Dylan's Adventures

Dreamlog 2011 02 18

2011-02-19T15:44:00.002+09:00

Wow, pretty intense dream last night. I'll spare you the minor details, but this was the general storyline:

Step 1: In an old abandoned subway tunnel, near the forgotten "Depression Midway" station recently unearthed during construction of a stage for charity concerts by Lito and Yuka's band, conceal 20 almost-dead victims of a virulent plague, hooking them up to IV's in order to keep them alive and unconscious.

Step 2: ...

Step 3: Profit, by dominating the market for tea exports from the UK to France.

Octopus's Garden

2011-02-16T00:01:00.003+09:00

Hey, so I just signed up for Twitter, thinking "aha, now I can be a part of the online community and be more active in the world!"

But then I realized... not being the most concise person in the world, expressing my feelings in 140 characters or less may prove to be quite frustrating... :P

So here's my overlength thought for tonight. I've been listening through some old Beatles stuff lately, and I'm continually amazed at how creative, talented, and experimental they were. I always thought of the Beatles as "from a previous era" but really they only broke up a few years before I was born. Their music reminds me of my young childhood - whereas at the time I was mostly preoccupied with fascinating things like plastic cups, crayons, and laundry baskets, in the background of my memories I often see the record sleeves of Beatles albums lined up leaning against the stereo cabinet, and although I don't explicitly remember a lot of these songs, they conjure up a strange mix of feelings (half-imagined, I'm sure) from a simpler time when my parents had long hair, my toys and clothes were handmade, and my family would go on picnics in the mountain fields, singing along with my dad playing Peter, Paul, and Mary songs on his acoustic guitar.

So, to my point...

The song "Octopus's Garden" weaves a beautiful image of a safe, secret hideaway beneath the ocean, where we can dance around without a care and be happy and free. Why does this image work? I mean in reality, the ocean is filled with dangerous predators, pollution, and fish poop, right? So it wouldn't seem particularly safe to a creature born and raised in the ocean. It's only with contrast to our world with its harsh and changeable weather that the bottom of the ocean seems like a safe, calm place.

So I started wondering, is there any perspective from which our world would seem like the Octopus's Garden? Off the top of my head, the thing that comes to mind is someone living outside the Van Allen belts. Out in the harsh vacuum of space, buffeted by radiation and solar flares, life down on Earth inside of our warm and protective atmosphere and magnetic field must seem pretty cozy and safe! If we could live down there life would be so wonderful.. we could sing and dance around without a care in the world!

Kinda makes me want to go outside more.

Yah I know i haven't posted in forever...

2010-02-07T04:00:00.002+09:00

But I just wanted to relate this one exchange from tonight:

Me: That, uh, you know... that guy who's in a bunch of ... that other guy's movies...
Lito: Johnny Depp and Tim Burton?
Me: Yes! Exactly!

Awesome.

Sorry, I'd share two more as per my previous policy, but it's time for bed, and those two people in giant furry dog suits who wandered into my local bar at 2:30am, well... this is Japan and things like that are just kind of commonplace here. ;)

The Law of Sines

2009-09-06T03:05:00.002+09:00

Ok, so according to Wikipedia:

The spherical law of sines was discovered by the 10th century Persian mathematician Abū al-Wafā' al-Būzjānī, whereas the plane law of sines was discovered by the 13th century Persian mathematician Nasīr al-Dīn al-Tūsī.

First, what's up with that? The plane law of sines is taught in every high school geometry class, and spherical geometry is something that most people never encounter in their lives... how was it discovered 300 years earlier?

Second, I'm totally curious about how a 10th century Persian dude did spherical trigonometry research... My imagination gives me images of cutting-edge researchers clambering over giant stone spheres, making marks on strings and calling out numbers to scribes lined up against the wall.

Third, why am I, an ostensibly well-educated engineering type, struggling at 3am on a Saturday night with geometry of the triangle? Well, if it gets published, I guess you'll find out. Hehe.

Anyway, this is getting kinda frustrating so I poured myself a Guinness. I'm going to bed when I get to the bottom of either the geometry problem or the beer, whichever comes first.

Blindsolvin'

2009-06-16T13:27:00.000+09:00

Step by Step

I've been taking the stairs to my 23rd-floor apartment lately to try to get some exercise. One thing I've tried to do a few times is count the steps, but it's actually quite difficult! For one thing, some flights have 7 steps and others have 8, so my stepping parity gets reversed every two flights. Another challenge is that the stairs go quite fast, so I don't fully have time to subvocalize the numbers as I go, and finally if I try to use kinesthetic or auditory rhythm to regulate the counting, I'm thrown off by the roughly 3 steps or so I have to take to traverse each landing, a variable which also depends upon which foot I finished the last flight on.

My point here is that it's interesting to explore the ways in which the mind works. Some tasks are inherently easy, and others quite difficult... which brings me to my topic for today.

Blindsolving the 2x2

So thanks to my good friend Florent, I've found a new way to pass the time on the buses and trains. My 3x3 cube time has kind of plateaued around 1:30 (I know, it's not the kind of time anyone would admit to on a speedcubing forum, but for the time being I don't see myself putting in the training hours to improve beyond this) so I've taken on a new Rubik's challenge: blindsolving the 2x2 cube.

Basically, the idea is to stare at the cube intently for a while and memorize its state, then close your eyes and twist away. It's quite difficult because it requires meticulous planning, careful memorization, and flawless execution. Until you've done it you probably don't appreciate the frustration that comes from forgetting a single rotation during a complex algorithm, and then continuing to work the cube for 10 minutes, only to end up with a cube that looks as scrambled as when it started.

My technique

What I like about this challenge is the way it lets me explore how my mind works. For example, I'm terrible at memorization, particularly when it comes to sequences of numbers and things. So I've been trying out ways to utilize the different parts of my memory to remember things like which blocks need to be exchanged in which order, and which need to be rotated in which direction. I'm sure this is horribly inefficient, but it's kind of interesting -- for exchanging the positions of blocks, I use musical notes.

It works out well because there are only eight blocks, so it exactly fits a major scale. For example, if the #2 block should be in the #6 position, and the #6 block in the #5 position, #5 in #8, and #8 in #2, then I remember it as Re-La-So-Do. I usually use the "#1" block as a reference to define which colors belong on which axes, so the melodies usually start on #2 or #3 and take on an eerie modal quality. If there are multiple cycles of blocks that need to be exchanged, I mark the divisions in the melody with half-notes.

For orientation of the blocks (which I memorize last and do first to minimize the amount of time I need to remember it, following the advice of some guy on youtube) I find left/right pairs or sets of three blocks that need to be rotated in the same direction. Again I use my audio memory to help me cache the information, but this time I use words. I use my own highly-nontechnical terms to describe the formation, then I use numbers to mark the blocks, and I use English words (right, left) to tag it with a direction, and finally Japanese words (migi, hidari, ue, shita, mae, ushiro) to flag which side of the cube my "reference block" is on, so I can rotate the cube back to the original position when I finish the orientation corrections.

As I said, I'm sure this is horribly inefficient, but it's kind of fun. :)

Results

I've been doing this on the train for about 2 weeks now. It usually takes me around 5-7 minutes to do the whole thing, memorization time included, although I'm still below 50% in terms of success rate. The hardest part for me is the orientation phase, because I have to change my grip and rotate the cube a lot to do it, so often I either fail to return the cube to its original position, or I accidentally rotate the wrong triplet of corners, ending up with two corners mis-rotated in an otherwise perfectly solved cube.

Looking online, people tend to dismiss blindsolving the 2x2 as too easy, citing that it's not that difficult to blindsolve the 3x3. Given that there are 20 "cubies" to move around, that would be almost two octaves on the 12-tone scale. If nothing else, it would be fantastic relative pitch training! I guess it would be possible to use an 8-tone major scale (including high and low "do") with vowels (a,i,u,e,o, and mm) to designate a position on a face. It would be a bit redundant since each corner piece would have three designations and each edge piece would have two, but maybe there would be ... some reason you'd want to do that?

If anyone tries something like this, let me know!

People are not idiots

2009-05-02T00:44:00.002+09:00

So, I've been doing a bit of user interface design lately, and I've been thinking a lot about what makes a good user interface.

What I've realized is that my design philosophy has evolved over the years. I used to believe that every system needed an "expert mode" and an "idiot mode" to accommodate the needs of power users (I want complete control!) and casual users (I just want it to work!).

I think that over time I have been pressured in the direction of "idiot mode". It's as if "usability" only means "usability by unthinking beginners". I will stand for this no longer. My new philosophy, I have realized, is "people are not idiots".

I believe people will rise to the expectations you set for them. This is not an excuse for hard-to-use interfaces, and it is not a justification for overwhelming users with too much information. I am merely asserting that the elements which are good for "expert mode" and "idiot mode" tend to be similar, and that I firmly believe it is reasonable for a beginner to be expected to make some effort to learn how to use a (well-designed) system.

Configurability

What I learned first, I think sometime after my college years of hacking my dotfiles and customizing my linux box beyond all recognition, was that infinite customizability is really not necessary. Sure, it's fun to some degree, especially for bored teenagers desperate for a place to express themselves, but really, excessive configurability is generally not useful.

The place where this always comes up is when I find myself helping a friend with some computer problem, and I have to figure out how to use their customized system. Standardization makes it easier to help people and to communicate about the system. Which is necessary because computers are NOT EASY TO USE.

Granted, having a few different modes is useful and necessary, but just a FEW. The perspectives in Eclipse, for example, are great. I don't really need to be able to customize and adjust every little view window within the perspectives, but the ability to switch perspectives adds real value.

Presets

Something I learned while playing around with VST effects for audio software was this: flexibility provides freedom, but not value. Presets provide real value. Give me 100 degrees of freedom in some effector module, and after weeks of study and experimentation I might be able to come up with something nice. Give me 5 presets, and I can make something sound good from the beginning, then quickly play around with them and make my own improved versions.

I'm intending to implement a "presets" style interface in some of my software for work. It really puts some structure on variable-tweaking.

Abstraction

Last night I was helping a friend with Windows over the phone. The conversation went something like this:

Me: "Ok, now change the file extension"
Friend: "I don't see the file extension"

Me: *sigh* ... "ok, open windows explorer"
Friend: "What's that?"

Me: "Open a window so you can see folders and files"
Friend: "Ok."

Me: "Open the Tools menu"
Friend: "I have Vista."

Me: *searches the internet for explanations of how to do it in Vista*
Me: "Ok, do blah blah blah"
Friend: "I only have a blah blah menu"

Me: *searches for a more recent screenshot, makes some guesses as to what the menu might be called in Japanese*

Friend: "Hmm... Can I just rename the file?"
Me: "Probably not, but try it..."

Friend: "Ok, I renamed it. It still doesn't open"

Me: "Ok, never mind then. Go to blah blah menu and uncheck 'hide ...', um... "

Me: *struggles to try to remember how to say "file extension" in Japanese*

Me: "Hide, um... I think it has the kanji for 'child' in it. Hide that for known files'"

Friend: "Hide it?"
Me: "No, uncheck 'hide it'..."

Friend: "So, wait, not hide it? Um, actually there are a whole bunch of options here. Which kanji was that?" ...

... several more minutes of confusion ...

Friend: *finally stumbles upon the right option*
Friend: "Oh, ok, looks like it worked. I can rename the file now. Now everything works!"

COME ON MICROSOFT!!!

In a discussion with a coworker today, we both agreed that the first thing we do when troubleshooting somebody's PC is turn OFF "Hide file extensions". File extensions are fundamental to the functionality of Windows, and they are not something you can ignore! On top of that, just trusting an icon is a security risk...

But really, a description of the type of file should be a completely independent field from the name of the file. In a good design, there would be no extension at all in the filename. Sure, I understand that for backwards compatibility, Windows can't redesign that at this point... But the solution is not to HIDE the extension from users! PEOPLE ARE NOT IDIOTS. Show them how it works. Then they can use it on their own, and I can go to sleep.

"Help"

The last thing I have been frustrated with lately is "help". Seriously, people, who uses this? I have NEVER ONCE found any of these help features useful, and I know nobody who has.

Au contraire, it is so frustrating when I'm rushing to complete something for a deadline, or to catch my last bus, and I accidentally click on Microsoft "Help and Support" or MS Office help, or Dell's built-in "In case you didn't have enough help already - oh and just to screw with you let's put this icon where the Run icon usually is" Help.

Usually there's a split-second of dread as I realize what I just did, and as my hard drive starts grinding away and my CPU is instantly pinned to 100%, my PC unresponsive to my desparate clicks - Cancel! Cancel! Cancel!!!!!

It seems that every help system I have ever encountered finds the need to swamp my computer, indexing volumes and volumes of information on startup, or launching a web browser to download some useless web page (and probably send out a bunch of my personal information in the process).

Ok, so "help" is theoretically a good thing. Here are my recommendations:

Make it useful

Make it require multiple clicks to come up (but make it obvious how to access it!)

Make the opening screen LIGHTWEIGHT, and quickly cancelable, so that accidentally opening it doesn't cost me a $40 taxi ride

In Conclusion

So, this may come off as a rant against Microsoft, but that's just because I use Windows every day. And really, I've grilled Apple enough about how much iTunes sucks (oh, did I mention? It keeps trying to install a Japanese update over my English iTunes!!! Needless to say, I just stopped installing their updates at that point. Like I need any more of their bloat anyway! iTunes 4.6 was fine.)

And Linux? Usability...? :P

But what I'm saying is that we should stop trying to idiot-proof user interfaces to such an extreme degree. Give people warnings when they're going to do something bad* and then let them do it if they want. Systems today are imperfect, and sometimes the user needs to do things that weren't anticipated by the designer. It's overly pretentious to take the stand that the designer is omniscient and that the user is an ignorant fool.

*bad: adj. - having actual negative consequences, as opposed to, say, moving your thumbs.db file !!!!!!!

Counterpoint: Gaza

2009-04-15T00:11:00.002+09:00

So I think that due to the fact that I rarely post anymore, most of my friends have given up on following my blog. But almost two months after my last post regarding the situation in Gaza, I was surprised to receive an email from an old friend, one of my students from the MEET program several years ago.

She was quite shocked at my statements about the situation in Gaza, and as an Israeli soldier who spent the war in bomb shelters 3 miles from Gaza, she offered her perspective on the situation. Here is what she said.

The Hamas rocket attacks are anything but ineffectual. Imagine what it would be like to hear an alarm announcing you have 15 seconds to get into a bomb shelter several times a day. Imagine what it would be like to have to constantly worry about being 15 seconds away from a bomb shelter. Every time you'd go out, you'd make sure you knew where the nearest bomb shelter was because you'd have to be 15 seconds away from one at all times. Every time you took a shower you'd have to ask someone to stay near the bathroom so they could let you know if they heard the alarm. Imagine sleeping with your neighbors on the floor of a cold shelter every night because everyone's terrified they won't wake up and make it to the shelter on time if they hear the alarm. Imagine living in a city where most adults take pills to control their anxiety and panic attacks, and where kids who are asked to draw themselves draw dead children with rockets on their heads. Now imagine living like this for 8 years.

Why, you may ask, would your government not do anything about this for 8 years? Because you live in one of those rare countries where the army refuses to harm innocent civilians, and the terrorists, who know this, make sure they're always surrounded by as many civilians as possible. If after 8 long years your government finally decided to do something, and the army went out of its way to target only terrorist training camps and underground tunnels, would you think it was responding disproportionately to the threat? If the army made a point of announcing its intention of bombing buildings where terrorists were hiding and giving civilians time to evacuate, would you consider that sinister? Would it be sinister of your government to regularly send the civilians supplies and medical aid?

I do genuinely offer my apologies to anyone I offended with my admittedly one-sided statements on the situation. Obviously, the whole point of terrorism is that even though the number of people actually killed is small, the psychological effect on the population is large, and I neglected to even mention that. Although I stand by my previous statements about how shocked I am at the things the Israeli military has done, it's certainly not anything close to a one-sided issue, and it should never be presented that way.

At the very least, I believe that it is really important to try to understand and sympathize with the people on both sides of the conflict. In a situation where both sides have innumerable grievances against each other, it just doesn't simplify down to good guys and bad guys.

Not-so-extreme Opinions

2009-02-18T01:33:00.002+09:00

Hey, so it's been a really long time since I've updated my blog. Maybe you can partly blame that on me being caught up in work (things have gotten busy lately and my research has been becoming more significant)(or, ok, maybe not my research, but the software I've written and am supporting has become more important to more people) or you can blame it on ... other distractions. Today was the first day I was able to solve the Megaminx without the help of a solution guide (I was able to solve it down to 5 (out of 62) pieces out of place about 4 months ago with no guide, but it's just beyond my attention span to work out the algorithms to switch edges, rotate corners, etc.)

Desperate for Input

So I went to download Monday's Colbert Report... but then saw that there was none to be downloaded. I guess it's Presidents' Week so they're on vacation.

No South Park yet (next episode airs on March 11th... I'll be at an international robotics conference then, so I'll try to catch it live in the US!) ... so I went to colbertnation.com and ended up getting sidetracked on his interviews with prominent feminists.

Awesome Feminists

First, Ariel Levy is awesome. I'm going to buy her book, "Female Chauvinist Pigs" if they have it at Kinokuniya. I think that living in Japan has really raised my awareness and interest in sexuality and sexual identity. This is such a weird place coming from an American viewpoint. But I could write a book on that topic.

His interview with Shere Hite was awesome too... both of these interviews were in 2006 but... I was busy? I'd like to read "The Shere Hite Reader" (covering 30 years of her work) but maybe that will be afterwards.

Then there was his interview with Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem (also in 2006) which was brilliant. I went to check out their website and it's been shut down already, but I read some reviews on why it was shut down and found a link to Air America, which I have heard of but never really checked out.

Air America

The two articles I checked out there were "Bill O'Reilly - Consistent Sexist?" and "Closing the Polls on Peace". Both interesting.

Bill O'Reilly

The Bill O'Reilly thing... hmm... Basically they're calling him sexist for some of his comments regarding Helen Thomas. I disagree. I completely agree that he's slamming on her disproportionately for being liberal / disagreeing with his opinions, and that he's kinda harsh on her about her age, but I really don't think what he says is particularly sexist by comparing her to "The Wicked Witch of the East". I mean, I really think he'd rip on an 88-year-old guy just as hard, with some other (probably offensive) metaphor. The video segment does correctly point out that his ridicule of her question is misplaced, and it points out the hypocrisy of his rebuttals against Courtney Martin from the Women's Media Center, who demanded an apology.

I guess my point here is that I think we have this culturally-ingrained oversensitivity to sexism (which I think is not the real issue here), without a proportionately healthy regard for other offenses, like personal attacks against people (regardless of age or sex) and rhetorical offenses, like making analogies that seem appropriate but are misleading. Actually, come to think of it, I'm probably guilty of the latter. What I'm saying is, I think it his statements were not only really mean (from a moral standpoint) but also wrong (from a logical standpoint), but I don't think they were particularly sexist per se.

Israel and Gaza

The other video I watched was "Closing the Polls on Peace". That was just really disturbing. Ann Wright, a retired US Army Colonel and former member of the US State Department, gives a firsthand account of a rare look at the devastation inside Gaza during this period of war. It was quite disturbing, and I guess the reason I feel that way is that I completely believe that she is honest and giving a true account of what is happening there. So many people give politically-biased reports from one side or the other, but sometimes you see someone who is really just committed to doing what is right. The same reason I (and most Americans, I guess) trust Barak Obama... just an intuition that he understands what is going on and says what he means.

Anyway, the situation in Gaza is horrific. The things the Israeli military is doing are sinister. Destroying their industries, tearing up their crop lands... using ineffectual Hamas rocket attacks as a pretext for destroying the livelihood of an entire people.

It's so hard because, having lived in Israel, I have good Israeli friends, and also Palestinian friends. I think what everyone really wants is peace. I guess from a really cynical perspective, if the Israelis drive the Palestinians out from Gaza and the West Bank, then after a few generations maybe people will adjust to the new status quo and there will be more peace than we have now. But then again, the Romans might have thought that 2000 years ago, and look at the situation now. Yes, I know it's a bad analogy. But... I just don't know what to feel.

Like, take this disturbing Flash game for example. You play the Israeli military and your job is to blow the crap out of Gaza. Your score depends on the ratio of Palestinian casualties to Israeli casualties. As in: if you kill more than 25x the number of Palestinians as the number of casualties on your side, then you win. Or something like that... I played it a few weeks ago and don't remember the exact details. But you get the point.

So... yes, I absolutely think the Israeli military is responding disproportionately to the threat, and yes, I think the US government is wrong for supporting them unconditionally. I don't think Hamas is "right", as in morally right, in their policies, but they may or may not be "right", as in effective, in what they do. I guess if getting a reaction from the Israeli military is their goal, they're pretty effective. :( In the long run, I'm not sure what will result in the greatest happiness for the greatest number two or three generations from now. But it's just terrible to hear about the destruction in Gaza. In these modern times, nobody should have to suffer like that. And as war zones go, I'm not really that well-informed, but I'm pretty sure that there are other places where things are much, much worse. When will we get beyond such primitive ways of settling our differences? I'm disappointed in the human race.

Peace on Earth?

I may sound like a hippie, but I really believe that the only way to get ahead is to embrace an abundance paradigm, so that the haves feel comfortable sharing with the have-nots, and we can actually start worrying about the best ways to help each other instead of the best ways to protect ourselves from each other.

Maybe we have to wait for times of better economic prosperity before people will feel comfortable doing that. *Sigh*...

And sorry I haven't blogged for a while. I miss all of you.

Ups and Downs

2008-10-16T01:25:00.002+09:00

Up: I got my new fiber optic internet service this week!
Down: I've spent two long nights trying to configure it, and it seems to be about as slow as ADSL... plus it looks like I'll no longer be able to receive incoming international calls. :(
Up?: I've ... gotten lots of Japanese reading practice trying to configure the system?

Up: The weather has been cooling off lately. Yay! I can finally walk around outdoors without being constantly drenched in sweat!
Down: I heard my first Christmas song in the shopping mall today on the way home from work. CHRISTMAS!!!! The song was "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" in case you were wondering.
Up?: Now I can stop complaining about the fact that Halloween decorations have been up since the end of August?

I don't have a third up-down-up pattern for today, but I did have a "Dylan moment" on the way home from work. I was sitting down on the train, sleep-deprived as usual, and I saw a poster for an LPGA tournament (evidently the Ladies' Professional Golf Association, as I would later retrospectively infer from the many pictures of ladies playing golf on the poster). The way it registered in my head, of course, and which seemed completely reasonable at the time, was that LPGA must be the Japanese branch of the Role Playing Game Association! Only later did I realize the alternative explanation...

Daily Show, Oct 7 2008

2008-10-11T03:27:00.001+09:00

Sarah Vowell is just completely awesome. Mad props.

Evolution

2008-10-07T01:37:00.003+09:00

So, I finally downloaded and watched the US Vice Presidential debate. And like countless others out there, I feel the need to blog about it. I haven't blogged in ages, and what better to start off with than a good ol' political rant! :)

In short, it was disappointing, basically because it wasn't a debate. They got away with dodging too many questions and let issues rest unresolved... Of course I and everyone I know wanted to see Biden tear Palin apart, but they just took turns reciting their memorized speeches. Kinda lame. Maverick, Maverick, Maverick, Scranton, Scranton, Scranton. Speeches and sound bites calculated by analysts and strategists to generate optimal public opinion impact.

I am thankful they didn't belabor any ridiculously divisive issues like gay marriage and abortion, simply because nothing useful would have been said whatsoever. I guess the political market has stabilized on the answer to the gay marriage question, as they agreed right off the bat to the most "voter-acceptable" response to that.

The Candidates

I thought Biden did a good job. He came across to me as intelligent, informed, and yet trustworthy and human in a way that John Kerry never seemed able to pull off. He made a few slip-ups, as did Palin, but we should forgive them both for those. The big issues are too important to dwell on who misspoke which words.

Sarah Palin made a much better impression on stage than she did on any of the news clips I'd seen before. I wish she hadn't. And she said a lot of things that I agreed with. At least... I agreed with the words she said. But even when she and Joe Biden said exactly the same phrases, I noticed sharp increases in my bile production every time she said them.

At first I thought it was because every word out of her mouth was either a double-edged lie or a slimy, twisted, sugar-coated, venomous dodge, topped off with a gosh darn down-home kitchen table mom smile and delivered with that irritating backwoods accent that made me homesick for George W. Bush's affected cowboy twang. And for the most part, yes, that was true. They were all lies, or at least every statement she made had an unspoken asterisk after it.

And polarization is such an easy groove to fall into, so I was enjoying despising her, but then every once in a while I caught myself and thought, come on... nobody can hate McCain! He seems like a good enough guy. I like him. But yet, that slimy venomous aftertaste persists...

Evolution - The Real Issue

But for me it's not about the people. I like Obama. I like McCain. I didn't know much about Joe Biden before, but I like him after seeing his debate performance. Palin makes me shudder, a haunting reminder of all the miserable, painful parts of growing up in *wince* small-town backstate America (Not that there weren't great things about it! But she doesn't represent those things to me at all). And besides the fact that she doesn't belong up there on stage at all, well... my real issue is not with her specifically.

It's the ridiculousness of what the debates represent. Both candidates were basically saying the same thing, but with different assumptions. "XXX is a problem. Let {Government, Industry} take care of it for you!" (Now, before I rip on the Republicans too hard... moderation in all things here. I would never say that unbridled socialism is unconditionally great, but looking at the miserable state of affairs in the US these days, we really do need a good solid hit of it!)

But as for the Republicans... Basically it always comes down to putting your faith in massive corporate power, in corporations already so enormous that they far outstrip the government's ability to regulate them. They regulate the government instead. Mega-conglomerates transcend nations in their power. They are self-propelling, living entities with no morality, no accountability, and no mercy, and we are the mindless, expendable parts, cast aside like scabs and dandruff when we have outlived our usefulness.

[Note: please nobody ever show this next bit to Mr. Henry or I'll retroactively fail 10th grade biology!]

In a not-so-metaphorical sense, they are the next step in evolution, engulfing us whole, not unlike the transition from prokaryotes to eukaryotes! These massive organisms live symbiotically (parasitically?) alongside government and we are but organelles churning away inside them. To take an analogy a few steps too far, I see blue-collar workers as the mitochondria, engineers and consultants as the ribosomes, and the executives as the cell nucleus...

Or is society itself like a cell too, with farmers as the mitochondria, artists as the ribosomes, and educators and parents in the nucleus, propagating the DNA? In fact, I'd love to try to piece together an analogy likening the ATP-ADP cycle to the interaction of media, information, and religion in society, but it's past 2am on a worknight and Bio class was a long time ago!

So... speaking of biology and religion in a completely non-contrived segue... :P

Evolution - Not the Issue at All

You know, every search I come up with on the net talking about the debate brings up flamewars of vitriolic fervor, with creationists and evolutionists angrily ranting away, pro-life and pro-choice beating each other up. So many of the debates come down to Christianity. Why doesn't anybody see that the issues aren't about Christianity at all? I mean literally, NOT AT ALL. Religion is just like this brainwashing drug that America is hopelessly addicted to... and big business is holding the syringes.

It's this weird, completely nonsensical slippery-slope thing, this synesthesia of capitalism and Hebrew mythology, where people lose consciousness of where the moral parables of religion end and physical reality begins.

"I believe that abortion is wrong, because the Bible says that life is sacred." - ok, I follow that. I mean, I disagree, but I see its consistency with some interpretations of that set of beliefs. I think this issue is a special case, though, because it is so easy in this case to draw battle lines between religious beliefs and individual rights. (as opposed to, say, medical marijuana, where I'd say it's not so clear-cut)

"I believe that homosexual marriages are wrong, because there are passages in the Bible that condemn homosexuality" - ok, again, I think it's debatable even among those who generally follow the Bible's teachings, but sure, ok, somewhat relevant, possibly.

"I believe in privatized health care / deregulation of industry because God gave us freedom as Americans" - I don't know if anybody literally makes this direct connection in their heads, but it sure sounds like something you might hear, and I genuinely believe this is a critical muddling in the American mind. What I'm saying is WHERE DID THIS LEAP COME FROM? It's the sports fanatic mindset, soaring from fundamentalist religion into fundamentalist capitalism on the wings of sheer nationalistic pride...

"I believe we shouldn't ever put timelines on withdrawing from Iraq because, um, God bless our troops!" - Ok, so I never got exactly what that phrase meant, is it that we're asking God to bless our troops but not the people on the other side? Shouldn't God want peace, love, and harmony between all of his/her children regardless of national boundaries? Certainly I believe we should appreciate the great sacrifice that the soldiers in our armed forces are making for us but HOW IS THAT IN ANY WAY A JUSTIFICATION FOR KEEPING THEM OVER THERE IN HARM'S WAY?

Although I did appreciate Biden's last comment, "...and selfishly, god bless our troops." I don't think it was intended in the way I prefer to interpret it, but basically it sounds like a perfect response to my last paragraph.

Common Sense?

But please, America, learn to sort out your values and clear up some of that cognitive dissonance. Here's a start...

Religion can provide some good moral lessons, but it shouldn't be used as a pretext for going to war and CERTAINLY should not replace science and logic.

Science can help us study, predict, engineer, and understand the world around us, but Darwinism shouldn't be used as a moral justification for, say, unbridled capitalism.

Capitalism is useful as long as it doesn't get out of hand and defeat the market-regulating forces that keep it functional and useful through healthy competition. Don't believe in it unconditionally like a religion.

You know, I write these things and I feel like I'm writing to a kindergartner. Seriously, how is it that this election could possibly even be close?

Yet somehow, We The People seem to be awfully confused...

*sob*

Rubik's Cube

2008-08-02T20:17:00.002+09:00

Hey, so I've been meaning to blog about several things lately... I canceled all my plans for the weekend so I can catch up on work, do my laundry, put my kitchen back together (had to clear it out for construction this week), and ideally catch up on emails and blogging and such.

But I don't think I'm going to write about my life tonight. I just wanted to share the latest xkcd comic with you. I laughed out loud when I saw this one!

Tozai to the E

2008-05-09T00:07:00.003+09:00

Three months ago, exhausted after a long day of work and a hard hour of voice lessons, Lito and I sat at the counter facing the window, looking out over the city below us. A decision needed to be made.

"You know, I've been really busy lately. I don't think I can put in the time to really do a good job at this."

"I've been feeling the same way. But I'd like to do it if we can."

"Sure, I just don't want to commit to something I don't have the time to deliver on."

