you're thinking, but the date I included in the title alerted me to the fact that the last time I worked on something I actually got to see to fruition was July 26th. D:< I know there was a two-week vacation in there somewhere, but still! That's two full weeks of work totally gone... It's definitely not the best feeling in the world to realize I've essentially been a glorified paperweight for since my presentation. >_<
I left work at around 6:30 and walked home. I went to the Yokosan to buy food supplies (senbei, bananas, milk, and dessert, because I made the mistake of looking in the freezer section haha), and they were out of my favourite ultra-cheap milk! I think they really need to take a hint, as there was FULL STOCK of ALL the other kinds of milk other than the one I wanted, which was entirely gone. It's the cheapest brand and it's low-fat to boot, so no wonder people like it... Please stock more! For the moment, I had to pay 50円 extra for my milk, which I'm pretty sure is full fat, because it tastes like I'm drinking creamo. D:< I really hope it's not actually creamo haha. D:>
I ate dorm dinner when I got home, which seemed to be an apology for yesterday's triangle-fish. :D There was gyoza, some pork mixture, some kind of cream stew (enough with the cream already!), miso soup and rice. It was all really good, and it also made up in size for today's breakfast. Unfortunately I'm now going to take all of those calories with me to sleep, instead of... well sitting with them at a desk doing math and reading all day. I guess it's not so bad ahaha. >_<
Anyways, I'd best get to bed now, as it's getting late, and I am tres tres tired. Falling asleep has been an elusive desideratum! D:< Diuuuuuu...
Night!
This morning I got up and ate dorm breakfast, which consisted of stewed chicken and cabbage with salted cut of salmon (and rice and miso soup). It was all rather small though. I wonder if the salmon was expensive or something, because I don't believe I've ever actually seen a dorm breakfast that small before. D: For some reason I was fine until lunch though, so no worries there.
In the morning I worked away at the variational inference problem I had been assigned. I was starting to get somewhere on the actual problem itself by 11:50 (not just teaching myself how to solve the problem using a related one with more available information), which was when Kabutoya-san showed up and told me to drop it and gave me something else to do. I can't say I'm terribly surprised, as the variational inference problem was kind of out of left field, and I had just been given a new research direction that it's not really too in line with. My new task better resembles what I understood my new research direction to be, so hopefully I will actually get to finish it... >_<
At lunch I ate hiyashi wakame ramen (why have they been making such nasty-looking other food lately!?). I have no idea why, but I don't get hungry in the afternoon after eating it, even though it's like, buckwheat noodles and some seaweed and that's it. O_O They must marinate the ingredients in lard or something, but it doesn't really taste like that, so I'm not quite sure what's going on...
After eating I played handiball with the usual suspects. I was alright again today, which was nice. When I was rotated out, Kurauchi-san asked me "Are you a person who hates losing?" Haha oh damn. I asked him why he asked that, if I was being too competitive or something, and he said that wasn't it, but I'm not sure if I believe him. >_< I was behaving in a perfectly normal fashion as far as I was concerned, and I'm not even a ballhog like some of the other people in the PIG group are, so I really have no idea where the question came from. Unfortunately that means I can't fix it. D:
After lunch I read a new paper Kabutoya-san gave me, which took an inordinately long time. D:< The authors were not native English speakers, and so their sentences were often kind of... backward, somehow. "Manifold" appeared to be their favourite word, and they used it many, many times, along with a lot of other more-complicated-than-necessary words. Did you know that "manifold" can be a noun, adjective, verb and adverb? Cool stuff. All-in-all, it was a pretty horrible read, which is unfortunate, because the actual content of the paper was good, it was just buried in an excrutiating level of detail, with said detail itself being buried in unnecessarily complicated language. >_< Trying to actually understand what was happening in the paper took a fat chunk out of my afternoon, and it was only like 12 pages long. D:
After making it through the demon-paper, I got to actually start doing stuff for the new model I'm supposed to use. Kabutoya-san just kind of handed the description of it to me and was like "Here, do Collapsed Gibbs Sampling on this", and my eyes kind of bugged out, as the graphical representation takes up like half a page. My previous experience in CGS consisted of working on two models that had one latent variable, one observed variable, two parameters, and two hyperparameters per model. Now, there are three latent variables, five observed variables, six parameters, and six hyperparameters. O_O I guess it's flattering that Kabutoya-san didn't seem to think giving me any help with it was necessary (or he's just too busy haha), but I honestly sort of just stared at it wide-eyed for a while thinking "Oh shi-- Guess I'm getting sent back to Canada now..." As it turns out (unless I'm horribly mistaken), the joint distribution (one of my desiderata, as that jankey paper would say) seems to factorize quite nicely (which is probably the point). I have not yet tried to make anything happen with the factors themselves, but I remember there being a healthy requirement for pyrotechnic mathematics (I am totally going to use that expression for the rest of my life now :D) in my last experience with CGS. D:
One unfortunate thing that occurred today was going back to look at my slides for CGS (they're already coming in handy haha). Looking at them didn't dredge up painful memories, if that's what you're thinking, but the date I included in the title alerted me to the fact that the last time I worked on something I actually got to see to fruition was July 26th. D:< I know there was a two-week vacation in there somewhere, but still! That's two full weeks of work totally gone... It's definitely not the best feeling in the world to realize I've essentially been a glorified paperweight for since my presentation. >_<
I left work at around 6:30 and walked home. I went to the Yokosan to buy food supplies (senbei, bananas, milk, and dessert, because I made the mistake of looking in the freezer section haha), and they were out of my favourite ultra-cheap milk! I think they really need to take a hint, as there was FULL STOCK of ALL the other kinds of milk other than the one I wanted, which was entirely gone. It's the cheapest brand and it's low-fat to boot, so no wonder people like it... Please stock more! For the moment, I had to pay 50円 extra for my milk, which I'm pretty sure is full fat, because it tastes like I'm drinking creamo. D:< I really hope it's not actually creamo haha. D:>
I ate dorm dinner when I got home, which seemed to be an apology for yesterday's triangle-fish. :D There was gyoza, some pork mixture, some kind of cream stew (enough with the cream already!), miso soup and rice. It was all really good, and it also made up in size for today's breakfast. Unfortunately I'm now going to take all of those calories with me to sleep, instead of... well sitting with them at a desk doing math and reading all day. I guess it's not so bad ahaha. >_<
Anyways, I'd best get to bed now, as it's getting late, and I am tres tres tired. Falling asleep has been an elusive desideratum! D:< Diuuuuuu...
Night!
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Today I literally had to use Wikipedia to look up more greek letters to use in my math D:
August 27: Ouch. Brain.
I got up on time today and ate a breakfast of natto and side dishes that I can no longer remember (with miso soup and rice). I took a HOT SHOWER, which is still novel and awesome on day 2, and departed for work.
All of today was devoted to trying to get everything together in my brain with respect to variational inference. I am seriously lacking the mathematical/statistical background for the material, so it's a pretty epic struggle to try to understand what is happening. This is especially true when the author uses such terrible notation! Dear Dr. Blei, did you really need to use beta for what everyone calls phi, and use eta for what everyone calls beta, and then re-purpose lambda from being part of your Lagrange multiplier (where it should be) into what I would have called eta (please stop)? Which then forced you to hide the subsequent analysis to cover up the fact that you still needed that lambda that you'd just misappropriated (totally not the real reasoning for him skipping it haha)? D:< Goddamn.
I think I am starting to understand the mathy details of variational inference for (smoothed) LDA as detailed in the paper in all its glory, but I have yet to attempt to make the move to a mixture of multinomials with Dirichlet priors (my goal). I am hoping that there's nothing terribly tricky that's going to happen, because I am hanging onto my understanding of the math by a thread, and I'd rather not be jostled, thanks. D:
At lunch I ate hiyashi wakame soba and cold tofu, which was nice, but I am starting to really wonder at their meal scheduling algorithm... Not to mention overall item choices, but I'm ignoring that. After eating, the usual culprits and I played handiball, and I was actually alright again (in the latter half of the half-hour we usually play for). I'm finally starting to shake off the physical activity debuff that going to Comiket granted me. ;D
In the afternoon, Fujimura-san (the group leader) came around with omiyage, and actually spoke Japanese to me, which was really nice, firstly because no one ever does, and secondly because I actually understood him (he spoke slowly and clearly). The omiyage was basically a disc of puffed rice loaded with chocolate, so it was by construction incredibly tasty. ;9 He said it was from Sapporo, which makes him the 4th coworker (if I've kept my counting straight) that went to Hokkaido over the break. O_O My coworkers really weren't kidding when they said that Japanese people like to go to places that are cooler than Tokyo during the summer. Haha whatever Comiket4Life nubs.
After work I walked home (it was raining slightly so it was really nice and cool) and, upon arrival, ate dorm dinner of assorted vegetables, that triangular fried fish that I don't like (still don't like it), and miso soup and rice along with something else that I have already forgotten. >_< There has been a wave of new hires or something, because a lot of people I've never seen have been around the office and in the eating area of the dorm at supper. They actually took up a whole table! It was amazing. There used to be, at maximum, two other people in the dining hall when I ate dinner, and I haven't changed the time at which I do so. I guess that means NTT is doing alright, which is good.
After dinner I just kinda hung out on the Internet. I am totally burnt out from work, and really really really should have gone to bed before now, but it's too late for that haha (damn you StarCraft)! Anyways, in the interest of having a functional brain tomorrow, I think that'll be it for today's blog. Night!
I got up on time today and ate a breakfast of natto and side dishes that I can no longer remember (with miso soup and rice). I took a HOT SHOWER, which is still novel and awesome on day 2, and departed for work.
All of today was devoted to trying to get everything together in my brain with respect to variational inference. I am seriously lacking the mathematical/statistical background for the material, so it's a pretty epic struggle to try to understand what is happening. This is especially true when the author uses such terrible notation! Dear Dr. Blei, did you really need to use beta for what everyone calls phi, and use eta for what everyone calls beta, and then re-purpose lambda from being part of your Lagrange multiplier (where it should be) into what I would have called eta (please stop)? Which then forced you to hide the subsequent analysis to cover up the fact that you still needed that lambda that you'd just misappropriated (totally not the real reasoning for him skipping it haha)? D:< Goddamn.
I think I am starting to understand the mathy details of variational inference for (smoothed) LDA as detailed in the paper in all its glory, but I have yet to attempt to make the move to a mixture of multinomials with Dirichlet priors (my goal). I am hoping that there's nothing terribly tricky that's going to happen, because I am hanging onto my understanding of the math by a thread, and I'd rather not be jostled, thanks. D:
At lunch I ate hiyashi wakame soba and cold tofu, which was nice, but I am starting to really wonder at their meal scheduling algorithm... Not to mention overall item choices, but I'm ignoring that. After eating, the usual culprits and I played handiball, and I was actually alright again (in the latter half of the half-hour we usually play for). I'm finally starting to shake off the physical activity debuff that going to Comiket granted me. ;D
In the afternoon, Fujimura-san (the group leader) came around with omiyage, and actually spoke Japanese to me, which was really nice, firstly because no one ever does, and secondly because I actually understood him (he spoke slowly and clearly). The omiyage was basically a disc of puffed rice loaded with chocolate, so it was by construction incredibly tasty. ;9 He said it was from Sapporo, which makes him the 4th coworker (if I've kept my counting straight) that went to Hokkaido over the break. O_O My coworkers really weren't kidding when they said that Japanese people like to go to places that are cooler than Tokyo during the summer. Haha whatever Comiket4Life nubs.
After work I walked home (it was raining slightly so it was really nice and cool) and, upon arrival, ate dorm dinner of assorted vegetables, that triangular fried fish that I don't like (still don't like it), and miso soup and rice along with something else that I have already forgotten. >_< There has been a wave of new hires or something, because a lot of people I've never seen have been around the office and in the eating area of the dorm at supper. They actually took up a whole table! It was amazing. There used to be, at maximum, two other people in the dining hall when I ate dinner, and I haven't changed the time at which I do so. I guess that means NTT is doing alright, which is good.
After dinner I just kinda hung out on the Internet. I am totally burnt out from work, and really really really should have gone to bed before now, but it's too late for that haha (damn you StarCraft)! Anyways, in the interest of having a functional brain tomorrow, I think that'll be it for today's blog. Night!
Friday, August 26, 2011
I know I'm slow at reading papers, but it doesn't take me two days to finish one...
August 26: One Good Surprise, One Less-Good Surprise
I woke up this morning and, lo and behold, there was HOT WATER!!! YESSSS!!! Taking a hot shower was sooo nice... Short though, because I slept in a little longer than usual. D: (still got to work on time)
Dorm breakfast was various pork mixtures (pork and green onions, pork and konnyaku, maybe another I can't remember) with miso soup and rice. I took my HOT SHOWER!!! after eating and left for work and caught my usual bus.
At work, Kabutoya-san wasn't there, as he usually isn't when I arrive (he typically leaves after me), which was fine, because I had a paper to read. The paper went pretty smoothly, for a first-thing-in-the-morning read. I found that clenching my leg muscles periodically while reading staves off sleepiness! Could this be the secret to reading papers!? It doesn't work perfectly, as the act of doing so distracts me from reading the paper, but it was much better than having to fight off sleep to be sure. I actually managed to read the paper in a semi-respectable amount of time, which was unfortunate, because Kabutoya-san wasn't in at 10 either. And so I read over all three papers again briefly, and then looked up some relevant stuff on Wikipedia until 11. Still no sign of him. D: I asked Nishida-san if he had seen Kabutoya-san today, and he said "No, he has some Ph.D entrance exams (or something like that) today". Oh, lovely! "And tomorrow he has a friend's wedding to go to, so he won't be in then either." I was laughing by this point. >_< I told Nishida-san that I hadn't actually been left with any work, and so he said he'd call Kabutoya-san for me after lunch and try to get something for me to do.
At lunch I ate Java curry again, because nothing looked appetizing. There was hiyashi tan-tan ramen, which I recall being more tepid than properly cold, and also rather salty, so curry it was. D: Oh well at least it's quite cheap.
After lunch I played handiball. We have new interns in the PIG group, and they played handiball for the first time today. On a completely related note, I can only now sort of understand why my coworkers were praising my rather embarassing handiball skills when I started. >_< Oh well, it was all good fun anyways, and there was an added "random" element to the game this time haha.
In the afternoon Nishida-san got Kabutoya-san to call me, and Kabutoya-san gave me some work that is incredibly far outside my ability, but was a very concise assignment to communicate over the phone. D: I'll see how it goes, but I don't forsee it going well, as it is to derive the equations for and implement a recommender using an estimation method I don't know, that uses math I don't know to deal with probability distributions I don't know. O_O Maybe I should have left him alone on his day "off" (writing exams is hardly "off") and farted around on Wikipedia until Sunday... (just kidding)
That kept me occupied until 6:30, when I left so that true and deep despair couldn't settle in haha. I liked my comfortable little-fish pond, where there the scariest thing was Collapsed Gibbs Sampling, but alas, it is no more... D:
I walked home in the light rain and ate dorm dinner of MORE pork (at least it tastes good), some kind of chikuwa salad with a coleslaw-esque sauce on it (the flavour was kind of... tricky...) and cold soba noodles with broth (yum). I retired back to my room, where I ended up watching clips of comedians on YouTube for the better part of the evening. I started to make another vocab sheet for Japanese, but my left elbow is going a little wonky today, and so it was really hard to hold the paper still haha. D:
Anyways, I'm a little shy on sleep, so I'd best get to bed now. Night!
