cat /proc/claus

Kaifuku, in Japanese, means “Restoration”, and this is what I’m feeling right now.

For most of the month of October, specially the past two weeks, I have spend working on a Journal paper about my research. The cool thing about this paper is that it was a collaborative effort with Carlos Azevedo, from the University of Pernambuco, in Brazil, who I met during GECCO this year in Montreal.

Anyway, the past month, the past week, and specially the past 3-4 days were absolutely insane. During the whole week, I was sleeping less than 6 hours a day on average. Between Thursday and Friday, I slept 2 hours. And Saturday morning (after not sleeping) I had to face a horde of more than 200 of 4-8 year old kids, in a part-time job Carol got me. Talk about a hard core Halloween! I finally submitted the thing on midnight Saturday, after fighting for about 4 hours with Elsevier’s backwards submission system. (After losing a party at Chaminda’s place I really really wanted to go to)

(Of course, these journal articles should stop being such a “big deal” for me - If I really want to become a researcher, I need to get used to the rhythm of regularly producing those and not acting like the world is falling down when doing so - but since this time my PhD hangs on me getting one more journal paper published, I guess I’m entitled to.)

Anyway, now it is done! And the amazing thing is, today I actually did not slept a lot, and spend the whole day walking with two crazy and amazing people who are staying at my place from Couchsurfing. We walked all the way from home to Akihabara, and then to Asakusa, and then home again. My body is a wreck, but I feel mentally rested, specially knowing that I now have no deadline looming over my head (which is not technically true, but I can allow myself to think like that until Wednesday at least).

Some highlights from the recent days:

* The Halloween part time job was a blast. I danced Thriller in front of an audience of 200 kids, scared most of them
with my mask, and got zerg-rushed into the ground by 5 girls in princess costumes and 2 boys in ninja costumes who were fighting about who would get to be carried by me first. Also, the costumes of some (many?) of those kids were AMAZING.

* I got to DM Sword and Wizardry for the Daydream crew last thursday, and the game was amazing - the weak wizard who had more money than the rest of the party combined. The quirky allied NPCs, like Ed the unlucky fighter, and Timmy the overexcited luggage boy. The elvira-styled evil cleric who got hit by the wizard’s sleep spell and found herself naked, bounded, gagged and forced by the party to walk in front of the formation to trigger traps. Etc. Etc. Etc. I hope I get more chances to DM that for them

See you tomorrow! (For reals, yo!)

One of the scenes I liked of the House show, was when they were discussing how Dr. House needed to have his subordinates around him, not because he really needed their knowledge (although it helped), but because he needed someone to bounce ideas off with.

I think I like these scenes because might be just the same. For example, today I produced quite a bit more of my article than I did in the previous two days. I believe the reason may be that I had the company of one of the correspondent researchers which is developing this work together with me. Even though we didn’t collaborate directly on what we should be writing about - he was writing one section of the paper and I was writing another, unrelated section - it helped keep my morale up, and made me write more. This is not the first time it happens - my Master Thesis that I wrote while at UNICAMP was largely written while I talked to a friend on ICQ who kept pushing me on and asking how I was doing.

This is one thing that I don’t really find in the laboratories here in Japan. While there are other researchers doing work at the same time as me, for some reason I just don’t know how I can get to bounce work off on them to keep myself concentrated on my tasks. So it doesn’t make that much of a difference if I’m in a lab full of people or alone. On the other hand, lectures are a place which is very conductive for me to perform work, for some reason. Of course, I don’t pay any attention to the lecture, but my programming and writing. (I’m now seriously considering expending this day and the next one sitting at random lectures to see if my writing improves…)

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On a side note, I found out how to make Audacious play Shoutcast radios. I like to hear “The Eagle”, “Classic Rock Hits” and “Sky FM, Mostly Classical”. Do you guys have any recommendations?

It should have been obvious, and I should have known it before, but I didn’t know, and never observed before that microwave operation interferes with my my computer’s wireless networking. XKCD even mentioned it recently. After reading it on XKCD, I started to notice that whenever I use the microwave to heat up some coffee for myself, my internet radio gets cut.

That said… I’m pretty sure I often used the microwave while using the computer before, and I have never noticed this phenomenon before reading the XKCD strip. Hmmm, I wonder if they did something to all wifi boards of the world? That would be quite a prank to pull off!