"Look, why don't we just do it for fun... it'll be good practice, and if we lose, no big deal. We'll just do the best we can."

"Ok, I'm in."

And thus the two-man vocal duo, "Tozai Express", was born.

You can imagine my surprise when we were chosen to go on to the semifinals in the Miki Gakki 2008 Duet Competition. Or perhaps you imagined it when I blogged about it about a month ago.

As the date of the semifinals drew near, we both found ourselves caught up with other things, busy, seldom able to get together to practice. We squeezed in some rehearsals at each other's houses late at night, or in hurried half-hour sessions after our voice lessons and before he had to run off to other rehearsals.

In our second-to-last rehearsal, we totally mixed things up, throwing in alternating rap and voice percussion parts during the bridge. In the last days before the competition I found myself frantically practicing my rap, quietly in my room, at 3am...

The competition itself was an incredible production. The lighting systems were amazing, and the event started off with a video worthy of network TV pre-Olympics hype. Slow-motion shots of last year's competitors singing their hearts out, and the winners overcome with tears of joy, powerfully narrated with a moving voiceover and triumphant background music. A bit dramatic, but it set the stage well.

Many of the other groups were quite amazing, and after about five groups had gone, we had already conceded defeat. These people were amazing singers, with tightly choreographed moves and meticulous costumes. They had obviously spent long hours practicing and it paid off. The genres were spread across the board, ranging from Disney songs to traditional Hawaiian music, to cutesy teeny-bopper music and Aretha Franklin.

We went on stage 10th out of 30 groups, and I was far more nervous than I had anticipated (considering that I perform on stage about once a month). This was evident in the fact that, standing in the middle of the stage in the blazing spotlights, in front of hundreds of people, with our backing track blasting from the massive speaker racks to either side, the song barely begun, I noticed something...

... nobody was singing!

And then I noticed something else...

... I was the one who was supposed to be singing!

Whatever my frantic heartrate had been a moment before, it spiked severalfold as I realized I had just ruined the song we had been practicing for months, and we hadn't even finished the first verse!

At the same time, though, it was like a pressure valve had been released... I had already screwed up the song, and we had already lost. So basically it was the two of us on stage with a captive audience for another 4.5 minutes. There was nothing for us to do but rock out and have fun!

Of course the most challenging part came afterwards, when they interviewed us on stage in Japanese... I ended up saying some stuff that sounded kinda ridiculous, but we got some laughs from the audience, so it was all good. Except that my Japanese teacher happened to be in the audience as well... I'm gonna get it on Friday! :P

Anyway, our friends were very supportive and everybody said we did a great job. There were still around 4 hours of performances to sit through before hearing the results, and most of my friends left soon after we finished.

Finally, it came time to announce the winners. By this time I had made a mental estimate of about a 35% chance of us being selected among the top 8 groups, on the off-chance that the judges decided to be forgiving of my brainfart at the beginning of the song.

There was more production drama, and they built up lots of tension in the style of any good awards show. As they were about to announce the winners, they rattled a bunch of stuff off in really fast Japanese, and I totally missed it. But Lito and I agreed that even if we did get chosen, we could just follow the lead of whoever got chosen before us.

And then they announced the first winners: "Number 10, Tozai Express"...

...

numb shock

...

"Dude, that's us"

...

"Really?!"

"What the @#$%^&?"

We stumbled up onto the stage, not knowing what to make of this.

The crowd was cheering wildly, and we both bowed. Then one of the judges came up and presented us each with ... a medal! Standing there in our vests, bowing our heads to receive our medals, the only image in my mind was of the last scene in Star Wars. Sans Princess Leia of course. ;)

So that's it. We're going to the finals!! We're really going to try to start early and do a solid job this time. This is so awesome.

A heartfelt thanks to all our friends who came to support us. If anybody wants to come cheer for us at the finals on June 8, drop me an email!

New toy - a green laser pointer!

2008-04-21T01:22:00.002+09:00

Haha...
So my parents came to Japan - FINALLY - last week, and we had lots of adventures that I'd love to blog about. But one thing they brought me was a new green laser pointer! (which I had actually bought myself and had shipped to them, but details, details)

Anyway, it totally rocks, and I've been playing with it all weekend. Just thought I'd post this picture which, though juvenile, is still, in my opinion, cool. ;) Taken on long-exposure night mode in a pitch-black room.

By the way, on a related note, check out this cool application presented at the last Human-Robot Interaction conference - "A Point-and-Click Interface for the Real World"

Advanced technology, my butt!

2008-04-07T13:50:00.004+09:00

Impulsive? Certainly. Gratuitous? Undoubtedly. Silly? Perhaps. But I have finally fulfilled one of my life-(in Japan)-long dreams. (And grammatically speaking, how _does_ one correctly insert a parenthetical note mid-(if this is even a word)-hyphenation?)

This was several years in coming, but something just told me the time was right to "ride the wave", so to speak, and join the Japanese in enjoying that pinnacle of technological achievements, the "Washlet".

Perhaps best likened to a creative fusion between a traditional toilet seat, R2-D2, and a supersoaker, most of my readers will have at least passing knowledge of this brilliant innovation from the nation who first pioneered the use of splintery wooden sticks as toilet paper many years ago.

The model I bought was at the "bottom end" of the price spectrum, and lacks so many of the sophisticated features that are advertised in the glossy brochures, such as the following:

- wall-mounted motion detection system
- self-opening toilet seat lid
- artificial "flushing" sound to cover biological noises
- built-in bathroom heater
- ejector seat mechanism

And yet, I find myself utterly unable to find any dissatisfaction with the basic functionality this device provides. Once I had worked my way through the sixteen pages of detailed installation instructions in Japanese, that is...

The experience

The excitement begins as you sit down on the (pre-heated) seat, and you feel and hear the main engines firing up, like a jet warming up on the tarmac. An internal ventilation system begins sucking in and filtering the air inside the bowl to remove any unwanted odors. Meanwhile, heating coils prime the water in a holding tank, heating it exactly to the temperature set via the built-in side-mounted control panel.

When your business is finished, you can reach up to grab the removable wall-mounted remote control panel and push the button with the international symbol for "butt" on it. A hidden panel deep within the machine slides back, and unseen, a long stainless steel cylinder extends from under the rim of the toilet seat beneath you, not unlike Luke's lightsaber emerging from Artoo's secret panel as Luke prepares to walk the plank on Jabba the Hutt's skiff.

Once fully extended, a jet of water leaps forth from the lightsaber. However, this is no random spray - it is a high-performance, precision-controlled stream. Not as clumsy or as random as a blaster, this is an elegant weapon for a more civilized time. The control panel sports a variety of buttons enabling you to delicately adjust the position and strength of the stream, set it to oscillate, fire it in pulses, or put it into overdrive. With a little practice, you can find just the combination of settings to blast the Sarlacc out of your, um, Pit of Carcoon.

As a bonus, there is an additional function for the ladies. Pressing the button with the girl's face on it (yes, that's next to the button with the international symbol for "butt" on it) triggers a smaller stainless steel cylinder to telescope out of the larger cylinder, reminiscent of the internal jaws of the creatures in Alien. This cylinder has several holes for delivering a more even, gentle spray, although of course with no less precision of control.

Every contingency has been anticipated. If you're worried about being startled by the experience and jumping up, spraying the walls with water, have no fear. A pressure switch in the toilet seat acts as a safety stop. If you're tired of leaning over to the side to find just the right combinations of control settings, worry no longer. The control panel is a detachable wireless remote control which bounces signals off the ceiling to a sensor on the back of the washlet.

But perhaps the most eerie function of all is the "etiquette spot", the effect of which is most poignant in the dark of night. Lifting the toilet seat automatically activates the "etiquette" system which, like a Predator UAV painting a target for your laser-guided weapon, projects a green dot in the center of the bottom of the toilet bowl, a vivid green bull's eye to keep men focused on the task at hand. Far, however, from being a solitary point in the darkness, the "etiquette spot" has the side effect of illuminating the entire bowl with an unnatural, otherworldly green glow, not unlike an ominous gateway to an evil B-movie nether dimension.

All of this technology and design together launches this device firmly into the curiously ambiguous space between "What in the *@#$% are they thinking?" and "I can't POSSIBLY live without this!" However what is irrefutable is the uncompromising quality of their precision design, which I can only imagine to be the product of decades of research by dedicated engineers, meticulously adjusting complex empirically-derived equations modeling viscosity and solubility (of, um, colloids?), and preparing their solutions for wind-tunnel testing by running elaborate simulations on high-precision finite-element models of the butt.

Duet Competition

2008-04-02T03:05:00.003+09:00

So, they announced the results of the Miki Gakki duet competition a few hours ago, and we passed the first round! Gotta come up with something good for the semifinals now...

Here are the results from the first round. I'm so psyched!

Here's a shot of the two of us with our vocal teacher, just after the first-round competition a month ago.

Awesome Lifelike Quadruped Walking Robot

2008-03-21T04:11:00.005+09:00

Ok, it's very late at night but I'll blame it on the jet-lag. Although of course it's not jet-lag, it's just my lifestyle.

I felt the obligation to post this video due to the sheer numbers of friends from across the world who have emailed this link to me. The lifelikeness of this robot's motion is really eerie. Of course, my robots roll rather than walk, but I can certainly appreciate the vast amount of work that goes into making a machine operate with this level of flexibility, speed, and robustness!

Of course, thinking of this technology in military hands is a little scary. I just got back from a robotics conference where they had a whole panel discussion on robo-ethics, and a lot of that centered around the military use of robots. Not to delve into that abyss at the moment, but watching this video in that context does conjure up images of unstoppable invading robot armies swarming across the landscape...

The Wrong Side of the Brain

2008-02-28T21:34:00.002+09:00

So... I was all psyched to participate in this experiment where they were going to scan my brain and stuff. I was really looking forward to it and hoping I could get a screencapture or two of my brain in action.

Alas, I was disqualified during the initial screening. Why? Because I'm left-handed. Apparently left-handed people tend to have screwy brain wiring and thus don't make good experimental subjects for these sorts of experiments.

Bummed out about that, I came home and did some reading on Wikipedia and whatnot. It looks like the term for what I am is "cross-dominant", since I favor my left hand for some tasks (writing, using scissors, mousing - generally things requiring precision) and my right for others (baseball, splitting wood, hockey, etc. - generally things requiring strength). On top of that, I'm right-footed, but left-eyed. I don't know which is my dominant ear, but I suspect it's my left.

I'm really curious as to how this affects my cognitive processing and my brain's layout.. apparently there are all sorts of variations between people and an endless supply of theories out there as to causes.

I also ran across this rather interesting article, showing a direct correlation between murder rates (!) and left-handedness in primitive societies. But even though lots of half-baked theories exist, the conclusion seems to be that basically nobody has any idea what handedness is all about.

Of course, whenever I sit around pondering why I'm left-handed, I remind myself that there are deeper mysteries in the world - for example, why I am I. That one has been spinning my head around for years now. And then I am content to let the questions lie. Until the next unexplainable mystery pops into my head. ;)

And of course, I had to take a 20-question quiz to see what it said. I don't know what these results mean in light of my cross-dominance, however. But I do think "cross-dominance" is a pretty kickass-sounding term. :)

(is there such thing as "cross-submissiveness", for that matter? ;)
(and should "kickass-sounding" actually be doubly-hyphenated?)

You Are 15% Left Brained, 85% Right Brained

The left side of your brain controls verbal ability, attention to detail, and reasoning.

Left brained people are good at communication and persuading others.

If you're left brained, you are likely good at math and logic.

Your left brain prefers dogs, reading, and quiet.

The right side of your brain is all about creativity and flexibility.

Daring and intuitive, right brained people see the world in their unique way.

If you're right brained, you likely have a talent for creative writing and art.

Your right brain prefers day dreaming, philosophy, and sports.

Are You Right or Left Brained?

um... dogs? Prefers them to what? To cats? Or to ... lack of dogs?

Balanced Steps

2007-11-13T23:04:00.001+09:00

As many of you know, I'm often criticized for my less-than-symmetrical choices of footwear. Yet it seems that this time the asymmetrical boot is on the other foot, so to speak.

Evidently there are some who would spend nearly $200 on a pair of boots and yet not notice while trying them on in the store that the left is substantially larger than the right... maybe someone's mind was on her puppy rather than on her dogs. ;)

[ed - so I actually wrote this in reference to my girlfriend at the time, but then got a perplexed email from my mom. Apparently, at the same time my girlfriend had bought these boots, my mom had also bought a pair of boots, one of which was too big for her, which she hadn't noticed... and she also had a puppy!]

Clinton vs Obama

2007-11-10T10:15:00.000+09:00

My friend Berta just posted this article on Facebook: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama

I haven't been following the political race too closely, but I think this article brings out a number of interesting points. It's also more well-written than any summary I could write, but I'll write one anyway for the "skimmers" who seem to be so disproportionately overrepresented in my blog readership... :P

First, the main thrust of the article is that the most important thing about this election is not about the specifics of what we're going to do in Iraq, or how the health care system will evolve, or policy about gay marriage... there aren't so many dramatic differences between candidates' stances on these issues, in terms of what actions they would realistically take.

The article's main argument is that, moreso than these specific policy issues, the biggest issue is the deep schism in American society that reaches back to Vietnam, the hippies, and the Civil Rights movement, a problem which has been greatly exacerbated by the fundamentalist right leaning of the Bush administration. It argues that Obama would be a much better choice than Clinton in terms of unifying the nation and bridging this divide.

There are two other points I found salient in the article. The first was sort of a sidenote, but it made me think... nobody questions the power of the media in shaping the outcome of an election. However, a divided nation voting between diametrically opposed candidates provides an exciting and dramatic battle, captures the public interest, and consequently boosts ratings. So really, healing the nation is not in the interest of the media. Keeping things tense and divided makes for a better show.

Another, unrelated, point was that many of the children in the Middle East have never known any American president other than Bush, and it is critically important to change the image that America projects if we want to gain the trust of the Muslim world.

Anyway, as I said, the article is much more well-written than any summary I can provide. My English skills are really going downhill, as are my Japanese skills. Soon I will only be able to communicate in grunts, gestures, and source code.

A Short Memento

2007-11-06T03:58:00.000+09:00

Ok, I know I've been terrible about blogging for ... well, since last November, when I nearly killed myself with NaBloPoMo.
I can't possibly catch up on everything in one post.

... or can I?

Well, certainly not with pictures anyway, but I can hit the highlights.

Let's go in reverse chronological order, shall we? Sort of Memento-style.

This Evening

I recover, trying to gain my bearings. What happened, an earthquake or something?! Standing in the kitchen... it looks like I'm in the middle of making some lemonade. I finish filling the two-liter pitcher with water, and try it. Wow, that's insanely sweet! I probably could have made ten liters with that...

I pour a cup and go sit at my computer to blog.

Earlier This Evening

Settling in at home on a quiet, rainy night, I go to the fridge to find... no juice to be found. Nothing at all to drink, really. I'm not about to go juicing shiitake mushrooms, and I'm not really up for wine or anything, so I decide to make some lemonade.

As this page says, everybody remembers the ingredients, but not necessarily the quantities. I followed the instructions - one cup sugar, one cup lemon juice, one cup water, and take a sip... sensory overload and the world goes black... whoever wrote that web page was trying to kill someone.

Sunday

I wake up. It's twilight outside... I'm in bed. The clock says it's around five. Am? Pm? I go shower and shave, and it's night by the time I get out. Guess it was PM. I go to the store and pick up a lot of groceries. So many that I don't seem to have room for juice. Has it been this long since I've been food shopping?

Saturday

I step off the plane, go through immigration and customs, and walk out of the airport heavily overdressed. Despite the autumn chill in the air, I find that I'm sweating. I strip off my jacket and overshirt, and buy my ticket for the bus into Osaka.

Thursday night

I am standing in a large room, bright white fluorescent lights mounted all across the wall facing me, in sort of a zigzag pattern. I turn around, and vast planes of blue stretch out above and below me. I'm feeling a little sleepy, and I get the nagging feeling that I need to go pack my bags.

Earlier thursday night

Nick walks into the hotel lobby. "Hey Dylan! Long time, no see! So are you ready to head out to the modern art museum?"

Haha... ok, writing like this takes too much time and thought. I'll never get back to the summer, or even my birthday party for that matter.

Guess I'll have to try again tomorrow. Almost over the jet lag, so I'm actually starting to get sleepy at 4am.
'night

Dylan's 20th Birthday!

2007-10-19T20:17:00.000+09:00

Hey everybody,
Tomorrow's my birthday! That's right... I'm going to be 20!
Gonna have a great party. I promise I'll post pics!
Anyway, heading out soon to go enjoy my last night of being 1F years old... ;)

Intelligence

2007-10-12T02:11:00.000+09:00

Cracking Go

So I was playing with Facebook today, and I ran across a link to this IEEE Spectrum article entitled "Cracking Go". Much more complex than chess, the game of go provides an extremely difficult challenge for computers due to the vast number of possible moves at any time and the complexity of evaluating board positions. Essentially what the author is saying in this article is that due to continually increasing computing power and improved search algorithms, he predicts that in the near future, computers will be able to beat the world's greatest masters at the game of go.

I don't disagree with him on that point. However, throughout the article he continually sings the praises of "brute force" techniques, touting them as being superior to AI techniques that mimic human reasoning because they are simpler to program, leading to fewer bugs, and they scale smoothly with computing power.

I don't disagree with him on those points either. Certainly, with sufficient processing power and clever pruning of decision trees and caching of information, brute force techniques can and will beat top-ranking go masters someday.

But is this interesting?

I would say no. It would certainly be an impressive accomplishment from an engineering standpoint, but I don't think I would call it artificial intelligence. Or even a significant step towards artificial intelligence. Brute force, even brute force with finesse, isn't intelligent.

Man vs Machine

I'd like to mention two other topics addressing this point. First, another IEEE Spectrum article, "Psyching out Computer Chess Players", (which is shorter and maybe a more interesting read for non-computer geeks than the previous article) described the current state of computer chess programs. Essentially, it says that chess grandmasters are still able to hold their own against today's most advanced computer opponents, in spite of the fact that both their hardware and software have improved dramatically since Deep Blue's historic defeat of Kasparov in 1997.

The point the article brings up is that human players are good at long-term strategy, while computers are good at rapid calculation. Thus, anticomputer strategies often hinge on setting up many moves ahead for critical positions which are beyond the computer's prediction horizon. To me, the ability to do that is a clear sign of great intelligence on the part of the human players, and absolute lack of intelligence on the part of the computer. I really don't think that we can say computers have become much more "intelligent" as long as they rely on primarily brute-force methods.

Or can we? What does intelligence mean in the first place? Why do we care whether a computer can beat a human at chess? I always thought that what we cared about was how intelligent the computer was, and assumed that chess was a good test of intelligence. After all, it requires analysis, understanding, strategy, creativity, flexibility, and guts. In my mind, however, a brute-force approach has the effect of removing all of those interesting elements from the problem! Instead of creating machines which can reason, understand, doubt, guess, be creative, take risks, and plan ahead, we are instead creating soulless systems that are ruthlessly efficient at evaluating hundreds of millions of board positions per second. That's not creating intelligence... it's sidestepping the problem.

My Latest Addiction

I bought a Rubik's Cube the other day, and it said on the package, "If you can solve it without looking at a book, your IQ is at least 130." What does that mean, solve it without looking at a book? Does that mean to solve it through on-the-spot intuitive analysis? Clearly, looking at a book would give you all the algorithms you need to solve the cube "without thinking". But... what if you developed those same algorithms yourself, and then used them? Where does the "intelligence" happen? What if you really are using algorithms subconsciously, and you don't realize it? I think that happens often. I tend to find myself making the same sequences of moves over and over again to solve the same kinds of problems, without ever having stopped to think "ok, this is an algorithm for solving this situation".

Maybe part of the "intelligence" is in the process of creative synthesis, where random twists of the cube are distilled into general patterns. Certainly that could be done in a brute-force way, but not very efficiently... the efficiency comes from recognizing patterns and arriving at the algorithms through educated guesses and learning from mistakes. A billion monkeys with a billion cubes might by chance arrive at a complete set of algorithms necessary for solving a cube, but given the choice I'd rather hire three real smart people to do it.

Another, and more essential, part of the "intelligence", I think, is the planning process. The problem definition. Who says we need algorithms in the first place? Seeing that need is the first important thing, and then you have to break the problem down into its component parts: algorithms for switching the corners, for twisting the corners, for interchanging the edges, etc. This top-level strategy is something that even a billion monkeys wouldn't come up with.

As for my personal cube technique, I'm teaching myself a new system for solving it. My old technique was to solve one side, then put the corners in place, then to exchange the edge pieces last. It was pretty easy, and I could pretty consistently solve the cube in under 5 minutes. Sometimes under 4. There wasn't much thinking involved, and I was limited mostly by my physical speed and the inefficiency of my algorithms. It was something that even one monkey (albeit VERY well trained) could do.

The new technique I'm learning is this speed-cubing technique. This strategy of building out from the corner rather than solving an entire face first makes a lot of sense. However, I have been solving one face of the cube since I was a little kid. The algorithms for doing that are so deeply ingrained in my mind that it's almost unconscious. Yet this approach requires a different set of techniques. I find I'm much slower with this new system, but the process of solving the cube is much more interesting. It's less mechanical, and I have to use my intuition more, especially during the first stages. It's a real challenge to my mind, not in terms of memorizing 7-move sequences or anything, but actually in terms of pushing the limits of my creativity, my spatial visualization, my lookahead. I'm limited much less by physical speed now and mostly by cognitive load. I'm slowly but steadily improving, and I certainly don't envision any monkeys catching up with me on this task.

The Future

So, where is this leading? Well, regarding AI, I would have to side with those who are trying to develop thinking machines rather than brute-force systems. Granted, statistical and brute-force approaches are useful and effective for the right tasks. Perhaps it's a trade-off - the cold, efficient reliability of a pocket calculator (or a machine gun) versus the creativity, insight, ... and perhaps also the fallibility, of man.

On the other hand, maybe the ability of computers to do boring, uninteresting calculations at blazing speeds will provide a much-needed wake-up call to our world's educational systems. We will abandon much of our rote memorization in favor of challenging, stimulating problems that push the limits of our creativity, of our insight, of our intelligent reasoning. We will do this because we are forced to. Like Kasparov, we need to take every advantage of our uniquely human abilities to out-think the computers, which are catching up to us at a ferocious pace, nipping, as it were, at our cognitive heels.

We must adapt and evolve, or be made obsolete. Maybe that "How to Survive a Robot Uprising" book I keep under my pillow will turn out to be useful after all.

I'm back!

2007-09-26T00:22:00.000+09:00

Hey everyone...
It's been a long time. I haven't slacked on my blog like this in months!

Autumn is here, and the air is starting to get cooler. At night, at least. The days are still miserably hot, but it's nice to stand at the bus stop in the evening and not be drenched with sweat by the time the bus comes.

I just finished a monster deadline... Fingers are crossed now and there's nothing to do but wait. I sincerely hope this paper gets in though... I had to work far harder for this one than for any of my previous papers. Plus the project was pretty cool, and I'd be psyched to present it. :)

I have literally hundreds of pictures to upload from this summer. Bad Dylan. As history has shown, I don't tend to deal with backlogs gracefully.

Anyway, I'll do what I can about the pictures. They take way too long to photoshop. :P

Here are a few to start, though.

First, I love this pic of Yuki and Florian. They're so cute together. :)
This was from our annual trip to Lake Biwa. Just a day trip this year, since we were all too busy for camping.

This one is from the PL Hanabi, perhaps the biggest fireworks festival in the world. We took the advice of a friend I have who lives in that area, and we watched it from a nearby graveyard instead of getting crushed for several hours in the mash of people struggling to watch it from the "official" site.

And finally, here's one of Keiko and me on our 6 month anniversary. Pictures of us together are always hard to find, since we usually take pictures of each other. Hmm... who took this one?

[ed - A number of people have asked me about this last one. Here are links to the original photos I used.]

Neighborhood Matsuri

2007-07-14T11:28:00.000+09:00

It's 9:00 on a Saturday.

Ok, more like 10. Sleeping in is awesome. It wasn't always that way... when I was a little kid I remember getting up at 5am to catch some obscure Saturday morning cartoons. Weekends and Christmas were times to get up _early_ rather than sleep in. I wonder when that transition came, and if the opposite transition will happen again later in life.

Anyway, as pretty much everyone in Japan knows, this weekend is the Gion Matsuri, which some consider the most famous festival in all Japan. It is also the weekend of Typhoon #4 (back home they give hurricanes cute names, but here they just stick with numbers). My plan up until a few days ago was to go to the matsuri on Sunday with some friends in yukata (pictures will be coming sooner or later) but now that doesn't seem likely.

Gion is not the only place having a matsuri this weekend, though. As I slide open the door and step out onto the veranda for a breath of morning air, I hear the familiar cacophonous, yet compellingly rhythmic, clacking and clanging of a danjiri matsuri floating up to me from the neighborhood below.

A danjiri is a kind of portable shrine with wheels that people push through neighborhoods during festivals. Not to be confused with a mikoshi, which has no wheels and has to be hoisted on the shoulders, danjiri are pulled by ropes. The most famous danjiri matsuri I know of is held in Kishiwada, in southern Osaka, in early September, and every once in a while people get injured or killed as these enormous multi-ton wooden structures barrel out of control through narrow streets clogged with onlookers. They even sell a special kind of home insurance there that covers you in the event that a chunk of your house is gouged out by a danjiri cutting a corner. Not all danjiri matsuri resemble insane chariot races with garbage trucks, however. Most are a bit more relaxed and civilized, like the one in my neighborhood.

I step back inside, wipe the sleep from my eyes, grab my camera, and go back out to try to spot the source of the clattering and shouting. These festivals usually have teams of 40-50 people hauling the danjiri, standing on it, or walking alongside and playing some sort of rhythm instrument, preferably a loud one.

Interestingly, from my 23rd floor vantage point, I can't spot a festival at all.

"DANG di-ga dong DON DON di-ga dong doom DANG di-ga dong DON DON di-ga dong..."

At last, they emerge briefly at a street corner far below.

Can you find them? (Click for larger image)

Haha... kinda like "Where's Waldo" (which, by the way, is called "Where's Wally" in Japanese)

Anyway, the answer is here. You can just barely make out some people dressed completely in white emerging from the street to the left.

The procession moves on slowly, and after they turn the corner by the school, you can get a better view of the arrangement. Two long ropes extend far out in front of the danjiri, and it looks like 20-30 people are pulling it.

They come closer, and as they turn the corner you can get a better view of the danjiri itself, with its rain hood on to protect the fine wood carvings. Remember, it's a portable shrine and a fine piece of artwork.

Here you can see in the side of the danjiri. It looks like there's somebody sitting inside, probably playing taiko drums or something. I've never hauled a danjiri, but I've carried two mikoshi. The first one had little kids inside (actually, not so "little" when their weight is crushing your spine for 4 hours straight) playing taiko, and the second one didn't... I guess it depends on local tradition.

Finally, they arrive at the shrine. These festivals have their roots in Shinto tradition, and thus center around the neighborhood shrines. There is generally an element of testosterone involved as well, and the mikoshi matsuri I've been to have generally involved hoisting the massive mikoshi overhead and spinning it around until you are about to collapse and be crushed to death. This matsuri didn't seem to be quite so extreme, but here you can see them lining up on one side, preparing to pop a danjiri wheelie.

...and it's in the air. Note that the shrine grounds are the only green to be found in the whole neighborhood. To me, that's one of the best things about the preservation of traditional religion here. Everywhere else they seem to have no qualms about not only tearing down forests, but decapitating entire mountains to make space for housing developments, shopping malls, and pachinko parlors. Only on the holy ground is nature really held sacred.

So, it's taken me so long to write this up that the danjiri-pullers have finished their lunch break and are now back out on the streets. I guess it's time to go experience some more of life rather than just blogging about it.

Summer is here

2007-06-28T19:58:00.000+09:00

Stepping out of the choking humidity into the blissfully air-conditioned bus, I felt a weight lift itself not just off my shoulders, but off of my entire body. Summer has come. Not full-force yet, but the vanguard has arrived.

And they have already started setting traps for the unwary... Tonight on the way home from work I was clotheslined by my first spiderweb of the year. It was barely anything, just a few light strands of silk. A mere suggestion of what is to come, like the sole concert A played by a violinist before the start of a dramatic orchestral piece. Had this been August, I might not still be here to blog about it. As I wiped the sticky strands from my face, horrific memories of the grim architectural creations of these monsters began to creep out of the dark corners of my memory. Evil, twisted, gnarly sticky webs, meters in length, nearly the size of the trees that bore them. Ghastly three-dimensional towers of death, sometimes with five or six giant spiders sitting in wait for whatever prey may come along. Massive, deep networks of threads stronger than steel, probably big enough to immobilize a baby or small dog.

We recently had a scourge of caterpillars that nearly ate the trees bare, and now there are brown moths everywhere. And now that the season has started, out come the dani (ticks that live in tatami floor mats) and poisonous centipedes!

Japanese summer is never dull.

The Last Train

2007-06-22T17:39:00.000+09:00

About two weeks ago, we had a farewell party for my coworker Eriko. It was held near work, so my last bus was pretty early - 10:50. As always, it took me longer than I expected to extract myself from the party, and I ended up missing my bus by about a minute.

However, due to the brilliant planning of the engineers who designed the Nara Kotsu bus system, the last bus arrives substantially earlier than the last train leaves. So, in addition to the 7-10-minute bus trip, I had an extra 10-15 minutes of margin, assuming I could get to the station in time.

Now, I've walked several times, and it takes about 30-35 minutes, depending on how much stuff I'm carrying. So my thinking was, if I can jog the whole way, I can get there in just under 20 minutes, and that should get me there in time for the train. So I flew out the door, clutching my bag, feet pounding the pavement.

After about 10-15 minutes of this, it became obvious that I wasn't going to make it in time. My starting point had been further from the station than I had internally modeled, and my bag was kind of heavy, making it difficult to run. I switched to plan B, and stuck out my thumb.

Unfortunately, working in the sticks like I do, there are very few passing cars. So I alternated jogging and trying to hitchhike. The first four cars passed by me with no hesitation. After another few minutes, a fifth car came by and I saw brake lights up ahead.

The guys who gave me a ride were bored college students out for a drive in the middle of the night. They seemed entertained at the novelty of picking up a foreign guy hitchhiking out in the middle of nowhere, and they were happy to take me to the station.

