A Month Has Passed
I’ve been in Japan now for a month, and have done a pretty poor job of writing about it. So here we go with a mish-mash of updates.
One of the first things I learned about Osaka is that it is quite large. My first weekend I decided to walk across it. Well, I wouldn’t have tried if my map had had a scale. It turns out that my little planned stroll was about 10km in distance. That might not be so bad, except I was constantly getting turned around. So, I ended up wandering aimlessly. Not so bad, actually, as I discovered some interesting things, including what are certainly the best Dance Dance Revolutionaries I have ever seen.
I was a bit better prepared for my next outing. I went to Osaka Castle with a Taiwanese guy who lives in the same building as me. The displays in the castle were good at educating me about Japan’s extremely bloody history, but as an actual living historical record the building was a bit lacking. If I were able to give a piece of belated advice to the Japanese warlords of centuries past it would be as follows: building defensive fortifications (i.e. castles) out of wood and paper is not such a good idea. Yeah, the most recent castle (of many) built on the the site is from 1931. Aside from the castle itself there was a very cool monument with a plaque saying something like “Here in 1572 the holy monk Kitayama hung his robe upon a pine branch, praying that his order might flourish.” (all paraphrased). I thought that was very cool, and they even had the stump of the pine tree in question. When I hit the big time maybe somebody will install a plaque where I hang up my coat.
A bit about my lab now. All the people are extremely friendly and welcoming. I think I’ve been assimilated successfully, at least to the point where I can interject with the odd “majide!?” in a conversation and get a chuckle from those involved. They threw me a nice welcome party, with an unusual assortment of foods and an odd contraption (pictured) that spins noodles around a little whirlpool, and the other night we had a barbecue and drank beer in the parking lot. Last weekend was a bit notable as my boss took me out and fed me some awesome yakitori, a fair amount of beer, and chicken sashimi. Chicken sashimi is an odd thing. If you are curious, raw chicken liver is squishy, whereas raw chicken stomach is a bit crunchy.
Next weekend I will be helping carry a float in a Mikoshi festival parade. I’ve read that every year a few people get killed in these things (presumably crushed during the float combats), but my understanding is that our local version of the festival is relatively peaceful. We will see.
Got My Mojo Working
I finally put in a few hours to finish mixing my recording of this Muddy Waters classic. It was my first attempt at “The Blues” and overall I’m pretty satisfied. The structure is simple enough (compared to, say, Jazz) that my limited piano skills were enough, and I think there are a few moments where the emotion comes through nicely. There are two things I would change if I had the time. First, I would transpose it down a tone or two, as I was straining a bit at the upper end of my (one octave!) vocal range. Second, I would have paid more attention to being strictly rhythmic. I wanted to tack on a drum track for a bit more “pop,” but the rhythm was too messy for that to be possible.
As a side note, despite my relative lack of natural vocal talent, I was recently pleased to learn that I am a better singer than both Britney Spears and Enrique Iglesias, which is nice.
I Have No Idea What You Are Trying To Say
Recently I took a quiz on the BBC website, which supposedly tells you the ‘sex’ of your brain. As a premise that is a bit ridiculous, but it turned out to be an enlightening quiz anyway. It is broken into different sections which test different things. To get the good out of the way, I am wicked awesome at mental rotation tasks. Give me some sort of Lego-like blocky shape and I can imagine it from whatever arbitrary viewpoint you like. Nice.
Now the bad news. I am totally incompetent at interpreting facial expressions. The quiz section in question presents a series of faces, cropped tightly around the eyes, and asks you to interpret the emotions of the owner of the face (e.g. happy, sad, angry, jealous). Going through this section I was convinced the test makers had messed up. There was simply no way anybody could interpret these expressions. They are cropped too tightly around the eyes, and the eyes themselves can’t possibly tell you anything. Nevertheless I did my best, and ended up getting 3/10, which is pretty much what somebody would get picking randomly. I didn’t feel too bad, until my rationalization that the test was flawed was shattered when my friend T independently sent out an email about the test, announcing that the “eyes” section was “so easy!” that he had scored 9/10, and only missed the one because he didn’t think the emotion was genuine.
So, what did I learn? Well, I’ve got skillz pretty much where I knew I had them. However, I am totally incompetent in a pretty darned important area. Mentally rotating objects is nice and all, but isn’t communicating with other people one of the more important and rewarding aspects of life? But I suck at this (or at least one component of it), and now I shudder to think. I must have messed up so many times over the years. Remember that one time you were glaring at me because I was being an idiot? Yeah, I had no idea. Maybe I thought you were flirting with me. And that time you were flirting with me? I was probably distracted by the thought of the sandwich I was going to make later. Oh well.
Come to think of it, maybe there’s a product here. I could mount a little camera on my shoulder which interprets people’s moods and lets me know so that I have an idea what’s going on.
Random Observations on Japan
- The Japanese are fanatical about recycling, yet everything is over packaged. Is it really necessary to individually wrap every cookie in a bag of cookies?
- All the food is good. It doesn’t matter where you go, it’s all good. And it’s cheap, too.
- Combination toaster/microwave = great idea.
- Combination washer/dryer = great idea.
- Some soap in the bathrooms would be nice.
- Guys, could we forget about the whole footwear obsession thing? I mean, shoes for outside, slippers for inside, and other slippers for the bathroom?
- Architectural style of the train stations: labyrinthine.
- Talking on your phone in a confined public space (e.g. on the train) is just not done. How civilized!
- Thank God there’s at least one country that hasn’t been over-run by tourists.
- Please stop cracking your knuckles.
- There’s an apparently infinite supply of free umbrellas.
