September 25: Meeting up with Dad and Linda
Today I woke up and ate dorm breakfast of natto and pork mixture. The natto had bonito and some brown jelly-like sauce on it what was not exactly a hit with me, I must say. D: I showered and got to work on time, and started back on writing my paper. I skimmed a bunch more papers and now my Related Work sections is looking reasonably well-fleshed-out. Kabutoya-san was back today (I was under the impression he was coming back tomorrow), and he took a look and told me that I've got enough references now, since this paper is for a domestic conference, not an international one. Whew! That was quite a relief, and I am glad to be back to being able to look at the actual words in my paper again, rather than just thinking about what else I can talk about that will require references haha.
At lunch I ate curry-udon, which was a bit of a mistake, as it was reaaaally hot and it stayed that way for some time, leading to quite a bit of mouth-burning. D: The roux was alright, but it was a little too salty for me to want to drink it after finishing the noodles, which was a shame. After eating my coworkers and I played handiball, and I was alright again, especially my serve (yay). In the afternoon I worked on my paper more (surpriiise~!)
I left promptly at 6pm to make sure I wasn't late to meet Dad, and that actually ended up putting me at Yokochuu about half an hour early. O_O I took the time to wander around a bit in a direction I haven't before, as well as in the vertical mall (seriously, its footprint is tiny and it's got 9 floors), where I found an arcade with all the same games I don't want to play that the other Yokochuu arcade that I know about has. >_< It also has a Project Diva machine, like the one I already knew about haha. Oh well, it's good to know about anyways.
Dad and Linda were driven to Yokochuu by Yuji and Emi, and so we ended up having dinner with them and Mariko as well. We went to a yakiniku place that they had spotted on their way here, which was pretty good (it's yakiniku, so your enjoyment of the food is pretty closely related to how much attention the cook is paying haha). I'm glad that they had a place in mind, as one of the places I had looked up last night was nowhere to be found, and the other was a bit of a walk to get to. It was nice to see Dad and Linda again, although with blogging we don't have too much to catch up on at all! >_< Should I stop? Haha j/k.
After dinner Dad and Linda bought Pasmos at my suggestion, which involved all of us standing around the machine pressing buttons haphazardly (OK, I'm embellishing a little). Somehow they actually got them in the end, and they hopefully will have fun using them to get around (I know that I still gain a little enjoyment every time I use mine).
After parting ways with everyone, I walked back towards the bus stop and watched the bus I wanted to be on leave. Damnit! The next one wasn't to come for another half-hour, so I ducked into the arcade that I already knew about and played a little Project Diva to kill some time. I haven't been playing much, so it was the usual routing of playing Po-Pi-Po and almost full-comboing it and then getting 2% short of a pass on moon. D:< Where 2% short of a pass means 78%, of course. Thanks Japan. I love you too.
The bus back to my dorm was suuuuper crowded. People are just as bad here about moving back as they are in Vancouver, and I got quite pushy while compressing people in the back half of the bus. I think I had a net emotional response of zero from the people on the bus due to the cancellation between the people behind me who loved me and the people whose personal space I was violating, who hated my guts. ;D
I got back to my dorm and debated going straight to bed, but I decided that eating frozen grapefruit is more important than sleep, so I stayed up while letting one thaw out. It's now thawed (and eaten haha), so I'll be taking a bow right about now.
Night!
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Saturday, September 24, 2011
No, I'm not going to make a "being stuck inside due to a typ(h)oon blows" joke for your amusement!
September 24: Happy Birthday Mom!
Whew, I've got a couple of days to catch up on, don't I? Good thing I didn't do much ahahaha!
Tuesday was pretty uneventful. Kabutoya-san took the day off, but I wasn't affected much by it, as I was just working on my paper. I am most certainly in the Related Work section now, which means I have to read a billion papers to check whether or not they are actually related to my work. Fun times... >_< There weren't enough people to play handiball, so I had to just go back to my seat after eating. D:
On Wednesday, I was woken up by an announcement being played through loudspeakers that are distributed by the area saying there was a flood warning due to heavy rain. O_O I am glad they had English, but the Japanese version said a lot more that I couldn't understand. D: I got up and wandered around the halls a little until I ran into someone who walked blearily to the bathroom, went pee, and then went back to bed. Since the announcement was quite audible the whole time, I took that to mean that it was safe to do so. >_< I went back to sleep and was actually able to sleep quite well until about 11, when I realized my bed was floati-- no I'm just kidding. ;D I had to use my sleeping bag when, well, sleeping, because the typ(h)oon dropped the temperature down to like, 23.8 according to my clock. Holy crap! Even as of this writing it's still only 25, which makes me very, very happy.
I didn't do too much on Wednesday, as the typ(h)oon was actually quite scary. The wind was whipping all the foliage I could see all over the place, and huuuuge sheets of rain were FLYING practically sideways. It was quite impressive, and I'm glad that my dorm appears to be well-suited to deal with typhoons. No rattling, creaking or leaking whatsoever. The rain had stopped by the time I went out to go get dinner, but the wind was so strong and the power lines were whipping around so crazily that I decided that scurrying to LAWSON STATION and hiding back in my room was in order. The ramen place that's a 20 minute walk away will have to wait. D: Seriously though, the wind was gusting stronger than I ever recall happening up at the front of the ferry, and it was switching direction all over the place. Quite a neat experience, though I was crossing my fingers whenever I went near any power lines. Thank goodness my Internet didn't cut out. :D
On Thursday I voice chatted with Mom and Jiuna in the morning for an unusually long time before setting out for the day. I actually made a long stop in Yokohama to try to pick up a pre-paid cell phone for Dad and Linda (and later Mom and Jiuna) from the Soft Bank near Yokohama Station, but I left empty handed. They have English sales representatives, which is nice, but the experience of taking a ticket, explaining what I wanted, getting told which model I wanted and the price, waiting for at least 20 minutes, and then going up to the counter after my number was called and having the lady say "Oh sorry... we're actually sold out of the 1900円 one, but we've got the 7000円 one in stock. Do you want that one?" was less than pleasant. Um, no way betch! I know it wasn't her fault, and I was pretty successful at remaining pleasant, but when she asked me if I wanted the 7000円 model instead, I'm pretty sure my voice went quite flat while saying "That would completely defeat the purpose." Oh well, when Dad and Linda are here, we can try looking in other stores if it's convenient.
I went from Yokohama to Akiba after that to try to pick up something for Jiuna, but I was unsuccessful, and only managed to buy something for myself again. >_< I'm pretty bad at this "personal shopper" thing... I had left so late and I had spent so much time in Yokohama that after looking for Jiuna's request and eating dinner (I ate katsu-curry at Katsu-ya instead of Meryl Streep), I only had time for two rounds of ESP Galuda and a round of Mushihime before I had to go home. I left earlier, because I wanted to have some wiggle room in case the typ(h)oon caused some delays or something.
Yesterday was also quite uneventful. I am up to 13 references, but that is not nearly enough, judging by how many Kabutoya-san's paper that he gave me as a sample has. For some reason DBLP (a giant online paper database) was on the fritz yesterday and today, which severely impeded my reference-hunting. I hope it's better tomorrow, because determining people's names by Google searches and then trial-and-error typing them into a plausible DBLP URL is somewhat tedious (though it works waaay better than it could, let me just say that). Yesterday for lunch I had delicious kimchi on some not-so-delicious fried rice. >_< Since the kimchi amounted to a whole four pieces, I think I will refrain from getting that one in the future. It was hella cheap though! But so not worth it. D: I played badminton with Kurauchi-san, because we again did not have enough people for handiball.
Today was, surprise, uneventful! I got up on time and ate dorm breakfast that was uncharacteristically small. D: For some reason it lasted until lunch though, so I guess I can't complain. For lunch I had wasabi chicken, and I finally got a large piece! I think I got it because Kurauchi-san was in front of me in line, but didn't get wasabi chicken. I'll have to follow him around and get stuff that he doesn't from now on... It was pretty good, and a welcome departure from hiyashi wakame ramen (that I miraculously still like). Today we played handiball again, hooray! I was terrible. D: Oh well, I don't have another game until the 7th, so I've got time to become un-terrible again, hopefully. In terms of actual work, my related work actually looks somewhat logical, but the problem I am having now is finding another aspect of my model to expound upon in terms of related work. I need more references, but I am not sure how to keep talking to get the space to make more citations. >_< I read over my paper a couple of times to try to suss out places to put more citations, but I think I'm good on that front, unfortunately. Oh well. At the end of the day I found more papers I actually want to reference, but I'm not sure how to go about using them without going on at length about a rather small detail of my model haha.
I think the people at the Yokosan are on to me. They must have caught on to my enormous grapefruit consumption habits, as the cheaper bags' grapefruits have been getting smaller and smaller, and the individual ones have been getting larger and larger, or at least that's how it seems... I have switched over to the larger ones, and am not regretting it so far. The small ones were seriously the size of a large orange this time, and they looked pretty ugly to boot.
At the dorm, supper was curry rice! It actually tasted quite a lot like how Mom makes it, which is strange because prior to now, I thought her style was unique (even though she SAYS she just follows the directions on the package). I got to chat with Yasu-san (the guy who did an exchange trip to Waterloo), which was neat. We talked about Japanese television and about how much Americans love guns.
Anyways, now that I've caught up in blogging, it's time to go to bed! One thing that I am very sad to have brought with me from Canada are my sleeping habits. >_< I need like, a shock collar for myself or something to help me learn to go to bed. D:<
Night!
Whew, I've got a couple of days to catch up on, don't I? Good thing I didn't do much ahahaha!
Tuesday was pretty uneventful. Kabutoya-san took the day off, but I wasn't affected much by it, as I was just working on my paper. I am most certainly in the Related Work section now, which means I have to read a billion papers to check whether or not they are actually related to my work. Fun times... >_< There weren't enough people to play handiball, so I had to just go back to my seat after eating. D:
On Wednesday, I was woken up by an announcement being played through loudspeakers that are distributed by the area saying there was a flood warning due to heavy rain. O_O I am glad they had English, but the Japanese version said a lot more that I couldn't understand. D: I got up and wandered around the halls a little until I ran into someone who walked blearily to the bathroom, went pee, and then went back to bed. Since the announcement was quite audible the whole time, I took that to mean that it was safe to do so. >_< I went back to sleep and was actually able to sleep quite well until about 11, when I realized my bed was floati-- no I'm just kidding. ;D I had to use my sleeping bag when, well, sleeping, because the typ(h)oon dropped the temperature down to like, 23.8 according to my clock. Holy crap! Even as of this writing it's still only 25, which makes me very, very happy.
I didn't do too much on Wednesday, as the typ(h)oon was actually quite scary. The wind was whipping all the foliage I could see all over the place, and huuuuge sheets of rain were FLYING practically sideways. It was quite impressive, and I'm glad that my dorm appears to be well-suited to deal with typhoons. No rattling, creaking or leaking whatsoever. The rain had stopped by the time I went out to go get dinner, but the wind was so strong and the power lines were whipping around so crazily that I decided that scurrying to LAWSON STATION and hiding back in my room was in order. The ramen place that's a 20 minute walk away will have to wait. D: Seriously though, the wind was gusting stronger than I ever recall happening up at the front of the ferry, and it was switching direction all over the place. Quite a neat experience, though I was crossing my fingers whenever I went near any power lines. Thank goodness my Internet didn't cut out. :D
On Thursday I voice chatted with Mom and Jiuna in the morning for an unusually long time before setting out for the day. I actually made a long stop in Yokohama to try to pick up a pre-paid cell phone for Dad and Linda (and later Mom and Jiuna) from the Soft Bank near Yokohama Station, but I left empty handed. They have English sales representatives, which is nice, but the experience of taking a ticket, explaining what I wanted, getting told which model I wanted and the price, waiting for at least 20 minutes, and then going up to the counter after my number was called and having the lady say "Oh sorry... we're actually sold out of the 1900円 one, but we've got the 7000円 one in stock. Do you want that one?" was less than pleasant. Um, no way betch! I know it wasn't her fault, and I was pretty successful at remaining pleasant, but when she asked me if I wanted the 7000円 model instead, I'm pretty sure my voice went quite flat while saying "That would completely defeat the purpose." Oh well, when Dad and Linda are here, we can try looking in other stores if it's convenient.
I went from Yokohama to Akiba after that to try to pick up something for Jiuna, but I was unsuccessful, and only managed to buy something for myself again. >_< I'm pretty bad at this "personal shopper" thing... I had left so late and I had spent so much time in Yokohama that after looking for Jiuna's request and eating dinner (I ate katsu-curry at Katsu-ya instead of Meryl Streep), I only had time for two rounds of ESP Galuda and a round of Mushihime before I had to go home. I left earlier, because I wanted to have some wiggle room in case the typ(h)oon caused some delays or something.
