T5A!

Ok, so now that I've got you all in my T3A groove, it's time to change things up a bit.

No, actually I just had a crappy day today, so to offset that I'm going to juice my T3A with an extra 2A.

I wanted to start with a "new old adage", such as "There are no crappy days, only crappy ..." but I couldn't finish that one. The best I could come up with was "There are no crappy days, only days on which you choose to let your perception of the balance of the universe skew in the direction of crappiness" but that was a bit long.

Then I came up with "Life is like an enormous box of chocolates, in which the removal of any single chocolate does not significantly affect the overall statistical distribution of the contents, and in which an unknown fraction of the chocolates are actually little chunks of polished-up and lovingly wrapped dog turds. When you happen to choose a dog turd or two from this box rather than the luscious chocolates you had hoped to get, the resultant shift in perception is what we call 'having a crappy day.'" This, of course, was far too long, and although I had a particular fondness for the simplicity with which it illustrated the fact that crappy days are subjective reactions to a more or less unchanging objective reality, I quickly abandoned that train of thought entirely, in favor of the simpler, more succinct solution of simply extending today's post by 2.

#5 - Something learned.

There's a beautiful quote from T.H. White in The Once And Future King... Let's see if I can Google it up.

“You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."

Haha, love that blockquote tag. Anyway, I learned something today. It has nothing to do with why the world wags, but it resolved something I had been confused about for a long time.

See, there's this new train line that goes out to near ATR. I take it every morning, actually, and as far as I could tell, it was called the "Keihanna Line" ("Kei-han-na" is a word formed using alternative readings of characters that make up the names of Kyoto, Osaka, and Nara, respectively). But sometimes, in their advertising, they'd call it the "Yumehanna Line" ("Yume" means dream, and the "hanna" just comes from "keihanna" - no second meaning there, as far as I know).

Anyway, I had always thought that this was just some silly advertising thing, but some people still called it the "yumehanna line", and I wondered whether there was more to the story.

Here is what I learned today: The Keihanna Line is the new extension that goes from Ikoma to Gakken-Nara-Tomigaoka (I wonder if they came up with this wonderfully succinct name by asking the same subway consultants who came up with the "Nagahori Tsurumi-Ryokuchi Line"). The existing extension of the Osaka Subway Chuo Line that goes as far as Ikoma is apparently just considered part of the Chuo Line now, even though I always thought it technically ended several stations before that, at Nagata. Now, to top all that off, the combined line, encompassing the subway line from Cosmosquare to Ikoma and the Keihanna Line going from there out to Gakken-Nara-Tomigaoka, is referred to in its entirety as the "Yumehanna Line".

So there you have it. A valuable lesson.

#4 - Poems on the train

Is it evidence of the fact that I now spend two hours a day commuting that my first two posts today are about trains? Or is it an artifact of the "primacy" and "recency" phenomenons in the brain, where we have better retention for the first and last of a series of experiences than for those in between? Being that those are the times of day when I ride the train, that could well be a possibility.

Anyway, tonight I was riding home on a later train than usual. Incidentally, time here is measured by the percentage of passengers on the train who are drunk salarymen -- a monotonically increasing function over time. In my train car tonight it was just over 50%, a sure indication that it was time to start stepping up my efficiency at work.

While sitting there, pointedly ignoring the rambunctious crew, I noticed some interesting posters. Counting the syllables, yes... several of them were haiku! Some were tanka, a slightly longer poetic form using lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. The topic of all of them was ... the train system. I suppose the Osaka subway system must have put on a poetry contest as part of a publicity campaign.

Anyway, most of them were what you'd expect... talking about manners on the train, don't use your cell phone, don't rush in while the doors are closing, etc. One said something I don't quite remember about how "when you have a warm heart, every seat on the train is a priority seat" which I kind of liked. And then there was this one.



I had to stretch over some crazy drunk salarymen to get that pic, so please forgive the substandard quality.

Roughly translated, it goes "Without pretending not to see, but speaking up instead, to stop perverts from feeling up ladies in the train, the great bravery." Ok, that was a REALLY rough translation, but you get the point. I just thought that one was a gem of Japanese culture.

