This really sucks, I hope my Karma is negative enough by now that I’ll start to see some good luck coming the following weeks.

I went skydiving in Fujioka, Tochigi prefecture, by Advanced Air Sports Inc. At their webpage, you can get all information needed about how to make a reservation, payment, how to get there, testimonials from other clients etc.

It costed around 25.000 yenes (250 dollars), 38000 yenes with the recording. Seems expensive, but a quick search will show that the prices are pretty much the same worldwide.

Actually, I am quite afraid of heights. I feel kind of funny when standing near windows in tall buildings. In the helicopter, while it was going up in the air I was quite afraid.

That said, the jump itself was surprisingly non-scary. After you jump out of the helicopter, you completely lose the sensation of “fall”. The ground is so far away that it doesn’t move, so you feel you are floating in the air.

So no, it is not scary at all.

Not really. In your first time, you have to jump together with an instructor (Tandem jump). You are linked to the instructor in 7 different points in your uniform, so there is no danger of falling from him.

Also the instructors themselves have more than a thousand jumps in experience. So no, not dangerous at all.

Hell yes!

Like I said before, you don’t actually feel you are falling. It seems like if you were still in the air. You feel a very strong wind current all over your body, similar to what you feel when you stick our arm out a window of a fast moving car.

The most impressive thing is the sound of wind rushing past your ears. It feels great.

I hope so! I don’t want to do just another “experimental” jump, so if/when I do it again, I want to actually go for the 7 jump course which is needed to take the certificate for solo jumps. However, that is too expensive to do right now.

Today’s mission: I got this DVD with the video recording of my most recent adventure in Japan. I want to take the video itself away from the menu fluff, and put it here for everyone to see.

Step one: Getting the DVD to work on my laptop

First fail: I insert the DVD in my ubuntu laptop, and it begins to auto-play, loading the movie player. Apparently, the ubuntu packager’s mothers never told them not to auto-play any strange media that connects to their computers :-(.

At least, no problems recognizing the DVD.

Step two: Installing the DVD ripping software

Drebes suggested Handbrake. `Apt-cache search dvd rip` suggests acidrip. Let’s try acidrip first.

Step three, part a: trying to rip the video out using acidrip

Downloaded Acidrip, and ran it. The man file does not explain a lot about the command line parameters. Theoretically, the defaults are sane. I can press the “RIP” button and generate and
avi file, but I can’t get mplayer or xine to successfully read it. Not really into reading manuals and manuals describing codecs, so let’s try handbrake.

Funnily enough, the “preview” button from acidrip shows me a nice video, with nice sound - is it reading straight from the DVD?

Step three, part b: trying out handbrake

download the binary. Run the binary: Handbrake -c 1 -i /dev/hdc -o file.mp4

There it goes. A nice, small video. Now I just need to find a place to put this binary in.

Here is the result:

My only wish is that there were MORE models :-).

Marilia put some pictures in her Picasa repository. Make sure to check them out!

So, in fact, my coat and my shirt were smelling strongly of cigarette. And that is the mystery:

I don’t smoke, no one in my laboratory smoke. When I go to a Cafe to study, I always sit in the non-smoking area. My RPG partners don’t smoke. How the hell my coat got infested by that strong cigarette smell?

Hmmm… :-/

Try it!

2007 was an year that went by really fast. It’s first quarter was dominated by a bunch of fun trips that me and Marilia did together, but the second and third quarter were completely overshadowed by my master thesis. I spent way too much time working on my thesis and the experiments that were required to complete it, not to mention a number of related academic presentations.

The result of this, coupled with my usual procrastination, means that unlike most other years in my life, I feel that the circle of people that I share my life with shrank quite a bit in 2007. Not as many house parties, not as many events, very few nengajyos.

Because of that, while normally I don’t bother with New Year’s resolutions, I decided to do a big one: This year, I want to try and reverse what happened in 2007, by trying to talk more, and to more people - rekindle the contacts I have, and try to make new contacts.

… :-/ But just the fact that I’m writing this blog post in the 11th of January shows how well I’m doing so far. Well it is never late to set things right, specially in the second week of the year, right?

This year, however, the experience is being quite different. When I asked who had Java programming experience, most students raised their hands. Questions about the programming aspect of the assignment were made right on the first class. And there was this one group of students who all were running Ubuntu in their laptops. Seems that we might be seeing some interesting results this year. I hope so.

I also learned something about teaching in a programming laboratory course. On the first two days, there were almost no questions or clarifications requested of me. But on the second day I noticed that a team seemed to be dozing off. Two team members were just staring at the ceiling, and the other was just staring at the laptop monitor. I decided to ask if they had already decided on a strategy for the team and for their programming, and eventually they told me that they were not really sure on how to program a soccer strategy for independent agents. They had divided their group into those who would do the programming for the forward players, and those who would program the defence players. When I gave some very vague suggestions, they seemed to pick up interest and started to have some good ideas of their own.

It dawned on me that our work is much more than just grading reports and answering questions, but also to try and light the creative spark in the student’s head by showing some interest into what they are doing.

Let’s see if this year I can put together a programmed team of my own to compete with theirs in the last class.

The first time it happened to me, it was because Eclipse was wrongly using the Gnu Java compiler, instead of Sun’s JDK 1.6. I corrected the links with ‘update-alternatives’, and all was well.

Now it happened again to me earlier this week. This time out, I made sure that the GJC did not have a higher priority than sun’s java, but still the error remained. Today I found out that, for some reason, the fault was of the “system library” of the project. The system library was set to the “default” (sun’s java 1.6). When I manually set the path for the 1.6 library, eclipse started working again.

Hmmm. I feel like I have just patched the symptoms, instead of really solving the problem, but at least my system is working now. Hope this helps other people - and if anyone has a more “solid” way of fixing my system, feel free to comment.