Ludum Dare, the charming challenge where you have to design and create a game in 48 hours from scratch, is coming up again. Last time, even though I was proud of my result, there were many failures in my cute little game. This time, I decided to prepare myself more carefully:

• Last week I’ve worked on a very simple warm up game, to refresh my libraries in my mind.
• Then this week I did some research on automated music creation tools (since my last game had no music).
• Today I made my song list for the event
• Tomorrow I’m going to buy a bunch of food for the weekend, since last time I ate way too much junk food.

Wish me luck, and please follow my updates during the weekend in my LD Journal!

After a short dry spell, I got plenty of research projects going on. A tutorial paper with my former advisor, an application of GA/GP for cancer research with a professor I met in Morocco and some theoretical GA work with a CS professor in my department. Also, I got into a technical project with the International Relations office. So much stuff to do!

I’m getting a lot of support from my “bosses” (I got two of them, long story) — the professors are making their best to add me to the “iinkais”, which are workgroups inside the department. This means more work for me, but it’s also great for my standing in the university.

People often ask about my classes. My coursework hasn’t started yet. I probably will have no classes until October, then I will give two intensive courses in October and December. Things might change, but this is what is planned anyway.

My apartment is almost “complete” — or at least not lacking any of the essentials. This week I bought a bookshelf and a couch, which should complete my living room. My bedroom has mostly used furniture, but my living room is looking pretty cool. Maybe I should hold a party on Sunday to celebrate.

Talking about parties, today I met the new brazillian students in Tsukuba University. It was pretty cool, they are so excited about their new environment. Two of the students are in my department, and at least one of them is interested in using GA in his research, which is great — my mad plan to have EC take over tsukuba progresses

Yesterday was the Geocaching Hanami. I haven’t geocaching for a long time, which was a big mistake. Geocaching is so fun. So after doing some caching again yesterday in Ueno, I got the taste of blood in my mouth, and today I found 3 more caches. I also had a chance meeting with a big name Geocacher who happened to work with me during the Morocco trip. Awesome.

So far, the energy usage has always been around 80% to 90% from the previous year — but since my return to morocco, it has jumped to over 160%. At first I thought it was some sort of weird experiment going on, but as this repeated day after day, I realized something else was up.

Then I got it — they compare it with LAST YEAR’S averages, and after the 3.11 earthquake, Tsukuba (and in fact most of japan) were under a serious blackout, brownout and energy conservation regimen. I guess we will keep going over the previous year’s average for a few more months.

1. Install the following packages: ibus, ibus-anthy, ibus-gtk, ibus-m17n
2. Go to the “K” menu -> applications -> system -> input setting framework
3. A box will show up with the ibus configuration options (and maybe asking you if it should start ibus, say yes)
4. configure your desired shortcuts in the “general” tab. Make sure to configure keys for “enable-disable” and “next input method”. In the “input methods” tab, add “Japanese->anthy” and “other->latin pre”
5. Close the configuration screen. Right-click on the ibus icon in your tray bar (a little keyboard with a ball) and select “restart” — you are good to go!

I always had difficulty getting both japanese and portuguese to work in my systems, it has become so easy now! How far have we come

When I first set up this blog, spam comments would be giant list of links. It was completely unnatural and easy to spot.

Then they changed into big collection of random words. Those would avoid pure “block multiple links” filter, but were also trivial to spot.

Then they evolved to constructed paragraphs about the products they are trying to sell. They were completely out of context with the post they commented, so it was trivial to spot them.

More recently, I was getting a lot of “your blog i very good” spam, where a praising comment would come together with the spammers webpage as the webpage of the comment’s poster. Now a few of them actually did look like regular comments (at least until I got used to their general structure), but it was easy to see that they were completely out of context (and always had that marketing link in them).

Today, I saw some really “interesting” spam - the spam was tailored to the blog posts that I wrote! In one where I wrote about my house hunting, the spambot said “this city is easy to live with so many hotels”. In another one, where I mentioned I was reading sherlock holmes, the spambot commented on the most recent sherlock homes movies. There were 5 total such spams in my spambox.

Of course, a quick glance would spot all of the robotic grammar in the comments, and the context was still not really there. And the random ad link was still there in the “http” section. Still, it is impressive to see the evolution of spam. I wonder if it will eventually come to this.

Also, credit where credit is due: My spamfilter, Akismet, is also getting smarter, and keeping itself one step ahead of the spammers - It has been more than a year since a single spam message fell into my “comments” box.

This would be pretty cool, it would allow me to control the music of the whole house centrally from my computer. I remember that a digital photo portrait that I had a few years ago had a similar feature — it could read its pictures from a designated shared folder in a network, using a specialized protocol. So I imagine there is something similar for music.

The “server side commands” would be better though, because then I could do fancy stuff as setting cronjobs from my computer to change the ambience at certain times, etc.