As I thanked them and got out of the car by the station, I looked at my watch. I had missed the last train by about 2 minutes! Nooooooooo!

However, I went up to the platform anyway. There are one or two trains after my last train that go about 1/3 of the way to the city, which is better than nothing if I have to take a taxi the rest of the way.

Strangely, my train was sitting there for me.

With the lights out.

And passengers sitting inside.

I was thoroughly confused for a moment, until an announcement came over the loudspeaker saying that somebody had jumped into the tracks a few stations down, and they were busy cleaning up the body parts. (Well, not so explicitly, but they announced an "accident involving human injury" and said that they had turned off the power so that station staff could go down into the tracks, which is the same thing). Suicide by jumping in front of the trains is a popular pastime in Japan.

So I sat down in the dark train car, still sweating profusely from my run, reflecting on the fact that someone gave their life to enable me to catch my last train home.

My last train of the night.

Someone's last train ever.

Cucumber Pepsi

2007-06-14T22:15:00.000+09:00

Ok, so I saw this light-green bottle labeled "ICE CUCUMBER" in the convenience store and had to buy it. It's the latest drink from Pepsi, and I think it's a limited-time trial only in Japan. At least I hope so.

The inscription on the label:

CUCUMBER (キューカンバー)とは
英語でキュウリのこと。
コーラとキュウリ、驚きの
コンビネーションの爽やかなコーラ！

Which roughly means:

"CUCUMBER" means "kyuuri" in English.
The surprising combination of cola and cucumber
makes a refreshing cola!

I guess I was hoping for an actual light, refreshing cucumber drink. Instead, it turned out to be a light-refreshing-cucumber-colored cola. I personally have always despised the sickly-sweet and harsh taste of cola. There did seem to be a slight scent of fake cucumber, or something like that, but really I was unable to distinguish the flavor from standard cola.

Anyway, um... nice try, Pepsi.

I hate technology

2007-05-29T23:19:00.000+09:00

Yes, a self-inflicted slap in the face with a fist of irony. But it's true.

My computer has been giving me the same old B.S. (bluescreen, that is) that it always has, and I've had it. I'm supposed to be this knowledgeable person about computers, and yet why is it that I have worse computer problems than any of my friends? Granted, it has less impact on me than on many of them, because having done it so many times, I've more or less streamlined the process of installing all my software, which I've consolidated onto one DVD. I've even made ISO images of my install CD's and put them on there to mount virtually. It's still a pain in the ass, but it's much less painful for me than for most of the people I know.

Kind of like my sister, who has lost her wallet so many times she has streamlined the process of replacing her driver's license, credit cards, etc. Funny, the similarities in the lives we lead on opposite sides of the planet.

Anyway, after three years of struggle, I think I've found the culprit, by a painful and expensive process of elimination.

You see,
I've tweaked my BIOS settings.
I've reinstalled my drivers.
I've reinstalled Windows.
I've flashed my BIOS.
I've replaced my hard drives.
I've replaced my fans.
I've replaced my memory.
I've replaced my motherboard.
I've replaced my power supply.
I've replaced my case.
In fact, I've replaced every single thing inside my computer except ...
yes, you guessed it. The CPU.

The cursed CPU. (How do you write the word "cursed" with two syllables in text? That's how I intend it to be read. Shakespeare style.)

I should have gotten suspicious when it MELTED THE ENTIRE CPU BRACKET OFF MY MOTHERBOARD back in Boston, but no... I blamed it on the fan, the fan controller, ANYTHING but the CPU!

That CPU was my baby... I did everything for it. Replacing parts, jacking up fan speeds... Everything to take care of it, but in the end, the CPU was the one that betrayed me.

Anyway, it's outta here. As soon as I can get on down to Den-Den town, I'm buying a new one. The ironic thing? It's an old Pentium 4, far cheaper than a single stick of memory, or a single hard drive. Cheaper even than the motherboard it's running on.

---------------

And although I want to end here, can I say? KORG SUCKS! There's this weird hardware problem with adjusting the gains on my D-888 multitrack recording console that makes it nearly impossible to get good mic level settings during recording. I've been struggling with this problem for months, but there's no good solution in sight. Korg apparently knows about this problem and refuses to do anything about it.

Buying individual preamps for each mic would probably solve the problem but probably also cost more than the recording console itself. The closest thing to a solution I've found is an impedance-balancing connector I have, which makes it easier to adjust the volume but attenuates the treble range a lot, causing the recordings to sound somewhat dull.

*sigh*

On the plus side, I'm making some progress with cleaning my room. It's amazing how much time magically appears when your computer is tied up running low-level diagnostics.

By the way, you may wonder how it is that I'm able to write this...
My PC's cover is off and I have a huge room fan blowing on it to bring the CPU core temperature down to a level where it runs stably. :P

A Very Random Day

2007-05-26T00:06:00.000+09:00

Ok, it's been a long day, so I'll try to keep this short. However, let me preface this with my dream from last night:

I'll leave out the details, but I was afflicted with a bizarre condition (hazardous waste was involved) in which my hair would instantly grow out when cut, like a hydra. Except, only on the sides and back. The top grew like normal hair. So every time I would go to get my hair cut, they would buzz off the sides and trim the top a little. Then the sides grew out into a big bushy 'fro again within a day, and I would go back to get it cut again, developing a sort of artificial bald spot on top while never being able to escape the wild bushiness of my hair.

Anyway, waking up from that odd nightmare is how my day started. Now back to reality:

Today started out with two unexpected structural failures.

First, while I was dashing for the train (not very hard, mind you... just a light trot) my bag experienced a sudden double-failure, and I found myself carrying only a shoulder strap, with no bag attached. Now what are the chances that the seams would rip (yes, the seams... the buckles themselves didn't fail) on both sides simultaneously? Normally you would expect one side to fail before the other and the strap to go down with the bag. Here are the remains:

Fortunately nothing inside was damaged.

The next failure, this one even more bizarre, occurred sometime between boarding the bus and arriving at work. It seems that the tip of my umbrella somehow snagged on my shoelace, pulled out some threads, and unraveled it while I was walking. What? Here, let me show you:

I've never seen anything like that happen in my life.

In Japanese class, I got all the really hard kanji right, and I got all the really simple beginner stuff wrong. I blame it on the fact that today is Friday. Actually I blame everything on that.

The rest of the day was spent uneventfully programming. My current project is coming along nicely, and the interface I'm building is already starting to look cool.

The evening was spent at a kick-ass cool a cappella concert. It was a vocal band called "Naturally7" who use a lot of looping and effects, but end up producing an amazing R&B sound comparable to or cooler than similar bands that use instruments. It was a rockin' show.

Afterwards, Kern and I headed home while the more hardcore fans stayed to get autographs. I found myself walking into two convenience stores on the way home, searching for ... something. I felt somehow unsatisfied. Milk. Milk was on my list, so I grabbed a liter. I wandered around for another five minutes or so as I often do in life, searching... searching... not sure what it is I'm looking for. Finally I bought the milk and headed home, still feeling like I wanted something. The thing is, everything in the convenience store is either high-calorie, expensive, or porn. Or, I suppose, two of the three possible two-item combinations of the above list. Granted, things exist which are pornographic and high-calorie, but they don't sell them at Lawson. ;)

I took my milk up to the cashier, and I was somewhat distracted by the strange woman outside the door squatting and carefully making a dogfood pizza on the ground (with no dog in sight). As the cashier processed my carton of milk, by attention was torn between watching the woman outside and eyeing the little chocolates by the register. Cheese flavored. Cheese-flavored chocolate.. I tried to envision that. I like cheese, and I like chocolate, but ... um... is that actually good?

The cashier must have seen me eyeing the chocolates, because he asked me, "Is this the only thing you want to buy?" in a more inquisitive tone than the mindless confirmation that is usually spoken just as a formality. I asked him, "do these chocolate cheese things actually taste good?" and he sort of nervously replied, "um... I ... think they do...?".

Unconvincing.

"So would you like to buy one?"

"No, sorry ... I'm too scared."

On my way home I pondered my search for the elusive source of satisfaction which was not illegal, immoral, fattening, or expensive. By the time the elevator hit 23, I realized that there was in fact, at least one item which would fit that description. Before I could go grab it, though, I opened my bag from the convenience store.

The dude put a straw in there. Did he really expect me to drink an entire liter of milk from the carton with a straw? O_o

I laughed out loud.

Anyway, before sitting down to write this post, I took a few minutes out to enjoy the solution I came up with to the aforementioned satisfaction problem. I haven't pulled this out in months, but sometimes it feels really good to have your back mercilessly jackhammered. Especially at the end of a long week.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

Greatest Band of All Time

2007-05-23T22:38:00.000+09:00

Thanks to the subtle suggestions of the shuffle function on my iPod, I was reminded again today that, considering all the genres of music that have and will be developed across all the history and future of humanity, and all the talented composers and performers who have ever lived or ever will, that there is a very high possibility that the greatest band of all time is, in fact, Rip Slyme.

T3A - Hisashiburi!

2007-05-19T00:28:00.000+09:00

Yeah, it's been a while since I've done one of these...

#3 - Linkin Park.
Whenever things settle into a rut and life feels like it's starting to stagnate, leave it up to the shuffle function on my iPod to give life that caffeine kick it needs! While I was sitting on the train studying kanji, my iPod fished out some Linkin Park from the unfathomable gigabytes of eternity.

I remember being skeptical the first time I listened to them... I'm really not a fan of intentional misspellings. (This was the same reason I was slow to become a Def Leppard fan, although they later became one of my favorite bands.) Anyway, they quickly grew on me. The crisp sound engineering and delicate blend of light, warm, surrounding sounds with cold, hard, thrashing guitars really does it for me. They're kind of like a younger version of Faith No More.

Rejuvenated by this rediscovery, I dialed them up on my iPod after that and listened to them for most of the rest of the day. :)

#2 - Warm summer breeze.
Granted, the air has been getting warmer with the coming of "spring" (actually this is what most people from nations in temperate climates would call summer. As the Japanese are fond of saying, "Japan has four seasons". What they neglect to mention is that these seasons are not winter, spring, summer, and fall, but in fact dreary-and-miserable, summer, unbearable-humid-roasting-inferno, and summer-again-but-with-colorful-leaves-this-time.)

Anyway, the change I noticed today was that the wind on my knuckles as I biked home from the station was quite warm. Soothing. Enveloping. Like taking a long, warm shower after a day of hiking in the cold rain. Like rubbing warm lotion into dry, cracked skin. It was a wonderful feeling. A delicate balance point between the seasons, and I'm sure it won't last for long.

#1 - Anonymous encounter.
This morning on my commute to work, I looked up from my studying while we were stopped at one of the stations I never get off at. A troop of elementary school kids was walking along the platform, identical little yellow hats bobbing past the window.

I watched their faces as they passed, trying to imagine them later in life. Trying to read their thoughts, their opinions of Japanese society. Although a few were joking around and laughing, most of them had dull, uninspired looks in their eyes. They only looked forward and down, making sure they stayed in their proper place in line.

That seemed kind of sad to me, but about 3/4 of the way down the line, one little girl seemed different. She was bouncing along with a sparkle in her eye, and she was looking at the things around her. As the line shuffled past my car, she looked in and saw me. The expression on her face transformed instantly. She was so excited! A real, live foreigner! Our eyes met for a moment through the train window... the glance we exchanged was like a little secret between the two of us, and we smiled at each other for a moment. Then the line began to move again, and just before she was swept away from the window, she mouthed a word to me through the glass.

"Hello."

And she was gone.

Stillness

2007-05-17T01:02:00.000+09:00

[Higashi-Osaka and Ikoma Mountain, just before sunrise]

I did a little bit of shopping after work today, (mostly due to the shocking fact I discovered yesterday that I was out of soy sauce!) and somehow I ended up catching a gap between trains after I finished. Normally I don't have to wait more than five minutes for a train, but right now I've been sitting here for about fifteen. The strange feeling of patience that you only see at the end of the line.

And yet... I have nothing to do here but wait. I finished dinner, finished shopping, and replied to a few of the outstanding mails on my phone. I guess I could dive into my kanji studying like I usually do, but it just isn't the same when the train isn't in motion. Maybe that's a bad thing. If I get too used to this, I won't be able to take the Japanese proficiency exam if I'm not in a moving vehicle...

Such a strange feeling, stillness... The train is just sitting here, a muted chorus of hums and hisses coming from above, below and all around me as its circulatory and respiratory systems idle away. Train conductors walk up and down the cars picking up the occasional forgotten wrapper or manga book left by the passengers on the way out here.

Work has been pretty intense lately. Intense in an off-season kind of way. The kind of intensity when you're struggling to put your head around a problem and learn what the last people did. Not the kind of heads-down, sprint-to-the-end intensity that characterized the last couple months. It's pretty exciting for me that I'm working with a team now. At the same time it's exhausting to sit through hours of meetings held completely in Japanese. My comprehension kind of saturates and then my mind just sits back and waves the words on through with a smile.

Been studying like mad lately, too. I realized last week that I'm going to have to cover three kanji lessons a week in order to be ready for the Level One test this December. That's a pretty ambitious goal, but I think I can keep it up as long as I study on the train every morning and most evenings. Feels like binge-and-purge education, but what else would be appropriate for this country?

My personal life has also been pretty eventful lately. The big news is that KIP and his friend Ryan came to visit over the weekend! It was sooo awesome to see him. We rented bicycles on Saturday and biked around Kyoto with Niklas and Keiko (yes... the girlfriend I've been hinting about for a couple of months), taking in some of the major sights and seeing some of the little back streets as well.

[Traffic hazards in Kyoto - Photo by Niklas]

Let me just say that this is THE best way to do Kyoto. I've ridden the crowded, stuffy buses, I've walked enormous distances, and I've taken overpriced taxis... but there is nothing like tearing across the city on a rented bike for 300 yen on a beautiful spring day!

[A beautiful afternoon at Kinkaku-ji - Photo by Niklas]

Although I have lots of photos from this trip, I won't have time to crop, resize, and upload them for a while. Fortunately, however, Niklas is a great photographer and is also diligent about uploading his pictures!

You can see his pics from our trip on his Flickr page, which has a cool slideshow function.

Yoriai 2007

2007-05-16T17:38:00.001+09:00

I had a show on Sunday with Urara 6. We sang three songs at an annual event in Kita-Senri called Yoriai, where a huge number of amateur a cappella groups gather to perform, network, and enjoy the spring air.

Our performance was well-received. Our set was much tighter than it was last year, and I think we delivered a lot more energy than most of the Japanese groups. And really, it's hard to ignore the music and talk with your friends when Kern is rockin' the house with "Signed, Sealed, Delivered".

I've still got a lot of work to do on my solo, and we have some new songs in the pipeline for our upcoming summer concerts. On top of that, both Urara 6 and Osakapella are in the middle of recording projects, and I recently started taking voice lessons! Busy busy busy.

It sounds like we'll be taking some time off from performing after our summer shows are over, though, so things won't continue at this intensity forever. We need to make some time off for group bonding, I think. Personally I'm recommending paintball, although the ladies don't seem to be quite so enthusiastic about that suggestion. ;)

Roman Holiday

2007-04-21T23:19:00.000+09:00

Well, not so much of a holiday as a business trip, but it was unquestionably Roman.

Last week I went to Rome for the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (known as ICRA to those who have reason to abbreviate it). This was my first international conference, and only my second time ever to Europe, so it was pretty exciting for many reasons.

I can't possibly summarize my whole trip in one post, but I would be remiss to post nothing until I have time to write it all up. Here are a few snapshots from the trip, and I will hopefully have time to fill in the details later.

First, here's a shot of me with my snazzy new suit and cool new camera! I wasn't sure what to wear to this conference, and all my coworkers assured me that they'd be wearing suits. Later I found out that all the Japanese people wear suits, to make up for their bad English. (Honestly, most of the Japanese presentations were pretty painful to sit through. I feel really bad for them... even though I sort of understand the reasons for it, it's still unbearable to watch somebody standing up there awkwardly struggling to read his own powerpoint slides.) Among the non-Japanese, the dress code varied wildly, from suit-and-tie to old jeans. One dude was even wearing a Whitesnake t-shirt!! :)

By the way, the camera's pretty cool too... 10x optical zoom among other features, and I love the blue case!

One of the things I really enjoyed was wandering down random streets on the way from my hotel to the conference. I spent the evenings walking around the city, too. Here's a shot of one of the old cobblestone streets (kinda rough on the feet after walking on them for a few kilos).

And everywhere you go in the city, there are statues of gods and angels watching over you. It's like the entire city is one big open-air art museum. Absolutely overwhelming.

I'll try to process and post some of my night photos over the next few days. There's so much to write about. I've got an a cappella rehearsal tomorrow at my apartment, though, so I need to clean the place up a bit tonight. :)

The city is still awake.

2007-04-05T23:53:00.000+09:00

The city is still awake.

I came home a little early today, having found myself dashing for my last bus home every other night this week. I've been working on a paper, which has been "almost done" for quite some time now. Funny, that is. The percentage of its lifespan that a project spends in the "almost done" phase probably exceeds that of any other phase. Except, of course the "yeah, I've really been meaning to get started on that" phase.

Dutifully typing away on my laptop as my train home rocketed through tunnel after tunnel, it didn't occur to me that she would still be awake when I got home.

But she is. From the vantage point of my 23rd-floor apartment, I can see her in all her beauty...

A gemstone. A vast, multifaceted blanket of brilliance. The phrase "a thousand points of light" comes to mind, and then a part of my memory wags its finger at the thought, telling it to go away because of some vague association with President Bush... what was that all about anyway? Another fleeting and forgotten catch-phrase for a fleeting and forgotten catch-thought, which probably changed the world in some irreparable way before it was forgotten.

The cars on the expressway below add their headlights and taillights to the spectacular cityscape. I was going to say dazzling, but really it isn't. The city exhibits her brilliance in many ways -- sometimes dazzling like the brilliance of a diamond, but sometimes deeply and subtly, like the mysterious cloudy lustre of the opal.

Off in the distance, islands of flashing strobes and neon lights mark pachinko parlors, a mating call to all the burnt-out businessmen who crave that kind of mindless sensory stimulation.

Below me, the lonely river plays its games, catching the orange light of a corner streetlamp and turning it into a shower of glimmering sparks floating on the water, seen by no one but me.

Like a very old string of Christmas lights with several odd-colored replacement bulbs, the occasional blue, red, or green light can be seen, but for the most part... white.

Oh, what amazing things the city does with white. In her hands, white is not a color but an entire medium for expression. The orderly yellow-white lights on that building there, with the soft shadows, bespeak a comfortable, structured, nurturing life for the families who live there. Off to the right, powerful industrial lamps give off a cold, harsh, impersonal, stern light suitable for doing construction work or loading heavy things onto trucks. Down and to the left, a dim, orange-tinted white glow rises up from obscured streetlamps, lighting an old and seldom-used street. Off in the distance, on the side of the mountain, the white lights carry a slight yellowish cast, a faraway field of pinpoints that feels like it came out of a fairy tale.

By the time I've written this, the city has already yawned a few times and is fluffing its pillow. Every time I look, more lights have gone out. Soon the traffic lights will switch to flashing red, and only taxis will be seen crawling the streets.

And the amazing thing is, the individuals who comprise this enormous, living, breathing being, .. are oblivious to it. The city goes through her day like a well-conducted symphony -- the carefully-orchestrated fourth movement is coming to an end right now -- and every day is played out according to the score. Granted, there are nuances of expression in the way each day is executed, and every listening brings out new subtleties and developments. But the individual people who drive their cars and bicycles through the city and turn out their lights at bedtime, are oblivious to the fact that they are just cells in the bloodstream of a mighty organism far larger than themselves.

Like the small puppy dancing around and nipping at its master's heels as the old man slowly and steadily trudges down the street, the lives of the people in the city move too fast for them to notice the slow dance of the city around them.

And yet, the symphony of the city dances frenetically like a sea of roiling flames, in comparison to the serene, majestic mountain behind it. Unmoving, deeply in thought, the great dark mass behind the light show watches silently. The moods of the mountain shift slowly across the seasons, and it cannot be troubled by the fickle whims of people and cities. We may drive over it, build on it, and tunnel through it, but like flies on a horse's back, the mountain can barely be troubled to notice.

After all, where will we be in ten million years? Long gone and forgotten.

Where will the mountain be? Right here. Deep in thought.

And on that note, I'll get back to writing the thrilling conclusion to my robotics paper.

Terrible acronym

2007-03-23T19:32:00.000+09:00

Hey everyone, spring is here and so is deadline craziness, which is one of the reasons I haven't been posting lately.

I just got an email today about this event... I thought laser plasma acceleration sounded cool, so I checked out their website. Nice acronym. :P

Japan is awesome.

Lonely Snowflakes

2007-03-07T00:51:00.000+09:00

On my way home tonight, I saw about fifteen lonely snowflakes as they spiraled down past a streetlight, tossed around by the wind, and sailed off into the darkness. The chill in the air today certainly took me by surprise, after this weekend's springlike weather, but this was something completely unexpected.

They were beautiful.

Work Ethic

2007-03-07T00:27:00.000+09:00

Working conditions and management in Japan suck

(Please note: I'm not ranting about my particular situation here. I think I'm luckier than most in this country.)

Ok, can I just say? The work ethic in this country is perverse. Almost everyone I know is forced to work ridiculous uncompensated overtime hours, has vacation days arbitrarily taken away, and has to submit to the most unreasonable and irrational of demands and policies. This doesn't seem to be an artifact of any one company, or any one industry, or even any social class. Everybody is forced to work way too hard here, and for no good reason.

One thing that bothers me is that this does NOT lead to an introspection and improvement of management practices, when there are SIMPLE solutions and ways to make the system better for everyone. Instead, it just leads to people going through more and more unnecessary pain.

Of course this isn't just a problem in Japan. It's happening everywhere, but Japan seems to be particularly bad, maybe because they're still stuck in their "work harder not smarter" mindset. It's like they seek out hardship here.

The BI-I-IG PICTURE - Technology fuels evil.

I'm going to go to bed now because I think I'm starting to catch a cold, but in short I think that the worldwide problem of overwork is a direct result of (a) the centralizing effects of technology putting far too much power in far too few hands and (b) the global interconnectedness of trade and communication increasing competition to an extreme level, throwing the entire system out of balance in favor of corporate power at the cost of humanity.

Technology widens the gap between rich and poor.

I'm not saying that we try to stop "progress"... that's impossible. I'm just saying that we need to try and spread it around. It's the gap between the time when technology is developed and the time when its benefits finally filter down to the poorest people that fuels so many of this world's problems. We as a world need to redirect our resources from developing technology to distributing that technology.

I know this tirade against technology sounds hypocritical, being that I do robotics research for a living. I love my job, but I also see the bigger problem. Anybody have any solutions?

This is kind of a long, three-part essay, but it presents exactly the problems I'm concerned about. You can just jump to part 3, and then read the other parts if you're still interested...

http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm

The awesome thing is that I found that in the list of references in the back of a paper I was reading today on high-speed algorithms to fit data to lines and curves...

Awesome comic!

2007-03-06T00:07:00.000+09:00

I'd like to announce that xkcd.com is my new favorite internet comic. I've already gone through and read every panel. Twice.

Some aspects of it are reminiscent of Piled Higher and Deeper, in that there are some jaded caricatures of grad school life interspersed with nerdy humor, but I like this one better. It's not a continuous story, but rather a series of insights and snapshots of life, and random yet poignant philosophical comments.

Here are a couple pics from the site. Note that each panel has "title" text that comes up as tooltips when you mouseover the comics, which usually has something witty or interesting to say as well.

Be warned that these are addictive, so don't stay up too late reading them. ;)

Here are just a few of my like 60 favorites, just to give you a taste of what it's like:

I love the creativity of this one:

And I'm sure you all know THIS feeling:

This next one made me laugh so hard it hurt and I couldn't breathe... this is SO TRUE!!

But the thing that I love the most is that some of the comics are just really romantic. I want to dedicate this one to a certain somebody, although she probably won't understand the English. :)

"Shippo."

2007-03-05T02:55:00.000+09:00

Every day brings with it more hilarity.

#3 - Late Valentine's ... Fish?

Yes, you read that right. I received a Valentine's gift about three weeks late, and it was ... a fish! Dad - can you tell me what this is... a trout, maybe? Leave a comment on my blog if you can identify it. :)

Anyway, what an awesome concept. It's got crunchy chocolate balls inside, some of which are colored sort of disturbingly like fish eggs.

No idea how I can possibly come up with anything equally as unique for White Day...

#2 - Anonymous smiles on the train.

So I was taking the loop line home tonight... I think it was the second-to-last train. Lots of people, and everybody was so sleepy. A couple stations down from Umeda, this one dude down the row from me totally zonked out and dropped his ticket on the floor.

There was a group of three ladies sitting across from him - two young ladies probably in their mid-twenties and one elderly woman. They were looking back and forth among themselves, and finally the old woman got up, picked up the ticket, woke the dude up, and gave it back to him.

He apologized profusely, of course, and then they all sat in silence for another couple stations. Then, when it was his turn to get off, he bowed to them, mumbled another apology, and staggered out the door off-balance. The guy must have been SO sleepy.

Anyway, I watched this whole exchange transpire and thought it was kind of heartwarming. Then one of the ladies happened to look over in my direction, and I gave them a big grin because I thought it was great that they had helped the guy. The two younger women started giggling amongst themselves and the older woman was just beaming... she seemed so excited! Maybe it was my white boy charm, or maybe it was the fact that everyone else on the train was zombied out and she thought it was cool that someone had noticed, but from there until my stop we just kept exchanging silly smiles. :)

#1 - "Shippo"

Not 15 minutes later, I stepped into the elevator of my building, next to another elderly woman. I'd guess she was in her 70's, although I'm not very good with ages. Anyway, she had a little dog with her with the UGLIEST haircut ever and little hair accessories and things dangling off its head. I wasn't quite sure how to react... I mean, dogs aren't allowed here, and it was awfully ugly...

So, with my best tatemae smile, I commented on how cute the dog was.
"Kawaii desu ne!"

The old woman smiled at me, paused for a moment, and then, still smiling, held up the dog's tail.
"Shippo."

That means "tail."

Um... ok... not quite sure how to respond to that. Was she trying to show me something? Was it an unusually long tail for that species? Was she trying to teach me the Japanese word for tail (without even exchanging greetings or anything)? I had no idea what she was trying to communicate to me.

"Shippo desu ne..." ("Yep, that sure is a tail alright.")

Another pause...

"Erai ossan desu ne. Shigoto?"

That's a little tricky to translate in one swoop. "Erai" describes when somebody does something honorable or praiseworthy. "Ossan" sort of means "middle-aged man"... but the image that goes with it in my mind is like a sort of greasy middle-aged businessman with a faraway look in his eyes and graying hair who slurs his Osaka-ben and drinks a lot of shochu at the tachinomi bar in the train station with his sarari-man buddies so he can squeeze out that last five minutes away from his family before he has to catch his train home. I don't think I'm an "ossan" yet, although there are certainly some who would disagree. :P

Anyway, the last word, "shigoto," means work, and she was asking me if I was coming home from work.

I was actually coming home from a concert, and I was wearing a blazer over a garish t-shirt with blue jeans and my big silver bling-bling G-Clef necklace on. I don't know what kind of a job she thought I was coming home from. :P

So I said no, I was coming home from singing. And then she nodded, saying

"Ah, karaoke! Wakarimashita!" ("Oh, karaoke! I see!") and got out on her floor.

Weird weird weird. Haha, I love these little exchanges.

T5A!

2007-03-02T00:37:00.000+09:00

Ok, so now that I've got you all in my T3A groove, it's time to change things up a bit.

No, actually I just had a crappy day today, so to offset that I'm going to juice my T3A with an extra 2A.

I wanted to start with a "new old adage", such as "There are no crappy days, only crappy ..." but I couldn't finish that one. The best I could come up with was "There are no crappy days, only days on which you choose to let your perception of the balance of the universe skew in the direction of crappiness" but that was a bit long.

Then I came up with "Life is like an enormous box of chocolates, in which the removal of any single chocolate does not significantly affect the overall statistical distribution of the contents, and in which an unknown fraction of the chocolates are actually little chunks of polished-up and lovingly wrapped dog turds. When you happen to choose a dog turd or two from this box rather than the luscious chocolates you had hoped to get, the resultant shift in perception is what we call 'having a crappy day.'" This, of course, was far too long, and although I had a particular fondness for the simplicity with which it illustrated the fact that crappy days are subjective reactions to a more or less unchanging objective reality, I quickly abandoned that train of thought entirely, in favor of the simpler, more succinct solution of simply extending today's post by 2.

#5 - Something learned.

There's a beautiful quote from T.H. White in The Once And Future King... Let's see if I can Google it up.

“You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."

Haha, love that blockquote tag. Anyway, I learned something today. It has nothing to do with why the world wags, but it resolved something I had been confused about for a long time.

See, there's this new train line that goes out to near ATR. I take it every morning, actually, and as far as I could tell, it was called the "Keihanna Line" ("Kei-han-na" is a word formed using alternative readings of characters that make up the names of Kyoto, Osaka, and Nara, respectively). But sometimes, in their advertising, they'd call it the "Yumehanna Line" ("Yume" means dream, and the "hanna" just comes from "keihanna" - no second meaning there, as far as I know).

Anyway, I had always thought that this was just some silly advertising thing, but some people still called it the "yumehanna line", and I wondered whether there was more to the story.

Here is what I learned today: The Keihanna Line is the new extension that goes from Ikoma to Gakken-Nara-Tomigaoka (I wonder if they came up with this wonderfully succinct name by asking the same subway consultants who came up with the "Nagahori Tsurumi-Ryokuchi Line"). The existing extension of the Osaka Subway Chuo Line that goes as far as Ikoma is apparently just considered part of the Chuo Line now, even though I always thought it technically ended several stations before that, at Nagata. Now, to top all that off, the combined line, encompassing the subway line from Cosmosquare to Ikoma and the Keihanna Line going from there out to Gakken-Nara-Tomigaoka, is referred to in its entirety as the "Yumehanna Line".

So there you have it. A valuable lesson.

#4 - Poems on the train

Is it evidence of the fact that I now spend two hours a day commuting that my first two posts today are about trains? Or is it an artifact of the "primacy" and "recency" phenomenons in the brain, where we have better retention for the first and last of a series of experiences than for those in between? Being that those are the times of day when I ride the train, that could well be a possibility.

Anyway, tonight I was riding home on a later train than usual. Incidentally, time here is measured by the percentage of passengers on the train who are drunk salarymen -- a monotonically increasing function over time. In my train car tonight it was just over 50%, a sure indication that it was time to start stepping up my efficiency at work.

