July 31: A Rather Typical Day
This morning I got up feeling rather nice, as I was able to sleep soundly until just before my alarm went off. You can't ask for better timing than waking up naturally right when you would do so anyways. >_< I think tomorrow I am going to try for a run, if I can will myself out of bed on time that is.
Today's dorm breakfast was chikuwa with cucumber along with some natto (and rice and miso soup). Sigh... I guess I finally have to admit that I actually like natto now... D: There's no denying it; I was happy when I saw it, and I now associate the smell with eating something I like, which means I don't mind it so much anymore. Hopefully the next time I get a whiff of actual stinky feet I will not get hungry. That would be more than a little disturbing. D:<
I got to work on time and wrote my first test program for my recently-completed recommender. Amazingly, once I got everything to stop segmentation-faulting (an error all CPSC students are intimately familiar with), it just kind of... worked. >_< I've only tested the recommender with 10 latent topics for faster feedback, but the prediction accuracy is kind of in line with what I'd expect... It's kind of wierd when stuff actually just works. I fiddled a bit more with the initial test program I wrote, then moved on to making the full-on test program that I'll use to generate results for a future presentation.
At lunch I ate Murugi curry, because the sobas and ramens didn't look very interesting today. Murugi curry is supposed to be Indian or something, but really it's just Japanese curry with some stringy chicken in it. >_> I talked pretty much all of lunch with Nishida-san about Evo haha. I'm quite happy to have another fighting game nerd in such close proximity! He was able to find match videos on NicoNico last night, which I don't have an account for, and I was only able to find ones on YouTube once I got home today. Nishida-san wasn't familiar with North American players prior to this Evo except for Justin Wong, but I've been telling him about some, and he's been watching videos. He's excited that some of the NA players play low-tier characters, as according to him, far too many of the top Japanese players just stick to Yun/Yang/Fei Long. He quite liked Juicebox Abel's stage antics, and I am excited to recommend the Alex Valle vs. Daigo Umehara match from the ro32 tomorrow, if he hasn't already found it by himself.
I played handiball again today, and I found a better way to serve I think. I found that I had to be really careful with my old way or I would crack my shoulder, but the new way seems to let me really smack the ball without fear of retribution from my joints. People again passed to me today, so I guess they really were just not listening to me when I said everything except for serving was fine. >_<
In the afternoon I worked more on my recommender and the associated test code, along with reading some more about the other recommender I'm going to implement in the near future. My next set of tests revealed another segmentation-fault-generating bug, which was at least simple to track down, if a bit drawn out. At the moment (and I will eat my words some day, possibly soon), I much prefer it when my programs fail spectacularly, because that generally means that tracking down the point of failure will be obvious, as opposed to them thinking they're doing fine, but ending up with like 0.1% recommendation accuracy. I guess that's what they taught us in class though, logical errors are much more obnoxious in practice than actual exceptions.
I left work at 6:15 due to another amazingly luckily-timed finishing of a part of my test program. I got to the point where I could start a batch of tests on one of the variables I want to look at in my model tonight, so I set it up and then left the office. I walked home again, and it was spitting rain now and again, but nothing too serious. It is already getting a little dark at 6:30-ish here, which is amazing. We don't have daylight savings, but I think it's probably still light out at 7:30 in Canada, isn't it? It must be, or it would be easier to get Mom to go for bio-luminescence swims up at the shack (I'm just joking Mom, you are a very good sport).
Dinner was curry-udon, which was alright. It was edible and filling, but I am finding that I prefer not to eat the foods I am very familiar with, because then I can see pick out things that are wrong with it haha. If I eat something totally new to me, then I can't compare it to rather less-student-budget-feasible versions I've had in the past (eg. sake and several pounds sukiyaki beef in the curry, etc etc). >_< Oh well, it was good enough and had lots of carrots and mushrooms and stuff in it. There were also some squash bricks on the side that were incredibly dry by themselves, but quite good when dipped in the curry-udon roux. :D
After dinner I scurried up to my room to check on Evo and MLG results, and found Evo ro32 and ro16 matches on YouTube, much to the misfortune of the rest of my evening. The other unfortunate thing about watching Evo matches is I really get the munchies, and end up eating a grapefruit and an entire bag of senbei in the space of 1.5 hours. >_< Unfortunately, I think every-day grapefruiting has to stop, as I noticed my teeth were MUCH more sensitive today, even before the grapefruit. If they continue to be a (literal) pain, then I guess I can go back to eating the grapefruit, but honestly I would rather have non-sensitive teeth. D:
Anyways, now it's time for bed so I can hopefully get up at an inhuman hour to run up hills and make myself want to be sick! Hurrah... >_<
Night!
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Back to work
July 30: Now With a Brand New Topic!
Ugh... Accidental terribad pun...
Anyways, this morning I got up early enough to get to work on time, surprisingly enough. >_< No more EVO streams for me! I ate dorm breakfast of ground beef and harusame in inari-bags with some kind of pork and vegetable mixture, and rice and miso soup. I went to work by bus, as running was completely out of the question on the amount of sleep I had had. >_<
At work I read papers for most of the morning. I got my next task from Kabutoya-san, and it seems oddly introductory at the moment, but we'll see if I retain that opinion after working on it more haha. I can see why I'm doing it though, as it kind of leads into what Iwata-san and Kabutoya-san discussed yesterday about my future direction. I was very glad to get a coding task, as reading papers is difficult at the best of times, and I was certainly not feeling my best this morning. >_<
At lunch I ate hiyashi-wakame-soba again. I quite like it as it's much milder than the majority of the rest of the cafeteria food. After lunch I played handiball, and I am happy to say that people actually pass to me again now that I am not gimped. >_< The numbness I used to get in my back near my shoulder blade has not made an appearance lately, so I think that I'm well and healed up again (for now). I would have liked to know what it was that caused the episode though...
In the afternoon I did mostly coding. The library code compiles at the present, but I haven't written the test program yet, which will not go as quickly as previously, as I cannot re-use my old test format (different things need to be tested). I am "looking forward" to spending all of tomorrow debugging. D:
I left work at 6:15, as that was when I removed the last of the compilation errors from my code. The next task would be to write the test, which was not a task to be done today. I walked home, and it had rained earlier in the day, so the forested part of the walk smelled WONDERFUL. :D It drizzled a little on the way to the dorm, but nothing serious. I stopped at the Yokosan to restock on senbei and buy a grapefruit. For some reason, I am kind of going nuts over grapefruit at the moment. I don't sweeten it (I have not sugar, no knife, no spoon and no bowls ahahaha), but it's somehow very very satisfying to eat one in front of my computer.
I ate dorm dinner of marinated fish and green onion and egg mixture. It is kind of wierd eating green onions like a vegetable. They have a really wierd texture when you bite into a big blob of them, which kind of makes my hair stand up. But hey, a green vegetable is a green vegetable, and I'm just happy I get any at all.
I retired to my room and checked for Evo VODs and MLG VODs, but neither were posted. D: I can't remember if MLG normally posts VODs or makes you pay, but in either case they weren't there. The Evo stream was also featuring a good player versus not-so-good players in the wee hours of the morning (pacific time), so that wasn't much worth watching, but somehow my evening disappeared anyways. D:
I'm going to go to bed now, so that I can hopefully catch up on sleep in preparation for running again. The typhoon induced temperature drop unfortunately seems to be in full retreat, as I am almost constantly sweating and have drunk 2L of water in the last 3 hours. Luckily it is cooling off a bit now, and is down to about 28C according to my clock.
Night!
Ugh... Accidental terribad pun...
Anyways, this morning I got up early enough to get to work on time, surprisingly enough. >_< No more EVO streams for me! I ate dorm breakfast of ground beef and harusame in inari-bags with some kind of pork and vegetable mixture, and rice and miso soup. I went to work by bus, as running was completely out of the question on the amount of sleep I had had. >_<
At work I read papers for most of the morning. I got my next task from Kabutoya-san, and it seems oddly introductory at the moment, but we'll see if I retain that opinion after working on it more haha. I can see why I'm doing it though, as it kind of leads into what Iwata-san and Kabutoya-san discussed yesterday about my future direction. I was very glad to get a coding task, as reading papers is difficult at the best of times, and I was certainly not feeling my best this morning. >_<
At lunch I ate hiyashi-wakame-soba again. I quite like it as it's much milder than the majority of the rest of the cafeteria food. After lunch I played handiball, and I am happy to say that people actually pass to me again now that I am not gimped. >_< The numbness I used to get in my back near my shoulder blade has not made an appearance lately, so I think that I'm well and healed up again (for now). I would have liked to know what it was that caused the episode though...
In the afternoon I did mostly coding. The library code compiles at the present, but I haven't written the test program yet, which will not go as quickly as previously, as I cannot re-use my old test format (different things need to be tested). I am "looking forward" to spending all of tomorrow debugging. D:
I left work at 6:15, as that was when I removed the last of the compilation errors from my code. The next task would be to write the test, which was not a task to be done today. I walked home, and it had rained earlier in the day, so the forested part of the walk smelled WONDERFUL. :D It drizzled a little on the way to the dorm, but nothing serious. I stopped at the Yokosan to restock on senbei and buy a grapefruit. For some reason, I am kind of going nuts over grapefruit at the moment. I don't sweeten it (I have not sugar, no knife, no spoon and no bowls ahahaha), but it's somehow very very satisfying to eat one in front of my computer.
I ate dorm dinner of marinated fish and green onion and egg mixture. It is kind of wierd eating green onions like a vegetable. They have a really wierd texture when you bite into a big blob of them, which kind of makes my hair stand up. But hey, a green vegetable is a green vegetable, and I'm just happy I get any at all.
I retired to my room and checked for Evo VODs and MLG VODs, but neither were posted. D: I can't remember if MLG normally posts VODs or makes you pay, but in either case they weren't there. The Evo stream was also featuring a good player versus not-so-good players in the wee hours of the morning (pacific time), so that wasn't much worth watching, but somehow my evening disappeared anyways. D:
I'm going to go to bed now, so that I can hopefully catch up on sleep in preparation for running again. The typhoon induced temperature drop unfortunately seems to be in full retreat, as I am almost constantly sweating and have drunk 2L of water in the last 3 hours. Luckily it is cooling off a bit now, and is down to about 28C according to my clock.
Night!
Friday, July 29, 2011
A ratio of 20:1 travel to "work" is not what most business trips aim for...
July 29: "Business Trip"
Whew! It's going to be hard to remember all the details of today; it's been a long one. >_<
I got up a little after 6:15, showered, packed my bag and left the dorm. I picked up katsu-don at the LAWSON STATION for breakfast, as I didn't want to spend the time to sit down and eat dorm breakfast, as going from Hayashi to Kyoto includes many, many places where things can go wrong and take extra time.
A bus came to the stop VERY quickly, as about a hundred million buses come between 6 and 8. I am a little skeptical of their scheduling, as the bus was nearly empty, and one was scheduled to come 7 minutes later... I will withhold final judgement until I see more empty morning buses, but at the moment I am thinking it would be nice to have some of those buses spaced throughout the day so that it's not 1/2 hours between arrivals. >_< Getting to Yokochuu was very quick, because no one wanted to ride! I actually skipped the first express that came, because I wanted to eat my breakfast, and I could see that another train was going to come in about 4 minutes.
I rode the express to Kamioooka (yes, that's 3 o's) and took the Yokohama subway blue line to Shin-Yokohama. In Shin-Yokohama I bought a non-reserved seat ticket for the Nozomi (super express Shinkansen) to Kyoto. I unfortunately did not check before boarding where the non-reserved cars were, so I had to wander the train for a while in a rather sketch-looking fashion, but I eventually did find the non-reserved cars, and even a window seat!
I am just going to take a moment to point out that the Shinkansen is mind-bogglingly fast. You cannot track the telephone poles beside the track coming into view, as they just kind of flash by in a dark blur and are too far gone. 300km/h is something that just has to be experienced; I can't really do it justice by describing it in text.
I was able to doze a little on the train, but I didn't want to fall completely asleep, as I had no desire to end up in Oosaka by accident. XD I ended up arriving in Kyoto at 11, about an hour ahead of schedule. Oh well, it's better to be early like that than late. I was able to scope out all the omiage (gift) stores inside the ticket-wickets while I waited for Kabutoya-san. They had some incredibly uninteresting ties for 13000+円, and some rather more reasonably priced edible things. I find it rather obvious what they expect people to actually buy. >_<
Kabutoya-san arrived at just before 12, and we ate lunch in the station. We both had curry-ramen, which is apparently not very common in Japan, according to Kabutoya-san. It wasn't very good, so perhaps that's why? D: We then departed by Kintetsu line for the NTT building in Keihanna. Unfortunately, Kabutoya-san is apparently not so familiar with going to Keihanna, as he completely missed the stop where we were supposed to transfer to a bus, and so we had to get off at the next (express) stop, and go back. >_< This meant that, after we ended up getting to the lab, the time we had to speak to Iwata-san (the person we came to see) was cut in half. After about half an hour, he had to make a presentation, at which point Kabutoya-san said that I should go home. >_<
There you have it! My first business trip consisted of roughly 10 hours of travel to and from combined, cost the company 24000円 in Shinkansen fare, and about 8000円 to me. Oh well, it was nice to be invited to go on the trip and it was a nice experience. I also saw a lot of nice scenery. >_<
I made my way home by myself, as Kabutoya-san stayed for the presentation. I got back to Kyoto station pretty much without event, where I bought some omiage to give to my labmates. I also ate dinner at the restaurant beside the omiage store, where I ate a respectably executed katsu-curry and an absolutely delicious iced green tea au lait. I was thinking about trying something more interesting than katsu-curry, but all their other options looked really, really small.
My Shinkansen ride back was very nice, and I was able to watch the landscape transition from evening into night, which was quite beautiful. I dozed some more, but made sure not to fall asleep, as this time I would have been in danger of ending up in Tokyo! (not such a bad fate haha)
I went back to Hayashi and bought a grapefruit to eat along with some senbei, as my dinner was actually at around 5:15. I then was *going* to go to bed at a reasonable time, but unfortunately for my health, the Evolution stream started, and now I am kind of stuck haha. I've actually got my screen split 50/50 between the stream and WordPad. >_< I am going to have to demonstrate incredible resolve to pull myself away, as even though the tournament has just started, the stream has already shown games by Kindevu (a top Japanese player), Floe (highly regarded American player), Sabin and others that I'm already beginning to forget. >_< Ugh! Must. Stop. Watching!!!
Anyways, I'm going to go brush my teeth now, and then I'll be off to bed, I swear.
Night!
Whew! It's going to be hard to remember all the details of today; it's been a long one. >_<
I got up a little after 6:15, showered, packed my bag and left the dorm. I picked up katsu-don at the LAWSON STATION for breakfast, as I didn't want to spend the time to sit down and eat dorm breakfast, as going from Hayashi to Kyoto includes many, many places where things can go wrong and take extra time.
A bus came to the stop VERY quickly, as about a hundred million buses come between 6 and 8. I am a little skeptical of their scheduling, as the bus was nearly empty, and one was scheduled to come 7 minutes later... I will withhold final judgement until I see more empty morning buses, but at the moment I am thinking it would be nice to have some of those buses spaced throughout the day so that it's not 1/2 hours between arrivals. >_< Getting to Yokochuu was very quick, because no one wanted to ride! I actually skipped the first express that came, because I wanted to eat my breakfast, and I could see that another train was going to come in about 4 minutes.
I rode the express to Kamioooka (yes, that's 3 o's) and took the Yokohama subway blue line to Shin-Yokohama. In Shin-Yokohama I bought a non-reserved seat ticket for the Nozomi (super express Shinkansen) to Kyoto. I unfortunately did not check before boarding where the non-reserved cars were, so I had to wander the train for a while in a rather sketch-looking fashion, but I eventually did find the non-reserved cars, and even a window seat!
I am just going to take a moment to point out that the Shinkansen is mind-bogglingly fast. You cannot track the telephone poles beside the track coming into view, as they just kind of flash by in a dark blur and are too far gone. 300km/h is something that just has to be experienced; I can't really do it justice by describing it in text.
I was able to doze a little on the train, but I didn't want to fall completely asleep, as I had no desire to end up in Oosaka by accident. XD I ended up arriving in Kyoto at 11, about an hour ahead of schedule. Oh well, it's better to be early like that than late. I was able to scope out all the omiage (gift) stores inside the ticket-wickets while I waited for Kabutoya-san. They had some incredibly uninteresting ties for 13000+円, and some rather more reasonably priced edible things. I find it rather obvious what they expect people to actually buy. >_<
Kabutoya-san arrived at just before 12, and we ate lunch in the station. We both had curry-ramen, which is apparently not very common in Japan, according to Kabutoya-san. It wasn't very good, so perhaps that's why? D: We then departed by Kintetsu line for the NTT building in Keihanna. Unfortunately, Kabutoya-san is apparently not so familiar with going to Keihanna, as he completely missed the stop where we were supposed to transfer to a bus, and so we had to get off at the next (express) stop, and go back. >_< This meant that, after we ended up getting to the lab, the time we had to speak to Iwata-san (the person we came to see) was cut in half. After about half an hour, he had to make a presentation, at which point Kabutoya-san said that I should go home. >_<
There you have it! My first business trip consisted of roughly 10 hours of travel to and from combined, cost the company 24000円 in Shinkansen fare, and about 8000円 to me. Oh well, it was nice to be invited to go on the trip and it was a nice experience. I also saw a lot of nice scenery. >_<
I made my way home by myself, as Kabutoya-san stayed for the presentation. I got back to Kyoto station pretty much without event, where I bought some omiage to give to my labmates. I also ate dinner at the restaurant beside the omiage store, where I ate a respectably executed katsu-curry and an absolutely delicious iced green tea au lait. I was thinking about trying something more interesting than katsu-curry, but all their other options looked really, really small.
My Shinkansen ride back was very nice, and I was able to watch the landscape transition from evening into night, which was quite beautiful. I dozed some more, but made sure not to fall asleep, as this time I would have been in danger of ending up in Tokyo! (not such a bad fate haha)
I went back to Hayashi and bought a grapefruit to eat along with some senbei, as my dinner was actually at around 5:15. I then was *going* to go to bed at a reasonable time, but unfortunately for my health, the Evolution stream started, and now I am kind of stuck haha. I've actually got my screen split 50/50 between the stream and WordPad. >_< I am going to have to demonstrate incredible resolve to pull myself away, as even though the tournament has just started, the stream has already shown games by Kindevu (a top Japanese player), Floe (highly regarded American player), Sabin and others that I'm already beginning to forget. >_< Ugh! Must. Stop. Watching!!!
Anyways, I'm going to go brush my teeth now, and then I'll be off to bed, I swear.
Night!
Thursday, July 28, 2011
This lazy day was brought to you by the incredible distance between Dasaiyashi and Akiba! D:
July 28: Sleeping In
This morning I slept in until about 12 again. Unfortunately this meant that after buying breakfast, eating and talking to Jiuna, it was almost 2:30, meaning that if I wanted to get back home at an early enough to go to bed at a reasonable time in preparation for my trip tomorrow, I would only get about 2 hours in Akiba, with showering, travel and dinner time all factored in. >_< Days in Akiba are my #1 discretionary expense, and a significant part of the cost is in the travel (about 2500円), so I decided that I would stay home today, to save that chunk of cash for next weekend or for my vacation with Jiuna. It was hard not to go, but I honestly didn't fully trust myself to actually leave after eating dinner there, so I decided it was important not to tempt myself. D:
Anyways, that means that today's blog will be rather dry. >_< I played StarCraft with Kevin and Vincent, watched GSL (StarCraft), and watched some SF4 VODs to get myself hyped up for Evolution 2011 (the largest and most prestigious fighting game tournament/event in North America), which starts TOMORROW! I will unfortunately not be able to watch much of it live (QQ), but they have always had VODs in the past (knock on wood).
I also talked a bit with Kusano-san, who told me that he had spent a lot of his weekend playing the SC2 demo. >_< He said he quite likes it, but it's very difficult and it ate up a lot of his time. I suggested that we play some after Jiuna and my vacation is done. I kind of hope he gets slightly addicted, as it would be great to have another StarCraft nut in the same timezone (although another of the NTT Yokosuka co-ops is apparently quite into StarCraft as well, if I haven't already mentioned it).
