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!