#3 - "To be late"

Learned a pretty cool thing today about Japanese. The word "okureru" has two different kanji. I'm not talking about "to send"(送れる) and "to be late"(遅れる), which are both read "okureru", but rather two different ways of reading "to be late".

The first is "遅れる", which is the reading I have known for years. The one I learned today was "後れる", which I think in the back of my mind I knew was an alternative way to write it, but which I never really understood.

Finally today I got the lowdown on the distinction between them. The first one is the sort of standard "to be late". The nuance of second one, though, means to be late in the sense that everything around you has accelerated, and you haven't kept up, such as not keeping up with a fashion trend. I thought it was really interesting that they have a separate way to write that.

#2 - Noren

They put a new door in my room at work, because some people are running experiments in one half of the room while the rest of us are doing robotics development on the other side, and we need to stay out of each other's way. The door is great, and one side benefit of it is that we get better ventilation now.

Unfortunately, the girl who works in my room has her desk right in front of the door, and she's very self-conscious about people looking in at her while she's working. So we came up with an interim solution of stacking a bunch of crates in front of her desk, but that was a really ugly solution.

So I came up with a better solution - noren! Yes, the cloth curtains they have at sushi shops and bath houses. I happened to have an extra noren at home (how do you say that in English? Pair of noren? Like curtains? It's just one piece of cloth, but then again so is a "pair" of pants...) so I bought some hooks and a bar for it and hung it in our room! The color goes well with the walls, too.



Anyway, the thing that made this truly "awesome" was that there's this older guy who comes over to use our machine shop sometimes - he's probably in his 60's, I'd guess. Anyway, the first time he walked in through the noren, he made some comment about how "you see, this is how you can really tell we're living in Japan". LOL!

#1 - My hotel.

So today I finally got around to booking a flight and a hotel for my trip to Rome next month. Kinda late to be making plans like that, I found out. I fortunately got the last available seat on the same flight out that some other guys in my lab are taking. Unfortunately, I wasn't so lucky with the hotel booking. Rome is a popular place, and with the conference in town it's hard to find hotels at any sort of a reasonable rate. The place where the other guys are staying was already booked up, and a lot of the other recommended hotels were quite far away from the city center.

I poked around here and there online, and finally found this service called "Haystack" which is one of the Lonely Planet's online services. Essentially their function is to help you reserve hostels and hotel rooms at recommended places for travelers without inflating prices.

Anyway, I managed to find a place there that not only is cheaper than any of the conference's recommended hotels, it's right near the Vatican! I'm so psyched! I've already got things mapped out in my mind - waking up early to catch the sunrise at some elegant square adorned with ancient steps and fountains, a cool stroll through the spring morning past the wonders of ancient Rome, with a stop at an elegant Italian cafe, perhaps, for a cappuccino before I meander back to the hotel, suit up, and go engage in academic discourse on robotics technology. I am SO PUMPED for this trip!

Haha, I'd better get crackin' on putting together my presentation though... ouch.

#0 - Google

Ok, I was going to stop at #1, but something happened about halfway through writing this... My computer bluescreened. Yes, in response to the inevitable questions, I was doing some things to my computer that I shouldn't have been doing. But I didn't expect it to crash when it did.

Anyway, I was really bummed out at the prospect of losing this elegant quilt of prose that I had already been working on for well over an hour. I booted into my more stable system, hoping that something would remain in my automatic Google blog cache, and ... nothing.

Nothing? I was devastated. All of my enthusiasm for writing drained out of me like fish broth from a leaky plastic bag (it happened to me last night, ok?). I was about to give up and just go to bed depressed, when I decided to boot back into my experimental, unstable, bluescreening Windows installation...

*insert choir of angels here*

Restoring my Firefox session, lo and behold, I was greeted with nearly the full text of my blog post! Google had pulled through after all! I could have kissed Google at that moment if (a) it weren't a large, faceless, abstract entity, and (b) if a certain someone wouldn't be jealous. ;)

Anyway, I just saw a video on Google's plans for world conquest, and I thought they deserved some praise for good design. If they can keep coming up with useful, free applications and excellent user interfaces, then I might even be happy with them taking over the world.

So there you have it. T6A. I never knew I had it in me. And with pictures, no less!