Yesterday was also quite uneventful. I am up to 13 references, but that is not nearly enough, judging by how many Kabutoya-san's paper that he gave me as a sample has. For some reason DBLP (a giant online paper database) was on the fritz yesterday and today, which severely impeded my reference-hunting. I hope it's better tomorrow, because determining people's names by Google searches and then trial-and-error typing them into a plausible DBLP URL is somewhat tedious (though it works waaay better than it could, let me just say that). Yesterday for lunch I had delicious kimchi on some not-so-delicious fried rice. >_< Since the kimchi amounted to a whole four pieces, I think I will refrain from getting that one in the future. It was hella cheap though! But so not worth it. D: I played badminton with Kurauchi-san, because we again did not have enough people for handiball.
Today was, surprise, uneventful! I got up on time and ate dorm breakfast that was uncharacteristically small. D: For some reason it lasted until lunch though, so I guess I can't complain. For lunch I had wasabi chicken, and I finally got a large piece! I think I got it because Kurauchi-san was in front of me in line, but didn't get wasabi chicken. I'll have to follow him around and get stuff that he doesn't from now on... It was pretty good, and a welcome departure from hiyashi wakame ramen (that I miraculously still like). Today we played handiball again, hooray! I was terrible. D: Oh well, I don't have another game until the 7th, so I've got time to become un-terrible again, hopefully. In terms of actual work, my related work actually looks somewhat logical, but the problem I am having now is finding another aspect of my model to expound upon in terms of related work. I need more references, but I am not sure how to keep talking to get the space to make more citations. >_< I read over my paper a couple of times to try to suss out places to put more citations, but I think I'm good on that front, unfortunately. Oh well. At the end of the day I found more papers I actually want to reference, but I'm not sure how to go about using them without going on at length about a rather small detail of my model haha.
I think the people at the Yokosan are on to me. They must have caught on to my enormous grapefruit consumption habits, as the cheaper bags' grapefruits have been getting smaller and smaller, and the individual ones have been getting larger and larger, or at least that's how it seems... I have switched over to the larger ones, and am not regretting it so far. The small ones were seriously the size of a large orange this time, and they looked pretty ugly to boot.
At the dorm, supper was curry rice! It actually tasted quite a lot like how Mom makes it, which is strange because prior to now, I thought her style was unique (even though she SAYS she just follows the directions on the package). I got to chat with Yasu-san (the guy who did an exchange trip to Waterloo), which was neat. We talked about Japanese television and about how much Americans love guns.
Anyways, now that I've caught up in blogging, it's time to go to bed! One thing that I am very sad to have brought with me from Canada are my sleeping habits. >_< I need like, a shock collar for myself or something to help me learn to go to bed. D:<
Night!
Monday, September 19, 2011
The company said no more holidays for the rest of the year. But tomorrow is a holiday.
September 19: Surprise Holiday
I didn't blog yesterday because I found out at 5pm that today (the 19th) was a holiday haha. I decided that I would be staying home (the weekend is coming up soon, and my budget is a little under the weather anyways), and so would have nothing to blog about. Combined with the fact that yesterday was quite uneventful, I decided to combine the two days into one.
Yesterday, as I said, was quite uneventful. I got up on time and to work on time, and worked on my paper all day. I am unfortunately finishing up all of the sections of my paper aside from "Related Work", which means I will no longer be able to avoid a massive amount of paper-reading. D: I'm pretty sure that's the wrong order to do things, philosophically speaking, but I would be highly surprised if it's not the norm haha. I am quite liking LaTeX the more I use it, and I think that the problems I do have with it are probably my own fault more than anything. >_< If I ever have to use it again, perhaps I'll find out.
A new employee joined the PIGs yesterday! He's apparently going to be working with Nishida-san, so I won't have work related contact with him, but he will be playing volleyball. He's actually taller than anyone else in the group by a significant margin, so I am interested to see how completely unfair it is haha. His name is Itou-san, and he did an internship (their domestic internships are 1 month! D:) for the PIGs, and is coming back after being hired by the company for real. Apparently when NTT hires you for real, they make you do something totally unrelated to your future work like selling FLET'S subscriptions in Nagano or something. >_< I am glad that North American companies don't seem to do that, and I'm glad that they didn't think it'd be a good idea to start me off in a similar manner over here haha.
Nothing too eventful happened in the evening, aside from dinner being unusually salty. It was curry-udon, but I could hardly eat it by the end. O_O I probably have high blood pressure or something by now. I am very much looking forward to food not having quite so much salt in it when I come back to Canada, that's for sure. Oh yes! I forgot to mention that the Yokosan had figs in stock last night. I bought some and devoured three, and put two in the freezer for today.
Today I got up at sometime between 10 and 12 ahahah. I honestly can't remember haha. I ate a breakfast of korokke I'd bought yesterday, carrots, bananas, grapefruit and figs. I let the figs thaw too long, and so they weren't frozen anymore at all. The freezing/thawing process had rendered them almost textureless, so at least it was an interesting experience, though not the one I was looking for (that experience is in another castle).
I spent the early afternoon playing StarCraft with Kevin, and later Vincent, before actually LADDERING for the first time in AGES. D: It was rather stressful, and just as frustrating as I remember it being. I don't understand why people love one-basing so much... It's pretty much a dead end in terms of skill progression, so it has to be completely about the instant gratification of winning. Grow up, chumps! D:< I do suppose it's a bit odd to call people I lose to chumps, but whatever, the people who lost to me are probably calling for the "N" key to be removed from standard keyboards or something. Oh well, it was actually rather enjoyable in retrospect ahaha. It also gives me the drive to do more constructive things, for some reason. I wrote up a vocab list for myself to use this weekend after playing! I guess that means that I'd better play more often, eh? ;D
I ate katsu-don for dinner because I didn't realize that I was hungry until I was starting to get a headache from it. Katsu-don is fast, so I decided to have it instead of a restaurant meal. I actually ran out of grapefruits in the freezer (D:), so I ended up eating chocolate ice cream for dessert. I hope I can get to sleep OK.
I was supposed to play StarCraft with the guy who just moved into my dorm a week or so ago, but he never appeared to have added me in the game. I assume he either forgot, or his Internet connection setup went not-so-smoothly. I hope that it was the former, because I would not wish a lack of Internet even upon my worst enemies (which I so have...). Anyways, that just about wraps up today, so I think I'll take a bow and go to bed now. Night!
I didn't blog yesterday because I found out at 5pm that today (the 19th) was a holiday haha. I decided that I would be staying home (the weekend is coming up soon, and my budget is a little under the weather anyways), and so would have nothing to blog about. Combined with the fact that yesterday was quite uneventful, I decided to combine the two days into one.
Yesterday, as I said, was quite uneventful. I got up on time and to work on time, and worked on my paper all day. I am unfortunately finishing up all of the sections of my paper aside from "Related Work", which means I will no longer be able to avoid a massive amount of paper-reading. D: I'm pretty sure that's the wrong order to do things, philosophically speaking, but I would be highly surprised if it's not the norm haha. I am quite liking LaTeX the more I use it, and I think that the problems I do have with it are probably my own fault more than anything. >_< If I ever have to use it again, perhaps I'll find out.
A new employee joined the PIGs yesterday! He's apparently going to be working with Nishida-san, so I won't have work related contact with him, but he will be playing volleyball. He's actually taller than anyone else in the group by a significant margin, so I am interested to see how completely unfair it is haha. His name is Itou-san, and he did an internship (their domestic internships are 1 month! D:) for the PIGs, and is coming back after being hired by the company for real. Apparently when NTT hires you for real, they make you do something totally unrelated to your future work like selling FLET'S subscriptions in Nagano or something. >_< I am glad that North American companies don't seem to do that, and I'm glad that they didn't think it'd be a good idea to start me off in a similar manner over here haha.
Nothing too eventful happened in the evening, aside from dinner being unusually salty. It was curry-udon, but I could hardly eat it by the end. O_O I probably have high blood pressure or something by now. I am very much looking forward to food not having quite so much salt in it when I come back to Canada, that's for sure. Oh yes! I forgot to mention that the Yokosan had figs in stock last night. I bought some and devoured three, and put two in the freezer for today.
Today I got up at sometime between 10 and 12 ahahah. I honestly can't remember haha. I ate a breakfast of korokke I'd bought yesterday, carrots, bananas, grapefruit and figs. I let the figs thaw too long, and so they weren't frozen anymore at all. The freezing/thawing process had rendered them almost textureless, so at least it was an interesting experience, though not the one I was looking for (that experience is in another castle).
I spent the early afternoon playing StarCraft with Kevin, and later Vincent, before actually LADDERING for the first time in AGES. D: It was rather stressful, and just as frustrating as I remember it being. I don't understand why people love one-basing so much... It's pretty much a dead end in terms of skill progression, so it has to be completely about the instant gratification of winning. Grow up, chumps! D:< I do suppose it's a bit odd to call people I lose to chumps, but whatever, the people who lost to me are probably calling for the "N" key to be removed from standard keyboards or something. Oh well, it was actually rather enjoyable in retrospect ahaha. It also gives me the drive to do more constructive things, for some reason. I wrote up a vocab list for myself to use this weekend after playing! I guess that means that I'd better play more often, eh? ;D
I ate katsu-don for dinner because I didn't realize that I was hungry until I was starting to get a headache from it. Katsu-don is fast, so I decided to have it instead of a restaurant meal. I actually ran out of grapefruits in the freezer (D:), so I ended up eating chocolate ice cream for dessert. I hope I can get to sleep OK.
I was supposed to play StarCraft with the guy who just moved into my dorm a week or so ago, but he never appeared to have added me in the game. I assume he either forgot, or his Internet connection setup went not-so-smoothly. I hope that it was the former, because I would not wish a lack of Internet even upon my worst enemies (which I so have...). Anyways, that just about wraps up today, so I think I'll take a bow and go to bed now. Night!
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Shortest blog; shortest title.
September 17: Nothing to Report
Today was just another day back at work, which means I don't really have much to blog about at all. >_< The most notable thing that happened today was that there was natto with dinner, which has never happened before. Oh yeah, and even more suprise dorm fees may be in my future. D:< There is some bill that I was given at the office that is for like, 7000円, and even Kabutoya-san isn't really sure what it's about. He says it might be a dorm fee, but he's not sure why it's for July, when it's currently September, and, if it is a dorm fee, why I didn't have one for June. He's going to ask tomorrow what exactly it is, and if it's actually even mine lol. >_< I am a little tired of my low-information situation (with respect to, uh, everything), but I can't complain too bitterly about additional fees, because my dorm is still ultra cheap compared to renting, even if this is a new monthly fee.
I feel a bit funny in my nose (oh no!), so I will be going to bed right this second (I've already brushed my teeth). Night!
Today was just another day back at work, which means I don't really have much to blog about at all. >_< The most notable thing that happened today was that there was natto with dinner, which has never happened before. Oh yeah, and even more suprise dorm fees may be in my future. D:< There is some bill that I was given at the office that is for like, 7000円, and even Kabutoya-san isn't really sure what it's about. He says it might be a dorm fee, but he's not sure why it's for July, when it's currently September, and, if it is a dorm fee, why I didn't have one for June. He's going to ask tomorrow what exactly it is, and if it's actually even mine lol. >_< I am a little tired of my low-information situation (with respect to, uh, everything), but I can't complain too bitterly about additional fees, because my dorm is still ultra cheap compared to renting, even if this is a new monthly fee.
I feel a bit funny in my nose (oh no!), so I will be going to bed right this second (I've already brushed my teeth). Night!
Friday, September 16, 2011
I totally blogged while waiting for my laundry to dry! And they say men can't multitask... *tsk tsk tsk*
September 16: Return to Work
Since I haven't blogged in a few days, I guess I'll start off by recapping.
On Tuesday, nothing really of note happened at all (hence no blog). I wrote a chunk of my paper and got tests ready to run over the weekend. I think I had hiyashi wakame ramen, so not too much to report on the food front. I played some Touhou UFO in the evening, as I kind of wanted to beat it before I bought the next game, Ten Desires, which became available in Akiba during the past week. As it turned out, I stayed up relatively late, and so I woke up on Wednesday at around 12:30. I somehow managed to take an inordinately long time to get ready to leave; it was 2pm before I was ready to go. I decided to go to Akiba on Thursday instead, to get a fuller day. For the rest of the day I played StarCraft with Kevin (since I wouldn't be playing on Thursday) and by myself, in addition to trying again and actually succeeding in beating UFO (haha perfect timing). I didn't go out for dinner, as I thought my budget was tight and had LAWSON STATION katsu-don instead. I'm not sure why I waited until AFTER eating to catch up on my budget tallying, because I was surprised to found out when I did, that I was actually in relatively good shape. Oh well. I enjoyed my katsu-don, as I haven't actually had it in like 3 weeks. I got all my chores done on Wednesday, so I was free to stay out late on Thursday. I called Dad at about 12:05am on Thursday morning, to wish him the earliest Happy-Birthday-in-which-it's-his-actual-birthday-for-at-least-one-of-the-parties-involved ever. I then proceeded to stay up too late doing nothing particularly useful (and that I can't even remember now, which means it was REALLY not particularly useful).
