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Saturday, September 26th, 2009
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3:47 pm - Rock Band 2
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Pros: Today I beat Rock Band 2's Endless Setlist 2 on hard drums. (All 84 core songs in a row, with about 15 seconds between each song.) I got 411 out of 420 stars.
Cons: It took 6.5 hours, and I am physically exhausted. I failed on Battery (a fluke, really, since I came back and 5-starred it), Visions, and Panic Attack (twice!). No Bladder of Steel Award for me today. :(
I can't speak for other instruments, but for me the hardest song on drums (on hard) out of the core 84 is Panic Attack. Visions is harder technically, but it's much shorter, so if you can pick up two energy streams and then never overdrive, your fill sections cut out a lot of notes. Panic Attack keeps changing from tricky rhythm to tricky rhythm and is much longer.
current mood:  tired
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| Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
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12:31 am - Japan, Part 7
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November 17, 2007 was our last day in Kyoto. Our itinerary was wide open once we met up with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sakanaushi and musicvera605. What better way to celebrate the old vs new of Japan than visiting a castle and going to an arcade?
We first met them at Kyoto Station, where we delivered our gifts of baby clothes, baby toys, and adult food:
Turns out some things are harder to find in Japan than you'd expect.
Conveniently, there was an arcade on our way to the castle. We had our picture taken and decorated it, played head-to-head Mario Kart, beat on drums, and of course, played DDR:
Nijojo castle was particularly neat. Bowing to the idea that walls could not stop their sneaky opponents (ninjas!) from getting into the castle, the designed the floorboards so the slightest pressure on any board in the hallways would cause a chirping sound. (They're referred to as nightingale floors.)
It felt like because they didn't worry about building up, they sprawled out. That may just be my lack of exposure to castles, though.
Sadly, they didn't allow photography inside the castle.
We also walked around the gardens.
We headed back to Kyoto for ramen. Afterward we said our goodbyes, and caught one of the last trains back to Tokyo.
(Somewhere in the three hours between Kyoto and Tokyo.)
we leave for the airport to fly to Tokyo via San Francisco in about 20 minutes, so this will be my last summary of last trip for a couple of weeks. (I'll make a strong effort to post summaries of this next trip in a more timely manner. No more than a year, tops.)
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| Sunday, June 28th, 2009
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9:41 pm - Japan, Part 6
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After the action-packed events of the 15th, November 16, 2007 was a slow day. We went to a historic area called Gion for sightseeing, eating, and shopping.
Jess and I often have differing views on what is delicious. We can both confirm, however, that Strawberry Milk from a vending machine is delicious:
A lot of effort has gone into restoring Gion's historic look, including burying power lines.
 
After sight-seeing and shopping, we headed back toward downtown Kyoto, and ended up eating at MOLLette, a restaurant specializing in the Japanese omelet. (Similar to ours, but they tend to be stuffed with rice.)
Then we browsed through Isetan, a department store at Kyoto station.
I was tempted by the packaged fish, but there was no way we could have fit it in our luggage without jettisoning something.
This was our last full day in Kyoto. However, we still had family to visit and DDR to play!
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| Saturday, June 27th, 2009
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10:32 pm - Japan Part 6
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Looking back, November 15, 2007 was one of our most densely packed days in Japan.
We started off with a visit to Ginkakuji, a.k.a. "The Temple of the Silver Pavilion". (The original plans were to have this match the Golden Pavilion (see below), but in the end the building was never covered with its silver-foil overlay.
I took an optional side-path that went up to an observation area, which provided a nice contrast between the quiet temple grounds and the city beyond:
We then went to Daitoku-ji, a Buddhist temple with around twenty-two sub-temples within the compound. On any given day, only a few of the sub-temples are open to the general public.
We first visited sub-temple Zuiho-in.
Founded in 1535, it has "an acclaimed example of a dry landscape garden".
After Zuiho-in, we ate at Izusen, which specializes in Zen vegetarian cuisine. Unfortunately, I don't have any decent shots of our meal, but bento.com does. As I remember it, we had lots of vegetables, and lots of gelatinous cubes.
After lunch we went to Kinkakuji (The Golden Pavilion). Originally constructed in 1397, the top two floors are covered in gold-leaf.
After walking around the grounds of the complex, we traveled out to eat dinner at Nishiki by bus. Note to visitors: the buses will stop running back to Kyoto at some point in the evening. Don't be surprised by this like we were.
As a general rule, we felt pretty self-conscious about taking pictures of a meal during the meal. I snuck a couple of shots that didn't come out too well, but their website has a nice shot of what the full-course meal looks like. (They serve course after course of small portions of food.)
