Do you speak English?

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

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

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

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!

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'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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.