On Thursday I voice chatted with Mom and Jiuna from 11 until maybe 12:30 before leaving for Akiba. I basically walked to the bus stop and straight onto a bus, which was really nice, as it was quite sunny, and the sun is so strong here it sometimes makes me dizzy (even in mid-September). Unfortunately, I would have been able to get off the bus and walk onto a train (well, walk to the station and run once I was in sight of the signboards telling me when the upcoming departure times were), but a cluster of incredibly relaxed women blocked the whole sidewalk for half the way to the station, and I missed the limited express by a hair (I heard the doors close as I ran up the stairs). D:< If someone ever notices and points out to me that I am engaging in such gainlessly disruptive behaviour, I think I will have a major personal crisis.
Once the train came, an old lady toootally budged in front of me and then went for the completely empty courtesy seats which are reserved for her anyways... Old habits die hard I guess...? I rode to Shinagawa, and then to Akiba without event.
Once in Akiba, I went to Tenya and ordered my usual all-star set before noticing that they've got a new fall menu. Oh well, there will be other opportunities, and their fall menu looked quite a lot like their summer one, to be honest. After eating I tried (again in vain) to find the doujinshi (a homebrewed comic) Jiuna wants, but that thing is impossible to find. I literally looked at every cover in the "New Arrivals" on the floor it should have been on, but to no avail. There was one open slot that was sold out that I noticed, but Jiuna hates things that are popular with untold fury, so I guessed that it wasn't what I was looking for haha. I actually managed to buy something for myself though, as browsing through all the new arrivals led me to a book with some rather beautiful random pieces of art in it. It was also cheaper than the price tag suggested. Yay~! Toranoana was actually sold of out Ten Desires, which was not terribly shocking to me. I had hoped they wouldn't be, but I realize that it's a new Touhou game during the week of its release, so I was fully prepared for that possibility. And by fully prepared, I mean that I knew that Gamers was also getting it in stock, and so I went there, where they had a gajillion copies left. >_> They put theirs on the 6th floor, those jerks. Oh well, it worked out for me hahahah. I unfortunately ended up buying two more Touhou games that I won't be playing for a while yet, but whatever. What is life, other than a series of loosely connected impulse-buys? ;D
After my unintentionally selfish shopping trip, I went to CLUB SEGA 2 to play ESP Galuda. I ended up playing reaaaally well by my standards, getting a score that was more than 1.5x my previous personal best, and clearing an entire stage that I think I may not have ever seen before, before dying on the boss of the next one. O_O I have no idea where this stroke of danmaku genius came from, but I was quite excited to see how it translated into Mushihime, and as I found out quite quickly after moving to HEY!, it didn't. I got to the 4th stage relatively frequently again, which is no longer a new development, but is still nicer than dying on stage 3 all the time. I have the most frustrating affliction of having wild performance shifts within a single play. D:< The times when I play the best are when I've royally screwed up the early levels and have few lives, if any, and few bombs if multiple bombs are possible, and when I do well in the earlier levels, and get to, for example, the middle of the third stage in Mushihime without bombing or dying, I will not even make it to the boss. This occurs in ESP Galuda, Mushihime and Touhou all with alarming reliability, which inevitably leads to copious swearing in the case of Touhou, where I'm in the privacy of my own room. >_<
I ate buta-kim don at Meryl Streep for supper at about 8:30 and left Akiba shortly after. The day basically ends when I get on the Yamanote to go back home, as the trip takes roughly 2 hours. One thing I noticed on my way home is that Kirin is now advertising a new line of Milk Tea they've put out called "Pungency". >_< Despite the poor name choice, I tried it, and it's actually pretty good, though that's probably just because I like Milk Tea.
Today was a regular day back at work. I worked on my paper all day, as my tests haven't finished yet. I loaded them on pretty thick, as I have until October 5th to submit my paper, and I want to know definitively if I'm totally screwed or not-- no more of this "I'm not sure if the results are conclusive or not" crap! Today was a bit frustrating, as I spent a good deal of time trying to find out how to do better formatting while restricted to using LaTeX's eqnarray. The sample document says to use eqnarray for multi-line equations (which is exactly what I'm working with), so I figured, since they have a 9-page document on how exactly to write your paper before you submit it to them, that it would be a good idea to stick to their outlined (and coloured and filled and embellished and varnished) procedures. Finding out how to do better formatting with eqnarray proved quite difficult, as everyone on the Internet who had asked the same questions as I was had been told in no uncertain terms that eqnarray sucks and they should use something else, which will instantly fix all of their problems. D: Lucky for me, Kabutoya-san came by after several hours of experimenting with new attempts at tricking eqnarray into behaving itself (interspersed with giving up and writing more stuff once in a while) and asked me how I was doing. I explained my problem, to which he (of course you all saw this coming a mile away) told me that I can totally just ditch eqnarray because it sucks and everyone uses amsmath's align instead because it instantly solves all your problems. D:< Why exactly didn't I actually ask whether it was OK to use other packages before giving myself ulcers? Well this is my blog, so you don't get to know until I do. D: Writing went a little more smoothly after that.
I left at around 6:15, as I wanted to get a wash going before eating supper, which didn't end up happening, as I remembered while walking by the Matsumoto Kiyoshi that I had run out of handsoap. I also bought some floss in case I run out, and I'm glad I looked into it then, because there was one on sale for about 200円, while all the others were more like 600. D: I'm a little worried about how much cheaper my floss was than the others... I hope it doesn't have like, fibreglass in it or something. D:
Dorm dinner was decent, it was pork mixtures and oden with miso soup and rice, but the real star of the show was FROZEN GRAPEFRUIT LIKE ALWAYS! HELLZ YEAH! *<:B I got my laundry going right away, but I still had to stay up to wait for it. I hope it's ready now, because I am done blogging and want to go to bed. At least I got to try out Ten Desires. It has yet to grow on me, and I have only played it past stage 2 (I tend to be a little suicidal in these games when they're free) about 3 times, so I am not yet passing judgement.
I have been feeling like I'm getting a lot better a danmaku with all the practice I've been getting, so I made the mistake of "empirically" testing this by firing up Touhou Perfect Cherry Blossom and seeing how I did on hard mode (my most played configuration and game before I stopped playing for a while). It was really easy keeping track of all the patterns, which I don't recall being true before, but that just meant I ran into bullets that I KNEW were there, which is kind of worse than before in a way... I still can't make it to the stage 4 boss on one continue, though I suppose more than 2 tries is necessary to see what's really what.
Anyways, I can't hear the dryer anymore, so I'm going to post and leave you for tonight.
Night!
Since I haven't blogged in a few days, I guess I'll start off by recapping.
On Tuesday, nothing really of note happened at all (hence no blog). I wrote a chunk of my paper and got tests ready to run over the weekend. I think I had hiyashi wakame ramen, so not too much to report on the food front. I played some Touhou UFO in the evening, as I kind of wanted to beat it before I bought the next game, Ten Desires, which became available in Akiba during the past week. As it turned out, I stayed up relatively late, and so I woke up on Wednesday at around 12:30. I somehow managed to take an inordinately long time to get ready to leave; it was 2pm before I was ready to go. I decided to go to Akiba on Thursday instead, to get a fuller day. For the rest of the day I played StarCraft with Kevin (since I wouldn't be playing on Thursday) and by myself, in addition to trying again and actually succeeding in beating UFO (haha perfect timing). I didn't go out for dinner, as I thought my budget was tight and had LAWSON STATION katsu-don instead. I'm not sure why I waited until AFTER eating to catch up on my budget tallying, because I was surprised to found out when I did, that I was actually in relatively good shape. Oh well. I enjoyed my katsu-don, as I haven't actually had it in like 3 weeks. I got all my chores done on Wednesday, so I was free to stay out late on Thursday. I called Dad at about 12:05am on Thursday morning, to wish him the earliest Happy-Birthday-in-which-it's-his-actual-birthday-for-at-least-one-of-the-parties-involved ever. I then proceeded to stay up too late doing nothing particularly useful (and that I can't even remember now, which means it was REALLY not particularly useful).
On Thursday I voice chatted with Mom and Jiuna from 11 until maybe 12:30 before leaving for Akiba. I basically walked to the bus stop and straight onto a bus, which was really nice, as it was quite sunny, and the sun is so strong here it sometimes makes me dizzy (even in mid-September). Unfortunately, I would have been able to get off the bus and walk onto a train (well, walk to the station and run once I was in sight of the signboards telling me when the upcoming departure times were), but a cluster of incredibly relaxed women blocked the whole sidewalk for half the way to the station, and I missed the limited express by a hair (I heard the doors close as I ran up the stairs). D:< If someone ever notices and points out to me that I am engaging in such gainlessly disruptive behaviour, I think I will have a major personal crisis.
Once the train came, an old lady toootally budged in front of me and then went for the completely empty courtesy seats which are reserved for her anyways... Old habits die hard I guess...? I rode to Shinagawa, and then to Akiba without event.
Once in Akiba, I went to Tenya and ordered my usual all-star set before noticing that they've got a new fall menu. Oh well, there will be other opportunities, and their fall menu looked quite a lot like their summer one, to be honest. After eating I tried (again in vain) to find the doujinshi (a homebrewed comic) Jiuna wants, but that thing is impossible to find. I literally looked at every cover in the "New Arrivals" on the floor it should have been on, but to no avail. There was one open slot that was sold out that I noticed, but Jiuna hates things that are popular with untold fury, so I guessed that it wasn't what I was looking for haha. I actually managed to buy something for myself though, as browsing through all the new arrivals led me to a book with some rather beautiful random pieces of art in it. It was also cheaper than the price tag suggested. Yay~! Toranoana was actually sold of out Ten Desires, which was not terribly shocking to me. I had hoped they wouldn't be, but I realize that it's a new Touhou game during the week of its release, so I was fully prepared for that possibility. And by fully prepared, I mean that I knew that Gamers was also getting it in stock, and so I went there, where they had a gajillion copies left. >_> They put theirs on the 6th floor, those jerks. Oh well, it worked out for me hahahah. I unfortunately ended up buying two more Touhou games that I won't be playing for a while yet, but whatever. What is life, other than a series of loosely connected impulse-buys? ;D
After my unintentionally selfish shopping trip, I went to CLUB SEGA 2 to play ESP Galuda. I ended up playing reaaaally well by my standards, getting a score that was more than 1.5x my previous personal best, and clearing an entire stage that I think I may not have ever seen before, before dying on the boss of the next one. O_O I have no idea where this stroke of danmaku genius came from, but I was quite excited to see how it translated into Mushihime, and as I found out quite quickly after moving to HEY!, it didn't. I got to the 4th stage relatively frequently again, which is no longer a new development, but is still nicer than dying on stage 3 all the time. I have the most frustrating affliction of having wild performance shifts within a single play. D:< The times when I play the best are when I've royally screwed up the early levels and have few lives, if any, and few bombs if multiple bombs are possible, and when I do well in the earlier levels, and get to, for example, the middle of the third stage in Mushihime without bombing or dying, I will not even make it to the boss. This occurs in ESP Galuda, Mushihime and Touhou all with alarming reliability, which inevitably leads to copious swearing in the case of Touhou, where I'm in the privacy of my own room. >_<
I ate buta-kim don at Meryl Streep for supper at about 8:30 and left Akiba shortly after. The day basically ends when I get on the Yamanote to go back home, as the trip takes roughly 2 hours. One thing I noticed on my way home is that Kirin is now advertising a new line of Milk Tea they've put out called "Pungency". >_< Despite the poor name choice, I tried it, and it's actually pretty good, though that's probably just because I like Milk Tea.
Today was a regular day back at work. I worked on my paper all day, as my tests haven't finished yet. I loaded them on pretty thick, as I have until October 5th to submit my paper, and I want to know definitively if I'm totally screwed or not-- no more of this "I'm not sure if the results are conclusive or not" crap! Today was a bit frustrating, as I spent a good deal of time trying to find out how to do better formatting while restricted to using LaTeX's eqnarray. The sample document says to use eqnarray for multi-line equations (which is exactly what I'm working with), so I figured, since they have a 9-page document on how exactly to write your paper before you submit it to them, that it would be a good idea to stick to their outlined (and coloured and filled and embellished and varnished) procedures. Finding out how to do better formatting with eqnarray proved quite difficult, as everyone on the Internet who had asked the same questions as I was had been told in no uncertain terms that eqnarray sucks and they should use something else, which will instantly fix all of their problems. D: Lucky for me, Kabutoya-san came by after several hours of experimenting with new attempts at tricking eqnarray into behaving itself (interspersed with giving up and writing more stuff once in a while) and asked me how I was doing. I explained my problem, to which he (of course you all saw this coming a mile away) told me that I can totally just ditch eqnarray because it sucks and everyone uses amsmath's align instead because it instantly solves all your problems. D:< Why exactly didn't I actually ask whether it was OK to use other packages before giving myself ulcers? Well this is my blog, so you don't get to know until I do. D: Writing went a little more smoothly after that.