I am unfortunately going to be getting up around 6:30 tomorrow morning, so I will just leave you with this short post and get to bed. I came across a neat little thing on TL about falling asleep, and it appeared to work to a certain degree on me, so I will certainly be trying that tonight to try to combat my late rise. Wish me luck... >_<
Night!
This morning I slept in until about 12 again. Unfortunately this meant that after buying breakfast, eating and talking to Jiuna, it was almost 2:30, meaning that if I wanted to get back home at an early enough to go to bed at a reasonable time in preparation for my trip tomorrow, I would only get about 2 hours in Akiba, with showering, travel and dinner time all factored in. >_< Days in Akiba are my #1 discretionary expense, and a significant part of the cost is in the travel (about 2500円), so I decided that I would stay home today, to save that chunk of cash for next weekend or for my vacation with Jiuna. It was hard not to go, but I honestly didn't fully trust myself to actually leave after eating dinner there, so I decided it was important not to tempt myself. D:
Anyways, that means that today's blog will be rather dry. >_< I played StarCraft with Kevin and Vincent, watched GSL (StarCraft), and watched some SF4 VODs to get myself hyped up for Evolution 2011 (the largest and most prestigious fighting game tournament/event in North America), which starts TOMORROW! I will unfortunately not be able to watch much of it live (QQ), but they have always had VODs in the past (knock on wood).
I also talked a bit with Kusano-san, who told me that he had spent a lot of his weekend playing the SC2 demo. >_< He said he quite likes it, but it's very difficult and it ate up a lot of his time. I suggested that we play some after Jiuna and my vacation is done. I kind of hope he gets slightly addicted, as it would be great to have another StarCraft nut in the same timezone (although another of the NTT Yokosuka co-ops is apparently quite into StarCraft as well, if I haven't already mentioned it).
I am unfortunately going to be getting up around 6:30 tomorrow morning, so I will just leave you with this short post and get to bed. I came across a neat little thing on TL about falling asleep, and it appeared to work to a certain degree on me, so I will certainly be trying that tonight to try to combat my late rise. Wish me luck... >_<
Night!
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
OK this Groovin' Magic thing is definitely an addiction...
July 27: Lazy Day
This morning I got up a little before 12 and went to the Yokosan to buy bananas, carrots, milk, a grapefruit and korokke, as well as some ziploc bags, as I am running out. I think my hodge-podge breakfast/lunch is pretty well-designed, as it's not only filling, but also contains many of the things that I don't get here that I would normally eat in Canada (most importantly fruit and milk). I wish there was an alternative to korokke, but they are just so damn cheap. >_<
I ate my breakfast back in my room, which is where I stayed for pretty much the entire day haha. I chatted with Jiuna about bookings for our impending vacation, and played some StarCraft with and without Kevin. I also caught up on Day[9] Dailies (a StarCraft strategy show) that I had been meaning to watch, which burns time quite well, as they are about an hour long. I also tried using XP Mode to play Alpha Centauri, but to no avail. D: I am not quite done trying yet, but at the moment I didn't really feel much like going through all of those "edit that .bat and this .dat", etc etc that goes along with trying to make one of the best games ever made run on anything resembling a modern machine. D: Seriously, Sid Meier, if you re-released Alpha Centauri for Windows 7, without even changing the graphics, I would buy a copy and another for everyone I know. Apparently that's not going to happen, because it was co-directed by Brian Reynolds, who is no longer with Firaxis. D:
For dinner I was pondering whether or not to eat at Irori-ya; a question that was answered by it not being open again. I know I have seen it open on Wednesday before! I guess it must just close really, really early today or something. I checked at 7:15, and the time I saw it open was at about 5, so next weekend I will PLAN! I got katsu-don from LAWSON STATION, as well as an ice cream sandwich dealie that was inhumanly proportioned. I enjoyed my katsu don, but the ice cream sandwich had me feeling a bit ill by the time I got through the whole thing. O_O I feel fine now though, so no long-term effects, thank goodness. I'm alright with the fact that I had to have convenience-store dinner today, because that means I've got more money to spend in Akiba tomorrow. ;D
For the rest of the day I just played games and prepped for Akiba (making vocab sheets, washing and filling water bottles, etc), as well as doing some laundry that I mentioned in my last post.
If I remember to do so, I think I will try checking out Kinugasa next Wednesday. It seems like a happening place (relative to Hayashi ahaha), and there are apparently some castle ruins or something.
Tomorrow is Akiba, so hopefully that will yield a slightly more interesting post haha. Night!
This morning I got up a little before 12 and went to the Yokosan to buy bananas, carrots, milk, a grapefruit and korokke, as well as some ziploc bags, as I am running out. I think my hodge-podge breakfast/lunch is pretty well-designed, as it's not only filling, but also contains many of the things that I don't get here that I would normally eat in Canada (most importantly fruit and milk). I wish there was an alternative to korokke, but they are just so damn cheap. >_<
I ate my breakfast back in my room, which is where I stayed for pretty much the entire day haha. I chatted with Jiuna about bookings for our impending vacation, and played some StarCraft with and without Kevin. I also caught up on Day[9] Dailies (a StarCraft strategy show) that I had been meaning to watch, which burns time quite well, as they are about an hour long. I also tried using XP Mode to play Alpha Centauri, but to no avail. D: I am not quite done trying yet, but at the moment I didn't really feel much like going through all of those "edit that .bat and this .dat", etc etc that goes along with trying to make one of the best games ever made run on anything resembling a modern machine. D: Seriously, Sid Meier, if you re-released Alpha Centauri for Windows 7, without even changing the graphics, I would buy a copy and another for everyone I know. Apparently that's not going to happen, because it was co-directed by Brian Reynolds, who is no longer with Firaxis. D:
For dinner I was pondering whether or not to eat at Irori-ya; a question that was answered by it not being open again. I know I have seen it open on Wednesday before! I guess it must just close really, really early today or something. I checked at 7:15, and the time I saw it open was at about 5, so next weekend I will PLAN! I got katsu-don from LAWSON STATION, as well as an ice cream sandwich dealie that was inhumanly proportioned. I enjoyed my katsu don, but the ice cream sandwich had me feeling a bit ill by the time I got through the whole thing. O_O I feel fine now though, so no long-term effects, thank goodness. I'm alright with the fact that I had to have convenience-store dinner today, because that means I've got more money to spend in Akiba tomorrow. ;D
For the rest of the day I just played games and prepped for Akiba (making vocab sheets, washing and filling water bottles, etc), as well as doing some laundry that I mentioned in my last post.
If I remember to do so, I think I will try checking out Kinugasa next Wednesday. It seems like a happening place (relative to Hayashi ahaha), and there are apparently some castle ruins or something.
Tomorrow is Akiba, so hopefully that will yield a slightly more interesting post haha. Night!
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
D:
July 26: Finally
The "finally" that is the title of this post actually refers to two things. The first is that I actually finally ran to work this morning. It was absolutely horrid, because I didn't get to sleep when I wanted to last night, and thus I not only slept in a little and thus didn't have hte 40 minutes I wanted to leave to digest, but I was very sleepy as well. I was quite tired of myself making excuses for not doing it though, so I just went and did it and made it to the office in like, 26 minutes, with copious amounts of walking and feeling rather queasy distributed throughout. As it turns out, a full stomach of salted fish and miso soup is not a good thing to have when going for a 20 minute uphill jog. D: Oh well, once I got there and used the shower in the basement locker room, I felt rather wonderful, actually, and I was very alert for almost the whole day.
The second is that I finally gave my damn presentation! It was kind of torturous... for all parties involved. >_< I had 60 slides, pretty much entirely composed of math, and that meant my presentation clocked in at just over ONE AND A HALF HOURS. D: People were trying so hard not to fall asleep, and I was trying equally hard to provide useful insight into rather hectic ratios of gamma functions as quickly as possible, while speaking slowly to make myself understandable for my audience of non-native English speakers. I felt horrible (not in an ill way, in a "I am really not making their day" kind of way) just about the whole time. D: I mean, isn't it everyone's nightmare, watching someone run over pre-prepared slides literally containing 8 different products-over-gamma-functions per line about a probabilistic model you aren't familiar with in a foreign language for 1.5 hours? What? You HAVEN'T had that one? Fine then...
Despite all that I just said, I do feel that my presentation, as unpalatable as it turned out to be, fulfilled its purpose. There is now a set of slides that are basically THIS IS HOW YOU DO LDA WITH CGS EZPZ 1 2 3 on the lab's fileserver. Nakatsuji-san thanked me for the presentation, and said that he is interested in having the slides to work from, and Kabutoya-san said that he was pleased with how I answered the questions that were posed, but I am not entirely sure if they were serious or if I wasn't hiding my "I just ran over a puppy" face very well. In the interest of not exhibiting symptoms characteristic of paranoia, I will be taking their comments at face value, but I have a suspicion that they are just being infinitely gracious. >_< Oh well, it is what it is, and I did my job (decently well, I think...), but unfortunately the material was ill-conditioned to being engaging, and the requirements laid out for my presentation necessitated the length and detail. Sigh...
Whew. With the frivolous parts of the day out of the way, I can move on to the important stuff! ;D Dorm breakfast today was salted salmon and a bean sprout mixture (dangerous! D:) with miso soup and rice. After eating I got my backpack ready and changed into running gear before setting out. Calling my "run" to work is kind of an inappropriate usage of the term, as it was like, 30% walking to prevent a spontaneous revistation of breakfast. >_< The rest of the time I was not going too much faster, because running uphill is not a skill I have great proficiency in yet. Oh well, the point is that I did it, and if I exhibit slightly more self-control than I normally do, it will become part of my routine. ;D
The morning was devoted to making sure I was ready for my presentation, as well as some review of Variational Bayes, which was apparently a tangent that is going to be dropped now, as it was only to occupy me until the Kyoto trip, when I will get an honest-to-gosh research topic.
At lunch I ate tsuke-men and talked about Canada with Nakatsuji-san and Fujimura-san. I am glad that I payed attention in Social Studies, as I was able to tell them about the Winnipeg General Strike, the fur trade, the colonization of Canada, the fact that the Canadian Shield comprises some of the oldest rock in the world, the history of Steveston as a fishing village, the internment of Japanese-Canadians during WWII, and the reparation payments made to them in the 80's. >_< I'm glad that my coworkers seem to be interested in Canadian history (even the ugly bits), and that I'm prepared to answer haha. I also got a bunch of people mentioning the University of Toronto today for some odd reason, and so I wiki'ed it when I got home. I guess that it's a valid topic of conversation, as it was the birthplace of things ranging from stem cell research to the notion of NP-completeness. O_O No idea why it was such a popular topic today though...
After eating I played handiball, and I was actually able to serve overhead again for the first time. If I get sloppy on the follow-through, my shoulder definitely lets me know, but if I do it properly, it's totally comfortable. I'm glad that's over, because it means I actually got to touch the goddamn ball today! D:< I am going to have to work on shoulder-flexibility somehow.
The early afternoon was occupied by my presentation, which I've already detailed. After that Kabutoya-san came to sit at my desk while we went over his upcoming research paper. It's written in English, so my purpose was to make sure that the sentences sounded natural and had unambiguous meaning. It was actually quite fun, haha. It helped that I can now understand his research, and that it's kinda neat. Anything involving an algorithm called "the Chinese Restaurant Process" loses points for Orientalism (oh god what have I become!?), but wins major one for extreme deliciousness. When I get back to Canada, I absolutely must must must eat Chinese food again. As I am writing this, I am thinking about crispy-noodle seafood chow mein and I am just about ready to make animal sacrifices to get my hands on some.
Tuesday is "refresh day", so I left the office at 6:05. I walked home, and I am very happy that I did, because there were falcons or something wheeling and ducking and twirling around in the parking lot of a glasses store by the road. It's amazing how graceful and beautiful birds of prey are up close. If I tried to describe it, it would border dangerously on the dread realm of fanfic, so I will just ask you to trust me that it was really damn cool. I didn't see what they were up to, but it had to be something out the ordinary, because I do not recall falcons being common parking lot dwellers. ;D
Back at the dorm I ate dorm supper of Japanese mapo-tofu and some kind of chilli beef, with miso soup and rice. It was all pretty good, and very not-fish flavoured, which was nice to have after my lovely jogging experience this morning. At dinner I ran into Yasuhiro-san (that's Yao the Dominion guy), who said that he was having trouble finding people to play Dominion with, as the other dorm residents work more typical Japanese (read: insane) hours. I told him that 2 people works too, and so we played dominion for like 2 hours after he was done eating. After that I browsed TL forever, and then wrote up this blog when Kevin politely brought my attention to the (rather appaling) time. Damn you TL and your quality content... >_<
Anyways, I think tomorrow will be a stay-at-home day, where I'll do a sheets wash, a towel wash, a slacks wash, a shirts wash and a bit of vacuuming. I sure know how to have fun, eh? Oh well, Thursday will be an Akiba day, although I will have to cut it short, as I will need to get up at like, 6:30 on Friday.
PS: I believe listening to Groovin' Magic on repeat for several days may qualify as a disorder... Whoever invented sugary/funky/discofabulous pop should give me my damn life back! D:<
The "finally" that is the title of this post actually refers to two things. The first is that I actually finally ran to work this morning. It was absolutely horrid, because I didn't get to sleep when I wanted to last night, and thus I not only slept in a little and thus didn't have hte 40 minutes I wanted to leave to digest, but I was very sleepy as well. I was quite tired of myself making excuses for not doing it though, so I just went and did it and made it to the office in like, 26 minutes, with copious amounts of walking and feeling rather queasy distributed throughout. As it turns out, a full stomach of salted fish and miso soup is not a good thing to have when going for a 20 minute uphill jog. D: Oh well, once I got there and used the shower in the basement locker room, I felt rather wonderful, actually, and I was very alert for almost the whole day.
The second is that I finally gave my damn presentation! It was kind of torturous... for all parties involved. >_< I had 60 slides, pretty much entirely composed of math, and that meant my presentation clocked in at just over ONE AND A HALF HOURS. D: People were trying so hard not to fall asleep, and I was trying equally hard to provide useful insight into rather hectic ratios of gamma functions as quickly as possible, while speaking slowly to make myself understandable for my audience of non-native English speakers. I felt horrible (not in an ill way, in a "I am really not making their day" kind of way) just about the whole time. D: I mean, isn't it everyone's nightmare, watching someone run over pre-prepared slides literally containing 8 different products-over-gamma-functions per line about a probabilistic model you aren't familiar with in a foreign language for 1.5 hours? What? You HAVEN'T had that one? Fine then...
Despite all that I just said, I do feel that my presentation, as unpalatable as it turned out to be, fulfilled its purpose. There is now a set of slides that are basically THIS IS HOW YOU DO LDA WITH CGS EZPZ 1 2 3 on the lab's fileserver. Nakatsuji-san thanked me for the presentation, and said that he is interested in having the slides to work from, and Kabutoya-san said that he was pleased with how I answered the questions that were posed, but I am not entirely sure if they were serious or if I wasn't hiding my "I just ran over a puppy" face very well. In the interest of not exhibiting symptoms characteristic of paranoia, I will be taking their comments at face value, but I have a suspicion that they are just being infinitely gracious. >_< Oh well, it is what it is, and I did my job (decently well, I think...), but unfortunately the material was ill-conditioned to being engaging, and the requirements laid out for my presentation necessitated the length and detail. Sigh...
Whew. With the frivolous parts of the day out of the way, I can move on to the important stuff! ;D Dorm breakfast today was salted salmon and a bean sprout mixture (dangerous! D:) with miso soup and rice. After eating I got my backpack ready and changed into running gear before setting out. Calling my "run" to work is kind of an inappropriate usage of the term, as it was like, 30% walking to prevent a spontaneous revistation of breakfast. >_< The rest of the time I was not going too much faster, because running uphill is not a skill I have great proficiency in yet. Oh well, the point is that I did it, and if I exhibit slightly more self-control than I normally do, it will become part of my routine. ;D
The morning was devoted to making sure I was ready for my presentation, as well as some review of Variational Bayes, which was apparently a tangent that is going to be dropped now, as it was only to occupy me until the Kyoto trip, when I will get an honest-to-gosh research topic.
At lunch I ate tsuke-men and talked about Canada with Nakatsuji-san and Fujimura-san. I am glad that I payed attention in Social Studies, as I was able to tell them about the Winnipeg General Strike, the fur trade, the colonization of Canada, the fact that the Canadian Shield comprises some of the oldest rock in the world, the history of Steveston as a fishing village, the internment of Japanese-Canadians during WWII, and the reparation payments made to them in the 80's. >_< I'm glad that my coworkers seem to be interested in Canadian history (even the ugly bits), and that I'm prepared to answer haha. I also got a bunch of people mentioning the University of Toronto today for some odd reason, and so I wiki'ed it when I got home. I guess that it's a valid topic of conversation, as it was the birthplace of things ranging from stem cell research to the notion of NP-completeness. O_O No idea why it was such a popular topic today though...
After eating I played handiball, and I was actually able to serve overhead again for the first time. If I get sloppy on the follow-through, my shoulder definitely lets me know, but if I do it properly, it's totally comfortable. I'm glad that's over, because it means I actually got to touch the goddamn ball today! D:< I am going to have to work on shoulder-flexibility somehow.
The early afternoon was occupied by my presentation, which I've already detailed. After that Kabutoya-san came to sit at my desk while we went over his upcoming research paper. It's written in English, so my purpose was to make sure that the sentences sounded natural and had unambiguous meaning. It was actually quite fun, haha. It helped that I can now understand his research, and that it's kinda neat. Anything involving an algorithm called "the Chinese Restaurant Process" loses points for Orientalism (oh god what have I become!?), but wins major one for extreme deliciousness. When I get back to Canada, I absolutely must must must eat Chinese food again. As I am writing this, I am thinking about crispy-noodle seafood chow mein and I am just about ready to make animal sacrifices to get my hands on some.
Tuesday is "refresh day", so I left the office at 6:05. I walked home, and I am very happy that I did, because there were falcons or something wheeling and ducking and twirling around in the parking lot of a glasses store by the road. It's amazing how graceful and beautiful birds of prey are up close. If I tried to describe it, it would border dangerously on the dread realm of fanfic, so I will just ask you to trust me that it was really damn cool. I didn't see what they were up to, but it had to be something out the ordinary, because I do not recall falcons being common parking lot dwellers. ;D
Back at the dorm I ate dorm supper of Japanese mapo-tofu and some kind of chilli beef, with miso soup and rice. It was all pretty good, and very not-fish flavoured, which was nice to have after my lovely jogging experience this morning. At dinner I ran into Yasuhiro-san (that's Yao the Dominion guy), who said that he was having trouble finding people to play Dominion with, as the other dorm residents work more typical Japanese (read: insane) hours. I told him that 2 people works too, and so we played dominion for like 2 hours after he was done eating. After that I browsed TL forever, and then wrote up this blog when Kevin politely brought my attention to the (rather appaling) time. Damn you TL and your quality content... >_<
Anyways, I think tomorrow will be a stay-at-home day, where I'll do a sheets wash, a towel wash, a slacks wash, a shirts wash and a bit of vacuuming. I sure know how to have fun, eh? Oh well, Thursday will be an Akiba day, although I will have to cut it short, as I will need to get up at like, 6:30 on Friday.
PS: I believe listening to Groovin' Magic on repeat for several days may qualify as a disorder... Whoever invented sugary/funky/discofabulous pop should give me my damn life back! D:<
Monday, July 25, 2011
59 slides later...
July 25: Presentation Tomorrow
This morning I got up and ate dorm breakfast of natto with okra, gobo (burdock root), and miso soup and rice. I am getting to quite like natto mornings, not because I actually like the flavour (although it's totally fine for me now), but because those little beans apparently pack an appalling amount of energy. When it's natto for breakfast, I'm never very hungry by lunch, which is kind of a wierd experience. O_O At the SAME STOP as the LIVE FOR SPEED lady, a guy got on with a shirt that said "SCOTLAND: They speak of my drinking, but never of my thirst." It had fleur-de-lis all over it. >_< I am going to have to keep my eyes open whenever people get on at Takegawa, as it has spawned some rather entertaining moments...
