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!
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