I left at around 6:15, as I wanted to get a wash going before eating supper, which didn't end up happening, as I remembered while walking by the Matsumoto Kiyoshi that I had run out of handsoap. I also bought some floss in case I run out, and I'm glad I looked into it then, because there was one on sale for about 200円, while all the others were more like 600. D: I'm a little worried about how much cheaper my floss was than the others... I hope it doesn't have like, fibreglass in it or something. D:
Dorm dinner was decent, it was pork mixtures and oden with miso soup and rice, but the real star of the show was FROZEN GRAPEFRUIT LIKE ALWAYS! HELLZ YEAH! *<:B I got my laundry going right away, but I still had to stay up to wait for it. I hope it's ready now, because I am done blogging and want to go to bed. At least I got to try out Ten Desires. It has yet to grow on me, and I have only played it past stage 2 (I tend to be a little suicidal in these games when they're free) about 3 times, so I am not yet passing judgement.
I have been feeling like I'm getting a lot better a danmaku with all the practice I've been getting, so I made the mistake of "empirically" testing this by firing up Touhou Perfect Cherry Blossom and seeing how I did on hard mode (my most played configuration and game before I stopped playing for a while). It was really easy keeping track of all the patterns, which I don't recall being true before, but that just meant I ran into bullets that I KNEW were there, which is kind of worse than before in a way... I still can't make it to the stage 4 boss on one continue, though I suppose more than 2 tries is necessary to see what's really what.
Anyways, I can't hear the dryer anymore, so I'm going to post and leave you for tonight.
Night!
Monday, September 12, 2011
2 for 1 blogging, anyone?
September 12: As Per Usual
Hi everyone! I completely forgot to blog yesterday, as you may have noticed. I remembered at supper, but promptly forgot before I could do anything about it, and the next time I remembered was this morning. >_< Sorry about that! Anyways, you didn't miss much at all yesterday, as nothing terribly eventful happened as far as I can recall, except for RESTOCKING ON GRAPEFRUITS!!! How exciting! Oh yeah, that and I'm an idiot and ate a bunch of chocolate ice cream before bed (I had a maaad craving) and then couldn't sleep. >_<
Today was pretty uneventful. There was "bacon" (it tasted like ham, but looked like bacon O_O) and an egg, with a yellow mixture of vegetables and miso soup and rice. I think the yellow might have been from mustard, but to be honest it didn't really taste like anything at all.
At work I attempted to sort out my model and started writing my paper. My model is misbehaving somewhat, and it is proving very hard to discern how to solve the problem. Kabutoya-san doesn't seem to think that it's an issue, but I'm kind of hung up on it, so I will hammer away at it until I tire myself out, since I don't have anything else to do except write about it. My model currently puts pretty much everthing into just a few topics, which yields results like Hotel Rwanda and Mrs. Doubtfire being put together. O_O At least my model appears to be good at generating humour, if nothing else. It also treated me to the discovery of how badly people can label movies if they are free to do as they please. Examples range "Stephen Speilberg", to "director should have won a Grammy" (um, what?), to --and this is my favourite--"Woman carried to top of large building". It's supposed to be describing The Hunchback of Notre Dame. D:< How exactly do these people think they're helping an online movie recommender with tags like "Woman carried to top of large building"!? There are countless other examples of these fail-tags ("woman" for Entrapment and Femme Nikita, and "animalpig" for Babe), but I will never escape if I begin to list them all. Amazingly enough, some tags that I thought would surely be trash proved to be quite enlightening when I looked them up, such as "fails Bechdel test" hahah.
I ran about a million tests and fiddled with parameters all over the place, but nothing really seemed to work very well. >_< I hope I can get it to behave soon, as the clock is ticking. I left work at about 6:15, which was when I finished getting to a point where I could let a test run overnight. I walked home and ate dorm dinner of KATSU (oh my god!!!) and miso soup and rice and some kind of broccoli coleslaw-esque business that was rather odd. It wasn't nasty or anything, just a little... unplaceable. O_O Afterwards I ate a frozen grapefruit. Whee! I really hope I never get tired of frozen grapefruit, because it is extremely convenient having a dessert I can look forward to that is non-fattening and less than 80円 per serving. Yum. It has also helped me stop eating entire bags of senbei at 11:30pm, which is probably a good thing on all accounts. >_<
Anyways, I got caught up reading stuff on the Internet (again) and now it's late (I literally got sidetracked for 3 hours in the middle of writing this), so I'd best get what sleep I can now. D: I guess it's a good thing it's Tuesday tomorrow haha. Damn, where did the week go? D:
Night!
Hi everyone! I completely forgot to blog yesterday, as you may have noticed. I remembered at supper, but promptly forgot before I could do anything about it, and the next time I remembered was this morning. >_< Sorry about that! Anyways, you didn't miss much at all yesterday, as nothing terribly eventful happened as far as I can recall, except for RESTOCKING ON GRAPEFRUITS!!! How exciting! Oh yeah, that and I'm an idiot and ate a bunch of chocolate ice cream before bed (I had a maaad craving) and then couldn't sleep. >_<
Today was pretty uneventful. There was "bacon" (it tasted like ham, but looked like bacon O_O) and an egg, with a yellow mixture of vegetables and miso soup and rice. I think the yellow might have been from mustard, but to be honest it didn't really taste like anything at all.
At work I attempted to sort out my model and started writing my paper. My model is misbehaving somewhat, and it is proving very hard to discern how to solve the problem. Kabutoya-san doesn't seem to think that it's an issue, but I'm kind of hung up on it, so I will hammer away at it until I tire myself out, since I don't have anything else to do except write about it. My model currently puts pretty much everthing into just a few topics, which yields results like Hotel Rwanda and Mrs. Doubtfire being put together. O_O At least my model appears to be good at generating humour, if nothing else. It also treated me to the discovery of how badly people can label movies if they are free to do as they please. Examples range "Stephen Speilberg", to "director should have won a Grammy" (um, what?), to --and this is my favourite--"Woman carried to top of large building". It's supposed to be describing The Hunchback of Notre Dame. D:< How exactly do these people think they're helping an online movie recommender with tags like "Woman carried to top of large building"!? There are countless other examples of these fail-tags ("woman" for Entrapment and Femme Nikita, and "animalpig" for Babe), but I will never escape if I begin to list them all. Amazingly enough, some tags that I thought would surely be trash proved to be quite enlightening when I looked them up, such as "fails Bechdel test" hahah.
I ran about a million tests and fiddled with parameters all over the place, but nothing really seemed to work very well. >_< I hope I can get it to behave soon, as the clock is ticking. I left work at about 6:15, which was when I finished getting to a point where I could let a test run overnight. I walked home and ate dorm dinner of KATSU (oh my god!!!) and miso soup and rice and some kind of broccoli coleslaw-esque business that was rather odd. It wasn't nasty or anything, just a little... unplaceable. O_O Afterwards I ate a frozen grapefruit. Whee! I really hope I never get tired of frozen grapefruit, because it is extremely convenient having a dessert I can look forward to that is non-fattening and less than 80円 per serving. Yum. It has also helped me stop eating entire bags of senbei at 11:30pm, which is probably a good thing on all accounts. >_<
Anyways, I got caught up reading stuff on the Internet (again) and now it's late (I literally got sidetracked for 3 hours in the middle of writing this), so I'd best get what sleep I can now. D: I guess it's a good thing it's Tuesday tomorrow haha. Damn, where did the week go? D:
Night!
Saturday, September 10, 2011
When good annotations go bad
September 10: Rut-roh
I got up on time this morning and ate a breakfast of various vegetable/pork/chikuwa mixtures with miso soup and rice (I could just say that every day and I'd be right more than half the time I'm sure haha). I got to work and started making the change that I talked about in my last blog that I didn't want to work. And it worked. >_< In a worse way than I could have imagined haha. Basically, prior to making the change, my model had 9% prediction accuracy when using tags (the novel part) and when not using tags (old news). This was too low, as regular LDA got 11% on the same dataset, and my model with no tags should be equivalent to LDA. After the fix I did, the untagged accuracy went up to 11%! Aaaand the the tagged accuracy stayed at 9%. Shiiiitttt..... Kabutoya-san wasn't at work today (he had warned me this time, yay~), so I couldn't confer with him about it, but I sure as hell am going to tomorrow. >_< For the rest of the day I cleaned up my code, added more automation to my tests, fixed some things causing slow calculations in my model, and tested everything to within an inch of its life to try to understand what exactly what was happening that was giving me that now-rather-problematic 9%.
At lunch I ate hiyashi wakame ramen and played handiball, and was pretty bad. >_< That was alright though, as I had a handiball game at 5:30 today and I redeemed myself there haha. I could hardly help from laughing all throughout the game, as it's just so silly. One girl actually recoiled and stuck out her arm when the ball was coming at her, only to have it shoot in between her face and arm and get stuck there hahahaha. I feel a little sorry for her because everyone just howled while she took a visible fraction of a second before realizing what was going on. XD Anyways, the handiball game was fun, and my team won (making it even better of course).
I walked home and ate dorm dinner of a fish and beef korokke with miso soup and rice. It was pretty good, although somehow I failed at one point while eating the fish, and put a piece in my mouth and chewed, only to realize it had literally 18 (I counted) bones in it. D:< That took a while to get sorted out. I went back up to my room for FROZEN GRAPEFRUIT!!! Yessss!!! I need to buy more, as I am now down to my last one. I sincerely hope grapefruit is good for you, because I have eating like, 10 in the last 8 days I think... O_O It's pink, which means it's got antioxidants or something, I'm sure... >_> While eating the grapefruit I watched the as-usual underwhelming GSL finals (StarCraft). Apparently the first game was really good, but it was already over by the time I tuned in. D:< Damnit! I am actually blogging SO EARLY today that I may actually be able to SLEEP EARLY, which makes me SO EXCITED (or EXCITED EARLY, if you are a pattern-related compulsions)! Anyways, I've told you what I ate, so I owe nothing more to you for today haha.
Night!
I got up on time this morning and ate a breakfast of various vegetable/pork/chikuwa mixtures with miso soup and rice (I could just say that every day and I'd be right more than half the time I'm sure haha). I got to work and started making the change that I talked about in my last blog that I didn't want to work. And it worked. >_< In a worse way than I could have imagined haha. Basically, prior to making the change, my model had 9% prediction accuracy when using tags (the novel part) and when not using tags (old news). This was too low, as regular LDA got 11% on the same dataset, and my model with no tags should be equivalent to LDA. After the fix I did, the untagged accuracy went up to 11%! Aaaand the the tagged accuracy stayed at 9%. Shiiiitttt..... Kabutoya-san wasn't at work today (he had warned me this time, yay~), so I couldn't confer with him about it, but I sure as hell am going to tomorrow. >_< For the rest of the day I cleaned up my code, added more automation to my tests, fixed some things causing slow calculations in my model, and tested everything to within an inch of its life to try to understand what exactly what was happening that was giving me that now-rather-problematic 9%.
At lunch I ate hiyashi wakame ramen and played handiball, and was pretty bad. >_< That was alright though, as I had a handiball game at 5:30 today and I redeemed myself there haha. I could hardly help from laughing all throughout the game, as it's just so silly. One girl actually recoiled and stuck out her arm when the ball was coming at her, only to have it shoot in between her face and arm and get stuck there hahahaha. I feel a little sorry for her because everyone just howled while she took a visible fraction of a second before realizing what was going on. XD Anyways, the handiball game was fun, and my team won (making it even better of course).
I walked home and ate dorm dinner of a fish and beef korokke with miso soup and rice. It was pretty good, although somehow I failed at one point while eating the fish, and put a piece in my mouth and chewed, only to realize it had literally 18 (I counted) bones in it. D:< That took a while to get sorted out. I went back up to my room for FROZEN GRAPEFRUIT!!! Yessss!!! I need to buy more, as I am now down to my last one. I sincerely hope grapefruit is good for you, because I have eating like, 10 in the last 8 days I think... O_O It's pink, which means it's got antioxidants or something, I'm sure... >_> While eating the grapefruit I watched the as-usual underwhelming GSL finals (StarCraft). Apparently the first game was really good, but it was already over by the time I tuned in. D:< Damnit! I am actually blogging SO EARLY today that I may actually be able to SLEEP EARLY, which makes me SO EXCITED (or EXCITED EARLY, if you are a pattern-related compulsions)! Anyways, I've told you what I ate, so I owe nothing more to you for today haha.
Night!
Friday, September 9, 2011
He wants you to look at the camera
September 9: Hiatus
Hello all! Please forgive me for the unexpected break from blogging that I took. On Tuesday I couldn't bring myself to do yet another blog that consisted of "I didn't do much today other than code, now here is what I ate". I didn't blog on Wednesday either because I figured that Thursday would be an at-home day and thus wouldn't warrant its own blog either, and then I stayed up too late doing other things on Thursday to get the blog out and still go to bed at a remotely reasonable time. Therefore, I will now try to catch up on the past four days, which will probably be pretty easy, as nothing happened on two of them and I've forgotten what I ate already haha.
