UBC sup (Sid) came yesterday and I presented what I have been working on for the past six months. It is amazing how presentations can reveal the true level of clarity that you have in your work. Before his visit I was busy trying to tie together my thoughts with what I have been working on and I think the presentation broke a lot of those down and now I will be busy rearranging the pieces and pulling them back together again. Not saying this in a negative way. I am still really interested in my problem space and think I now have some mechanisms to simplify it and make it more focused which is good. Sorry that’s all vague.

But for my weekend…in some chunks.

Chunk 1: Saturday morning I met Mayumi in Tokyo and we boarded a bus to Asahi in Chiba prefecture. We both snoozed a little on the 2 hour ride but woke up in time for the Asahi stop. The next one was ours…Asahi New Town…but we started talking…talking…talking…suddenly we were out here:

and we realized that we had gone too far. We got off (what else can you do) and that is our bus driving away. For a split second I felt like we were stranded in the middle of nowhere but then I remembered that where we were, there wasn’t too much nowhere and besides, we could always cool down at the ramen shop across the way:

No really, Mayumi’s friend Yuko was going to pick us up by car so we gave her a ring and she came down here for some lunch. Most grateful for her having to go out of the way-ness. I wish I took more pictures inside this restaurant. It had an obsession with Coke paraphernalia, and this weird Old Western theme going on. But they served ramen…such an interesting mix. Another interesting mix was what I ordered: soup curry ramen. Curry-flavoured ramen (Japanese-style curry of course).

One more picture before I start some work:

On the way to this wonderful piece of shore. More pictures later or go to my flickr account if you are impatient.