Kicked out of the office (in a good way)

Jun 20: Back to Work

By the time today rolled around I was quite happy to go back to work, because as much fun as Akiba is, I'm quite ready to be good at things again (at least for five days haha)! ;D  Dorm breakfast today was stewed squid and natto. >_<  I survived, and I realized, while making my way through the rather hefty pil of the stuff, that natto doesn't actually taste like very much at all, it just smells super gross.

I got to work on time and started Rubying it up.  Today I got my first task that isn't in the book!  Mind you it's making a basic recommender using K-means clustering, both the recommender part and the K-means part are things in the book. >_<  Baby steps though!  I was quite glad to be able to truly think (even just for a little bit) about what I was doing today.

At lunch I had "cold shabu shabu", which is basically some thin strips of cooked pork with an incredibly large pile of cabbage and wakame.  I was of course on my way to the curry. ;D  At lunch we had a rather funny misunderstanding between me using the word "niche" and my coworkers hearing "nishi".  Apparently they know the word "niche", but pronounce it so it rhymes with "rich".

After eating we played handiball for a bit.  My serve is getting more consistent, but the rest of my play is still kinda crap. D:  The player positioning very ad-hoc, which doesn't really help, because that either leaves you right next to a player, or with half the court to cover.  Mostly it's just silly and fun though.  :D

In the afternoon I tried to implement the clustering in my recommender, but I think there is a bug in my code, because it did not terminate after 100 iterations of the usual k-means algorithm.  I added more detailed output, which showed me that the total summed distance between the clusters and the data points was kind of oscillating.  K-means is supposed to make this value decrease monotonically, so I'm pretty sure I've done something wrong. >_<

At 5:30 Kabutoya-san invited me to watch his handiball game, in which his team absolutely destroyed the opposition.  They have pretty good team coordination, which gives them a very large edge (it helps that two of their players are tall, though "tall" is apparently about my height D:).

After volleyball I went back to my desk to work on my buggy K-means clustering.  I wanted to stay late and work on it, but Kabutoya-san literally stood at my desk and watched me pack up after telling me I should go home. O_O  He said that in university he would work for as long as it took as well, but in the office this is apparently (strongly) discouraged.  How odd...

Back at home I ate dorm supper, which was a ground-meat kind of korokke thing (I guess there's a good deal on ground meat or something...) and some fish, with some spinach with bonito and miso soup with enoki mushrooms and tofu skins.  I've noticed filmy particulate matter in the tea that comes out of the dispenser on multiple occasions now, so I think I may stop drinking it...  D:

I tried wandering around the building looking for internet, and the connection appears to be much, much better on the second floor!  I will have to see if it can hold a good connection in the lounge area there.  That may be very useful while I wait for my own to be set up.  I will have to test it by trying to watch the Dreamhack SCII finals. ;D  For science, of course.

I'd best be getting ready for bed now, so I'll hear from you all later.  Bye now!