I woke up this morning and, lo and behold, there was HOT WATER!!! YESSSS!!! Taking a hot shower was sooo nice... Short though, because I slept in a little longer than usual. D: (still got to work on time)
Dorm breakfast was various pork mixtures (pork and green onions, pork and konnyaku, maybe another I can't remember) with miso soup and rice. I took my HOT SHOWER!!! after eating and left for work and caught my usual bus.
At work, Kabutoya-san wasn't there, as he usually isn't when I arrive (he typically leaves after me), which was fine, because I had a paper to read. The paper went pretty smoothly, for a first-thing-in-the-morning read. I found that clenching my leg muscles periodically while reading staves off sleepiness! Could this be the secret to reading papers!? It doesn't work perfectly, as the act of doing so distracts me from reading the paper, but it was much better than having to fight off sleep to be sure. I actually managed to read the paper in a semi-respectable amount of time, which was unfortunate, because Kabutoya-san wasn't in at 10 either. And so I read over all three papers again briefly, and then looked up some relevant stuff on Wikipedia until 11. Still no sign of him. D: I asked Nishida-san if he had seen Kabutoya-san today, and he said "No, he has some Ph.D entrance exams (or something like that) today". Oh, lovely! "And tomorrow he has a friend's wedding to go to, so he won't be in then either." I was laughing by this point. >_< I told Nishida-san that I hadn't actually been left with any work, and so he said he'd call Kabutoya-san for me after lunch and try to get something for me to do.
At lunch I ate Java curry again, because nothing looked appetizing. There was hiyashi tan-tan ramen, which I recall being more tepid than properly cold, and also rather salty, so curry it was. D: Oh well at least it's quite cheap.
After lunch I played handiball. We have new interns in the PIG group, and they played handiball for the first time today. On a completely related note, I can only now sort of understand why my coworkers were praising my rather embarassing handiball skills when I started. >_< Oh well, it was all good fun anyways, and there was an added "random" element to the game this time haha.
In the afternoon Nishida-san got Kabutoya-san to call me, and Kabutoya-san gave me some work that is incredibly far outside my ability, but was a very concise assignment to communicate over the phone. D: I'll see how it goes, but I don't forsee it going well, as it is to derive the equations for and implement a recommender using an estimation method I don't know, that uses math I don't know to deal with probability distributions I don't know. O_O Maybe I should have left him alone on his day "off" (writing exams is hardly "off") and farted around on Wikipedia until Sunday... (just kidding)
That kept me occupied until 6:30, when I left so that true and deep despair couldn't settle in haha. I liked my comfortable little-fish pond, where there the scariest thing was Collapsed Gibbs Sampling, but alas, it is no more... D:
I walked home in the light rain and ate dorm dinner of MORE pork (at least it tastes good), some kind of chikuwa salad with a coleslaw-esque sauce on it (the flavour was kind of... tricky...) and cold soba noodles with broth (yum). I retired back to my room, where I ended up watching clips of comedians on YouTube for the better part of the evening. I started to make another vocab sheet for Japanese, but my left elbow is going a little wonky today, and so it was really hard to hold the paper still haha. D:
Anyways, I'm a little shy on sleep, so I'd best get to bed now. Night!
Thursday, August 25, 2011
A treatise on the exquisite art of sitting on one's bum all day
August 25: Just a Lazy Day
Today I woke up at around 11 and voice chatted with Jiuna over a breakfast of carrots and bananas. After I was done talking to her, I went out to the Yokosan to pick up some milk, a grapefruit and a couple of korokke to top off my brunch. After eating, I played StarCraft with Kevin for a while and then with my dormmate Kusano-san. Kusano-san was really good for someone who's only been playing for 2.5 weeks! He says he played a lot of PvP Age of Empires II, which is a rather different game from StarCraft, but apparently there is at least some transfer of skill since he was able to get into respectable StarCraft-shape in rather short order!
I was pleasantly surprised when I scouted his base in the first game to find that he actually was building multiple barracks, had a refinery up, and was walling his ramp and everything! :D He's still got a ways to go, because he attacked me rather early and it did almost nothing even though I expanded off of one gate (a comparatively greedy, punishable opening gambit), which means that there are certainly some kinks to work out, but it's a good start.
Since he played so well in the first game, I decided that I didn't need to use the kid gloves quite so much, and I applied early pressure with some units in the second game we played. We found out that he needs improvement on the defensive aspects of the game haha. He died pretty quickly to some rather non-committal pressure from a zealot, a stalker and a sentry. I started apologizing for attacking him so early, and explained that I did it because he seemed so together in the first game, but he wasn't mad or anything. He actually seemed to be extremely excited that early attacking is possible and useful in StarCraft (it's largely pointless in Age of Empires, as far as I know), and actually asked me to rush him again in the second game because he wanted "experience". O_O Okay... I used the double chronoboosted stalker build from like, a year ago, since it's the only true rush build I know, and he died pretty easily and was again very excited about it haha. He said he needed to "study and practice more", which has me worried that I may have created a monster hahaha. "Feed me, Seymo- I mean Sumi!"
Three games was enough for him, so we stopped, but then Kevin appeared back online and we had a nice chat. After the 8th time telling Kevin to go to bed (OK, maybe that's a bit of a stretch), he actually did so, and I was left to my own devices. I ended up watching professional StarCraft matches from 6pm until after 10 haha. Today was apparently a very StarCraft-ey day... The matches were alright, but only one of the two teams I wanted to win actually did so. Oh well. The team that lost was a bit of an outside shot anyways.
I looked through my Etrian Odyssey artbooks, and then played Etrian Odyssey for the rest of the night. The background art in that game is really nice, and it's making me want to improve my art, but it's hard to know where to begin. >_< I need to though, because a rash of crayon-card-requiring birthdays are coming up rather soon, and I can't draw chimaeric duck-monsters for those cards (don't ask). ;D
Anyways, it's a workday tomorrow (and paper-reading to start the day off, no less), so I'd best get to bed now. Night!
Today I woke up at around 11 and voice chatted with Jiuna over a breakfast of carrots and bananas. After I was done talking to her, I went out to the Yokosan to pick up some milk, a grapefruit and a couple of korokke to top off my brunch. After eating, I played StarCraft with Kevin for a while and then with my dormmate Kusano-san. Kusano-san was really good for someone who's only been playing for 2.5 weeks! He says he played a lot of PvP Age of Empires II, which is a rather different game from StarCraft, but apparently there is at least some transfer of skill since he was able to get into respectable StarCraft-shape in rather short order!
I was pleasantly surprised when I scouted his base in the first game to find that he actually was building multiple barracks, had a refinery up, and was walling his ramp and everything! :D He's still got a ways to go, because he attacked me rather early and it did almost nothing even though I expanded off of one gate (a comparatively greedy, punishable opening gambit), which means that there are certainly some kinks to work out, but it's a good start.
Since he played so well in the first game, I decided that I didn't need to use the kid gloves quite so much, and I applied early pressure with some units in the second game we played. We found out that he needs improvement on the defensive aspects of the game haha. He died pretty quickly to some rather non-committal pressure from a zealot, a stalker and a sentry. I started apologizing for attacking him so early, and explained that I did it because he seemed so together in the first game, but he wasn't mad or anything. He actually seemed to be extremely excited that early attacking is possible and useful in StarCraft (it's largely pointless in Age of Empires, as far as I know), and actually asked me to rush him again in the second game because he wanted "experience". O_O Okay... I used the double chronoboosted stalker build from like, a year ago, since it's the only true rush build I know, and he died pretty easily and was again very excited about it haha. He said he needed to "study and practice more", which has me worried that I may have created a monster hahaha. "Feed me, Seymo- I mean Sumi!"
Three games was enough for him, so we stopped, but then Kevin appeared back online and we had a nice chat. After the 8th time telling Kevin to go to bed (OK, maybe that's a bit of a stretch), he actually did so, and I was left to my own devices. I ended up watching professional StarCraft matches from 6pm until after 10 haha. Today was apparently a very StarCraft-ey day... The matches were alright, but only one of the two teams I wanted to win actually did so. Oh well. The team that lost was a bit of an outside shot anyways.
I looked through my Etrian Odyssey artbooks, and then played Etrian Odyssey for the rest of the night. The background art in that game is really nice, and it's making me want to improve my art, but it's hard to know where to begin. >_< I need to though, because a rash of crayon-card-requiring birthdays are coming up rather soon, and I can't draw chimaeric duck-monsters for those cards (don't ask). ;D
Anyways, it's a workday tomorrow (and paper-reading to start the day off, no less), so I'd best get to bed now. Night!
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
An Akiba day not spent in Akiba
August 25: Meeting Jeremy
Today I got up a little earlier than I usually do on weekends, but by the time I was out of bed and ready to eat, the Yokosan was open, meaning I ate cold korokke needlessly. D: Oh well. Also, my grapefruit today tasted quite sweet, but also a little bit wrong, so I pitched it to be on the safe side. I called Jeremy and Celine (friends from high school who are currently travelling in Japan), and they said that they were going to a museum today, but would call me after they were done if I was going to be in Tokyo anyways.
I set out for Akihabara, and the trip was pretty uneventful. I did however, notice a rather funny sign on the way to Yokochuu, which had the shop name in big letters, and then off to the side it read "A florist that loves flower." Um, yeah? I mean some people hate their jobs, but someone who hates flowers becoming a florist seems pretty much impossible to me haha. I'm sure there's some (rather bitter by this point, surely) counterexample or other on Earth, but whatever.
Once in Akihabara I went to Tenya, which was tasty as usual, but I unfortunately had a bit of a service problem this time. D: I went in and got seated in a corner, and then I think they forgot about me or something. I waited a while for one of the waitresses to come around, and when one did, she walked right past me to take the order of a guy who came in after me. When she was on her way back I flagged her down and ordered the thing I've gotten every single time I've been there (which has probably been around 10 times since Jiuna arrived). However, when it came, it was an All-Star Ten-don, not an All-Star Set. >_< It was one of the same waitresses that's been taking my identical order all the time, too. Oh well, at least the non-set comes with miso soup, and is 100円 cheaper haha.
After eating I went to CLUB SEGA 2, and found a 3rd Strike player who was *gasp* incredibly evenly matched with me! We played quite a bit, and I think we both put about 300円 in the machine, which, I must say, is rather more enjoyable than having to put in 600円 all by yourself for the same amount of play haha. He was using Ibuki, which probably contributed to my enjoyment, as Ibuki and Elena are pretty close in terms of tier, and have a 5/5 matchup. I won the last set and then he never put another coin in so I moved on to HEY!, where I played Mushihime once, where I did quite well, before moving on to Mushihime Futari, where I did quite poorly haha. I was going to play more Mushihime not-Futari, but Jeremy called and said that he and Celine were done with the museum, so I made my way over to Shibuya, where they currently were.
In Shibuya Jeremy, Celine and I just kind of walked around for about 4 hours haha. It's interesting how quickly the time goes when you're spending time with people you know well and haven't seen in a while. We walked up and down a bunch of streets near the station, went into a couple of clothing/department stores (nobody bought anything, there were rhinestones EVERYWHERE), spotted some lovely Engrish advertising Combustion Tomato Cheese for sale (how exciting! In Japanese it just said Fried Tomato Cheese), and went to Tower Records.
In Tower Records I FINALLY found the Legend of Mana Soundtrack that I looked for in every store I went to with Jiuna when she was here. It was only about as overpriced as all Japanese CDs are, which is nice, but I was kind of hoping to find a good deal somewhere, as the game DID come out when I was in ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. D:< Nope. Apparently everyone else liked the music from that game as much as I did and hung on to their copies. I also saw a Japanese release of Scissor Sisters' "Night Work" album, but the only difference appeared to be the inclusion of some remix bonus tracks. The cover and back design were identical to the North American release (the bonus tracks were advertised on the paper spine cover inside the wrapping), and I have yet to hear a remix of a Scissor Sisters song that I actually like (plus, they were of "Fire with Fire" and "Invisible Light", nothing to get terribly excited about). They also had Scissor Sisters "Scissor Sisters", but it didn't have the UK bonus tracks as I'd hoped it might. Oh well.
After Tower Records we went and got some food at the Food Show! underground in Shibuya Station. Both Jeremy and I settled for fried rice, although there were a great many other foods I would have tried, given infinite money, stomach capacity and metabolism. We sat against a railing outside the station to eat it, and chatted and caught up. Apparently Jeremy is trying to transfer to UBC for the coming fall, which could be cool. He has 2 years of credits from Langara, so he won't be done by the time I get back (unlike everyone else I have ever known at UBC except for Oliver). Yay! Maybe I'll have someone to get mushroom burgers with again...
At 8pm, Jeremy and Celine caught the last Hachiko bus to get back to their accomodations, and I took the Yamanote back to Shinagawa, and then made my usual way home from there.
I didn't get much Akiba in today, but I enjoyed my time with Jeremy and Celine, which more than made up for it. I think I am going to try to do more Akiba days on Wednesday in the future, as I seem to stay up late after coming home haha. Also, there wasn't that sort of Sunday Blues following me around all of today (actually it did appear now and again when I temporarily forgot that it wasn't actually Thursday ahahaha), which was really nice. Tomorrow I'll no doubt get it a bit, but at least I'm not going to then be prone to spend money to stuff my pain. :D
Anyways, it's really, really late here, and I want to get to bed before birds start chirping or something. Night!
Today I got up a little earlier than I usually do on weekends, but by the time I was out of bed and ready to eat, the Yokosan was open, meaning I ate cold korokke needlessly. D: Oh well. Also, my grapefruit today tasted quite sweet, but also a little bit wrong, so I pitched it to be on the safe side. I called Jeremy and Celine (friends from high school who are currently travelling in Japan), and they said that they were going to a museum today, but would call me after they were done if I was going to be in Tokyo anyways.
I set out for Akihabara, and the trip was pretty uneventful. I did however, notice a rather funny sign on the way to Yokochuu, which had the shop name in big letters, and then off to the side it read "A florist that loves flower." Um, yeah? I mean some people hate their jobs, but someone who hates flowers becoming a florist seems pretty much impossible to me haha. I'm sure there's some (rather bitter by this point, surely) counterexample or other on Earth, but whatever.
Once in Akihabara I went to Tenya, which was tasty as usual, but I unfortunately had a bit of a service problem this time. D: I went in and got seated in a corner, and then I think they forgot about me or something. I waited a while for one of the waitresses to come around, and when one did, she walked right past me to take the order of a guy who came in after me. When she was on her way back I flagged her down and ordered the thing I've gotten every single time I've been there (which has probably been around 10 times since Jiuna arrived). However, when it came, it was an All-Star Ten-don, not an All-Star Set. >_< It was one of the same waitresses that's been taking my identical order all the time, too. Oh well, at least the non-set comes with miso soup, and is 100円 cheaper haha.