The work on the paper for the special issue of IS continues. My “crunch” started on Monday, the deadline is Saturday, today is Tuesday and I’m afraid I haven’t advanced much yet I have decided I’m not going to the lab anymore this week, except to do whatever is absolutely necessary - I just can concentrate better at home, when it comes to slaving away writing an article - I can listen to music, food is cheaper to come by, and if I have to stay up until late, I can just sleep in my own bed and wake up in a much better shape the next day. Of course, I can’t keep this up forever, If I stay too long locked away in my home I start getting depressed for not seeing anyone else, but I think I can easily pull it off for one week.

Well, for 5 more days

Recently I have read a news article at ACM’s website about the ICPC, which reminded me why I usually hate the media. How facts are casually distorted in order to make the truth “sexier”, sometimes even when it is not needed to.

The ICPC is a programming contest hosted by ACM. In it, students from all over the world get together to try and solve a large number of very hard programming problems in 5 hours. Each team has 3 students and one computer, so the contest involves not just the ability to read a problem, figure out which algorithm will solve it, and implement that algorithm correctly in a short time, but also how to best manage the single computer among the three students (you have to figure out and write down most of your code in paper before sitting down to program to save time). The participants are the best teams of their respective local competitions, young people with a great knack for maths and programming. The contest itself and the associated events were really fun.

However, obviously this was not enough for whoever wrote the article. They had to say things like that “the participants did the work of a traffic controller”, or that “the contest challenges participants to solve real world problems”. Really? Maybe the contest has changed a lot in the last 5 years, but the problems where all mathematical problems (longest path, geometric problems, search, constraint satisfaction, etc) with some “stories” thrown into the mix to test the players reading comprehension. *Sigh*

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On the other news, this week will be dedicated to writing my second journal paper, to complete the publication requirements for my PhD at the university of Tokyo. Allegedly I managed to get enough data for the publication with last week’s experiments, now comes the inglorious tasks of transforming all of that in an interesting and engaging document which won’t be criticized too heavily by the all mighty anonymous reviewers. I only have one week until the deadline of 31st, and I have a lot of other stuff to do in the same period, so I’m getting a bit worried that I won’t be able to make it. But if I don’t make it in time, I can still submit it for another, non-Special Issue Journal, a few weeks later - with the negative side that the lack of a fixed, externally imposed deadline would reduce my motivation.

(why am I posting in my blog instead of working? I’m trying to amp myself into writing mode by sitting down and writing here instead of reading a dozen different news and getting anxious - like the news I just blogged about above :-P).

Today professor Fukunaga from the Tokyo University of Engineering (Toukoudai), came to Toudai to make an invited lecture about Heuristics. I had a very nice chance to talk to him after his lecture, where we discussed some questions about my research which are likely to result in a chapter of my thesis (and possibly a publication somewhere), and I also had a chance to pick his brain about his opinions on cooperative research here in Japan and in the United States.

I always had some problems with Cooperative Research. It is in my nature to try and get people to participate in what I’m doing - be it parties, or my hobbies, or anything - and yet I had very little success in trying to do some cooperative research. Until very recently, I was never able to do it at all. Fortunately, I think I’m finally getting the hang of what exactly you can and cannot expect to share with other people in terms of work and research tasks.

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Later this night I had a meeting with a group called the “Asia Interaction Club”, which was introduced to me by Chaminda. “International Clubs” like this one, for those who have never been in an university in Japan, are student associations which aim to have meetings to integrate foreign and local students. An interesting thing about this one is that they concentrate mostly on
east asian foreign students, while most of the other International Clubs I have seen before seemed to just consider tall blue eyed blond foreigners as “proper” international students. The meeting was quite fun, as they were planning for an “games afternoon” event in the near future and I was able to give many suggestions of what kinds of games to run. Managed to take my head off my many research tasks I’m swamped to these days (the fact that some of the results from my experiments came today and were quite positive also made the night meeting a bit more fun, I guess :-P)

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After watching the move “Us Now”, like I blogged abotu a few days ago, I made my Couchsurfing profile. Since then (about 3 days ago), I already got more than 10 requests for couchsurfing for the next month - half of them for the next week - WOW! I wonder if october is holiday season in Europe or something like that. Of course, I could not accept many of them because of my thesis or stuff, but I actually got guests staying at home for the most part of the next few days. I’ll report about it as they come.