Volleyball 0.2?

Jun 14: First Normal Day of Work

Today was my first "normal" day at work, since there were student presentations yesterday.  I got up fine in the morning, which I'm glad about considering how hilariously ineffectual my travel clock is against my heavy sleeping.  I got to work a little early and basically spent the day familiarizing myself with Ruby.  I find it quite funny that, for someone like myself who has spent most of their time coding in C, an "intuitive" language like Ruby is so, so far from that.  I always find it unnerving when keywords are operators, or when I'm supposed to mysteriously ignore all kinds of things that would be very, very important in C.  I often find myself wanting to use "low level" language features that are very much not present.  It's coming around a bit now though, and hopefully it will continue to do so.

At lunch today I tried to get curry, but I didn't see it in the area where the guy who I asked where it was pointed to, so I ended up with chicken.  Of course the curry shows up right when I'm picking up my tray to leave for the Kabutoya-san and Co. table grrr.  The chicken was good though, so I'm not complaining.  At lunch Kabutoya-san and Co. asked me a lot of questions again, including what I do in my free time.  At first I answered that I ski on weekends in the winter, but then I realized how hilariously obvious it is that that shouldn't take up all my time, and so I admitted to playing a lot of video games. >_<  I said I liked StarCraft, but none of them seemed to know what it was, until the oldest guy at the table (who's probably in his 30s or 40s) said "Oh I used to play that".  O_O  I was not expecting that at ALL.

After lunch we played "volleyball".  It's "volleyball" with quotation marks, because the ball is a bit more like a beach ball, and the net is super low.  The company treats it super legit though, and apparently there's a tournament that starts soon and runs until February, with an elimination bracket at the tail end and everything.  XD  It was actually pretty fun, since trying to get super fancy doesn't really pay off, since the ball kind of wafts hahaha.  Apparently tomorrow I am going to play tennis with them.  I'm not sure how they could change tennis like they did volleyball, but I'm prepared to be surprised haha.  If it's real tennis, I wonder if I can still hit the damn thing.

In the afternoon I gave my introduction presentation, which went pretty smoothly.  I had prepared decent slides, and the information wasn't technical (or very important, for that matter), so I was pretty relaxed.  The Ko-san (I think he's the project lead) asked me a bunch of questions about difficult topics like what am I going to focus on in the remainder of my degree.  Doesn't he know how difficult a question that is!?  I told him I would try to focus on what I had been focusing on so far (algorithm design and scientific computing), but said that UBC's degree program encourages breadth more than depth (it's true, as far as I've seen), so I don't have too much room to focus.  He also asked me about whether I might do grad school, and I said that one of my professors is a computational geometry researcher and offered to let me take some grad school classes, and I said I'd take some and see if I liked it.  I must have come off as very non-committal, which is probably a bad thing.  I don't want to get the nickname Konnyaku-san.  At the end Ko-san said that I'll be ready for grad school in machine learning by the end of my internship, and it might be true, since they appear to have grand plans for me.  O_O  I hope I can still exceed their expectations, when said expectations include submitting to conferences all over the place.  Speaking of conferences, one of the people on the project said he had just been to UBC last month for CHI, and so I told him I had a friend who went who's affiliated with a lab at UBC (I don't remember if Bear actually went to CHI or GRAND QQ).

After work I discovered that leaving slightly late is also not such a great idea, because I then waited for the bus for quite some time.  I took the right one this time, since I looked up and tried my best to memorize the kanji for 病院 (byouin = hospital).  It literally takes me 10 minutes to get to my dorm by bus, and so I was able to shower (I got totally drenched in sweat despite it being handi-ball) before eating supper.

The food Oohashi-san (the dorm mother) makes has been quite good so far!  Tonight it was chicken and vegetable yakisoba and some lightly battered tofu with some strange honey-textured-and-coloured-but-not-at-all-similar-in-taste sauce.  I'm glad that I get green vegetables with the dorm food, as that means I don't have to blow my paycheque on cucumbers. ;D

I went to Yokochuu after supper to buy an alarm clock (among other things), and of course almost forgot to buy it (while buying said other things).  I wasn't able to try it out in the store, but luckily it turns out the one I bought is relatively loud.  If it hadn't been, it was only about 2000円 anyways.

My other purchases included 6 more hankies, as the office does not have towels or a useful hand dryer, an umbrella, because they had a skookum-looking purple one for a decent price, another towel (since things take forever to dry here), a bucket for my toileties, some batteries for my alarm clock that comes with batteries (D:), 10 hangers, and some crayons.  Yep.  Crayons.  I had intended to buy pencil crayons, but they only had reaaaaaally shitty ones in like, 6 colours, and so I decided to take the risk on the larger set that looked like they were better quality.  They had a picture that looked an awful lot like crayons, but they claimed to be "COUPY-PENCIL".  I asked the lady at the till whether these were coloured pencils, but that didn't go over so well.  So I tried asking her if they were pencils, to which I thought she said yes, but without the wood, and then she said something else that I didn't understand.  I then tried asking if they were crayons, and she said something that sounded like they were a bit like a pencil and a bit like a crayon.  Sounds a bit like a pencil crayon...?  I decided to try my luck and bought them.  I mean, with all the talk we had about them being some Lovecraftian woodless boneless self-aware crayon-pencil construct, I figured that they couldn't be just straight up crayons.

...

THEY ARE TOTALLY JUST FUCKING CRAYONS!

Augh.  I hope my family can get excited about some, uh, "nostalgic" (circa kindergarten) birthday cards...  They're pretty hard to blend with too, although I think Prismacolours are just exceptionally easymode in that regard.

Back at home I caught up with fighting game news, since the net seemed good (Third Strike Online Edition AND Skullgirls updates!!!  Both of which looked AWESOME!), which put me behind on my blogging schedule.  Luckily, that means I'm now hungry enough to go down and eat my leftovers from the izakaya before the octopus gets too old.  :D  I hope they still taste anything like they originally did.

Oh, today I got invited to not one, but TWO drinking parties.  D:  On consecutive days: Tuesday and Wednesday next-next week.  D:  I have no idea what to expect.  Apparently the one on Tuesday is a goodbye party, and the one on Wednesday is...  Maybe in my honour?  The guys who invited me didn't have the best English (although one of them is wicked good at serving in handi-ball, and yes it is possible to be good at handi-ball), so it wasn't immediately clear if it will be "for me".  The one on Tuesday is project-wide, and the one on Wednesday is team-wide, or at least that's what they said.

Anyways, gotta go stuff my face with fatty food right before bed.  Ciao!