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!
4 comments:
That's so mean!! I felt so sorry for them. Japanese school officials are such sadists... and probably pedophiles too!
Here, I think this should go on your T3A list:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNPOdffkkLo&eurl=
They are called ランドセル, those shiny backpacks... strangely came up in conversation the other time.
I've started to notice a lot of cases in junior high (and elementary school too) where the REASON girls are wearing micro-skirts, dying their hair and getting all dolled up is because they're copying their mom's fashion.
I don't know why uniform codes are written the way they are, but it has always struck me as sadistic too. I taught in junior high for 3 years, and the girls all had to wear skirts in the winter, the heating is grossly inadequate, and they can't wear scarves, gloves, coats or anything during class (even though it's often cold enough to warrant it). Most girls brought towels or blankets to class to drape over their legs so they didn't freeze completely.
I was watching an episode of a very famous drama called Kinpachi-sensei (it's been running for over 20 years I think) where a high-school girl got yelled at by the principal because her skirt was too LONG! It was within the school regulations, but given that all the other girls in school had their skirts at or above the knee, this girl was standing out by wearing a skirt all the way down to her ankles. She was getting teased for it too, and the principal considered it her fault.
Her response; "I've done my best to abide by the regulations of this school, but apparently that is insufficient. I would rather not come to school than dress in what you consider a 'feminine' fashion, so you won't be seeing me again." She then walked out, went home, and explained to her mom that she couldn't go to school because the Principal was bullying her over her entirely-legitimate uniform. Smart girl.
They're not allowed to wear coats in class?!
Back at Toyonaka the kids used to wear around five to seven layers in the winter because of the cold. Then again, they don't have a dress code there - the students just wear their uniforms for fun. Students didn't take their coats off all day because it was sometimes colder indoors than outdoors.
I think a big part of it is just pointless sadism. This is sort of a different topic, but I've been talking to friends about the driver's test that you have to take to get your foreign license switched to a Japanese license (something you're exempt from because you're Canadian... grrr). Anyway, it sounds like they make you take the test around four times, regardless of your driving skill. Apparently a big part of the test, by the way, is memorizing the map of the course and driving the one obscure path through it that they tell you beforehand. No looking at the map during the test.
Anyway, while you're driving they just pick obscure details as reasons for you to flunk until they feel like passing you - looking left for one second too long or short... signalling two seconds too late or early... 7500 yen a hit, and they only tell you one "mistake" each time, so this can go on for days. Of course that's nothing compared to the 300,000 yen it takes to do it through a driving school, but ... considering that you can just switch your license for a nominal fee if you're from Iceland, Ireland, UK, Italy, Austria, Australia, the Netherlands, Canada, Greece, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Korea, Denmark, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, Finland, France, Belgium, Portugal, or Luxembourg ... it seems pretty pointless and arbitrary to subject other foreigners to this ridiculous ritual.
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