While sitting there, pointedly ignoring the rambunctious crew, I noticed some interesting posters. Counting the syllables, yes... several of them were haiku! Some were tanka, a slightly longer poetic form using lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. The topic of all of them was ... the train system. I suppose the Osaka subway system must have put on a poetry contest as part of a publicity campaign.

Anyway, most of them were what you'd expect... talking about manners on the train, don't use your cell phone, don't rush in while the doors are closing, etc. One said something I don't quite remember about how "when you have a warm heart, every seat on the train is a priority seat" which I kind of liked. And then there was this one.

I had to stretch over some crazy drunk salarymen to get that pic, so please forgive the substandard quality.

Roughly translated, it goes "Without pretending not to see, but speaking up instead, to stop perverts from feeling up ladies in the train, the great bravery." Ok, that was a REALLY rough translation, but you get the point. I just thought that one was a gem of Japanese culture.

#3 - "To be late"

Learned a pretty cool thing today about Japanese. The word "okureru" has two different kanji. I'm not talking about "to send"(送れる) and "to be late"(遅れる), which are both read "okureru", but rather two different ways of reading "to be late".

The first is "遅れる", which is the reading I have known for years. The one I learned today was "後れる", which I think in the back of my mind I knew was an alternative way to write it, but which I never really understood.

Finally today I got the lowdown on the distinction between them. The first one is the sort of standard "to be late". The nuance of second one, though, means to be late in the sense that everything around you has accelerated, and you haven't kept up, such as not keeping up with a fashion trend. I thought it was really interesting that they have a separate way to write that.

#2 - Noren

They put a new door in my room at work, because some people are running experiments in one half of the room while the rest of us are doing robotics development on the other side, and we need to stay out of each other's way. The door is great, and one side benefit of it is that we get better ventilation now.

Unfortunately, the girl who works in my room has her desk right in front of the door, and she's very self-conscious about people looking in at her while she's working. So we came up with an interim solution of stacking a bunch of crates in front of her desk, but that was a really ugly solution.

So I came up with a better solution - noren! Yes, the cloth curtains they have at sushi shops and bath houses. I happened to have an extra noren at home (how do you say that in English? Pair of noren? Like curtains? It's just one piece of cloth, but then again so is a "pair" of pants...) so I bought some hooks and a bar for it and hung it in our room! The color goes well with the walls, too.

Anyway, the thing that made this truly "awesome" was that there's this older guy who comes over to use our machine shop sometimes - he's probably in his 60's, I'd guess. Anyway, the first time he walked in through the noren, he made some comment about how "you see, this is how you can really tell we're living in Japan". LOL!

#1 - My hotel.

So today I finally got around to booking a flight and a hotel for my trip to Rome next month. Kinda late to be making plans like that, I found out. I fortunately got the last available seat on the same flight out that some other guys in my lab are taking. Unfortunately, I wasn't so lucky with the hotel booking. Rome is a popular place, and with the conference in town it's hard to find hotels at any sort of a reasonable rate. The place where the other guys are staying was already booked up, and a lot of the other recommended hotels were quite far away from the city center.

I poked around here and there online, and finally found this service called "Haystack" which is one of the Lonely Planet's online services. Essentially their function is to help you reserve hostels and hotel rooms at recommended places for travelers without inflating prices.

Anyway, I managed to find a place there that not only is cheaper than any of the conference's recommended hotels, it's right near the Vatican! I'm so psyched! I've already got things mapped out in my mind - waking up early to catch the sunrise at some elegant square adorned with ancient steps and fountains, a cool stroll through the spring morning past the wonders of ancient Rome, with a stop at an elegant Italian cafe, perhaps, for a cappuccino before I meander back to the hotel, suit up, and go engage in academic discourse on robotics technology. I am SO PUMPED for this trip!

Haha, I'd better get crackin' on putting together my presentation though... ouch.

#0 - Google

Ok, I was going to stop at #1, but something happened about halfway through writing this... My computer bluescreened. Yes, in response to the inevitable questions, I was doing some things to my computer that I shouldn't have been doing. But I didn't expect it to crash when it did.

Anyway, I was really bummed out at the prospect of losing this elegant quilt of prose that I had already been working on for well over an hour. I booted into my more stable system, hoping that something would remain in my automatic Google blog cache, and ... nothing.

Nothing? I was devastated. All of my enthusiasm for writing drained out of me like fish broth from a leaky plastic bag (it happened to me last night, ok?). I was about to give up and just go to bed depressed, when I decided to boot back into my experimental, unstable, bluescreening Windows installation...

*insert choir of angels here*

Restoring my Firefox session, lo and behold, I was greeted with nearly the full text of my blog post! Google had pulled through after all! I could have kissed Google at that moment if (a) it weren't a large, faceless, abstract entity, and (b) if a certain someone wouldn't be jealous. ;)

Anyway, I just saw a video on Google's plans for world conquest, and I thought they deserved some praise for good design. If they can keep coming up with useful, free applications and excellent user interfaces, then I might even be happy with them taking over the world.

So there you have it. T6A. I never knew I had it in me. And with pictures, no less!

End of an Era

2007-02-26T23:42:00.000+09:00

So, I haven't written here in a while, and, as usual, I'm sleepy and want to go to bed. So here's another quick one:

#3 - David is famous!

So my friend David was at a Chinese New Year festival in Paris, and he was interviewed by some national news channel! Here's the link to the video, although he says it's only going to be available for the rest of the day : http://jt.france2.fr/20h/index-fr.php?jt=0&start=1411

[ed - you can see this until the end of the week, apparently - see comments.]

#2 - Mad expensive vending machines.

I never in my life thought I'd put $1500 into a vending machine, but here it is - the machine I bought my 6-month train pass from. I felt a little nervous putting that much cash into a machine with no human operator, but my faith in the Japanese system carried me through. And now I have my very own teiki-ken commuter pass! Just like a real salaryman!

#1 - Love is in the air!

So ... it has happened at last. "Crazy" Yuki is getting married! This is a day I don't think I'd ever prepared myself for ... my old drinking and clubbing buddy is tying the knot. It's really like the end of an era for me. Of course I'm incredibly happy for her and Florian. They're a wonderful couple.

I guess the reason it's hitting me so hard is that through the past seven years a lot of people have been coming in and out of my life, but Yuki was the one constant. It's not like she's going away or anything, but there is definitely somewhat of a wall between married and unmarried life. Maybe it's finally time for me to think about growing up.

Or just find some new party friends. ;)

Reflections on T3A

2007-02-17T23:43:00.000+09:00

As those of you who have me on your RSS feed readers may have noticed, I haven't posted in a few days. Just like in November, I have found that posting every day is just too much time and effort for me. Plus I feel like the quality of the posts suffers a little. Any opinions from my readers? How does it impact the entertainment value of my blog? I mean, I have a personal, paper diary I could write this stuff in rather than putting it all up here.

But beyond the logistics of blogging, I think there's another problem with the T3A concept. Although I think it's a great idea to make an effort to notice the beautiful and good things in life, I think that in most cases, the negative experiences are what enable us to learn lessons and gain insights. Writing purely about the good things makes my blog feel flat and without substance.

Anyway, I'm feeling kind of tired today... I think I'm going to go to sleep early.

#3 - Silly English

Here's a pic I took while wandering through Shinsaibashi. It's a typical example of a Japanese-English "single-entendre". I think this is a takoyaki stand, with the creative name, "I see. Happen?"

In case you're completely lost on that one, the Japanese below the name says "Oishii? Happon?" which, if your pronunciation is creative enough, is an exact homophone for the English phrase above it. "Oishii" means delicious, and "Happon" is a counting word, meaning eight of anything sticklike.

So now you get it. It's a Japanese joke. :P

#2 - Love Thy Neighbor

So it occurred to me last night, as I was preparing a salad and realized that I had no dressing, that I have neighbors. Not just random people living near me, but friends who live in the same building as me, whom I hardly ever see.

So I took the elevator down to Peter's apartment, rang the doorbell, and asked him if I could borrow some salad dressing. It just so happens that he had just gotten several bottles of salad dressing from Costco, and he happily lent me one.

Something about that exchange was very ... human. So many of our relationships are structured and defined a priori - when you need X, talk to person Y, etc. But just going over to a neighbor's place seemed so ... organic? warm? I can't quite put an exact word on it. It seemed a little bit old-fashioned. Like walking over to Mrs. Garrison's place to ask if she has a cup of flour you can use for the butter cookies you're baking to bring to the barn dance that night.

I often lament the lost sense of community that seems to be a product of our technologized society, and this experience just seemed to contradict that pattern beautifully.

Plus it was pretty good dressing.

#1 - ...

I'm kind of tired right now, so I think I'm going to stop here. But just trust me that #1 was really, really awesome. :)

White Lovers and Pterodactyl Porn

2007-02-14T21:21:00.000+09:00

So to prevent me from procrastinating too long, I'll limit these descriptions to just a few sentences each. I've been spending too much time blogging and not enough living. Tonight I shall exact vengeance upon my belongings that have so smugly been sitting there, un-put-away, mocking me from the safety of their cardboard boxes for the past month. I am going to take action and bring this to an end.
This I vow: there will be carpet visible this night!

T3A for today:

#1 - Gorgeous sunrise!

Today was a rainy day, but when I woke up, it hadn't started yet... a blanket of thick, heavy gray thunderclouds hung overhead, and yet a band of sky near the horizon was still clear. The morning sun peered over the edge of Ikoma Mountain with sleek, dark, variously-shaped clouds scudding past it. The atmosphere was full of energy, and if I hadn't been so sleepy from photoshopping that Star Wars picture last night, I might have even gone for my camera!

#2 - Pterodactyl porn!

Yes, you read that right. I love this guy's blog post about it, where he presents it as irrefutable evidence of Intelligent Design. He's got a screen capture from it there, too (no naughty bits visible, but you can tell what's going on). Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately...) the link from there to the video itself seems to be down. I think the site that hosts the video got bombarded with too many requests.

If any of you get your hands on this video, though... let me know. ;)

#3 - Valentine's Day

So today was that least-favorite holiday of mine, Valentine's Day. As I mentioned a day or two ago, Valentine's Day in Japan is typified by a one-way exchange of chocolate from women to me. In response to the numerous queries I have already received regarding the number of chocolates I've been given this year, I offer my standard response of, "enough to make me happy, but not enough to make me fat."

Anyway, in terms of interestingly-named chocolates, the prize has to go to this treasure from Hokkaido: the Japanese writing on it reads "Shiroi Koibito", which means "White Lover". Why they chose that name I have no idea, but I find it hilarious!

-- UPDATE, 1:21 am --

Mission accomplished! More or less... My carpet is clear and my kitchen is improving greatly. I had to put some stuff back in boxes, but that's sort of inevitable for the moment I think. For now, though... I think this place is almost livable. Once I carry out the five bags of trash and piles of cardboard boxes by my door. Who would have thought that I'd have so much stuff left to throw out after moving?

I also came up with a new profile photo for my blog. A couple people have been weirded out by my old freaky picture. Here's the new one. I took it with my phone and applied a fresco effect in photoshop. I'm pretty happy with how it came out, although the fresco effect looks a little strange at some sizes - kinda just makes it look like my face is dirty or something. :P

Blogging, Sleep, and Robots... Choose two.

2007-02-14T00:59:00.000+09:00

#3 - New Blogger Templates

So I was up kinda late last night completely replacing the template on my blog. If I did a good job, most of you didn't notice that much had changed. :P

A little while back, when Blogger pulled out of Beta, they made this option available, but I never got around to upgrading my template. Recently, though, I started noticing how difficult it was to navigate to previous posts, and given my prolificity throughout NaBloPoMo and my recent fits of prose, it was beginning to become quite a problem.

Please notice the cool new sidebar, which is far, far more navigable than the old interface. You can click on the little arrows and whatnot. Very cool.

The next step, I guess, is to start using tags. It'll probably take me another two months to get around to that as well, so don't hold your breaths. ;)

#2 - Midday napping can save your life!

Scientific studies provide incontrovertible proof that napping can prevent heart disease. Ok, so it was just one study, but 23,000 subjects ain't too shabby!

Anyway, I'd better print out a copy of this and post it by my desk for my boss to see.

According to this article the three pillars of health are diet (ouch!), exercise (ouch!), and sleep (haaa, right...). So it appears that there are almost boundless opportunities for me to make my life even better than it is now!

#1 - Robovies at attention

Haha, I'm such an eight-year-old...

At one point recently we had to line up a bunch of the robots in one room for an inspection. It really reminded me of the ranks of stormtroopers lined up while the Emperor came to inspect the Death Star. So, here you go, yet another way I spend my free time other than sleeping.

(By the way, the writing wasn't photoshopped... the front robot really is an R-2 unit!)

(also note that almost all the photos I post are available on Flickr at much higher resolution... click on the photo and then click "All Sizes" for options)

Urara 6 Reunion!

2007-02-12T21:06:00.000+09:00

At least it felt like it. I had rehearsal with Utaurara today for the first time since December! They've actually had one rehearsal since then, but I had to work late that day so I couldn't make it. Anyway, it was good to sing again. Nothing has really changed in the meantime, though - Kern was sick, as usual, and Lito hadn't practiced his music, as usual. :P

We had a good rehearsal - practiced choreography for our show next Sunday, worked on some new songs, and had a nabe party afterwards! Right around then is where the T3A list starts:

#3 - Valentine's Chocolates!
So the Urara 6 ladies were really nice again this year and got Valentine's Day chocolates for the guys (Japanese tradition dictates that girls give chocolates to guys for Valentine's Day, and then the guys give girls chocolates one month later, on "White Day"). Here's how the distribution of the chocolates went:

"Kern, here's a very special present just for you. We know you'll love it!"

"Lito, here's something for you, too - we looked all over and we found the perfect thing for you!"

"Dylan... oh, you can just grab a generic gift out of that bag over there. It doesn't matter which one."

...

Yup, I guess that's me right there, your run-of-the-mill everyday average Joe, nondescript, generic, and replaceable. Ha ha.

Revenge comes on March 14.

#2 - Walking and Soujing

I've been cleaning up my apartment lately, or at least talking about cleaning it when in reality all I'm doing is blogging. :P

Anyway, it turns out that I had left my broom in my old apartment, and thus needed to purchase another one. I found a cool broom at one of the stores in my area. It comes as a set with a dustpan, which has a long handle so you don't have to squat down to use the dustpan when you're sweeping. The best thing about it, though, was the label:

For those of you who don't understand that, "souji" is the Japanese word for cleaning. They don't usually put "-ing" on words, though, even when they "Engrify" them, so I thought this was interestingly original.

#1 - Very cool interactive radio website

Philo emailed me a link to this: http://www.musicovery.com/. It has a very interesting interface, distributing music in a 2D space based on how energetic or calm it is, and how dark or positive it is. It also represents the song on a timeline, showing when it was created, and there are a number of other controls based on genre and other factors.

It also gives you a 2D space to move around in, showing where your song is located and plotting a path through other songs that seems to be kind of like a playlist trajectory. You can scroll around the space and click on other songs, too.

Anyway, don't just read my description of it... try it out! If nothing else, it can bring a little glimmer of user interface joy to your life.

Hoshi Matsuri '07

2007-02-12T01:07:00.000+09:00

Sleepy as usual, so I'll just cut to today's T3A:

#3 - Falafel!

Four of us went out for falafel and hummus tonight. Not the kind of thing you get a lot of in Japan, and we had to head all the way up to Demachiyanagi, in northern Kyoto, to get it. This is the same restaurant I went to for my birthday last year, by the way.

Anyway, after an excessive wait, the food wasn't great, but it was certainly passable. After the heavenly food we had in Abu Ghosh, it's hard to eat hummus anywhere else. Anyway, that meal brought some joy to my life, as Middle Eastern food is something I love to eat and yet rarely get the opportunity.

We ran into some friends there too, by chance. Kansai is starting to feel real small these days...

#2 - Today was 2/11, Japan's National Foundation Day. It also happens to be the day of the Agonshu Hoshi Matsuri. A full description of this festival can be found on my blog entry from last year.

Anyway, here are some pics from this year's festival.

The Fires:

The Blessing:

The Devout:

#1 - Coat check

So this is another "it happened last night, but after midnight so it counts as today" posts.

I was at a night club. There were on the order of 100 people there, all there to see this famous DJ. When we entered, I had handed my coat to a friend of a friend to check with the people working the bar. Then, around 2:30am I decided it was time to head home. Except, I didn't have a coat check ticket or anything, and I didn't know where my friend was.

So I walk up to the bartender (some guy whom I had never spoken with - his shift must have just started) and ask if I can have my coat, and he's like, "sure." Then he walks into the back room and almost immediately comes back... with the right coat! How awesome is that!? Out of like a hundred coats. Talk about service!

That totally rocked.

Extraordinary lung capacity

2007-02-10T14:52:00.000+09:00

So... I've tried to refrain from putting too many YouTube links in the T3A list, partly because my parents have an internet connection that pumps bits about as fast as a kindergartener typing in Morse code, and partly because the whole T3A philosophy was to get myself to notice and share the beauty of life around me, not silly web links.

However, it would be denial to pretend that the internet isn't a part of and an influence on my life, and many of the links I've been forwarded lately have, in fact, been YouTube links. I spent a good hour today catching up on watching all the videos I've been sent over the past couple weeks, and this one was too awesome to let slip.

#1 - Beatboxing while playing the flute

This man is a god! I am in awe of his breath support and sense of rhythm...

The guy's name is Greg Pattillo, and he has a couple other videos on YouTube, although I found this one to be the most impressive of the ones I watched:

#2 - Bunnies.

They're cute, they're furry, they're athletic, they're survivors. They're the canonical basis for comparison when discussing reproductive fervor. Bunnies.

Born in the year of the Rabbit in the Chinese calendar, I can't help but identify with them to some degree. I never thought I would get requests for things to put on the T3A list, but hey, why not? This is pretty awesome. :)

Yes... it's the Danish Bunny Show Jumping Championships.

And of course, how could I not follow that up with a nostalgic clip showing what bunnies can REALLY do...

#3 - Underage

So tonight I went out with a friend from Osaka, and some of his friends from Shimane Prefecture, and a friend they knew from Tokyo, who happened to have some Japanese friends who were DJ's and who were playing at an event with Sinbad, a world-famous DJ from (France, I think?) whose name I had heard but whose music I had not. Anyway, I ended up going, of course.

As I was mingling with the crowd and meeting interesting people, I noticed a Japanese guy who appeared to be underage. Now, they're pretty lax about enforcing rules about that here... I only know one major club that regularly cards people, so it was completely reasonable to assume that somebody underage (20 years old is the cutoff for pretty much everything in Japan) had gotten into the club.

His actions really kind of gave him away. Everyone else was dancing in a very relaxed, sort of adult way (the music was pretty mellow at that point), but he was sort of jumping around awkwardly. He didn't really seem comfortable talking with people, either. I didn't see whether he had been drinking or not, but at one point he just came up and hugged me, while looking off in another direction, then he left again, distracted.

Finally, at one point a couple of my friends went up and asked him how old he was. It turns out he was three. He was playing with Matchbox cars too... I guess that was another giveaway. :P

That was kind of interesting. Not exactly what you would expect to see at a nightclub. He was adorable, though.

Short skirts

2007-02-10T02:10:00.000+09:00

Haha, no pictures with this one, sorry guys. ;)

You'll be thankful though.

Anyway, it's past 2am and I never got around to that "tidying up" last night - spent most of the evening playing with Jamglue - I made a little a cappella mix, which I'd say is not too bad for my first mix, using my crappy webcam mic and a bunch of clips from random people. :)

So here's today's T3A:

#3 - Short skirts.

I woke up about 20 minutes earlier than usual this morning, and I got off on an early start to work. It's a different world. Normally there's no more than one person who gets on during the 23-floor elevator ride that stands between me and reality. Today, we stopped pretty much every three floors.

At the first stop, this schoolgirl with a short little skirt stepped on the elevator... with her mom! I thought the whole thing was that they left the house looking all wholesome with their skirts down to their ankles, and then on the way to work rolled them up to the limits of the imagination... honne and tatemae. Guess that's not always the case.

But that was just the start.

At the next stop, and the next, they piled in... blue blazers on top and nothing but bare flesh down below... not even any cloth hanging below the shirt hem! But that wasn't the most disturbing thing.

This was the most disturbing thing:

None of them were girls.

They were all, as far as I could tell, elementary school boys (although quite tall - they must have been sixth graders). For some reason, the standard-issue boys' winter elementary school uniform in Japan includes a pair of very short, very tight shorts.

A whole army of them was waiting outside the elevator doors when we got off, all with their polished-leather elementary school backpacks (I don't remember the Japanese name for those) wearing their dorky-looking bonnets, and long, spindly bare legs, standing around in a freezing cold, foggy, rainy winter's morning as adults bustled by wearing big puffy coats and carrying umbrellas.

I don't know if this counts as "awesome", but it was certainly poignant, and kinda funny if you don't feel too sorry for them. And you know, I guess I have a right to laugh because I'm not them. So it is awesome after all. :)

#2 - When will he ever shut up about these @#$^& particles!?

Not yet, evidently. So I had actually decided to give up on tuning and tweaking my particle filter yesterday, and I had some thoughts last night on how to write something simpler but certainly good enough for my application. This morning, though, I had a change of heart and decided to go back in for some more parametric wrangling.

After a couple hours of cleaning up and refactoring code, diagnosing problems, coming up with mickey-mouse workarounds, and tweaking and refining the Frankenstein patchwork of code that is the workhorse of my heuristic data segmentation algorithm, I experienced a rush of something that was most likely either enlightenment or caffeine.

This epiphany inspired me to simply let go. With liberal use of the magical characters "/*" and "*/", within a few minutes I had laid to rest huge chunks of my code. I discarded weeks of work and started nearly from scratch.

I'll spare you the details, but in the following few hours I came up with a simple, elegant solution that produced vastly superior results. Although it isn't quite complete (is anything, ever?), I left work with a deep sense of satisfaction and a sort of floating feeling somewhere between the lightness you feel after a massive haircut and the spatial disorientation of taking off your skates and standing back on the ground again.

Sometimes you just know when something's right, and you know when it's not. When you do get it right, the feeling of universal alignment and balance is worth every minute of study, effort, and perseverance you put in. It's true for music, it's true for go, and it's true for code. Allegedly it's also true for love, but I'll need to collect some more empirical evidence to support that conjecture.

#1 - Speedy delivery!

I got a letter in the mail today, from a friend I haven't seen in years. A letter. Illustrated in colored pencil. With sparkly stickers. :)

That was just so awesome. So sad that most of our communications today have no physical instantiation. Even if you print them out, the paper is so impersonal, so ... fileable.

A letter, on the other hand, is highly personalized and rich with meaning. And extremely inefficient. A waste of paper, time, effort and postage when an email would do perfectly well.

The love we have for these inefficiencies is one of the primary qualities that separates us as emotional, aesthetic beings from the impersonal heartlessness of our future evil robot overlord masters, and so we should recognize and treasure it.

Or even consider implementing it in the design of the evil robot overlords. Oh wait, I wasn't supposed to say anything about that so early on in the project... never mind!

Jamglue!

2007-02-08T23:43:00.000+09:00

Ok, so I've got some "tidying up" to do, so I'll dive right in to today's T3A.

#3 - Jamglue

I got an email this morning from Gautam. Yes, the guy from the Toons who made all the women swoon and whose grandmother was riding a bike down the street the other day. It turns out he's working for a startup now, which has developed a pretty cool online service.

They're called "Jamglue" (http://www.jamglue.com) and their app allows you to do audio mixing online! The software seems like a simple version of ProTools or Sony Acid Pro, except that you do everything inside your browser, and it seems to be integrated into an online community.

This is actually something that might be really good for Osakapella, now that I think of it... former members are scattered around the world, and there are still a few old songs I'd love to record!

Anyway, Jamglue has a project going on this week where they're trying to amass the "world's biggest Valentine's Day choir" and get lots of random people to volunteer to sing along with one of two songs - one for V-Day lovers, and one for V-Day haters. Or you can do both, if you're either chronically indecisive or just really excited to add your voice to the mix.

They say all you need is a microphone, so I recommend you all try it out! I've always believed in supporting talented street musicians and innovative tech startups. :)

#2 - Kern Passed 2-Kyuu!

This afternoon I found out that my friend Kern passed the Level 2 Japanese Language Proficiency Test. The implications of this are far-reaching. I passed Level 2 four years ago (can you believe it? FOUR YEARS?!?! Dang time flies...) and I've been kind of slacking lately in my studies of Japanese. Now there's gonna be some healthy cutthroat competition in the ol' a cappella group! I just started Japanese classes again yesterday after about a month of vacation, and if I crank away at memorizing kanji this year, Level One may be a possibility...

Haha, I've been such a slacker since Linda left.

#1 - A beautiful analogy

I'll spare you the details, but I've been working on implementing a state estimation filter at work, and at one point tonight I asked my coworker Jaume a few questions about some equations. He was able to explain the stuff pretty clearly... "this term is the blah blah blah transformation matrix, this term is the blah blah covariance," and so on. But for one of the terms he just said, (be sure to read this one with a Spanish accent!) "this one... this is like the oil in the frying pan."

It was perfect... I knew exactly what he meant, and suddenly the equations all made sense to me. Well mostly. We'll see if it works when I code it up tomorrow. :)

Do Not Serve

2007-02-07T23:39:00.000+09:00

Gonna make this one short - I'm sleepy tonight.

Gave up on the particle filter thing today, for this project at least. I did get it working, but my heuristic position estimations were already so good that there wasn't really any improvement to be gained using the particle filters anyway. I've started implementing a different kind of filter that I'm not sure has a name, but which should help to smooth out the kinks in my data with MUCH less computational overhead than the particles.

The way I look at it, even if what I'm currently trying to do comes to nothing in the end, the act of going through and implementing it will force me to clean up my code a lot, which will make it easier to reuse for the next project. I look forward to the day when I don't have to implement any of the nuts and bolts stuff from scratch anymore. In fact, I look forward to the day when "programming" is little more than the act of "having an idea", and the rest is automatically taken care of for you. Seriously... I feel like 80% of the work of programming is just managing little details that, with a little thought, could easily manage themselves.

Other quick updates on my life - I went on sort of a date tonight, but the "awesomeness" of that is highly dependent on future developments, so it doesn't go into the T3A yet. My room is still a disaster area, although once I can get my hands on a pipe cutter, things will be much more manageable. :) My inbox is as full as ever, but I'm hoping to start dealing with that now that things seem to be cooling down at work, and I'm almost completely finished listening to the Hitchhiker's Guide radio series. Also, it sounds like a few of us may get together to go to the Agonshu Hoshi Matsuri again this Sunday! Not sure I wouldn't rather just sleep in, but I guess once the wheels are rolling, they're rolling.

T3A for today:

#1 - A new friend.

So I finally got to meet this guy Gary at work. I've heard of him, of course... usually in hushed tones between paranoid glances over the shoulder. But today, by chance, I ended up having lunch with him. He's lefty, which is an a priori plus, and I remarked that I thought he looked kind of like Matthew Broderick. His response... "Yeah, sometimes people tell me that, but I don't get it. I mean, Matthew Broderick is white!" (Gary is Canadian.) Anyway, I'm glad I was able to make that connection. He seems like a cool guy. Oh, and his name is a near-homophone for the Japanese word for diarrhea. That's gotta be tough.

#2 - Christian Slater

I was stunned to discover today that Christian Slater starred in the Hitchhiker's Guide radio series (Quandary Phase) as Wonko the Sane! Christian Slater!!!
Of course, if I had known from the start that he was in it, I would have expected something more in line with his characters from "Heathers" or "Pump Up The Volume". Sort of a sneering cynicism or something. He played the part pretty straight, as it turns out. Still, hearing his name in the end credits was pretty cool, especially since I've never heard of any of the other voice actors in the entire production.

#3 - Random.

This was something kind of funny that Andrew observed at the drink bar at Joyfull today. It's the hot tea machine, and we were all pretty stumped as to what this could be trying to communicate by the phrase, "Do Not Serve". Note that the tea dispenser was fully-functional, as always.
(Sorry for the substandard photo quality... took this one with my phone)

Haha, so much for "making it short" tonight.

Wielding the White Sword

2007-02-06T23:13:00.000+09:00

So today I adapted my old particle filter code to my new human-tracking software. I haven't worked out the kinks yet, but it's properly running. Now there are only like 25 or so parameters to tweak before I can get it working effectively. :)

I missed my little particles. When I first ran them this afternoon a mass of them squirmed around my screen like an infestation of something organic. It was pretty trippy, actually. After all these clean-cut laser beams and carefully computed position data, even the slowly-moving humans I was tracking seemed to move like living things (and with good reason), but throwing the particle filters in there was like releasing a swarm of bees. Actually, moreso than bees, they reminded me of the black squirmy things in Princess Mononoke. I actually felt a momentary sensation of fright as they swarmed out to see them take over the right side of my screen.

Have no worries, though... I'll have them trained in no time, and then they will swarm together rather than apart. :)

Anyway, after a day of heads-down coding, I found myself in a sort of an altered state. It's rather difficult for me to interact with other humans in real-time after hours and hours of coding. Kind of like the feeling of having just woken up from a nap when everyone around you is in the full swing of their day.

Without further ado, today's T3A:

#3 - Cool visualization tool.

As I was refactoring and cleaning up my code today, I looked around online for some tools that might help me out in identifying what parts of my code needed to be cleaned up, simplified, or restructured, and I ran across the Metrics plugin for Eclipse. This is so cool. Check out the visualization feature... there are pictures about 3/5 of the way down that page. It's auto-generated, and it dynamically moves around and morphs as it's scanning in all the classes and figuring out their dependencies. Then you can spin it around, zoom in and out, and stretch it into a hyperbola!

It didn't really help me out so much, but it was definitely cool to see how all my classes and packages were connected together. I imagine it would be a lot more useful for more complex, team projects.

#2 - I have acquired the White Sword.

No, I'm not playing Zelda. I have gradually been equipping my kitchen over the past couple weeks, a spatula here, a coffee maker there, and finally it was time to purchase a knife. Now I could go with a crappy old $20 or $30 knife, or I could spend some real money and get a work of beauty that would stay with me for many years. I looked at many knives... I found some really beautiful ones on sale at Conan - $160 knives on sale for half price, etc. But though I stood and admired them for several minutes, my inner "yes" breaker didn't fire.