Stuffed, we wandered out and looked for the bus back to Kyoto. And the streets were almost deserted.
On the plus side, I got to play with night-time exposures on my cheap digital camera. They worked pretty well as long as you have a tripod like surface to rest the camera on.
Fortunately, we eventually found a cab to take us back.
They do have McDonald's in Japan:
However, マクドナルド is pronounced "makudonarudo". (The ハンバ-ガ- is just "hambaagaa"). Oddly, of all the borrowed words we've learned in Japanese, I think this one gives us the most problems.
Finally, we got back to our ryokan and collapsed.
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10:02 pm - The statistics of candy
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Ever feel like your bag of Peanut M&Ms has fewer of one color than another? I did, but I assumed that it averaged out over time. Then I decided to test that assumption. Here's what the numbers look like over thirty bags of Peanut M&Ms:
As it turns out, I've been consistently shortchanged orange red Peanut M&Ms!
I also found it interesting to note the variance in number of Peanut M&Ms per bag. (That's to be expected, of course, since they do it by weight.) My bags varied from 18 to 26 Peanut M&Ms. Unfortunately, I don't have a scale at work, so I don't know how close the bags are in weight.
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| Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
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11:00 pm - Japan, Part 5
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November 14, 2007
Today we left Tokyo for Kyoto. On our way we noticed this advertisement. I'm not sure what they're doing to her, but she's very calm about it:
To get to Kyoto we took the Shinkansen (bullet train). The trip took about 2.75 hours, and we arrived at Kyoto station. (I really liked the look of the station, but apparently there is/was some controversy about such a new-style building going up in such an old-style city.)
Attention Old Women: Don't listen to ninjas!
On a somewhat more serious note, in general, smoking is a very common thing for the Japanese to do. One of the McDonald's we went to had an upstairs eating section that was rather hazy from all the smoke, for instance. From the looks of this ad, they're encouraging parents to not pass on the habit:
Today was mostly a shopping day, and it looks like I decided not to take pictures of the stores. However, we saw the coolest parking structure I've ever seen. Each car was lifted up and over to the appropriate level by a car-sized elevator, with no ramps whatsoever.
Kyoto's skyline is noticeably shorter:
If you're a British ex-pat you might find a home-away-from-home at the Pig & Whistle:
(We didn't go in, so I can't comment on the authenticity. I'm not sure I could anyway, since I'm not familiar with pubs either.)
After a day full of travel, shopping, and eating, we settled in for the night at our new ryokan.
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10:27 pm - Japan, Part 4
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November 13, 2007 (Wow, over 1.5 years! I'm SLOW.)
Before we headed off to the Tokyo National Museum, we stopped at Denny's again for a breakfast of champions:
To get to the museum, we decided to get off the rail at a station that was closer on the map. Unfortunately, you can only enter the museum from one side, and we weren't on it. Lot's of closed gates barred our way:
But finally we got there! And saw a gigantic statue of a whale.
 
This is a very stereotypical thing to do, so I will try not to do it anymore... but here's a shot of where modern Japanese toilets are compared to ours: (This is the control panel for one of the Museum's sit-down toilets.)
For dinner we went to Tsunahachi, a tempura restaurant, and I wish I had taken pictures of some of the dishes. Eel Tempura was part of the set course. We were sitting at the counter about five feet from the cook. He grabbed a live eel out of the vat, presented it, and after we agreed that it was definitely an eel, he had it in the pan in less than a minute, and on our plates soon after. Each individual piece was very good, but I ordered a very big course, and I had trouble eating everything.
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10:23 pm - Japan, part 4 incoming...
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So, among other things, moving several states, buying a house, getting a new job, and pure laziness have kept me from finishing up my series on our honeymoon in Japan. However, since we're going to go again come July 1st, I think it's high time to wrap it up. Prepare for the abridged version.
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| Friday, December 12th, 2008
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8:57 pm - on Motif & XmScreen
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If you want to change a resource of your XmScreen, make sure you make that change before creating any Widgets that you want affected. (For instance, if you're using a pre-2.1 Motif and want to change the XmNinsensitiveStippleBitmap to something that doesn't look horrible.)
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| Thursday, December 11th, 2008
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5:42 pm - Things I learned today...
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Today I learned...
It's ridiculously easy to cause a segfault using Motif if you don't know what you're doing. I add a widget? Everything is fine. I add a second widget? SEGFAULT. Why‽ (I eventually got it working.)
If you meet someone who claims that Motif is object-oriented, then I disagree with them.
The man pages for Xm* were written by people who understood Motif for people who understand Motif.
