cat /proc/claus

A delayed post with the next part of my trip!

It turns out that internet access is more difficult than I expected at first - there is internet available in my hotel, but I usually got there too late and tired to do any serious posting - and the conference also has wireless access, but I was usually too busy there to use the computer.

But this just means that now that I have more free time, my posts will hopefully much more juicier.

Anyway, day two was a free day, so we woke up late and decided to go out and walk around some tourist places in Montreal. Before leaving, I managed to talk to Albert, a friend I knew from a Mafia Forum, and we arranged to meet at night. This is the third time I meet someone from the online games I access during my trips - and it is usually funny in what ways people in Real Life turn out to be different from their internet personas. In particular in the case of Albert, he had a much softer and kinda introverted voice than I would expect from his posts.

Me, and two friends from the Lab went for shopping at a nearby supermarket, where I found out that everything sold here has a hefty 17% sales tax which is not included in any price tags - It could lead to very embarassing situations if you don’t have enough money for a big purchase without tax. The supermarket was giantic, putting to shame anything I had ever seen in Japan in terms of variety. The prices were pretty similar to the prices in Tokyo.

Breakfast done, we’re cleared for some tourism! Montreal has a pretty comprehensive metro system, which takes you to most interesting spots in the city. There is a one week pass for metro/buses for $19.00 (23.50 with taxes T_T). Our first stop was the “Old Town”, which is a neighbourhood near the riverside with lots of very beautiful old-European styled houses. There is a large number of Touristy shops and Museums there, but there are also some boulevards and parks where people can just sit and relax in weekends.

Besides the tourist traps, there were more interesting places - like some very charming (and a bit - not much - expensive) French Restaurants, and a medieval shop with incredible looking statues of knights and witches. We found a shop specialized in Maple Syrup - they had Maple Syrup icecream, butter, salad dressing, and even Mustard! (the mustard was not that tasty).

We also visited the magnificent Notredame Cathedral, where I enjoyed some very unique cultural shock with my Japanese friends. Basically, they have never really been to a big Christian church, so I had to explain most of the imagery and the meanings of the rituals and objects. They were quite interested in attending to a Missa, although they were worried about the money (You need to pay quite some money to attend to Shinto religious rituals). It was the reverse role of what I was used to in Japanese temples.

After the old town, we headed to Rue St. Deniz, a somewhat more Bohemian part of the town, with many bars and clothing shops. My real objective, though was visiting the Valet du Cour, a large game shop in that street. While the prices were not very different, there were many games that couldn’t be found in Japan. I bored my friends for about an hour while I poured over their many games. In the end I spend almost $100 with Bang, a Carcassone expansion, a Munchkin expansion and the “Dungeon Delve” 4E book.

After that, we decided to walk our way back into the hotel - we followed through this completely charming part of the town, with many cute houses in the shape of castles, balconies asking to be used for reading and drinking, and parks full of squirrels. I could speak more and more, or you could just check out the pictures of the trip.

When we arrived in the hotel, I slept for a little while, then met Albert, from the previously mentioned mafia forums. We went to a coffee shop, and spent a long while talking about the japanese language, my life in Japan and Montreal city. Unfortunately, since Albert was without internet connection or a Mobile phone, we were not able to meet up again after this.

This concludes my second day in Montreal - the next day was quite promising: The start of the GECCO conference

From today up to the 13th, I’ll be in Montreal, Canada, for the GECCO conference. The GECCO is probably the biggest conference in Evolutionary Computation, and all around it is a Big Deal to be publishing a paper here. Specially, since I’m graduating next year, this conference will also serve as the chance for me to network with researchers in my area so that I can try to get myself a good Post Doc position after I finish my course.

But for now, I have one and a half of a free day before the conference begins, so I’d better enjoy it!

The flight here took most of the first day, but it was actually very pleasant. Air Canada has great airplanes, with very comfortable chairs and a lot of space in the aisle to pace about during the 12 hour flight. One big highlight were the electric (and USB!) power outlets in each chair in the economic class - including the domestic leg of the flight! During the flight, they had dimming lights of different colors in the cabin - perhaps to simulate dawn/dusk - the colors were kinda weird, though - purplish and greenish lights. The meal service was nice; nothing to write home about, except maybe that they served us Cup Noodles in the middle of the flight - wtf?

During the flight I saw “RIP: A Remix Manifesto“, a documentary criticizing copyright in its current form and its influence in the Remixing culture. I really reccomend it - even if you heard all there is about how copyright sucks (70 years past the authors death and counting!), it still has some new info here and there you maybe didn’t know about. And if you are clueless about how copyright today is messed up, you should definitely see this movie.

I also managed to get on with my GEB reading - I finished two more chapters. It was hard at first - I stopped for almost 3 months, but since they were about the Church-Turing thesis, and a refutal to the Goddel-based Anti-AI argument, I managed to pick it up quickly. My reading list for this trip includes two articles to review, two ACM communications magazines, and trying to make the writeup of my next RPG adventure.

Reading GEB, and seeing the REMIX movie made me think that I need to do some re-structuring in my time when I get back to Tokyo, in order to try and lead a more productive winter term. Ideally, I would try to schedule my time in “Thesis”, “Research (programming)” “Hacking (personal tech projects)” and “Socialize (RPG and Going out)”. I still have to figure out some time for my internet vices so that the whole thing holds up, but it would be nice to take back projects like the Wesnoth Translation, and putting up some basic tutorials in this blog. Let’s see how it goes.