After eating I went to CLUB SEGA 2, and found a 3rd Strike player who was *gasp* incredibly evenly matched with me! We played quite a bit, and I think we both put about 300円 in the machine, which, I must say, is rather more enjoyable than having to put in 600円 all by yourself for the same amount of play haha. He was using Ibuki, which probably contributed to my enjoyment, as Ibuki and Elena are pretty close in terms of tier, and have a 5/5 matchup. I won the last set and then he never put another coin in so I moved on to HEY!, where I played Mushihime once, where I did quite well, before moving on to Mushihime Futari, where I did quite poorly haha. I was going to play more Mushihime not-Futari, but Jeremy called and said that he and Celine were done with the museum, so I made my way over to Shibuya, where they currently were.
In Shibuya Jeremy, Celine and I just kind of walked around for about 4 hours haha. It's interesting how quickly the time goes when you're spending time with people you know well and haven't seen in a while. We walked up and down a bunch of streets near the station, went into a couple of clothing/department stores (nobody bought anything, there were rhinestones EVERYWHERE), spotted some lovely Engrish advertising Combustion Tomato Cheese for sale (how exciting! In Japanese it just said Fried Tomato Cheese), and went to Tower Records.
In Tower Records I FINALLY found the Legend of Mana Soundtrack that I looked for in every store I went to with Jiuna when she was here. It was only about as overpriced as all Japanese CDs are, which is nice, but I was kind of hoping to find a good deal somewhere, as the game DID come out when I was in ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. D:< Nope. Apparently everyone else liked the music from that game as much as I did and hung on to their copies. I also saw a Japanese release of Scissor Sisters' "Night Work" album, but the only difference appeared to be the inclusion of some remix bonus tracks. The cover and back design were identical to the North American release (the bonus tracks were advertised on the paper spine cover inside the wrapping), and I have yet to hear a remix of a Scissor Sisters song that I actually like (plus, they were of "Fire with Fire" and "Invisible Light", nothing to get terribly excited about). They also had Scissor Sisters "Scissor Sisters", but it didn't have the UK bonus tracks as I'd hoped it might. Oh well.
After Tower Records we went and got some food at the Food Show! underground in Shibuya Station. Both Jeremy and I settled for fried rice, although there were a great many other foods I would have tried, given infinite money, stomach capacity and metabolism. We sat against a railing outside the station to eat it, and chatted and caught up. Apparently Jeremy is trying to transfer to UBC for the coming fall, which could be cool. He has 2 years of credits from Langara, so he won't be done by the time I get back (unlike everyone else I have ever known at UBC except for Oliver). Yay! Maybe I'll have someone to get mushroom burgers with again...
At 8pm, Jeremy and Celine caught the last Hachiko bus to get back to their accomodations, and I took the Yamanote back to Shinagawa, and then made my usual way home from there.
I didn't get much Akiba in today, but I enjoyed my time with Jeremy and Celine, which more than made up for it. I think I am going to try to do more Akiba days on Wednesday in the future, as I seem to stay up late after coming home haha. Also, there wasn't that sort of Sunday Blues following me around all of today (actually it did appear now and again when I temporarily forgot that it wasn't actually Thursday ahahaha), which was really nice. Tomorrow I'll no doubt get it a bit, but at least I'm not going to then be prone to spend money to stuff my pain. :D
Anyways, it's really, really late here, and I want to get to bed before birds start chirping or something. Night!
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
It's hard to tell if having your prior frustration be for naught is worse than knowing you may need to do battle with it again in the future D:
August 24: A Change of Direction
This morning I got up and ate dorm breakfast of stewed lotus root, shu-mai thingees, and a sunny-side-up egg on ham (with rice and miso soup). It was actually surprisingly easy to separate the ham into bite-sized pieces with chopsticks, since the ham in question was quite thin. I would not want to attempt such a feat with a thicker ham haha.
The shower wasn't fixed this morning. D: I had a lovely swim in my own personal Agamemnon Channel, which is getting a little old. For some reason, although today's weather was hotter, the shower water seemed colder. Oh well, it will be fixed eventually (I hope haha), and in the meantime, I am very, very awake for the period between showering and getting on the bus to go to work each morning. >_<
I got to work on time and coded away. Things progressed rather slowly because I didn't get nearly enough sleep last night, and my brain kept getting things turned around. I wrote stuff down on a paper to remember how I'd figured it should work, but that doesn't help when you start second-guessing (and third- and fourth-guessing) what you've written down. D: Oddly, Kabutoya-san wasn't present this morning, and at lunch (hiyashi wakame soba) people were actually asking *me* where he was. I told them I didn't know, because I didn't! He was at his desk when we came back from handiball (which I was slightly better at today), and didn't offer any explanation for his absence, or at least he didn't to me.
In the middle of the afternoon, Kabutoya-san came by my desk and told me that my research is changing direction. Online learning is too current a field or something, and he was unable to think up anything novel for me to do, so it clearly can't be my research topic anymore haha. Now I'm going to be looking at something completely different, which still concerns topic models, at least. I'm kind of wondering when exactly this decision was made, as it was pretty clear that coming up with a novel topic was going to be less easy than he expected during our Kyoto trip. I guess I'm just a touch bitter that dealing with that (in my opinion) incomplete recommender has now been rendered compeltely pointless.
Unfortunately, a new topic means paper reading. Ugh. What an inconvenient weakness to have! It took me two hours to get through two papers, and there's another one waiting for me on Friday. >_< It's new and fresh, which means it's interesting, but I wish I could predict paper-reading days, and make sure to go to bed at like, 8pm the night before, so I don't have to try to understand the content of the paper while simultaneously fighting to keep my eyelids open. I wonder if I've got some kind of rare, paper-reading-specific variant of narcolepsy... Today at one point I was literally thinking "Oh, this is interesting", while my eyes were closing and preventing me from reading more, before I forced them back open. O_O It both helps and doesn't help that I've got the stupidest chair in the world (essentially a padded folding chair with wheels) at work, which helps me stay awake through discomfort, but certainly doesn't me to focus on the paper. D:<
Today was "refresh day", so I didn't stay late to read the third paper, and ended up leaving at around 6:15. I stopped at the Yokosan on the way home to pick up breakfast for tomorrow, in case I actually manage to get up early like I always plan to. I've got a large bottle of Pocari Sweat in my floor's freezer, which I hope I drank enough out to stop it from cracking the bottle while freezing. Last time I went to Akiba, I brought a 1.5L bottle of Pocari Sweat with me from the Yokosan, which lasted me the whole half-day. Normally I have to buy like, 4 drinks at 150円 a pop, and with the 1.5L Pocari only costing about 200円... well I think that's math we can all do. Somehow water by itself doesn't quite cut it for Akiba days. The last time I tried going on water only the other day, and I felt a little wierd. I must ragesweat when getting my face rearranged in 3rd Strike or something. ;D
Back at the dorm, I ate a lovely dinner of miso soup, rice and a miniature nabe (stewing pot) full of goodies like harusame, beef, shiitake and tofu, served with (cover your eyes, Mom) raw egg. It was really good, and really filling to boot.
As you may see by the creation time of this post, it is high time for me to get to bed if I am going to have a hope in hell of getting up at all early tomorrow. I am thinking that tomorrow will be my Akiba day this weekend, as that gives me two chances to meet up with Jeremy and Celine (by going to Tokyo tomorrow and trying to call them, and then being able to go back on Thursday if necessary), and if there is no need to meet Jeremy and Celine on Thursday, then I can easily sleep in, chat with Mom and Jiuna, play StarCraft with Kevin and hopefully with Kusano-san as well.
Night!
This morning I got up and ate dorm breakfast of stewed lotus root, shu-mai thingees, and a sunny-side-up egg on ham (with rice and miso soup). It was actually surprisingly easy to separate the ham into bite-sized pieces with chopsticks, since the ham in question was quite thin. I would not want to attempt such a feat with a thicker ham haha.
The shower wasn't fixed this morning. D: I had a lovely swim in my own personal Agamemnon Channel, which is getting a little old. For some reason, although today's weather was hotter, the shower water seemed colder. Oh well, it will be fixed eventually (I hope haha), and in the meantime, I am very, very awake for the period between showering and getting on the bus to go to work each morning. >_<
I got to work on time and coded away. Things progressed rather slowly because I didn't get nearly enough sleep last night, and my brain kept getting things turned around. I wrote stuff down on a paper to remember how I'd figured it should work, but that doesn't help when you start second-guessing (and third- and fourth-guessing) what you've written down. D: Oddly, Kabutoya-san wasn't present this morning, and at lunch (hiyashi wakame soba) people were actually asking *me* where he was. I told them I didn't know, because I didn't! He was at his desk when we came back from handiball (which I was slightly better at today), and didn't offer any explanation for his absence, or at least he didn't to me.
In the middle of the afternoon, Kabutoya-san came by my desk and told me that my research is changing direction. Online learning is too current a field or something, and he was unable to think up anything novel for me to do, so it clearly can't be my research topic anymore haha. Now I'm going to be looking at something completely different, which still concerns topic models, at least. I'm kind of wondering when exactly this decision was made, as it was pretty clear that coming up with a novel topic was going to be less easy than he expected during our Kyoto trip. I guess I'm just a touch bitter that dealing with that (in my opinion) incomplete recommender has now been rendered compeltely pointless.
Unfortunately, a new topic means paper reading. Ugh. What an inconvenient weakness to have! It took me two hours to get through two papers, and there's another one waiting for me on Friday. >_< It's new and fresh, which means it's interesting, but I wish I could predict paper-reading days, and make sure to go to bed at like, 8pm the night before, so I don't have to try to understand the content of the paper while simultaneously fighting to keep my eyelids open. I wonder if I've got some kind of rare, paper-reading-specific variant of narcolepsy... Today at one point I was literally thinking "Oh, this is interesting", while my eyes were closing and preventing me from reading more, before I forced them back open. O_O It both helps and doesn't help that I've got the stupidest chair in the world (essentially a padded folding chair with wheels) at work, which helps me stay awake through discomfort, but certainly doesn't me to focus on the paper. D:<
Today was "refresh day", so I didn't stay late to read the third paper, and ended up leaving at around 6:15. I stopped at the Yokosan on the way home to pick up breakfast for tomorrow, in case I actually manage to get up early like I always plan to. I've got a large bottle of Pocari Sweat in my floor's freezer, which I hope I drank enough out to stop it from cracking the bottle while freezing. Last time I went to Akiba, I brought a 1.5L bottle of Pocari Sweat with me from the Yokosan, which lasted me the whole half-day. Normally I have to buy like, 4 drinks at 150円 a pop, and with the 1.5L Pocari only costing about 200円... well I think that's math we can all do. Somehow water by itself doesn't quite cut it for Akiba days. The last time I tried going on water only the other day, and I felt a little wierd. I must ragesweat when getting my face rearranged in 3rd Strike or something. ;D
Back at the dorm, I ate a lovely dinner of miso soup, rice and a miniature nabe (stewing pot) full of goodies like harusame, beef, shiitake and tofu, served with (cover your eyes, Mom) raw egg. It was really good, and really filling to boot.
As you may see by the creation time of this post, it is high time for me to get to bed if I am going to have a hope in hell of getting up at all early tomorrow. I am thinking that tomorrow will be my Akiba day this weekend, as that gives me two chances to meet up with Jeremy and Celine (by going to Tokyo tomorrow and trying to call them, and then being able to go back on Thursday if necessary), and if there is no need to meet Jeremy and Celine on Thursday, then I can easily sleep in, chat with Mom and Jiuna, play StarCraft with Kevin and hopefully with Kusano-san as well.
Night!
Monday, August 22, 2011
A long post that contains none of the things you wanted! How exciting!
August 22: Back to Work
I haven't been blogging due to the immense pileup of material I haven't written about (pretty much my entire vacation), and despite multiple people suggesting I do exactly this, it's taken me until now to give up on maintaining chronological ordering. The vacation posts will come when they come, and in the meantime I'll be blogging again. Sorry for the delay! >_<
Today I got up and ate dorm breakfast of some kind of green onion and pork mixture, along with tiny fishes on a blob of oroshi (grated daikon). It was alright, and I was glad to have dorm food again after having an admittedly rather strange diet for the rest of my vacation after Jiuna left (wholly composed of senbei, korokke, carrots, bananas, grapefruit, katsu-don from LAWSON STATION, the All-Star set from Tenya, and the Stamina-don from Chez Meryl). >_< A general feeling of malaise I've had was dispelled by the time I got to work, so I think I am going to need to be more careful about my diet the next time I'm left to my own devices with only a microwave for almost a week. Oh wait... ;D
Unfortunately, of late the showers have been without hot water. For the past couple of days I have needed to pretend I'm going for a swim out in front of the shack while washing. D: Luckily, even with the colder weather present at the time being (which, I heard from my coworker, is more typically seen at the end of September, looking forward to it), it's still 27 degrees, and the totally unheated water is actually pretty manageable.
I left to walk to the bus, but I met Kusano-san in the entryway, who offered me a ride that I gladly accepted. :D On the short drive to work we talked about Comiket and briefly about StarCraft. According to him Comiket had 6 million visitors this year, but I'm not sure if I believe that. It seems a little extreme, but then again so was Comiket. O_O If it's true, it's kinda frightening that three times the population of Metro Vancouver, or equivalently a fifth of the population of the Kanto region, passed through a single (rather large, arguably robot-shaped) building in the space of 3 days. O_O In less mind-boggling news, Kusano-san has beaten the StarCraft Campaign and wants to try out multiplayer. We are going to play this weekend, which will hopefully work out well. Kevin usually stops playing between 3 and 4pm, and last time I checked, that's about when Kusano-san wakes up on weekends ahahaha. ;D Plays StarCraft, sleeps in, seems to know what and who Touhou and Hiroyuki Oda are (although I constantly get that confused with other people, possibly even right here). Do I sense a kindred spirit?
I got to work and, well, worked. >_> I worked away at the recommender I had left alone over the break, and refreshed my memory on what issues I had with it, exactly, before going to Kabutoya-san and asking him what to do about them. He didn't actually have an answer, and said that I should work on the other recommender until he gets/thinks up one. >_< By now, I'm pretty sure this recommender was unfortunately not terribly well though out before being assigned to me... The main problem I've got with it at the moment is actually something it's SUPPOSED to do. Well, only as much as anything with computational complexity resembling something between n-squared and n-cubed (rough guess) is "supposed" to slow down when fed a large amount of data. >_> It's a bit frustrating that the issue isn't something I'm really able to puzzle out. Fixing it will require either making minor changes to the model without probabilistic justification, or making major ones with such justification.
