I just had the realization that in my work I never focus on the product and improving the product but on the method to use to improve the product. If that makes sense. Won’t elaborate much now but I think this is a big realization that might shape the next…x-some-years. Hmm….
I was on a roll and now it has been a while. But it is Saturday moning, I am sitting here at my computer avoiding all the work I have to do this weekend. Just for a bit more…then I will get going.
This Wednesday is the start of an event at Miraikan, a science museum in Tokyo. Everyday from Wednesday to Sunday there will be two large screen presentations of artwork from Kazuo Oga, an art director and background artist for Studio Ghibli films (My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, etc.). The theme of the event is “human and nature” and they hope that by showing nature scenes, people can reflect on beauty outside of the concrete fortress and strive to preserve the nature we still have.
After these presentations the museum likes to receive questionnaire responses so that they can judge the effectiveness of the presentation, both enjoyment-wise and for the visitors’ learning and reflection.
Way back in November one of the organizers saw a system I developed during my internship and was interested in using it as a novel way for people to reply to a questionnaire (this is how I managed an internship extension). So, we’ve redesigned the application and this is what will happen:
After the presentation people will be asked to come answer questions about their experience. In the “questionnaire space” there will be leaf shaped cards scattered around. Each leaf is printed with one question and QRcodes for replying to the question, and reading other responses. In Japan most people can capture QRcodes with their mobile phone cameras and the codes can be decoded into text: in this case an email address (to send an email response to a question) or URL (to go see other responses). Some questions have multiple choices for response and a visitor can choose by capturing the code next to their choice and sending an email to the address inside.
Doing this we can present the responses back in real time. We will project a tree/leaf-themed visualization of responses being returned. Sure - this might create bias but my view is that questionnaires are super biased anyway and we are hoping that given a novel way to answer them, people will be curious, have fun, be engaged and generally be more interested in the feedback they provide.
This weekend I have to work on that visualization. I have made several versions already and most of the back-end is in place and good but we’ve been going over redesigns for the interface and I have not yet had the chance to implement them (or have not yet taken then chance…yikes!) I am a little scared about not being prepared but it is weird, another part of me is pretty calm and confident that everything will come into place. I think that I have possibly finally lost the tendency to panic and feel really anxious before big events / demos / presentations. I will try my hardest and even if something goes wrong people generally understand.
I am more nervous about the first day - the directory of our laboratory is friends with a director at Miraikan, Mamoru Mohri and he arranged a chance for us to meet him. Okay and guess what - this guy has been in space! I am meeting an astronaut! I had not thought about it much before but since this meeting was arranged the amazing-ness of space travel has started to dawn on me. It is an experience that few have and it is utterly (you can send your kicks by mail) out of this world.
Fun!
We needed games to play on our trip so before heading to shibu onsen I hit the store that has everything you need to be cool and impress your friends and found this groovy novelty jenga. “Gum avalanche” it is called and the blocks mimic packs of Lotte brand gum - Black Black, Cool Mint, and Green Gum.
Now that I have you here, I can go off about mundane things. Like my 薬 (kusuri) (medicine) buying experience tonight. On the way home from the trip, this was last Monday, I was sitting on the train, did two stretches and then something in my upper back snapped. The next morning I couldn’t lift myself from bed. Had to steamroll my body over the edge and stand up using the bed to support me. That was a hard day at work. It was getting gradually better over the week and then on Friday morning, I couldn’t get out of bed again. The pain woke me up this morning as well but for most of the day it has been okay…possibly because I have not spent too much time at a computer.
Anyway - oh…sorry…actually I didn’t intend to write six sentences on my pain. I’m going to be horrible when I’m 80. Like, posting form shots of my hunch back so you can feel how crooked I have become on your solids display.
I went to the drug counter and explained my problem and the woman recommended some medicine. I was suspicious though. It was not medicine from behind the counter and the packages surrounding it were labeled with many As and Bs and Cs and Es. Was she trying to sell me vitamins? 1750円 vitamins? Yes.
I told her I wanted something stronger. In my head I was thinking that I wanted knock-me-out medicine that I could take tonight and wake up twelve hours later with a drool stain on my pillow from which I could forecast what they will serve in the cafeteria on Monday. She recommended that I go to the hospital but I wasn’t going to buy that cause I could see shelves of possible relief behind that counter. I told her that I would like to try medicine now and if I still felt pain in a few days, I would go to the hospital. There was some more discussion and hesitancy to go for things behind the counter but then she finally realized I wanted something strong and now and she asked me if my stomach was good. Yes, it is. The hesitancy to sell stronger medicine, even when stocked, is interesting.