Back to the trip, the only bad thing about Air Canada that I can say (and unfortunately it is a moderately big one), is that they managed for some reason to be late arriving in Toronto, and then the Luggage took ages to come out, meaning that we lost our connection flight to Montreal, and had to take another one one hour and a half later. While the “change flights” process was smooth, it still messed up my plans of meeting a friend in Montreal Airport. I kinda expected it, since every year, the Brazillian Exchange students who come by Air Canada consistently arrive way later than their estimated times.

Air Canada: Travel Confortably, if you’re not in a hurry.

Once we arrived, it was mostly smooth. I did not meet my friend - not sure if he left because I was late or if he couldn’t show up in the airport in the first place. We took a limousine bus to the center of the town. I managed to forget one of my bags inside the limousine bus, so we had to walk about three blocks from the hotel to the Central Station to pick it back - fortunately, everything was all right.

The hotel is some sort of temporary residence. They rent apartments, and there is no room service. But the apartments are huge (livingroom+kitchen+2bedrooms - each bedroom with a separate key). I’m sharing my bedroom with a labmate, and the third of us is sharing his with two Americans who also just came for the conference today. The bad news is that the hotel hadn’t discounted the room value from my credit card yet - so I’m looking at more 40.000Yen spent by the end of the month

The Jazz Festival is JUST by the hotel - You can see some of the shows from my street. I was planning to attend today, but after we had done eating, unpacking and unwinding, it had all but died down :-/ (it was about 1 in the morning already). Guess I’ll leave it for tomorrow (and every other day as well ^_^).

No pics today - in the rush of the trip I just took a few. But tomorrow will be a full-fledged tourism tour, so stay tuned!

I’m trying to make a reservation at a hostel for my upcoming trip to New Zealand (To AI 08), and I just ran into something extremely silly.

For some reason, most of the hostels in Auckland request your credit card information _BEFORE_ you actually make a reservation. In fact, they will ask you for your C/C number before even telling you if there are any vacancies or not, which makes no sense at all! If you are not sure that I can actually stay there, why are you asking my Credit Card number?

The most unnerving thing is that they even claim that they won’t charge anything from the credit card. Well, if you’re not charging anything, why do you need my card number them?

This makes me extremely uneasy :-/ Or maybe it is because it’s late here.

This weekend, Me, Marilia, Paulo and Mitsue went together to a brief trip to Kyoto.

Initially, me and Marilia decided to go by ourselves, when Paulo said that he and Mitsue were thinking about going as well. Paulo invited us to go by car, which we did. When in four people or more, renting a car can be cheaper than buying night-bus tickets - usually the cheapest way to travel around in Japan.

There are a few problems with travelling by car: 1- you need multiple drivers, else the weight of driving will all fall on a single person 2- you will need a cheap place to park your car when you get there, for parking is usually very expensive in Japan.

The bright side is that, with only you and your friends in the car, you can mess around much more, and much louder than when you are in a bus/plane or other form of mass transit. The trip there and back again were really fun. (you might think that being able to drive around freely would also be a plus but… see below).

Once in Kyoto, we stayed at the Yurakuso Guest House. I had started looking for lodgings two weeks before the trip. Since our trip was on a national holiday, this was NOT ENOUGH TIME. Most places were booked by the time I got around calling/e-mailing them. If you are going to travel to a hot touristic spot, on a holiday, book at least 2 months in advance. Yurakuso was not that bad, we shared a nice room - but it was not worth the price we paid for it - specially because the shower was basically non-existant (a flimsy plastic cubicle inside the kitchen. Luckly, there was a rather nice sentou nearby).

During the days, we visited many places. On the first day we went to Arashiyama, which was packed with tourists (like everywhere else, though). We made the mistake of trying to go by car there - not only we took a LONG time to get in and out in the traffic, but we also paid premium for the parking. However, the koyou (autumn leaves) were very impressive - specially the famed “takemura no michi” - the bamboo path. At Marilia’s suggestion, we went to a temple in the far end of arashiyama, which was dedicated to Jizous - the statues of deceased infants - it was a solemn and beautiful place.

At night, we met with Igor for dinner, then went back home, went to the sentou (where I saw an yakuza guy with this huge tattoo on his back!) and had a nice game of Carcassone before going to bed.

On the second day, Renato accompanied us on a trip around the temples in the south-eastern part of Kyoto. We first went to Inari Jinja, followed to a quick trip to Tofukuji, Kyomizudera, Yasaka Pagoda, Chion Park, then HouRenJi and Chionji at night. The last two were performing their night light shows (as many other temples in Kyoto in the period). Hint regarding the night light show - wait for at least one hour after the opening time before entering - more if possible. This way, you will avoid the throng of tourists, and (maybe) will be able to experiment a little bit of the peaceful sensation of walking in a Japanese garden at night. HouRenJi was packed when we got there, which took away a little bit of the enjoyment. ChionJi, on the other hand, was much more interesting to see.

At night, we went to the Sentou again, and played Carcassone (Carcassone turned out to be a great game to play in small groups in trips - it is fast, easy to teach, and fun).

The third day we went to Nara - but passed by Kinkakuji first. We were all kinda tired already, but Nara went without a Glitch. On the way back Diogo joined us, and with two drivers, the return trip was much smoother - the DS’ New Super Mario Bros minigames for multiplayer ROCKS.

Pictures? Well - I forgot to put my memory card in my camera AND only found that out in the SECOND day of my trip… keep tuned on marilia’s blog though, she might post some pictures soon.