In the meantime I'm trying to implement a rather more complicated (but much better fleshed out, as I'm taking it from a published paper) recommender which is proving to be challenging in all the right ways. I am glad for the rather concrete reminder that I am not a work-shirking weasel-sea-sponge hybrid. I was starting to get a little... aware of how many times I was going to Kabutoya-san essentially saying "I can't do this, it doesn't many any sense" concerning the last one. Before anyone feels the need to tell me anything about myself, I realize I am not part sea-sponge nor part weasel. I have seen my birth certificate, after all (but was it the REAL one!? EFF D:<), and no such notes were present.
At lunch I ate Java Curry (purportedly "Indonesian"), which tastes exactly like Murugi Curry (purportedly "Indian") without the chicken. I do not think I will ever tire of poking fun at Japan's fictional understanding of other cultures. :D I must say though, that I like days with Java Curry, because for some reason it's far, far cheaper than most of the other substantial food items available in the cafeteria. :D The 100円 I saved will either buy 2 korokke, 20 minutes of entertainment playing Mushihime, or 30 seconds of getting my teeth kicked in in 3rd Strike. D:
After eating, it was time for handiball! Going to Comiket appears to have sapped me of whatever anemic shreds of "sporting" ability I had via nerdsmosis. D: In short, I was really damn terrible today. It was quite embarassing. Iimura-san and I had a little co-failure routine going, where the ball would go more towards me, she's make a lot of noise and run towards it, see me, and then back off, after which I would look surprised at her sudden retreat and start going to hit the ball, when she would see my surprised look, make more noise, and go for the ball again, with both of us stopping short of actually hitting the damn thing for fear of smacking it into eachother's faces. >_< It was funny the first time. And the next three times, for us at least ahahahaha. After we were done playing, I told Nishida-san that going to Comiket took away all of my ability to play sports, to which he said "Yes! You have very much improved!" Wait, what? HEY!!! D:< Oh, the language barrier... ;D
In the afternoon it was all just coding, which made it go rather quickly. I discovered that I have an interesting bad habit (which I will really need to solve if I am to work in the software industry) with respect to coding. I am completely unable to be satisfied with using libraries for things I can do, at a subconscious level. This afternoon my coding speed was drastically reduced, and I would spend I-don't-even-want-to-know-how-long staring at my computer screen lost in thought, because I was using the C++ Standard Template Library's vector, queue (and tomorrow, map) classes. I was completely unable to let go of thinking about how to write my own (especially for the mapping/data-window-shifting/potentially-callbacks part of the model). The majority of my meaningful coding background is in C, from RadiSys and CPSC 415, and it really shows. Today I often caught myself thinking that it would just be easier to write my own data structures and traversal algorithms using static functions with void* and double pointers all over the place. To be honest, it probably would be faster for the time being (especially given how much time I spend thinking about how to do it!), but as I found out in 415, the poor people go to use my code (sorry Jake D:) just end up seeing the Matrix. Or alphaghetti (although really it's more like ampersenne or asteriskuini).
I handed out a few of the chocolates that Jiuna brought, including one to the group leader, who, upon receiving it, didn't seem terribly interested that they were from a store that's somewhat famous among Vancouverites, yadda yadda, and immediately asked me afterwards with a rather excited tone of voice "Did you go to Comiket!? You did!? FOR TWO DAYS!?" O_O Priorities...? I left the rest of the chocolates in the centre of the area where the people I actually know work, and put a nice little sign saying "EAT ME!!" on top of them so that people will, you know, eat them. I couldn't distribute them all by hand, because that would mean picking favourites. D: I'm pretty sure that the sign will be a dead giveaway as to who they're from.
I left work fairly early, at around 6:15, when I reached a logical breakpoint (I am so lucky with those haha). I walked home, and just appreciated the cool weather we've been having lately. When I got back to the dorm, I ate dorm supper of some pork mixture or other, miso soup with carrots in it (didn't really jive), a hamburger/korokke hybrid, and rice.
Apparently the boiler for the shower will be fixed tomorrow, which makes me rather happy. I miss the shack, but not enough to want to take non-elective cold showers first thing in the morning. >_> I don't know if it will be fixed in time for tomorrow morning though. Maybe I'll turn out the lights and wave my cellphone under the water and pretend there's bio-luminescence! *<:B Derp.
Anyways, it's most certainly bedtime now, as I successfully killed time without knowing where it went until about 11, and then remembered to blog (hooray!), bringing it to about 12 now.
Night!
I haven't been blogging due to the immense pileup of material I haven't written about (pretty much my entire vacation), and despite multiple people suggesting I do exactly this, it's taken me until now to give up on maintaining chronological ordering. The vacation posts will come when they come, and in the meantime I'll be blogging again. Sorry for the delay! >_<
Today I got up and ate dorm breakfast of some kind of green onion and pork mixture, along with tiny fishes on a blob of oroshi (grated daikon). It was alright, and I was glad to have dorm food again after having an admittedly rather strange diet for the rest of my vacation after Jiuna left (wholly composed of senbei, korokke, carrots, bananas, grapefruit, katsu-don from LAWSON STATION, the All-Star set from Tenya, and the Stamina-don from Chez Meryl). >_< A general feeling of malaise I've had was dispelled by the time I got to work, so I think I am going to need to be more careful about my diet the next time I'm left to my own devices with only a microwave for almost a week. Oh wait... ;D
Unfortunately, of late the showers have been without hot water. For the past couple of days I have needed to pretend I'm going for a swim out in front of the shack while washing. D: Luckily, even with the colder weather present at the time being (which, I heard from my coworker, is more typically seen at the end of September, looking forward to it), it's still 27 degrees, and the totally unheated water is actually pretty manageable.
I left to walk to the bus, but I met Kusano-san in the entryway, who offered me a ride that I gladly accepted. :D On the short drive to work we talked about Comiket and briefly about StarCraft. According to him Comiket had 6 million visitors this year, but I'm not sure if I believe that. It seems a little extreme, but then again so was Comiket. O_O If it's true, it's kinda frightening that three times the population of Metro Vancouver, or equivalently a fifth of the population of the Kanto region, passed through a single (rather large, arguably robot-shaped) building in the space of 3 days. O_O In less mind-boggling news, Kusano-san has beaten the StarCraft Campaign and wants to try out multiplayer. We are going to play this weekend, which will hopefully work out well. Kevin usually stops playing between 3 and 4pm, and last time I checked, that's about when Kusano-san wakes up on weekends ahahaha. ;D Plays StarCraft, sleeps in, seems to know what and who Touhou and Hiroyuki Oda are (although I constantly get that confused with other people, possibly even right here). Do I sense a kindred spirit?
I got to work and, well, worked. >_> I worked away at the recommender I had left alone over the break, and refreshed my memory on what issues I had with it, exactly, before going to Kabutoya-san and asking him what to do about them. He didn't actually have an answer, and said that I should work on the other recommender until he gets/thinks up one. >_< By now, I'm pretty sure this recommender was unfortunately not terribly well though out before being assigned to me... The main problem I've got with it at the moment is actually something it's SUPPOSED to do. Well, only as much as anything with computational complexity resembling something between n-squared and n-cubed (rough guess) is "supposed" to slow down when fed a large amount of data. >_> It's a bit frustrating that the issue isn't something I'm really able to puzzle out. Fixing it will require either making minor changes to the model without probabilistic justification, or making major ones with such justification.
In the meantime I'm trying to implement a rather more complicated (but much better fleshed out, as I'm taking it from a published paper) recommender which is proving to be challenging in all the right ways. I am glad for the rather concrete reminder that I am not a work-shirking weasel-sea-sponge hybrid. I was starting to get a little... aware of how many times I was going to Kabutoya-san essentially saying "I can't do this, it doesn't many any sense" concerning the last one. Before anyone feels the need to tell me anything about myself, I realize I am not part sea-sponge nor part weasel. I have seen my birth certificate, after all (but was it the REAL one!? EFF D:<), and no such notes were present.
At lunch I ate Java Curry (purportedly "Indonesian"), which tastes exactly like Murugi Curry (purportedly "Indian") without the chicken. I do not think I will ever tire of poking fun at Japan's fictional understanding of other cultures. :D I must say though, that I like days with Java Curry, because for some reason it's far, far cheaper than most of the other substantial food items available in the cafeteria. :D The 100円 I saved will either buy 2 korokke, 20 minutes of entertainment playing Mushihime, or 30 seconds of getting my teeth kicked in in 3rd Strike. D:
After eating, it was time for handiball! Going to Comiket appears to have sapped me of whatever anemic shreds of "sporting" ability I had via nerdsmosis. D: In short, I was really damn terrible today. It was quite embarassing. Iimura-san and I had a little co-failure routine going, where the ball would go more towards me, she's make a lot of noise and run towards it, see me, and then back off, after which I would look surprised at her sudden retreat and start going to hit the ball, when she would see my surprised look, make more noise, and go for the ball again, with both of us stopping short of actually hitting the damn thing for fear of smacking it into eachother's faces. >_< It was funny the first time. And the next three times, for us at least ahahahaha. After we were done playing, I told Nishida-san that going to Comiket took away all of my ability to play sports, to which he said "Yes! You have very much improved!" Wait, what? HEY!!! D:< Oh, the language barrier... ;D
In the afternoon it was all just coding, which made it go rather quickly. I discovered that I have an interesting bad habit (which I will really need to solve if I am to work in the software industry) with respect to coding. I am completely unable to be satisfied with using libraries for things I can do, at a subconscious level. This afternoon my coding speed was drastically reduced, and I would spend I-don't-even-want-to-know-how-long staring at my computer screen lost in thought, because I was using the C++ Standard Template Library's vector, queue (and tomorrow, map) classes. I was completely unable to let go of thinking about how to write my own (especially for the mapping/data-window-shifting/potentially-callbacks part of the model). The majority of my meaningful coding background is in C, from RadiSys and CPSC 415, and it really shows. Today I often caught myself thinking that it would just be easier to write my own data structures and traversal algorithms using static functions with void* and double pointers all over the place. To be honest, it probably would be faster for the time being (especially given how much time I spend thinking about how to do it!), but as I found out in 415, the poor people go to use my code (sorry Jake D:) just end up seeing the Matrix. Or alphaghetti (although really it's more like ampersenne or asteriskuini).
I handed out a few of the chocolates that Jiuna brought, including one to the group leader, who, upon receiving it, didn't seem terribly interested that they were from a store that's somewhat famous among Vancouverites, yadda yadda, and immediately asked me afterwards with a rather excited tone of voice "Did you go to Comiket!? You did!? FOR TWO DAYS!?" O_O Priorities...? I left the rest of the chocolates in the centre of the area where the people I actually know work, and put a nice little sign saying "EAT ME!!" on top of them so that people will, you know, eat them. I couldn't distribute them all by hand, because that would mean picking favourites. D: I'm pretty sure that the sign will be a dead giveaway as to who they're from.
I left work fairly early, at around 6:15, when I reached a logical breakpoint (I am so lucky with those haha). I walked home, and just appreciated the cool weather we've been having lately. When I got back to the dorm, I ate dorm supper of some pork mixture or other, miso soup with carrots in it (didn't really jive), a hamburger/korokke hybrid, and rice.
Apparently the boiler for the shower will be fixed tomorrow, which makes me rather happy. I miss the shack, but not enough to want to take non-elective cold showers first thing in the morning. >_> I don't know if it will be fixed in time for tomorrow morning though. Maybe I'll turn out the lights and wave my cellphone under the water and pretend there's bio-luminescence! *<:B Derp.
Anyways, it's most certainly bedtime now, as I successfully killed time without knowing where it went until about 11, and then remembered to blog (hooray!), bringing it to about 12 now.
Night!
Saturday, August 13, 2011
I'm sure our whole vacation will get posted EVENTUALLY...
August 8 Part 2: Snorkeling and Sleeping
(continued from yesterday's post)
After surviving our ill-advised beach trip, we set out to return to the bay we originally departed from. The trip went smoothly (figuratively, the swells were still rather large), and we didn't see any more shark fins. :D At the mouth of the bay, our guide took us through a natural archway that was sheltered from the waves, as consolation for the fact that we couldn't go into any caves today (which we normally would have on our tour). It was still quite cool, and it made me quite sad that about missing the caves. D:
On the opposite side of the bay, we pulled into a nook to snorkel in much clearer water, as our guide said we had time. The clearer water was very nice, as it meant we were able to see some coral, a larger variety of fish (including some pufferfish), some sea cucumbers, a couple of wierd anemones, and some beautiful shells. One such beautiful shell was handed to Jiuna by our guide, and it appeared to be empty. However, after some time holding the shell, a large hermit crab popped out onto her hand, and she unfortunately smacked a rock with the other hand rather hard. >_< She got a hefty couple of gouges from that that she used some polysporin on and had to dig at with a needle for a bit when we got to the ryokan. D:
When getting back into our kayaks to return to the beach we departed from, Jiuna took the only spill of the day trying to mimic some complicated backward-sliding manoeuvre that the guide showed her, but quite out of line with our luck so far, she wasn't hurt (hooray!). We got back to the beach without incident, and loaded up the kayaks onto our guide's car before being driven to the ryokan.
We checked into our fancy-schmancy ryokan in T-shirts, wet swim trunks and sandals, much to Jiuna's embarrassment, but we didn't find any tangible indication of displeasure at this during our stay haha. We got our stuff and selves washed in our room and went down to dinner.
Our dinner was a lovely assortment of sashimi and other washoku (traditional Japanese food). There was a rather interesting candle-like contraption that used some blue fuel cone to heat an iron cooking surface, which we used to cook our Louis Vuitton. O_O Apparently the pork we were eating was some kind of brand-name pork called LYB-ton, with the ton meaning pork, and LYB being an acronym for the place it's farmed. It was very tasty, but most fatty-and-vaguely-salty fresh-cooked meat is. >_< Jiuna and I agreed that the thin pieces were better than the thicker ones, which is unfortunately in agreement with LV's unhealthy influence on young women's body ideals. D:
After dinner we planned to go to the onsen attached to our hotel, which had a beautful view of the typ(h)oon waves crashing against the cliffs nearby, but Jiuna had some sunstroke or something, and was reduced to flaking out on the floor of our room and drinking Dakara (a bit like gatorade without the atrocious colouring and suspect flavouring). She fell asleep quite early, and I decided I wasn't going to go to the onsen by myself, as it didn't really seem fair, given that she did ALL the research and booking for the place. Besides, the onsen is actually open to the public for 1000円-ish during the day, so if I find myself in Izu again for whatever reason, I could just go if it turns out to gnaw at me for the rest of my stay here.
Anyways, I'd best get to bed, as we have a very full day tomorrow. We're going to go to Comiket again (and apparently Sunday is the craziest day), and we're going to meet Osamu for dinner as well. Plus, it's both Jiuna and Nathaniel's last full day in Japan, so I expect we will be burning the midnight oil in Akiba. ;D
Night!