On Tuesday I coded at work, and it went alright. I got my test up and running so it could go throughout the weekend and spit out results for me today. There was handiball at lunch, and I recall being bad again, so let's not dwell on that haha. Now that I'm talking about Tuesday, I think I now remember that breakfast was natto and dinner was udon and gyoza with a shredded vegetable tempura nest. Both were pretty good, and the udon was absolutely huge. I recall having trouble finishing it all. O_O I bought my breakfast for the next day at the Yokosan along with another bag of grapefruits, as I've been absolutely demolishing them. :D I ended up playing quite a bit of Touhou UFO (same genre as Mushihime, but for the PC) on Tuesday night before going to bed. I got significantly farther than I ever have and became stuck on the idea of actually passing the 5th stage. >_< Several hours and countless continues later, I went to bed. I like her theme song (it's got some delightfully cheesy obvious synth, etc. but you have to remember that ONE GUY makes the ENTIRE GAME from start to finish), but Nazrin can get caught in a goddamn mouse trap for all I care now! D:< Your lasers? Take them and go!
On Wednesday I slept in (yaaay~) and then went to Akiba for the day (yaaay~). I started the day off doing some shopping for Jiuna, which I was only partially successful at. I seem to either forget important details or make new (false) ones up as I go along, which is rather problematic when trying to find a single comic in a 7-floor store that carries probably tens of thousands of similar looking items. >_< Oh well, 2/3 isn't bad when you forget about the fact that the one I didn't get was the only one Jiuna actually needed. D:
After failing, I ate at Tenya. The waitresses there now know my order, which means I should probably change things up, but the all-star set is just too good... >_< Oh well, at least it means I get my food quickly, as they probably start making it as soon as they see me come in ahahaha. I then moved over to CLUB SEGA 2 where I played a hundred billion rounds of ESP Galuda. I set a personal record for stage progression by actually beating that stupid psychopath little girl with the attack-trained flowers. I also finally figured out how to activate the game's score building method; silly me, why didn't I think to HOLD DOWN the gender-change button (I am completely serious) before? ;D With my danmaku-brain warmed up, I moved over to HEY! to get humbled by Mushihime. I think I am going to continue starting off with ESP Galuda, as I made it to stage 4 quite a few times in quick succession, which is not normally something I can do, and I also got a score almost in the 50-55 million range, which is what I recall my best from the easier 2P side being. Progress! Exciting! After having my Mushihime performance taper off I just kinda wandered around playing this and that, in HEY! and CLUB SEGA 2, before eating buta-kim-don (it was quite good, and quite a bit like Donburi-Ya, perhaps unsurprisingly) at Chez Streep. After eating it was 8:30, so I decided not to tempt myself and left Akiba for home before I could get myself absorbed and stranded haha.
Yesterday was an incredibly uneventful day. I did my usual Thursday routine of chatting with Mom and Jiuna, playing StarCraft with Kevin and doing chores so I don't have to during the week. I ate at the "Chinese" restaurant again, after I got some recommendations from Kusano-san for something in the direction down the main drag I haven't explored much. I left to go there, and there was an absolutely horrible smell blowing in from that direction, so I turned around and decided it was time for "Chinese" food! I completely forgot about my plan to try out the something-or-other-Wagaya place that may or may not be a restaurant, but it wasn't far enough from the smell anyways. "Chinese" restaurant was sufficiently far, although I have noticed that their food is... not something you write home about (despite me doing exactly that at the moment haha). It's not super bad or anything, it just never has as much flavour as you would expect from looking at it lol. >_< I will probably keep eating there, as it is fast, cheap and nearby. Kusano-san admitted that there's not really much to eat in Hayashi. He only mentioned two places, and one he said was "so-so". >_<
Today I got up and ate dorm breakfast of salty mushrooms, salty fish, and saltier-than-usual miso soup. It was all relatively tasty on its own, but it was just a bit hard to get it all down (quickly, as I was running a little behind) first thing in the morning, and I did not feel very good for most of the day. D:
At work there was a problem with the building's power supply (however it comes in), and so almost the entire day was spent in the dark, with the air conditioning off. Oh how lovely. I really would like all of my sleep-deprived "Monday"s to be dark and warm! D:< In terms of actual work, today I looked at the full results of my accuracy tests, which were unfortunately bad enough to be not right, and good enough to be completely unhelpful in determining where the problem lay. D:< I pretty much spent all of today looking for potential problems and solutions (with a break in the early afternoon to learn a bit of LaTeX). It's kind of hard to debug when what you're troubleshooting requires 15+ minutes to run before giving you any useful information at all. By the end of the day, I found what I believe to be the hidden symptom that is causing the visible symptoms (bad accuracy), but the actual cause of everything is still escaping me. I have one thing that I can try first thing tomorrow morning, but I will be rather disappointed if it works, honestly, because it is not something I believe *should* change anything. If it does, it means the method of inference I'm working with is much more sensitive than I would want/expect it to be. However, I'm going to try it, because it's the only difference apparent to me between the model I have that works and the model I have that doesn't. >_< At 3:30 or thereabouts, I had a bit of a "Lost in Translation" moment haha. The lights came back on, and people cheered a little bit (probably more for the AC, which came back on as well), when the PA guy came on and started talking, and didn't stop for about 5 minutes. I turned to Kawanaka-san, who sits next to me, and asked him what the guy was saying.
"He said the lights came back on."
...
"Alright... Anything else? He was talking for a while..."
"Um... Also he said the air conditioning is back on."
Right. With zero new information gained, I decided to go back to my work. >_< I ended up leaving quite late today, almost at 7, because Kabutoya-san forgot to kick me out and I have developed something of a grudge against my model and was thus hating it for not working as quietly as possible so that he wouldn't notice me haha. Eventually he went to leave and found me still there and kicked me out haha. Damnit! Now I have to go back to it tomorrow morning... Oh well, I probably wouldn't have finished even if left to my own devices, as my brain was starting to power down.
I walked home and ate dorm supper of mapo-eggplant and some kind of harusame, potato and pork mixture with rice and miso soup. It was all pretty good, and very welcome at almost 8pm. D: I retired to my room to eat a frozen grapefruit and blog. There may or may not have been some StarCraft-watching in there too. <_< >_>
Anyways, I am now caught up again, and I will be off to bed, in case tomorrow there is another power failure and thus have to work again in soporific conditions. Night!
Hello all! Please forgive me for the unexpected break from blogging that I took. On Tuesday I couldn't bring myself to do yet another blog that consisted of "I didn't do much today other than code, now here is what I ate". I didn't blog on Wednesday either because I figured that Thursday would be an at-home day and thus wouldn't warrant its own blog either, and then I stayed up too late doing other things on Thursday to get the blog out and still go to bed at a remotely reasonable time. Therefore, I will now try to catch up on the past four days, which will probably be pretty easy, as nothing happened on two of them and I've forgotten what I ate already haha.
On Tuesday I coded at work, and it went alright. I got my test up and running so it could go throughout the weekend and spit out results for me today. There was handiball at lunch, and I recall being bad again, so let's not dwell on that haha. Now that I'm talking about Tuesday, I think I now remember that breakfast was natto and dinner was udon and gyoza with a shredded vegetable tempura nest. Both were pretty good, and the udon was absolutely huge. I recall having trouble finishing it all. O_O I bought my breakfast for the next day at the Yokosan along with another bag of grapefruits, as I've been absolutely demolishing them. :D I ended up playing quite a bit of Touhou UFO (same genre as Mushihime, but for the PC) on Tuesday night before going to bed. I got significantly farther than I ever have and became stuck on the idea of actually passing the 5th stage. >_< Several hours and countless continues later, I went to bed. I like her theme song (it's got some delightfully cheesy obvious synth, etc. but you have to remember that ONE GUY makes the ENTIRE GAME from start to finish), but Nazrin can get caught in a goddamn mouse trap for all I care now! D:< Your lasers? Take them and go!
On Wednesday I slept in (yaaay~) and then went to Akiba for the day (yaaay~). I started the day off doing some shopping for Jiuna, which I was only partially successful at. I seem to either forget important details or make new (false) ones up as I go along, which is rather problematic when trying to find a single comic in a 7-floor store that carries probably tens of thousands of similar looking items. >_< Oh well, 2/3 isn't bad when you forget about the fact that the one I didn't get was the only one Jiuna actually needed. D:
After failing, I ate at Tenya. The waitresses there now know my order, which means I should probably change things up, but the all-star set is just too good... >_< Oh well, at least it means I get my food quickly, as they probably start making it as soon as they see me come in ahahaha. I then moved over to CLUB SEGA 2 where I played a hundred billion rounds of ESP Galuda. I set a personal record for stage progression by actually beating that stupid psychopath little girl with the attack-trained flowers. I also finally figured out how to activate the game's score building method; silly me, why didn't I think to HOLD DOWN the gender-change button (I am completely serious) before? ;D With my danmaku-brain warmed up, I moved over to HEY! to get humbled by Mushihime. I think I am going to continue starting off with ESP Galuda, as I made it to stage 4 quite a few times in quick succession, which is not normally something I can do, and I also got a score almost in the 50-55 million range, which is what I recall my best from the easier 2P side being. Progress! Exciting! After having my Mushihime performance taper off I just kinda wandered around playing this and that, in HEY! and CLUB SEGA 2, before eating buta-kim-don (it was quite good, and quite a bit like Donburi-Ya, perhaps unsurprisingly) at Chez Streep. After eating it was 8:30, so I decided not to tempt myself and left Akiba for home before I could get myself absorbed and stranded haha.
Yesterday was an incredibly uneventful day. I did my usual Thursday routine of chatting with Mom and Jiuna, playing StarCraft with Kevin and doing chores so I don't have to during the week. I ate at the "Chinese" restaurant again, after I got some recommendations from Kusano-san for something in the direction down the main drag I haven't explored much. I left to go there, and there was an absolutely horrible smell blowing in from that direction, so I turned around and decided it was time for "Chinese" food! I completely forgot about my plan to try out the something-or-other-Wagaya place that may or may not be a restaurant, but it wasn't far enough from the smell anyways. "Chinese" restaurant was sufficiently far, although I have noticed that their food is... not something you write home about (despite me doing exactly that at the moment haha). It's not super bad or anything, it just never has as much flavour as you would expect from looking at it lol. >_< I will probably keep eating there, as it is fast, cheap and nearby. Kusano-san admitted that there's not really much to eat in Hayashi. He only mentioned two places, and one he said was "so-so". >_<
Today I got up and ate dorm breakfast of salty mushrooms, salty fish, and saltier-than-usual miso soup. It was all relatively tasty on its own, but it was just a bit hard to get it all down (quickly, as I was running a little behind) first thing in the morning, and I did not feel very good for most of the day. D:
At work there was a problem with the building's power supply (however it comes in), and so almost the entire day was spent in the dark, with the air conditioning off. Oh how lovely. I really would like all of my sleep-deprived "Monday"s to be dark and warm! D:< In terms of actual work, today I looked at the full results of my accuracy tests, which were unfortunately bad enough to be not right, and good enough to be completely unhelpful in determining where the problem lay. D:< I pretty much spent all of today looking for potential problems and solutions (with a break in the early afternoon to learn a bit of LaTeX). It's kind of hard to debug when what you're troubleshooting requires 15+ minutes to run before giving you any useful information at all. By the end of the day, I found what I believe to be the hidden symptom that is causing the visible symptoms (bad accuracy), but the actual cause of everything is still escaping me. I have one thing that I can try first thing tomorrow morning, but I will be rather disappointed if it works, honestly, because it is not something I believe *should* change anything. If it does, it means the method of inference I'm working with is much more sensitive than I would want/expect it to be. However, I'm going to try it, because it's the only difference apparent to me between the model I have that works and the model I have that doesn't. >_< At 3:30 or thereabouts, I had a bit of a "Lost in Translation" moment haha. The lights came back on, and people cheered a little bit (probably more for the AC, which came back on as well), when the PA guy came on and started talking, and didn't stop for about 5 minutes. I turned to Kawanaka-san, who sits next to me, and asked him what the guy was saying.
"He said the lights came back on."
...
"Alright... Anything else? He was talking for a while..."
"Um... Also he said the air conditioning is back on."
Right. With zero new information gained, I decided to go back to my work. >_< I ended up leaving quite late today, almost at 7, because Kabutoya-san forgot to kick me out and I have developed something of a grudge against my model and was thus hating it for not working as quietly as possible so that he wouldn't notice me haha. Eventually he went to leave and found me still there and kicked me out haha. Damnit! Now I have to go back to it tomorrow morning... Oh well, I probably wouldn't have finished even if left to my own devices, as my brain was starting to power down.
I walked home and ate dorm supper of mapo-eggplant and some kind of harusame, potato and pork mixture with rice and miso soup. It was all pretty good, and very welcome at almost 8pm. D: I retired to my room to eat a frozen grapefruit and blog. There may or may not have been some StarCraft-watching in there too. <_< >_>
Anyways, I am now caught up again, and I will be off to bed, in case tomorrow there is another power failure and thus have to work again in soporific conditions. Night!
Monday, September 5, 2011
Today I present to you my newest invention: the demiblog!
September 5: When Have Trouble Counting the Zeros, It Means You Have Too Many Transactions
I've let the time sneak up on me again tonight, so in the interest of getting to bed at an appropriate time I won't be writing much of a blog today. Sorry! You aren't missing much though, as today was incredibly uneventful...