- 3 alphabets is 2 alphabets too many.
Mmm, mmm, smokeless tobacco
I was browsing www.fark.com and there was a flash ad for Skoal smokeless tobacco. Now, smokeless tobacco is not something that I think about frequently, but this ad really made an impression on me with the sheer magnitude of its grossiness. How much more unappealing can something be? It’s a sack full of gooey looking brown stuff that you suck on. And this is ignoring the fact that it can kill you or make your tongue fall off.
Unfortunately I was unable to take a screenshot in time when little sacks of it were flying around suggesting situations where smokeless tobacco might be fun. One suggestion was “shopping with the wife.” Now, to me, munching on tobacco while shopping with the wife is a double-dose of suck. If I’m going to be stuck shopping, I want to suck on something fun. How about jelly beans!
It’s All About the Packaging
I needed some noise-isolating headphones, so I went down to Yodobashi and picked up a pair of Sennheiser CX400s. When I got them home I was faced with a daunting task: opening one of these horrid glued together plastic clamshell packages with nothing but my fingers and some nail-clippers. Any company who still uses packaging like this must hate itself. Why? Because every customer who is forced to struggle opening one of these things forms a negative opinion towards your product before even having a chance to try it.
Packaging is important, even though it’s something you only deal with once. Or, maybe it’s important because you only deal with it once. Apple figured this out. Opening an iPod or a Mac is a joy, and something you remember for a long time. I will remember the Sennheiser experience as well, mostly because of my sore fingers and a smallish cut.
And how are the headphones? A little bit muddy and bass-heavy compared to my Grados, but of course there isn’t really anything under $100 to compare with a nice set of Grados.
Update Dec. 5, 2008: These headphones are pretty terrible. It really hit home listening to Black Sabbath: Paranoid. It’s like I’m listening to my neighbours’ music through the wall. Boomy, indistinct, and altogether unpleasant.
First Japan Post
I’ve been in Japan for almost 2 weeks now, and it is time to write a post. My first weekend was uneventful, what with me being sick and sleeping the whole time. The first week in the lab was better. The people are very welcoming, and have helped me adapt to a new and strange country. We go to lunch together regularly (Kizami Udon ftw. Katsu Kare ftw.) and I’ve started learning about the projects here. They are doing some really good work which I hope to be able to help with.
My second weekend was more fun. I headed to downtown Osaka with not much of a plan, and ended up wandering randomly. I ended up in Yodabashi, which turns out to be the ultimate “Garth Store,” selling pretty much all I’ve ever wanted. Watches on the first floor, cameras on the second, TVs on the third… you get the idea. It is also an amazingly intense environment, with employees up on ladders yelling at people to come on over and buy this or that. I get the impression that in general Japanese take shopping very seriously, and go about the activity with intensity.
While I was in Osaka I went into some random restaurant place because it had an appetizing picture of rice and beef in the window (I ignored the McDonald’s next door. Yay me!). The restaurant inside appeared to be the equivalent of an American truck stop. Pretty low budget, with stools crammed together around a bar area. The guy came over and while I was trying to figure out exactly how to tell him I wanted the rice and beef bowl he says to me “beef only!” So, yeah, this restaurant serves only one thing: rice and beef. It makes ordering easy!
Peter Hodson on the Brain
Is it bad if you dream about the portfolio manager of a mutual fund you own? Last night I did just that. Peter Hodson is the manager for the Sprott Growth Fund, and I actually met him once at a dinner event in Vancouver. I was seated right across from him, and took the opportunity to pepper him with questions while he tried to eat his food. He was friendly and seemed to take it quite well. My dream was that I was reading a discussion on the net focussing on the recent poor performance of the Growth Fund. Somebody was defending Peter, saying something like “He’s a really nice guy. Too bad his fund has been having such a rough go recently.” That’s the dream, really. Sorry if you were expecting something more titillating.
And Peter, if you ever read this, please get your ass in gear and make me some money.
The Air Canada Seatback Entertainment System Sucks
I recently flew to California on Air Canada to attend CHI 2007, a conference dealing with computer-human interaction. I was overjoyed (or perhaps just joyed) upon entering the plane to see that they had the seatback touchscreen entertainment systems that allow each person to choose their own movie or TV show. The bodings were ominous however, when an announcement (paraphrased) came over the speaker that “once the entertainment system is activated, be careful to not touch the screen too many times in quick succession, or it will crash.” Over the course of the flight I would discover the many other ways in which the seatback entertainment system was deeply inadequate.
So let’s enter rant mode and simply list the many flaws in the system. First the system reacted very slowly to any input. Several seconds would pass after touching the screen and seeing any sort of feedback. Second, the movies and TV shows were categorized in non-intuitive and inappropriate categories. Finding something you wanted required navigating up and down the hierarchy to figure out where Air Canada hid whatever you wanted. This was made more maddening by the slow response. Third, many of the buttons were far too small and jammed together. My fingers are fairly slim, but I only had about a 50% success rate in pressing many of the buttons (particularly for changing volume). Fourth, much of the text was far too small, to a degree that the woman across the aisle from me couldn’t read it at all. She had to get somebody beside her to read it for her.
So is having the entertainment system better than having no entertainment system? Absolutely, however overall the system was about as bad as it could be while still functioning. It seems the people designing it had no sense for how it would be used, and what requirements there might be. If I were Air Canada I would have refused to pay for this. I suspect they are perfectly content though. The management responsible for installing these systems probably doesn’t spend too much time worrying about user/customer satisfaction with the system. They just want to be able to tick the box beside “seatback entertainment system” in their competitive advantage comparison chart.