I walked out with a pack of Ringl. Just took one of the little turquoise capsules and thinking about how unsatisfying vitamins would be right now. Which is funny because it is not even about effectiveness - it is satisfaction. Like I need a box with warnings and an ingredient list with many words I don’t know. It is unknown territory, mystical, and I feel more satisfied because to make my pain go away, it must take magic.
We went to a really old pachinko parlour and I thought that that night could have been the night but no, I am still a pachinko virgin. Five hundred yen each bought us saucers of small corks and time with the rifles, trying to shoot things off of these shelves:
I figured out that if I aimed for one of the bottom guys I could always hit a block from the middle shelf. Some of the blocks had cheesy 1970s portraits glued to them - kept going for this kid with a green shirt and shiny side-parted blond hair. Walked out of there with two trophies: a blue honey-dew melon-sized bouncy ball and a small hello kitty cloth bag.
The street ahead of us curved and as we walked past the curve I spotted this:
and my body jumped a little. It was “kaonashi” or “noface” from Spirited Away. That moment was so surreal. Then I looked at the surroundings. The statue was placed in front of a very large ryokan hidden by its front wings and trees:
It did remind me a lot of the bathhouse in Spirited Away. Was there a connection? With some Internet searching later I found that several people had similar opinion and it is said that this is one of the ryokan that inspired Miyazaki.
The village is an onsen village - it is filled with many hot springs and baths (onsen=hot spring). There is a set of 10 (I think) public baths all within walking distance of each other. They are locked but public and if you stay at a ryokan you can get a key to enter. Inside there is a small entrance way with shelves to place your belongings and then you can enter the bath room, also quite small. I would say that maybe a maximum of 6 people can comfortable use the bath at the same time. A few baths we didn’t enter because people were occupying them already but the ones we did go into, we had to ourselves.
You can also buy this cloth listing the names of the 10 baths then at each one, there is a stamp for you to mark it off of your list. I didn’t get them all. I think I missed 6 and 7, 3 there were people inside and it didn’t look like they were going anywhere and 2 was insanely hot. We tried but it just wouldn’t cool down.
Sunday afternoon after band practice me and 3 women from work took the train to Shibu Onsen in Nagano prefecture. We arrived in time for supper, ate, and then geared up to do what you do in this small mountain village - hit the baths. The ryokans (inns) supply the yukatas (bathrobe style) and geta (wooden sandals)…
…which you can wear outside, all day, as you wander around narrow streets which, at night time, are free of cars.
We were lucky that there was a small summer festival going on. Wooden games for children and adults were stationed under street lamps casting a warm glow on everything. People were eating cotton candy and the most prominent sound was that of wooden geta clacking against the road. I love that sound.
Well, I will admit, the next day at 6am I was not in the mood for geta clacking but I did manage to mostly get back to sleep and in my dreams the noise turned into mystical nighttime geta clacking sound.
Because I am too busy working on my thesis to write anything here, please enjoy this list of search strings that bring people here. My next assigment: I will write a short story in which I used these strings.
| eggo waffles.com |
| kami no shizuku |
| maine coon cat |
| maine coon |
| maine coon cats |
| sarushima |
| mainecoon cat |
| peanut cream |
| huge cats |
| barbapapa toys |
| tuvaq |
| mainecoon |
| coon cat |
| taitei meaning |
| blue heart backgrounds |
| google stalk |
| creamed pies |
| pictures of someone burping |
| lani billard |
| mainecoon cats |
I had another hanabi outing yesterday (was it yesterday? yes…I think it was). This time it was hanabi of the large variety. We left work early to buy food and drinks and then parked ourselves on a very large tarp by the banana boat stand.
I was surprised that there was so much space on the beach. I guess the Miurakaigan fireworks are not as big and spectacular as the Umikaze ones that I saw last year and missed last weekend. Well, not entirely - I could hear them from my apartment as I was working on my thesis. It was sooooo that episode where Bart prays for the snow day but then is trapped studying.
The fireworks were good. It was nice being on a beach, by the ocean, and very close to the explosions.