And yet, building a gui by hand with Motif felt a lot like building one in Java by hand.
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| Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
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9:13 am - amazon.co.jp
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If you, like us, are foolish enough to buy something off of amazon's Japanese version of their website, you will be automatically signed up to hear about sales a couple times a week. However, while their website has an "In English" button (ありがとう ございます!), these emails do not. (The "In English" button only partially works, but it's still pretty awesome that they have it.)
If you want to stop getting the advertisements, and in case the "In English" button stops working on the "Your Account" page and you want to change your Communication Preferences, you're looking for: the second section (アカウント設定), the first part (登録内容の変更), the second link in the left column (Amazon.co.jp 情報配信サービスの設定を変更する).
Behold! A page that does not respond to the "In English" button. You (probably) want to un-check each of the check boxes on the left, and then hit the save button ( ) (Anyone know what the literal translation of that is?)
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| Friday, September 19th, 2008
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7:19 am - おはよう。
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In our copious spare time (ha!) Jess and I will be taking the Japanese I course over at CCCC. Sadly we missed the first class due to late sign-up, but we should be able to catch up. The only downside: it's a Saturday class. (The Tuesday/Thursday class didn't make it.)
いってきます。
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| Wednesday, September 10th, 2008
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9:18 pm
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I saw an interesting property today. While pondering problem 26 on Project Euler I noticed that the ratios approaching 1/1000 have a neat progression:
1/998 = 0. 001 002 004 008 016 032 064 128 256 ...
1/997 = 0. 001 003 009 027 081 243 ...
1/996 = 0. 001 004 016 064 256 ...
Of course, this isn't unique to the area around 1/1000...
1/499 = 0. 002 004 008 016 032 064 128 256
1/98 = 0. 01 02 04 08 16 32 ...
1/49 = 0. 02 04 08 16 32 ...
The visibility of the pattern breaks down due to carries when you get to too many decimal places in numbers like 1/998, or pretty immediately for numbers like 1/19:
0.05 26 31 57 = 0.05 + 0.0025 + 0.000125 + 0.00000625 ... etc.
I'm sure I learned this when we covered infinite series in Calculus, but it's neat to stumble across it again.
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| Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
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9:00 pm
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I'd love to shake the hand of the author of Coign of Vantage. It's a wonderfully simple flash game: orient the 3D field so that the pixels appear to make the picture. Very intuitive, very well done.
(Personal high score: just over 300k. "... you still need 1601590 more points for a highscore." Thank you, internet.)
Edit: Link via Good Experience Games
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| Saturday, May 3rd, 2008
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9:07 pm - Japan, Part 3
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Japan, Part 3
November 12, our first Weekday in Japan!
I tried to capture the size of our room at Kimi Ryokan, but it was just too cramped to really do it justice. The room was pretty much square, with a tiny entrance hall: It was large enough for our two sleeping mats, the table, and a little border around both. We also had a few small cupboards: the blue wall piece opened up to a suitcase-sized hole, and the area below it held the other luggage.
 
We decided to be daring and not go to Denny's two days in a row, so for breakfast we went to Jonathan's. I have gone on and on about the awesome system they use here. And now I will once more. Each waiter had an electronic pad with wireless access to the store's point-of-sale system. Whenever you needed service, you pressed the little button on your table:
It went ding! and your table number lit up on the wall in several places. We returned to Jonathan's several times, including when it was busy, and I'd estimate the average wait time after pressing the button was about five to fifteen seconds. Then, a cheerful person would show up, and try to guess what we wanted by our grunts and gestures. (Actually, they dealt with our English very well.) They'd tap on their pad and it would zip off to the kitchen. Their job done, they'd hurry off to the next table that needed them. Since it was automated, when the kitchen finished our dish, any waiter available would deliver it to the table. Since every waiter had access to our table's information, when we hit the button the closest person to us would come over, which was very efficient. Sadly, I expect this system will never work in America. There's no tipping for service in Japan, so there isn't any hassle about how to divide a tip among your seven waiters.
We took the JR Yamanote line to the Shimbashi station and started our walk to the Hama Rikyuu Gardens. Along the way we saw this awesome building. Our best guess is apartments:
We arrived at the Hama Rikyuu Gardens, "the garden of a feudal lord's residence during the Edo Period". They were very expansive, including a flower garden (with a moat around it), several duck hunt fields, several ponds, and more!
After the gardens we took the Sumida river cruise north to Asakusa. This was a great way to get off our feet for half an hour and see some really neat parts of Tokyo. Bring a jacket in moderate weather, though, it gets quite breezy. (Though true for all of what we saw, it's tough to do the river cruise justice. We took almost ninety pictures, and had to pick out just two for space considerations.)