I got to work and spent all day just doing stuff with my presentation and trying to learn Variational Inference. It's kind of hard to go into more detail, because all I did was read formulae from a textbook and tinker with graphs in my slides pretty much all day. I honestly have no idea how the day passed so quickly doing that, but pass it did. At lunch I ate tan-tan-men again, which is somewhat akin to Aka-Oni Ramen, but not as good (as it's made by the company cafeteria). At least I know what to look for when I eat ramen somewhere that might do it well! At lunch my coworkers were asking me all kinds of details about my upcoming trip to Kyoto, but I knew absolutely nothing, because Kabutoya-san did not give me any info until later in the day. >_< I didn't even know how long I was going for, or really what I would be doing there, aside from something to do with "the topic of my research". Oh well, they didn't seem to mind haha.
I played handiball, and my shoulder feels juuuust about better. I hope I can start doing overhead serves again, so people will actually pass to me again! I decided to stop "casually mentioning" that nothing hurt except for serving, since it clearly wasn't doing much good. D:<
In the afternoon I found out not that much more about the Kyoto trip, other than that the Shinkansen fare is covered by the company, it will be on Friday, I will not be staying overnight, and there is a researcher named with the last name Iwata that works with Kabutoya-san there that we will speak with, which is the reason for our trip. I am also apparently going to proofread Kabutoya-san's new paper, as it's in English, and Kabutoya-san doesn't like using the company's professional technical writer, as apparently you just give him your paper and he gives you something back later, with almost zero communication in between. D: Sounds dangerous...
I am kind of glad that I am wishing every day that I didn't effectively skip my entire Multivariable Calculus and Introduction to Probability and Statistics courses. Cramming and getting ugly, ugly B-'s that are 20% below my average was unfortunately not really enough to teach me to stop, but I feel like this sort of constant regret that I didn't really learn the material, and thus am struggling with it at work right now (not that anyone seems to be complaining >_<), is something I will be able to draw on to discourage myself from skipping in the future. D: Oh well, lesson learned, hopefully.
After work I walked home, and once again mourned my inability to bring a proper camera, as the forest in the valley beside the office was once again misty and gorgeous in the sunset. D: I walked by some literal cottage-industry, as I noticed in the window of a small room detached from the larger house on a property I walked by, that a man was inside sitting on a tatami floor and making what appeared to be furniture with hand tools. Whoa. O_O That must cost a fortune, either that or it's for him and he's just saving money (though definitely not any time).
I ate dinner at the dorm, consisting of cold soba in a ramen bowl with boiled chicken and seaweed, along with some gyoza and rice (no miso soup, yo-dawg avoided). I actually went out and got a frozen dessert the other day, which comes with a rather... underwhelming story that I am nonetheless going to share with you. Basically I was in LAWSON STATION to pick up katsu-don on the "weekend", and I saw the chest of frozen desserts, and was like "OH YES MUST EAT RIGHT NOW!!!". I was perusing the selection, and saw a bar labelled "Vanilla", to which, and it still evades me how I could possibly have this bad of a brain fart, I thought "Oh man! A VANILLA bar? I wonder what that tastes like!"
...
It tastes like VANILLA ICE CREAM, RJ! THAT IS WHAT VANILLA ICE CREAM BARS TASTE LIKE! Somehow I completely missed the fact that vanilla is like, you know, THE standard flavour of ice cream, and that I do indeed know what it tastes like. I got home and put it in my ice bucket and was like "... did I just get excited and curious about a bar entirely composed of vanilla ice cream and purchase it?" Yes. Yes I did. Oh well it tasted pretty good (it's ice cream, derp). ;D The next day I tried a frozen Calpis dessert that I thought was going to be a frozen yogurt Calpis bar, but turned out to be just frozen Calpis in a plastic bottle/tube. >_< Steeerike two!
I was GOING to watch GSL semi-finals after dinner, but both of the losers got their teeth kicked in 3-0, and so I actually only caught the last game. D: Oh well, I was able to do more productive things with my time, like browse TL. >_< I actually remembered to blog early today, so I may actually get to bed early tonight (famous last words). In either case, that's all I've got left to write, so I will depart for now.
This morning I got up and ate dorm breakfast of natto with okra, gobo (burdock root), and miso soup and rice. I am getting to quite like natto mornings, not because I actually like the flavour (although it's totally fine for me now), but because those little beans apparently pack an appalling amount of energy. When it's natto for breakfast, I'm never very hungry by lunch, which is kind of a wierd experience. O_O At the SAME STOP as the LIVE FOR SPEED lady, a guy got on with a shirt that said "SCOTLAND: They speak of my drinking, but never of my thirst." It had fleur-de-lis all over it. >_< I am going to have to keep my eyes open whenever people get on at Takegawa, as it has spawned some rather entertaining moments...
I got to work and spent all day just doing stuff with my presentation and trying to learn Variational Inference. It's kind of hard to go into more detail, because all I did was read formulae from a textbook and tinker with graphs in my slides pretty much all day. I honestly have no idea how the day passed so quickly doing that, but pass it did. At lunch I ate tan-tan-men again, which is somewhat akin to Aka-Oni Ramen, but not as good (as it's made by the company cafeteria). At least I know what to look for when I eat ramen somewhere that might do it well! At lunch my coworkers were asking me all kinds of details about my upcoming trip to Kyoto, but I knew absolutely nothing, because Kabutoya-san did not give me any info until later in the day. >_< I didn't even know how long I was going for, or really what I would be doing there, aside from something to do with "the topic of my research". Oh well, they didn't seem to mind haha.
I played handiball, and my shoulder feels juuuust about better. I hope I can start doing overhead serves again, so people will actually pass to me again! I decided to stop "casually mentioning" that nothing hurt except for serving, since it clearly wasn't doing much good. D:<
In the afternoon I found out not that much more about the Kyoto trip, other than that the Shinkansen fare is covered by the company, it will be on Friday, I will not be staying overnight, and there is a researcher named with the last name Iwata that works with Kabutoya-san there that we will speak with, which is the reason for our trip. I am also apparently going to proofread Kabutoya-san's new paper, as it's in English, and Kabutoya-san doesn't like using the company's professional technical writer, as apparently you just give him your paper and he gives you something back later, with almost zero communication in between. D: Sounds dangerous...
I am kind of glad that I am wishing every day that I didn't effectively skip my entire Multivariable Calculus and Introduction to Probability and Statistics courses. Cramming and getting ugly, ugly B-'s that are 20% below my average was unfortunately not really enough to teach me to stop, but I feel like this sort of constant regret that I didn't really learn the material, and thus am struggling with it at work right now (not that anyone seems to be complaining >_<), is something I will be able to draw on to discourage myself from skipping in the future. D: Oh well, lesson learned, hopefully.
After work I walked home, and once again mourned my inability to bring a proper camera, as the forest in the valley beside the office was once again misty and gorgeous in the sunset. D: I walked by some literal cottage-industry, as I noticed in the window of a small room detached from the larger house on a property I walked by, that a man was inside sitting on a tatami floor and making what appeared to be furniture with hand tools. Whoa. O_O That must cost a fortune, either that or it's for him and he's just saving money (though definitely not any time).
I ate dinner at the dorm, consisting of cold soba in a ramen bowl with boiled chicken and seaweed, along with some gyoza and rice (no miso soup, yo-dawg avoided). I actually went out and got a frozen dessert the other day, which comes with a rather... underwhelming story that I am nonetheless going to share with you. Basically I was in LAWSON STATION to pick up katsu-don on the "weekend", and I saw the chest of frozen desserts, and was like "OH YES MUST EAT RIGHT NOW!!!". I was perusing the selection, and saw a bar labelled "Vanilla", to which, and it still evades me how I could possibly have this bad of a brain fart, I thought "Oh man! A VANILLA bar? I wonder what that tastes like!"
...
It tastes like VANILLA ICE CREAM, RJ! THAT IS WHAT VANILLA ICE CREAM BARS TASTE LIKE! Somehow I completely missed the fact that vanilla is like, you know, THE standard flavour of ice cream, and that I do indeed know what it tastes like. I got home and put it in my ice bucket and was like "... did I just get excited and curious about a bar entirely composed of vanilla ice cream and purchase it?" Yes. Yes I did. Oh well it tasted pretty good (it's ice cream, derp). ;D The next day I tried a frozen Calpis dessert that I thought was going to be a frozen yogurt Calpis bar, but turned out to be just frozen Calpis in a plastic bottle/tube. >_< Steeerike two!
I was GOING to watch GSL semi-finals after dinner, but both of the losers got their teeth kicked in 3-0, and so I actually only caught the last game. D: Oh well, I was able to do more productive things with my time, like browse TL. >_< I actually remembered to blog early today, so I may actually get to bed early tonight (famous last words). In either case, that's all I've got left to write, so I will depart for now.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Just a half-hour of using a text editor that does NOT lag on an i7 with 16GB of RAM was enough to make my day...
July 24: A Presentation Approaches!
This morning I got up and had dorm breakfast of stewed lotus root and konnyaku and a ground beef omlette (with rice and miso soup). I got out of the dorm on time and caught my usual bus. This time, however, on the ride to work I saw some rather spectacular English on an it-would-be-generous-to-call-her-middle-aged lady. It was blue, with a circle of darker blue stars, with the top of the circle replaced by letters saying "LIVE FOR SPEED", and then, also in dark blue, cursive print swooping across the lower right of circle asking the rather appropriate question "Why the hell?". Not "Engrish" per se, as everything was pretty much correctly formed, but it was just so... random and, like I said, was being worn by a lady who was probably 70+. "Why the hell?" indeed. O_O I see a lot of "English" on clothing here, so I'm getting kinda blind to it, but this was just too spectacular, and I almost guffawed out loud on the bus.
At work I talked to Kabutoya-san about my presentation, and he had a bunch of suggestions that were relatively minor changes, but did make quite a bit of sense. My presentation is easily separable into 3 parts, the first two of which are very, very similar, so Kabutoya-san gave me feedback on the first part so I would have something to do while he looked over the second two parts. When he came back with feedback on the second and third parts, we came to the lovely discovery (two days before my presentation) that he had never actually communicated to me that I was supposed to benchmark LDA as well as my multinomial mixture. D: Yikes! Oh well, the LDA code was his anyways, so all I had to do was write a Ruby test suite, which took me less than half an hour, as I made a decent test for my multinomial mixture that has easily modifiable code and I just worked from that. I just hope that the results of my LDA (which runs slower than my mixture model due to increased model complexity) test will be ready to put in my presentation by the time I have to give it haha. >_<
At lunch I ate hiyashi-chuuka, which was lovely. I'm still a bit wierded out by the sweetness of the sauce, which is something we definitely do not subscribe to at home. Oddly, people seem to put wasabi in the hiyashi-wakame-soba, but it looks like they put MUSTARD in hiyashi-chuuka! This is most heretical, and I am going to have to stage a surgical strike operation against the mustard supply to the office. ;D
I played handiball at lunch, and my shoulder felt like it was juuuust about ready to get better, so I really didn't strain it at all. Hopefully I can get back to normal play, as my teammates don't seem to understand that ONLY serving seems to be a problem, and have stopped passing to me as much. Either that or they just mysteriously hate me now... D:
After lunch was more presentation stuff. I'm kind of glad that this presentation is wrapping up, because I'm sounding a bit like a broken record in the blog these days. >_< I actually have mostly wrapped up the changes Kabutoya-san asked for, and will submit my slides to him again tomorrow morning. In the meantime he's asked me to try to understand the Variational Inference method detailed in the actual LDA paper (we used Collapsed Gibbs Sampling as an alternative to this). Apparently Kabutoya-san is not familiar with this Variational Inference business, so if I can grasp it, I think that will be a big win for everyone. The trouble is that with this kind of stuff, it's always a question of "how deep?". I mean, the update equations are right there on the page, so actually using it would probably be quite easy as they've laid it out. I also think I understand the process of how to derive said equations as is detailed in the paper, but to actually do it is faaar beyond my ability at the moment. It appears to require calculating conditional expectations, using Jensen's inequality (an old nemesis haha) and using the Kullback-Leibler divergence, all of which are beyond my reach at present. I will certainly try though, because actually doing something honestly useful is sounding very attractive after a month and a half of work haha.
Kabutoya-san actually left before me today, which I guess explains a bit about my humourously easy hours, as the only people who are there when I arrive and leave consistently are the team lead, the deputy team lead and Kawanaka-san, who sits next to me, and is surely given extra hours as punishment for using spray-on deodorant! D:< I actually don't mind too much, as it's mild and does not resemble Axe in the slightest, but after 3 years of high school PE, I have a very, very strong prejudice against spray-on deodorants. Kawanaka-san's product does win brownie points for having the rather humourous name of "BODY SPLASH BY SEXY BOY". >_< Sounds illegal in most countries to me...
As a result of finishing my slides off and Kabutoya-san not being there, I left work "early", at about 6:10. I find that I'm getting better and being operational while hungry, but reading papers while hungry when I'm not even technically supposed to be there still is not something I yet choose to indulge in. My walk home was pleasant, although I am quite sad that I do not have "Groovin' Magic" available to put on my music player, though I suppose I *could* fix that.
At the dorm I ate dinner of stewed squid and daikon with a ground beef korokke (which was actually mostly onion haha). Oh, and how could I forget the miso soup and rice!? After dinner I just kinda flaked, although I managed to forget to write my blog, and just as I was about to get ready for bed at the highly respectable time of 10:30, I remembered, and now here I am up at 12! I did actually brush and floss my teeth and catch up on a couple of Gunnerkrigg Court posts as well though, so I've only actually spent about an hour on the blog, which is pretty normal.
Anyways, I am enjoying my life on 8 hours of sleep a night (as opposed to less, of course. Derp.), so I am going to leave you with that, and bid you good night.
Night!
This morning I got up and had dorm breakfast of stewed lotus root and konnyaku and a ground beef omlette (with rice and miso soup). I got out of the dorm on time and caught my usual bus. This time, however, on the ride to work I saw some rather spectacular English on an it-would-be-generous-to-call-her-middle-aged lady. It was blue, with a circle of darker blue stars, with the top of the circle replaced by letters saying "LIVE FOR SPEED", and then, also in dark blue, cursive print swooping across the lower right of circle asking the rather appropriate question "Why the hell?". Not "Engrish" per se, as everything was pretty much correctly formed, but it was just so... random and, like I said, was being worn by a lady who was probably 70+. "Why the hell?" indeed. O_O I see a lot of "English" on clothing here, so I'm getting kinda blind to it, but this was just too spectacular, and I almost guffawed out loud on the bus.
At work I talked to Kabutoya-san about my presentation, and he had a bunch of suggestions that were relatively minor changes, but did make quite a bit of sense. My presentation is easily separable into 3 parts, the first two of which are very, very similar, so Kabutoya-san gave me feedback on the first part so I would have something to do while he looked over the second two parts. When he came back with feedback on the second and third parts, we came to the lovely discovery (two days before my presentation) that he had never actually communicated to me that I was supposed to benchmark LDA as well as my multinomial mixture. D: Yikes! Oh well, the LDA code was his anyways, so all I had to do was write a Ruby test suite, which took me less than half an hour, as I made a decent test for my multinomial mixture that has easily modifiable code and I just worked from that. I just hope that the results of my LDA (which runs slower than my mixture model due to increased model complexity) test will be ready to put in my presentation by the time I have to give it haha. >_<
At lunch I ate hiyashi-chuuka, which was lovely. I'm still a bit wierded out by the sweetness of the sauce, which is something we definitely do not subscribe to at home. Oddly, people seem to put wasabi in the hiyashi-wakame-soba, but it looks like they put MUSTARD in hiyashi-chuuka! This is most heretical, and I am going to have to stage a surgical strike operation against the mustard supply to the office. ;D
I played handiball at lunch, and my shoulder felt like it was juuuust about ready to get better, so I really didn't strain it at all. Hopefully I can get back to normal play, as my teammates don't seem to understand that ONLY serving seems to be a problem, and have stopped passing to me as much. Either that or they just mysteriously hate me now... D:
After lunch was more presentation stuff. I'm kind of glad that this presentation is wrapping up, because I'm sounding a bit like a broken record in the blog these days. >_< I actually have mostly wrapped up the changes Kabutoya-san asked for, and will submit my slides to him again tomorrow morning. In the meantime he's asked me to try to understand the Variational Inference method detailed in the actual LDA paper (we used Collapsed Gibbs Sampling as an alternative to this). Apparently Kabutoya-san is not familiar with this Variational Inference business, so if I can grasp it, I think that will be a big win for everyone. The trouble is that with this kind of stuff, it's always a question of "how deep?". I mean, the update equations are right there on the page, so actually using it would probably be quite easy as they've laid it out. I also think I understand the process of how to derive said equations as is detailed in the paper, but to actually do it is faaar beyond my ability at the moment. It appears to require calculating conditional expectations, using Jensen's inequality (an old nemesis haha) and using the Kullback-Leibler divergence, all of which are beyond my reach at present. I will certainly try though, because actually doing something honestly useful is sounding very attractive after a month and a half of work haha.
Kabutoya-san actually left before me today, which I guess explains a bit about my humourously easy hours, as the only people who are there when I arrive and leave consistently are the team lead, the deputy team lead and Kawanaka-san, who sits next to me, and is surely given extra hours as punishment for using spray-on deodorant! D:< I actually don't mind too much, as it's mild and does not resemble Axe in the slightest, but after 3 years of high school PE, I have a very, very strong prejudice against spray-on deodorants. Kawanaka-san's product does win brownie points for having the rather humourous name of "BODY SPLASH BY SEXY BOY". >_< Sounds illegal in most countries to me...
As a result of finishing my slides off and Kabutoya-san not being there, I left work "early", at about 6:10. I find that I'm getting better and being operational while hungry, but reading papers while hungry when I'm not even technically supposed to be there still is not something I yet choose to indulge in. My walk home was pleasant, although I am quite sad that I do not have "Groovin' Magic" available to put on my music player, though I suppose I *could* fix that.
At the dorm I ate dinner of stewed squid and daikon with a ground beef korokke (which was actually mostly onion haha). Oh, and how could I forget the miso soup and rice!? After dinner I just kinda flaked, although I managed to forget to write my blog, and just as I was about to get ready for bed at the highly respectable time of 10:30, I remembered, and now here I am up at 12! I did actually brush and floss my teeth and catch up on a couple of Gunnerkrigg Court posts as well though, so I've only actually spent about an hour on the blog, which is pretty normal.
Anyways, I am enjoying my life on 8 hours of sleep a night (as opposed to less, of course. Derp.), so I am going to leave you with that, and bid you good night.
Night!
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Kirby's worst power ever turns out to be quite good for humans...
July 23: Sleep is Nice
I actually succeeded in getting to sleep early last night, and consequently I felt pretty darn good all day haha. I am going to try to at least partially recreate that tonight for obvious reasons haha. ;D
This morning I got up and ate dorm breakfast of carrots stewed with tiny fish and stuffed chikuwa (and miso soup and rice). All of it was pretty good, but the chikuwa stuffing was completely unidentifiable, aside from being kind of creamy and fatty. >_<
I got to work on time and worked on my presentation some more. I am a little fed up with using PowerPoint by now, because making changes to a page with a lot of formulae takes waay too long. I have to wait at least 5 seconds before I get any visual feedback on things I do, and the way they structure the mathematical expressions means you can't really do stuff blind. >_< I will be very happy to go back to my emacs once this is over haha (knock on wood).
Today was apparently informal treats day or something. First, Kabutoya-san gave me some chocolate wafers he had bought for the baseball cards inside. He was giving them out to a lot of people, so he must have bought a lot. >_< Then, later in the day Kurashima-san showed up with some cheesecake-blobs that he brought from Hokkaido. It called itself a "cheesecake omlette", but I have no idea what the omlette part was about haha. It was from a place called "Snaffles", and had the lovely catchphrase "I snaffle therefore I am" on the packaging haha.