Instead, I found myself returning once again to a $50 Kyocera ceramic knife I had been eyeing for a while. It seemed a little strange to buy a kitchen knife from the company that made my last mobile phone, but after my Panasonic bicycle, nothing really surprises me any more. :)

The only thing holding me back was the price tag... I've never used a ceramic knife before, and I wasn't sure if it would be a good investment. But the "yes" breakers had tripped, and it was just a matter of a little rationalization to soothe my "are you doing something stupid again?" warning systems. Which are all too easily soothed.

I brought the knife to the counter, and just before handing over the money, I caught another flash of white out of the corner of my eye. There, in front of me, was a slightly smaller but still quite usable ceramic knife by the same manufacturer, for only $30! And as a special promo offer, it came with a ceramic potato peeler (no, not for ceramic potatoes...). I kind of thought the first one seemed to be slightly nicer, but it certainly wasn't $20 nicer.

So here we have it - my White Sword.

#1 - News from an old friend.

So I was talking with KIP today, and he said he just got back from NYC, where he saw a bunch of PKT guys. In the course of our conversation, he sent me a link to Danny's home page. I haven't spoken to Danny in ages, and it's so wonderful to see him doing well out in Cambodia. Granted, he's there as a missionary, which isn't my kind of thing, but he seems to have successfully combined two things I have often seen as, though perhaps not mutually exclusive, certainly something that very few manage to successfully bring together.

I'm talking about the "Settling down and raising a happy family" ideal and the "Going out, seeing the world, and doing something that makes a difference" ideal. I'm really impressed and inspired by the fact that he seems to be achieving both. Of course the same goes for Joel and Rebecca, but I've at least vaguely been in touch with them on and off for the last few years. It was great to get this sort of one-way update on Danny.

Yesterday's T3A

2007-02-06T10:02:00.000+09:00

It turns out that I fell asleep pretty much as soon as I got home last night, so here's a quick T3A for yesterday, whilst I wait for my program's morning data-crunching to finish.

This time let's go in order of increasing length of explanation.

#3 - Andrew is back!

Yesterday Andrew (otherwise known as An-chan 3) had his first day back at work in Japan after several weeks on sick leave in Australia. It's awesome to have him back!

#2 - My program works!

Although the term "works" is certainly a pretty loose characterization, which encompasses a wide range of functionality and effectiveness, I very distinctly passed a milestone yesterday whereby my program can now easily, smoothly, and efficiently do any of the tasks for which it was designed without any silly bugs getting in the way. With one click I can trim all the data files to their specified lengths. With another click I can batch-process all of them and condense their data output into one file. I'm psyched. :)

#1 - Entertaining train ride.

I met an interesting girl at the bus stop last night. From the moment we started talking, she reacted to everything with this continuous, high-energy, edge-of-insanity laugh. Beyond that, it was interesting to meet someone with absolutely no aspirations whatever in life.

Her: "Do you always head home this late?" (laughing)
Me: "Depends on how busy things are at work... how about you?"
Her: "Well, I work from about 8:30am to 9pm" (giggling)
Me: "Wow... those are long hours to work every day."
Her: "Actually that was my last job. Now I start work around 2pm." (laughing)
Me: "Really?! That's awesome... What do you do with all that free time?"
Her: "Nothing. I guess I sleep for some of it." (nervous laughter)
Me: "You don't have any hobbies, or dreams you're following, or anything?"
Her: "No. Actually, I'm thinking about quitting this job... The hours are kinda long." (slightly manic laughter)
Me: "You're kidding. You only work a half day, and that's too long?"
Her: "Yeah..." (still laughing)
Me: "So if you had all the time and money you wanted, what would you do with it?"
Her: "... Nothing, really." (hesitant laughter)
Me: "Uh-huh. Interesting..."
Her: (laughs)

This went on for about half an hour. :P

Exploring my kingdom

2007-02-04T23:40:00.000+09:00

Before I get into my blog post today can I just say something? It's the day after Setsubun, and already the stores have decorations up for Hina Matsuri! What is this world coming to... :P

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm going to have to be on guard against ogres this year. In case any of you were wondering what a Japanese ogre looks like, here's a picture:

That's a bag of dried soybeans, by the way. In addition to hurling them at ogres, Japanese tradition dictates that on Setsubun Eve, you eat exactly as many beans as your age, plus one. Before you go ahead and eat the rest.

I spent most of my day today continuing my home improvement projects, particularly on the electrical (rerouting an extension cord and a ground cable to my fridge's new location) and plumbing (fixing a leak in the spout of my sink faucet so I can try to affix a water filter attachment) fronts. After that, I went up and biked around Kyobashi a bit, to try to get a feel for the lay of the land.

Kyobashi is a very confusing area, with a subway station, a JR station, and a Keihan station, each with shopping malls and the like growing out of them, connected and divided by crooked little streets. I'm starting to get a feel for the way it's laid out, but I think it'll take a few more trips before I can navigate it confidently.

The great thing about Kyobashi, besides the fact that it's like a 5-minute bike ride away, is that it's full of little restaurants, bars, and izakayas, as well as plenty of shopping and of course little takoyaki stands on the street (yeah Osaka!). A couple turns down the wrong streets, though, and the sushi and kushi-katsu signs are quickly replaced by sketchy storefronts with photos of sexy girls and charts listing hourly rates. Not just a few of these places, either... street after street is lined with these "service establishments", and the interesting thing was that I saw a number of shops with big signs saying "free information service"... ostensibly to help prospective clients find the shops that offered the services and the price ranges they were looking for.

Interesting neighborhood.

Anyway, without further ado, today's T3A list.

#3 - Home Improvements.

I finally came up with a decent-looking solution for my aforementioned rerouting of electricity through my kitchen. The tricky thing is that they don't really do 3-prong plugs here, so you need a separate ground wire for the microwave. Instead of having cables dangling all over my kitchen, I chose to go with a more elegant approach, using plastic cable-routers. Here you can see the final result:

I'm pretty happy with it. It's out-of-the-way and also visually unobtrusive.

#2 - View from Dylan-Jo.

I've named my new apartment "Dylan-Jo" (in kanji: 侍嵐城 - the third character, "Jo," means castle in Japanese) because not only is it right next to Osaka-Jo, but because the regal view from my balcony makes me feel like I'm gazing out over my kingdom. All the cars that pass below are my loyal subjects going about their daily business, and my dominion stretches from the Hirano-gawa below, all the way to the Ikoma ridge in the distance.

Tonight, though, as I looked out over my kingdom before embarking upon my adventure to explore Kyobashi, I was greeted by a beautiful orange waning gibbous moon hanging just above the horizon. Like the Eye of Sauron, its baleful gaze swept across the plains below, my subjects all cowering in fear and awe. I rushed to get my camera, but try as I might I could not capture its presence and enormity. The moon always looks so tiny in photos...

Anyway, here is the best shot I could come up with:

#1 - Love at first sight.

I totally forgot to mention this in my post last night, but since it happened after midnight it can technically go into today's list. Yuka and I had just gotten onto the Loop Line platform after running all the way to JR Osaka station from the Blarney Stone (where The Native Tongues were (was?) playing). She was having some trouble with one of her contacts, so we slowed down so she wouldn't run into any walls or anything while she poked and prodded at her left eyeball.

Just at that moment, stumbling up the stairs behind us were two very cute Japanese girls in their early 20's, one of whom was absurdly drunk and could barely stay on her feet as her friend shuffled her up the steps. Extremely Drunk Girl finally managed to clear the top step, and let out a shriek when she saw me! The two of them stumbled over, and she grabbed my arm and, with a dreamy look in her eyes, "I love you!!"

I just gave her a knowing smile and said, "Nice." But she went on, professing her love to me several times and declaring that foreigners were SO wonderful and how she LOVES foreigners.... By this point Yuka had like three fingers in her eye at once and was veering dangerously close to a wall, so I bid farewell to my lovestruck admirer, who heaved a wistful, heartbroken sigh as I left to go back and check on Yuka.

Anyway, that kind of thing happens every so often. Japan is a wacky, wacky place.

A Beanless Setsubun

2007-02-04T02:04:00.000+09:00

So today was Setsubun, but my day involved no hurling at ogres of legumes of any sort. Au contraire, I spent my day setting things up in my new apartment. The details are minor but numerous, and little things like getting pegs for my adjustable bookshelves, clips for running my phone cord along the wall, and the like ended up taking up most of my day. I moved my fridge, too, to let the morning sunlight into my kitchen.

In the evening, I went to a couple of parties. I got to see the French crew out in Aramoto (and their Nintendo Wii) for a brief hour before I headed back into Osaka to see the Native Tongues. Lots of friends there too, including Yui, whom I've only seen once since New York. It was nice to see human beings again after two weeks of pretty much just staring at screenfuls of code and setting up sensor hardware.

Anyway, today's T3A:

#3 - 11 hours of sleep! :D

I really needed it, too. It's been a rough two weeks, and sleeping in so late was wonderfully decadent, like swimming in a pool of chocolate.

#2 - My friend got married!

Walking home by myself on the dark streets of Osaka after taking the last train home... wouldn't you know it but I ran into my old friend Peter! We talked for a while about everything from music to life to Japanese culture to quantum physics, astronomy, and string theory... and in passing he casually mentioned, "Oh yeah... by the way, I got married two weeks ago."

!!!!!!!! That's really awesome! He and his gir^H^H^H wife are a really sweet couple, and they're both realistic, grounded, cool people. I'm really happy for them.

#1 - I got to be a rap star!

At the Native Tongues show tonight, Lito invited me up on stage to do the rap for "Now That We've Found Love". I don't think I've had an opportunity to sing with an actual instrumental band since ...1996? That was a lot of fun. The audience was going crazy too... this was right at the end of the show, and everyone was dancing. On top of that, it just so happened that the 9 people dancing right in the front all happened to be my good friends, which upped the energy even more. Thanks, guys!

Video is here: (6.8 MB, wmv file) (mom and dad... that means a 35-minute download for you)
http://urara-file20.up.seesaa.net/image/NowThat-1.wmv

It's pretty dark, but you can see about 18 seconds of my rap at the beginning. :)

Probably shoulda hurled some beans though, in retrospect. Guess I'll have to keep an eye out for ogres this year.

Groundhog Day

2007-02-03T00:25:00.000+09:00

Happy Groundhog Day, everyone. Once again today I went through my annual ritual of explaining what a groundhog is, and what this day is all about, to curious Japanese coworkers. And once again I got the usual confused stares and questions... "So it's like, a big rat?" "Do Americans have any other strange holidays like this involving animals?" (to which I had to respond, "Easter", and then go through the entire explanation of why it has the name Easter, and what rabbits, chocolate eggs, baskets of fake plastic grass, and the resurrection of Christ have to do with each other. I even described the Cadbury Creme Egg commercial with the bunny making clucking sounds and laying an egg. And after all these contradictions and mixed metaphors, the only thing they thought was odd was the fact that people put the hard-boiled eggs in the same basket as the candy!)

Haha, like they have any right to say our holiday is weird. Tomorrow is Setsubun, which was eloquently and succinctly described to me by one of my students as "the day we hurl beans at ogres".

But on to today's T3A list, this time in reverse chronological order:

#3 - Rediscovery of an old familiar story: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
This book has played such a big part in my life. I remember seeing my parents watching the TV series when I was too young to understand it - all I remember is Then I spent endless hours playing the text adventure game in middle school, and reading the "trilogy" over and over so many times in high school that I wore out books 1 and 2 to the point where I had to buy new copies! My senior year of high school I managed to find copies of the original radio episodes from 1978, and I listened to them in the car every day while commuting to school. I've recommended the story to many of my good friends, and I've memorized an enormous amount of the dialogue.

Today I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the radio series was continued! Starting in 2003, they recorded a third, fourth, and fifth series, apparently following along with the corresponding books. Several of the original voice actors appear in the new series, although unfortunately three of them passed away in the 25 years since the original series was recorded. I really miss Peter Jones's voice... They feature some clips of his narration in the first episode, and just hearing those few words brought back so many memories...

Anyway, I've only listened to two episodes so far, but it's absolutely great. The sound effects are really good and add a lot to the story... I love the bubbly voice of the mattress talking with Marvin!

#2 - Earlier today, I checked my Myspace account, and I had a friend request waiting from my old friend Danny! He was only in like 4th or 5th grade when I graduated from high school, but now he's a big international businessman about to do an MBA in Brazil! I'm really glad he found me... There aren't so many people from my hometown I stay in touch with, but it's always wonderful to hear from them and see how everyone's doing.

#1 - This morning, like most mornings, I stumbled groggily down to the station, plugged in my super-cool headphones and zoned out for half the train ride. It was just another usual morning as the train went into the long tunnel under Ikoma Mountain. Darkness, darkness, tunnel lights whipping past in a blur, and then at long last, we surfaced again on the other side...

... to a world full of dazzling white snow! All around me, everywhere I looked, thousands and thousands of snowflakes whirling and churning with the wind. Big snowflakes, too! They floated forever in the air, sailing up and down with the currents of the wind. Then they hit the ground like little snowballs, breaking apart and sending little clumps of snow skidding along ahead of them.

For the rest of the train ride and my wait for the bus, I couldn't close my eyes... I was mesmerized by watching the snow fall! When I was a little kid this was no big deal, but here, where it never really snows much, it was really exciting. That brightened my whole day!

T3A for February 1, 2007

2007-02-02T00:49:00.000+09:00

Three awesome things from today:

#3 - They lowered the prices on the lunch specials at Saizeriya! The aona no wafu-spaghetti lunch (including salad and drink bar! mmm... cappuccino) has been reduced from 600 yen to 500 yen. I did a double-take when I saw the menu today. It's not some special promotion or anything... they just lowered the price. And I always thought the inevitable law of economics was that prices were always supposed to go up for everything (except computer components, I guess).

#2 - I'm going to Rome! Of course, I knew this already, but today I submitted the final version of my robotics paper and registered for the conference in April. It felt so good to get that all taken care of... there were so many last-minute difficulties with embedded fonts, credit card authorization, and whatnot, that when the "Final Submission Received" screen came up, the satisfaction washed over me like a nice cool shower after a day in the heat of a Kansai summer.

#1 - Puppies! My mom sent me this picture of the new puppy my parents just got. Isn't she adorable?

Molly, the one they chose, is the one with her eyes open, sitting there wide awake while all the dutiful, obedient, good puppies are fast asleep. I think my parents miss me. ;)

The T3A List

2007-02-01T23:38:00.000+09:00

So I've had quite a bit more time for thought lately, due primarily to my new 1-hour commute to work. I've come to a few realizations:

1 - Time is flying WAY faster than it should be.

I was looking down the long, empty street in front of my company the other day, feeling the stillness of the lonely midday silence outdoors, isolated by thick stone walls from the frantic activity taking place in all the research labs around me. A memory welled up from my hitchhiking adventures across Japan, and as a car appeared on the horizon, I felt the urge to stick out a thumb and follow the highway where it would take me. Then it struck me... I did that almost FOUR years ago! Where did all the intervening time go?!

(Of course, I know where it went - those memories haven't vanished or anything... Scaling rocky mountain peaks in the Andes with Chris... offroading in the Israeli desert with Yaron, Max, Jake, and Assaf... weeknight Risk games with Dave and Dave and Lauren... crazy weekend trips down to New York on the Chinatown bus... camping trips to the Adirondacks... expeditions to Lake Biwa... festivals, fireworks, house parties, Ultimate games, Saizeriya lunches, late night conversations in front of Lawson, intense a cappella rehearsals in grimy basement music studios, all-night clubbing in Minami, picnics in Nara, performances in funky Osaka restaurants, ... and of course database administration, SQL, C++, Java, debugging, deployment, source control, data visualization, sockets, serial protocols, threading, deinterlacing, installing cards, soldering connectors, machining laser scanner mounting brackets, calibration, map-matching,
reverse-engineering badly commented code... omg, was the last 1/3 of that all computer stuff?)

2 - Working overtime in a room with no sunlight is bad for the psyche

I love my job, but I don't think my circadian clock approves of all-day fluorescent lighting. Especially since so many of my good friends left, and our random midday chat breaks no longer happen, I'm feeling the need to actively push back against the gradual negative effects of overwork on my psychological health.

3 - Three seems like a good number to set as a goal for the length of a list.

Not too big, not too small. Three shall be the length of the list, and the length of the list shall be three. Four items shalt thou not list, nor shalt thou list two, excepting that thou then dost proceed to three.

And thus, I announce my latest project. The "T3A list". Every so often I will make a post on my blog, listing three awesome things that I did or observed that day. I thoroughly believe that there is endless beauty to be experienced in every moment of life, even when things really suck. It's all about your outlook. On a deeper level, I believe that (a) by talking about these things, they become reinforced in our minds, thus helping to shape our memories which in turn define our identity in a more positive way going forward, and (b) the act of sharing these experiences with friends and random strangers on the web only increases the amount of positive energy in the world, and I really feel like positive energy is something that is lacking in our world, with depressing news, inequality, war, fear, and cynicism all around us.

I won't pretend that I'll be able to do this every day, but it seems like it should be a fun project.
So I'm going to cut back on making negative comments about Japan (or America, or humanity in general, or even bad haircuts), and I'll try to put up a quick T3A post every few days, sharing the brilliant gems of beauty and harmony that I encounter on my adventures.

(The acronym "T3A", for those of you who are wondering, stands roughly for "3 Awesome Things", but in the tradition of French acronyms like "SI" the letters have been creatively rearranged.)

Pikachu?!

2007-01-31T00:21:00.000+09:00

So I was out shopping at Aeon last night for a gas range for my kitchen, and I noticed a girl near the entrance of one of the stores wearing a full-body Pikachu suit. I thought that was cute, and I was curious as to what kind of promotion was going on. It's not so uncommon to see people in weird character suits as part of some sort of promotion here - Japanese people love to play dress-up.

But as I walked closer, I realized she wasn't an employee. She was a CUSTOMER! Walking around in a full-body Pikachu suit and flip-flops! Just shopping by herself... not even acting embarrassed or silly, just kinda wandering around, window-shopping with a faraway stare like there was nothing unusual going on.

Japan kicks ass. :)

Adventures in the world of fashion

2007-01-28T00:28:00.000+09:00

So... maybe it's good that I didn't bring a camera today -- you'll have to use your imaginations for this one. ;)

The story begins when Jen took me out shopping a couple weeks ago, in an attempt to help me give my wardrobe a makeover. I came home with quite a bounty of tops, bottoms, and even one accessory. However, I haven't had many chances to wear these wonderful new articles because I've been so busy with work and moving.

Tonight, however, I got back from work in time to go see "The Native Tongues", which is an fantastic "reggae band" based in Osaka. I put quotes around that because it seems like every show I see them play has less and less actual reggae and more and more pop, jazz, rap, funk, r&b, and metal, and only a token few reggae songs. :) Not that it detracts from the fun at all. They did a great fusion of US3's "Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)" and Bananarama's "Venus" that got the whole house on their feet!

I've seen this band perform several times, and the reason for this can be seen in the following Venn diagram, illustrating band membership:

But I digress. The reason I mention this is that tonight was at last an opportunity to wear something from my new wardrobe in public. I wasn't sure what sort of reaction to expect... a couple people complimented me on my shirt. A couple people were like, "hmm...", and then I ran into an ex-girlfriend. She came up to me from across the bar with a genuinely concerned look on her face, like she was worried about me.

"So, um... how come you're dressed like you're gay?"

Haha, thanks, Jen. :P

Great Quote

2007-01-26T13:40:00.000+09:00

Hey everyone... lots of news but no time to write it all. I just got internet at my new apartment, so I'll try to put some interesting stories up within the next week or so.

For now, I just want to share this sentence that someone wrote to me:

"you are best my englsi teacher foever!"

Hmm... I think that says something about my teaching abilities. Maybe I'd better stick with robotics. ;)

Do you speak English?

2006-12-23T01:19:00.000+09:00

Wow, I was impressed with the response to my last blog entry... I'll write more on that topic when I've tried out these systems for a bit longer.

Anyway, I just saw this. I have no idea where it's from, but ... well, maybe finding this as funny as I did means I need more sleep. Anyway, I thought I should share it with all y'all. :)

Bigger than my Pocketwatch

2006-12-20T04:17:00.000+09:00

In many of my blog posts so far, I've mentioned how crushed I feel for time... there are simply too many things I want to do, and never enough time to do them - my eyes are bigger than my pocketwatch, so to speak.

Perhaps this failure is exemplified best by the fact that I didn't even have it together to get proper Xmas presents for my family this year. I used to come up with all sorts of random creative themes, or wrapping, or treasure hunts for presents, and this year I've done almost nothing. (Key word 'almost'... If I hadn't done anything at all I wouldn't still be up at 4am. ;)

So I've decided that this needs to end. It's not worth spending the rest of my life being stressed about time. To that end, I've been exploring various to-do list and time management tools.

Getting Things Done

I've been listening to an audiobook seminar series thing by David Allen, the "Getting Things Done" guy. I must say, he's a fantastic speaker. Very skilled with language and imagery. As for his message, I think I agree with it for the most part. One of his key ideas is to make lists and dump absolutely all of your unresolved issues and open mental loops out onto paper, in the form of action items.

His point is that if you can trust that the list contains EVERYTHING you need to worry about, you can then relax and simply execute the items on the list. I haven't finished the book, but ostensibly he has a system of lists that guarantees that, with appropriate processing, everything will get done.

I find it interesting that this is similar to the way a computer's architecture is structured, with data storage happening in a very different piece of hardware from where processing takes place.

Anyway, inspired by his words, I've begun dumping information out of my head and generating to-do lists. I've experimented with various media... I had a paper planner for a while, until I lost it(!) This is very unlike me... I don't usually lose things, so it's just ironic beyond words that the first important thing that I lose is the very thing that was supposed to guarantee my "together"ness. :P

However, I spend roughly 12 hours a day sitting in front of a computer, so I feel like an electronic medium would suit me better. Preferably web-based and accessible anywhere.

Tools for Organization

I've looked at a number of applications and services. Of these, the one I'm most excited about is stikkit.com, not because of its functionality (their beta is still pretty buggy, and they don't support multi-level to-do lists (which are absolutely essential, as far as I'm concerned)), but because I love their interface. You just type stickies in natural language, and it automagically generates to-do lists where necessary. Then you click on the items after you complete them, and they gray out and get crossed out! I'm really just all excited about that one feature, truth be told, because it's so nice to see my accomplishments crossed off! Other apps just erase them from your list or move them to the bottom or something...

I found one other app that I'd like to try out. It's called MyLifeOrganized, or MLO, and it's a lightweight app that you can put on a thumb drive and carry with you. A little more effort than automatically loading in one of my permanent tabs on Firefox, which I also have automatically load when I log in... but it seems like it's pretty powerful and simple to use. Maybe I'll try throwing my lists into that as well as stikkit, and I'll see which one survives longer.

There are a LOT of other tools out there too, but many of them are uber-configurable like ShadowPlan, the multitude of buttons and extensive color palette of which scared me into immediately uninstalling it... too many controls, and no obvious way to get started. Good reviews from users, but I suspect their sense of UI aesthetics differs from mine.

Also, this "LifeBalance" program seems interesting... apparently they use fuzzy logic or something to dynamically adjust your priorities on your action list and make your life better based on your values. I wonder how well it works... I've seen some good reviews of this too.

Of course, it's discouraging to be spending so much of my valuable time finding and setting up "productivity" tools, but if I can get any of these to work for me, the payoff will be more than worth the investment.

Anyway, I'll keep you guys updated on how the quest goes. Any recommendations on techniques and strategies for life management?

Why Computers Suck

2006-12-08T00:40:00.000+09:00

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.

--P. J. O'Rourke

Philo sent me a link to some P.J. O'Rourke quotes today, and although many are hilarious and insightful, that one stands out as my favorite.

But that's not what I want to write about today. I want to write about something that was on my bulleted list a couple posts ago: Usability.

iTunes 7.0.2 Sucks

In particular, I want to express my extreme disappointment with iTunes 7.02. And computers in general, but first let me slam Apple for a while.

First, let me explain about iTunes. I used to be an Apple user until around my second year of university, when I switched to Linux. It was only grudgingly that I allowed myself to get sucked into the world of Windows several years later, and I still have a soft spot in my heart for the cryptic elegance of Linux, as well as a deep and abiding respect for the unshakable, yet very expensive, standards of Apple.

To me, the message of Apple was always, "We will restrict our users to our hardware and our software, denying them choice and configurability, but in return, we will give them a quality, impeccably stable system with a slick user interface which is aesthetically unparalleled. And although we will charge them top dollar for it, it will be worth it to them, and they will be more than happy to pay."

I think there's a certain integrity to that statement, which, incidentally, has never been made by Apple in those words, but which they may license from me for an appropriate copyright fee. From graphic designers to "I don't want to know how a computer works" people, to astronomers, musicians, and black-coffee-drinking poets, they have amassed an enormous following that respects their "top dollar for top quality" policy.

I bought an iPod last year, and it has brought happiness to my life. The iPod is a beautiful object, and iTunes has, until now, been an excellent, or at least, stable and passable, software product.

Now fast-forward to September 12, 2006. Apple releases iTunes 7. With software from other makers, I often hesitate when upgrading and installing new versions, assuming that there will be unanticipated bugs, and instead wait a couple weeks to watch disaster strike the foolhardy. With Apple, though, things were different. Their entire business model was based on an unwavering commitment to quality and usability. Apple, I foolishly thought, is a company I can trust. Given that iTunes 6 was a touch on the slow side, I naively thought that iTunes 7 would be an improvement. And thus I clicked on the fateful "Download" button.

Now, when I run iTunes, my computer is unusable. Something that it does causes my "System" process to suck 50% of my CPU, and all of my applications hang for an indefinite amount of time when I click on things in iTunes. It is quite sporadic and difficult to pin down, but the effect is bad enough that I have had to give up using iTunes completely. Ironically, I actually listen to my iPod while sitting at my computer now.

Other people had worse problems, of course, and Apple released iTunes 7.0.1 to fix their issues. Then they released 7.0.2 to fix the rest of the problems. Then, apparently, enough of their customers were happy that they decided it was no longer cost-effective to respond to the desperate cries of users like me on their forums and actually fix their software any further.

So here I am, trying to make a CD for a friend, and barely able to use iTunes to do it. I have actually resorted to writing the track names down on paper to decide the order, which is what I used to do in junior high school when making mix tapes. Sad, sad, sad. It's not that I mind using a pencil and paper (even notepad hangs when iTunes is open), but my faith in Apple has been shattered forever. As soon as I get the time and energy, I will start exploring all of the iTunes clones and alternatives that are out there.

The Real Problem

But I'm not just talking about Apple and iTunes. This problem is much more endemic and sinister. What people need is stable, reliable, simple, and usable software. What the marketing people think people want is flashy, cool, new features and infinite configurability. Actually, that's also what the engineering people want to build. And perhaps it's even what some users think they need.

Unfortunately, all of this feature creep leads to memory-hogging programs that are unstable.

Now, instability is ok if we're talking about bleeding-edge technologies that people are playing with for fun. If you agree to beta-test some cool new software, the risk of instability is part of what you're signing up for. However, once you have valuable data entrusted to a computer, you want to believe that that data is safe. And yet the question no longer seems to be whether a Windows system will get gunked up, crash, and die, but rather, how long will it be safe to wait between full reinstalls?

Computers have made a transition from being high-tech toys to being a fundamental part of our lives. With that shift in roles comes a shift in responsibility. Microsoft and other developers of major applications now bear the responsibility to create systems where stability and security are the highest priorities. Of course this is a daunting task, but my point is that they shouldn't be putting their effort into adding bells, whistles, dynamic 3D shadows, and irritating talking paperclips to Word.

Here's a good example - the other day a friend of mine called me at 2:30am with a Blue Screen Of Death. What do you do when the computer bluescreens, will not boot in Safe Mode, and tells you only this?

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

Technical Info:

*** STOP: 0x0000000A ( 0x 010007E8, 0x 0000001D, 0x 00000000, 0x 804D9D57 )

This is completely unhelpful to any normal person who's not a sysadmin and who doesn't have a second computer handy to search for the error message on the web.

The fact is, most people don't even know where their documents are, much less the relationship between the "My Documents" folder in Windows and their "C Drive". These are the people whose computers will fall victim to viruses and crapware, and they won't have the foggiest idea of how to back up their data. Especially when the HP support line gives, "Try reformatting your hard disk and reinstalling Windows" as a first resort. Yes, they said that to my sister, and she lost all her data!

This doesn't have to happen.

Computers should not be difficult to use.

Software and system stability should be a priority.

We, as engineers, need to consider that software is actually used by real people. And we, as consumers, need to hold software makers accountable for these things.

I feel very, very strongly about this. People think I'm joking when I say I hate computers, but I think it's tragic that we are so dependent on them while they persist in their current state of technological immaturity.

Enough for tonight. Good night, everyone, and don't forget to back up your data.

The Princess Bride

2006-12-04T19:33:00.000+09:00

A few nights ago, I had some friends over to watch The Princess Bride. Although nearly every American and Canadian I know has seen it, my other friends had never heard of it before. I have, of course, seen the movie probably ten times or more, and I still find it thoroughly enjoyable.

To make things more interesting, I decided to introduce to them another concept that is fairly well-known in North America - the movie drinking game. If you do a Google search for "princess bride drinking game" you can see some examples. Essentially, this is how it works: you make a list of phrases or events that happen in the movie, and when those phrases are spoken or events happen, everybody watching the movie has to drink. Simple. There are more complex variations where each person chooses a character and whatnot, but this is the basic idea.

The list of phrases we used included such phrases as "true love", "man in black", "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die," and, of course, "humperdink". Those of you who are familiar with the Miracle Max scene can understand why most of us weren't able to keep the game up for the whole movie. :)

I noticed an interesting side effect, though. One of my guests was Japanese, and she really doesn't speak any English at all. Yet, given a sheet of phrases to look for, she was able to pick out when those lines were said in the movie, sometimes even before I noticed. I'm only speculating here, but I would guess that if she were to just watch the whole movie start to finish with no drinking game, she would have simply tuned out and stopped listening to the dialogue. I've certainly done that enough with Japanese movies.

Dylan's Brilliant Idea of the Week

I propose that movie drinking games like this be introduced to the high school English curriculum, for a number of reasons:

Drinking games are available for hundreds of popular movies and TV shows, providing large amounts of culturally-relevant course material.

The vocabulary list, which is studied beforehand, helps the listener focus on key parts of the dialogue. I've seen this technique used in class before, where essential words and phrases are presented before reading a passage, and it can be quite effective in priming the mind and increasing comprehension.