This morning's breakfast was some stewed vegetable mixtures and green peppers with ground beef inside (delicious) with miso soup and rice. Today's miso soup had baked squash in it, which was novel, but it will not be bringing about a flavour revolution, if you ask me. ;D
At work I worked on my recommender some. It seems to do its job well, the problem is that there are 10 million transactions in the full dataset I've been given, which is far, far too many to handle. I estimated that one run of the recommender would take about 3 days. D: I spent most of today on the task of reducing the size of the dataset through various means, although the more "principled" ways have unfortunately failed for the most part. After imposing relatively strict requirements on transactions that would be allowed to be kept, I was left with... 8.5 million transactions. D:< Not so helpful. After consulting with Kabutoya-san about this, he told me that I will just have to cut out a slice of transactions that were made in a certain time frame. It'll work, but it's not terribly pretty. Oh well, anything to make it work... At lunch I ate hiyashi wakame soba and played handiball badly. Not much else to say there haha. >_<
I walked home and ate dorm dinner of some kind of glazed chicken, more baked squash, and a pile of very small clams. It was all quite good, but not very large, which made me happy to have a frozen grapefruit waiting for me afterwards. I didn't do too much for the rest of the evening, so I'll end the blog there and go brush my teeth. As would be expected, I appear to be the only one here who a) knows how to brush his teeth properly, and b) ever flosses. D: Their poor teeth... A lot of the people in my dorm actually have respectable teeth at this point, but if they keep brushing like I see them brushing, that will eventually change. D:
Night!
I've let the time sneak up on me again tonight, so in the interest of getting to bed at an appropriate time I won't be writing much of a blog today. Sorry! You aren't missing much though, as today was incredibly uneventful...
This morning's breakfast was some stewed vegetable mixtures and green peppers with ground beef inside (delicious) with miso soup and rice. Today's miso soup had baked squash in it, which was novel, but it will not be bringing about a flavour revolution, if you ask me. ;D
At work I worked on my recommender some. It seems to do its job well, the problem is that there are 10 million transactions in the full dataset I've been given, which is far, far too many to handle. I estimated that one run of the recommender would take about 3 days. D: I spent most of today on the task of reducing the size of the dataset through various means, although the more "principled" ways have unfortunately failed for the most part. After imposing relatively strict requirements on transactions that would be allowed to be kept, I was left with... 8.5 million transactions. D:< Not so helpful. After consulting with Kabutoya-san about this, he told me that I will just have to cut out a slice of transactions that were made in a certain time frame. It'll work, but it's not terribly pretty. Oh well, anything to make it work... At lunch I ate hiyashi wakame soba and played handiball badly. Not much else to say there haha. >_<
I walked home and ate dorm dinner of some kind of glazed chicken, more baked squash, and a pile of very small clams. It was all quite good, but not very large, which made me happy to have a frozen grapefruit waiting for me afterwards. I didn't do too much for the rest of the evening, so I'll end the blog there and go brush my teeth. As would be expected, I appear to be the only one here who a) knows how to brush his teeth properly, and b) ever flosses. D: Their poor teeth... A lot of the people in my dorm actually have respectable teeth at this point, but if they keep brushing like I see them brushing, that will eventually change. D:
Night!
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Despite the number of large, system-wide errors we hear horror stories about all the time, I wouldn't bet against the distribution of the actual length of all bug fixes following a power law or something...
September 4: Sample Dat
This morning's breakfast was tororo and gobo-kinpira with rice and miso soup, which was delicious, but rather small. I was running a little behind, so I suppose it was good to have a breakfast that was easy to eat quickly, but I did not enjoy the hour between 11am and 12pm as a result. >_< In face, thanks to my tiny breakfast, I somehow made it to the bus EARLIER than I usually do... Yikes.
At work I was actually able to solve my "mystery" bug very early in the day. It was due to me not initializing an array properly (when is it ever anything else...?), and I actually, for a brief moment, understood why some people hate C and C++ (I still wasn't able to agree with them, though). One of the reasons I was having trouble tracking down the bug yesterday was because I would get any of three different error messages at three different locations on a given running of the code, and the error would disappear and reappear if I changed the range of data to work on, all just because I put m_K instead of m_U at one place in the code. I am actually blaming Ruby for the trouble I had, because the three different error messages were its fault, and if it had just been "Segmentation Fault" every single time I wouldn't have been nearly so confused. Oh well, it's gone, and without being too much of a headache, to boot!
For the rest of the day I ran tests on my finished model to make sure it was, to the best of my knowledge, working, before setting it loose on the hugegantic full data set (I expect it will take at least 5 hours to complete), before starting on the next model I'm supposed to code, which will serve as a baseline for the performance evaluation I'm going to do.
At lunch I ate murugi curry, which was good enough, but somehow food doesn't taste as good when you choose it out of necessity rather than actual preference. >_< Today's menu options were reaaaaally sad... D: I wasn't hungry in the afternoon until almost 6 though, so I guess the gossamer chicken in the curry did something after all. After eating was handiball, which was decent, although there were gigantic teams again, so I didn't get to play too much.
I went home almost right at 6 today, because I had readied the next model (it turned out to be rather trivial to turn the one I already had into the next one) and started it on the 5-hour test as well, leaving me with nothing to do aside from start ANOTHER model, which would likely take a half-day. The walk home was pleasant as usual with the vestigal typ(h)oon breezes cooling things off. I wonder if the nights are honestly cooling off now, or if it's just the typ(h)oons at work, because it's actually 28 degrees in my room. This makes me happy, and I am wondering if it is here to stay. One of my coworkers said that the weather wouldn't get cold until October, but maybe this year's fall will come early... I'm crossing my fingers...
Dinner was chow mein and a preserved fish (looked and tasted quite a lot like a kipper). The preserved fish was kind of impossible to eat, as a lot of the outer flesh had turned into a sort of carapace, making it rather hard to negotiate with chopsticks. >_< The chow mein was really good, though it bore little resemblance to real chow mein, or even my understanding of the Japanese interpretation of chow mein for that matter. O_O I wonder if it was even supposed to be chow mein at all. Maybe it was secretly a pork bun or something...
I got to enjoy the first of many frozen grapefruits after supper. :D I am very happy for the insight the frozen oranges from Jiuna's and my Izu trip provided! I didn't think this would happen, but the freezing really tones down the tartness. I kind of have the process of eating a frozen grapefruit down to an art now; before dinner I take one out and put it in a bucket of cold water, and then by the time I come back from eating, it's still frozen, but the mesocarp (frighteningly, I didn't actually even need look that one up...) is thawed and easy to peel off, and the segments softened enough to split. Yum...
I am going to go to bed now, in the hopes that I will actually enjoy waking up in the morning (HA!). Night!
This morning's breakfast was tororo and gobo-kinpira with rice and miso soup, which was delicious, but rather small. I was running a little behind, so I suppose it was good to have a breakfast that was easy to eat quickly, but I did not enjoy the hour between 11am and 12pm as a result. >_< In face, thanks to my tiny breakfast, I somehow made it to the bus EARLIER than I usually do... Yikes.
At work I was actually able to solve my "mystery" bug very early in the day. It was due to me not initializing an array properly (when is it ever anything else...?), and I actually, for a brief moment, understood why some people hate C and C++ (I still wasn't able to agree with them, though). One of the reasons I was having trouble tracking down the bug yesterday was because I would get any of three different error messages at three different locations on a given running of the code, and the error would disappear and reappear if I changed the range of data to work on, all just because I put m_K instead of m_U at one place in the code. I am actually blaming Ruby for the trouble I had, because the three different error messages were its fault, and if it had just been "Segmentation Fault" every single time I wouldn't have been nearly so confused. Oh well, it's gone, and without being too much of a headache, to boot!
For the rest of the day I ran tests on my finished model to make sure it was, to the best of my knowledge, working, before setting it loose on the hugegantic full data set (I expect it will take at least 5 hours to complete), before starting on the next model I'm supposed to code, which will serve as a baseline for the performance evaluation I'm going to do.
At lunch I ate murugi curry, which was good enough, but somehow food doesn't taste as good when you choose it out of necessity rather than actual preference. >_< Today's menu options were reaaaaally sad... D: I wasn't hungry in the afternoon until almost 6 though, so I guess the gossamer chicken in the curry did something after all. After eating was handiball, which was decent, although there were gigantic teams again, so I didn't get to play too much.
I went home almost right at 6 today, because I had readied the next model (it turned out to be rather trivial to turn the one I already had into the next one) and started it on the 5-hour test as well, leaving me with nothing to do aside from start ANOTHER model, which would likely take a half-day. The walk home was pleasant as usual with the vestigal typ(h)oon breezes cooling things off. I wonder if the nights are honestly cooling off now, or if it's just the typ(h)oons at work, because it's actually 28 degrees in my room. This makes me happy, and I am wondering if it is here to stay. One of my coworkers said that the weather wouldn't get cold until October, but maybe this year's fall will come early... I'm crossing my fingers...
Dinner was chow mein and a preserved fish (looked and tasted quite a lot like a kipper). The preserved fish was kind of impossible to eat, as a lot of the outer flesh had turned into a sort of carapace, making it rather hard to negotiate with chopsticks. >_< The chow mein was really good, though it bore little resemblance to real chow mein, or even my understanding of the Japanese interpretation of chow mein for that matter. O_O I wonder if it was even supposed to be chow mein at all. Maybe it was secretly a pork bun or something...
I got to enjoy the first of many frozen grapefruits after supper. :D I am very happy for the insight the frozen oranges from Jiuna's and my Izu trip provided! I didn't think this would happen, but the freezing really tones down the tartness. I kind of have the process of eating a frozen grapefruit down to an art now; before dinner I take one out and put it in a bucket of cold water, and then by the time I come back from eating, it's still frozen, but the mesocarp (frighteningly, I didn't actually even need look that one up...) is thawed and easy to peel off, and the segments softened enough to split. Yum...
I am going to go to bed now, in the hopes that I will actually enjoy waking up in the morning (HA!). Night!
Saturday, September 3, 2011
And now, for a list of situations inappropriate for APM demonstrations: 1) Installers and similar wizards
September 3: Not Much to Say
Sorry folks, today's blog is destined to be a short one. >_<
Today's breakfast was some pork mixtures, shredded vegetable tempura and nori, along with miso soup and rice. It was all fairly good, but not my among my favourites certainly. I left the dorm and got to work on time, where I coded and debugged all day. My current problem is with a bug that only appears on certain ranges in the data, but I'm not able to determine what is unique about those points... Whatever it is it is really nasty, because it somehow causes memory allocation problems in RUBY of all things. >_>
Lunch was that wasabi chicken thing I had last week on rice. I unfortunately got ripped off again, as I took the only one available as i was walking past, and then, for the next person after me to take, the cafeteria ladies put out a noticeably larger one. >_< I swear I've never been rude or obnoxious (in the cafeteria, that is), so I'm not sure what this secret vendetta against my quest to actually get a sufficient lunch is about.
After eating I played handiball, which was kind of funny, in all senses of the word. >_< Aside from the usual silliness inherent in handiball, today there were veritable masses of people playing who had clearly not done so terribly often before... My team was a decent mixture of said noobs and people who normally played, as was the other team, but for some reason the other team felt the need to put all of their experienced people adjacent to eachother in their rotation. This meant that they would literally go 10 points on us before they rotated out, and then we'd just serve it and their noobs would stand there looking at the ball, or get hit by it, or hit it in a randomly/astrologically determined direction until we caught up. >_< I must say it wasn't terribly riveting to watch (and there were long lines to rotate back in due to all the players present), or to play for that matter haha. Oh well...
In the afternoon I "got" my lab e-mail address finally. Apparently it takes about this long to get one, for whatever reason. >_< "Got" is in quotation marks because the company apparently changed the password for the account in between giving it to Kabutoya-san over the phone and him taking the piece of paper he'd written it down on and giving it to me. Uhhh... Anyways, that meant that I installed/reinstalled Thunderbird about 3 times, and triple checked all the information I'd put in before calling Kabutoya-san over to explain that something was amiss. His solution was to click a bunch of buttons without reading them (in his defence, they were in English), get Thunderbird into a state that appeared to be mostly broken, and then click the "Create Account" button several times, expressing non-diminishing surprise each time doing so yielded the same failure message, before going back to call the people in charge of the account and finding out what was actually wrong. I somehow can't capture what happened with the right cadence without sounding acerbic, but I was actually just trying not to laugh during the whole episode. I made a noise every time he went for a button that I was pretty damn sure wouldn't do anything useful, but he always got there before it became anything intelligible, so I was just kind of sitting there going "Eh! Uh. Erk. Eh. Ngh! Uh. No- Uh. Mm." He's normally quite technically competent, so I really have no idea what that was about... After he left I reinstalled Thunderbird. :D Another thing about my e-mail address is that the part of it that's supposed to be my name is "robato_sumi". I was joking with my coworkers about who exactly this "Robato" guy is, and how we feel very sorry for him for having a name that rhymes (or "rimes", if you're being a douche in Scrabble, like me for example) with "potato". Now I'm thinking about how Dot might have pronounced it "R'beta" haha. I hope I never forget about this; you guys must all call me "Robato" upon my return to Canada. *<:B
After work I walked home in the lovely and refreshing typ(h)oon winds, and my trip was free of giant flying spiders! *shudder* I got home and ate dorm breakfast that was a giant omu-rice (scrambled eggs wrapped around a distinctive sort of ketchup fried rice, with ketchup on top) and miso soup (but no rice, as it was clearly otherwise engaged). I went to the Yokosan and bought more senbei and an ENTIRE BAG of grapefruits to put in the freezer! The bag cost 398円 for 5 grapefruit which normally cost 99円, so I am quite pleased with that. Unfortunately the Yokosan hasn't been selling figs of late, as I wanted to try freezing them too.