At lunch I had hiyashi-wakame-soba again, and the server lady didn't ask any questions at all haha. It was good, but I already knew that haha. At lunch I played some handiball, and my shoulder is feeling much better, but still not perfect. I still feel a strange sensation in my back near my shoulderblade sometimes. It's kind of like someone's just got a couple of fingers on me and they're holding them there and pressing lightly. >_< It's kinda wierd, and I hope it's not serious, because if it is something bad I have no idea what to do about it. D:
After lunch I clean up my presentation even more, and I was going to get Kabutoya-san to look it over, but he was nowhere to be found. I literally had nothing left to do for the first time at work, and I was kind of stumped. It was about 5pm, and I still had an hour left, so I waited for him while looking up probability-related stuff on Wikipedia, but he didn't show up even by 6:15. I literally had nothing to do, so I decided to leave, since my Wikipedia tabs had started to transition into more physics and less probability haha. Hopefully he will come in relatively early tomorrow, or I will be stuck in the same situation again. >_< The latest I've seen him come in is 11:10, and I'm really hoping he doesn't go for a new record tomorrow. D:
I walked home and ate dorm supper of fake crab salad, something saucy I don't remember on rice, and some kind of potato chowder, which was pretty good, especially when put on the rice. After that I blogged and kinda just browsed the internet. San Diego Comic Con is on right now, and Capcom is making it their mission to release enough announcements to take up all my time just keeping up. >_<
Anyways, I'm going to get to bed now so that I get a decent amount of sleep haha. Night!
I actually succeeded in getting to sleep early last night, and consequently I felt pretty darn good all day haha. I am going to try to at least partially recreate that tonight for obvious reasons haha. ;D
This morning I got up and ate dorm breakfast of carrots stewed with tiny fish and stuffed chikuwa (and miso soup and rice). All of it was pretty good, but the chikuwa stuffing was completely unidentifiable, aside from being kind of creamy and fatty. >_<
I got to work on time and worked on my presentation some more. I am a little fed up with using PowerPoint by now, because making changes to a page with a lot of formulae takes waay too long. I have to wait at least 5 seconds before I get any visual feedback on things I do, and the way they structure the mathematical expressions means you can't really do stuff blind. >_< I will be very happy to go back to my emacs once this is over haha (knock on wood).
Today was apparently informal treats day or something. First, Kabutoya-san gave me some chocolate wafers he had bought for the baseball cards inside. He was giving them out to a lot of people, so he must have bought a lot. >_< Then, later in the day Kurashima-san showed up with some cheesecake-blobs that he brought from Hokkaido. It called itself a "cheesecake omlette", but I have no idea what the omlette part was about haha. It was from a place called "Snaffles", and had the lovely catchphrase "I snaffle therefore I am" on the packaging haha.
At lunch I had hiyashi-wakame-soba again, and the server lady didn't ask any questions at all haha. It was good, but I already knew that haha. At lunch I played some handiball, and my shoulder is feeling much better, but still not perfect. I still feel a strange sensation in my back near my shoulderblade sometimes. It's kind of like someone's just got a couple of fingers on me and they're holding them there and pressing lightly. >_< It's kinda wierd, and I hope it's not serious, because if it is something bad I have no idea what to do about it. D:
After lunch I clean up my presentation even more, and I was going to get Kabutoya-san to look it over, but he was nowhere to be found. I literally had nothing left to do for the first time at work, and I was kind of stumped. It was about 5pm, and I still had an hour left, so I waited for him while looking up probability-related stuff on Wikipedia, but he didn't show up even by 6:15. I literally had nothing to do, so I decided to leave, since my Wikipedia tabs had started to transition into more physics and less probability haha. Hopefully he will come in relatively early tomorrow, or I will be stuck in the same situation again. >_< The latest I've seen him come in is 11:10, and I'm really hoping he doesn't go for a new record tomorrow. D:
I walked home and ate dorm supper of fake crab salad, something saucy I don't remember on rice, and some kind of potato chowder, which was pretty good, especially when put on the rice. After that I blogged and kinda just browsed the internet. San Diego Comic Con is on right now, and Capcom is making it their mission to release enough announcements to take up all my time just keeping up. >_<
Anyways, I'm going to get to bed now so that I get a decent amount of sleep haha. Night!
Friday, July 22, 2011
Asking questions in order to receive answers is the best invention ever
July 22: Clarity is Wonderful
I got up today feeling pretty damn bad, but in a not-sick way (so far, crossing my fingers). I ate dorm breakfast of stewed puffy tofu with peas and some hanpen (and miso soup and rice haha). It has been DELIGHFULLY cool of late (26 degrees in my room right now, but with a cool breeze), due to the typhoon. According to Nishida-san (and the brilliant sunshine, derp) it has actually missed us, so I will not be seeing a typhoon quite yet.
I got to work on time, and worked on my presentation, surprise surprise! I clarified with Kabutoya-san what I should be doing with respect to detail in the derivations in my presentation, which was good, because at the same time I learned that I am not actually be covering the IPLSA papers. Yay! I was kinda worried about that, because I've been spending all my time on LDA and CGS trying to bring that part up to my standards. I still had time to include it, but I was resigned to having it not be as good as the rest.
Apparently next week I will be going to Kyoto for something to do with my research with Kabutoya-san! I haven't the slightest idea what I might need to go to Kyoto for, but it sounds exciting regardless haha. I wonder when next week I'll be going. I hope it's not too near to when Jiuna shows up, but I doubt it will be *knocks on wood*.
At lunch I ate something called like "hiyashi tan-tan men" or something, which was decent. It was a bowl of spicy tepid broth and soba noodles, with some goodies like charsiu and stuff in it. I've liked other stuff better, but it wasn't offensive. After eating I played handiball, and it was beach-style so I had a lot of fun. My shoulder is still slightly gibbled, but it only prevents me from serving, at which I am getting better with my underhand. I wish I knew what was irritating it, because it is being very slow to go away...
In the afternoon I worked more on my presentation, which goes reasonably quickly now that I can just lose myself in writing out the derivations for my models. Or at least I COULD lose myself in it, if PowerPoint wasn't crapping its pants all the time! At one point today I could repeatably crash PowerPoint by typing a "z" in a specific place, though I did not confirm whether or not other characters would get the same result. I don't think PowerPoint likes me triple-nesting subscripts, but it's necessary unless I want to create even more of a nomenclature nightmare. I would use just regular subscripts, but for some reason they don't save properly, so I'm forced to do my triple-nesting. >_< Excel is also SUUUUPER slow when you start stacking up the mathematical formulae, which is kind of dumb, since I'm just doing entry-level derivations on a brand-new computer with a million gigabytes of RAM (16 is a million in base... OK fine I give up, whatever). Hopefully after this presentation Kabutoya-san will let me switch to something that people actually use, like LaTEX or something (although maybe I'll want to go back to PowerPoint after having actually used it hahaha).
The afternoon went by, and my presentation is now like, 11 slides larger, all of which are stuffed with math. At about 6:15 I left the office, as I was getting kind of hungry (I didn't get kicked out). I walked home, and it was an incredibly pleasant experience, because the air was less humid than usual and much, much cooler. It felt a bit like a cooler day in summer in Vancouver, actually. I got home and ate dorm dinner of pork and green peppers over rice, with pork, mushroom and shrimp chow mein. The chow mein actually somewhat resembled Chinese food, much to my surprise haha, and it tasted pretty good too.
After dinner I gave Nishino-san his present and then watched some StarCraft. I unfortunately missed the first foreigner all-kill, where QXC apparently wiped out IM, including MVP in the fourth set (one of the best players in the world). I then typed up this blog and now I'm going to go to bed haha.
Night!
I got up today feeling pretty damn bad, but in a not-sick way (so far, crossing my fingers). I ate dorm breakfast of stewed puffy tofu with peas and some hanpen (and miso soup and rice haha). It has been DELIGHFULLY cool of late (26 degrees in my room right now, but with a cool breeze), due to the typhoon. According to Nishida-san (and the brilliant sunshine, derp) it has actually missed us, so I will not be seeing a typhoon quite yet.
I got to work on time, and worked on my presentation, surprise surprise! I clarified with Kabutoya-san what I should be doing with respect to detail in the derivations in my presentation, which was good, because at the same time I learned that I am not actually be covering the IPLSA papers. Yay! I was kinda worried about that, because I've been spending all my time on LDA and CGS trying to bring that part up to my standards. I still had time to include it, but I was resigned to having it not be as good as the rest.
Apparently next week I will be going to Kyoto for something to do with my research with Kabutoya-san! I haven't the slightest idea what I might need to go to Kyoto for, but it sounds exciting regardless haha. I wonder when next week I'll be going. I hope it's not too near to when Jiuna shows up, but I doubt it will be *knocks on wood*.
At lunch I ate something called like "hiyashi tan-tan men" or something, which was decent. It was a bowl of spicy tepid broth and soba noodles, with some goodies like charsiu and stuff in it. I've liked other stuff better, but it wasn't offensive. After eating I played handiball, and it was beach-style so I had a lot of fun. My shoulder is still slightly gibbled, but it only prevents me from serving, at which I am getting better with my underhand. I wish I knew what was irritating it, because it is being very slow to go away...
In the afternoon I worked more on my presentation, which goes reasonably quickly now that I can just lose myself in writing out the derivations for my models. Or at least I COULD lose myself in it, if PowerPoint wasn't crapping its pants all the time! At one point today I could repeatably crash PowerPoint by typing a "z" in a specific place, though I did not confirm whether or not other characters would get the same result. I don't think PowerPoint likes me triple-nesting subscripts, but it's necessary unless I want to create even more of a nomenclature nightmare. I would use just regular subscripts, but for some reason they don't save properly, so I'm forced to do my triple-nesting. >_< Excel is also SUUUUPER slow when you start stacking up the mathematical formulae, which is kind of dumb, since I'm just doing entry-level derivations on a brand-new computer with a million gigabytes of RAM (16 is a million in base... OK fine I give up, whatever). Hopefully after this presentation Kabutoya-san will let me switch to something that people actually use, like LaTEX or something (although maybe I'll want to go back to PowerPoint after having actually used it hahaha).
The afternoon went by, and my presentation is now like, 11 slides larger, all of which are stuffed with math. At about 6:15 I left the office, as I was getting kind of hungry (I didn't get kicked out). I walked home, and it was an incredibly pleasant experience, because the air was less humid than usual and much, much cooler. It felt a bit like a cooler day in summer in Vancouver, actually. I got home and ate dorm dinner of pork and green peppers over rice, with pork, mushroom and shrimp chow mein. The chow mein actually somewhat resembled Chinese food, much to my surprise haha, and it tasted pretty good too.
After dinner I gave Nishino-san his present and then watched some StarCraft. I unfortunately missed the first foreigner all-kill, where QXC apparently wiped out IM, including MVP in the fourth set (one of the best players in the world). I then typed up this blog and now I'm going to go to bed haha.
Night!
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Dear Mom: Do not look at the timestamp on this post. D:
July 22: The Briefest Among Akibae
Today I got up and got my standard breakfast/lunch of bananas, carrots, grapefruit, curry korokke and milk from Yokosan. While eating I voice chatted with Mom and Jiuna for a while before playing a bit of StarCraft with Kevin and Vincent.
After StarCraft I took my HST ballot to the post office in Yokochuu and sent it back to Canada, where Mom will mail it for me. I actually managed to conduct myself almost entirely in utterly horrid Japanese, which I was quite proud of, until I realized I was misremembering the last syllable in the verb "to send". This, of course, meant that the attendant knew what I wanted anyways, and I was not the least bit coherent. Oh well, if somehow my vote ends up in Nairobi as a result, I hope they are holding a referendum, so it at least gets used. I also negotiated the ATM (lol in English haha), and Japan really is like something out of the Jetsons sometimes. I tried to use my debit card, but it wouldn't eat it and started flashing the PASSBOOK slot. Incredulous, I took out my passbook (it's an account of my transaction history and account information and stuff), and put the ENTIRE BOOK into the ATM, which of course worked perfectly. I understand that paper is lower tech than a magnetic stripe card, but somehow it is absolutely shocking to me that an ATM ate A BOOK, READ IT (yeah, yeah it probably scanned the barcode on the back whatever) and then WROTE IN IT (in the right place no less!).
I hopped on a Limited Express for Shinagawa, and read my vocab charts the whole way. The lady beside me was quite-obviously-trying-to-subtly look at my vocab sheets, and later on she started writing kanji on her knee with a finger. For some reason seemed to think it was still necessary to keep up the appearance that she was not actually looking even while doing this. Really, lady I'm studying JAPANESE. I know what you're doing!!! ;D For now, the cultural differences are adorable, but I'm unfortunately relatively certain that on at least one occasion, I will find such behaviour incredibly frustrating. >_<
From Shinagawa I went to Shibuya station by Yamanote Line, and there I went to the Tokyu in the station's "FOOD SHOW!" or whatever it was called. There I purchased some kind of manju that came in a sexy brown box that's delightfully textured and weighted, and also only about 1100円. Perfect! I actually bought two, because I am going to give one to Kabutoya-san, since he was the one who asked, and tried to stop me from giving Nishino-san anything using that as an argument. I thought about it, and maybe that meant that I was supposed to be thanking Kabutoya-san instead, so I decided to play it safe and get two lol.
I looked around FOOD SHOW! a bit, and it was extremely crowded, as it was quite near supper time by that point. I saw many things that I would love to eat, but I was very hungry, having my last eaten meal being fruit and two korokke at 11am. This meant that eating something like the tomato bocconcini salad would be rather unwise due to potential acidic repercussions. I elected to head to Akiba without eating, and once there went straight for Chez Streep presents Stochastic Maid Curry, where I did not actually eat curry. They have been advertising "sauce katsu-don", so I decided to have it today, since last time the full MEGA katsu curry proved difficult to vanquish. It was pretty darn good (not highbrow cuisine by any means though), and the MEGA size is 100円 cheaper than MEGA kastu curry, and it was the perfect amount! The "sauce" is just some kind of thin brown sauce they douse the katsu in, so that its coating is a bit of a similar texture to Mom's Balsamic Chicken. I'd recommend it to anyone who happens to find themselves in Akiba and looking for a cheap, quick meal.
After eating I headed to HEY! to get my ass whooped at 3rd Strike, and to mega-fail at Mushihime. >_< I guess I'm a little glad I didn't have much time in Akiba today, because I appeared to suck more terribly than usual at my favourite games. D: I did get to stage 5 once on MAX mode in Mushihimesama, but it was a messy affair, and I did not best my previous personal highscore.
I was quite happy to break for a bit and watch someone who was doing pretty damn good at Original Mode MAX, though he was dying quite a bit due to over-aggression. He at least showed me how you're *supposed* to play Mushihime once you stop being a total scrub like me haha. I had previously been quite puzzled by why some people get glowing auras on their bullets and I don't. I surmised from watching him play that the aura appears when you get your combo counter to a certain level (I think it might be 10000 and 50000, though there might be extra zeroes there), and the aura is associated with a bullet speed-up effect. You apparently get MASSIVE points for sticking your face into enemies' faces while they're trying to kill you, as he was doing this quite often and there were gigantic amounts of gold point crystals flying everywhere. He had my stage 5 personal best beaten by the end of stage 2, which stung quite badly until I realized that he wasn't actually a white guy haha (that's MY gimmick!). I seriously thought he was until he got up to leave, when I saw his face and was then reminded that I was in the Mothership of the Pasty Nerds. >_<
After dying horribly some more, I called it quits and rode the trains/buses home to my dorm. Nothing much of note occurred, except for a woman and her friend sitting behind me on the bus speaking a back-and-forth English/Japanese mixture that was really fun to eavesdrop on haha. The one who was using more English looked like she might be half-African American/half-Japanese, as she had very unique facial features and very natural sounding Japanese and English.
Back at my dorm I made the mistake of checking Shoryuken and TL before going to bed, and thus I'm writing this blog up WAAAY too late, as not only did Huk get sent out as the ace in oGs vs Prime.WE in StarCraft II, and not only did he also manage to win two games and thus take the match for oGs, Capcom ALSO announced Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, featuring Strider Hiryu! Euuuggghhhh... All great news, but now I am going to feel absolutely horrid tomorrow... >_<
Night!
Today I got up and got my standard breakfast/lunch of bananas, carrots, grapefruit, curry korokke and milk from Yokosan. While eating I voice chatted with Mom and Jiuna for a while before playing a bit of StarCraft with Kevin and Vincent.
After StarCraft I took my HST ballot to the post office in Yokochuu and sent it back to Canada, where Mom will mail it for me. I actually managed to conduct myself almost entirely in utterly horrid Japanese, which I was quite proud of, until I realized I was misremembering the last syllable in the verb "to send". This, of course, meant that the attendant knew what I wanted anyways, and I was not the least bit coherent. Oh well, if somehow my vote ends up in Nairobi as a result, I hope they are holding a referendum, so it at least gets used. I also negotiated the ATM (lol in English haha), and Japan really is like something out of the Jetsons sometimes. I tried to use my debit card, but it wouldn't eat it and started flashing the PASSBOOK slot. Incredulous, I took out my passbook (it's an account of my transaction history and account information and stuff), and put the ENTIRE BOOK into the ATM, which of course worked perfectly. I understand that paper is lower tech than a magnetic stripe card, but somehow it is absolutely shocking to me that an ATM ate A BOOK, READ IT (yeah, yeah it probably scanned the barcode on the back whatever) and then WROTE IN IT (in the right place no less!).
I hopped on a Limited Express for Shinagawa, and read my vocab charts the whole way. The lady beside me was quite-obviously-trying-to-subtly look at my vocab sheets, and later on she started writing kanji on her knee with a finger. For some reason seemed to think it was still necessary to keep up the appearance that she was not actually looking even while doing this. Really, lady I'm studying JAPANESE. I know what you're doing!!! ;D For now, the cultural differences are adorable, but I'm unfortunately relatively certain that on at least one occasion, I will find such behaviour incredibly frustrating. >_<
From Shinagawa I went to Shibuya station by Yamanote Line, and there I went to the Tokyu in the station's "FOOD SHOW!" or whatever it was called. There I purchased some kind of manju that came in a sexy brown box that's delightfully textured and weighted, and also only about 1100円. Perfect! I actually bought two, because I am going to give one to Kabutoya-san, since he was the one who asked, and tried to stop me from giving Nishino-san anything using that as an argument. I thought about it, and maybe that meant that I was supposed to be thanking Kabutoya-san instead, so I decided to play it safe and get two lol.
I looked around FOOD SHOW! a bit, and it was extremely crowded, as it was quite near supper time by that point. I saw many things that I would love to eat, but I was very hungry, having my last eaten meal being fruit and two korokke at 11am. This meant that eating something like the tomato bocconcini salad would be rather unwise due to potential acidic repercussions. I elected to head to Akiba without eating, and once there went straight for Chez Streep presents Stochastic Maid Curry, where I did not actually eat curry. They have been advertising "sauce katsu-don", so I decided to have it today, since last time the full MEGA katsu curry proved difficult to vanquish. It was pretty darn good (not highbrow cuisine by any means though), and the MEGA size is 100円 cheaper than MEGA kastu curry, and it was the perfect amount! The "sauce" is just some kind of thin brown sauce they douse the katsu in, so that its coating is a bit of a similar texture to Mom's Balsamic Chicken. I'd recommend it to anyone who happens to find themselves in Akiba and looking for a cheap, quick meal.
After eating I headed to HEY! to get my ass whooped at 3rd Strike, and to mega-fail at Mushihime. >_< I guess I'm a little glad I didn't have much time in Akiba today, because I appeared to suck more terribly than usual at my favourite games. D: I did get to stage 5 once on MAX mode in Mushihimesama, but it was a messy affair, and I did not best my previous personal highscore.
I was quite happy to break for a bit and watch someone who was doing pretty damn good at Original Mode MAX, though he was dying quite a bit due to over-aggression. He at least showed me how you're *supposed* to play Mushihime once you stop being a total scrub like me haha. I had previously been quite puzzled by why some people get glowing auras on their bullets and I don't. I surmised from watching him play that the aura appears when you get your combo counter to a certain level (I think it might be 10000 and 50000, though there might be extra zeroes there), and the aura is associated with a bullet speed-up effect. You apparently get MASSIVE points for sticking your face into enemies' faces while they're trying to kill you, as he was doing this quite often and there were gigantic amounts of gold point crystals flying everywhere. He had my stage 5 personal best beaten by the end of stage 2, which stung quite badly until I realized that he wasn't actually a white guy haha (that's MY gimmick!). I seriously thought he was until he got up to leave, when I saw his face and was then reminded that I was in the Mothership of the Pasty Nerds. >_<
After dying horribly some more, I called it quits and rode the trains/buses home to my dorm. Nothing much of note occurred, except for a woman and her friend sitting behind me on the bus speaking a back-and-forth English/Japanese mixture that was really fun to eavesdrop on haha. The one who was using more English looked like she might be half-African American/half-Japanese, as she had very unique facial features and very natural sounding Japanese and English.