On the alternate walk home from my local train station, kenritsudaigaku (県立大学) or what I like to call “kenritz”, there is a street with a curry shop, a pet store, a steamed meat dumpling shop, and a ramen restaurant. In my time here I have gone to none of them but I think one day I should. I think I take this alternate route (a block away from the regular route) when I am in particularly pensive walking modes and it is easy for me to take the atmosphere in and spit it right back out. Today I stopped by the pet shop and enjoyed the blue glow of tanks and aquariums in the dusk.
I think I have quite the photos of creatures thing going on here. That’s not really intentional but it is making me realize that i must be quite taken by living things that are not humans or vegetation. But it is funny cause I don’t think I am an “animal lover”…I don’t own pets, I don’t awwww over everything, I don’t have much animal-related decor…well…I guess at work there is my moo cow eraser (from highschool but getting old I might have to order more), my red dinosaur from the udon shop, and my neko nyan bou. But that’s it. Hmm…I am going to have to reflect on my animal aesthetics for a bit.
I am currently on hold with air miles. Want to book a flight for this fall. They are playing the mooooooooooooost depressing music. I am talking Seal’s Kiss from a Rose interrupted by a please hold message every 10 seconds which itself gets interrupted by another please hold message from another woman. This is the part that is not free I guess. Oh yeah and there’s also the taxes and gas prices and other fees…I am sleepy and tempted to hang up. Or at least the skype equivalent of hang up button which is not as satisfying and you still feel like the person on the other line can hear you.
My sister pointed me to this:
check the about - it is kind of interesting and a nice change from the usual Google interface.
Paragraph by paragraph they say. But these paragraphs take hours to assemble. It seems like it will take fooooooorever to finish. It probably does not help that I use the page count as a progress indicator rather than the actual content. Then there are the “expanders”. Formatting that you save up for times when you feel like it will never get done and you need motivation through apparent increased page count. Some expanders:
- adding a table of contents
- adding page breaks so that each chapter starts on its own page
- adding an appendix (or even just placing the title and page for one
- adding figures (this I save until near the end) and
- I keep my document single spaced so that it is faster to scroll through but since the required format is double spaced - every hour double spacing your paragraphs just to see how many pages it will really be
Below was possibly…a little negative and I am tempted to delete but…maybe instead of getting rid of pain the aspirin here makes me a little loopy. I’ll keep it there as a reminder. I am wiped, checking in soon. Was watching an episode of Samurai Jack and wondering why the first four minutes were filled with shots of planets, space, and howling wind sounds. Then a character talked and I realized I was watching my screen saver. Seriously - 4 minutes.
To start off - I am sort of in a foul mood at the moment. That’s a warning. You might choose to move on. I woke up this morning with a knot in my neck. It aches and it sends pains into my shoulder, arm, down my back, and into my head. I tried aspirin but nothing, still in pain. I want to give up, go home - do nothing.
On top of that, it is really quiet at work. I have not had (and imagine I will not) any work related interactions today. It makes me feel - why am I here? Would there be a difference in me here and me not here? Of course the truth is I am here because I have a lot to do in the next 3 weeks. I should really go do it.
But how to rid myself of this foul mood? Or this pain? Would it help if I could complain to a real person not just a text editor. Maybe…they could give me a massage. A computer can’t do that. Not even the ones in the massage chairs in the basement. They just poke and squeeze and it would be quite uncomfortable given the intensity of this knot.
Hmm…I just did a little bit of work. Maybe writing helps. Maybe I don’t even need to post this and I can keep my site 99% happy. But that wouldn’t be logging would it.
So while we are logging - I am also feeling lonely. I almost erased that because I don’t want to admit it. I don’t want the response “oh yes, living in a foreign country…” because this is your general run-of-the-mill alone that I have felt in various cities with varying quantities of people around me so that physically, I am actually not that alone.
The fact that I am still thinking about deleting all this and replacing it with something about buying muji socks tonight to make myself feel better points to a main root of this troublesome emotion. All too often I accept it. There are relationships and interactions that I would like to have with people but if it is someone I don’t know well, the effort I put towards making those interactions happen is inversely proportional to the amount I want them to happen. Because I am scared and think I will be a burden on those people. And even though I can remember - “but they are people too and they want attention too”, the decision making part of me replies “but possibly not from you”.
I’m still skirting around my emotions, the above is a generalization of more specific thoughts and feelings. I am skirting around something that I can communicate about to only like, 3 people in this world - love. I want to say more but I just became pinned under a large boulder so I’m gonna stop now and chisel some actionscript into this rock while I wait for a rescue team. Hurrah!