The drinking game aspect of this activity scales the difficulty of the game proportionally to the player's success rate. The more words you correctly identify, the more times you drink, and the more difficult subsequent words become. This makes it particularly useful for classes where the students have a wide variety of skill levels.

Conversely, false positives are punished as well: if you mistakenly think you hear a key word, you have to drink, which makes the game more difficult and thus serves as a small penalty for your mistake, encouraging you to pay better attention so as not to avoid future penalties.

The alcohol also helps to reduce inhibitions about speaking English, which is one of the most difficult challenges facing Japanese students today.

Finally, since high school students aren't generally allowed to drink alcohol, making it legal for English class could help instill a heightened interest in English and reduce the "ho, hum, when will English class be over" attitude that I've seen in many of my students.

I wonder if any Japanese Ministry of Education officials read my blog... ;)

Farewell, NaBloPoMo!

2006-11-30T23:39:00.000+09:00

At last, the end has come. Thirty days of late nights, sleepy fingers pounding at the keys, blurry eyes proofreading pages and pages of similar-looking words. Had I been in high school, my English teacher would be proud. But now I am the English teacher. Or rather, I was. Now there is no English teacher. Perhaps that is the ultimate state of transcendence... First you are the student, then you are the teacher, and then you realize that there is no teacher.

Whoa.

So I thought it would be cool to present a bunch of funky graphs at the end of the month, colorfully presenting data and trends that meant next to nothing to next to no one. I was going to crank them out on Matlab at work before I came home tonight, but...

As I sleepily walked back up into my lab after a delicious meal of soboro ankake tofu, I was shocked to my senses by an acrid smell of burning electronics! If you know what that smells like, I'm sorry for you, because it almost inevitably means something very bad. However, it's one thing when it's a $300 stereo system or a $1000 home computer, but this was a lab full of $200,000 robots, and that smell could mean something very, very bad. What's worse, I was unable to identify which robot the smell was coming from. I cut the power to my two robots, but wasn't sure what to do with the others... I had never worked with those models before, and they were being frantically prepared for a demo, so I wasn't sure whether simply unplugging them wouldn't do irreversible damage.

Two of the other researchers were still downstairs eating, and three others were asleep at their desks, passed out after several days of sleep deprivation, no doubt. I roused one of them, explained the situation, and sprinted downstairs to alert the others. We came running back up to find the others crowded around two robots. Screwdrivers were already in hand, parts from inside the robot quickly accumulating on the floor, while one of the researchers was scanning the robots with an infrared video camera that I suspect is more expensive than any object I have ever owned.

Over time the acrid smell was vented away, and all of the robots had been off for long enough that it became a meticulous search through motherboards, power supplies, motor controller boards, and other parts to try to identify what had been burning. I went back to my robot and ran a few last tests of my code before I hopped on my bike and headed home through the rice fields, completely forgetting about my ambition of preparing cool Matlab graphs for my final NaBloPoMo post.

At home, without Matlab or Excel, I turned to some random web-based service that generates 3D graphs for you, and I put together but a single one of the many graphs I had in mind. I was thinking about plotting things like word count vs. day of the week, number of photos vs. number of comments, and things like that, but I decided to cut the scope down to just this graph:

I wanted to put in separate entries for Hong Kong and Germany, since some of my very good friends live there, but (a) the graph-making service limits you to six categories, and (b) they clearly don't read my blog as often as my AWESOME friends in Canada and France! :P

Haha, then again, it may have been just Kern's Canadian friends, and my Canadian friends don't love me anymore. Damn Canadians... you think they're your friends and then they turn around and stab you in the back. Okay, three deep breaths... ... ... I won't rip on Canada tonight, I won't rip on Canada tonight, I won't rip on Canada tonight.

Hehe, it would be awesome, though, if BC had a separate top-level domain from the rest of Canada. Then I could really know who was reading my blog and who was ignoring me. :P

Ok, so anyway, this is my last post of NaBloPoMo, and I (unlike Kern) haven't thought anything through, since I'm really concentrating on starting to organize all my stuff so that this move in January doesn't kill me. There were lots of things I was thinking of writing about. For example:

Why iTunes 7.02 has destroyed any last shred of hope I ever had that there is any morality in the corporate world

The deep significance of the analog and the digital, and how the desire of humanity to dominate nature blinds us to acceptance of true beauty and balance

How the blind application of technology without deep thought to its consequences is inherently evil, and why we should reexamine the responsibilities of scientists and engineers

The nasty gray fungus stuff that somehow invaded my apartment over the summer and got into everything, and how truly nasty it is, although I think I've finally cleaned up the last major infestations of it

A rant on how computers are fundamentally unusable and some thoughts on how to help humanity deal with how much they suck

A sappy reflection on how awesome my friends are, and a bunch of pictures of happy memories with them

A slightly ironic reflection on how much I love singing with Utaurara 6, juxtaposed with the facts that our musical tastes are COMPLETELY contradictory to each other and the social dynamics of the group are so strange

Some sort of soul-searching, wandering blabber about finding love, followed by some cynical comments that aren't bitter, but are somewhat less-than-optimistic

Reflections on cleaning my room and uncovering bank statements, junk mail, and old love letters

A bulleted list of meta-blog-posts, so that I don't actually have to post about all those things since you would all skim anyway!

I'm pretty certain everyone is skimming by this point, so I should probably do my homework and get some sleep. But for anyone who made it this far, I feel like I should reward you with another photo, because a picture is worth a thousand words, and word count blogged is the ultimate measure of the worth of a man's life.

Here is a picture of me, Kern, and Hiroko, from last fall. We're at the random aqueduct near ... Nanzen-ji? Eikan-do? Anyway, it's somewhere in that area. I'm including this photo because it's an example of something I could be doing INSTEAD OF BLOGGING!

I guess the thing I learned most from the NaBloPoMo experience is that I should cherish my free time and live life for the moment, rather than spending it all sitting in front of my computer. :)

And to all the NaBloPoMo'ers out there, ...

OTSUKARE!!!!!!

Got To Keep On Movin'

2006-11-29T11:59:00.000+09:00

Once again it happens... I bike home frantically from a cappella rehearsal, hitting "new post" just as the clock on my computer flips to 12:00, hoping, hoping... and yes, Blogger's clock is a few seconds behind mine and I make it just under the line again.

So it's official... I started the paperwork for moving today. I don't think the two little beings hanging out on my shoulders are an angel and a devil, but one of them is going "yeeeeah!" and the other one has its face down in its hands, shaking its head as if to say "what have we gotten ourselves into now?"

Moving is going to be a real pain. But it will be worth it. You've got to keep on movin', I keep telling myself, as strains of Matthew Wilder's "Break My Stride" well up from some unknown depths of my memory. I remember them singing that on "Kids Incorporated." Yes, I mean the Saturday morning kids' music show from the 80's sponsored by Jordache.

Anyway, all that aside, NaBloPoMo is nearly over. In reflection, I didn't achieve as much of my goal of catching up with things that I've done over the past year as I had hoped, but I did manage to post a few key events. After the 'Mo is over, I'm certainly going to cut down on my blog time, but as usual I hope to post once a week or so. If I start to go below once every two weeks, feel free to kick me (via email of course).

In the spirit of posting memories, here are a few more pics. And because it's starting to get damn cold here, I'm going to go with some pictures from the summer.

Let's see how many photos I can crop, tweak, and upload before I pass out from lack of sleep. :) By the way, in case you didn't know, you can click on the photo to go to its Flickr page, then click on "All Sizes" and choose a high-resolution version to download. I think most of these photos are in there at 1024x768.

First, a sailing picture. You have no idea how many awesome pictures we took on this sailing trip. It was my first time out on a boat this size, and it was a blast! Maybe I should save the stories for a blog post of their own.

Yodogawa hanabi! We had amazing seats, right under the center of it all. I'd never seen a fireworks display so spectacular or well-choreographed before!

Our wonderful seats were thanks to the connections of my soon-to-be-neighbor Peter. It was great to see him again too... it's sad how you can live so close to somebody and almost never see them.

The Ulfuls concert was awesome beyond words. Thank you so much to Yoko for the hook-up. These guys are my favorite band in Japan (sorry, Rip Slyme!) and mechamecha kandou shita! (By the way, they let you bring cameras in but ask you not to take photos during the show... so I took this photo just after the show was over. :)

To-kae, a light-up festival in Nara that has no deep meaning. Pretty, though.

This shot was also in Nara during To-kae. It's times like this when I guess I'll miss living so close to Nara. Not a lot of quiet, candlelit mountain paths in Morinomiya. :P

And this was our picnic to celebrate the end of summer. We had it in the park that sits upon the archaeological site of the ancient first capital of Japan.

Here we are moving the picnic to follow the shade. Even though this was in late September, it was still unpleasantly hot in the sun. I think it was my idea to just drag the entire picnic tarp... that turned into sort of a mini-disaster, but it got the job done. People kept telling me that it was a stupid idea, and we should just leave the tarp where it was, but something inside me kept telling me ... you've got to keep on movin'.

Confessions of a Digital Packrat

2006-11-28T20:36:00.000+09:00

Nostalgia.

This is the week when I need to make my decision about moving in January. I'm really pretty sure I'm going to do it - I think I'll give them the final decision tomorrow. I can think of lots of reasons pro and con, but my heart has built up enough momentum in that direction that it would be pretty disappointing to back out now. I'll certainly miss this place, though... the enormous kitchen, the sunlight streaming through the sliding glass doors in the morning, the two wonderfully spacious balconies...

Standing out on my rear balcony tonight, looking up at the cold, sharp first-quarter moon between the smooth, high clouds of ice crystals, listening to the silence of the crickets and cicadas who serenaded me to sleep every evening and chanted louder than my alarm to wake me up in the summer mornings, looking out to the empty street, cold, still, devoid of cars, then stepping back into my tatami room that has been with me for the last year and a half, I am struck by wave after wave of nostalgia.

Just a few of the many memories from this apartment that come back to me, mostly parties and sickness:

Last summer, sweating profusely, curled up on my little tatami cushion thing, three bottles of Canada Dry Ginger Ale by my side, hardly able to sit up as I stayed home for three days with food poisoning, barely managing to stagger out and go see the Robocup for an hour, but mostly spending the intervening time throwing up or watching Full Metal Alchemist from my cushion on the floor.

A small Christmas party last December with Hiroko, Mitsuko, and Noda-kun, all of us sitting at my kotatsu, sharing stories and wine over a nice Italian dinner and some Christmas cake.

A weekend last winter when I suddenly came down with a terrible fever and stomach bug, and Linda came over to bring me some medicine and make me some hot lemonade... thank you, Linda! You're awesome.

The random night when Emma locked her house keys in her kendo dojo and had to crash at my place. We stayed up till 2am playing go. :)

David standing at my whiteboard, educating us about the geography of France.

The going-away party / hanami / not really sure what the excuse was party this past spring, when Masuda-san brought an entire branch of a cherry tree in full bloom.

And of course, my very first night here, dropped off around 11pm by Kanda-san, exhausted, hungry, with no food or knowledge of my surroundings, hoping that (a) all of the stuff in my luggage survived the flight unscathed, and (b) I would be able to find the bus to work in the morning...

I guess sadness is an essential part of awareness. I find that if I really open my mind and try to perceive everything without all the social guards we usually put up, I am overwhelmed by emotions of joy and sadness. I will really miss this apartment, but... is that a reason not to move? It's kind of like ending a relationship. It is ending a relationship. Inasmuch as people have relationships with inanimate things, the relationship with your home is a particularly intimate one.

But just because something is good doesn't mean it has to be perpetuated forever. This is where my "meaning of life" instincts start getting confused. For example, if you were to go to the pile of my stuff that still sits in my parents' basement, you would find a lot of things that aren't essential at all. Old binders from elementary school, t-shirts from high school, an old fish tank I had many years ago... a lot of that stuff is junk, and has no practical value. Its only value is to be a vessel for memories. How can I possibly part with my "Cobleskill College Math Team - We strive to be number -eⁱπ" shirt? (Yes, that's what it says, rather than the correct -e^iπ) And yet... when would I ever wear it again? What would I do with it?

A few years ago I came up with the idea of taking digital photos of things like that and then throwing away the originals. That way the memories would still be retrievable. I haven't done it so much yet, though. Which is probably good considering my personal history with hard drives.

But where does the value in life lie? Is it in our memories? Memories fade. They can only be kept alive with the taking of photos and the retelling of stories. Even so, "living in the past" is something most people consider negative.

Ok, is it just me, or do we all look SUPER young in this picture?

On the other hand, "living for the present" can also be taken to excess. How would you rate the quality of life of somebody who, say, spent every waking hour drugged out and happy, staring blankly (yet contentedly) at the TV as the days pass unnoticed? Something tells me that is "bad".

Yet someone who moves from town to town, job to job, building no lasting relationships, is living in the present and staying active.. and yet still it seems to me that something is missing. Memories, history, and deep relationships are important.

I think Philo mentioned something today about how taking photographs is unnatural. Looking at the images artificially reinforces insignificant memories in our minds, and thus alters our structure of memory, which, I would add, fundamentally changes who we are, since memories are a significant part of our identity.

It's a difficult balance, trying to preserve memories that are important to us, and yet trying to avoid being a packrat and keeping boxes and boxes stuffed with baubles and trinkets with no significant meaning to us. Do we really need to commemorate every single week of our lives?

I wonder if our generation is seeing the birth of a new breed of "digital packrat", an obsessive personality type hoarding gigabytes and gigabytes of personal history, from blogs and digital photos, to archives of old emails, office documents, chat histories, ... and descending into the realm of neurosis, how about even keeping web history files, system error logs, old bookmarks files, and obsolete software? I have a few old Infocom games from the mid-80's for the Apple IIGS in my parents' basement... it's hard to part with games like that when I poured so many hours of my life into them.

I guess it's a subconscious pursuit of immortality. By keeping an exact record of everything we ever did, we can preserve our lives forever. The only problem is that documenting this information and sorting through this information takes time. Blogging itself has taken up approximately three full days of my time over this past month. That's time when I could have been living life instead of documenting it. But what is the worth of a life not shared?

As for sorting through and weeding out the valuable from the worthless, I often brush off this responsibility, saving it for this imaginary time "when I'm 75 years old and bored, sitting in a rocking chair and staring out my picture window all day", but I wonder whether that day will ever come.

Just like that old bag of gummi Ninja Turtles candies from Spain from 1990 and that nasty old box of Ghostbusters Cereal with the hologram on it from who knows when, I guess it's time to part with this apartment. It's sad to say goodbye, but sometimes you know that it's time to move on.

I'll miss the balconies, though.

Yet Another Love Test

2006-11-27T23:51:00.000+09:00

Haha, I haven't done one of these in a while. :)

This is a test that determines your love personality type. I took it once and got a pretty disturbing result (something about being woman's worst nightmare!?) but I went through again and thought through the answers more carefully and came up with this result, which is fairly accurate in my estimation.

I'm sort of cringing in advance at the comments certain people might post in response to this, but hopefully it's all constructive. ;)

"Huh?"

The Billy Goat
Deliberate Brutal Sex Dreamer (DBSDm)

Horny. Stubborn. Kinda cute. Slightly immature. And often found on rough terrain. You are The Billy Goat.

You're lusty, but typically monogamous, and all in all you're a pretty good boyfriend. In fact, you enjoy relationships, if mostly for the sex and physical companionship. You'd do or say almost anything to get together with someone, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

You're sensitive, you have a certain boyish charm, and you're eager. Therefore you probably attract girls who are serious about romance. But few who get close to you realize how unready for total commitment you are. People fall for you. Meanwhile, you maintain your emotional distance, and there goes another box of tissues.

Your exact opposite:
The Loverboy

Random Gentle Love Master

You're perfectly capable of a long-haul relationship, but, right now, dating someone primarily means having a consistent, available, preferably not-too-chatty, hookup. You're a careful, methodical person, and you work hard at making things work. It's just that the type of woman most likely to find your strengths endearing is also the most likely type to find your shortcomings heartbreaking. Someone with a similarly laid-back approach to dating would be perfect for you.

ALWAYS AVOID: The Priss, The Sonnet, The Wild Rose

CONSIDER: The Playstation

Link: The 32-Type Dating Test by OkCupid - Free Online Dating.

So... any "Playstations" out there? :P

A Quiet Day at Home

2006-11-26T23:48:00.000+09:00

So, all my friends went to Universal Studios Japan (USJ) today. They invited me to go, and it was a tough decision... on the one hand, it's an exciting cool theme park with state-of-the-art technology and thrilling rides, and a group of eight of my good friends was going. On the other hand, I've been burning my candles at both ends for an awfully long time, and I've been feeling a real need for some downtime. Plus I have never had any interest whatsoever in USJ.

I ended up not going, and I stayed home doing exciting things like: buying one of those blue tablet things for my toilet, scrubbing underneath and behind my bath, doing laundry, washing dishes, and organizing my files. I also managed to reduce my "starred emails" pile by 15 messages (from 243 to 227), and I put a dent in the enormous pile of ancient frozen foods taking up my freezer, some of them left by people who moved away so long ago that nobody here today even knows who they were...

I also finally got around to some tasks that were on my "to-do" list for a long time. One of them was preparing my karin-shu, which is a liqueur made of an odd fruit called "Chinese quince" in my dictionary. I'm not sure it's edible. Anyway, that's soaking now and should be ready in six months.

Karin-shu

I'm making some mikan-shu as well, which is a liqueur made of mandarin oranges. I made some ume-shu (often translated as "plum wine") over the summer, which came out very well, and in the past I've experimented with making prune-shu and strawberry-shu, which were both pretty harsh, although the prune-shu was much more drinkable. The strawberry-shu tasted like paint thinner with a slight hint of strawberry.

Mikan-shu

All of these things are basically the same idea - take some fruit, some sugar or honey, and a whole bunch of "white liquor", which is low-grade shochu (distilled sake). You put it in a sealed glass container and let it sit for several months, by which time the shochu, originally as strong and harsh as cheap vodka, becomes a nice, fruity liqueur. The fruits, on the other hand, absorb a huge amount of the alcohol, as will become immediately obvious to you when you bite into the plum sitting at the bottom of your ume-shu. :)

The karin is an extremely strong fruit, and it's very hard to cut, even with a sharp knife. As I was wrestling with the fourth one, I accidentally slipped and gashed one of my fingers on my right hand. I finished the karin-shu preparation one-handed, with my bleeding finger high in the air, and then I bandaged it up. It's not too bad of a cut, fortunately, but I have started noticing things that I do with my right hand. The two that I noticed today were (1) peeling fruit, and (2) opening bottles and milk cartons. Why do I use my right hand for these tasks? I have no idea.

Anyway, I'm going to finish packing up my summer clothes and camping gear and going through some piles before I call it a night. I didn't get to go on the Spiderman or Jurassic Park rides today, but I think I came closer to achieving some peace of mind.

The Blanket of Time

2006-11-25T11:49:00.000+09:00

Wow, that was a lot of pictures yesterday. Now it's time for some prose - 1541 words today.

Lunch in Namba

Today I met up with an old Japanese friend of mine who is visiting from Hong Kong. We went to an Italian restaurant in Namba, and the food was good. Several things about the restaurant seemed odd to me, though. Not odd like, "only in Japan", but odd in that they went against my basic internal values and aesthetics.

First, the decor of the place was cold. Very cold and impersonal, like the lobby of a company that makes enterprise middleware or something else equally bland. In my experience, Italian restaurants tend to be dimmer, with more organic-looking decor. Rough-hewn wood with farming implements or Renaissance paintings on the walls with tarnished frames. Maybe some stucco. Not aluminum and plexiglas.

Next, the price was a bit ridiculous. It wasn't really so prohibitive, but I've certainly had food of the same quality for much lower prices elsewhere. I guess the thing that got me was that, on top of the inflated prices, they insisted on charging us for the water at the table. Come on, we're already paying for pizza and pasta... what's up with that?

I can certainly understand charging extra for the value of the real estate, but unless you're going to provide a nice atmosphere, why put up the pretense that this is some sort of unique experience? I went there to be with my friend, and I was paying the cost of the meal for that opportunity. I would have been far more happy to have had the water charge included with the price of the menu set than to be told, "here, you have to pay extra because you're so lucky we are giving you mandatory fancy water." Drop the pretense, please. If you're going to go for pretense, make the place look like an Italian farmhouse or something rather than a fancy corporate bathroom.

On the positive side, the glasses and silverware were excellent. Nice reverberant ring to the water glasses, and the silverware appeared to actually be silver. That was a nice touch that made it feel like a "fancy restaurant".

Water Glasses of Antiquity

At one point I caught myself glancing over at the cabinet where they kept all the fancy water glasses, and I had a cognitive glitch. One of those moments where you get a flash of a whole bunch of ideas at once that aren't really related to what is going on.

It was about a topic I have often been stewing on for the past few years - the differences between life now and life in the past. By the past I don't mean the 1970's, or the 1920's, or the 1880's, but long, long ago... Think pre-Roman, pre-Greek, back to the fertile crescent, the Nile, the Ganges.

I often consider what today's society has in common with these ancient civilizations. The differences are obvious, of course, and I feel like they often give us a false sense of intellectual superiority over people in those days. But what of the similarities?

Let's look back at this restaurant. A fancy restaurant on the top floor of a new shopping center in the largest shopping district in Osaka. What did they have going for them?

- Good food. I'm sure they had excellent food in ancient times. People tend to find a way to put together delicious dishes given whatever kinds of food they have at hand. Except for the English, apparently.

- Fancy silverware. The technology for silversmithing certainly existed in those times. In fact, given that there was no mass-production, I would suspect that a great deal more pride went into fashioning beautiful silverware.

- Fancy glassware. Glass-blowing is also an ancient art.

- A solid customer base. I'm not sure about this. I assume that far fewer people had the free time and ready cash to eat out regularly in the olden days, but I don't really know. When in history or prehistory did the concept of the restaurant first arise? Does anyone know? As far as I can tell, this is the only thing that is likely to have changed significantly with the progress of technology.

Reflections on the Past

Anyway, this mental glitch triggered an avalanche of thought. What other things do we have in common with the past, or in what ways are we superior?

It seems like the main forces that motivate people are sex, money, love, and fear. I guess there are more to the list, like hunger, cold, and the need to pee. Anyway, this is all off the top of my head. If you want a more comprehensive listing that can be backed up by actual evidence or research, ask a humanities person. I develop cold, unfeeling automatons for a living.

These forces have not changed significantly since the dawn of civilization, as far as I know, and thus I suspect the behaviors of people have not changed so much either. Love triangles, broken contracts, oppressive governments, betrayal, lies, trust, deceit, inspiration, introspection, gambling, sales, storytelling, and envy were probably just as relevant to life of an ancient peasant on the banks of the Nile as they are to high school kids in North Carolina today.

Why do we think we're so superior? The things I most enjoy in life today - spending quality time with good friends, maybe with some quality food and drink and some quality conversation - are not direct results of technology. Yes, I have more time to do things like this thanks to the generally raised standard of living we have developed, but very little of it has anything to do with computers or space exploration. Even if you're a tribe of nomads out on the steppe, you can achieve the same goal around a campfire after a hard day of herding whatever it is that lives out on the steppe.

What if we're not so superior, then? Still staring at the wine glasses, my mind made a huge, wet, mental sucking sound as I zoomed out temporally to view all of history in one instant... so many of the things we think are so important become infinitesimally small and inconsequential when you do that.

The Blanket of Time

The lives of mere mortals become little, repetitive stories, all the same elements playing over and over again like patterns in a woven blanket. Problems or decisions that seem enormous on a personal scale to each of those billions of little people, are reduced to little repeats of the same refrains - if only we could all share one great pool of memory, we wouldn't be doomed to repeat these little histories over and over again. Great dynasties and kingdoms become reduced to single threads in the massive blanket of time.

This gave me a deep feeling of insignificance.

What does insignificance mean, though? I'm obviously important to my friends and family, and they to me. But our lives will probably have little or no impact on history, like the other anonymous masses whose lives lie untallied in the depths of time.

Perspective

Maybe it means to relax and chill out... that all the drama of life isn't really so significant. On the other hand, maybe that's a dangerous way to think - to chill out about everything is to live one's life without passion. I think passion is one of the things that defines us as individuals and carries the meaning in life.

I guess it's mostly just about seeing things in perspective. Realizing how much of the blanket your life touches, and being sure your decisions and emotions aren't disproportionate. For example, when you think about the reality of politics throughout history, you realize how meaningless it is to get angry about what you read in the news. It's fine to be informed, and even to take action to try to change things, but there's no point in being angry and decreasing the quality of your own life.

Likewise, it is important to see relationships in perspective. Breakups, for example, are hard, but realizing that billions and billions of people have gone through the same emotions you're going through is comforting in some small way. It takes things out of the "end of the world" status category and puts them into the "things that suck but people deal with and move on" category.

In a way it's nice to feel un-special. Although it's disappointing, it's also a bit comforting to know that I'm seldom breaking new ground with my ideas or experiences. Others have been there before me, and others will come after. My actions don't mean anything in the Grand Scheme of Things. I need only worry about their effects on myself, the people and institutions I love, and the reality of the world around me.

Epilogue

I do apologize for the length again... I would have tried to organize and filter a bit more if I hadn't written this late on a Saturday night. I do actually prefer writing coherent essays over rambling aimlessly. :P The ideas I wrote about tonight are very important to me, though, and it is a bit frustrating when I can't exactly put into words why this is. Perhaps I don't fully understand myself. Anyway, hit me back with any thoughts you have regarding similarities between life today and life in the past!

Fushimi Inari Taisha

2006-11-24T23:17:00.000+09:00

Here's the first part of yesterday's adventures. I went to Fushimi Inari Taisha, a large shrine complex in southern Kyoto which I've been wanting to go to for several years now.

This has been an exhausting week, and I'm not going to write much - I'll let the pictures tell the story with some minimal narration. Spent more time on the pics than I would spend writing anyway. :P

Here we are at the entrance to the shrine complex.

Inari shrines have something to do with foxes. I have long known this in a vague sense, and my Japanese friends weren't able to shed any more light on it, so I'll just leave it at that for now. There were lots of fox statues here, and they even had fox-shaped charms for sale. I do know that foxes, like tanuki, are reputed to have magical powers, and I think in Japanese mythology they have been known to shapeshift and deceive people.

Fushimi Inari Taisha is a really big, commercially successful shrine. These wooden plaques have people's wishes written on them. That's standard at any shrine or temple, but here there were an incredible number of them. In addition to ordinary people, many business owners come here as well, giving huge amounts of money to the shrine in exchange for blessings and good luck.

At last we arrived at the entrance to the path Fushimi Inari is famous for. This walking path winds around and up the mountain, allegedly covered by 1000 torii gates. None of us felt like counting, though...

Towards dusk, it can get kind of dark and spooky.

Halfway up the mountain, there was a nice lookout point where we could behold the wonderful ugliness of Japan from above.

The top of the mountain was covered with vast stone fields of torii leading to more torii, with hundreds and hundreds of little wooden torii scattered around for some reason. Again, our Japanese guides could do little to shed light on what the meaning of all these little gates could be.

Ok, I really need to go to sleep now... But here's one last picture - sometimes when I'm photoshopping, I get sidetracked... :)

Thanksgiving

2006-11-23T23:56:00.000+09:00

All week I've had just one thing on my mind. There is a bar called Tin's Hall in Tennoji that serves a turkey dinner special every year for Thanksgiving. I put myself on a mission to obtain this turkey dinner, and nothing would deter me from that path.

Side note for those who weren't aware: Canadia also has a Thanksgiving. Their Thanksgiving is on the second Monday in October. They imported the traditions and foods of Real Thanksgiving from cowardly traitors who fled to Canada from the US during the Revolutionary War. In addition, they waffled indecisively for decades over what day it should be celebrated on, finally deciding to move it from a day in November to a day several weeks before Real Thanksgiving, based on the flimsy claim that Canadian harvest season falls earlier than American harvest season "because Canada is further north", a pathetic attempt at one-upmanship, when it is common knowledge that vegetables simply do not grow in Canada. The only fruits of their harvest are blocks of ice, and Thanksgiving dinner tends to consist of polar bear steak with sno-cones for dessert.

My personal history regarding this turkey dinner at Tin's Hall involves an attempt around five years ago to get some, only to find that they were sold out by the time I got there. That was a terrible disappointment. I vowed revenge.

This week, at last, the day of reckoning had come. My friends and I arrived early, seeing to our disappointment a large number of reserved tables. Using quick wits and creativity, we crowded eight chairs around a small round bar table, and we were able to put our orders in as the bar was still starting to fill up.

The food was exquisite, or at least as exquisite as bar food gets. The turkey was perfectly roasted and flavorful, and the entire entourage of Thanksgiving fixin's was there - stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, some greens, cranberry sauce, and a roll. Soooooooo good! I didn't realize nearly how much I missed that kind of home-cooked meal until the first bite. Suddenly, a tidal wave of holiday memories was loosed forth, and I was back with my family for a moment.

Note: I know that sometimes, photos come out like this when people don't know which camera to look at. However, this time, there WAS NO OTHER CAMERA.

Dessert was almost a failure, after I had managed to convince everyone that they wanted pumpkin pie. Ordering it at the counter, I was informed that there was but one piece left! Without even glancing sidelong at the snaking queue of ravenous pie-seekers next to me, I quickly ordered the last piece and a pile of forks, so I could share it with the rest of the table.

Many of my friends had never had turkey or pumpkin pie before. I caught one curiously prodding her cranberry sauce, wondering what to make of it. Thanksgiving dinner was an exciting new experience for many of my friends, and it was a long-needed taste of home and tradition for me.

Mission accomplished.

Important Classes

2006-11-22T15:42:00.000+09:00

Today I'm going to write about the most important classes I took at MIT, and what I learned from them. This is inspired by an email I just got from a friend who is currently having trouble deciding what courses to take next term. Of course, these classes are very specific not only to MIT, but to the terms when I took them, but hopefully the lessons learnt will be generally applicable.

Here they are, in no particular order:

16.010/16.020/16.030/16.040: Unified Engineering

Kicking off a list like this without Unified in it would be like listing influential people in my life and neglecting to mention my parents. It would be like making a pizza without the crust. It would be like composing a symphony and forgetting the entire string section.

Unified was a fascinating course, bringing together structures, dynamics, fluid dynamics, electronics, thermodynamics, signals and systems, and several other disciplines of engineering, and combining them to solve complex problems. This was exactly the reason I chose to major in aero/astro, and it was fascinating. It was really hard, too, and I kind of wish I had done a little better in it, except that (a) I have never used my aero/astro knowledge in a real work situation, and (b) I had other things in life to learn about at that time, such as having my first real girlfriend.