(continued from yesterday's post)
After surviving our ill-advised beach trip, we set out to return to the bay we originally departed from. The trip went smoothly (figuratively, the swells were still rather large), and we didn't see any more shark fins. :D At the mouth of the bay, our guide took us through a natural archway that was sheltered from the waves, as consolation for the fact that we couldn't go into any caves today (which we normally would have on our tour). It was still quite cool, and it made me quite sad that about missing the caves. D:
On the opposite side of the bay, we pulled into a nook to snorkel in much clearer water, as our guide said we had time. The clearer water was very nice, as it meant we were able to see some coral, a larger variety of fish (including some pufferfish), some sea cucumbers, a couple of wierd anemones, and some beautiful shells. One such beautiful shell was handed to Jiuna by our guide, and it appeared to be empty. However, after some time holding the shell, a large hermit crab popped out onto her hand, and she unfortunately smacked a rock with the other hand rather hard. >_< She got a hefty couple of gouges from that that she used some polysporin on and had to dig at with a needle for a bit when we got to the ryokan. D:
When getting back into our kayaks to return to the beach we departed from, Jiuna took the only spill of the day trying to mimic some complicated backward-sliding manoeuvre that the guide showed her, but quite out of line with our luck so far, she wasn't hurt (hooray!). We got back to the beach without incident, and loaded up the kayaks onto our guide's car before being driven to the ryokan.
We checked into our fancy-schmancy ryokan in T-shirts, wet swim trunks and sandals, much to Jiuna's embarrassment, but we didn't find any tangible indication of displeasure at this during our stay haha. We got our stuff and selves washed in our room and went down to dinner.
Our dinner was a lovely assortment of sashimi and other washoku (traditional Japanese food). There was a rather interesting candle-like contraption that used some blue fuel cone to heat an iron cooking surface, which we used to cook our Louis Vuitton. O_O Apparently the pork we were eating was some kind of brand-name pork called LYB-ton, with the ton meaning pork, and LYB being an acronym for the place it's farmed. It was very tasty, but most fatty-and-vaguely-salty fresh-cooked meat is. >_< Jiuna and I agreed that the thin pieces were better than the thicker ones, which is unfortunately in agreement with LV's unhealthy influence on young women's body ideals. D:
After dinner we planned to go to the onsen attached to our hotel, which had a beautful view of the typ(h)oon waves crashing against the cliffs nearby, but Jiuna had some sunstroke or something, and was reduced to flaking out on the floor of our room and drinking Dakara (a bit like gatorade without the atrocious colouring and suspect flavouring). She fell asleep quite early, and I decided I wasn't going to go to the onsen by myself, as it didn't really seem fair, given that she did ALL the research and booking for the place. Besides, the onsen is actually open to the public for 1000円-ish during the day, so if I find myself in Izu again for whatever reason, I could just go if it turns out to gnaw at me for the rest of my stay here.
Anyways, I'd best get to bed, as we have a very full day tomorrow. We're going to go to Comiket again (and apparently Sunday is the craziest day), and we're going to meet Osamu for dinner as well. Plus, it's both Jiuna and Nathaniel's last full day in Japan, so I expect we will be burning the midnight oil in Akiba. ;D
Night!
Friday, August 12, 2011
Staying somewhere with things to do at night is not conducive to blogging, apparently...
August 8 Part 1: Kayaking
On the 8th, Jiuna and I both woke up quite early, due to the sun shining brightly into our room and the noisy cicadas (and a crow, says Jiuna). We got breakfast at the nearby Family Mart and ate it in Tabi-tabi's kitchen area. After that we packed up our stuff and waited for the kayaking company to pick us up (so convenient!).
The kayaking guy showed up pretty much bang on-time, and it turned out that we were the only ones booked for today! I didn't know that Jiuna didn't know this ahead of time until later; I thought she'd booked a private lesson ahaha.
There was apparently a typ(h)oon nearby, and the waves at the beach we went to first were too large. Our guide said that he'd drive us across the peninsula to the West coast and bump back the end of our trip by the same amount of time. That actually ended up working out great for us, as our accomodation for the next night was on the West coast, and after the tour was over the guide just drove us to our ryokan, as it was about 5 minutes away from the beach.
Kayaking proved to be a rather interesting experience in many, many different ways. First of all, the waves were smaller where we ended up going (Tago beach and the Dogashima area), but they were still impressive swells such that you could really feel yourself rising up and falling down. Both Jiuna and I got a little bit dizzy from the constant motion from the large swells and the multi-directional smaller waves on top, but luckily no one got seasick. :D
Next, once we were about 10 minutes away from the bay we started out in, our guide pointed out a fin sticking out of the water and said it was a shark. O_O We asked what kind and he said "Hammerhead". D: We were visibly alarmed, so he told us that where we were was too shallow for the adult ones, and the only ones we would see were harmless juveniles. I wasn't totally calmed by that, because you always hear in the news "two tourists were eaten by an X that uncharacterisically did Y", and I most certainly did not want to die in that manner at this time. D:
We broke for lunch on a beach near where we would be staying that night, and our guide told me and Jiuna that we could swim while he cooked us pasta. We snorkeled around for about 15 minutes, and saw some little blue fish that were quite pretty. The water was a little stirred up and cloudy, so it was a little hard to see.
Lunch was a red sauce pasta with some king oyster mushroooms. It was pretty good, and it came with cold tea, which was highly welcome in the hot sun. :D Our guide also brought some tokoroten, which is a jelly made from boiled seaweed, and is a regional specialty. We had it with kinako (soybean flour) and black honey (some kind of sugar syrup deal). It was absolutely delicious! We had it again later at our ryokan, but it was a more refined, savoury version and was not quite as exciting.
After eating, our guide told us we had about 45 minutes before we needed to start heading back, and so Jiuna and I went swimming again. We decided to swim across the quasi-bay (there was a shallow area that is at times above water). We did so, and it was a relatively pleasant swim over, but we misjudged the strength of the waves, and sort of beached ourselves. O_O We laugh when we talk about it now, but there was serious potential for injury there. Both of us were having trouble holding onto the rocks when waves came in and I had a fair bit of difficulty getting back out into deeper water again, and was bowled over a couple of times. I'm very thankful that I didn't bonk my head, as that was a very real possibility. Note to selves, next time you go swimming in typ(h)oon driven open ocean swells, do not beach yourself on a beach full of large, kind-of-sharp rocks. >_< Both Jiuna and I are in one piece, and weren't much worse for wear (a few scrapes on knees and a couple of finger cuts), though it did mean we swam back across the apparently shark-infested waters while bleeding (if slightly).
It's almost 2:30AM now, and I really need to get to sleep, but I haven't blogged forever, so I think I'll just post what I've gotten written down from last night and tonight. >_< It's pretty difficult to find the time to blog, because Tokyo stays awake late into the night, unlike Hayashi. I'll try to get the rest up when I can.
Night!
On the 8th, Jiuna and I both woke up quite early, due to the sun shining brightly into our room and the noisy cicadas (and a crow, says Jiuna). We got breakfast at the nearby Family Mart and ate it in Tabi-tabi's kitchen area. After that we packed up our stuff and waited for the kayaking company to pick us up (so convenient!).
The kayaking guy showed up pretty much bang on-time, and it turned out that we were the only ones booked for today! I didn't know that Jiuna didn't know this ahead of time until later; I thought she'd booked a private lesson ahaha.
There was apparently a typ(h)oon nearby, and the waves at the beach we went to first were too large. Our guide said that he'd drive us across the peninsula to the West coast and bump back the end of our trip by the same amount of time. That actually ended up working out great for us, as our accomodation for the next night was on the West coast, and after the tour was over the guide just drove us to our ryokan, as it was about 5 minutes away from the beach.
Kayaking proved to be a rather interesting experience in many, many different ways. First of all, the waves were smaller where we ended up going (Tago beach and the Dogashima area), but they were still impressive swells such that you could really feel yourself rising up and falling down. Both Jiuna and I got a little bit dizzy from the constant motion from the large swells and the multi-directional smaller waves on top, but luckily no one got seasick. :D
Next, once we were about 10 minutes away from the bay we started out in, our guide pointed out a fin sticking out of the water and said it was a shark. O_O We asked what kind and he said "Hammerhead". D: We were visibly alarmed, so he told us that where we were was too shallow for the adult ones, and the only ones we would see were harmless juveniles. I wasn't totally calmed by that, because you always hear in the news "two tourists were eaten by an X that uncharacterisically did Y", and I most certainly did not want to die in that manner at this time. D:
We broke for lunch on a beach near where we would be staying that night, and our guide told me and Jiuna that we could swim while he cooked us pasta. We snorkeled around for about 15 minutes, and saw some little blue fish that were quite pretty. The water was a little stirred up and cloudy, so it was a little hard to see.
Lunch was a red sauce pasta with some king oyster mushroooms. It was pretty good, and it came with cold tea, which was highly welcome in the hot sun. :D Our guide also brought some tokoroten, which is a jelly made from boiled seaweed, and is a regional specialty. We had it with kinako (soybean flour) and black honey (some kind of sugar syrup deal). It was absolutely delicious! We had it again later at our ryokan, but it was a more refined, savoury version and was not quite as exciting.
After eating, our guide told us we had about 45 minutes before we needed to start heading back, and so Jiuna and I went swimming again. We decided to swim across the quasi-bay (there was a shallow area that is at times above water). We did so, and it was a relatively pleasant swim over, but we misjudged the strength of the waves, and sort of beached ourselves. O_O We laugh when we talk about it now, but there was serious potential for injury there. Both of us were having trouble holding onto the rocks when waves came in and I had a fair bit of difficulty getting back out into deeper water again, and was bowled over a couple of times. I'm very thankful that I didn't bonk my head, as that was a very real possibility. Note to selves, next time you go swimming in typ(h)oon driven open ocean swells, do not beach yourself on a beach full of large, kind-of-sharp rocks. >_< Both Jiuna and I are in one piece, and weren't much worse for wear (a few scrapes on knees and a couple of finger cuts), though it did mean we swam back across the apparently shark-infested waters while bleeding (if slightly).
It's almost 2:30AM now, and I really need to get to sleep, but I haven't blogged forever, so I think I'll just post what I've gotten written down from last night and tonight. >_< It's pretty difficult to find the time to blog, because Tokyo stays awake late into the night, unlike Hayashi. I'll try to get the rest up when I can.
Night!
Sunday, August 7, 2011
A Peninsula Pirates are us!
August 7: Touring the Izu Peninsula
Today Jiuna and I got up at 8:30 and packed up our stuff to head out for our trip. We grabbed a breakfast of assorted breads at Ueno station, which turned out to be quite good. We took the Yamanote to Tokyo, where we caught a Shinkansen for Atami. In Atami we had the delightful experience of eating frozen oranges. O_O They had them sitting in a little box in the station, and were about 250円 for two of them. When mandarin oranges come into season in Canada, you all should try freezing a couple and eating them; it's really good.
From Atami we took a train to Jogaseki, where we walked to the coast to see some rather impressive cliffs. We've got pictures, so I won't go into too much detail, but the scenery was quite good. There were a ton people though! It's tourism season in Japan, so I think we can expect decent crowds everywhere we go, unfortunately. At Jogasaki was also the official disappointment of the day. They had some suspension bridge advertised, and it was like, the most boring thing ever. >_< It wasn't particularly long, it didn't sway too much, and there were a bunch people standing around on it like it was nothing, so it was kind of hard to get excited about in the slightest haha. Oh well, the rest of Jogasaki was cool, so perhaps asking for an interesting bridge on top of that is asking too much.
We walked back up the long hill to the station, and were delighted to discover that at the station, they appear to be aware that they are situated on top of a giant hill. Off to the side of the platform, there's a little pool-type-deal, intended to be a foot bath, that may or may not be fed from a hot spring, according to Jiuna. The water was a little slippery (which would mean alkaline, right?), so that might mean it came from a natural source. In either case, it was soooo nice to have after walking all over the place, and we agreed that our feet felt much better for the entire rest of the day.
From Jogasaki station, we took the train to Shimoda, where we transferred to a bus bound for Kisami, where our accomodation is. Tabi-tabi, the place where we're staying, is quite cute, and seems to be comfy. Apparently one has to be careful with respect to... ahem, certain types of belongings though. According to the people in charge, bikinis specifically have gone missing from the drying lines outside when left overnight, on not one, but two occasions. D: Eugh... We had no bikinis to hang, so we were safe in either case.
We got a recommendation for a place to eat from one of the proprieters, and it turned out to be really, really good. :D If you ever find yourself in Kisami, you should eat at Cafe South. Jiuna had an excellent Ahi pokke salad, and I had a respectable proscuitto salad, but the star of tonight's show was the ceviche. It had all kinds of seafood that was all REALLY good (we're by the sea), and the dressing had shiso and mirin in it, we think. Jiuna also had a mango mojito that was quite good.
After dinner, we walked to the beach, and on the way, we made a somewhat disturbing discovery. All along the river to the ocean, there are crabs. Burrowing crabs that also like to scurry about on the path and hide in trees. O_O I don't care what you think, crabs in trees is a thing that is both wrong and scary. We made it to the beach without any serious trauma, where we saw a multitude of surfers hanging out in the waves. We walked along the beach, and pondered getting our suits, but it was getting dark, and most of the surfers were turning in as well, so we decided against it (besides, we'd need to find a way to dry our suits... Eugh... >_<).
On the walk back, we discovered that the crabs are possibly nocturnal (or perhaps crepuscular), as there was greatly increased crab activity on the boardwalk by the river. They scurry like spiders, which Jiuna despises, and I'm afraid of crabs, so we were not having too much fun walking back. On the final stretch it proved too much, as there were dark shapes darting back and forth in front of us, and the trees above entirely covered the path, and we just booked it back to Tabi-tabi. >_< We are not the bravest of souls haha.
Back at Tabi-tabi we had a snack of food purchased at the local Family Mart, and while eating, we chatted with one of the owners about skiing in Japan. He came to the conclusion after we mentioned we really liked Revelstoke (when we mentioned it, he clutched his head in despair at not having been there), that we would probably like Hakuba. Apparently the glades are very skiable, and the terrain is more difficult than on Hokkaido, but the snow is not as good.
We took showers after that, and are now getting ready to go to bed. We have to get up early to get to our kayaking trip, so we'd best get to sleep soon.
Night!
Today Jiuna and I got up at 8:30 and packed up our stuff to head out for our trip. We grabbed a breakfast of assorted breads at Ueno station, which turned out to be quite good. We took the Yamanote to Tokyo, where we caught a Shinkansen for Atami. In Atami we had the delightful experience of eating frozen oranges. O_O They had them sitting in a little box in the station, and were about 250円 for two of them. When mandarin oranges come into season in Canada, you all should try freezing a couple and eating them; it's really good.
From Atami we took a train to Jogaseki, where we walked to the coast to see some rather impressive cliffs. We've got pictures, so I won't go into too much detail, but the scenery was quite good. There were a ton people though! It's tourism season in Japan, so I think we can expect decent crowds everywhere we go, unfortunately. At Jogasaki was also the official disappointment of the day. They had some suspension bridge advertised, and it was like, the most boring thing ever. >_< It wasn't particularly long, it didn't sway too much, and there were a bunch people standing around on it like it was nothing, so it was kind of hard to get excited about in the slightest haha. Oh well, the rest of Jogasaki was cool, so perhaps asking for an interesting bridge on top of that is asking too much.
