August 22: Back to Work
I haven't been blogging due to the immense pileup of material I haven't written about (pretty much my entire vacation), and despite multiple people suggesting I do exactly this, it's taken me until now to give up on maintaining chronological ordering. The vacation posts will come when they come, and in the meantime I'll be blogging again. Sorry for the delay! >_<
Today I got up and ate dorm breakfast of some kind of green onion and pork mixture, along with tiny fishes on a blob of oroshi (grated daikon). It was alright, and I was glad to have dorm food again after having an admittedly rather strange diet for the rest of my vacation after Jiuna left (wholly composed of senbei, korokke, carrots, bananas, grapefruit, katsu-don from LAWSON STATION, the All-Star set from Tenya, and the Stamina-don from Chez Meryl). >_< A general feeling of malaise I've had was dispelled by the time I got to work, so I think I am going to need to be more careful about my diet the next time I'm left to my own devices with only a microwave for almost a week. Oh wait... ;D
Unfortunately, of late the showers have been without hot water. For the past couple of days I have needed to pretend I'm going for a swim out in front of the shack while washing. D: Luckily, even with the colder weather present at the time being (which, I heard from my coworker, is more typically seen at the end of September, looking forward to it), it's still 27 degrees, and the totally unheated water is actually pretty manageable.
I left to walk to the bus, but I met Kusano-san in the entryway, who offered me a ride that I gladly accepted. :D On the short drive to work we talked about Comiket and briefly about StarCraft. According to him Comiket had 6 million visitors this year, but I'm not sure if I believe that. It seems a little extreme, but then again so was Comiket. O_O If it's true, it's kinda frightening that three times the population of Metro Vancouver, or equivalently a fifth of the population of the Kanto region, passed through a single (rather large, arguably robot-shaped) building in the space of 3 days. O_O In less mind-boggling news, Kusano-san has beaten the StarCraft Campaign and wants to try out multiplayer. We are going to play this weekend, which will hopefully work out well. Kevin usually stops playing between 3 and 4pm, and last time I checked, that's about when Kusano-san wakes up on weekends ahahaha. ;D Plays StarCraft, sleeps in, seems to know what and who Touhou and Hiroyuki Oda are (although I constantly get that confused with other people, possibly even right here). Do I sense a kindred spirit?
I got to work and, well, worked. >_> I worked away at the recommender I had left alone over the break, and refreshed my memory on what issues I had with it, exactly, before going to Kabutoya-san and asking him what to do about them. He didn't actually have an answer, and said that I should work on the other recommender until he gets/thinks up one. >_< By now, I'm pretty sure this recommender was unfortunately not terribly well though out before being assigned to me... The main problem I've got with it at the moment is actually something it's SUPPOSED to do. Well, only as much as anything with computational complexity resembling something between n-squared and n-cubed (rough guess) is "supposed" to slow down when fed a large amount of data. >_> It's a bit frustrating that the issue isn't something I'm really able to puzzle out. Fixing it will require either making minor changes to the model without probabilistic justification, or making major ones with such justification.
In the meantime I'm trying to implement a rather more complicated (but much better fleshed out, as I'm taking it from a published paper) recommender which is proving to be challenging in all the right ways. I am glad for the rather concrete reminder that I am not a work-shirking weasel-sea-sponge hybrid. I was starting to get a little... aware of how many times I was going to Kabutoya-san essentially saying "I can't do this, it doesn't many any sense" concerning the last one. Before anyone feels the need to tell me anything about myself, I realize I am not part sea-sponge nor part weasel. I have seen my birth certificate, after all (but was it the REAL one!? EFF D:<), and no such notes were present.
At lunch I ate Java Curry (purportedly "Indonesian"), which tastes exactly like Murugi Curry (purportedly "Indian") without the chicken. I do not think I will ever tire of poking fun at Japan's fictional understanding of other cultures. :D I must say though, that I like days with Java Curry, because for some reason it's far, far cheaper than most of the other substantial food items available in the cafeteria. :D The 100円 I saved will either buy 2 korokke, 20 minutes of entertainment playing Mushihime, or 30 seconds of getting my teeth kicked in in 3rd Strike. D:
After eating, it was time for handiball! Going to Comiket appears to have sapped me of whatever anemic shreds of "sporting" ability I had via nerdsmosis. D: In short, I was really damn terrible today. It was quite embarassing. Iimura-san and I had a little co-failure routine going, where the ball would go more towards me, she's make a lot of noise and run towards it, see me, and then back off, after which I would look surprised at her sudden retreat and start going to hit the ball, when she would see my surprised look, make more noise, and go for the ball again, with both of us stopping short of actually hitting the damn thing for fear of smacking it into eachother's faces. >_< It was funny the first time. And the next three times, for us at least ahahahaha. After we were done playing, I told Nishida-san that going to Comiket took away all of my ability to play sports, to which he said "Yes! You have very much improved!" Wait, what? HEY!!! D:< Oh, the language barrier... ;D
In the afternoon it was all just coding, which made it go rather quickly. I discovered that I have an interesting bad habit (which I will really need to solve if I am to work in the software industry) with respect to coding. I am completely unable to be satisfied with using libraries for things I can do, at a subconscious level. This afternoon my coding speed was drastically reduced, and I would spend I-don't-even-want-to-know-how-long staring at my computer screen lost in thought, because I was using the C++ Standard Template Library's vector, queue (and tomorrow, map) classes. I was completely unable to let go of thinking about how to write my own (especially for the mapping/data-window-shifting/potentially-callbacks part of the model). The majority of my meaningful coding background is in C, from RadiSys and CPSC 415, and it really shows. Today I often caught myself thinking that it would just be easier to write my own data structures and traversal algorithms using static functions with void* and double pointers all over the place. To be honest, it probably would be faster for the time being (especially given how much time I spend thinking about how to do it!), but as I found out in 415, the poor people go to use my code (sorry Jake D:) just end up seeing the Matrix. Or alphaghetti (although really it's more like ampersenne or asteriskuini).
I handed out a few of the chocolates that Jiuna brought, including one to the group leader, who, upon receiving it, didn't seem terribly interested that they were from a store that's somewhat famous among Vancouverites, yadda yadda, and immediately asked me afterwards with a rather excited tone of voice "Did you go to Comiket!? You did!? FOR TWO DAYS!?" O_O Priorities...? I left the rest of the chocolates in the centre of the area where the people I actually know work, and put a nice little sign saying "EAT ME!!" on top of them so that people will, you know, eat them. I couldn't distribute them all by hand, because that would mean picking favourites. D: I'm pretty sure that the sign will be a dead giveaway as to who they're from.
I left work fairly early, at around 6:15, when I reached a logical breakpoint (I am so lucky with those haha). I walked home, and just appreciated the cool weather we've been having lately. When I got back to the dorm, I ate dorm supper of some pork mixture or other, miso soup with carrots in it (didn't really jive), a hamburger/korokke hybrid, and rice.
Apparently the boiler for the shower will be fixed tomorrow, which makes me rather happy. I miss the shack, but not enough to want to take non-elective cold showers first thing in the morning. >_> I don't know if it will be fixed in time for tomorrow morning though. Maybe I'll turn out the lights and wave my cellphone under the water and pretend there's bio-luminescence! *<:B Derp.
Anyways, it's most certainly bedtime now, as I successfully killed time without knowing where it went until about 11, and then remembered to blog (hooray!), bringing it to about 12 now.
Night!
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