I'm actually in something of a position to get enough sleep tonight, so I will depart now to try to capitalize on that! I hope my excitement about not feeling horrible tomorrow doesn't keep me awake... >_< Damn, why did I say that...
Night!
Sorry folks, today's blog is destined to be a short one. >_<
Today's breakfast was some pork mixtures, shredded vegetable tempura and nori, along with miso soup and rice. It was all fairly good, but not my among my favourites certainly. I left the dorm and got to work on time, where I coded and debugged all day. My current problem is with a bug that only appears on certain ranges in the data, but I'm not able to determine what is unique about those points... Whatever it is it is really nasty, because it somehow causes memory allocation problems in RUBY of all things. >_>
Lunch was that wasabi chicken thing I had last week on rice. I unfortunately got ripped off again, as I took the only one available as i was walking past, and then, for the next person after me to take, the cafeteria ladies put out a noticeably larger one. >_< I swear I've never been rude or obnoxious (in the cafeteria, that is), so I'm not sure what this secret vendetta against my quest to actually get a sufficient lunch is about.
After eating I played handiball, which was kind of funny, in all senses of the word. >_< Aside from the usual silliness inherent in handiball, today there were veritable masses of people playing who had clearly not done so terribly often before... My team was a decent mixture of said noobs and people who normally played, as was the other team, but for some reason the other team felt the need to put all of their experienced people adjacent to eachother in their rotation. This meant that they would literally go 10 points on us before they rotated out, and then we'd just serve it and their noobs would stand there looking at the ball, or get hit by it, or hit it in a randomly/astrologically determined direction until we caught up. >_< I must say it wasn't terribly riveting to watch (and there were long lines to rotate back in due to all the players present), or to play for that matter haha. Oh well...
In the afternoon I "got" my lab e-mail address finally. Apparently it takes about this long to get one, for whatever reason. >_< "Got" is in quotation marks because the company apparently changed the password for the account in between giving it to Kabutoya-san over the phone and him taking the piece of paper he'd written it down on and giving it to me. Uhhh... Anyways, that meant that I installed/reinstalled Thunderbird about 3 times, and triple checked all the information I'd put in before calling Kabutoya-san over to explain that something was amiss. His solution was to click a bunch of buttons without reading them (in his defence, they were in English), get Thunderbird into a state that appeared to be mostly broken, and then click the "Create Account" button several times, expressing non-diminishing surprise each time doing so yielded the same failure message, before going back to call the people in charge of the account and finding out what was actually wrong. I somehow can't capture what happened with the right cadence without sounding acerbic, but I was actually just trying not to laugh during the whole episode. I made a noise every time he went for a button that I was pretty damn sure wouldn't do anything useful, but he always got there before it became anything intelligible, so I was just kind of sitting there going "Eh! Uh. Erk. Eh. Ngh! Uh. No- Uh. Mm." He's normally quite technically competent, so I really have no idea what that was about... After he left I reinstalled Thunderbird. :D Another thing about my e-mail address is that the part of it that's supposed to be my name is "robato_sumi". I was joking with my coworkers about who exactly this "Robato" guy is, and how we feel very sorry for him for having a name that rhymes (or "rimes", if you're being a douche in Scrabble, like me for example) with "potato". Now I'm thinking about how Dot might have pronounced it "R'beta" haha. I hope I never forget about this; you guys must all call me "Robato" upon my return to Canada. *<:B
After work I walked home in the lovely and refreshing typ(h)oon winds, and my trip was free of giant flying spiders! *shudder* I got home and ate dorm breakfast that was a giant omu-rice (scrambled eggs wrapped around a distinctive sort of ketchup fried rice, with ketchup on top) and miso soup (but no rice, as it was clearly otherwise engaged). I went to the Yokosan and bought more senbei and an ENTIRE BAG of grapefruits to put in the freezer! The bag cost 398円 for 5 grapefruit which normally cost 99円, so I am quite pleased with that. Unfortunately the Yokosan hasn't been selling figs of late, as I wanted to try freezing them too.
I'm actually in something of a position to get enough sleep tonight, so I will depart now to try to capitalize on that! I hope my excitement about not feeling horrible tomorrow doesn't keep me awake... >_< Damn, why did I say that...
Night!
Friday, September 2, 2011
Dear RJ, Do not search for new Scissor Sisters live recordings on YouTube beginning at 10:30pm. Sincerely, Your Eyelids of Tomorrow
September 2: Back to Programming
Getting more settled in at work means larger tasks, and therefore less variation within and between days. That means I will probably not have too much to blog about in the work front in the near future, as I think the next couple of days will just be coding. Sorry for those of you who were enjoying the riveting pyrotechnic mathematics. ;D
I got up on time today and ate dorm breakfast of a pork mixture with celery, a stewed vegetable mixture, featuring celery, and a Japanese-style omlette with ground beef and celery in the middle. Oh yeah, and there was rice and miso soup with celery in it. >_< It was quite remarkable, and I had to try quite hard to prevent myself from laughing every time I discovered celery in yet another dish. I must say I thought of Dad and that "obedient ingredient" show he talks about from time to time, but this celery was actually rather unruly. It was crunchy and made everything taste like it had celery in it, not so obedient at all. >_< Surprisingly, I quite enjoyed the, ahem, thematically unified breakfast.
I got to work on time and got Kabutoya-san to check my parameter estimation and Gibbs update equations. They were all in order, though he notified me that his original plan for how to generate a part of the model was no longer an option, as it had been proven to have poor performance in practice. O_O I'm to spend some time thinking about how to encode information about words in metadata that is not covered by a) the meaning of the word, or b) how it is used. Uhh... I hope I'm allowed to not come up with an answer for this one. >_<
I spent the whole day coding my model in a mixture of Ruby and C++. I am kind of worried about the fact that neither of my co-op positions have involved anyone actually looking at my code. I think I probably have appalling habits and ways of doing things that will shock and horrify whoever gets to first see my code. "What do you mean that I'm not supposed to use macro replacement functions to allocate and initialize my two dimensional arrays?" D: To be honest, I'm mostly doing that one for fun though. ;D
At lunch I ate hiyashi wakame soba and played handiball. For some reason I was quite good today, which I hope is the beginning of a trend. Playing well meant that people set the ball for me more often (including a girl on the opposite team, by accident of course) and so I got to practice my "spikes" (the quotation marks are because it feels heretical to call them that when the net is so low). Seeing more play also meant I got better exercise, so it would appear that there is really no reason for me to want to not be better at handiball (derp).
In the afternoon was... more coding. My recommender is perhaps 70% together, but I have come across some questions to ask Kabutoya-san about the model which could possibly necessitate more work than I can expect at this point. I am not looking forward to debugging this one, as the dataset is larger and the model more complicated than all my previous recommenders. >_< Oh well, if I had to make another of the simpler recommenders, I think I would be "driven 'round the bend", to quote my linear algrebra prof from first year.
I left work at about 6:30, and walked home in the somewhat blustery winds that were apparently typ(h)oon-driven. It was pleasant to have the breeze, as today was on the hot end of things. It's nice and cool in my room right now, which, as far as my experience dictates, means another typ(h)oon is indeed on the way. It is getting dark quite early here, which gave me the lovely experience of walking straight up to a "leaf" and having it run right by my foot before realizing it was actually the largest spider I had ever seen in my entire life. D: Euuuuughghhghghhghgh!!!!!!! There were actual leaves blowing everywhere across the sidewalk, with some hitting me as well, so needless to say I was very relieved when I got to the Takeyama intersection (where the trees stop), by which point I was pretty much a nervous wreck. >_< Bleaghghghghgh.... The things I do for 1.7 plays of Mushihime...
I got home and took my grapefruit out of the freezer and put in a bucket of water before going down to dinner. Unfortunately, Oohashi-san was nowhere to be found. I waited for about 15 minutes, thinking she'd gone out to get something or other, when another dorm resident came in, walked up to the door into the kitchen and yelled "KON BAN WA!" (good evening) only a little sharply, which caused her to appear within 10 seconds. >_< I don't think I will yell it quite so loud as he did if this ever happens again, but it's a good thing to know about.
Dinner was some pork salad thing, which was pretty good, and some lump of somewhat salty and dry fish, which was not so good. >_< Celery was nowhere to be found. I went back up to my room and ate my frozen grapefruit and the rest of my matcha ice cream (for better or for worse, I needed something to drown out the fish haha).
Anyways, I'm off to a terrible start on the sleep front this week, so I'm going to end today's blog post right now and bid you goodnight. Night!
Getting more settled in at work means larger tasks, and therefore less variation within and between days. That means I will probably not have too much to blog about in the work front in the near future, as I think the next couple of days will just be coding. Sorry for those of you who were enjoying the riveting pyrotechnic mathematics. ;D
I got up on time today and ate dorm breakfast of a pork mixture with celery, a stewed vegetable mixture, featuring celery, and a Japanese-style omlette with ground beef and celery in the middle. Oh yeah, and there was rice and miso soup with celery in it. >_< It was quite remarkable, and I had to try quite hard to prevent myself from laughing every time I discovered celery in yet another dish. I must say I thought of Dad and that "obedient ingredient" show he talks about from time to time, but this celery was actually rather unruly. It was crunchy and made everything taste like it had celery in it, not so obedient at all. >_< Surprisingly, I quite enjoyed the, ahem, thematically unified breakfast.
I got to work on time and got Kabutoya-san to check my parameter estimation and Gibbs update equations. They were all in order, though he notified me that his original plan for how to generate a part of the model was no longer an option, as it had been proven to have poor performance in practice. O_O I'm to spend some time thinking about how to encode information about words in metadata that is not covered by a) the meaning of the word, or b) how it is used. Uhh... I hope I'm allowed to not come up with an answer for this one. >_<
I spent the whole day coding my model in a mixture of Ruby and C++. I am kind of worried about the fact that neither of my co-op positions have involved anyone actually looking at my code. I think I probably have appalling habits and ways of doing things that will shock and horrify whoever gets to first see my code. "What do you mean that I'm not supposed to use macro replacement functions to allocate and initialize my two dimensional arrays?" D: To be honest, I'm mostly doing that one for fun though. ;D
At lunch I ate hiyashi wakame soba and played handiball. For some reason I was quite good today, which I hope is the beginning of a trend. Playing well meant that people set the ball for me more often (including a girl on the opposite team, by accident of course) and so I got to practice my "spikes" (the quotation marks are because it feels heretical to call them that when the net is so low). Seeing more play also meant I got better exercise, so it would appear that there is really no reason for me to want to not be better at handiball (derp).
In the afternoon was... more coding. My recommender is perhaps 70% together, but I have come across some questions to ask Kabutoya-san about the model which could possibly necessitate more work than I can expect at this point. I am not looking forward to debugging this one, as the dataset is larger and the model more complicated than all my previous recommenders. >_< Oh well, if I had to make another of the simpler recommenders, I think I would be "driven 'round the bend", to quote my linear algrebra prof from first year.
I left work at about 6:30, and walked home in the somewhat blustery winds that were apparently typ(h)oon-driven. It was pleasant to have the breeze, as today was on the hot end of things. It's nice and cool in my room right now, which, as far as my experience dictates, means another typ(h)oon is indeed on the way. It is getting dark quite early here, which gave me the lovely experience of walking straight up to a "leaf" and having it run right by my foot before realizing it was actually the largest spider I had ever seen in my entire life. D: Euuuuughghhghghhghgh!!!!!!! There were actual leaves blowing everywhere across the sidewalk, with some hitting me as well, so needless to say I was very relieved when I got to the Takeyama intersection (where the trees stop), by which point I was pretty much a nervous wreck. >_< Bleaghghghghgh.... The things I do for 1.7 plays of Mushihime...
I got home and took my grapefruit out of the freezer and put in a bucket of water before going down to dinner. Unfortunately, Oohashi-san was nowhere to be found. I waited for about 15 minutes, thinking she'd gone out to get something or other, when another dorm resident came in, walked up to the door into the kitchen and yelled "KON BAN WA!" (good evening) only a little sharply, which caused her to appear within 10 seconds. >_< I don't think I will yell it quite so loud as he did if this ever happens again, but it's a good thing to know about.