Back at my dorm I made the mistake of checking Shoryuken and TL before going to bed, and thus I'm writing this blog up WAAAY too late, as not only did Huk get sent out as the ace in oGs vs Prime.WE in StarCraft II, and not only did he also manage to win two games and thus take the match for oGs, Capcom ALSO announced Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, featuring Strider Hiryu! Euuuggghhhh... All great news, but now I am going to feel absolutely horrid tomorrow... >_<
Night!
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Sloth is the spice of life
July 20: Errands, Kind of
Today I got up at some time roughly resembling noon and went to get breakfast at the Yokosan. I still had a couple of bananas and a carrot left from Monday, so I only got some milk, a grapefruit and a couple of curry-korokke, along with some paper towels and senbei. I really have to stop buying the box-shaped senbei to "have it on hand", as I always end up eating it the day I buy it because it is too damn good.
I ate my breakfast while text-chatting with Mom and Jiuna. I am getting quite excited about Jiuna arriving! We are planning a little trip, and I am looking forward to doing some travelling. After talking with Mom and Jiuna I played some StarCraft with Kevin, and I invited Kusano-san (that's Niconico-san's real name) to watch. He seemed very interested in the game, which isn't that surprising, since he said he liked Age of Empires a lot, and StarCraft is basically THE genre-defining RTS game (yes, yes I know I'm playing SCII not BW, be quiet). I hope he gets totally absorbed in it, so I will have someone in my dorm to play with haha.
I also did some laundry today, mainly my mattress cover, which I have yet to see if I can actually put back on the foamy squares that compose my matress. It was quite difficult to get off, so I am kind of expecting a struggle. D: It really needed washing though, as it smelled... spiky. The scent was indeed somehow sharp, and I don't think it was me, because nothing I have ever smelled smelled like that. >_<
I did some vacuuming as well, which was long overdue, and I was disappointed to find out that the pilliness in the carpet beneath my feet at my desk is appearently permanent. D:< The vacuum that lives in the common area for our floor is pretty swank though. It's got blue LEDs all over it and stuff, so you kinda want to pump up the Eurobeat while you're cleaning your room.
For dinner I decided ate katsu-don from LAWSON STATION in front of my computer while watching GSL. Sadly, Tester yet again failed to advance, which means that the only Protoss in the semifinals is HongUn. D: I believe he is facing NesTea, so I don't even WANT him to win... The games between Bomber and Byun were kind of sad to watch, though whenever a series goes to game 5 there's some inherent excitement in that.
After eating I copied some vocab charts for my train ride into Akiba tomorrow, and then played a little Touhou UFO and browsed TL and Shoryuken until Kevin kindly alerted me to the time. >_< Whooops. Unfortunately getting settled in and comfortable here has brought back some really, really bad habits that I was glad to seemingly not brought with me from Canada. Damn, no such luck. D:
Tomorrow I will be going to Akiba after I chat with Mom and Jiuna at what I assume will be the regular time of 11am. For now, I must put my bed back together and then get to sleep!
Night!
Today I got up at some time roughly resembling noon and went to get breakfast at the Yokosan. I still had a couple of bananas and a carrot left from Monday, so I only got some milk, a grapefruit and a couple of curry-korokke, along with some paper towels and senbei. I really have to stop buying the box-shaped senbei to "have it on hand", as I always end up eating it the day I buy it because it is too damn good.
I ate my breakfast while text-chatting with Mom and Jiuna. I am getting quite excited about Jiuna arriving! We are planning a little trip, and I am looking forward to doing some travelling. After talking with Mom and Jiuna I played some StarCraft with Kevin, and I invited Kusano-san (that's Niconico-san's real name) to watch. He seemed very interested in the game, which isn't that surprising, since he said he liked Age of Empires a lot, and StarCraft is basically THE genre-defining RTS game (yes, yes I know I'm playing SCII not BW, be quiet). I hope he gets totally absorbed in it, so I will have someone in my dorm to play with haha.
I also did some laundry today, mainly my mattress cover, which I have yet to see if I can actually put back on the foamy squares that compose my matress. It was quite difficult to get off, so I am kind of expecting a struggle. D: It really needed washing though, as it smelled... spiky. The scent was indeed somehow sharp, and I don't think it was me, because nothing I have ever smelled smelled like that. >_<
I did some vacuuming as well, which was long overdue, and I was disappointed to find out that the pilliness in the carpet beneath my feet at my desk is appearently permanent. D:< The vacuum that lives in the common area for our floor is pretty swank though. It's got blue LEDs all over it and stuff, so you kinda want to pump up the Eurobeat while you're cleaning your room.
For dinner I decided ate katsu-don from LAWSON STATION in front of my computer while watching GSL. Sadly, Tester yet again failed to advance, which means that the only Protoss in the semifinals is HongUn. D: I believe he is facing NesTea, so I don't even WANT him to win... The games between Bomber and Byun were kind of sad to watch, though whenever a series goes to game 5 there's some inherent excitement in that.
After eating I copied some vocab charts for my train ride into Akiba tomorrow, and then played a little Touhou UFO and browsed TL and Shoryuken until Kevin kindly alerted me to the time. >_< Whooops. Unfortunately getting settled in and comfortable here has brought back some really, really bad habits that I was glad to seemingly not brought with me from Canada. Damn, no such luck. D:
Tomorrow I will be going to Akiba after I chat with Mom and Jiuna at what I assume will be the regular time of 11am. For now, I must put my bed back together and then get to sleep!
Night!
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
A wild TYPHOON appears! TYPHOON used GUST!
July 19: I'm Sorry, I Misspelled "TYPOON"
This morning I got up and ate dorm breakfast of some kind of weiner-hash business, wakame with eggs, and some siu mai (with miso soup and rice). I left for work and when I got on the bus it was kind of drizzling a bit. By the time I had gotten to the office, it had changed into a total wind-driven downpour with sheets of rain flying around visibly. Whoa! I found out from my coworkers that apparently one of the strongest typhoons in the last few years is going to be coming through. At the present moment, it's not raining, but considering how quickly it changed from Vancouver Sunshine to Holy Crap, I'm guessing that it'd be smart to bring an umbrella wherever I go for the next few days.
At work I just worked on my presentation and went over the papers for LDA, PLSA and CGS like, a billion times. I'm not sure how else to make sure I know the details of them without actually using them (and I'm still kind of freaking out about it). The morning went relatively quickly, as I was able to spend a lot of it typing up stuff for my presentation.
At lunch I ate hiyashi wakame soba (chilled seaweed on noodles in broth), which was mysteriously difficult to order (I am exaggerating massively when I say that haha). I asked for "hiyashi wakame soba", and the server lady was like "...soba?" and I was like "yeah....?" and she was like "OK... tsumetai?" (cold) and I was like "...yeah....?" (I don't think there's even an option for it not to be cold, who has ever heard of hot hiyashi anything soba). I guess she was probably trying to make sure I knew what I was ordering, but she only succeeded in freaking me out and making me think that I had mispronounced something and had tried to order fried children or something. When I took my seat next to my co-workers, Nishida-san said "Oh, Robert, you like hiyashi wakame soba?" I was was just like RRRRRAGE!!! Yes, Nishida-san, yes I do. It was delicious, by the way.
After eating I played handiball, and I am very displeased to announce that my shoulder is still gibbled. I have no idea what I've done to it or how to fix it, because nothing was wrong with it until it just started hurting! I didn't fall or wrench it in any other way, and I don't even put the strap of my messenger bag on that side. >_< Can Jiuna bring Nancy Drew here to investigate my shoulder-mystery? (I just about said Nancy Greene, who, although a rather cool lady, I suspect would be not so useful for solving mysteries. "Oh hey Nancy, what do you think is up with my shoulder?" "I dunno, but I like to go fast." And in a flash she'd be a speck on the horizon and that'd be the last I see of her.)
In the afternoon I read the LDA and CGS papers pretty much start to finish 2 or 3 times trying to iteratively refine how I am going to present them. I am trying to strike the right balance between "simple, accessible and usable", and "rigourous, detailed and complete", and doing so has been revealing holes in my understanding that I have to patch. My presentation is reasonably complete for the LDA/MM with CGS part, except if I need to show more mathematical derivations, which I will ask Kabutoya-san about on Friday (he was away from his desk a lot today, and swearing whenever he was there so I didn't bother him while I still had stuff to do).
I ended up leaving the office at about 6:20 to 6:30 (I can't really remember), and I walked home as it wasn't raining anymore, and I didn't want to pass up the opportunity to see the misty hills after typhoon-rains, and to smell the air in the "forest" part of the walk after a rainstorm. I got home without getting rained on much at all, and ate dorm supper of garden salad with pork, some kind of egg, shiitake and gobo mixture, and rice and miso soup with EGGPLANTS in it. The eggplants were soo mushy you could "chew" them with your tongue, which was kind of an interesting experience haha.
After supper I hung out in my room kind of hoping for games of Dominion that never materialized. I watched MC lose to HongUn in GSL (professional Korean StarCraft II), which was surprising and disappointing, as I quite like MC (along with 1/3 of StarCraft players haha). I discovered a lovely trick for keeping cool, which is totally obvious, and I am a dunce for not thinking of it before. I filled up my shower bucket with ice from downstairs and chilled my water jug in it! Ah, the miracles of modern technology! I realized that I haven't had a cold drink in like, at least two weeks, and I must say it was quite a nice experience. I am definitely going to be doing that as often as possible. For some reason the ice machine's tray full of ice cubes makes me want to hide things in there for no reason. Like ice cream bars or something, but we have freezers, so it'd be totally pointless, not to mention probably against some rule or other.
Back upstairs after an ice run I found people from my floor sitting around in front of the fridge in the lounge. They told me that they had found a nine-month-old egg (or maybe eggs), and asked if I wanted it (they were not serious). Charming, I'm sure. The decidedly strange guy from my floor told me that "Inside this fridge... There is only... chaos..." O_O Thanks...? I told him that's a rather fancy way of saying "old eggs", and went back to my room haha. He's right though, that thing is ridiculous. I am not surpised in the slightest that there are nine-month-old eggs in there, as it's just totally jammed with nondescript bags that look easy to forget about.
I am trying to decide whether to go to Akiba tomorrow or the next day right now. If I go tomorrow I will be more tired, as I'm currently awake at a rather inappropriate hour, but if I do manage to get up relatively early, I can spend all day there, whereas I will likely not spend as long there if I go on Thursday, and I have to come home at a reasonable time. Decisions, decisions...
Anyways, I'd best be getting to bed. Night!
This morning I got up and ate dorm breakfast of some kind of weiner-hash business, wakame with eggs, and some siu mai (with miso soup and rice). I left for work and when I got on the bus it was kind of drizzling a bit. By the time I had gotten to the office, it had changed into a total wind-driven downpour with sheets of rain flying around visibly. Whoa! I found out from my coworkers that apparently one of the strongest typhoons in the last few years is going to be coming through. At the present moment, it's not raining, but considering how quickly it changed from Vancouver Sunshine to Holy Crap, I'm guessing that it'd be smart to bring an umbrella wherever I go for the next few days.
At work I just worked on my presentation and went over the papers for LDA, PLSA and CGS like, a billion times. I'm not sure how else to make sure I know the details of them without actually using them (and I'm still kind of freaking out about it). The morning went relatively quickly, as I was able to spend a lot of it typing up stuff for my presentation.
At lunch I ate hiyashi wakame soba (chilled seaweed on noodles in broth), which was mysteriously difficult to order (I am exaggerating massively when I say that haha). I asked for "hiyashi wakame soba", and the server lady was like "...soba?" and I was like "yeah....?" and she was like "OK... tsumetai?" (cold) and I was like "...yeah....?" (I don't think there's even an option for it not to be cold, who has ever heard of hot hiyashi anything soba). I guess she was probably trying to make sure I knew what I was ordering, but she only succeeded in freaking me out and making me think that I had mispronounced something and had tried to order fried children or something. When I took my seat next to my co-workers, Nishida-san said "Oh, Robert, you like hiyashi wakame soba?" I was was just like RRRRRAGE!!! Yes, Nishida-san, yes I do. It was delicious, by the way.
After eating I played handiball, and I am very displeased to announce that my shoulder is still gibbled. I have no idea what I've done to it or how to fix it, because nothing was wrong with it until it just started hurting! I didn't fall or wrench it in any other way, and I don't even put the strap of my messenger bag on that side. >_< Can Jiuna bring Nancy Drew here to investigate my shoulder-mystery? (I just about said Nancy Greene, who, although a rather cool lady, I suspect would be not so useful for solving mysteries. "Oh hey Nancy, what do you think is up with my shoulder?" "I dunno, but I like to go fast." And in a flash she'd be a speck on the horizon and that'd be the last I see of her.)
In the afternoon I read the LDA and CGS papers pretty much start to finish 2 or 3 times trying to iteratively refine how I am going to present them. I am trying to strike the right balance between "simple, accessible and usable", and "rigourous, detailed and complete", and doing so has been revealing holes in my understanding that I have to patch. My presentation is reasonably complete for the LDA/MM with CGS part, except if I need to show more mathematical derivations, which I will ask Kabutoya-san about on Friday (he was away from his desk a lot today, and swearing whenever he was there so I didn't bother him while I still had stuff to do).
I ended up leaving the office at about 6:20 to 6:30 (I can't really remember), and I walked home as it wasn't raining anymore, and I didn't want to pass up the opportunity to see the misty hills after typhoon-rains, and to smell the air in the "forest" part of the walk after a rainstorm. I got home without getting rained on much at all, and ate dorm supper of garden salad with pork, some kind of egg, shiitake and gobo mixture, and rice and miso soup with EGGPLANTS in it. The eggplants were soo mushy you could "chew" them with your tongue, which was kind of an interesting experience haha.
After supper I hung out in my room kind of hoping for games of Dominion that never materialized. I watched MC lose to HongUn in GSL (professional Korean StarCraft II), which was surprising and disappointing, as I quite like MC (along with 1/3 of StarCraft players haha). I discovered a lovely trick for keeping cool, which is totally obvious, and I am a dunce for not thinking of it before. I filled up my shower bucket with ice from downstairs and chilled my water jug in it! Ah, the miracles of modern technology! I realized that I haven't had a cold drink in like, at least two weeks, and I must say it was quite a nice experience. I am definitely going to be doing that as often as possible. For some reason the ice machine's tray full of ice cubes makes me want to hide things in there for no reason. Like ice cream bars or something, but we have freezers, so it'd be totally pointless, not to mention probably against some rule or other.
Back upstairs after an ice run I found people from my floor sitting around in front of the fridge in the lounge. They told me that they had found a nine-month-old egg (or maybe eggs), and asked if I wanted it (they were not serious). Charming, I'm sure. The decidedly strange guy from my floor told me that "Inside this fridge... There is only... chaos..." O_O Thanks...? I told him that's a rather fancy way of saying "old eggs", and went back to my room haha. He's right though, that thing is ridiculous. I am not surpised in the slightest that there are nine-month-old eggs in there, as it's just totally jammed with nondescript bags that look easy to forget about.
I am trying to decide whether to go to Akiba tomorrow or the next day right now. If I go tomorrow I will be more tired, as I'm currently awake at a rather inappropriate hour, but if I do manage to get up relatively early, I can spend all day there, whereas I will likely not spend as long there if I go on Thursday, and I have to come home at a reasonable time. Decisions, decisions...
Anyways, I'd best be getting to bed. Night!
Monday, July 18, 2011
I am a master of flaking out!
July 19: A Nice, Relaxing Day
Today I had the day off, and I got up a bit before noon. I got some bananas and some carrots and a grapefruit from the Yokosan along with my korokke and some milk. I came back to the dorm to eat lunch, and had a nice long chat with Mom and Jiuna. We got video chat working this time, as they used Jiuna's laptop instead of Mom's netbook to avoid Chrome crashes. It was nice to see their faces again, and I am very much looking forward to Jiuna coming over in a couple of weeks.
After we finished our chat, I played StarCraft with Kevin for a couple of hours, and today I was alright again! Haha I think the biggest things that I changed were turning down my graphics settings so that my framerate is perfectly smooth again, and putting a kleenex under my arm and wrist haha. Seriously! I think a lot of my control problems were due to the face that I noticed my arm kind of sticking to the desk due to the humidity here, and a kleenex solved that nicely. I was kind of destroyed the kleenexes (kleenexen?!?) at an alarming rate though, so I tried switching to one of my "body towels" (they're thinner than washcloths are here haha) in the interest of being environmentally friendly, and it worked fine too. I also think I'm getting used to the smaller screen and used to playing StarCraft again period haha.
After playing with Kevin I caught up on webcomics and studied a little, and then went out to LAWSON STATION to buy myself some dinner. They didn't have any katsu-don left! NOOO!!! It turned to be fine though, because I got hiyashi-chuuka, as they offer it now that it's summer. It was pretty good, a touch plastic-y, but there were chashu slices and cucumbers and eggs and stuff, so I feel almost virtuous about it. I ate it while watching the GSL Code A finals, which were 6 games of PvP totalling less than an hour and a half, with 5 of the 6 games being 4-gate vs 4-gate. >_< I was reminded of one of the reasons why I'm hesitant to ladder, but the 5th game had some pretty cool stuff, and the sixth game was alright too.
After eating I played some Touhou UFO and floundered around on the Internet. I convinced myself not to go to Akihabara when I'll be going there in like, 2 days, but at the moment I'm wondering what exactly that was supposed to accomplish ahaha. My shoulder is still a little gimped. I really wonder what I've done to it... I haven't suffered any trauma to it, but it came on so suddenly. Luckily I don't use the motions that hurt outside of handiball, and even then only when serving. I do wonder what this is about though...
Anyways, it's much, much past my bedtime, and I really must get to sleep as soon as possible now that I've blogged. Hopefully my weekend days will be a little more exciting to read about than today was haha (although just chilling for a day was totally awesome, and now tomorrow is "Friday").
Night!
Today I had the day off, and I got up a bit before noon. I got some bananas and some carrots and a grapefruit from the Yokosan along with my korokke and some milk. I came back to the dorm to eat lunch, and had a nice long chat with Mom and Jiuna. We got video chat working this time, as they used Jiuna's laptop instead of Mom's netbook to avoid Chrome crashes. It was nice to see their faces again, and I am very much looking forward to Jiuna coming over in a couple of weeks.
After we finished our chat, I played StarCraft with Kevin for a couple of hours, and today I was alright again! Haha I think the biggest things that I changed were turning down my graphics settings so that my framerate is perfectly smooth again, and putting a kleenex under my arm and wrist haha. Seriously! I think a lot of my control problems were due to the face that I noticed my arm kind of sticking to the desk due to the humidity here, and a kleenex solved that nicely. I was kind of destroyed the kleenexes (kleenexen?!?) at an alarming rate though, so I tried switching to one of my "body towels" (they're thinner than washcloths are here haha) in the interest of being environmentally friendly, and it worked fine too. I also think I'm getting used to the smaller screen and used to playing StarCraft again period haha.
After playing with Kevin I caught up on webcomics and studied a little, and then went out to LAWSON STATION to buy myself some dinner. They didn't have any katsu-don left! NOOO!!! It turned to be fine though, because I got hiyashi-chuuka, as they offer it now that it's summer. It was pretty good, a touch plastic-y, but there were chashu slices and cucumbers and eggs and stuff, so I feel almost virtuous about it. I ate it while watching the GSL Code A finals, which were 6 games of PvP totalling less than an hour and a half, with 5 of the 6 games being 4-gate vs 4-gate. >_< I was reminded of one of the reasons why I'm hesitant to ladder, but the 5th game had some pretty cool stuff, and the sixth game was alright too.