We walked back up the long hill to the station, and were delighted to discover that at the station, they appear to be aware that they are situated on top of a giant hill. Off to the side of the platform, there's a little pool-type-deal, intended to be a foot bath, that may or may not be fed from a hot spring, according to Jiuna. The water was a little slippery (which would mean alkaline, right?), so that might mean it came from a natural source. In either case, it was soooo nice to have after walking all over the place, and we agreed that our feet felt much better for the entire rest of the day.
From Jogasaki station, we took the train to Shimoda, where we transferred to a bus bound for Kisami, where our accomodation is. Tabi-tabi, the place where we're staying, is quite cute, and seems to be comfy. Apparently one has to be careful with respect to... ahem, certain types of belongings though. According to the people in charge, bikinis specifically have gone missing from the drying lines outside when left overnight, on not one, but two occasions. D: Eugh... We had no bikinis to hang, so we were safe in either case.
We got a recommendation for a place to eat from one of the proprieters, and it turned out to be really, really good. :D If you ever find yourself in Kisami, you should eat at Cafe South. Jiuna had an excellent Ahi pokke salad, and I had a respectable proscuitto salad, but the star of tonight's show was the ceviche. It had all kinds of seafood that was all REALLY good (we're by the sea), and the dressing had shiso and mirin in it, we think. Jiuna also had a mango mojito that was quite good.
After dinner, we walked to the beach, and on the way, we made a somewhat disturbing discovery. All along the river to the ocean, there are crabs. Burrowing crabs that also like to scurry about on the path and hide in trees. O_O I don't care what you think, crabs in trees is a thing that is both wrong and scary. We made it to the beach without any serious trauma, where we saw a multitude of surfers hanging out in the waves. We walked along the beach, and pondered getting our suits, but it was getting dark, and most of the surfers were turning in as well, so we decided against it (besides, we'd need to find a way to dry our suits... Eugh... >_<).
On the walk back, we discovered that the crabs are possibly nocturnal (or perhaps crepuscular), as there was greatly increased crab activity on the boardwalk by the river. They scurry like spiders, which Jiuna despises, and I'm afraid of crabs, so we were not having too much fun walking back. On the final stretch it proved too much, as there were dark shapes darting back and forth in front of us, and the trees above entirely covered the path, and we just booked it back to Tabi-tabi. >_< We are not the bravest of souls haha.
Back at Tabi-tabi we had a snack of food purchased at the local Family Mart, and while eating, we chatted with one of the owners about skiing in Japan. He came to the conclusion after we mentioned we really liked Revelstoke (when we mentioned it, he clutched his head in despair at not having been there), that we would probably like Hakuba. Apparently the glades are very skiable, and the terrain is more difficult than on Hokkaido, but the snow is not as good.
We took showers after that, and are now getting ready to go to bed. We have to get up early to get to our kayaking trip, so we'd best get to sleep soon.
Night!
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Round One: Ready? GO!
August 6: Jiuna!!!
This morning I got up and ate dorm breakfast of natto and showered before getting my room ready to be left alone for a while (taking out garbage, drawing blinds, etc.). I got out of the dorm at around the time I wanted to, and stopped at Pain de Mie to pick up a melon pan to give to Jiuna on her arrival. I got one for myself and ate it, so that I could avoid giving it to her if it gave me acid stomach by the time she landed haha.
I took the Keikyu line to Shinagawa, and then the Yamanote to Ueno, where I took the Keisei line to Narita. It all went quite smoothly, as I had google-mapped it beforehand, and knew which exits to take. I arrived at the arrival gates about 45 minutes before her plane was scheduled to land, which gave me time to pick up some blueberry yogurt and a red bean pastry for a pseudo-lunch.
Jiuna's plane arrived slightly ahead of time, and it took about half an hour for her to get off the plane and through customs I think. I met her right at the arrival gate, and we hugged and I gave her her melon pan and some pocky. We took the Keisei Skyliner back to Ueno (we're just high-rollers like that) and checked into our hotel. After checking in and getting settled, we headed straight for Akiba and grabbed an early dinner at Tenya. Today we mostly wandered Akiba at Jiuna's direction. Apparently a lot of stuff has changed since she was here. Many of her favourite bookstores are in newer, swankier buildings or in different locations entirely. I took her to the Project Diva machines at CLUB SEGA 2, because I thought there might be a huge crowd for the new song release that happened on the 4th, but it looked quite tame at first sight. The reason for the lack of a lineup, however, was that there was some sort of tournament going on! It wasn't really all that captivating though. I think I'll stick to Evo and StarCraft for my ESPORTS needs. There were some cosplayers though, and the people in attendance were making a lot of cheerful noise, which is always cool to see. We also bought our Izu Q-kippu (some kind of touring ticket deal) at Akihabara JR Station, although we actually use a different line to get to Akiba from our hotel.
Jiuna started to crash at about 9 and I was getting quite tired too, so we headed back to our hotel to prepare for tomorrow. We will be getting up decently early to check out and will make our way to Izu to start our grand adventure! I'm not sure what our Internet arrangements will be like when we're there, so don't get worried if I miss a day of blogging (for the first time!). Anyways, I'd best get to bed now, so that I'm able to get up with Jiuna, whose body clock is on quite a different time than local, and will probably be raring to go at some ungodly hour in the morning. >_<
Night!
This morning I got up and ate dorm breakfast of natto and showered before getting my room ready to be left alone for a while (taking out garbage, drawing blinds, etc.). I got out of the dorm at around the time I wanted to, and stopped at Pain de Mie to pick up a melon pan to give to Jiuna on her arrival. I got one for myself and ate it, so that I could avoid giving it to her if it gave me acid stomach by the time she landed haha.
I took the Keikyu line to Shinagawa, and then the Yamanote to Ueno, where I took the Keisei line to Narita. It all went quite smoothly, as I had google-mapped it beforehand, and knew which exits to take. I arrived at the arrival gates about 45 minutes before her plane was scheduled to land, which gave me time to pick up some blueberry yogurt and a red bean pastry for a pseudo-lunch.
Jiuna's plane arrived slightly ahead of time, and it took about half an hour for her to get off the plane and through customs I think. I met her right at the arrival gate, and we hugged and I gave her her melon pan and some pocky. We took the Keisei Skyliner back to Ueno (we're just high-rollers like that) and checked into our hotel. After checking in and getting settled, we headed straight for Akiba and grabbed an early dinner at Tenya. Today we mostly wandered Akiba at Jiuna's direction. Apparently a lot of stuff has changed since she was here. Many of her favourite bookstores are in newer, swankier buildings or in different locations entirely. I took her to the Project Diva machines at CLUB SEGA 2, because I thought there might be a huge crowd for the new song release that happened on the 4th, but it looked quite tame at first sight. The reason for the lack of a lineup, however, was that there was some sort of tournament going on! It wasn't really all that captivating though. I think I'll stick to Evo and StarCraft for my ESPORTS needs. There were some cosplayers though, and the people in attendance were making a lot of cheerful noise, which is always cool to see. We also bought our Izu Q-kippu (some kind of touring ticket deal) at Akihabara JR Station, although we actually use a different line to get to Akiba from our hotel.
Jiuna started to crash at about 9 and I was getting quite tired too, so we headed back to our hotel to prepare for tomorrow. We will be getting up decently early to check out and will make our way to Izu to start our grand adventure! I'm not sure what our Internet arrangements will be like when we're there, so don't get worried if I miss a day of blogging (for the first time!). Anyways, I'd best get to bed now, so that I'm able to get up with Jiuna, whose body clock is on quite a different time than local, and will probably be raring to go at some ungodly hour in the morning. >_<
Night!
Friday, August 5, 2011
So excite!
Aug 5: Last Day of Work for a While
Today I got up and ate dorm breakfast of something mustardy and onion-y with some pork and vegetables (and miso soup and rice). I took the bus and got to work on time, where I made the change to my recommender that I thought of before the "weekend". It didn't appear to totally wreck things, but it wasn't completely solved, either. I talked to Kabutoya-san regarding my questions, and I didn't get particularly great answers, as he was very very busy today trying to get a paper submitted (deadline was today). I worked on some of his suggestions for the recommender, as well as cleaned up the code a bit before the lunch bell rang.
At lunch I ate hiyashi-ramen, which was only alright, but better than all the other options (I did not feel like having Murugi-curry yet again; what is up with their scheduling?). It was kind of salty, but none of the flavours were offensive. After eating I played handiball, and enjoyed myself again, as it was with the usual crowd. I wasn't great, but neither were many of them for some reason. >_<
In the afternoon I worked on some other suggestions Kabutoya-san had made. Unfortunately, one thing about this model is that it cannot forget the old data that is no longer relevant, so at the moment it just gets more and more bloated as "time" goes on (time is in quotes because I'm just reading data sequentially from a text file). The next model I'll implement doesn't have this problem, but it comes at the expense of needing to completely and abruptly forget data, rather than attenuating its importance over time. Luckily I am pretty much done with the model I'm currently working on as of the end of today, so when I go back to work after the vacation I will be starting fresh on something new, not something half-finished that I've forgotten the details of.
After work (practically all the PIGs left before me for some reason...) I walked home and ate dorm dinner of yakisoba wrapped in scrambled egg with ketchup on top. There was also some mapo-nasu (I don't know if that's a real thing, but it at least describes what's happening) and some fake crab salad. Everything was quite good, and I had a brief chat with the new kids that moved in (who are probably older than me, but I will call them kids because they look like they're 15 years old). After dinner I had a grapefruit for dessert and did some laundry and packing for my imminent adventure. I watched a little StarCraft as well, but the matches I saw today weren't so great.
After StarCraft, I remembered that I needed to shave, and of course that took absolutely forever, and of course I competely forgot about blogging, so now here I am, up late and still needing to pack some more. D: Oh well, I will be on vacation soon, so being a little shy of sleep will hopefully be alright. Anyways, I'd best finish up my packing ASAP, and get to bed.
Night!
Today I got up and ate dorm breakfast of something mustardy and onion-y with some pork and vegetables (and miso soup and rice). I took the bus and got to work on time, where I made the change to my recommender that I thought of before the "weekend". It didn't appear to totally wreck things, but it wasn't completely solved, either. I talked to Kabutoya-san regarding my questions, and I didn't get particularly great answers, as he was very very busy today trying to get a paper submitted (deadline was today). I worked on some of his suggestions for the recommender, as well as cleaned up the code a bit before the lunch bell rang.
At lunch I ate hiyashi-ramen, which was only alright, but better than all the other options (I did not feel like having Murugi-curry yet again; what is up with their scheduling?). It was kind of salty, but none of the flavours were offensive. After eating I played handiball, and enjoyed myself again, as it was with the usual crowd. I wasn't great, but neither were many of them for some reason. >_<
In the afternoon I worked on some other suggestions Kabutoya-san had made. Unfortunately, one thing about this model is that it cannot forget the old data that is no longer relevant, so at the moment it just gets more and more bloated as "time" goes on (time is in quotes because I'm just reading data sequentially from a text file). The next model I'll implement doesn't have this problem, but it comes at the expense of needing to completely and abruptly forget data, rather than attenuating its importance over time. Luckily I am pretty much done with the model I'm currently working on as of the end of today, so when I go back to work after the vacation I will be starting fresh on something new, not something half-finished that I've forgotten the details of.
After work (practically all the PIGs left before me for some reason...) I walked home and ate dorm dinner of yakisoba wrapped in scrambled egg with ketchup on top. There was also some mapo-nasu (I don't know if that's a real thing, but it at least describes what's happening) and some fake crab salad. Everything was quite good, and I had a brief chat with the new kids that moved in (who are probably older than me, but I will call them kids because they look like they're 15 years old). After dinner I had a grapefruit for dessert and did some laundry and packing for my imminent adventure. I watched a little StarCraft as well, but the matches I saw today weren't so great.
After StarCraft, I remembered that I needed to shave, and of course that took absolutely forever, and of course I competely forgot about blogging, so now here I am, up late and still needing to pack some more. D: Oh well, I will be on vacation soon, so being a little shy of sleep will hopefully be alright. Anyways, I'd best finish up my packing ASAP, and get to bed.
Night!
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Realizing you have never beaten the reduced-difficulty party-version of the easiest mode in a game you like is a crushing experience for a gamer D:
Aug 4: Happy Birthday Jiuna!
Today I got up at around 11:30 and got my usual Yokosan lunch before voice chatting with Mom. I managed to ruin her lemon squares from several thousand kilometres away. D: After finishing talking to her I called Jiuna and sung her Happy Birthday while she was on the SkyTrain ahah. Since it's a long distance call, and we'll be seeing eachother in TWO DAYS, we kept the conversation brief.
After talking to Jiuna I headed out to Akiba for the day. The trip was mostly uneventful, as it often is now that I know the route by heart. I did manage to take a small wrong turn in Shinagawa station, which by chance led me to a bakery I had not seen before. It was full of baked goods more in the style of bakeries in Canada, which lit up my eyes with delight you can be sure, as I am a great fan of baked goods, and Japanese ones seem to put my stomach in a funk. I got some crusty roll that said something about Hokkaido on the tag, but it turned out to just be a really good roll with not too much (read: any) fancy stuff happening.
Once in Akiba I went to CLUB SEGA 2, to see if there were any other really terrible 3rd Strike and Melty Blood players about. Much to my amazement, even though it was a Thursday, there actually were! The Melty Blood people were bad enough that I could beat them, but the 3rd Strike people were playing Ken and Yun, so while they seemed equal to me in terms of ultra-scrubbiness, they simply did too much damage off of their hits and I couldn't beat them (I did take rounds though, hooray!).
After getting my fighting game fix, I wandered around Club Sega to see what was up. The arcades in Akiba constantly change their layout, which somehow makes it very exciting to explore them, even if they haven't actually gotten anything new. There was a Project Diva song release TODAY, but it's a Thursday, so it wasn't totally coo-coo-bananas. There was still a hefty lineup, so I didn't end up playing (if I want to play I can just go to Yokochuu haha). After all was said and done for exploring the 5th floor, I suddenly got an overwhelming urge to play Metal Slug when I walked past it again... Yeah... That got fixed pretty quick. >_> In a bizarre way, I kind of want to get good at it, because it's one of the only arcade games that you see consistently on the ferries in BC (I'm ignoring Tekken).
I headed over to HEY, and unfortunately they have reorganized the danmaku floor such that both of the Mushihime cabinets are side-by-side and facing a place where people can gather and watch. D: I liked having my discreet little side-cabinet to hide on and try to get better away from watchful eyes, but alas it is no more. However, having to play in the new configuration yielded an amazing and rather important discovery! I have been playing the wrong side of the game! I have always been playing as 2P, because I like being 2P for some reason (I blame it on a combination of Jiuna convincing me that Luigi was more desirable to play as because he was green, and coping with Aaron always needing to be 1P). HOWEVER, apparently in Mushihimesama, 1P and 2P are not identical! D: Only on the 1P side do you get the bullet speedup effects according to your combo! So apparently not only have I been playing on the lowest difficulty setting with the auto-bomb mode, I have also been playing the side that does not increase the difficulty of the game tenfold when you manage to avoid dying for any reasonable amount of time. D: I have now moved over to playing 1P, but it's quite slow going getting used to the increased difficulty, and facing the screen from the 1P side is also proving to be more disconcerting than I would have expected. Oh well, now I know how to get the glowy bullets that try harder to kill you... >_< I didn't do so well in terms of advancement through the stages today, but I absolutely trashed all of my previous point records by starting to apply what I've learned about scoring from players I've watched. Of course, getting higher scores means doing crazy things that get you killed, but it's extremely fun, and I think it's actually rather good practice. I find it's helping me memorize the levels better.
