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!
10 February 2007
08 February 2007
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. :)
#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. :)
07 February 2007
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.
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.
06 February 2007
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.
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
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
04 February 2007
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.
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.
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.
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