After eating I played some Touhou UFO and floundered around on the Internet. I convinced myself not to go to Akihabara when I'll be going there in like, 2 days, but at the moment I'm wondering what exactly that was supposed to accomplish ahaha. My shoulder is still a little gimped. I really wonder what I've done to it... I haven't suffered any trauma to it, but it came on so suddenly. Luckily I don't use the motions that hurt outside of handiball, and even then only when serving. I do wonder what this is about though...
Anyways, it's much, much past my bedtime, and I really must get to sleep as soon as possible now that I've blogged. Hopefully my weekend days will be a little more exciting to read about than today was haha (although just chilling for a day was totally awesome, and now tomorrow is "Friday").
Night!
Sunday, July 17, 2011
If I have any say in the matter, the next recommender system I make is going to be called "Skynet"... OR BUYNET HURP DURP!
July 17: Programming Our Robot Overlords
Ugh. I have a lovely recipe for all of you to try out.
Step 1: Put sheets into washing machine after dinner to be tidy and responsible and proactive and all that jazz.
Step 2: An hour later move sheets over to dryer.
Step 3: Play Dominion with dormmates until after 12am on a weeknight.
Step 4: Blog about it.
Step 5: Retrieve sheets from dryer and have nice clean sheets to crash on.
Makes: clean sheets and happy RJs, serves 1.
Now, what happens if you forget step 2!? SUDDENLY YOU ARE BAKING A CAKE OF UNIMAGINABLE AGONY!!! D:<
Eauughghglghgllll... I ended up staying up until like 2:30am yesterday waiting for my sheets to dry. >_< Needless to say I was *quite* tired this morning. D:
I had dorm breakfast of ham and a sunny-side-up egg, with some salty, fishy stewed vegetables (they had shrimp and rubbery clams hidden inside) that I really didn't like in the slightest haha. >_< I guess I'm quite lucky that I like almost all the food I've eaten here, but this morning was definitely a bust QQ. Oh well. I got to work on time and read papers for the whole morning. I am so bad at reading papers it's rather funny, but I've already talked about that particular weakness at length, so I won't go into details haha.
At lunch I ate Murugi curry, which is some sort of Japanese curry that claims to be from another culture due to the presence of chicken in the roux. It was good enough though, and the other options today were not so great, so in contrast it was great! PS. Dear cafeteria, if you're going to serve katsu, please do not charge like 520円 for it (you can keep the single leaf of lettuce and the cruddy sauce if it helps). D:<
After eating I played handiball, and it was 3-on-3, so I quite enjoyed myself. My shoulder really hurt while serving today for some reason so I had to stop after a couple of times. O_O I also rolled my ankle (same side), but not badly to put me out of commission for more than half a minute. I was getting quite worried what else might go wrong with my body during the lunch hour! Luckily that was it (I hope I'm not jinxing myself now haha), and I was able to play without a hitch for the rest of it (thank goodness!).
In the afternoon I read papers some more and started making my presentation slides. Making the slides is much harder this time around, because I have not actually used LDA before (as I have mentioned), meaning I haven't already stressed and stressed over the correctness of my derivations and resultant equations. Also, LDA uses a concept that's new to me, in that it "doesn't estimate the parameters", but I'm not totally sure about what that actually means, as I end up with estimates of the parameters at the end of the day... I am going to try to find out more about that on Tuesday (tomorrow is a holiday).
I stopped work at about 6:30 today, which surprised me, because all day I had been gazing longingly at the clock and I was thinking today was a day when I would actually leave when Kabutoya-san says I should haha. >_< Paper reading and trying to understand the contents is something that really makes you feel each and every minute, but just as it was coming up to about 5:30, I was able to start writing bits of my presentation, and before I knew it an hour had passed!
I walked home again today. I am getting to really like the walk home, except for the Forest of A Thousand Spiders (actually just a series of bushes) crowding the narrow sidewalk before the hydrangea part of the hill from the Tsuushin Kenkyujo). I always get hit in the face with stray silk, and I know one of these days I'm going to have a spider on me and I will not like it one bit. D:<
On the way home I went to the 100円 store, as I am an idiot and had looked at the WRONG STORE yesterday. >_< Somehow I forgot that the 100円 store is bright pink with flashing lights... I am very special sometimes. Anyways, I was able to buy a tape measure and some towels and some wastebaskets, which is totally awesome. I am 99% sure that the towels are going to fall apart in a single wash and will give me rashes and possibly malaria, but I've been meaning to buy towels for a while, and they are the perfect size and were 100円 each! How could I resist!? Once I got home I had dorm dinner of green soba-esque noodles with chilled broth, kimchi and gyoza (and rice and NO MISO SOUP!!!). It was delicious and perfect for summer, and more than made up for the meals of the rest of the day.
After supper I tidied my room a little bit and started blogging. In the midst of blogging Dad and I were able to connect for a nice little video chat. I hadn't really heard his voice properly since I left Canada, so that was quite nice. He and Linda and I chatted about how I was doing and what I was doing, etc. until they had to go to eat breakfast.
When I got back to blogging, I suddenly and spontaneously remembered that having good Internet again means I can listen to music from youtube/grooveshark again! I have been going through Ella Riot withdrawal, and now I can finally get my fix! Thanks for getting me hooked right before going JIUNA. D:< OK OK I admit it's my fault because you tried to introduce me to them months and months ago but I was busy being an apathetic pill haha. I'm actually not sure if Japan's laws on streaming are the same as Canada's. I hope so, or I've just published something rather incriminating hahaha. >_< I can laugh now because I'm not being deported... yet (I *did* do some bad conjugations the other day...). ;D
Anyways, I'm going to go to bed now, as I need to recover from my 2:30am laundry adventure from yesterday (yes yes I know it's technically today hardy-harshutup <3). Night!
Ugh. I have a lovely recipe for all of you to try out.
Step 1: Put sheets into washing machine after dinner to be tidy and responsible and proactive and all that jazz.
Step 2: An hour later move sheets over to dryer.
Step 3: Play Dominion with dormmates until after 12am on a weeknight.
Step 4: Blog about it.
Step 5: Retrieve sheets from dryer and have nice clean sheets to crash on.
Makes: clean sheets and happy RJs, serves 1.
Now, what happens if you forget step 2!? SUDDENLY YOU ARE BAKING A CAKE OF UNIMAGINABLE AGONY!!! D:<
Eauughghglghgllll... I ended up staying up until like 2:30am yesterday waiting for my sheets to dry. >_< Needless to say I was *quite* tired this morning. D:
I had dorm breakfast of ham and a sunny-side-up egg, with some salty, fishy stewed vegetables (they had shrimp and rubbery clams hidden inside) that I really didn't like in the slightest haha. >_< I guess I'm quite lucky that I like almost all the food I've eaten here, but this morning was definitely a bust QQ. Oh well. I got to work on time and read papers for the whole morning. I am so bad at reading papers it's rather funny, but I've already talked about that particular weakness at length, so I won't go into details haha.
At lunch I ate Murugi curry, which is some sort of Japanese curry that claims to be from another culture due to the presence of chicken in the roux. It was good enough though, and the other options today were not so great, so in contrast it was great! PS. Dear cafeteria, if you're going to serve katsu, please do not charge like 520円 for it (you can keep the single leaf of lettuce and the cruddy sauce if it helps). D:<
After eating I played handiball, and it was 3-on-3, so I quite enjoyed myself. My shoulder really hurt while serving today for some reason so I had to stop after a couple of times. O_O I also rolled my ankle (same side), but not badly to put me out of commission for more than half a minute. I was getting quite worried what else might go wrong with my body during the lunch hour! Luckily that was it (I hope I'm not jinxing myself now haha), and I was able to play without a hitch for the rest of it (thank goodness!).
In the afternoon I read papers some more and started making my presentation slides. Making the slides is much harder this time around, because I have not actually used LDA before (as I have mentioned), meaning I haven't already stressed and stressed over the correctness of my derivations and resultant equations. Also, LDA uses a concept that's new to me, in that it "doesn't estimate the parameters", but I'm not totally sure about what that actually means, as I end up with estimates of the parameters at the end of the day... I am going to try to find out more about that on Tuesday (tomorrow is a holiday).
I stopped work at about 6:30 today, which surprised me, because all day I had been gazing longingly at the clock and I was thinking today was a day when I would actually leave when Kabutoya-san says I should haha. >_< Paper reading and trying to understand the contents is something that really makes you feel each and every minute, but just as it was coming up to about 5:30, I was able to start writing bits of my presentation, and before I knew it an hour had passed!
I walked home again today. I am getting to really like the walk home, except for the Forest of A Thousand Spiders (actually just a series of bushes) crowding the narrow sidewalk before the hydrangea part of the hill from the Tsuushin Kenkyujo). I always get hit in the face with stray silk, and I know one of these days I'm going to have a spider on me and I will not like it one bit. D:<
On the way home I went to the 100円 store, as I am an idiot and had looked at the WRONG STORE yesterday. >_< Somehow I forgot that the 100円 store is bright pink with flashing lights... I am very special sometimes. Anyways, I was able to buy a tape measure and some towels and some wastebaskets, which is totally awesome. I am 99% sure that the towels are going to fall apart in a single wash and will give me rashes and possibly malaria, but I've been meaning to buy towels for a while, and they are the perfect size and were 100円 each! How could I resist!? Once I got home I had dorm dinner of green soba-esque noodles with chilled broth, kimchi and gyoza (and rice and NO MISO SOUP!!!). It was delicious and perfect for summer, and more than made up for the meals of the rest of the day.
After supper I tidied my room a little bit and started blogging. In the midst of blogging Dad and I were able to connect for a nice little video chat. I hadn't really heard his voice properly since I left Canada, so that was quite nice. He and Linda and I chatted about how I was doing and what I was doing, etc. until they had to go to eat breakfast.
When I got back to blogging, I suddenly and spontaneously remembered that having good Internet again means I can listen to music from youtube/grooveshark again! I have been going through Ella Riot withdrawal, and now I can finally get my fix! Thanks for getting me hooked right before going JIUNA. D:< OK OK I admit it's my fault because you tried to introduce me to them months and months ago but I was busy being an apathetic pill haha. I'm actually not sure if Japan's laws on streaming are the same as Canada's. I hope so, or I've just published something rather incriminating hahaha. >_< I can laugh now because I'm not being deported... yet (I *did* do some bad conjugations the other day...). ;D
Anyways, I'm going to go to bed now, as I need to recover from my 2:30am laundry adventure from yesterday (yes yes I know it's technically today hardy-harshutup <3). Night!
Saturday, July 16, 2011
So today I taught my computer to predict the future roughly 10% of the time...
July 16: Ahh... The wonders of stats and probability... Shoot!: SUCCESS!
Today I woke up and had dorm breakfast of natto and a salted, baked fish that had reddish flesh, but the skin looked kind of like mackerel. Oh, and miso soup and rice. How could I forget? ;D Secret: I didn't.
I got to work on time and got working on my CGS (collapsed Gibbs sampling) Multinomial Mixture recommender, and by about 2pm I had it behaving rather nicely. Now, wasn't that painless!? Kabutoya-san had supplied me with his own Mixture Model using EM after taking pity on my inability to make mine consistent, and after I had my CGS one together, I took a look at it. I found one part that was different, but it was different theoretically, meaning I had made a mistake in my derivation that he hadn't caught. I implemented the change, and my model seemed to give much more stable results! HOWEVER, when I decided, for the hell of it, to run performance tests on Kabutoya-san's MM, I kept getting very low performance, which must be a mistake, as he said that his was consistently decent. I will ask him about it tomorrow when I report my results for how varying the number of latent topics in my MM with CGS affects performance.
At lunchtime I had curry tsuke-men, which consists of a bowl of chilled ramen noodes served with a bowl of curried ramen broth and various goodies. I liked it, due to the curry-ness, but it was a little too salty to be called "good". I played handiball after eating, and today there were only 6 of us playing, which meant beach-style! Hooray! I was much better at it than 4-on-4, as expected haha. >_<
After lunch, I finished off coding my MM with CGS recommender and reported to Kabutoya-san. He gave me two new papers, tasked me with testing the performance of it with respect to various values of Z (the number of latent topics), and told me that next Tuesday (not this coming) I will make another presentation. My presentation will be on my mixture model with CGS, incremental PLSA (probabilistic latent semantic analysis, a cousin of my mixture model and a previous topic of study, as well as the subject of today's new papers), and LDA (latent Dirichlet allocation) using CGS. Kabutoya-san says that the LDA part of the presentation is actually the most important, as many people in PIG (my group within the lab) are very interested in LDA, but do not have the time to study up on it, especially given that the papers laying them out are in English (I don't think there are Japanese equivalents). I am a little apprehensive about this, because as far as I understand, I will essentially be lecturing on it, despite having no practical experience and having only been introduced to it in the past week or so. >_< Presuure, pressure. Bleagh. At least it's also an exciting way to give back haha (I'll be focusing on that to avoid freaking out completely).
I spent the rest of the day reading papers and writing and twiddling with performance tests. My CGS MM runs much faster than Kabutoya-san's PLSA and my EM MM, so I have written a totally monster test for it, haha. I'm varying Z from 10 to 100 by steps of 5, and each value will have 5 trials (as, like EM, CGS is an approximation algorithm that yields different results on different trials). I hope I haven't gotten overzealous and that it's done by tomorrow morning haha.
I got kicked out of the office at 6:30 today. Unfortunately I will have to stop trying to stay late, as today Kabutoya-san said that the manager (whoever that may be) could actually get angry if I stay truly late. Yikes! I will have to make a point of leaving by 6:15-ish in the future. I suspect I will be breaking this rule a lot though, as when you're debugging and you have an idea you want to try it NOW! And it always takes about three times as long as you'd expect to implement the change haha. >_<
I walked home from work and tried to buy a tape measure for measuring my suitcase at the dollar store, but no such luck was to be found. D: I am going make a quick trip to Seiyu on either Monday (if it's open on the holiday) or Wednesday/Thursday. I have verified that they close at 8pm on Sunday, so tomorrow is not an option.
At the dorm I ate dorm dinner of ground beef in green peppers, harusame with various chopped pale vegetables, tiny fish on grated daikon and miso soup with puffy tofu (my favourite variant ;D). Niconico-san (I really need to get to know his name >_<) was there heating up his own dinner from elsewhere, and I asked him about board games. He said that Yao (also from the dormitory) is the board-game dude, who arrived shortly after Niconico-san mentioned him. It turns out that he bought Dominion last week! Haha awesomeee! He just got Seaside today and wanted to play, but Niconico-san was not available. They said that they will come get me when they do end up playing, which is super exciting! It turns out Niconico-san liked Age of Empires a lot in high school, and was very interested in being shown StarCraft at some point! ;D My life here is getting very, very exciting haha! I'm sure you can tell this by the number of exclamation points present in that last paragraph. ;D
I thought I was done for the night; sitting down and blogging, when literally as I was writing the last paragraph, Yao-san appeared and said he had found different players for Dominion! It's now 12:30, meaning that I just played Dominion for like, 2.5 hours haha. We only played 3 games, because they're mostly newer and they take long turns (that and the first game was a Throne Room/Pirate Ship/Ghost Ship/Thief with no Moat/Lighthouse snoozefest that ended with ONE province purchased). I won 1/3 games, as I grossly mismanaged my Wharf/Fishing Village/Merchant Ship (I over-Wharfed, typical me haha) against mass Treasury in the second game and lost by 2 points. >_< In the last game I cleaned up with a 8+ point lead by abusing ridiculous Tactician/Outpost/Warehouse/Remodel craziness (playing an Outpost on a Tactician turn and then playing the Tactician on the Outpost turn while denying other people Provinces by remodeling my own into more Provinces hahaha). I had a really good time, and I hope they did too, as I would LOVE to play again. They were picking up on my Remodel usage, so maybe they will keep me around to steal my card combos at least haha. Hopefully they will listen to me next time when I say that Throne Room/Pirate Ship/Ghost Ship/Thief with no defense is not a recipe for good times! ;D
For now, I'd best mention random things about the day before heading straight to bed to be ready for work tomorrow (paper reading, my greatest weakness >_<;;). First, there was another earthquake last night when I was in my room. I seem to recall hearing that regular earthquakes happen in clusters (which would make sense), and I believe if there are many in "quick" succession, I should get worried, as apparently earthquake "swarms" are a warning sign for larger quakes. The trouble is that I don't know what "quick" and "swarm" mean haha. For now I'm not worried though, as I'm pretty sure that two minor ones in a week is not a swarm haha. Second, there is a man (at least I'm guessing it's a man hahah >_<) at the office who sneezes like Uncle Neil! Well, obviously he's a little quieter, or you'd know about it back in Canada (especially the Kootenays), right? ;D
Anyways, I think that's all for today. Hopefully I didn't forget something major due to my blogging being interrupted by hours of Dominion. Night!
Today I woke up and had dorm breakfast of natto and a salted, baked fish that had reddish flesh, but the skin looked kind of like mackerel. Oh, and miso soup and rice. How could I forget? ;D Secret: I didn't.
I got to work on time and got working on my CGS (collapsed Gibbs sampling) Multinomial Mixture recommender, and by about 2pm I had it behaving rather nicely. Now, wasn't that painless!? Kabutoya-san had supplied me with his own Mixture Model using EM after taking pity on my inability to make mine consistent, and after I had my CGS one together, I took a look at it. I found one part that was different, but it was different theoretically, meaning I had made a mistake in my derivation that he hadn't caught. I implemented the change, and my model seemed to give much more stable results! HOWEVER, when I decided, for the hell of it, to run performance tests on Kabutoya-san's MM, I kept getting very low performance, which must be a mistake, as he said that his was consistently decent. I will ask him about it tomorrow when I report my results for how varying the number of latent topics in my MM with CGS affects performance.
At lunchtime I had curry tsuke-men, which consists of a bowl of chilled ramen noodes served with a bowl of curried ramen broth and various goodies. I liked it, due to the curry-ness, but it was a little too salty to be called "good". I played handiball after eating, and today there were only 6 of us playing, which meant beach-style! Hooray! I was much better at it than 4-on-4, as expected haha. >_<
After lunch, I finished off coding my MM with CGS recommender and reported to Kabutoya-san. He gave me two new papers, tasked me with testing the performance of it with respect to various values of Z (the number of latent topics), and told me that next Tuesday (not this coming) I will make another presentation. My presentation will be on my mixture model with CGS, incremental PLSA (probabilistic latent semantic analysis, a cousin of my mixture model and a previous topic of study, as well as the subject of today's new papers), and LDA (latent Dirichlet allocation) using CGS. Kabutoya-san says that the LDA part of the presentation is actually the most important, as many people in PIG (my group within the lab) are very interested in LDA, but do not have the time to study up on it, especially given that the papers laying them out are in English (I don't think there are Japanese equivalents). I am a little apprehensive about this, because as far as I understand, I will essentially be lecturing on it, despite having no practical experience and having only been introduced to it in the past week or so. >_< Presuure, pressure. Bleagh. At least it's also an exciting way to give back haha (I'll be focusing on that to avoid freaking out completely).
I spent the rest of the day reading papers and writing and twiddling with performance tests. My CGS MM runs much faster than Kabutoya-san's PLSA and my EM MM, so I have written a totally monster test for it, haha. I'm varying Z from 10 to 100 by steps of 5, and each value will have 5 trials (as, like EM, CGS is an approximation algorithm that yields different results on different trials). I hope I haven't gotten overzealous and that it's done by tomorrow morning haha.
I got kicked out of the office at 6:30 today. Unfortunately I will have to stop trying to stay late, as today Kabutoya-san said that the manager (whoever that may be) could actually get angry if I stay truly late. Yikes! I will have to make a point of leaving by 6:15-ish in the future. I suspect I will be breaking this rule a lot though, as when you're debugging and you have an idea you want to try it NOW! And it always takes about three times as long as you'd expect to implement the change haha. >_<
I walked home from work and tried to buy a tape measure for measuring my suitcase at the dollar store, but no such luck was to be found. D: I am going make a quick trip to Seiyu on either Monday (if it's open on the holiday) or Wednesday/Thursday. I have verified that they close at 8pm on Sunday, so tomorrow is not an option.
