Birthday Party!!

So, I promised Linda I'd post on my blog tonight, although I'd much rather be sleeping right now... After a night on the town (well, inasmuch as Nara can be called "the town") I came home and spent about 3 hours adjusting the dérailleurs on my bike. The shifting has gotten horrifically out of whack lately, and I figure hey, if I can program a robot, I can fix a bike.

Much to my dismay, I found some similarities in the two tasks... tuning a dérailleur, especially on a crappy bike like mine, is like tuning a control loop or particle filter - you have a whole bunch of coefficients, setscrews, or other variables that you can control, and although there are general guidelines on how you can more or less get the performance you want, the last step always seems to be "and if it's not right, tweak it until it is."

There were moments when I thought I pretty much had it, but ... no. Too many variables. In the end, I got it more or less working, although the rear sprocket's shifting performance seems to be too dependent on which ring on the front chainwheel the chain is riding on. But good enough. :P

So, here are some pics from my birthday party last weekend:



First, I had a pleasant surprise at work - Three of my coworkers got me a cake! You can almost make out the cute little blue robot on it, which unfortunately appears to have been thrown out with the candles. :(

The funny thing was, they came in to give me the cake just at the beginning of our lunch break, and then we're all like ... um ... we should have lunch first. So I blew out the candles and we put the cake back in the fridge for later. :P



Next, we went out for a gourmet lunch at "Joyfull", the woefully understaffed restaurant next to our company. We were all positioned for a picture, I had the camera fired up and ready for the push of a button, and we asked the waitress to take our picture. She looked at me quizzically, hesitated in deep thought for about 20 seconds, and then was like, "No. Too busy." That was a first for me in Japan...

Thus we had to put my camera on the next table over and do a timer shot, with the result that you can't see what we're eating. But it's not about the food - it's about the company. And the iced cappuccinos at the drink bar. :D



And of course we had to have my second annual takoyaki birthday party! I even pulled out the Hanshin Tigers jersey that the CJP's gave me last year. It was a pretty good party, but as usual we made too much takoyaki batter and got too much octopus. The next day I finished off the octopus in a funky omelet-like creation.

Somehow Anton managed a smile here, even though his body was battered and broken from carrying a mikoshi that morning. I think the mikoshi-carrying industry is secretly funded by the chiropractors' guild.



I like this picture, although I think that's the same takoyaki ball that I'm trying to eat in the previous shot. :P



Hehe, gotta love the fact that they let you drink in public here. We all piled into the last train to Namba to go to a club for the rest of the night. Yuki made sure she didn't go empty-handed. :)



But of course we all had to help her.



Watch out Osaka, here we come!

Most Awesome Birthday Present!!

Okay, so I just posted a few hours ago, but... THIS IS SO AWESOME!!!

My parents rock.



Hehe, now I can do at home ... the same thing I do at work. :P

Happy Birthday to me!!

Hey. Um, yeah... I haven't posted in a while, by which evidence you can correctly assume that I've been busy. Had a serious bout of farewell parties this past two weeks, which was fairly exhausting. Last Thursday I was out with an interesting group, including a guy named "Freek" (ok, so it's really "Freerk", but you try to get a Japanese person to say that!), a white dude named "Zen", and a girl named "Eleven". I crack up just thinking about that. Eleven!?!

Been singing too. Had a good show in Umeda a couple weekends ago, and I was supposed to sing this past Sunday in kitasenri, when a surprise fever hit me just hours before we were supposed to go sing! So I had to duck out. Fortunately it wasn't a big show - just some open mic event, so they recruited some people to take my place. The show was a success and I got to sleep for an entire day, so all was well.

Anyway, as of one hour ago, it's my birthday!!! :)
I'm allegedly having a party on Saturday, but given that I'm burnt-out at work, overwhelmed with life, and still not quite over my cold from last weekend, it's going to take a lot of energy to get into my best party mood.

However, birthdays inevitably come, and parties must inevitably be had. So it is written. So it shall be done.

Here are some pics for ya.


Rockin' out at the police station. Yes, we actually sang in the basement of a police station. Probably a good thing, as it was standing-room-only and the popularity of Urara6 tends to incite riots. Thanks to Philo for the pic!


Auf Wiedersehen to An-chan... we both look weird in this picture, haha. Took this shot a few hours before he flew back to Germany with his lovely lady.


Sayonara to Shizu... this was the least incriminating photo I could dig up. ;) All I can say is, watch out France!


er... I would try to come up with a third multilingual alliterative farewell for Freerk, but (1) I don't know any Dutch, and (2) I appear to have an egg in my mouth.

Ok, time for some sleep. Don't anybody tell Matsubara-sensei I did this instead of homework for her class!

A Sad Farewell

A good friend of ours passed away this weekend. Yuki gave him the nickname "Okinawa-kun" when we met him at a club back in March, and since then he's been a part of our lives... He came to all my parties, and we went camping together twice. We went together to watch my friend's band play a few times, too. Sure, I'd only known him for seven months, but considering the turnover rate of people I know these days, that's pretty good.

Anyway, I got the mail this morning. I couldn't believe it. He was surfing over the weekend in Okinawa, and he was suddenly thrown off his board, lost consciousness, and drowned. Absolutely unexpected. I think that the suddenness of it makes it particularly hard to internalize the fact that he's gone.



He was a wonderful guy. Always together, always kind, always thinking of other people. He was a crazy athlete... he crashed at my place a couple times and I always found him doing crunches or yoga or something when I woke up in the morning. He loved Okinawa, too. He brought his snakeskin shamisen to a few parties and sang the old folksongs of his homeland with pride. And he was a great cook. He made some sort of so-men dish for our hanami. Damn that was good. I don't think I'll ever forget that so-men. I should try to find a recipe.



Needless to say, today wasn't the most productive day at work. I found out this morning, and I spent half the day emailing people to let everyone know. So, so sad... I was sitting there crying at my computer, my thoughts everywhere but on the human-tracking program I'm working on for my robot... fortunately I don't have a pressing deadline at the moment.

Interesting thing, though... he had just finished moving to Tokyo. His company moved him there, and he really didn't seem happy about leaving. So we had a number of goodbye parties for him, and we all got to say our farewells. I imagine it's not so often that you get to say goodbye a friend before they die in an accident. Although it makes the situation no less tragic, in retrospect it is in some small way satisfying to have been able to say goodbye to him.




So I've been pretty philosophical all day, thinking about life... its transitory nature, the importance of valuing your friends while you have them, all the stuff you would probably expect. Also thinking about short-term friendships. Working where I do, I have an unusual proportion of friends whom I have known for less than a year, but yet these people are my closest friends now, and it's hard to reconcile that with growing up in the sticks with the same group of people around me for 17 years... I guess I'm worried that I may take friendships here too lightly, but I've come to the conclusion that really, this is just the way real life is.

I know that's not so coherent. I already wrote it in Japanese on my other blog, so I'm just sort of summarizing it here. And no, the Japanese wasn't any more coherent. :P

Anyway, one last thought, because I need some sleep. Okinawa-kun gave me some photos as a farewell present when he left. So I scanned them in, because I guess they represent some of his memories of us.



Not sure where this one was taken... Savannah?



Nara park, at our flowerless hanami.



Group photo after a party at my apartment.

So, philosophically speaking, which should be more important to me? The photos I took of him, or the photos he took of me? I don't know if there's an answer, but it certainly stirs some interesting thoughts.

And here's one last picture of Okinawa-kun from hanabi this summer:



Many tears were shed throughout Kansai today. We won't forget you, Okinawa-kun.

[Edit: For reference, here's a link to the article (in Japanese) about his accident on MSN Japan]