 
We wandered toward Sensoji, a Buddhist temple. "The legend says that in the year 628, two brothers fished a statue of Kannon, the goddess of mercy, out of the Sumida River, and even though they put the statue back into the river, it always returned to them. Consequently, Sensoji was built there for the goddess of Kannon. The temple was completed in 645, making it Tokyo's oldest temple."
Leading up to the temple are 200 meters of shops, which have been there in some form or another for hundreds of years:
The temple was impressively busy for a weekday. It appeared that some were still celebrating Shichi-Go-San... there were more cute children dressed up in traditional outfits. Here's Jess looking really awkward about being a lonely gaijin:
There were several different signs at Sensoji about pigeon feeding, but this was our favorite:
After a long day we stumbled home, stopping on the way at Miami Garden for some Italian food done Japanese style... witness the Pear and Gorgonzola Cheese Pizza!
It was only 7:00 pm local time, but with the jet lag we were ready for bed. Tomorrow: The Tokyo National Museum!
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| Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
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11:32 pm - Japan, Part 2
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November 11, our first full day in Japan! Remember that restaurant from last night? It actually took several days of walking past it in the morning to connect it as the place we first ate at:
 
Jess wanted a bit of familiarity before we immersed ourselves for the day, so we had breakfast at Denny's. They do have recognizable food on the menu, but I opted for a more traditional meal: (fish, miso soup, white rice, natto, and pickled vegetables)
We took the Yamanote line to the Harajuku station, and set off for the Meiji Jingu Shrine. We figured we found the entrance when we saw this:
After a long walk through a park (one of the few in Tokyo, it seemed!) we got to the Shrine:
It turned out we went to the shrine during Shichi-Go-San (Seven-Five-Three). "A traditional rite of passage and festival day in Japan for three and seven year-old girls and three and five year-old boys." Translation? Jess kept exclaiming how cute all the little children were in their formal garb:
After the shrine, and a lunch of tonkatsu (fried pork cutlet) at Maisen we visited Aoyama Cemetery. It was enormous and very peaceful, while at the same time surrounded by the skyline of the city. Very old-meets-new.
We headed toward Omotesando-dori (street) to go shopping! We had to visit the store dedicated to all-things-Peanuts, of course. I guess November 11 was close enough to December 25 for them too, because they played nothing but Christmas music over the speakers here.
We walked most of the way down Takeshita-dori, a pedestrian-only street rumored to have many cosplaying teenagers and fashionable clothing stores. Sadly, we went at the wrong time for the cosplaying, but we still saw a lot of neat stores.
I won't post much in the way of "Engrish" here... as badly as they can mangle English there, I'm sure we do a pretty miserable job with Japanese here. However, this shop had the best title ever:
Sadly, our camera ran out of batteries around this point. We shopped some more, and then returned to Ikebukuro, to once again try to find our ryokan. (This time with light!)
An exhausting day, and we still had jet lag to overcome.
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| Thursday, April 10th, 2008
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11:31 pm - Whoosh!
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| Wednesday, December 5th, 2007
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5:27 pm - Japan, Part 1
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Our flight to Japan began November 9 with a 6:25 am flight to Houston. Seeing this as a great opportunity to begin adapting to a Japan sleeping schedule, I did an all-nighter (Jess slept for a few hours... wimp!), and then slept most of the 13-hour flight to Narita airport, outside Tokyo. (Along the way we passed closer to Alaska than I've ever been before, but that's not saying much.)
Ah, commercialism. :-)
Once we made it through immigration, collected our luggage, and customs, we got our two-week passes for the JR Trains, and headed off to Tokyo via train.
We stayed at a place called Kimi Ryokan. (A ryokan is Japanese guesthouse, so roughly 'Hotel Kimi'.)
 
We checked in, dropped off our luggage, and explored some of the surrounding streets, looking for a good place for our first dinner. We eventually decided on this small place around the corner from the Ryokan where we had donburi (rice bowl dish). (I had eel, Jess had chicken.)
At that point we collapsed in preparation for our first full day!
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2:43 pm - Attn Bank: Japanese Yen Do Not Equal U.S. Dollars!
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In related Japan news (pictures still forthcoming!), we had some leftover travelers checks that were issued in Japanese Yen (¥). They totaled to 300,000 ¥, or about $2,726.70. My bank decided that even though I wrote ¥ after every amount, that I really meant $, so for a few minutes I showed a deposit of $300,000. To their credit, they caught their mistake and took it back.
Ah well, it was nice while it lasted.
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| Monday, November 26th, 2007
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6:45 pm - We're back!
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