At the dorm I ate dorm dinner of ground beef in green peppers, harusame with various chopped pale vegetables, tiny fish on grated daikon and miso soup with puffy tofu (my favourite variant ;D). Niconico-san (I really need to get to know his name >_<) was there heating up his own dinner from elsewhere, and I asked him about board games. He said that Yao (also from the dormitory) is the board-game dude, who arrived shortly after Niconico-san mentioned him. It turns out that he bought Dominion last week! Haha awesomeee! He just got Seaside today and wanted to play, but Niconico-san was not available. They said that they will come get me when they do end up playing, which is super exciting! It turns out Niconico-san liked Age of Empires a lot in high school, and was very interested in being shown StarCraft at some point! ;D My life here is getting very, very exciting haha! I'm sure you can tell this by the number of exclamation points present in that last paragraph. ;D
I thought I was done for the night; sitting down and blogging, when literally as I was writing the last paragraph, Yao-san appeared and said he had found different players for Dominion! It's now 12:30, meaning that I just played Dominion for like, 2.5 hours haha. We only played 3 games, because they're mostly newer and they take long turns (that and the first game was a Throne Room/Pirate Ship/Ghost Ship/Thief with no Moat/Lighthouse snoozefest that ended with ONE province purchased). I won 1/3 games, as I grossly mismanaged my Wharf/Fishing Village/Merchant Ship (I over-Wharfed, typical me haha) against mass Treasury in the second game and lost by 2 points. >_< In the last game I cleaned up with a 8+ point lead by abusing ridiculous Tactician/Outpost/Warehouse/Remodel craziness (playing an Outpost on a Tactician turn and then playing the Tactician on the Outpost turn while denying other people Provinces by remodeling my own into more Provinces hahaha). I had a really good time, and I hope they did too, as I would LOVE to play again. They were picking up on my Remodel usage, so maybe they will keep me around to steal my card combos at least haha. Hopefully they will listen to me next time when I say that Throne Room/Pirate Ship/Ghost Ship/Thief with no defense is not a recipe for good times! ;D
For now, I'd best mention random things about the day before heading straight to bed to be ready for work tomorrow (paper reading, my greatest weakness >_<;;). First, there was another earthquake last night when I was in my room. I seem to recall hearing that regular earthquakes happen in clusters (which would make sense), and I believe if there are many in "quick" succession, I should get worried, as apparently earthquake "swarms" are a warning sign for larger quakes. The trouble is that I don't know what "quick" and "swarm" mean haha. For now I'm not worried though, as I'm pretty sure that two minor ones in a week is not a swarm haha. Second, there is a man (at least I'm guessing it's a man hahah >_<) at the office who sneezes like Uncle Neil! Well, obviously he's a little quieter, or you'd know about it back in Canada (especially the Kootenays), right? ;D
Anyways, I think that's all for today. Hopefully I didn't forget something major due to my blogging being interrupted by hours of Dominion. Night!
Friday, July 15, 2011
Handiball is a brilliant device for keeping sleep-deprived employees awake in the afternoon
July 15: Handiball Victory!
Bleagh... Yesterday I didn't get to sleep until after 2:30AM. >_< I was rather tired for most of the morning as a result, but I did end up getting to work on time. I ate dorm breakfast of stewed ground beef and cabbage with chikuwa stuffed with cucumbers and green peppers. I quite liked all of it (including the miso soup and rice haha).
At work I set about deriving the important equations for using Collapsed Gibbs Sampling in my mixture model properly. It was relatively straightforward, but it takes quite a while because I want to be as careful as possible. I showed my work to Kabutoya-san and he had some minor adjustments to make (mostly notational, as the paper that I was working from uses the world's crappiest notation), but on the whole my derivation passed inspection.
At lunch I ate Hiyashi ramen, which is good, but their broth is always too salty! I think I have quite enough salt in my diet already without all the extra added unnecessarily into the broth. I can understand what Kabutoya-san and co. mean when they complain about the cafeteria a little bit more now, as I've been mimicking what they're eating a little bit of late. I do find it strange, however, that they appear to choose the foods that I have found the cafeteria to do the most poorly. >_<
After eating I played handiball, and I was alright but not great, and unfortunately my serve was horrid today. There was quite a crowd at the handiball court today, which was kind of fun due to raucous observers aplenty.
In the afternoon I coded my CGS mixture model recommender, and I actually managed to "complete" it at around 5pm, starting from about 2:30 (I had some more stuff to ask Kabutoya-san, who was away from his desk for quite a while, so I read up on some relevant concepts on Wikipedia in the meantime). "Complete" is in quotation marks, because currently it doesn't work. I dunno man, 0.0/infinity sounds like a perfectly reasonable value for a probability to me. >_< I guess I'll find out tomorrow what that's about haha...
At 5:30 I had my second formal handiball game! Our team has about 9 players on it, so I only play for about half the time. I served really, really poorly today, which was really annoying because that's kind of my selling feature, by my own evaluation. I at least was able to contribute in other ways though, as my average-for-North-America height is a rather unfair advantage. >_< Our team ended up winning 2-0, which is doubly nice, as Kabutoya-san said that the other team is actually an alright team.
After the game I went back to my desk and made as little noise as possible while working, and I was able to stay until about 6:40 before Kabutoya-san remembered to kick me out hahah. Damnit! I wanted to get my recommender to a state at least somewhat resembling operational on the first day (just for pride's sake), but it wasn't in the stars. D: I walked home, and it was quite pleasant, because I was still in my short and T-shirt from volleyball. Did you know slacks are not the best possible wear for walking up and down hills? ;D
I got home and had dorm supper of tofu with a green onion, shiso and tiny crustacean (shrimpy things, possibly krill?) topping, as well as some rather bland chicken on rice (with miso soup). I quite liked the tofu thing, as it was cool and very slightly salty and had a very strong shiso flavour, all of which are perfect for summer (when I got back to my room from work the thermometer on my clock read at slightly above 33C, ew).
Oh, today I found out that I have Monday off! Turns out it's "Sea Day", which is a holiday for the Emperor's birthday. I wonder what I'll do for it... ;D I actually did ask Nishida-san if there are any actual celebrations for Sea Day, but he said that there isn't much (and nothing traditional, certainly), as the holiday is new, and will disappear when there's a new Emperor with a different birthday.
I'd best go to bed soon to avoid falling further behind in sleep. Night!
Bleagh... Yesterday I didn't get to sleep until after 2:30AM. >_< I was rather tired for most of the morning as a result, but I did end up getting to work on time. I ate dorm breakfast of stewed ground beef and cabbage with chikuwa stuffed with cucumbers and green peppers. I quite liked all of it (including the miso soup and rice haha).
At work I set about deriving the important equations for using Collapsed Gibbs Sampling in my mixture model properly. It was relatively straightforward, but it takes quite a while because I want to be as careful as possible. I showed my work to Kabutoya-san and he had some minor adjustments to make (mostly notational, as the paper that I was working from uses the world's crappiest notation), but on the whole my derivation passed inspection.
At lunch I ate Hiyashi ramen, which is good, but their broth is always too salty! I think I have quite enough salt in my diet already without all the extra added unnecessarily into the broth. I can understand what Kabutoya-san and co. mean when they complain about the cafeteria a little bit more now, as I've been mimicking what they're eating a little bit of late. I do find it strange, however, that they appear to choose the foods that I have found the cafeteria to do the most poorly. >_<
After eating I played handiball, and I was alright but not great, and unfortunately my serve was horrid today. There was quite a crowd at the handiball court today, which was kind of fun due to raucous observers aplenty.
In the afternoon I coded my CGS mixture model recommender, and I actually managed to "complete" it at around 5pm, starting from about 2:30 (I had some more stuff to ask Kabutoya-san, who was away from his desk for quite a while, so I read up on some relevant concepts on Wikipedia in the meantime). "Complete" is in quotation marks, because currently it doesn't work. I dunno man, 0.0/infinity sounds like a perfectly reasonable value for a probability to me. >_< I guess I'll find out tomorrow what that's about haha...
At 5:30 I had my second formal handiball game! Our team has about 9 players on it, so I only play for about half the time. I served really, really poorly today, which was really annoying because that's kind of my selling feature, by my own evaluation. I at least was able to contribute in other ways though, as my average-for-North-America height is a rather unfair advantage. >_< Our team ended up winning 2-0, which is doubly nice, as Kabutoya-san said that the other team is actually an alright team.
After the game I went back to my desk and made as little noise as possible while working, and I was able to stay until about 6:40 before Kabutoya-san remembered to kick me out hahah. Damnit! I wanted to get my recommender to a state at least somewhat resembling operational on the first day (just for pride's sake), but it wasn't in the stars. D: I walked home, and it was quite pleasant, because I was still in my short and T-shirt from volleyball. Did you know slacks are not the best possible wear for walking up and down hills? ;D
I got home and had dorm supper of tofu with a green onion, shiso and tiny crustacean (shrimpy things, possibly krill?) topping, as well as some rather bland chicken on rice (with miso soup). I quite liked the tofu thing, as it was cool and very slightly salty and had a very strong shiso flavour, all of which are perfect for summer (when I got back to my room from work the thermometer on my clock read at slightly above 33C, ew).
Oh, today I found out that I have Monday off! Turns out it's "Sea Day", which is a holiday for the Emperor's birthday. I wonder what I'll do for it... ;D I actually did ask Nishida-san if there are any actual celebrations for Sea Day, but he said that there isn't much (and nothing traditional, certainly), as the holiday is new, and will disappear when there's a new Emperor with a different birthday.
I'd best go to bed soon to avoid falling further behind in sleep. Night!
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Dear North America, here's a novel concept: selling produce that's actually ripe! D:
July 14: Produce!
Today I got up at around 9:30 and took a shower before heading out to get breakfast. Since my "weekend" is actually in the middle of the week, I was able to go to the greengrocer that's never open! I got 5 plums, a bunch of bananas and three good-sized carrots for 450円. I then went to the Yokosan and restocked on senbei and milk and got 2 korokke for breakfast (they cost 67円 instead of 50円 today). I very much enjoyed having fewer korokke and more light food for breakfast, and I think my body liked it too, as I felt pretty darn good all day. I had a nice chat with Mom and Jiuna and after that I played some StarCraft with Kevin. Unfortunately I really, really sucked. >_< I'm not sure if it's the whole not-playing-for-a-month thing, or if it's the difference in keyboard/mouse/monitor, but I was amazingly terrible. D:
After getting my teeth kicked in by Kevin, I headed out to Akihabara for the day to play some SINGLE PLAYER GAMES. ;D Actually I tried my hand at 3rd Strike against people who were much better than me, but I fared much better than I thought I would. The players I typically play with, and as it turned out the ones at least a little better than them as well, have very lopsided game skills. They can do these great combos and can parry stuff like crazy, but I can often get them to around half life just by poking. If I could learn how to capitalize on a damn knockdown, I'd be golden! >_< The same goes for Melty Blood. The players I play against can do 3000+ damage combos, but they are so damn predictable that the only reason I lose to them is because I get less than a third of the damage off a clean hit. Please keep in mind that I am playing against people who are really, really terrible (like me).
I went to Yellow Submarine (a hobby shop) in search of Dominion, but it is so not even the right kind of store. >_< They've got like, figures, models and collectible card games only from what I saw. I will have to make a trip to Moebius in Suidobashi, but first I have to figure out how to get there!
I played a little Mushihimesama after that, but I was really terrible, so I had to stop. I used the break to go eat dinner at Meryl Streep Presents Possibly Maid Cafe Curry (it's not actually called that). I had the MEGA katsu curry again, which I should probably stop doing, because it's a bit of a white-knuckle affair towards the end. >_< What can I do though!? It's curry!
After dinner I played more Mushihime and was luckily much, much better. I didn't manage to set a personal record, but I did get a decent way into stage 5, which is not something I am able to do often. It's a shame that that's the case, because stage 5 is basically PARTY STAGE, in that there are huuuuge amounts of bullets and enemies flying everywhere, and at almost all times you are shooting at a type of enemy-producing structure that when you kill it, it turns all the bullets on the screen into point crystals. It's totally wild, and there's gold and purple flying everywhere, and I can hear the explosions through my earplugs haha. Ah yes, earplugs. I may have forgotten to mention that I now wear earplugs when in arcades, as they are too loud and I like being able to hear. I'm not sure what to do about the cigarette smoke. Can Jiuna bring me a gas mask when she comes?
After getting to stage 5 in Mushihime, I decided to try out the MAX mode that seems to be the one that most people play (even scrubs like me who play on Original, not Maniac or Ultra). Oh my god! I wonder if I'll be able to go back... It turns out that MAX mode is actually secretly PARTY MODE! Hahaha! It introduces a combo counter, and you start off will maximum firepower, and you only get one bomb per life as oppposed to three. However, you will automatically use your bomb if you get hit (instead of dying), which turns the whole affair into ONE BIG PARTY.
I think despite the silly PARTY-ness of it, MAX mode is actually really good for learning the game. Because the scores are so vastly inflated (meaning you get the 2 point-based extra lives easy peasy) and because of the auto-bomb, I was able to get to Stage 5 pretty much no sweat, and was more daring in my approach to bullet patterns as I didn't have the fear of wasting lives. MAX mode also introduces more bullets at some parts of the game, which is also really nice, as stages 1 and 2 have sort of degraded into "Will I lose my focus badly enough to fail to No-Miss No-Bomb clear these or not?" (though they were still a bit dreary on MAX). I'm sad that I only experimented with PART--I mean MAX mode on my very last play before leaving Akiba. I am looking forward to it next time though!
Also, I got the daily 2nd place high score for Normal MAX mode at HEY! on my final play, which is something that makes me very happy, despite it being somewhat akin to winning a silver medal in a tricycle race with possibly as few as 4 other participants. For those of you scratching your heads at that, I play on the easier game setting, on the less prominently featured machine, and I can't confirm that more than 4 other people even TRIED to get a high score, because only 5 high scores are displayed. But still! It's HEY!! Hopefully QNT will one day rule the leaderboards of ULTRA MAX mode with scores that can only be concisely expressed using the Ackermann function (sooo not gonna happen).
On the train ride home my job was apparently to be a pillow for the woman next to me. >_< The first time her head bumped into my arm she acted super embarrassed and straightened up and fiddled with her belongings, but I am just too damn comfortable (nice and squishy D:), and by Kawasaki she was totally sawing logs. She didn't drool, so I guess I don't mind, but it was a little wierd.
I have discovered a wonderful use of the 2 hour trip to and from Akihabara! Today before leaving I copied two chapter's worth of vocab from my Japanese textbook, and I just reviewed it over and over and over again for the whole ride there and back haha. Next time I will prepare better and bring more! The other girl beside me (not sleepyhead, obviously), showed me up by pulling out her English practice that was like, suuuper well done. >_< I seriously didn't detect ANY grammatical errors, and the casual speech portions of it even sounded pretty natural (there were a few awkward sentences here and there).
Apparently Japanese people have a rather incorrect understanding of the North American use of the word "diet". I have heard/read on two occasions now that they think that North Americans don't use "diet" to mean cutting back on fattening foods or food in general. We most definitely do mean that; don't let the fact that many people on "diets" don't adhere to them lead you to believe otherwise! I was considering pointing this out to her, along with the fact that "Jazzercise" should probably be capitalized, but then I realized she was on the train to YOKOCHUU, and might be at the point where the next white guy that randomly starts talking to her gets a free macing, no questions asked. I hope she doesn't lose marks or whatever due to her non-capitalization of "Jazzercise", but safety first folks.
In Yokochuu I didn't hang around to play Project Diva, because the bus to my dorm was due to arrive just a few minutes after I got to the stop. I came straight back home and tried to find out more on how to play Elena properly (QQ no one plays her...) before blogging.
It's long past when I should be going to bed now, so I'll bid you all goodnight and hope I can get up early tomorrow (fat chance haha).
Night!
Today I got up at around 9:30 and took a shower before heading out to get breakfast. Since my "weekend" is actually in the middle of the week, I was able to go to the greengrocer that's never open! I got 5 plums, a bunch of bananas and three good-sized carrots for 450円. I then went to the Yokosan and restocked on senbei and milk and got 2 korokke for breakfast (they cost 67円 instead of 50円 today). I very much enjoyed having fewer korokke and more light food for breakfast, and I think my body liked it too, as I felt pretty darn good all day. I had a nice chat with Mom and Jiuna and after that I played some StarCraft with Kevin. Unfortunately I really, really sucked. >_< I'm not sure if it's the whole not-playing-for-a-month thing, or if it's the difference in keyboard/mouse/monitor, but I was amazingly terrible. D:
After getting my teeth kicked in by Kevin, I headed out to Akihabara for the day to play some SINGLE PLAYER GAMES. ;D Actually I tried my hand at 3rd Strike against people who were much better than me, but I fared much better than I thought I would. The players I typically play with, and as it turned out the ones at least a little better than them as well, have very lopsided game skills. They can do these great combos and can parry stuff like crazy, but I can often get them to around half life just by poking. If I could learn how to capitalize on a damn knockdown, I'd be golden! >_< The same goes for Melty Blood. The players I play against can do 3000+ damage combos, but they are so damn predictable that the only reason I lose to them is because I get less than a third of the damage off a clean hit. Please keep in mind that I am playing against people who are really, really terrible (like me).
I went to Yellow Submarine (a hobby shop) in search of Dominion, but it is so not even the right kind of store. >_< They've got like, figures, models and collectible card games only from what I saw. I will have to make a trip to Moebius in Suidobashi, but first I have to figure out how to get there!
I played a little Mushihimesama after that, but I was really terrible, so I had to stop. I used the break to go eat dinner at Meryl Streep Presents Possibly Maid Cafe Curry (it's not actually called that). I had the MEGA katsu curry again, which I should probably stop doing, because it's a bit of a white-knuckle affair towards the end. >_< What can I do though!? It's curry!
After dinner I played more Mushihime and was luckily much, much better. I didn't manage to set a personal record, but I did get a decent way into stage 5, which is not something I am able to do often. It's a shame that that's the case, because stage 5 is basically PARTY STAGE, in that there are huuuuge amounts of bullets and enemies flying everywhere, and at almost all times you are shooting at a type of enemy-producing structure that when you kill it, it turns all the bullets on the screen into point crystals. It's totally wild, and there's gold and purple flying everywhere, and I can hear the explosions through my earplugs haha. Ah yes, earplugs. I may have forgotten to mention that I now wear earplugs when in arcades, as they are too loud and I like being able to hear. I'm not sure what to do about the cigarette smoke. Can Jiuna bring me a gas mask when she comes?
After getting to stage 5 in Mushihime, I decided to try out the MAX mode that seems to be the one that most people play (even scrubs like me who play on Original, not Maniac or Ultra). Oh my god! I wonder if I'll be able to go back... It turns out that MAX mode is actually secretly PARTY MODE! Hahaha! It introduces a combo counter, and you start off will maximum firepower, and you only get one bomb per life as oppposed to three. However, you will automatically use your bomb if you get hit (instead of dying), which turns the whole affair into ONE BIG PARTY.
I think despite the silly PARTY-ness of it, MAX mode is actually really good for learning the game. Because the scores are so vastly inflated (meaning you get the 2 point-based extra lives easy peasy) and because of the auto-bomb, I was able to get to Stage 5 pretty much no sweat, and was more daring in my approach to bullet patterns as I didn't have the fear of wasting lives. MAX mode also introduces more bullets at some parts of the game, which is also really nice, as stages 1 and 2 have sort of degraded into "Will I lose my focus badly enough to fail to No-Miss No-Bomb clear these or not?" (though they were still a bit dreary on MAX). I'm sad that I only experimented with PART--I mean MAX mode on my very last play before leaving Akiba. I am looking forward to it next time though!
Also, I got the daily 2nd place high score for Normal MAX mode at HEY! on my final play, which is something that makes me very happy, despite it being somewhat akin to winning a silver medal in a tricycle race with possibly as few as 4 other participants. For those of you scratching your heads at that, I play on the easier game setting, on the less prominently featured machine, and I can't confirm that more than 4 other people even TRIED to get a high score, because only 5 high scores are displayed. But still! It's HEY!! Hopefully QNT will one day rule the leaderboards of ULTRA MAX mode with scores that can only be concisely expressed using the Ackermann function (sooo not gonna happen).