After playing the worst round of Mushihime I have ever played in my entire life (I got down to zero lives on the Stage 1 boss, and then subsequently suicided out of shame and despair D:), I decided it was time to eat dinner haha. I had MEGA sauce-katsu-don at Meryl Streep Presents Probably Not Maid Curry again, and it was as good as I remembered. When I get better at Japanese I may have to ask them to lay off on the mayo though. :S After eating I went back to CLUB SEGA 2 to redeem myself in 3rd Strike (no such luck) and then went back to play Mushihime at HEY. When I arrived, both machines were occupied (one guy was actually worse than me! I'm moving up in the world! ;D), so I played... GAUNTLET LEGENDS!!! Oh man, what a trip down memory lane... HEY are not JERKS like all North American arcades, and do not make your life tick down for no reason other than to grab your cash and make you angry and never want to play again. This meant that I actually got to... you know, PLAY THE GAME. >_> It was significantly less exciting than I remember, but it was entertaining nonetheless, and it felt good to hear "BLUE ARCHER NEEDS FOOD BADLY!!!" again haha. I kind of sucked at Mushihime again when I got back at the cabinet, and so maybe it was good that I had the opportunity to play something I don't fail super hard at.
I was apparently Akiba starved, because I played until waaay later than I usually do, and ended up leaving HEY with the intention of going home at like 9:40. When I arrived at Yokochuu at 11, I looked at the bus schedule and found that the last bus to 三崎東岡 (Misakihigashioka, the bus I take) was coming at 11:20! I guess I'm glad that I wasn't doing well at Mushihime and thus stay until 10... Somehow I had remembered there being several buses after 11pm, but apparently that is false.
I got home at about midnight, and made the mistake of watching most of the Skullgirls Evo panel before I remembered that I had to blog. O_O Ouchie, I guess I'm glad that I only have one work day ahead of me before I'm off on my grand adventure. Anyways, that just about wraps it up for today, and I will now bid you good-night.
Night!
Today I got up at around 11:30 and got my usual Yokosan lunch before voice chatting with Mom. I managed to ruin her lemon squares from several thousand kilometres away. D: After finishing talking to her I called Jiuna and sung her Happy Birthday while she was on the SkyTrain ahah. Since it's a long distance call, and we'll be seeing eachother in TWO DAYS, we kept the conversation brief.
After talking to Jiuna I headed out to Akiba for the day. The trip was mostly uneventful, as it often is now that I know the route by heart. I did manage to take a small wrong turn in Shinagawa station, which by chance led me to a bakery I had not seen before. It was full of baked goods more in the style of bakeries in Canada, which lit up my eyes with delight you can be sure, as I am a great fan of baked goods, and Japanese ones seem to put my stomach in a funk. I got some crusty roll that said something about Hokkaido on the tag, but it turned out to just be a really good roll with not too much (read: any) fancy stuff happening.
Once in Akiba I went to CLUB SEGA 2, to see if there were any other really terrible 3rd Strike and Melty Blood players about. Much to my amazement, even though it was a Thursday, there actually were! The Melty Blood people were bad enough that I could beat them, but the 3rd Strike people were playing Ken and Yun, so while they seemed equal to me in terms of ultra-scrubbiness, they simply did too much damage off of their hits and I couldn't beat them (I did take rounds though, hooray!).
After getting my fighting game fix, I wandered around Club Sega to see what was up. The arcades in Akiba constantly change their layout, which somehow makes it very exciting to explore them, even if they haven't actually gotten anything new. There was a Project Diva song release TODAY, but it's a Thursday, so it wasn't totally coo-coo-bananas. There was still a hefty lineup, so I didn't end up playing (if I want to play I can just go to Yokochuu haha). After all was said and done for exploring the 5th floor, I suddenly got an overwhelming urge to play Metal Slug when I walked past it again... Yeah... That got fixed pretty quick. >_> In a bizarre way, I kind of want to get good at it, because it's one of the only arcade games that you see consistently on the ferries in BC (I'm ignoring Tekken).
I headed over to HEY, and unfortunately they have reorganized the danmaku floor such that both of the Mushihime cabinets are side-by-side and facing a place where people can gather and watch. D: I liked having my discreet little side-cabinet to hide on and try to get better away from watchful eyes, but alas it is no more. However, having to play in the new configuration yielded an amazing and rather important discovery! I have been playing the wrong side of the game! I have always been playing as 2P, because I like being 2P for some reason (I blame it on a combination of Jiuna convincing me that Luigi was more desirable to play as because he was green, and coping with Aaron always needing to be 1P). HOWEVER, apparently in Mushihimesama, 1P and 2P are not identical! D: Only on the 1P side do you get the bullet speedup effects according to your combo! So apparently not only have I been playing on the lowest difficulty setting with the auto-bomb mode, I have also been playing the side that does not increase the difficulty of the game tenfold when you manage to avoid dying for any reasonable amount of time. D: I have now moved over to playing 1P, but it's quite slow going getting used to the increased difficulty, and facing the screen from the 1P side is also proving to be more disconcerting than I would have expected. Oh well, now I know how to get the glowy bullets that try harder to kill you... >_< I didn't do so well in terms of advancement through the stages today, but I absolutely trashed all of my previous point records by starting to apply what I've learned about scoring from players I've watched. Of course, getting higher scores means doing crazy things that get you killed, but it's extremely fun, and I think it's actually rather good practice. I find it's helping me memorize the levels better.
After playing the worst round of Mushihime I have ever played in my entire life (I got down to zero lives on the Stage 1 boss, and then subsequently suicided out of shame and despair D:), I decided it was time to eat dinner haha. I had MEGA sauce-katsu-don at Meryl Streep Presents Probably Not Maid Curry again, and it was as good as I remembered. When I get better at Japanese I may have to ask them to lay off on the mayo though. :S After eating I went back to CLUB SEGA 2 to redeem myself in 3rd Strike (no such luck) and then went back to play Mushihime at HEY. When I arrived, both machines were occupied (one guy was actually worse than me! I'm moving up in the world! ;D), so I played... GAUNTLET LEGENDS!!! Oh man, what a trip down memory lane... HEY are not JERKS like all North American arcades, and do not make your life tick down for no reason other than to grab your cash and make you angry and never want to play again. This meant that I actually got to... you know, PLAY THE GAME. >_> It was significantly less exciting than I remember, but it was entertaining nonetheless, and it felt good to hear "BLUE ARCHER NEEDS FOOD BADLY!!!" again haha. I kind of sucked at Mushihime again when I got back at the cabinet, and so maybe it was good that I had the opportunity to play something I don't fail super hard at.
I was apparently Akiba starved, because I played until waaay later than I usually do, and ended up leaving HEY with the intention of going home at like 9:40. When I arrived at Yokochuu at 11, I looked at the bus schedule and found that the last bus to 三崎東岡 (Misakihigashioka, the bus I take) was coming at 11:20! I guess I'm glad that I wasn't doing well at Mushihime and thus stay until 10... Somehow I had remembered there being several buses after 11pm, but apparently that is false.
I got home at about midnight, and made the mistake of watching most of the Skullgirls Evo panel before I remembered that I had to blog. O_O Ouchie, I guess I'm glad that I only have one work day ahead of me before I'm off on my grand adventure. Anyways, that just about wraps it up for today, and I will now bid you good-night.
Night!
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
A much needed recharge
August 3: A Lazy RJ is a Happy RJ
Today I got up and did nothing all day. Yesss!!! ;D
I got my usual breakfast/lunch at the Yokosan, again trying desperately to find anything else there that at all compares to the price of korokke, but alas, no such thing appears to exist... Oh well, grapefruit, carrots, bananas, milk and korokke is a pretty decent breakfast/lunch.
After eating I played some StarCraft with Kevin until he had to go to bed. After that I investigated a open-source game called FreeOrion, which is apparently loosely inspired by the Master of Orion series, which I absolutely loved. Unfortunately, as I determined after several hours of play, the project is not far along enough to really be called "playable". The learning curve is nearly a vertical wall on the first couple of turns, as there are very few explanations as to what things actually do and how you put stuff together, but through a combination of a tutorial on the projects wiki (which gives false information) and some experimentation, I eventually discovered how to play the game haha. Unfortunately, after you make it that far, that's kind of it. There is not much logical tech progression, and some rather "important" techs apparently do not work with some of the races (including the one I was playing), such as Terraforming. O_O Yeah that's a big one. You can still build it, it just does nothing haha. The AI also is pretty much nonexistent. They will place use their initial colony ship to settle a planet near their starting world, and then will do absolutely nothing for the rest of the game. They actually did mention this on their wiki, so I was aware of this fact going into the game. Their economy/production system is kind of neat though, and I would like to see how it turns out once the game is in true playable condition.
It being a 4x game (and the slowest-paced one I've ever seen, at that), fiddling around with it and getting to the point where I had a stable expansion pattern and was teching up steadily and ready to start amassing forces to attack my non-existent adversaries took pretty much the whole rest of the day haha. I will be keeping an eye its development, as I would like to see how it turns out (if it ever does).
I didn't go to Akiba today because a) it was about 4pm when I finished playing StarCraft with Kevin, b) I will be going tomorrow, and c) because I got my dorm fees bill today, and it appears to be about 7000-8000円 larger than I expected. O_O Because of the discretionary money I budget an a per-month bases, my spending money total is still in the black, but it certainly could not handle a double-Akiba weekend after having to absorb that extra cost. I am kind of wondering what is up with the difference in dorm fees, as the offending category was "communal spaces" or something like that, which went from 630円 for half a month of living in June, to 9650円 for a full one in July. I am not actually aware of using any common space resources, other than tap water and a corner of the fridge door, so the increase is rather surprising. I can only hope that it was supposed to be 965円, and whoever wrote it up just made a hundred-dollar typo. >_< I guess I'm glad I've got ample wiggle room in my budget, and that this is therefore just puzzling and confusing rather than disastrous and stressful.
Anyways, I'd best get to bed if I'm going to get up to talk to Mom and Jiuna tomorrow. Night!
Today I got up and did nothing all day. Yesss!!! ;D
I got my usual breakfast/lunch at the Yokosan, again trying desperately to find anything else there that at all compares to the price of korokke, but alas, no such thing appears to exist... Oh well, grapefruit, carrots, bananas, milk and korokke is a pretty decent breakfast/lunch.
After eating I played some StarCraft with Kevin until he had to go to bed. After that I investigated a open-source game called FreeOrion, which is apparently loosely inspired by the Master of Orion series, which I absolutely loved. Unfortunately, as I determined after several hours of play, the project is not far along enough to really be called "playable". The learning curve is nearly a vertical wall on the first couple of turns, as there are very few explanations as to what things actually do and how you put stuff together, but through a combination of a tutorial on the projects wiki (which gives false information) and some experimentation, I eventually discovered how to play the game haha. Unfortunately, after you make it that far, that's kind of it. There is not much logical tech progression, and some rather "important" techs apparently do not work with some of the races (including the one I was playing), such as Terraforming. O_O Yeah that's a big one. You can still build it, it just does nothing haha. The AI also is pretty much nonexistent. They will place use their initial colony ship to settle a planet near their starting world, and then will do absolutely nothing for the rest of the game. They actually did mention this on their wiki, so I was aware of this fact going into the game. Their economy/production system is kind of neat though, and I would like to see how it turns out once the game is in true playable condition.
It being a 4x game (and the slowest-paced one I've ever seen, at that), fiddling around with it and getting to the point where I had a stable expansion pattern and was teching up steadily and ready to start amassing forces to attack my non-existent adversaries took pretty much the whole rest of the day haha. I will be keeping an eye its development, as I would like to see how it turns out (if it ever does).
I didn't go to Akiba today because a) it was about 4pm when I finished playing StarCraft with Kevin, b) I will be going tomorrow, and c) because I got my dorm fees bill today, and it appears to be about 7000-8000円 larger than I expected. O_O Because of the discretionary money I budget an a per-month bases, my spending money total is still in the black, but it certainly could not handle a double-Akiba weekend after having to absorb that extra cost. I am kind of wondering what is up with the difference in dorm fees, as the offending category was "communal spaces" or something like that, which went from 630円 for half a month of living in June, to 9650円 for a full one in July. I am not actually aware of using any common space resources, other than tap water and a corner of the fridge door, so the increase is rather surprising. I can only hope that it was supposed to be 965円, and whoever wrote it up just made a hundred-dollar typo. >_< I guess I'm glad I've got ample wiggle room in my budget, and that this is therefore just puzzling and confusing rather than disastrous and stressful.
Anyways, I'd best get to bed if I'm going to get up to talk to Mom and Jiuna tomorrow. Night!
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
I didn't ever believe I could get so pointlessly frustrated with the need of probability distribution to sum to one... (even while knowing that it's actually helping me find logical flaws)
Aug 2: Weekend!!!
Bleagh... I'm very, very glad this week is over.
Today I got up and ate dorm breakfast of harusame and beef with something I can't remember haha (and miso soup and rice). I got out of the house and to work on time, and worked a bit on my recommender business. Unfortunately, the results of the recommender are not as I would expect, and it is far slower than regular PLSA to boot (it's supposed to be faster). The big problem is that I now have a sheet of paper full of things that I am suspicious about, but Kabutoya-san wasn't there again today, and apparently noone else in the group works on topic models. D: So, on Friday, I hope he is ready to answer a hundred million questions about what might be going wrong with the recommender. It's a bit hard to be productive when you not only have serious doubts about the theoretical completeness of the model, but also about the suitability of your dataset to the problem. >_<
At lunch I ate murugi curry again (I have no idea who makes the schedule), because it was there, and looked better than everything else (except for pricey katsu). There appears to be a bit of a fad happening at the cafeteria; everyone is starting to eat this soy-based yogurt stuff. It's quite funny to see so many people with it on their trays all of a sudden. It's 100円, and I've been getting hungry in the afternoon lately, so I bought some to try when I saw it in Yokosan today. It's a little dessert-ey, so maybe not a good addition to lunch. I will have to translate the nutritional information before I pass final judgement though. I didn't play handiball after eating, as there was only Tsutsumida-san and I available today, and that's not really enough.
In the afternoon I puzzled away at how to fill in the deficiencies I think exist in the models I'm to implement. The problem is that my current topic of study is online learning, which means the model is able to learn from new data as it comes in. While this is cool, not to mention practical, it also means that the hardcore principled mathematical justifications behind all the formulas kinda get... flushed down. >_< At present it seems a bit more like wizardry than anything, as we are putting decay-causing parameters on things we want to decay, but still are saying "this parameter is drawn from an Dirichlet distribution", which makes no mention of decay. Iwata-san's paper seems to have a more principled approach, but it's far beyond what I'm working with at the moment. I don't seriously mind the black-magicking that's going on, other than that it makes it a little hard to decide what to do when I believe I'm missing information, since I can't really derive it per se.