This is also where I first learned Matlab and a number of other tools that proved to be invaluable to me in the years to come.

21M.051: Fundamentals of Music

I took this class with George Ruckert, an excellent and inspiring instructor. The reason this class was so formative for me was that each member of the class (a small group of about eight people) was REQUIRED to stand in front of everyone and sing an unaccompanied solo... every day.

This was as terrifying as you imagine it would be, at first... but gradually we became accustomed to it, and eventually, I sang my first a cappella piece with three other students as a final project. One of the songs I learned for that class became my audition song for the Toons (it was "Wayfaring Stranger", for the record), and that, of course, changed my life dramatically, leading to such momentous life events as my dropping out of grad school and my return to Japan after the JET program.

12.006: Chaos and Complexity

This class was important to me because it introduced to me hard mathematical evidence for a philosophical concept I had never understood. The basic idea, without getting too far into details, is that even when the mechanics of fundamental processes are understood, higher-level patterns can arise from them which, though deterministic, are essentially unpredictable due to sensitivity to initial conditions.

I can tell that I've lost 80% of my audience already...

Anyway, it raises all sorts of questions about the role God might play in a deterministic universe, and also inspires thoughts about free will and the validity and value of bottom-up analysis. All starting from the problem of modeling a ball bouncing on an oscillating surface.

I should read that book again...

21M.301: Harmony and Counterpoint I

Simply put, this class taught me invaluable skills that I have used again and again while arranging a cappella music throughout my life. Elena Ruehr was a fantastic and deeply inspiring teacher as well. I still remember her looking at one student's composition, and, on the fly, playing it, first as written, then in the way Bach would have harmonized it, then in 3 or 4 more styles of historical composers... wow. Talk about having a true, deep understanding of what you are teaching.

6.302: Hell

Ok, it was actually "Control Systems", but close enough... This class was irreplaceably valuable for two reasons:

(1) Control systems are a discipline of engineering that cuts across borders, serving aero and comp sci and chemical engineers equally well. The relevance of this class to anything cannot be overstated. I find it fascinating, and it's not only highly important, it's quite difficult to learn on your own.

(2) The Lab Assistant while I was taking the course was one of the most evil, mean human beings I'd ever encountered in my life. Not only would he put down, insult, and discourage students, he would mark entire weeks of work on lab reports as worthless with comments like "You obviously have no idea what you're talking about" and zero points for the assignment. No feedback, no teaching, no encouragement, no love.

In short, he taught me everything a teacher should not do. This was quite instructive, and I like to think that it helped me later in life when I became a teacher myself.

12.411: Astronomy Field Camp

This class taught me once and for all that I do NOT want to be an astronomer. It's a lonely, lonely job, waking up in the afternoons and sleeping in the morning, spending most of the intervening time in a small room next to a telescope, incessantly photographing unfamiliar star fields. I am a social person - I need to interact with people to be happy. I didn't fully realize this until this class took me to the Arizona desert.

On the other hand, the Grand Canyon was fantastic. Actually the whole program was well-run and quite valuable to me. It's simply and unfortunately the case that I'm not a good match for astronomy. I have no complaints whatsoever about the faculty or administration. I've always felt that the warmth and humanity of Course 12 was one of its strong points.

6.004: Computation Structures

This wasn't even in my major, but they taught us, from the bottom up, how a computer works. Starting from the atoms in semiconductors and transistors and going up to the operating system. We even built a computer from scratch using wires and basic chips, such as and gates and flip-flops. Given the significance of the role computers play in our lives, I think having an understanding of how a computer works is quite important, even if only on a philosophical level, in that what we do not understand seems mystical and somehow untouchable. Fascinating class. Lost a lot of sleep over that one.

Other Stuff

Certainly these classes weren't the most useful classes I took, nor were they the most difficult. They were quite fascinating, however, and I believe each one opened my eyes to something in the world they had previously been closed to.

Other classes I wish I had taken:

Linear Algebra
Control Systems (another - better - class, preferably the one in my major)
Artificial Intelligence
Rhetoric (I don't think they even offered a class on this at MIT)
Principles of Software Design
6.270 (the LEGO robot design competition)

I don't know if this is helpful to anyone, for the reasons I already mentioned, but I think it gives an indication of the types of things that I find valuable, looking back after having finished my engineering degree.

Good luck to those of you still struggling through your "education". Remember that graduation doesn't mark the end of your education - it only marks a shift of responsibility: the school is no longer responsible for your education. Now you are.

Wind-Powered Walking Robots

2006-11-21T23:16:00.000+09:00

This is not new, but it is quite extraordinary, and I hadn't seen it before.

For the last ten years, Dutch artist Theo Jansen has been developing enormous wind-powered walking creatures that look like something out of a Ghibli film. He describes them as "skeletons that walk on the wind", but it's difficult to do them justice with mere words - to fully appreciate them, you really need to see them in action.

Here he is featured in a BMW commercial:

These aren't really robots, of course. They're kinetic sculptures. Nevertheless,there is something really inspiring about seeing a beautiful piece of engineering like this. Some people say that it's a "fusion of engineering and art", but I don't like that description - similar to what he says in the commercial, I consider engineering and art to be two faces of the same process. I certainly do agree, however, that feats of engineering as aesthetically beautiful as this are quite rare. Leave it up to the Dutch, eh?

This comes at a time when I've been a little bit down about my job - not about my company specifically, or my current work, but looking at the big picture, the lack of job security and profitability in the research world has been on my mind a lot lately. I'm really excited about things like autonomous localization and mapping algorithms, and state estimation in the face of uncertainty, and I'm also really looking forward to working with my new robot, but thinking long-term gets a little depressing.

Inspiration is always important for refueling the enthusiasm engine, and Theo Jansen's Strandbeesten reawaken that part of my mind that rejoices in the harmony of elegant design and thrills at the possibilities of what the human mind can achieve. Maybe I need to cultivate some large-scale dreams like his: "the making of a new nature".

If you want to see more, the following two videos are much slower-paced, but you do get to see a little bit more detail of the creatures' motions.

New Project!

2006-11-20T21:51:00.000+09:00

I got a new project at work today! Of course it's super super top secret, so I can't write anything about it, but I'll be working with a new robot that one of the researchers in my group just built. It's pretty basic right now, and for the moment I'm just going to be working on getting the localization and navigation functional. The control software is pretty much all written already - we adapted it from another robot.

It'll be a month or two before we can start getting to the interesting research part of the project, but it's exciting to have a new robot to play with. I've got a whole new codebase to learn, though, and I need to regain my "linux legs". It should be fun, though, and hopefully what I learn from the new robot will help me improve the design of the software for my current robot.

Actually, the thing I'm most excited about is that I have somebody to work with. For months now I've been working on a project that was like, "Here's a brainless hulk of a robot. Architect and implement all the control software for it from scratch." It's certainly a very cool project, and one which I'm lucky to have been assigned, but maybe not the best thing for a rookie roboticist.

I feel like I should include a photo, so, since Thanksgiving is in a few days, here is a photo I took at the Parkers' farm this summer.

Show tonight in Osaka

2006-11-19T15:17:00.000+09:00

My a cappella group, Utaurara 6, will be singing in Osaka tonight. It's our last real show of 2006, although we are planning to do a small, unofficial show for my friends here in Takanohara next month.

We haven't performed in a while, and we have some new songs in our set, so I don't have the level of confidence where you "can't get it wrong". I don't think any of us do. Our last rehearsal went pretty well, though, so I think it should be fine. It sounds like a lot of my friends are coming, so I'm pretty excited!

If I have any photos tonight, I'll post them after I get home. Just wanted to get this blog entry in, in case I don't make it home before midnight. :)

...

Ok, I'm back. The show was great... I had a wonderful time, and lots of friends came to see us! The food was pretty good too, and the people working at the restaurant were very nice. If you want to go there sometime, you can look them up at http://www.magatama.net

My photo-otaku friend Anton was kind enough to shoot some photos of us during the show. Unfortunately, he used my crappy little camera, and most of the photos will require a lot of time with Photoshop to make them presentable. After much tweaking, here are just a few of them.

"Lonesome Road"

Lito omoroi na.

The end of "Straight Up". Yuka rocks.

Here's me singing one of my solos - I sang "Crazy Little Thing Called Love", "Mexico", "That Lonesome Road", and one verse of "Hoshikuzu no Machi". Alas, I was born with the curse of blue eyes, and it seems nigh impossible to remove the red-eye in any natural-looking way.

"I Want You Back"

Ok, I'm not going to post any more until tomorrow... all the red-eye repair and other tweaking takes soooo long!

oyasumi~

One day in Kyoto

2006-11-18T22:30:00.000+09:00

First things first - I seem to have been discovered. This is sort of interesting because getting new people to read my blog was never one of my motivations for joining NaBloPoMo. It's as if I started jogging every morning to get in shape, and I happened to run across a group of joggers who by chance run the same route every morning.

I guess it's interesting to me because I never really thought of myself as part of the "blogosphere". I don't link to web sites much because I don't generally have time to surf the web. In fact, if it were an option, I'd prefer to write my blog using construction paper, scissors, glitter, and paste... I spend enough time sitting in front of a monitor all day as it is, and the fact is I really don't like computers.

First and foremost, this blog is a way to keep in touch with my friends. Newcomers are certainly welcome, though, and if you have any philosophical thoughts to share, I'm all ears! Or... eyes? Or, um... screen real estate in my comments section? :P

Jefferson meets Kyoto

Today I experienced an interesting collision of worlds. A sort of acquaintance from my hometown (actually I didn't really know her - we were half a generation apart, but she was good friends with my babysitter when I was little, and she was my dad's student, so we knew of each other) came to visit me! I had one day to show her around Kyoto, and so, two of my coworkers joining us, we hit the two biggest-name sights around: Kiyomizu-dera and Kinkaku-ji.

The weather was a bit dull today - overcast, grey, a little bit of rain in the afternoon. Didn't get a lot of pictures. Leaves weren't so colorful, but the crowds were plentiful. Crammed tightly into buses, we braved the Kyoto tourist track in full force.

My friends hadn't been to either of these destinations before, and they seemed to be having a great time, so we cut our list of places to visit short and spent plenty of time exploring the grounds of Kiyomizu-dera and Kinkaku-ji.

Kiyomizu-dera

Few and far between though the spectacular colors of the foliage may be, if one learns to see with the discerning eye of the Japanese, to focus narrowly on the beauty and shut out all else, one may truly appreciate the splendor of autumn.

At a leisurely pace, we explored all the little shrines within Kiyomizu-dera, including the famous "lovers' shrine" where lonely souls go to pray fervently to find their true love, buy love talismans of all sorts, and perhaps take the ultimate challenge - walking between two rocks roughly 10 meters apart with their eyes closed. It is said that succeeding in this task guarantees that you will find your true love. On a weekday, perhaps it's possible. On a day like today, the shrine was so full of people that it was difficult to even find the other rock with one's eyes open!

Nevertheless, I turned around at one point to see one of the faithful, eyes closed, hands outstretched, bumping into people left and right, serenely seeking the far stone. The crowd seemed to vanish as she progressed, and a chorus of excited schoolgirls on the sidelines began cheering her on! Stumbling forward, bouncing from side to side off of innocent bystanders while muttering "sumimasen, sumimasen...", she managed to maintain an uncannily straight course.

As if guided by an invisible force, she was drawn directly to the rock, a sure sign that she will find true love. During the last moments, it really seemed as though she was going to miss the stone, but ... I could have sworn I heard some heavenly voices from above calling, "righto! righto! righto!" It must have been the voices of the kami themselves.

Kinkaku-ji

Kinkaku-ji, the golden pavilion, is a sight that I've often seen gleaming with the warm glow of the evening sun, but it wasn't so spectacular today. A cold rain started to fall as we entered the grounds, and yet the crowds did not seem to let up. However, though robbing the Golden Pavilion of its spectacular brilliance, the rain seemed to enhance the beauty of the beds of moss blanketing the stones and stretching into the forest, and I think I was able to appreciate the beauty of the grounds much more for it.

Here is my "artsy" photo of Kinkaku-ji. It is motivated by the fact that hundreds and hundreds of people a day bustle through, stand in the "photogenic spot" for a picture, and then move on, after maybe a brief moment's contemplation. As many of my friends have been observing lately, the taking of photos seems to detract from an experience. Once you have the photo, the feeling is, "I've captured it now, and I should be moving on". I've noticed this myself - it is hard to break out of that mindset, and I tend to enjoy myself much more when I don't bring my camera.

The problem with Kinkaku-ji is that it is one of the most recognizable visual symbols of Kyoto, and one feels compelled to take the obligatory photograph, and then move on so others can take theirs. Later, looking over your photos, you might sit and think about what you saw, but at that point you are looking at a mere visual reproduction. The experience "in the moment" is lacking. In addition to this, images of it are everywhere, so most people are desensitized to it, and there's nothing visually new to see that "kicks your mind open".

The statement I am trying to make with this photo is that by viewing Kinkaku-ji through its reflection in the water, one sees it with more awareness than by looking at it directly. Not only is the form seen from an unfamiliar perspective and the mind forced to build a fresh image of the pavilion, but the ripples and raindrops in the water, combined with the reversal of background and foreground, fuse that visual image with an acute awareness of nature and environment in that moment.

Cold Remedy

2006-11-17T13:54:00.000+09:00

As I have mentioned before, I seldom encounter new aspects of Japanese culture these days. Every once in a while, though, I uncover a gem. :)

I ate lunch with a Japanese colleague today, and I mentioned to him what Kern had said about Japanese people believing it's not good to eat oranges when they have a cold. He said he had never heard of this, but then.. leaning closer and speaking in a lower voice, he asked me, "but have you heard of using negi as a cold remedy?"

I believe negi is equivalent, or very close to, the term "scallion" or "spring onion" in English. Needless to say, I had never heard of the use of a scallion as a cold remedy, and I told him so.

"This is a part of old, traditional Japanese culture, and I think it's not so common today."

"Ok, so what do you do with the negi? Is it cooked? How do you prepare it?" I asked.

"You don't need to prepare it. You just insert it... rectally."

I just gawked for a moment.

"um... really?"

"Yes."

"Wow. So... how, um, long do you do this for? Like, for a few minutes, or do you walk around with it in there all day?"

"I think you are supposed to put it in before you go to sleep, and leave it in all night."

"Have you ever done this?"

"No, it's a part of old Japanese culture. But I think they still do it in Tohoku." (Tohoku is the northeastern part of Honshu, and is generally considered to be a bit on the backwoods hillbilly side, not unlike my hometown.)

"Wow... Japanese culture is ... interesting," I said.

"Yeah, isn't it? What I've always wondered is, who decided to even try that in the first place?"

Blog Addiction

2006-11-16T17:31:00.000+09:00

I've come to the conclusion that blogging is dangerous to me. Last night I spent four full hours on my blog entry - roughly 2.5 hours writing the text, an hour choosing, adjusting, cropping, resizing, and uploading photos, and half an hour proofreading and correcting grammar and spelling.

Let me reiterate that... FOUR HOURS. 10pm to 2am. Four hours of my life were sucked away into my blog.

My plan for last night was to clean my room (I have a guest coming tomorrow!) and practice my a cappella music (I have a show this weekend!).

Needless to say, neither of those goals was even remotely accomplished.

I had a flash of an image this morning of myself as an addict. I'm usually ok as long as I can keep myself away from my blog, but once I begin typing, I have difficulty stopping. NaBloPoMo has the same effect on me as inviting an alcoholic to an open bar every evening and saying, "you have to drink at least one beer".

My blog is consuming my life. Must... learn... moderation...

In lieu of an endless stream of text tonight, I'll pass on a couple links I've run into over the past few days.

An interesting page on Japan

I love the section on tattoos! I also enjoyed the "urgent news" and "food and history" sections. :)

A new Korean robot that can track and kill human targets

Images like this are what motivated me to get into the business of robots that teach English and hug children.

That's all I'm going to write today... I'll let you all recover from last night's prose binge.

Quest for a Beach

2006-11-15T21:57:00.000+09:00

I was thumbing through my blog tonight, and I realized I never finished writing this post from last October, about a trip I took last August...

Before anyone (Kern) begins complaining loudly that previously-written work is a transgression of the rules of NaBloPoMo, let me reiterate that I never finished writing this, and state that at the time I began working on this tonight, there were only 719 words according to the Cut & Paste Word Count script, and no photos. At the time of completion, I had 2663 words.

Let us drift back in time together, then, to the summer days of yesteryear, or actually, to the autumn days, from which I will subsequently step back again with you - sometimes taking a whole 15 months in one step can be a shock to the system...

October, 2005

So I've kinda detected a pattern whereby the more interesting experiences I have and things I have to say, the less time I have to document and say them. Thus I'm way behind in my blogging. Permit me then, if you will, the liberty to take time a bit out of order...

Let us step back in time, past the autumn rains, past the farewell parties, back to the time of the songs of the cicadas, of the Ultimate games of yore, to the time, I would say, of the sweltering Kansai heat, were that heat not still present even now, interspersed with the October chills, lurking in the shadows, in the transitions... where building superintendents, unable to distinguish the hairline between sweltering and frigid that seems to characterize the Japanese perception of weather, err on the side of the zero-body-fat, uninsulated Japanese physique and fire up the furnaces at the first sight of a long-sleeved shirt. But I digress.

Today let us go back to mid-August. It was the night of the first-quarter moon, if I remember correctly, which I do. That day, four of us, Lily, Linda, Yuki, and I, set out on a quest. The idea had come up over lunch two days earlier. Lily and I were enchanted by the legends we heard of a beautiful sandy beach far to the east, beyond Ise Jingu, the holiest of all Shinto shrines. Drawn by the promise of beautiful white sands and mysterious bioluminescent waters, we carelessly threw together a rickety plan full of uncertainty and risk. Two days and a visit to Conan later (it's like the Home Depot of Japan), our alarms firing off at 6am on a Saturday, we suited up and departed on our journey.

The perils of our quest soon became clear, though, as we nearly lost one of our intrepid crew to the tantalizing temptations of slumber, but a few phone calls from me and she was out of bed, allowing our journey to begin in earnest.

Sleeping engineers are not easily roused at 6am for a pilgrimage to a destination unknown.

Laden with all our equipment, we attracted many a stare as we barreled south through Nara, then east into Mie, as fast as the Kintetsu could fly, steel wheels gnashing on steel rails, the thunderous CRACK every time we hit the shock wave of an oncoming train, the clay-tiled roofs of Japanese farmhouses tearing past in a blur, and the uniformed train staff turning back bowing each time they walked through the door at the end of the car.

Yuki standing guard over the camping equipment

Ise Jingu - The Holiest of all Shrines

Crossing the bridge to her destiny

At Ise Jingu, we purified ourselves at the Shinto fountain and proceeded to enter the holy grounds, splashing our feet in the holy river, visiting countless similar-looking holy temples, all burned down and rebuilt every 20 years.

The location where the shrine will be rebuilt after it is tragically but intentionally consumed in fire.

Our path soon brought us to the great stone staircase to the Inner Shrine. Bathed in the glow of this spiritual center of the Shinto world, and walking up the holy staircase to the main gate, we encountered another group of pilgrims, clearly inspired by the holiness of the mighty shrine before us, because they kept making "Z" shapes with their hands and yelling "Zortan!", encouraging us to join them in their revelry. They even helped us along our path to enlightenment by digitally immortalizing the moment for us.

Not for the faint of heart, mastering the "Zortan" move is a prerequisite for enlightenment.

We reflected on the solemnity of the occasion, then proceeded up the final steps to the holy fourth wall of the inner shrine, from which we could behold (but not approach) the even more holy third wall of the inner shrine, solemnly enclosing in turn the successively increasing holiness and obscurity of the second and first walls, the fortress of barriers at last culminating in the almost overwhelming holiness of the holy imperial mirror, nestled in its concentric holy cloth bags that have never been opened. In awe we gazed upon the unspectacular wall that separated us from anything we might be interested in seeing.

Basking in the obfuscated glory of that experience, we headed back down, swinging by the holy horse stall on the way back the holy path to the holy bridge over the holy river, only to find that the horse was nowhere to be seen. There were holy bitemarks all over the shrine, though, so we were pretty sure it had been there at some point.

Hey, is this place holy, or what?

The holiness we had experienced, however, could merely whet our appetite for the spiritual experience that was to come.

The Journey South

Returning to the station and collecting our camping gear from our lockers, we reembarked upon our original mission. Drenched with sweat from our walk through the harsh summer heat, we rehydrated and reenergized with some mikan juice as we waited for the train. At last it came, and we stumbled through the doors into the refreshingly air-conditioned compartment.

The rails of the Kintetsu split, and we traveled down the coast, away from Nagoya. Southward we went, past Tobu, and eventually had to switch to a local train. Moving and stopping, moving and stopping, every station looking the same, every name equally incomprehensible, it took an eternity to reach the station we suspected was near the beach we hoped was there.

Disembarking in an unknown small town, we knew not how far our journey would take us, so we decided to first procure some food and supplies. Linda guarded our gear at the station as the rest of us set off to find a supermarket. The moment we entered the supermarket, though, some primal beast inside of Lily awoke. Like a lioness in pursuit of her prey, she zeroed in on the coolers at the back of the store. For some, camping is about a peaceful retreat from the noise of everyday life. For others, it's about communing with the beauty of nature. For Lily, well... eventually we left the store, heavily laden with many bags of meat and fish, some of the varieties of which I was thoroughly unable to identify.

Returning to the station, we were met by a heavily laden Linda, who had for some reason decided to carry all of the camping equipment for four people down the stairs in one trip, and we all piled into a taxi, eager to set eyes on the legendary beach that seemed almost within our grasp.

Beach Ho

The Taxi Driver was a humble man with a spiritual serenity to him, the work of his days mostly concerned with chauffeuring the common people back and forth between the village and the pachinko parlors. He explained that a town ordinance had forbidden pachinko parlors from being built within the town limits, so it was a substantial drive to get to one. His customers were all regulars, and they called him by name on his cell phone.

Now, three of us were foreigners in a strange land, with all the language barriers that one would expect. Yuki was the only local in our group, and we hoped she could help us to communicate the goal of our pilgrimmage to the Taxi Driver. Alas, we had neglected to consider the critical fact that not a one of us actually knew where we were going. He looked at us with a curious amusement in his eyes as we attempted to communicate to him the spiritual significance of our quest.

And so began one of the trials of our journey. Only worthy pilgrims may set eyes on the Most Beachy of Beaches. After several discussions with the Driver, and after many miles of road through small towns and fishing villages, we at last pulled up to a low hill, its top adorned by tufts of hard and weathered grass. Beyond this hill, he said, lay the beach we sought.

The four pilgrims stepped out, and we approached the crest. Topping the hill, we were greeted with the sight of ... a large concrete barrier. Approaching and climbing that barrier, we were greeted with ... a not-so-exciting beach. It was a beach, however, and the taxi driver had brought us here. We contemplated setting up camp. Sometimes it is important to settle with what life gives you. Setting your expectations too high leads only to disappointment, so you should just accept your lot in life. Besides, this beach was convenient and right here. There might not even be another beach nearby, and it was starting to get late...

Never.

Seeing the looks in my companions' eyes, I knew that we would not be satisfied with this. We had traveled too far, for too long, sacrificed everything for this trip, and we would not give up until we found the True Beach. We returned to the taxi.

"Taxi Driver, we have passed your little test. This is not the One True Beach as foretold by the Canadians. Take us there. You know where it is."

"Very well," replied the Taxi Driver, "you have proven yourselves worthy. I am the spiritual Guardian of the Beach, and I needed to test your will before showing you to the One True Beach you have sought for so many days. Get in, and I shall take you there. For 8000 yen." The look in his eyes would not have seemed out of place atop a mountain in Tibet, and we knew we were getting a pretty sweet deal.

Setting Up Camp

When we arrived, we knew we had come to the right place. The road we were on ran atop a concrete barrier, and fifty feet below us, the enormous sandy expanse of the Great Beach stretched to the horizon, curving around a peninsula in the distance. Few stragglers remained from a day of beaching, and we made our way to a hidden corner of the sand to the left, behind a small copse of trees. This is where we would pitch our tent.

Making the same mistake I always make, I elected to head the Tent Pitching Committee rather than the Fire Building Committee, and struggled with the poles and ropes and stakes while the girls went to fetch firewood in the last light of the setting sun. Alas, when I had finished and turned to check on the fire, all I saw was a wad of smouldering paper and damp wood at the bottom of a deep hole in the sand, with a meager pile of rotten branches at the ready.

In the pitch black (we had chosen not to bring flashlights to the One True Beach because flashlights would, of course, preclude our finding the Great Beach, for they deny faith in the bioluminescence (which, it turns out, wasn't there)), I managed to gather some tinder, twist some newspapers, and at last get a fire going for our feast. Mmm... meat, veggies, chocolate that wouldn't melt onto crackers but which we ate anyway on principle.

Eventually, and through much hardship, the fire was started.

Though the water did not sparkle, the stars overhead did. To commune with their sparkling, we lit off a few lonesome hanabi that we had brought, and which were answered by others launched by strangers far down the beach. Then, giving up on sparkling altogether, we went for a midnight swim to absorb the full depth of enlightenment the beach could provide us. The moon was dipping towards the horizon, and we wondered whether our tent would be safe from the tide. I tried giving a quick survival lecture on moon phases and tidal motion, but after a few chu-hais, deductive reasoning starts to lose its edge.

We settled in for sleep, the sounds of summer all around us.

The Morning After

My eyes opened. Early glow of dawn. The roof of the tent above me and the screens on the sides covered with a menagerie of crawling, flying, and (one can assume) biting insects of all sorts, meaty little buggers, antennae waving, beady little compassionless bug eyes sizing us up as targets. Why they were there, I do not know. Why we all got the hell out of that tent immediately, I do.

Dawn of a new beginning

We each experienced the sunrise in a different way, Linda from the beach near the trees, Yuki from further down the beach, Lily perched atop the enormous concrete wall by the road, and I floating on my back in the water. We rekindled the fire and broke our fast as the early beachgoers began to arrive.

Yuki in thought

The illumination of the morning sun cast a new light on the beach. No longer the beautiful, idyllic sandy beach of our dreams, presented to us by our magnanimous Spiritual Guide and Taxi Driver, we had now passed the honeymoon of enlightenment, and we were able to see the enormous amount of detritus washed up by the waves and left by day-tripping merrymakers. More cars began to pass overhead. Yuki and I helped lighten our load for the trip home by making sure no chu-hais were left full.

After a nice morning swim, the four of us expeditioned (expedited? expeded?) over the hillside to see what was on the Other Side. After following several branches of the roads and paths in the sand, we conceded that there was no other beach and, in fact, nothing interesting whatsoever. Sometimes, the grass is not greener on the Other Side. It did provide some fun dune-scaling opportunities, though, and such experiences are not to be trivialized - though no goal is achieved, they provide the meat and potatoes of our everyday existence.

Packing up the tent, we hiked back through a long and winding road through a beachside village behind us, hiking much further than we expected, but knowing there was no turning back, to a ferry dock that the Guardian had showed us the night before. Sweaty, salty, hot, and exhausted, we arrived to see that the ferry had just left. We turned to the only time-killing option within our visual range - an old, faded cafe on the other side of the parking lot.

The cafe had been bleached and faded in the sun for years, and it reminded me of a beachside restaurant we used to frequent near my aunt Elise's house on Shelter Island. The same bleaching by salt and sun, the same time lag for your eyes to adjust to the lack of brilliant sunlight as you enter. It even had an old sit-down video game from the early 80's, replete with faux wood paneling and appropriately nonfunctional.

We polished off some kaki-gouri's and boarded the ferry. The cruise home was quite pleasant, the rhythmic churning of the boat's engines relaxing the body as we watched the ocean and land roll by through the tinted windows that shaded us from the sun's harsh fury.

After some omiyagination, we hauled our burdenous equipment aboard the train and wasted very few of the minutes between there and home with the trifling matter of consciousness.

Although my companions don't remember it, I suspect the Guardian visited each of us in our dreams, reminding us with that mysterious glint in his eye, never to forget the spiritual lessons learned on our epic voyage.

The Forest of Ideas

2006-11-14T22:07:00.000+09:00

I will start off by saying that this, again, will not be a fully-coherent, well-balanced essay. I have a couple different memes that I would like to present, linked with two or three recent events in my life. I'll try to keep it short enough to avoid "word indigestion" as one of my glib critics has described it. Perhaps subsections will give the reader ample time to chew thoroughly and swallow.

A Blog Post A Day

I have been reflecting, lately, on the nature of my writing. NaBloPoMo has pushed me past a barrier of sorts, the boundary defined by the limits of my natural desire to write. When blogging once a month, I save up ideas and photos until I'm just bursting to blog about them. Then the writing comes easily. This month, though, after a week or so of blogging every day, I felt I'd written myself dry. And yet I am dragged forward, bound by the shackles of my vow to continue writing. Each day I squeeze out more ideas, thoughts, memories, and connections, and it has taught me about both the limitations of my vocabulary and the limitations of my readers' attention spans. Thus from here on out, I will try to pay more attention to my writing and try to keep it more tractable.

The Conceptual Hydra and Forest of Ideas

According to three of my friends, my essays are incoherent. Rather than focusing on a single point they ramble and spread, like a swarm of disinterested thought tendrils, touching on concepts briefly, and then getting bored and moving on again. I don't deny this. The way I see the world, everything is deeply connected in countless ways to everything else. Every idea, every observation, is painted on the canvas of the mind in a blend of common colors, patterns and conceptual textures. When we recognize these underlying patterns and see how they connect ideas to each other, it becomes evident that the universe of ideas is an enormous interconnected web. Every link we follow leads to many connections, each of which in turn leads to many more. A conceptual hydra. Try as we may to hack off its heads and come to a conclusion, many questions and connections spring up in their stead, and I find myself writing and writing until sleep threatens to overtake me.

I think of this web as a forest. We are all standing in a dense forest of ideas, spreading out for miles around us, and each of us is familiar with different, though overlapping, areas of this forest. Some paths in the forest are well-traveled, though some are seldom trodden and require a guide. Other areas have yet to be discovered. When I write, I am guiding you on a day trip through parts of the forest I have seen. I realize that I can't show you every tree, but it brings me great joy to show guests to some of the beautiful sunny glades and deep gorges I have discovered in the forest, and I sometimes linger longer than planned. I will certainly try to have you back by sundown, though. Tired hikers tend not to fully appreciate the beauty of nature.