On the train ride home my job was apparently to be a pillow for the woman next to me. >_< The first time her head bumped into my arm she acted super embarrassed and straightened up and fiddled with her belongings, but I am just too damn comfortable (nice and squishy D:), and by Kawasaki she was totally sawing logs. She didn't drool, so I guess I don't mind, but it was a little wierd.
I have discovered a wonderful use of the 2 hour trip to and from Akihabara! Today before leaving I copied two chapter's worth of vocab from my Japanese textbook, and I just reviewed it over and over and over again for the whole ride there and back haha. Next time I will prepare better and bring more! The other girl beside me (not sleepyhead, obviously), showed me up by pulling out her English practice that was like, suuuper well done. >_< I seriously didn't detect ANY grammatical errors, and the casual speech portions of it even sounded pretty natural (there were a few awkward sentences here and there).
Apparently Japanese people have a rather incorrect understanding of the North American use of the word "diet". I have heard/read on two occasions now that they think that North Americans don't use "diet" to mean cutting back on fattening foods or food in general. We most definitely do mean that; don't let the fact that many people on "diets" don't adhere to them lead you to believe otherwise! I was considering pointing this out to her, along with the fact that "Jazzercise" should probably be capitalized, but then I realized she was on the train to YOKOCHUU, and might be at the point where the next white guy that randomly starts talking to her gets a free macing, no questions asked. I hope she doesn't lose marks or whatever due to her non-capitalization of "Jazzercise", but safety first folks.
In Yokochuu I didn't hang around to play Project Diva, because the bus to my dorm was due to arrive just a few minutes after I got to the stop. I came straight back home and tried to find out more on how to play Elena properly (QQ no one plays her...) before blogging.
It's long past when I should be going to bed now, so I'll bid you all goodnight and hope I can get up early tomorrow (fat chance haha).
Night!
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
INTERNET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
July 12: INTERNET!!!
Today I stayed home and slept in niiiiice and late. :D I got up at about 11:30 and went to the Yokosan to buy lunch (korokke are on sale again! Yippee!), which is always disheartening, because they have some good looking food, but it's lying out on a table! I'm pretty sure unagi should be refrigerated... Also, they charge WAAAAY too much for everything other than korokke. Today I saw a small box of RICE priced at OVER 250円! That's ridiculous! I'll stick to my korokke, thanks. I also got some milk, which is also nice and cheap (relatively speaking). I came home and called NTT to troubleshoot my Internet problems. The lady answering the phone was very helpful and told me that the little black line->phone converter that the diagrams in the things they sent me showed me using was the problem. Once I removed that from the works and just plugged the line into the jack (it fits as well as the phone one did, despite being a different size...) my Internet showed up. >_< Damnit! Oh well, I now have Internet, so all past grief is immediately forgotten.
I tested out my Internet by torrenting the Eclipse IDE, and I got up to about 2.1MB/s, which is waaaay faster than I ever got at home. I spent the remainder of the day at home catching up on stuff that I had missed due to my crappy connection. Being able to watch a 5 minute YouTube video in less than 15 minutes is very, very nice. >_<
I planned on going to the izakaya down the street for dinner, but when I went to go there, they were closed. I hope that they are OK, and that closing on Wednesdays is just what they do for some reason. I'm pretty sure they were open other weeknights, but I could have mistaken Saturday or Sunday for a weeknight, as they're in the middle of my work week. Instead I had to settle for LAWSON STATION katsu-don, because there doesn't seem to be that much around Ikkidzuka that stays open past 7. >_<
I ate my katsu-don while watching StarCraft matches that unfortunately resulted in Huk's elimination from GSL (he's Canadian and a Protoss player, so I like to cheer for him). I looked up where to buy board games in Tokyo, but it looks like they're hella expensive. Moebius Games in Suidobashi priced Dominion at 6800円, which is like twice the price in Canada. >_< I am going to try Yellow Submarine in Akiba tomorrow, and see if they have either Smallworld or Dominion for a slightly more sane price. I would love to be able to show either of them to Fujimura-san and Nishida-san, not to mention the Niconico user on my floor in my dorm.
Sorry about the short post today; I don't have much to talk about because I just hung around all day in my room basking in the wonder of having proper Internet again haha. Tomorrow I will be going to Akiba, so hopefully I will be able to relate my (mis)adventures there to you then.
Night!
Today I stayed home and slept in niiiiice and late. :D I got up at about 11:30 and went to the Yokosan to buy lunch (korokke are on sale again! Yippee!), which is always disheartening, because they have some good looking food, but it's lying out on a table! I'm pretty sure unagi should be refrigerated... Also, they charge WAAAAY too much for everything other than korokke. Today I saw a small box of RICE priced at OVER 250円! That's ridiculous! I'll stick to my korokke, thanks. I also got some milk, which is also nice and cheap (relatively speaking). I came home and called NTT to troubleshoot my Internet problems. The lady answering the phone was very helpful and told me that the little black line->phone converter that the diagrams in the things they sent me showed me using was the problem. Once I removed that from the works and just plugged the line into the jack (it fits as well as the phone one did, despite being a different size...) my Internet showed up. >_< Damnit! Oh well, I now have Internet, so all past grief is immediately forgotten.
I tested out my Internet by torrenting the Eclipse IDE, and I got up to about 2.1MB/s, which is waaaay faster than I ever got at home. I spent the remainder of the day at home catching up on stuff that I had missed due to my crappy connection. Being able to watch a 5 minute YouTube video in less than 15 minutes is very, very nice. >_<
I planned on going to the izakaya down the street for dinner, but when I went to go there, they were closed. I hope that they are OK, and that closing on Wednesdays is just what they do for some reason. I'm pretty sure they were open other weeknights, but I could have mistaken Saturday or Sunday for a weeknight, as they're in the middle of my work week. Instead I had to settle for LAWSON STATION katsu-don, because there doesn't seem to be that much around Ikkidzuka that stays open past 7. >_<
I ate my katsu-don while watching StarCraft matches that unfortunately resulted in Huk's elimination from GSL (he's Canadian and a Protoss player, so I like to cheer for him). I looked up where to buy board games in Tokyo, but it looks like they're hella expensive. Moebius Games in Suidobashi priced Dominion at 6800円, which is like twice the price in Canada. >_< I am going to try Yellow Submarine in Akiba tomorrow, and see if they have either Smallworld or Dominion for a slightly more sane price. I would love to be able to show either of them to Fujimura-san and Nishida-san, not to mention the Niconico user on my floor in my dorm.
Sorry about the short post today; I don't have much to talk about because I just hung around all day in my room basking in the wonder of having proper Internet again haha. Tomorrow I will be going to Akiba, so hopefully I will be able to relate my (mis)adventures there to you then.
Night!
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
I'd call it a "tabekai" instead, but I didn't eat much either
July 12: Presentation Time!
Ugh... Last night I checked the clock when I turned out my light and it was 11:00. Three hours later, I was still awake. >_< Bleagh. I felt pretty shitty this morning as a result, but I managed to get to work on time (certainly no running though). I ate dorm breakfast of fake crab salad and pork with stewed (soy?) beans, both of which were pretty good, though I'm still not terribly partial to the flavour of fake crab by itself.
In the morning at work I reviewed my presentation slides and looked over the LDA and Gibbs sampling papers again. My next task is to implement Gibbs sampling to estimate the parameters for my multinomial mixture (instead of EM). I spent some time on a side-task, which was to determine how to use LDA with Gibbs to make recommendations, which is a rather short task to do mindlessly, but I tried to actually understand it, which ended up taking a fair while. I was ultimately unsuccessful, but my efforts paid off when Kabutoya-san explained the conceptual aspect of recommending with LDA and I had sufficient familiarity with the material that I understood what he was talking about (or at least I think I did haha). Amazingly enough, my tests from last night hadn't actually finished by the time I got in this morning. I timed them pretty much perfectly though (totally by accident), as it turned out that by the time I had finished entering and formatting the data that was ready when I got in (trials for latent variables Z=10, 20, ..., 90), the data for Z=100 was ready haha.
At lunch I ate some kind of noodle thing that was cold noodles on the side, which you dip into warm broth that has wakame and an egg brick and some other stuff. It wasn't that great actually, but I can see that if someone other than the cafeteria did it it could be good hahaha. After eating I played handiball with my coworkers, which was silly and fun as always. There were a LOT of people playing today, which makes 4-on-4 better. When there are a lot of people, you're bound to get some jokers in the bunch, and some humour can permeate the language barrier without even trying haha.
In the afternoon I gave my presentation, which turned out to be longer and significantly more stressful than I'd imagined, because they asked real questions at the end! D: Luckily I feel like my answers were half-decent, and some of the people who were asking questions later complimented me on my presentation, but that could just be them being polite. They unfortunately had a lot of fodder for difficult questions, because my mixture model had a really, really terrible result on one of my trials, and I had been highlighting all the minimum accuracy runs in bold red text. I of course got asked "how come your mixture model can have such bad performance?", and unfortunately my answer was essentially that I don't know, but I did offer some credible sources of problems that could have combined for a "perfect failure". When I implement CGS (it might just be Gibbs, not collapsed Gibbs in this case, I'm not yet sure) for my mixture model, I hope for it to work beautifully, as that will demonstrate that the problem was likely a result of the convergence of my EM algorithm on a bad local maximum, and not just some random bug that I couldn't find.
After my presentation I worked more on understanding LDA and CGS, and by the end of the day I was feeling pretty decent about my grasp of CGS (which is the more pertinent subject at the moment). Unfortunately this was shaken as Kabutoya-san pointed out a problem with my derivation of a recommendation from my mixture model using CGS, which involved something I had completely not forseen. He seemed to think that it was fair for me to miss that point though, as the information that changes from LDA (the model that my paper on CGS works on) when going to a multinomial mixture is kind of buried amidst gamma functions and subscripts haha. I only had about half an hour to try to wrap my head around the implications of the change Kabutoya-san pointed out before I needed to leave for the welcome party, so at present I don't know how drastically my derivation will need to change.
When I was getting on the bus with Yamamoto-san and Nishida-san, I had the horrible realization that I had never cancelled my dorm dinner for tonight! I talked to Yamamoto-san and Nishida-san about this, and they decided that Kabutoya-san would have Oohashi-san's phone number, so Yamamoto-san messaged him and got the number for me. I waited until we were off the bus in Yokochuu and then called her, and she was wild and loud as usual, but she didn't seem resentful that I had cancelled my dinner 20 minutes before I'd normally be showing up to eat it (I doubt I get a refund though, as that would be a little unreasonable). Nishida-san and Kurauchi-san said that we were too early getting to Yokochuu, and that we needed to kill 20 minutes before heading to the restaurant for the party. Kurauchi-san suggested we go to the arcade haha. >_< No objections here! I made a mock-fuss about "my secret hobby being revealed" and showed them my Project Diva account card haha. I think they are beginning to grasp the magnitude of my nerdiness, and it's turning out nicely, as Nishida-san and Fujimura-san (the group leader, who is maybe in his 40s or 50s) talked to me about video and board games for about half of the party.
At the arcade I didn't end up playing Project Diva at all, because we first watched Kurauchi-san play Drummania and then Nishida-san invited me to play Guitar Freaks with him. It turns out he hadn't ever played much before, and so he was rather happy that I could carry him through the songs he picked haha. On the last one he was a bit sadistic though, and picked a song labelled as "47" difficulty, when we had been playing ones below 20 previously. >_< Oh well it was fun until we failed miserably, which put us at just the right time to leave for the party haha.
The party was held at a place called 949, for which the restaurant gives the reading "Ku Shi Kyuu", which means something to do with skewers (I couldn't read the second kanji to look it up later). Sure enough, dinner involved some skewers, but not as many as I would expect for a place with a name like 949. The most interesting thing served was a salad dressed with some kind of sesame vinaigrette that had rainbow tapioca balls in it! It made me really miss bubble tea. D: I asked Nishida-san about bubble tea, just in case it had become a thing in Japan since Jiuna last came (and I had somehow missed it thus far), but alas he confirmed that such a thing was not popular in Japan. There was also some chicken with some kind of salsa on it, some beef slices, some skewers and some king crab (just a little, but still delicious!). Fujimura-san asked me whether I had had "tarabakani" (king crab) before, and I told him that I hadn't, and confessed that I'm quite afraid of spindly crabs. >_< I said that eating them is totally OK though haha.
The party was quite enjoyable, as sitting with Nishida-san and Fujimura-san yielded good conversation about university, culture, travel, video and board games and music. I introduced Nishida-san to Scissor Sisters after we talked a bit about Shiina Ringo, and he said that he was going to look them up on YouTube once he got home (which I'm not sure if I believe, though I can hope), but he had a little trouble believing that the person singing "Any Which Way" is a man haha. I guess falsetto isn't something that's that popular in Japanese rock... Iimura-san (the woman who sat across from me who often plays volleyball at lunch) couldn't believe it either, and wanted to hear more, so I put on "Filthy/Gorgeous" haha. I told them that he sometimes sings in a more normal voice as well.
After the party I was still really, really hungry and I had just watched the bus to Ikkidzuka pass by, so I went to the Yoshinoya for a Gyuu-nabe-don haha. It's still 380円 for a large. Hooray! ;D
Once I got back to my dorm I started some laundry and got down to blogging. Tomorrow is my "Saturday", and I am going to call NTT to try to sort out why I don't have Internet. If their call centre is in India as well, I am going to be mad, because that means there is no reason why they shouldn't have better hours! Ah well, it is what it is, and I really REALLY hope that after tomorrow I will have my own Internet connection (or at least that it will be in the works in earnest).
Night!
Ugh... Last night I checked the clock when I turned out my light and it was 11:00. Three hours later, I was still awake. >_< Bleagh. I felt pretty shitty this morning as a result, but I managed to get to work on time (certainly no running though). I ate dorm breakfast of fake crab salad and pork with stewed (soy?) beans, both of which were pretty good, though I'm still not terribly partial to the flavour of fake crab by itself.
In the morning at work I reviewed my presentation slides and looked over the LDA and Gibbs sampling papers again. My next task is to implement Gibbs sampling to estimate the parameters for my multinomial mixture (instead of EM). I spent some time on a side-task, which was to determine how to use LDA with Gibbs to make recommendations, which is a rather short task to do mindlessly, but I tried to actually understand it, which ended up taking a fair while. I was ultimately unsuccessful, but my efforts paid off when Kabutoya-san explained the conceptual aspect of recommending with LDA and I had sufficient familiarity with the material that I understood what he was talking about (or at least I think I did haha). Amazingly enough, my tests from last night hadn't actually finished by the time I got in this morning. I timed them pretty much perfectly though (totally by accident), as it turned out that by the time I had finished entering and formatting the data that was ready when I got in (trials for latent variables Z=10, 20, ..., 90), the data for Z=100 was ready haha.
At lunch I ate some kind of noodle thing that was cold noodles on the side, which you dip into warm broth that has wakame and an egg brick and some other stuff. It wasn't that great actually, but I can see that if someone other than the cafeteria did it it could be good hahaha. After eating I played handiball with my coworkers, which was silly and fun as always. There were a LOT of people playing today, which makes 4-on-4 better. When there are a lot of people, you're bound to get some jokers in the bunch, and some humour can permeate the language barrier without even trying haha.
In the afternoon I gave my presentation, which turned out to be longer and significantly more stressful than I'd imagined, because they asked real questions at the end! D: Luckily I feel like my answers were half-decent, and some of the people who were asking questions later complimented me on my presentation, but that could just be them being polite. They unfortunately had a lot of fodder for difficult questions, because my mixture model had a really, really terrible result on one of my trials, and I had been highlighting all the minimum accuracy runs in bold red text. I of course got asked "how come your mixture model can have such bad performance?", and unfortunately my answer was essentially that I don't know, but I did offer some credible sources of problems that could have combined for a "perfect failure". When I implement CGS (it might just be Gibbs, not collapsed Gibbs in this case, I'm not yet sure) for my mixture model, I hope for it to work beautifully, as that will demonstrate that the problem was likely a result of the convergence of my EM algorithm on a bad local maximum, and not just some random bug that I couldn't find.
After my presentation I worked more on understanding LDA and CGS, and by the end of the day I was feeling pretty decent about my grasp of CGS (which is the more pertinent subject at the moment). Unfortunately this was shaken as Kabutoya-san pointed out a problem with my derivation of a recommendation from my mixture model using CGS, which involved something I had completely not forseen. He seemed to think that it was fair for me to miss that point though, as the information that changes from LDA (the model that my paper on CGS works on) when going to a multinomial mixture is kind of buried amidst gamma functions and subscripts haha. I only had about half an hour to try to wrap my head around the implications of the change Kabutoya-san pointed out before I needed to leave for the welcome party, so at present I don't know how drastically my derivation will need to change.
When I was getting on the bus with Yamamoto-san and Nishida-san, I had the horrible realization that I had never cancelled my dorm dinner for tonight! I talked to Yamamoto-san and Nishida-san about this, and they decided that Kabutoya-san would have Oohashi-san's phone number, so Yamamoto-san messaged him and got the number for me. I waited until we were off the bus in Yokochuu and then called her, and she was wild and loud as usual, but she didn't seem resentful that I had cancelled my dinner 20 minutes before I'd normally be showing up to eat it (I doubt I get a refund though, as that would be a little unreasonable). Nishida-san and Kurauchi-san said that we were too early getting to Yokochuu, and that we needed to kill 20 minutes before heading to the restaurant for the party. Kurauchi-san suggested we go to the arcade haha. >_< No objections here! I made a mock-fuss about "my secret hobby being revealed" and showed them my Project Diva account card haha. I think they are beginning to grasp the magnitude of my nerdiness, and it's turning out nicely, as Nishida-san and Fujimura-san (the group leader, who is maybe in his 40s or 50s) talked to me about video and board games for about half of the party.
At the arcade I didn't end up playing Project Diva at all, because we first watched Kurauchi-san play Drummania and then Nishida-san invited me to play Guitar Freaks with him. It turns out he hadn't ever played much before, and so he was rather happy that I could carry him through the songs he picked haha. On the last one he was a bit sadistic though, and picked a song labelled as "47" difficulty, when we had been playing ones below 20 previously. >_< Oh well it was fun until we failed miserably, which put us at just the right time to leave for the party haha.
The party was held at a place called 949, for which the restaurant gives the reading "Ku Shi Kyuu", which means something to do with skewers (I couldn't read the second kanji to look it up later). Sure enough, dinner involved some skewers, but not as many as I would expect for a place with a name like 949. The most interesting thing served was a salad dressed with some kind of sesame vinaigrette that had rainbow tapioca balls in it! It made me really miss bubble tea. D: I asked Nishida-san about bubble tea, just in case it had become a thing in Japan since Jiuna last came (and I had somehow missed it thus far), but alas he confirmed that such a thing was not popular in Japan. There was also some chicken with some kind of salsa on it, some beef slices, some skewers and some king crab (just a little, but still delicious!). Fujimura-san asked me whether I had had "tarabakani" (king crab) before, and I told him that I hadn't, and confessed that I'm quite afraid of spindly crabs. >_< I said that eating them is totally OK though haha.
The party was quite enjoyable, as sitting with Nishida-san and Fujimura-san yielded good conversation about university, culture, travel, video and board games and music. I introduced Nishida-san to Scissor Sisters after we talked a bit about Shiina Ringo, and he said that he was going to look them up on YouTube once he got home (which I'm not sure if I believe, though I can hope), but he had a little trouble believing that the person singing "Any Which Way" is a man haha. I guess falsetto isn't something that's that popular in Japanese rock... Iimura-san (the woman who sat across from me who often plays volleyball at lunch) couldn't believe it either, and wanted to hear more, so I put on "Filthy/Gorgeous" haha. I told them that he sometimes sings in a more normal voice as well.
After the party I was still really, really hungry and I had just watched the bus to Ikkidzuka pass by, so I went to the Yoshinoya for a Gyuu-nabe-don haha. It's still 380円 for a large. Hooray! ;D
Once I got back to my dorm I started some laundry and got down to blogging. Tomorrow is my "Saturday", and I am going to call NTT to try to sort out why I don't have Internet. If their call centre is in India as well, I am going to be mad, because that means there is no reason why they shouldn't have better hours! Ah well, it is what it is, and I really REALLY hope that after tomorrow I will have my own Internet connection (or at least that it will be in the works in earnest).
Night!
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