At the very end of the day I had an idea that I very much wanted to try, but it unfortunately would have taken at least 2 hours, so I couldn't stay to do it. Oh well, at least I will have something additional to bring to my question session with Kabutoya-san. >_< It would have been nice to have had the chance to test it out instead and just move on, but that's just how it goes sometimes. :|
I walked home, which was pleasant, but some sort of rather large bug seems to be... in bloom. Or something. I'm not sure how to describe it. There are these carcasses of large, winged bugs lying around more often at the moment. They aren't EVERYWHERE, but I had never seen one prior to yesterday, when I saw one or two, and on the way home I saw maybe 3 more, and then there was one more on the dorm stairs. :S I'm hoping that bugs vs. time is not a linear function... Oh the humanity! ;D
Dorm dinner was pretty good. There was a pork and garden salad, a piece of salmon and stir-fried vegetables with miso soup and rice. After, I ate a grapefruit (my teeth seem to be better again, spoke too soon and hope they stay this way) and some of my multitudinous carrots. After I just relaxed and unwound. This week has felt like the longest yet by a long shot. It's really hard to believe I went to Kyoto just 4 days ago. O_O I had a nice text chat with Mom, and am now going to sleep until I wake up naturally, which will be a wonderful, wonderful experience.
Night!
Bleagh... I'm very, very glad this week is over.
Today I got up and ate dorm breakfast of harusame and beef with something I can't remember haha (and miso soup and rice). I got out of the house and to work on time, and worked a bit on my recommender business. Unfortunately, the results of the recommender are not as I would expect, and it is far slower than regular PLSA to boot (it's supposed to be faster). The big problem is that I now have a sheet of paper full of things that I am suspicious about, but Kabutoya-san wasn't there again today, and apparently noone else in the group works on topic models. D: So, on Friday, I hope he is ready to answer a hundred million questions about what might be going wrong with the recommender. It's a bit hard to be productive when you not only have serious doubts about the theoretical completeness of the model, but also about the suitability of your dataset to the problem. >_<
At lunch I ate murugi curry again (I have no idea who makes the schedule), because it was there, and looked better than everything else (except for pricey katsu). There appears to be a bit of a fad happening at the cafeteria; everyone is starting to eat this soy-based yogurt stuff. It's quite funny to see so many people with it on their trays all of a sudden. It's 100円, and I've been getting hungry in the afternoon lately, so I bought some to try when I saw it in Yokosan today. It's a little dessert-ey, so maybe not a good addition to lunch. I will have to translate the nutritional information before I pass final judgement though. I didn't play handiball after eating, as there was only Tsutsumida-san and I available today, and that's not really enough.
In the afternoon I puzzled away at how to fill in the deficiencies I think exist in the models I'm to implement. The problem is that my current topic of study is online learning, which means the model is able to learn from new data as it comes in. While this is cool, not to mention practical, it also means that the hardcore principled mathematical justifications behind all the formulas kinda get... flushed down. >_< At present it seems a bit more like wizardry than anything, as we are putting decay-causing parameters on things we want to decay, but still are saying "this parameter is drawn from an Dirichlet distribution", which makes no mention of decay. Iwata-san's paper seems to have a more principled approach, but it's far beyond what I'm working with at the moment. I don't seriously mind the black-magicking that's going on, other than that it makes it a little hard to decide what to do when I believe I'm missing information, since I can't really derive it per se.
At the very end of the day I had an idea that I very much wanted to try, but it unfortunately would have taken at least 2 hours, so I couldn't stay to do it. Oh well, at least I will have something additional to bring to my question session with Kabutoya-san. >_< It would have been nice to have had the chance to test it out instead and just move on, but that's just how it goes sometimes. :|
I walked home, which was pleasant, but some sort of rather large bug seems to be... in bloom. Or something. I'm not sure how to describe it. There are these carcasses of large, winged bugs lying around more often at the moment. They aren't EVERYWHERE, but I had never seen one prior to yesterday, when I saw one or two, and on the way home I saw maybe 3 more, and then there was one more on the dorm stairs. :S I'm hoping that bugs vs. time is not a linear function... Oh the humanity! ;D
Dorm dinner was pretty good. There was a pork and garden salad, a piece of salmon and stir-fried vegetables with miso soup and rice. After, I ate a grapefruit (my teeth seem to be better again, spoke too soon and hope they stay this way) and some of my multitudinous carrots. After I just relaxed and unwound. This week has felt like the longest yet by a long shot. It's really hard to believe I went to Kyoto just 4 days ago. O_O I had a nice text chat with Mom, and am now going to sleep until I wake up naturally, which will be a wonderful, wonderful experience.
Night!
Monday, August 1, 2011
Sometimes living in Japan means you've just gotta buy some carrots, even though you've already got 4
Aug 1: Not the Best of Days
Ugh... Last night I had like, zero success getting to sleep. >_< I went to bed later than I planned to begin with, but then I couldn't actually fall asleep FOREVER. D: I woke up to my alarm at 7, and my nose was giving me warning signs, so I decided to sleep until 8 instead of running. It's a bit of a nasty feedback loop I've got going. I can't sleep because I don't run and I don't run because I can't sleep. D: I'm crossing my fingers that I can change this tonight.
In the morning I had chikuwa with green peppers and tiny fish, potato with egg and tiny fish, and oden-ish daikon and konnyaku (no tiny fish) with miso soup and rice. Unfortunately, the tiny fish were rather, well, fishy, and that made breakfast a little hard to eat while feeling like such crap. >_< I don't have much choice though, as my options to obtain additional food at work are limited, to say the least. I made it through without getting any surprise revisitations of previously vanquished tiny fish, so I guess it all turned out in the end...
I got to work on time and worked some on my performance testing and parameter variation in my newest model. I had a lot of trouble being productive today, as I had a headache due to tiredness. D: I did get some stuff done though, and I also did a LOT of reading about being a better Ruby programmer (a little easier to handle on an achy brain than papers, which was the alternative), so hopefully that will be an investment I will see the dividends of in the future.
At lunch I ate mapo-tofu on rice, which was delicious and cheap! Unfortunately not many of the usual suspects were available for handiball, which meant that the people from our group ended up playing with and against a bunch of derpy 20-somethings. D:< Easily one of my least enjoyable handiball sessions, possibly even beating out the one where I tried to gouge my eye out (since it turned out to be OK haha). What is it about being in their twenties that just seems to turn men into apes? I don't even speak Japanese well enough to fully understand what they were saying, but their derpiness transcended that barrier. Ballhogging and spiking straight into painfully obvious blocks is also a universal language. D:< I am looking forward to playing with my usual cohort again...
In the afternoon I was pretty braindead, but I did get make some useful progress in fleshing out my recommender. I unfortunately ran into a situation I feared might come up, but hoped would not. I will need to ask Kabutoya-san about it most likely, which means I will not be able to solve the problem tomorrow. I don't think I can puzzle out the solution for myself, as Kabutoya-san only provided me with the end-result equations for the model, and didn't give me any derivations or conceptual information, which are pretty critical if you want to make an informed judgement regarding making alterations. Nishida-san came over to my desk before he left and asked if I had seen the Evo final standings. >_< I'm not sure why he thought I would have, since they would have been posted during the workday... Nishida-san! At least I've gotten him excited about North American tournaments, and I'll admit I was thinking about checking them during some of my long tests haha (who cares about good Ruby style when there's Evo amirite!?!).
I left work pretty soon after 6 because I was at just about the lowest level of productivity I have been at since arriving in Japan, and it would just be an exercise in self-mutilation to stay past when I'm allowed to leave on a day like today. >_< I walked home, and it felt surprisingly short as I was totally zoned out for most of it. >_< I went to the Yokosan to buy carrots to bring to work tomorrow, as I my appetite appears to be returning to level more what I would expect from myself. I bought two bags, and of course, once I got home I remembered that I had ALREADY HAD THAT IDEA EARLIER IN THE WEEK! D: Oh well, I guess it's a good think I like carrots, because I am now the proud owner of about 12 rather large ones. >_<
I ate dorm dinner of a saucy hamburger patty and some assorted stirfried vegetables and something that I can only describe as being a cousin of SPAM (with rice and miso soup). There were some new hires eating dinner at the same time as I was, and they were of course dressed all nicely, making me feel a little slovenly in my wifebeater, pajamas and azure crocs (I also have not shaved in like 2 weeks). >_< They were pleasant though, and I tried speaking Japanese with them until they just decided that English was the better way to go. The one who talked for the most part had really, really good English, as he was an exchange student at Waterloo. He says he's from a robotics background and is worried about doing programming for his job now due to not having a good foundation in coding. He decided that he would ask me if he had any problems because I'm in Computer Science. He has, uh, clearly never met Joe Average UBC CS student or he wouldn't have so much confidence in me haha... >_<
After eating dinner, I finished my final entry (from yesterday) into my budget record for July. I am happy to say that I managed to save my goal of 50000円 (about $625), and I only had a deficit of 367円 in my discretionary spending tally! That deficit has been absorbed by today's unspent discretionary money, so I am totally in the black coming into August, even with the rather pricey Kyoto trip (although I will be getting reimbursed for more than I expected, as Kabutoya-san included costs Ikkidzuka->Shin Yokohama and vice versa as well as Shinkansen fare >_<). I ate some carrots and checked Evo results and videos, and talked a bit with Kusano-san before writing this up.
It is now time for bed, so I hopefully don't have a sleep-deficit-headache again tomorrow. D: Night!
PS - Just as I was about to post this, I got a message on my phone from "Area Mail", with some red exclamation marks, and the only part of which I could make sense of was 地震 (earthquake). I closed my phone and everything started shaking! O_O Luckily it was not serious in the slightest, but it was stronger than any of the others I've felt here (which would explain why its P-waves would have triggered the Area Mail). Gave me a little scare though!
Ugh... Last night I had like, zero success getting to sleep. >_< I went to bed later than I planned to begin with, but then I couldn't actually fall asleep FOREVER. D: I woke up to my alarm at 7, and my nose was giving me warning signs, so I decided to sleep until 8 instead of running. It's a bit of a nasty feedback loop I've got going. I can't sleep because I don't run and I don't run because I can't sleep. D: I'm crossing my fingers that I can change this tonight.
In the morning I had chikuwa with green peppers and tiny fish, potato with egg and tiny fish, and oden-ish daikon and konnyaku (no tiny fish) with miso soup and rice. Unfortunately, the tiny fish were rather, well, fishy, and that made breakfast a little hard to eat while feeling like such crap. >_< I don't have much choice though, as my options to obtain additional food at work are limited, to say the least. I made it through without getting any surprise revisitations of previously vanquished tiny fish, so I guess it all turned out in the end...
I got to work on time and worked some on my performance testing and parameter variation in my newest model. I had a lot of trouble being productive today, as I had a headache due to tiredness. D: I did get some stuff done though, and I also did a LOT of reading about being a better Ruby programmer (a little easier to handle on an achy brain than papers, which was the alternative), so hopefully that will be an investment I will see the dividends of in the future.
At lunch I ate mapo-tofu on rice, which was delicious and cheap! Unfortunately not many of the usual suspects were available for handiball, which meant that the people from our group ended up playing with and against a bunch of derpy 20-somethings. D:< Easily one of my least enjoyable handiball sessions, possibly even beating out the one where I tried to gouge my eye out (since it turned out to be OK haha). What is it about being in their twenties that just seems to turn men into apes? I don't even speak Japanese well enough to fully understand what they were saying, but their derpiness transcended that barrier. Ballhogging and spiking straight into painfully obvious blocks is also a universal language. D:< I am looking forward to playing with my usual cohort again...
In the afternoon I was pretty braindead, but I did get make some useful progress in fleshing out my recommender. I unfortunately ran into a situation I feared might come up, but hoped would not. I will need to ask Kabutoya-san about it most likely, which means I will not be able to solve the problem tomorrow. I don't think I can puzzle out the solution for myself, as Kabutoya-san only provided me with the end-result equations for the model, and didn't give me any derivations or conceptual information, which are pretty critical if you want to make an informed judgement regarding making alterations. Nishida-san came over to my desk before he left and asked if I had seen the Evo final standings. >_< I'm not sure why he thought I would have, since they would have been posted during the workday... Nishida-san! At least I've gotten him excited about North American tournaments, and I'll admit I was thinking about checking them during some of my long tests haha (who cares about good Ruby style when there's Evo amirite!?!).
I left work pretty soon after 6 because I was at just about the lowest level of productivity I have been at since arriving in Japan, and it would just be an exercise in self-mutilation to stay past when I'm allowed to leave on a day like today. >_< I walked home, and it felt surprisingly short as I was totally zoned out for most of it. >_< I went to the Yokosan to buy carrots to bring to work tomorrow, as I my appetite appears to be returning to level more what I would expect from myself. I bought two bags, and of course, once I got home I remembered that I had ALREADY HAD THAT IDEA EARLIER IN THE WEEK! D: Oh well, I guess it's a good think I like carrots, because I am now the proud owner of about 12 rather large ones. >_<
I ate dorm dinner of a saucy hamburger patty and some assorted stirfried vegetables and something that I can only describe as being a cousin of SPAM (with rice and miso soup). There were some new hires eating dinner at the same time as I was, and they were of course dressed all nicely, making me feel a little slovenly in my wifebeater, pajamas and azure crocs (I also have not shaved in like 2 weeks). >_< They were pleasant though, and I tried speaking Japanese with them until they just decided that English was the better way to go. The one who talked for the most part had really, really good English, as he was an exchange student at Waterloo. He says he's from a robotics background and is worried about doing programming for his job now due to not having a good foundation in coding. He decided that he would ask me if he had any problems because I'm in Computer Science. He has, uh, clearly never met Joe Average UBC CS student or he wouldn't have so much confidence in me haha... >_<
After eating dinner, I finished my final entry (from yesterday) into my budget record for July. I am happy to say that I managed to save my goal of 50000円 (about $625), and I only had a deficit of 367円 in my discretionary spending tally! That deficit has been absorbed by today's unspent discretionary money, so I am totally in the black coming into August, even with the rather pricey Kyoto trip (although I will be getting reimbursed for more than I expected, as Kabutoya-san included costs Ikkidzuka->Shin Yokohama and vice versa as well as Shinkansen fare >_<). I ate some carrots and checked Evo results and videos, and talked a bit with Kusano-san before writing this up.
It is now time for bed, so I hopefully don't have a sleep-deficit-headache again tomorrow. D: Night!
PS - Just as I was about to post this, I got a message on my phone from "Area Mail", with some red exclamation marks, and the only part of which I could make sense of was 地震 (earthquake). I closed my phone and everything started shaking! O_O Luckily it was not serious in the slightest, but it was stronger than any of the others I've felt here (which would explain why its P-waves would have triggered the Area Mail). Gave me a little scare though!
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