cat /proc/claus

So, finally, I’m done with my “Test” Thesis Defence. For those not used to the Japanese system of graduate studies, six months before you graduate, you need to perform a “mock examination”, where you do your thesis Defence in the same conditions as your final Defence, including to the same commitee. This committee will judge whether your work should be “ready” by the end of the following six months, and tell you what they think you need to do to complete your thesis.

Unlike many of the “rituals” of Japanese academia, this is one that I don’t find to be completely useless. The professors don’t read your thesis anyway, but at least they have the chance to make some serious questions to your work, and you have the chance to address those questions, which makes a kind of “building together” feeling which pleases me.

So most of my late December and all of January was spent preparing for it, a time where almost all of my other activities where stopped or cancelled. But it was actually worth it. I managed to get rid of 90% of the “drudge” of my thesis, and stablish all that had already been done. The presentation itself was much lighter than I expected, the professors liked my thesis and my results, which gave me a boost in confidence. Instead of making any big criticisms of my thesis, they all just suggested extensions to lines of research that I had already drawn out in the first place.

Now, after a month and a half in this backbreaking pace, I go back to “almost” my normal routine. I got two papers I have to finish by the end of march, so the idea is to do experiments now in Feb, and writing the results next month. Also, and perhaps most importantly, I’m now on “job hunting” season, which means getting my shit together to find out and apply to a few nice places to a post-doc/professor/researcher position. Of course, I also have to finish the changes to my thesis, but I got at least 4 months after these papers, so that is on hold. On the personal side, I want to return to regular geocaching, reading books, bi-weekly RPG games, and python programming. And writing a dozen of late blog articles I wanted to write about.

Heh, maybe I don’t have so much free time as I thought I would, but this is looking like a very interesting last year in Japan, if I can keep myself from procastinating too heavily

I woke up 2 in the afternoon today. Even when I was staying awake for days at a time when I was writing that article last month, I never had crossed the AM/PM line for waking up. I wonder if it is the cold - today was a constant 8 degrees during the whole day, and everyone I called for a coffee out said they couldn’t go, so I end up staying the whole day at home…

Which means that I had plenty of time to keep hacking away at my Python problem :-). Today, I tried a more direct approach by try and coding directly the functions I needed, stopping to google a concept or another when I ran into something I did not understand. This worked surprisingly well, as I managed to intuitively use the list constructs and function in python to easily implement my genome, mutation, crossover operations, as well as population mechanics, like elite, sorting, tournament selection, etc. I did find my share of bizarre bugs, like once when I got confused about instance and class scopes, and that resulted in a constructor operator which generated bigger and bigger individuals in geometric progression and ate up all my computer’s memory in just 4 generations, but by the end of about 6 hours I managed to have a fully fledged evolutionary system (although with a dummy evaluation function). Tomorrow I’ll try writing the engine for my ETD game/evaluation function.

Besides that, I also read up two chapters in the new book I have started “Here Comes Everybody”, by Clay Shirky. The book talks about and tries to explain the phenomenon of the massive, loosely linked community actions, like wikipedia or flickr, based on the idea that the cost to maintaining social connections has collapsed in the past few years, which allowed non-profit actions which were too expensive for informal communities to organize, but too unprofitable for formal companies to tackle, to flourish. Reading the book I can’t help but feel that I had heard all this talk in many different blogs, forum/slashdot comments, and Free Software talks, but it is always nice to see everything put together in one cohesive, well argued text, and with plenty of interesting anecdotes to illustrate the concepts.

Talking about books, last week I also read “A Wizard of Earthsea”, by Ursula K. Le Guin, and I really really recommend this book. I devoured it in less than 2 days. This book is one of the precursors of Medieval Fantasy, and the wizards and how the magic works in Le Guin’s world is too charming. The concept that a Mage is just as powerful as he knows and understand the world around him draws you into her world. I hope I can make my own D&D world as mystical and still consistent as hers.

And that’s for a very cold and gray Sunday. I got one of my three bases covered

I have recently fell in gastronomical love with this fungus:

It is called Eringi in Japanese, or “King Oister Mushroom” in english — wikipedia tells me it is originally a mediterranean fungi, so I’m a bit surprised that the Japanese name is simpler. It is deadly simple to prepare - just slice it, fry it in a pan with a bit of oil, adding salt and black pepper, and it develops a rich taste not unlike that of white meat. Very little work, and I can get big chunks of it in the 24h 100 yen store near my apartment, which means that at least for a while it will successfully replace sweets (and maybe even ice cream?) as a midnight snack.

After a surprisingly punk week, I took the Friday to do some much cleaning in my apartment. While moving stuff around in my room, I found a incense set that I bought ages ago (perhaps when I still lived in the other apartment? I don’t quite remember). A set of aromatic candles, an oil holder, and some sandalwood oil. After finishing cleaning, I decided to try to use them - the sandalwood oil gives off some wonderful aromas when burning, and the oil holder looks really lovely when the candle under it is on.

I don’t know why I forgot about those for so long. I have this memory of trying to use this oil holder, to very catastrophic results, but I can’t remember right now what went wrong about it… If you don’t hear from me in a day or two, it is because I managed to burn my house down ;-).

The thing about aromas, the guard who stays at the Yaoi gate at Tokyo University always uses this absolutely wonderful incense in his work place. Now that I have found my incense burning stuff, I might go and ask him what it is. And just to end this post on a geek note, sandal wood will always remind me of the sandalwood box, one of the items from Lord British which is needed to finish Ultima V (The only Ultima I have never finished).

PS: Tomorrow is a Geocacher’s meeting in Tokyo (or, more accurately, in the Showa Memorial Park). The price is a bit expensive, but I’m really curious about meeting many people I only knew from usernames and log book signatures!

After about three weeks of pretty good weather, it is raining again in Tokyo. I have a love-hate relationship with the rain, which includes much more hate than love, actually :-/. Walking out on the rain, with an umbrella over my head, makes all those blue, depressing feelings and thoughts assault me. I can’t really go by bike, so I have to take the train (and spend money), or walk all the way to school, and get my feed wet and my socks ruined. The only time I like the rain, and at those times I really like it, is when I can afford to stay at home, reading a book, enjoying the sound and smell of the rain outside from the safety of my roof.

By the way, yesterday I finished reading “Salt: A World History”. It is a good book, full of interesting information. But even as a non-fiction book, I felt it could have used a “conclusion”, “summary” or something - the end of the book just came really abruptly.

Anyway, today I cannot afford to stay at home and read. I have to go to the university to help fixing the study space of the new Post Doc student. Which is about the only thing that I really need to be at uni to do - most everything else I can download to my laptop and do here, but I’m not really feeling like studying at home today - maybe because of the rain, or because my home is a mess.

Of the stuff I could download and do here at home, I have the translation of the Robotic Science survey paper - the person I’m collaborating with asked me again today when I’m gonna finish it, and in fact, it has stopped for at least three weeks now I’m kinda losing my hopes with this one - maybe I’ll have to pull the plug on it. I also have to port my recently submitted paper to a smaller format to a japanese conference. I have a bunch of experiments to start for the next leg of my research. My professor asked me also to find a new application for my methodology. I have two journal papers to review. And last but not least, my mid-term thesis defense is still sitting in its corner in my desk, eyeing me hungrily.

Gah.