Static ideas, though, can get boring. The boulders I showed you last week are no different this week, but a new sapling I discovered just up the hill from here, is.

The Decision to Move

Today's sapling is a decision I need to make in the next two weeks. I've been waiting for a room to open up in this apartment complex in Morinomiya, where two of my friends live. It seems like a good location in terms of accessibility to civilization - it's on three convenient train lines, it's a 20-minute bike ride from either of the two main shopping and nightlife centers in Osaka, and my commute to work would be roughly an hour, compared with half an hour by bicycle from here. Moving there would help satisfy my longtime desire to live "in" a "city". Where things are happening. Connected with the pulse of civilization.

Nothing is perfect, though, and the apartments there are nowhere near as wonderful as my place here in the sticks. The place I'm considering moving to is smaller, without the wonderfully spacious balconies, kitchen, and bathroom I have now. It's also located near a refuse-burning plant, and when the wind blows the wrong way, you can smell it. In fact, this is still pretty good for the price. In reality, the cost of rent would normally prohibit me from renting a huge apartment like the one I'm living in now - spacious, bright, with clean air and a symphony of birds, cicadas, and crickets chirping outside - except that it's a company apartment and I can live here cheaply in relative luxury.

Luxury, but not civilization. As I said in my first blog post, the convenience store closes at 9:30. I suspect that the half-hour bike ride to work is going to become quite unpleasant as the cold of winter closes in. In addition, there are no restaurants or bars to speak of here, and, perhaps more significantly, most of the people I know who live here, inevitably move away. I don't have a solid, stable community to connect with. That may be inevitable as a foreigner in Japan. I don't know. However, I've felt restless and unsatisfied lately, and often I have thought that moving might help.

I seem to have neglected to mention thus far that yesterday, a room did open up on the 21st floor of the building where my friends live, overlooking the spectacular night view of Osaka Castle Park and the skyline beyond. I reserved the room. If I take it, I can move anytime before January 13th, but I need to make the decision in the next two weeks.

Introspection

Decisions like this lead one to question one's values. Whose standards am I judging myself by? Am I the spoiled prince, afraid to give up his cold, sterile castle to join the lively peasants living their lives to the fullest in the village down below? Or am I the country mouse, longing to take part in the fantasy of city life, only to be disappointed and bitter when I encounter the reality of it? Should I follow my parents as role models, and run away as far as I can from the noise and chaos of city life, or should I follow the advice of my old mentor Hiroshi Ishii, and choose what I perceive to be the high-risk, high-return option, so as never to look back regretfully at the path not taken?

Of course the "responsible" choice would be to stay here. I would save a few hundred dollars a month, which I could put towards retirement (or commuting to Osaka for a cappella rehearsal... :P), I would have fewer chances to go out and spend money, since this place is a ghost town by the time I get back from work each night, and I could spend more time focusing on work, since I'd save that extra hour a day in commuting time.

But where does one draw the line between preparing for the future and living for the moment?

Coda

Life is a sculpture, a symphony, a work of art, and I'm hesitating over whether to throw a bold stroke of paint over some delicate details I had just finished a few months ago; whether to write in a wailing electric guitar solo over the subtly textured harmonies I composed for the violins and violas. The decision of where to live is only one part of this opus. Career, social life, music, and blogging are all elements of the multimedia composition I call my life.

At this point, I was planning to take you up an interesting side trail, exploring some ideas I have been discussing lately about how the information age has changed our lives, but I can see the sun is already quite low, and we need to get back before sundown. I'll show you that path another day.

Dylan's New Toy

2006-11-13T23:34:00.000+09:00

I've been realizing lately that I haven't come up with many blog posts that discuss interesting aspects of Japanese culture. This, I think, is because I don't really interact with Japanese culture all that much. Today I left my house, biked to work alone, listening to my audiobook of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", coded all morning, went to lunch with my Greek, Dutch, French, Ukrainian, and Canadian friends (and that's only three people!), went back to work, coded by myself and did some data entry, ate dinner with basically the same foreigners, did some shopping, went back to work, debugged a bit, and came home. I wish I could bring up interesting points like the fact that Japanese kids perceive the sun to be red, but the fact is, I don't have that level of interaction with Japanese culture anymore.

So instead, I will present my new toy for show and tell today. It's a Korg D888 Digital Multitrack Recorder!

"But Dylan," you all say, "don't you already have a digital multitrack recorder?" That is true. BUT... (a) it can only handle one or two inputs at a time, and (b) it uses SmartMedia cards, which seem to be about as easy to find as single-density floppy disks these days.

This thing is pretty sw33t. It can handle eight simultaneous inputs and outputs, which is almost enough for Osakapella, and more than enough for Urara 6. It has an internal 40GB hard drive and USB out, so I don't need to carry around piles of obsolete flash memory cards. It also can be used as a mixing board (albeit an expensive one) in a pinch. Oh, and Lito and I bought it as part of a deal together with a set of speakers for him, and thus I got a free T-shirt and carrying case with it, so now I can be a Korg posterboy. :)

The downsides - it's kinda heavy for carrying long distances, it doesn't have any effects besides reverb, and, well... the manual is all in Japanese so I haven't really tried it out yet. They have the English manual on their website though, so no worries there.

Now the question is, where are we going to record? My apartment would work, except that I don't have separate booths for voice percussion and soloists, and I'm worried that the sound will bleed. A studio might work, except that in most of the studios we've used, you can hear the thundering rumble of the bass and crash of the cymbals from the inevitable thrash metal band in the next studio over. Maybe we can find a nice studio with separate booths somewhere... I'll have to look into that.

Anyway, I plan to learn how to use my new toy over the next week. If anyone has any advice on amateur recording that may be helpful, let me know! I'm really excited about recording Osakapella's third CD and Utaurara 6's first! :)

Why does the caged gaijin sing?

2006-11-12T11:58:00.000+09:00

Today was a day of performances. For once I wasn't involved in any of them. Merely a spectator this time, I sat, and watched, and took pictures, and enjoyed the show.

First I went to Kobe, where a cafe was celebrating its second anniversary. My friends' group, "LHYRYHKK" or something like that (I can never quite get the spelling) was performing, as well as Canary-ian, who performed with us at Osakapella's 5th anniversary party. All of these groups are horrendously incestuous - Yuka and Macky and Atsuko from Canary-ian are also in Urara 6, the group I'm in with two other ex-Osakapella members, and I believe all of the members of LYHYRHKK are also current or former members of Osakapella. In fact, I went to Tin's Hall in the evening to see my friends' reggae band, The Native Tongues, perform, and that group includes four members of Urara6, including nonoverlapping members from both of the two aforementioned groups. But that's not my actual point - just a curious aside.

[My only photo from LHYKRHHK's performance in Kobe today that I didn't take with somebody else's camera]

My point today is that it was interesting to see the difference in poise and stage presence between the different groups and different members of each group. I won't go through all the performers, but a few caught my eye.

One was a woman who played the guitar at the first show. She walked up on stage with her guitar, almost shaking. She explained, eyes averted, that she had never performed in front of people before, and that she might have to stop in the middle of the song because she was so nervous. She played for us, and hit pretty much all the right notes, although her nervousness expressed itself in many slips, squeaks, and small mistakes. For one song she actually had a helper come up and conduct the rhythm for her.

Compare that to this amazing guy who performed tonight. He was a fantastic solo violin player, with a wireless pickup on his fiddle so he could walk through the audience sawing away on a vaguely Scottish- or Irish-sounding tune with bits of blues riffs, some classical melodies, and plenty of hoedown-style double-stops to add color and energy. He had total command of his instrument, was grinning the whole time while he fired up the audience, all of us excited and clapping in time. Later he started jamming with the reggae band as well.

I'm sure these two people saw the process of performance in completely different ways. This is all speculation, of course, but I would guess that the guitarist probably saw this as a challenge that she hoped she was up to - a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to prove her abilities to herself in front of a live audience. Her focus, I imagine, was on the instrument, the music, and the challenge of putting it all together to produce a song that people, hopefully, would enjoy. I think the Japanese word that captures the essence of this (as Lito and I were talking about today) is happyoukai (発表会), described in Jim Breen's EDICT dictionary as "recital (i.e. of music, by a pupil)".

On the other hand, I would imagine that the violin player saw today in a very different light. His confidence with the instrument or his musical ability were certainly not in question. I doubt he even saw the evening as a challenge. Rather, I am imagining that he saw it simply as an opportunity to have fun, to share his joy and passion for music with the crowd, and to spend some time doing the thing he loves to do.

There is a dramatic difference between these two mindsets. Obviously, the latter is generally more enjoyable for the audience, but the former certainly demands a great deal more courage, and can be invaluable to the performer. There is a wide continuum in between these two extremes, but this qualitative difference is important.

The focus is quite different as well. Beginners tend to focus on themselves and the challenge of the task. Higher-level performers focus on the audience. The task is merely a medium that enhances their ability to be expressive.

By the way, this task-focused mentality is not limited only to beginners. I was at a party several years ago near Kobe where a Japanese guy and I had each brought our guitars. He was a lead guitarist, and I tend to just enjoy playing chords, so I suggested that we jam. I started laying down a 12-bar blues pattern for him to solo over, and he stared at me blankly, uncomprehending of what I expected him to do. Changing tactics, I then suggested a few simple songs and showed him the chords. Still, he seemed puzzled and unable to follow along. Finally, he offered to show me what he could play, and pulled out a book of sheet music, a music stand, and a CD player. Playing the background music to a Yngwie Malmsteen song on the CD player, he picked up his pick, switched on the distortion on his portable guitar amp, and dove into an intense speed-metal guitar solo. His fingers raked up and down the fretboard with grace, accuracy, and blistering speed, spiraling through scales and modes I'd probably have to pull out my old music theory books to name. I reckon he played the entire solo perfectly, down to every thirty-second note in the sheet music.

And yet... I would still put him in the same category as the woman who played today.

Now I am trying to think of fields where I have transcended the task-focused mindset. Skiing is probably one such field - when I ski, I'm usually more concerned with where I'm going, or what the scenery looks like, or who I'm with, than I am about the mechanics of skiing, which are now instinctive to me.

With guitar and singing, I feel like I'm almost there, as long as the difficulty level isn't too high. I'm not quite there yet, though. I often find myself thinking more about myself and my group than I do about the audience, but on the other hand, many aspects of singing have become second-nature to me, and rather than actively think about those things, I can focus on the emotion and expression of the song.

One of the best concerts I've ever been to was when I saw Poison live in 1997. Musically, I've seen much better bands, but for some reason, I truly enjoyed the Poison show, and not just for the entertainment value of seeing people in their late 30's squeezing back into their ripped jeans and heavy metal T-shirts from the 80's. The group did an amazing job of connecting with the audience. I felt engaged, part of the show. The band wasn't just playing at a venue to produce income - they were playing for us. Most bands don't give me that feeling.

It's that feeling that I want to create when I sing and play, and I think that's going to be the goal for my musical development in the near future. I've had enough happyoukais, and now I want to get to a level where I can really perform and fully connect with the audience.

Ok, this post is long enough, so I won't expound any more on this topic. It is left as an exercise to the student to apply this principle to (choose one):

(a) go
(b) love life
(c) robotics
(d) teaching
(e) maintaining friendships
(f) fitness
(g) cleaning my bathroom
(h) fashion
(i) blogging
(j) life in general

The webs we weave

2006-11-11T18:41:00.000+09:00

I had an interesting little "connections" moment today. Our company president had his annual fall barbecue today (the one I wrote about last year). Walking around, I encountered many faces that I recognized but couldn't put a name to, which I suppose is natural in a company as subdivided as ours is.

At one point I happened to walk over to such a group of people - I had seen some of their faces before, but didn't know their names. After talking for a while, one of them asked me something about Okinawa-kun. I couldn't remember her name, but I was certain that I had seen her before, and it puzzled me how she would know Okinawa-kun, since he didn't really have any connections to ATR besides through me. We talked about it, and then I realized that I had never seen her at ATR - she had come to one of my parties last spring, and that's where I had met her. We worked out all the connections, and it was quite a tenuous web.

Here are the stories of the connections. Last summer, I met an MIT intern at ATR. Nobody had introduced us, but she was wearing an MIT sweatshirt and I was wearing my brass rat, so I decided to go up and introduce myself. Through her I got to know some interns who were here on a program from Canada. Through the fall and winter, I became pretty close friends with them.

Around the same time, last fall, the girl I was speaking to today was introduced by one of her university friends to another friend who happened to be from Okinawa. He, in turn, was friends with Okinawa-kun, and introduced the two of them.

Later, in the spring, one of my aforementioned Canadian friends introduced me to a visiting researcher who had previously been a part of the same Canadian internship program, and who had returned to ATR for a few months. He worked in a different lab from mine, and so, through him, I got to know a few of the Japanese researchers he worked with.

Around the same time, last spring, I met Okinawa-kun in a dance club, and we started hanging out.

Finally, all the elements came together when I invited both Okinawa-kun and one of the Japanese researchers to a party in Nara park. Okinawa-kun invited the girl I was speaking to today, and she became friends with the Japanese guy from ATR. Later, she got to know some of his coworkers, with whom she ended up coming to the ATR barbecue.

The really strangely coincidental thing today was that half an hour before I spoke with this girl, I had gotten an email on my phone from another friend, asking whether I knew Okinawa-kun's mailing address. I did not. However, it turns out that the girl I talked to today was very close with him and did have his address, which I was then able to pass on to my friend.

It was one of those moments when you say "it's a small world", but that doesn't quite do it justice. Personal relationships are the lifeblood of society, and it's important to recognize that in a complex and interconnected social web like ours, the tenuous connections are the most powerful. Those are the connections that have the power to join completely separate social circles in the network, and thus it's important to recognize and respect their value.

It's kind of funny... when I was a teacher, so many of my Japanese students would write their essays on a theme like, "Friends are Important" or some such trite and mundane-sounding topic. And now I find myself writing about the same thing. :)

Halloween

2006-11-10T23:55:00.000+09:00

Ok, so let's return to the recent past for a bit and visit Halloween. Usually there's this unofficial party that takes place on the Osaka loop line. Hundreds of merrymakers gather in costume on the platform of Osaka Station, and after partying for a half hour or so, all dive simultaneously into one train. They take this train around the entire loop, getting out at every station to switch cars, causing great confusion to the Japanese people riding the train, who barely have any idea what Halloween is at all.

Anyway, it seems like it might still be a cool idea, until you consider the number of participants. I went last year, and the train cars were completely packed. Normal Japanese people trying to go about their lives were anywhere from simply annoyed to genuinely freaked out by all these foreigners in outrageous costumes (to be fair, quite a few Japanese people participated too) and this detracted a lot from the fun. With about 1/4 the number of people, I think it might actually be fairly cool and not really get in people's way too much, but it's just gotten way out of control.

This is what it looked like last year:

This year, however, the Osaka police cracked down on the party, refusing to let the partiers onto the trains and threatening to arrest people. This was well-publicized ahead of time, and consequently I don't know anyone who went this year. So we must bid sayonara to the tradition of the loop line party.

Instead, I went to a house-rewarming party chez my friend Ben, who just returned to Japan. Since it was Halloween I felt obligated to take my way-cool hand-made party-mask-to-end-all-party-masks that Yuki gave me from her trip to Italy. We ended up meeting up with some friends in Umeda afterwards and dancing all night at a place called Club Noon, which was decidedly NOT a Halloween party, although a bunch of people in our group did in fact come in costume, which attracted quite a bit of attention from the hundred or so "normal" people there. Crazy gaijin.

And here come the pics - consider this my penance for such wordy posts this week. ;)

Party at Ben's house. But... where's Ben? He kind of vanished as soon as the party started...

"Drink from the orange bottle and the story ends. You go home, get a good night's sleep, you wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.

"Drink from the violet bottle, and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes."

Haha... it's been so long since I've had to correct red-eye on TWO people in a picture.

"Arr, that's quite a cutlass ye got thar, what ye need is a good scabbard!"

"I think carefully before acting rashly."
"Sound advice."

"Daahling, aren't we FABulous?"

Awww... too cute for words.

---

And finally, here is a natsukashii shot from last Halloween. I had been working on hair for the costume, but I didn't finish it in time, and thus, out of probably 150 people I talked to, only two knew what I was supposed to be (hint: look at what I'm holding in my hand).

Capitalism vs. Socialism

2006-11-09T20:56:00.000+09:00

Ok, tonight I talked to two people from Socialist countries who are against socialism. They say that the older generations work hard but the younger generations are lazy. I'm personally from a capitalist country, and all I see are the failings of capitalism. Single-parent families where the mother has to work two jobs to support the kids, etc.

There must be a happy medium, where nobody is in a dire situation, yet people have motivation to work hard, to innovate, etc. I open this up to the peanut gallery. Does anyone have a good solution?

Again I apologize for the brevity of my blog. In a survey of 5 people, 5 out of 5 skipped "the middle part" of my previous blog entry, which I sweated and slaved over for two hours the night before last. Thus, if you find this entry to be too brief, feel free to read over my older stuff. If you really did read everything, wow... I'm impressed. You have the kind of attention span I wish I had. :)

By the way, I spent most of the evening hanging out over a couple of bottles of red wine with two really cool Mongolians. That's the kind of thing that never happened to me back in the states. :)

Oyasumi...

Places I've been

2006-11-08T16:56:00.000+09:00

Ok, with last night's post I again seem to have gone a bit overboard in terms of length, so I'll keep it very short today.

Saw this on Berta's blog - it's a personalized map of all the countries you've been to in the world. Looking at mine, I suppose I really need to do some catching up in Europe. You can sign up for free and generate your own map at world66.com.

By the way, it looks like you can set it up to display the places you want to go to in addition to the places you've been, but I haven't played with that yet - too much thought required to decide where I want to go.

Silence and Technology

2006-11-07T22:32:00.000+09:00

It's great to have so many comments on my blog! Please, keep it up, everyone, and don't feel shy to post. My posts are but the humble work of one man, but when we discuss and collaborate, this blog becomes a living, dynamic work of our collective mind, an existence far superior to any individual alone.

But yet... it is said that, "a person is smart, but people are stupid". At what point does the dynamic change from the idiocy of a crowd of panicked people, all intelligent when taken individually, stampeding away from the emergency exit, ignoring clearly marked signs in the throes of blind panic; to the brilliant and complex ballet of individually unintelligent bees working together to maintain and develop the hive, breed young, and communicate at a level where they can systematically harvest nectar and pollen from specific locations that can be miles away?

I'm not going to address this question today... I'm just throwing it out there. My thoughts today, rather, are about silence. And technology.

One of the valuable lessons I learned in college, I learned not from the classroom, but from my a cappella group. I arranged a number of songs for them, and while some were so bad that merely uttering the name of the song became its own punchline, I steadily improved, to the point where one musician I respect declared one of my arrangements to be his favorite song ever. (Though he had somewhat of a penchant for hyperbole, I did sense a fair bit of honesty in his statement).

Now as you may know, in Japan, there are some people who practice tea ceremony for the majority of their lives, dedicating 70 years or more to the refinement and development of their aesthetic sense of wabi-sabi, as well as the coordination of body, mind, and spirit. Other traditional arts are studied the same way - flower arrangement, martial arts, calligraphy, taiko drumming, as well as my personal favorite, the game of go. In all of these cases, the specifics of the activity have only secondary significance. A true and thorough explanation of the primary purpose of this study and practice is probably beyond my understanding and ability to explain. I believe an important part of it is to develop a deep aesthetic sense, not limited to a single game or art, but fundamental and underlying everything in life, and to engage oneself in applying it. In doing so, we learn about the patterns of things in the world, we recognize our limitations, and we learn valuable lessons that can be applied, perhaps non-consciously, to unrelated aspects of our lives.

In go, I have observed and lived countless patterns that apply to business, to relationships, to personal development, and elsewhere. It's a game about balance and about compromise. Play all your stones too high, too aggressively, and you'll have your base cut out from under you in no time. Play your stones too low, and you'll be walled out from the center, pressed down into a low, inefficient position with no potential. Every time you take something, you give away something else - it's not like chess where you just destroy everything in your path. This is not American foreign policy. It's a game for a realistic, civilized world of give and take, and I believe that by developing a good sense for the game, one can also develop the skills to be successful in business, negotiations, relationships, and self-improvement in life.

I feel that a cappella, or rather music in general, has many valuable lessons like these to teach us. While not a literal microcosm for the exchanges and relationships in life, music certainly does embody deep aesthetic principles that are true everywhere. Take harmony and counterpoint, for example.

Harmony describes the vertical arrangement of notes at any given moment into chords, and the relationships between those chords over time. It's concerned only that the group of notes fit well together and do not clash with each other at any given moment in the song.

Counterpoint, on the other hand, describes the horizontal flow of notes in their parallel and complementary melodies, and the relationships of these melodies between different instruments or voices.

To demonstrate the difference, consider that it's possible to freeze one's right hand in the position of a C major chord on the piano, mash it down alternately with the thumb on C, then G, then A, then F, and repeat, producing something that resembles the structure of a song. Mozart would never go for that, though - it has no finesse, no delicacy. Now imagine six virtuoso violinists in the room. You simultaneously tell them all to rock out on their most beautiful and emotional violin solo. Any one of them individually would produce a heartwarming melody, but in this room their melodies have no relationship to each other, and all that results is a cacophonous mess. This is perhaps a clumsy and not completely accurate representation of what harmony and counterpoint are, but I think you get the point. [Ed - This example was kind of off the top of my head, and I know it's slightly wrong - if you can think of a better example of counterpoint without harmony, please write it as a comment to this post! :)]

Japanese society places great value on their "wa", which literally means harmony (both musically and in the general sense). It might not be too much of an oversimplification to state that the ultimate ideal of their society is to preserve peace and harmony, even at the expense of individual freedom. The result? Low crime rate, high suicide rate, no guns allowed. Ok, that really IS an oversimplification. But as this is not the central point of my essay, I'll move on. Likewise, in the USA, we value personal freedom over just about everything else. In many cases I think this has been taken to too much of an extreme, as everyone and their mother expects "special treatment" for this or that, and people are aggressive and irritating because "it's their right" to be like that. Customer service sucks, and you have to fight for just about everything you want or deserve in life. Counterpoint out of control.

Possibly the most surprising (to me, at that age) insight I had came during grad school. I had just finished my undergrad degree, which taught me about the equations of science, the processes and tools of engineering, and that everything was done by the textbook. Analytical tools were available for everything from simulating lift and drag on a wing, to developing requirements dependency trees for top-level systems design. My music classes had taught me the rules for determining whether the next note should go up to the 5th, or down to the 3rd. I had learned everything there was to know, except for a few low-level specifics that I expected to learn in my Master's courses. Seldom have I been more wrong.

Though the learning process was rough in both cases, I gradually realized the truth - that musical composition, engineering design, scientific discoveries, and mathematical proofs are all arrived at the same way - through intuition. The analytical rules can then be applied to justify the conclusion you have come up with, which is of course a formalism necessary for communication with the scientific community.

The big lie, of course, comes when these discoveries are always presented as if they had been arrived at in the bottom-up manner in which they are described, rather than as flashes of guided inspiration. The key word here is "guided". All those years of education are not worthless; on the contrary, they build the foundation of concepts and ideas these inspirations are based on, and they create the networks of connections in the mind along which these inspirations flow. But in the end, it is our insight, our aesthetic that creatively synthesizes ideas and guides us in the right direction.

So it is in music - the rules and structures are merely the framework, the "lines on the field", to give a soccer analogy. The beautiful coordination of play, the graceful passes and daring steals in a well-played soccer game are no more defined by those lines than a musical masterpiece can be synthesized using formal rules.

There are many guidelines and patterns, however, that can be discovered through practice, whether on the soccer field, in an engineering lab, or at the piano keyboard, and this brings me to my last analogy, the inspiration for my title, "Silence and Technology". This was an extremely valuable and deeply fundamental principle that I learned over years of composing a cappella arrangements.

The principle is this: Silence is an essential element of music. It must be given consideration equal to that of the other instruments or voices in the composition of a piece. It is far too easy to be caught up in the harmony and counterpoint, or in complex rhythms and counterrhythms, or in clever ways of weaving lyrics into the background parts of an a cappella piece, and to forget the critical part that silence plays in a composition.

It's like they say with young children - I read somewhere that an elementary school teacher was famous among her colleagues for the beautiful artwork her students always produced. When asked what her secret was, she simply replied, "You just need to know when to take away the pencil." Young children often have little or no sense of the value of silence (or white space, in this case), and taking away the pencil forced them not to fill it all up. I remember some of my drawings as a child - they looked like some of those traditional Japanese tapestries, with thousands of little tiny people, each one living out his own life, surrounded with bridges, buildings, forests, trees, and maybe a parade or a battle going on to add to the complexity. Though the content differed (my drawings were mostly of spaceships and grotesque aliens), my mom often remarked about how busy those drawings were.

However, this is not merely an aesthetic principle for the visual arts. I think, and I'm sure many agree, that it is essential to apply this principle to our lives as well. Surrounded as we are by media of all sorts, advertisements, propaganda, meaningless trivia, and pop music racing like a cloud of informational sperm to be the first to get into our heads, it has become essential to manage our silence. There are many who choose not to do this, leaving the TV on in the background for the entire time they're home, or constantly listening to music on their iPod whenever they go anywhere. Certainly I'm guilty of the same thing - the first thing I do when I get home is switch on my computer. I believe, however, that this is not the way to live a balanced and fulfilling life.

The internet has only compounded this problem. Not only do we now have access to incomprehensibly vast sources of information, we have had a dramatic increase in noise as well - spam, popups, and annoyances such as spyware, of which we need to vigilantly keep abreast, that alone sucking away our attention and time. Although I fully recognize and appreciate the availability of information, I often find myself in a state of information overload. First it was email... trying to keep up with far more friends than I ever would have attempted staying in touch with using mere pen and paper. Then it was blogs - I have so many friends whose blogs I want to read, but opening them every day takes time and effort. Then I discovered RSS. I can have the information from my friends' blogs piped directly to me... as well as a profusion of news sites and blogs that I find fascinating - lifehacker.com, robots.net ... the list is long, and life is short.

So often it seems the timesavers that are meant to help us, consume more of our time than they save. It becomes a gamble. Is it worth my time to sign up for Orkut, Facebook, Mixi, or MySpace? Where should I host my photos? The importance of our digital data has brought up new concerns on our home computers as well. Which firewall should I use? Which antivirus? Antispam? Defragmenter? Photo organizer? Music organizer? Backup utility?

Perhaps one of the most disconcerting things is that these peripheral choices - decisions that must be made that aren't really essential to the content of our lives - are seldom permanent. Each year, or every few months, old services die. New services are released. One must remain ever on the lookout for the new trends in supporting technology, a huge burden considering that it has almost nothing to do with the things we truly care about. I use my computer to stay in touch with my friends, to manage my photos, and to write and record music. Ideally, 100% of the time I spend on my computer should be devoted to those tasks, but the other things are too distracting - installing the new version of Firefox breaks compatibility with plugin x, so now I have to search for a new solution for that, etc. etc.

Maybe the biggest thing that bothers me about computers and the digital age in general, is that by spending all this time on maintenance, I feel like I'm falling behind. I'm not sure with respect to what standard this is, but I have a perpetual feeling that I need to catch up. Organize my contact lists, tag my mp3's... and I find that this eats into the time I should be spending in real life. Sleeping, for example, or cooking, shopping, organizing my apartment, or ... even relaxing?

Again, silence (downtime, in this case) is the key. Until this NaBloPoMo thing started, I was even enforcing a 30-minute delay between when I got home from work and when I turned on my computer. I noticed immediately that it improved the feeling of relaxation in my life... except for those times when I felt pressed to deal with something over email. I've heard of people who refuse to check email outside of one hour per day, say from 7-8pm. Lifehacker, the blog I mentioned above, is full of ways to save time and improve efficiency. There are many books written on these topics, and yet... I seldom talk with my friends about it, or hear others talk about it. Is that because it's not a problem for some people? Or is it that we're living in denial?

I suspect that some people find it desirable to live without silence, because it relieves them of the responsibility of being introspective. Many people don't like to think, and especially when our lives encounter deep contradictions and dilemmas, we prefer to distract ourselves, rather than face the difficult thoughts and choices.
Is this our fate? As more and more of us enter the Age of Distraction, will we cease to be introspective, and become consumed with maintenance of information and persuit of new technologies? Or are we merely going through a rough transition to an era where computers and technology really will be transparent to us and save us time?

As I once again seem to be approaching the two-hour mark with my philosophical ramblings, I shall end this post with two recent quotes from ... me. :P

"A computer should not be like a hammer. It should be like the shirt on your back."

"When Google is out of beta, the human race will no longer have any need for biological memory."

...With a little help from my friends

2006-11-06T23:36:00.000+09:00

*Whew!*

Yesterday's post was a bit much... it took me around two hours to write, and even after deleting several paragraphs, it was still up near 1700 words - and not even a coherent point to show for it!

If I'm going to keep this up for 25 more days, I really need to start pacing myself. Also, I feel bad for my Japanese friends who are actually trying very hard to read what I write. So I'm going to keep it light today.

Today, I'd like to give some thanks to my friends. I was looking through the logs for my site, and I noticed that I've had a number of visitors linking here through my friends' blogs. After I finish posting tonight I'll properly link back to them to return the favor, but here are the numbers of people who've visited me from my friends' blogs, in ascending order:

Bobby : 5 visitors
Berta : 16 visitors
Sayuri : 23 visitors
Mina : 27 visitors
Lily : 37 visitors
Cameron : 90 visitors
Kern : 100 visitors

For the record, direct links from google.co.jp and google.com were tied at 47 visitors each, so Kern and Cam were the only ones who beat Google. I guess I know who my real friends are now... sorry Bobby. :P

Anyway, I'm not really sure what to make of these numbers... it could be indicative of how connected each of my friends are, or maybe it could be a sign of how many curious (or bored) people my friends tend to attract.

Regardless, thanks for sending those readers my way. Now I have to come up with something interesting to say to keep them reading. :)

But maybe not today. :P

Finally, I just want to show you this fantastic picture Masumi took at my birthday party two weeks ago. I absolutely love this picture, because it was supposed to be a straight group shot, but ended up being so quirky, with me being distracted by some cute Japanese girl and Anton doing ... whatever he's doing in the background... I love the way everyone else came out, too. This is my current wallpaper on my home PC, and I just wanted to share it with you guys.