Or maybe I’m playing too much Shadowrun

One day I got a mail from a friend here: “Hey look at this you tube video I found, isn’t it cool?”. The video was about a guy who prepared a set of pendulums so that they swung in very pretty patterns.

That video was indeed cool. But then my friend send me a message “Let’s do the same thing!”, “sounds fun, why not?”, “Ok, how about next week?”.

Next week?

It turns out my friends was perfectly serious about this. We contacted three other people. One was responsible for making the necessary calculations, the other for buying the needed materials, and another one for finding a suitable place to conduct the experiment. We all met here in Tsukuba, walked around a little bit, and started on the task of setting up our own furikko:

Well, as you can see, our version of the pendulums were not quite perfect, but we were able to find out where we did wrong, and what we could do to improve the next time we tried that. More than anything else, I was happy that we could get this going in such a short notice!

Oh, next time my friend wants to try the “Coca-Cola/Menthos” rocked experiment

On other news, I have moved to my new apartment. Expect more news about that soon-ish!

I’ve found two places that, at first glance, were very very nice. Both of them are about the same in terms of rent and availability of shops (supermarket, drugstores, banks, post offices, etc). Both are also very new and well maintained.

The first one is a very large 2LDK (meaning two rooms, a living room and a dining room/kitchen), one of the rooms is a tatami room. It has plenty of space for a large living room, a study, my bedroom and a “place stuff here” room. Another big plus is that it doesnt require almost none of the large initial sum of money that is usually needed for renting an apartment in Japan. For only 2 times the rent as the initial fee, this baby is all mine. The negative part, big negative, is that it is 4 km from the tsukuba station, and 7 km from my workplace. This means a 20 minute bycicle ride to the station, 30 for work, every day, each way. It is not such a big problem in terms of going to work, since there are buses for the rainy days… but it will be kinda hard to have Tokyo friends over in such a faraway place, so my gaming parties might take a hit.

The other is a very nice apartment in the 12th floor of a building. The building is within spitting distance of the Midorino Station, in the TX line. While this means paying the train to get to the uni, it also means very little rain related problems, and my friends can get to my room that much easier. Also the building itself is quite nice, with pretty halls and stuff. The apartment itself, while also a 2LDK, is a bit smaller than the previous one. I would have my own room, but the study room would be kinda merged with the living room, and no “stuff room” would be available. The bad point, though, is that all the traditional “lost money” costs of entering a rental contract in japan are in place, and I would have to pay about 5 times the rent to enter this place.

So, having a place accessible to my friends is a very big deal for me, but is being close to the station worth 200.000 yens? That is my big dilemma.

Also, In the beginning of the post, I said “at first glance”. The rent for both apartments is about 80.000 yens. From my tokyoite perspective, this is a very reasonable rent. I used to pay the same for an apartment in tokyo that, while great, was smaller and in worse condition. On the other hand, tonight some folks in Tsukuba told me that this is too much to pay for an 2LDK around here, specially both being so far from Tsukuba station itself. So while this morning I was quite happy in having a pleasant dilemma to decide on, now I am thinking if I should spend more time looking for an apartment. But since this is the height of apartment hunting season in Japan, that might be a bit difficult, and would probably mean more time in my “hotel room”…

Aaargh! What to do?

There is just too much going on. My ex-supervisor in Brasil is contacting me with research results to analyze, my former japanese advisor wants me to make a presentation at his lab, my current professor wants me to draw out ideas for the G30 program, I have to study for my intensive courses, prepare for the morocco trip, I still have all sorts of forms to fill, I have to ready my business cards, academic web page, experimental environment, find a new home.

Days are just flying by. While I havent really had the time to walk about Tsukuba, I am trying to at least get home at a reasonable time and get some decent rest. Also, this week I returned to the age-old kanda RPG group, just in time to start playing RPG again. It was good to have some of my old routine back, even though some bits here and there have changed. I was specially impressed by O-san, the clerk of the RPG shop we play in, who seemed really happy to see me again - that caught me a bit by surprise.

Now, time to read a bit more Sherlock Holmes before heading to my bed, and then getting ready for more grinding tomorrow!

As a Brazilian working in Japan as a professor, I actually have to option to pay either the brazilian or the Japanese income tax for two years. If I keep working in Japan for more than two years, then I have to pay Japanese I.T. anyway. It seems that this time limit varies with your job and nationality (probably based on international agreements).

So I since I have a choice, I had to research a bit. As for the tax amount, it is basically the same in both cases (around 20% of my salary). If I choose to pay taxes in Brazil, I need to send a notice to the japanese tax office about my decision, and pay my brazilian taxes directy to the brazilian government, yearly. On the other hand, if I decide to pay Japanese Income taxes, they will be deduced automagically from my salary, and I need to submit a form to the brazilian embassy stating that I have moved out of the country (along with a bunch of other info).

Since the values are about the same, I decided that it made more sense for me to pay the Japanese Income tax, since I should be staying here for the medium term. It was also generally less hassle. I was quite surprised about how much information about this is readily available online, though.