End of an Era

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

#3 - David is famous!

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

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

#2 - Mad expensive vending machines.

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



#1 - Love is in the air!

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

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

Or just find some new party friends. ;)

Reflections on T3A

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

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

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

#3 - Silly English

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



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

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

#2 - Love Thy Neighbor

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

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

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

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

Plus it was pretty good dressing.

#1 - ...

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

White Lovers and Pterodactyl Porn

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

T3A for today:

#1 - Gorgeous sunrise!

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

#2 - Pterodactyl porn!

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

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

#3 - Valentine's Day

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

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





-- UPDATE, 1:21 am --

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

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

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

#3 - New Blogger Templates

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

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

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

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

#2 - Midday napping can save your life!

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

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

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

#1 - Robovies at attention

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

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

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



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

Urara 6 Reunion!

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

Revenge comes on March 14.

#2 - Walking and Soujing

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

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



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

#1 - Very cool interactive radio website

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

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

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

Hoshi Matsuri '07

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

#3 - Falafel!

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

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

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


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

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

The Fires:



The Blessing:



The Devout:




#1 - Coat check

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

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

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

That totally rocked.

Extraordinary lung capacity

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

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

#1 - Beatboxing while playing the flute

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

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




#2 - Bunnies.

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

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

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



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



#3 - Underage

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

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

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

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

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

Short skirts

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

You'll be thankful though.

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

So here's today's T3A:

#3 - Short skirts.

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

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

But that was just the start.

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

This was the most disturbing thing:

None of them were girls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#1 - Speedy delivery!

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

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

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

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

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

Jamglue!

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

#3 - Jamglue

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

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

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

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

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

#2 - Kern Passed 2-Kyuu!

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

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

#1 - A beautiful analogy

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

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

Do Not Serve

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

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

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

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

T3A for today:

#1 - A new friend.

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

#2 - Christian Slater

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

#3 - Random.

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



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

Wielding the White Sword

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

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

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

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

Without further ado, today's T3A:

#3 - Cool visualization tool.

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

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

#2 - I have acquired the White Sword.

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

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

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

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

So here we have it - my White Sword.



#1 - News from an old friend.

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

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

Yesterday's T3A

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

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

#3 - Andrew is back!

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

#2 - My program works!

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

#1 - Entertaining train ride.

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

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

This went on for about half an hour. :P

Exploring my kingdom

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

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



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

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

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

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

Interesting neighborhood.

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

#3 - Home Improvements.

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



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

#2 - View from Dylan-Jo.

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

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

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


#1 - Love at first sight.

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

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

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

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

A Beanless Setsubun

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

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

Anyway, today's T3A:

#3 - 11 hours of sleep! :D

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

#2 - My friend got married!

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

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

#1 - I got to be a rap star!

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

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

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

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

Groundhog Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

T3A for February 1, 2007

Three awesome things from today:

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

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

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



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

The T3A List

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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