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!!!!!!