Dinner was some pork salad thing, which was pretty good, and some lump of somewhat salty and dry fish, which was not so good. >_< Celery was nowhere to be found. I went back up to my room and ate my frozen grapefruit and the rest of my matcha ice cream (for better or for worse, I needed something to drown out the fish haha).
Anyways, I'm off to a terrible start on the sleep front this week, so I'm going to end today's blog post right now and bid you goodnight. Night!
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Going to bed early at nearly 1AM does not achieve the desired results
August 31/September 1: Month 3 Begins
Holy crap... It's hard to believe that I've been here for almost 3 months now! Even scarier is that means that in a few weeks I will be 1/3 done my stay here. ;_; Ugh... Let's not think about that...
Yesterday I went to Akiba. 'Nuff said. Haha, if you really want more detail, then I can tell you that I ate the korokke that I'd bought for breakfast before taking the bus to Yokochuu. For some reason the traffic was reaaaaaally bad, and it took forever to get there, but upon arrival, when I beeped my Pasmo to exit the bus, the screen showed that I had been given a 300円 credit for my next bus. O_O I still have no idea what causes this (the bus wasn't THAT slow), but I am always happy when it ends up happening.
I didn't waste any time in Yokochuu and took the Keikyu line and then the Yamanote straight to Akiba. I started out the day trying to do some shopping for Jiuna, but unfortunately I'm an idiot and did not take down nearly enough information about the things I wanted to try to buy. Going to Akiba and being like "this CD is here.... Somewhere..." is not a winning strategy in the slightest. >_< I tried feebly to check in Tora no Ana (no dice), and was going to go the the Lammtara, but there was a blockade of really obnoxious-looking people at the entrance to the store so I abandoned the idea. I ate at Tenya for lunch, and they got my order right this time, but gave me the saddest amount of rice I have ever seen. Maybe they think I made Jiuna mad and that's why she's not here, and now they're taking revenge on her behalf or something... I have no idea what's up. >_< I will keep going and hopefully if I smile enough they will start giving me the correct dish/proper amount of food again. D:
After eating, I spent the rest of the day in CLUB SEGA 2 and HEY!, where I sucked horribly at all the games I touched. D: It was quite frustrating, and I couldn't help but think about whether it was karmic retribution for not trying harder to find Jiuna's stuff. >_< I ate stamina-don for dinner at Meryl Streep, which was tasty as usual, but I felt a bit funny for the rest of the day. I have never had that experience before (either that or I just haven't noticed haha) from Meryl Streep, so I don't know what that's about. Since I'm still here today, it obviously wasn't anything too serious; I could have just been dehydrated for all I know (for some reason my frozen Pocari Sweat refused to melt... D:<).
After dinner I went back to CLUB SEGA 2 and played a million games of ESP Galuda 2, and after a while I started to actually get respectably far (by my own standards, of course haha D:). Emboldened by my success, I went over to HEY!, where I tried my hand at Mushihime again (I had seriously almost game-overed on the first stage earlier in the day), and I managed to get as far as I ever have (4th stage boss with 20% health left), and got the highest score I ever have (since moving to the 1P side, of course). I checked my phone for the time and it was unfortunately already 9pm, and so I had to leave right after that. >_< Apparently I should start all my Akiba days with 1000円 worth of ESP Galuda 2 haha.
It was a good thing I didn't try to play chicken with my leaving time, because as I found out on the Yamanote line back to Shinagawa, the Keikyu line was behind schedule (due to passenger injury, they didn't specify of what sort O_O)! This unfortunately meant that, after getting on a train at a fairly regular time, the train then had to take FOREVER to get to Yokochuu, as it had to wait at all kinds of lights and such, presumably due to running outside of what I would assume is a rather tight track schedule. Bleagh. And I didn't even have any new vocab lists. D:<
I got home pretty late, but decided it would be a good idea to go on the Internet (I'm such a genius), and ended up talking to Kevin until I realized that I was so tired that I had a headache. D:
This morning I got up a little later than usual (I had rescheduled my chat with Mom and Jiuna), but I had some errands to do before talking to them, which took waaaaay longer than I expected, and I ended up starting our conversation about 30-45 minutes later than I'd originally advertised. O_O Sorry! I did get quite a lot of necessary household shopping done though, so I do feel good about that. I've got a fresh supply of paper towels, laundry detergent, shampoo, conditioner, tissues, and a bunch of other things. Unfortunately they only gave me one bag at the Matsumoto Kiyoshi (the drug store), and so I had to go back home to drop my purchases off before going to the Yokosan to get breakfast. Even I have enough shame to think it's tacky to walk into the Yokosan with unbagged tissues and paper towels from a different store under my arm haha.
I chatted for a while with Mom and Jiuna (they talked about swimming in the ocean, which is certainly something I miss), and then played some StarCraft with Kevin. My StarCrafting was cut short by noticing that my computer was actually hot to the touch. >_< It was 32 degrees today, which is hotter than usual, and I guess too hot for my poor little laptop to run StarCraft. D: I closed the application and it got better again quite quickly. I guess I'm glad that my games with Kevin weren't of the 40-minute variety, as I enjoy having a usable computer in my room. D:
After stopping StarCraft, I started trying to read Blue Mars from where I'd stopped, but that was apparently waaay too long ago (come to think of it, I think it may have been an entire year since I last read Blue Mars), as I could not for the life of me remember what the characters were talking about in terms of current events and plotlines. >_< I think I will need to start again from the beginning of the book.
I DIDN'T have LAWSON STATION food for dinner tonight! I actually planned ahead and left home at a reasonable time to go eat dinner at the "Chinese" restaurant down the road. It was a pleasant enough experience, although I have no idea why I ordered ma-po tofu, since it's one of the few things on their menu that I HAVE eaten before (at their restaurant, no less!). The Yokosan today actually had a small bucket of matcha ice cream, so I had some of that for dessert. I realize now that having caffeinated ice cream at like, 7pm is possibly not the best idea when I am already expecting to have trouble getting to sleep, but for some reason the RJ that existed at 7pm did not think about this while stuffing his face with ice cream (gee, I wonder why). I will try going to the chinese restaurant again and ordering something a little more adventurous, all though to be honest, that's a pretty silly adjective to use, as everything on the menu looks pretty benign.
After supper (and a somewhat prolonged dessert, the spoon I had was TINY) I tidied my room a bit (and finished off my laundry) before watching some StarCraft. Today's matches were decent enough. The team I wanted to win won, but unfortunately not in the manner I wanted them to (they were already out of contention for the league playoffs, but if they won by more than 1, which they did, they kicked their opponents, another team I like, out of the playoffs). Because they won so handily, I didn't get to see either of my favourite players play, either. D: Oh well, there's always next season.
Anyways, I told myself today that I would go to bed at a reasonable time to set a good pace for the week. Well, you know how well that went from the timestamp on this post. That means I'd best get to bed to salvage what I can from my available sleeping hours as soon as possible. Night!
Holy crap... It's hard to believe that I've been here for almost 3 months now! Even scarier is that means that in a few weeks I will be 1/3 done my stay here. ;_; Ugh... Let's not think about that...
Yesterday I went to Akiba. 'Nuff said. Haha, if you really want more detail, then I can tell you that I ate the korokke that I'd bought for breakfast before taking the bus to Yokochuu. For some reason the traffic was reaaaaaally bad, and it took forever to get there, but upon arrival, when I beeped my Pasmo to exit the bus, the screen showed that I had been given a 300円 credit for my next bus. O_O I still have no idea what causes this (the bus wasn't THAT slow), but I am always happy when it ends up happening.
I didn't waste any time in Yokochuu and took the Keikyu line and then the Yamanote straight to Akiba. I started out the day trying to do some shopping for Jiuna, but unfortunately I'm an idiot and did not take down nearly enough information about the things I wanted to try to buy. Going to Akiba and being like "this CD is here.... Somewhere..." is not a winning strategy in the slightest. >_< I tried feebly to check in Tora no Ana (no dice), and was going to go the the Lammtara, but there was a blockade of really obnoxious-looking people at the entrance to the store so I abandoned the idea. I ate at Tenya for lunch, and they got my order right this time, but gave me the saddest amount of rice I have ever seen. Maybe they think I made Jiuna mad and that's why she's not here, and now they're taking revenge on her behalf or something... I have no idea what's up. >_< I will keep going and hopefully if I smile enough they will start giving me the correct dish/proper amount of food again. D:
After eating, I spent the rest of the day in CLUB SEGA 2 and HEY!, where I sucked horribly at all the games I touched. D: It was quite frustrating, and I couldn't help but think about whether it was karmic retribution for not trying harder to find Jiuna's stuff. >_< I ate stamina-don for dinner at Meryl Streep, which was tasty as usual, but I felt a bit funny for the rest of the day. I have never had that experience before (either that or I just haven't noticed haha) from Meryl Streep, so I don't know what that's about. Since I'm still here today, it obviously wasn't anything too serious; I could have just been dehydrated for all I know (for some reason my frozen Pocari Sweat refused to melt... D:<).
After dinner I went back to CLUB SEGA 2 and played a million games of ESP Galuda 2, and after a while I started to actually get respectably far (by my own standards, of course haha D:). Emboldened by my success, I went over to HEY!, where I tried my hand at Mushihime again (I had seriously almost game-overed on the first stage earlier in the day), and I managed to get as far as I ever have (4th stage boss with 20% health left), and got the highest score I ever have (since moving to the 1P side, of course). I checked my phone for the time and it was unfortunately already 9pm, and so I had to leave right after that. >_< Apparently I should start all my Akiba days with 1000円 worth of ESP Galuda 2 haha.
It was a good thing I didn't try to play chicken with my leaving time, because as I found out on the Yamanote line back to Shinagawa, the Keikyu line was behind schedule (due to passenger injury, they didn't specify of what sort O_O)! This unfortunately meant that, after getting on a train at a fairly regular time, the train then had to take FOREVER to get to Yokochuu, as it had to wait at all kinds of lights and such, presumably due to running outside of what I would assume is a rather tight track schedule. Bleagh. And I didn't even have any new vocab lists. D:<
I got home pretty late, but decided it would be a good idea to go on the Internet (I'm such a genius), and ended up talking to Kevin until I realized that I was so tired that I had a headache. D:
This morning I got up a little later than usual (I had rescheduled my chat with Mom and Jiuna), but I had some errands to do before talking to them, which took waaaaay longer than I expected, and I ended up starting our conversation about 30-45 minutes later than I'd originally advertised. O_O Sorry! I did get quite a lot of necessary household shopping done though, so I do feel good about that. I've got a fresh supply of paper towels, laundry detergent, shampoo, conditioner, tissues, and a bunch of other things. Unfortunately they only gave me one bag at the Matsumoto Kiyoshi (the drug store), and so I had to go back home to drop my purchases off before going to the Yokosan to get breakfast. Even I have enough shame to think it's tacky to walk into the Yokosan with unbagged tissues and paper towels from a different store under my arm haha.
I chatted for a while with Mom and Jiuna (they talked about swimming in the ocean, which is certainly something I miss), and then played some StarCraft with Kevin. My StarCrafting was cut short by noticing that my computer was actually hot to the touch. >_< It was 32 degrees today, which is hotter than usual, and I guess too hot for my poor little laptop to run StarCraft. D: I closed the application and it got better again quite quickly. I guess I'm glad that my games with Kevin weren't of the 40-minute variety, as I enjoy having a usable computer in my room. D:
After stopping StarCraft, I started trying to read Blue Mars from where I'd stopped, but that was apparently waaay too long ago (come to think of it, I think it may have been an entire year since I last read Blue Mars), as I could not for the life of me remember what the characters were talking about in terms of current events and plotlines. >_< I think I will need to start again from the beginning of the book.
I DIDN'T have LAWSON STATION food for dinner tonight! I actually planned ahead and left home at a reasonable time to go eat dinner at the "Chinese" restaurant down the road. It was a pleasant enough experience, although I have no idea why I ordered ma-po tofu, since it's one of the few things on their menu that I HAVE eaten before (at their restaurant, no less!). The Yokosan today actually had a small bucket of matcha ice cream, so I had some of that for dessert. I realize now that having caffeinated ice cream at like, 7pm is possibly not the best idea when I am already expecting to have trouble getting to sleep, but for some reason the RJ that existed at 7pm did not think about this while stuffing his face with ice cream (gee, I wonder why). I will try going to the chinese restaurant again and ordering something a little more adventurous, all though to be honest, that's a pretty silly adjective to use, as everything on the menu looks pretty benign.
After supper (and a somewhat prolonged dessert, the spoon I had was TINY) I tidied my room a bit (and finished off my laundry) before watching some StarCraft. Today's matches were decent enough. The team I wanted to win won, but unfortunately not in the manner I wanted them to (they were already out of contention for the league playoffs, but if they won by more than 1, which they did, they kicked their opponents, another team I like, out of the playoffs). Because they won so handily, I didn't get to see either of my favourite players play, either. D: Oh well, there's always next season.
Anyways, I told myself today that I would go to bed at a reasonable time to set a good pace for the week. Well, you know how well that went from the timestamp on this post. That means I'd best get to bed to salvage what I can from my available sleeping hours as soon as possible. Night!
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