Category Archives: thoughts

I am sitting in Christina’s tiny apartment in Kitakyushu listening to her practice koto. Earlier, she returned from a flower arranging lesson with some flowers, which she re-arranged here after riding home with them on her bike. Before she left, though, there was a rainbow:

While Christina has been at work, and doing various other things, I have been working on a couple iPhone/iPad apps, and doing a bit of wandering on my own.

The first weekend I was here, we took a trip up to Kanazawa, and Osaka, which was pretty interesting even though it was really hot. The following weekend we cleaned up the apartment, and went to see the Tobata Gion, which is a local festival where the men from each of the four parts of Tobata build floats and carry them around saying, “YOI-to-SA!” They also bang on drums. On Saturday evening, they built a pyramid of laterns on the floats, and they all parade around together banging on the drums, and so forth, which was very impressive.

On the Friday following the festival, there were fireworks nearby, just at the other side of the train station over the straight between Tobata and Wakamatsu. Japanese fireworks are pretty great. I’m looking forward to seeing more in Tokyo the weekend after next. This past Sunday after the fireworks, we took the Shinkansen down to Fukuoka to do some shopping. Christina bought a new bento for lunches, and I found some more oatmeal to eat for breakfast.

Since then, I have been doing some more coding and a little more wandering. This weekend I think we are going to try to go visit Mojiko and Shiminoseki. I don’t have my usual photo-editing software along with me, so I won’t be posting more pictures until I get back to California, or more likely, after I manage to move myself to Zurich.

I have been having a good time in Japan with Christina. I got into Fukuoka late last Friday night, and the next day we wandered around Dazaifu. There, we saw the stone garden at Kōmyōzen-ji, a Zen temple, and Dazaifu Tenman-gu, a Shinto shrine. Then we headed back to Kitakyushu after eating some delicious ramen. On Sunday, I was very jet-lagged, and we mostly sat around at home. During the following week, I found out that my PLDI paper was rejected in spite of the good reviews. On the other hand, I also found out that I’ll be visiting ETH Zurich for an interview during the first week of March, which should be exciting. I am sad about the PLDI paper not getting in, but I’ll be able to make some big improvements and rerun the experiments on a bigger machine at the Intel lab, and resubmit to OOPSLA at the end of March. Anyhow, what I’ve been doing while Christina has been at work is working on said improvements.

This past Saturday we ventured up to Kyoto on the shinkansen. I will make another post about that because now it is time to make French toast.

It has been a long time since I wrote anything here. To correct my previous post, I did end up going home for Thanksgiving thanks to finding a cheap(er) ticket on the Sunday beforehand.

So, what’s new? After submitting my paper to PLDI, I took some time off, and then focused my full attention on writing my dissertation. Except for a wonderful trip to Disney World with Christina and her parents, and then to Pittsburgh for Christmas, I worked on it non-stop until this past Tuesday when I sent off a complete draft to my adviser.

The trip to Florida and Disney World was really great. I very much enjoyed seeing the Hall of Presidents with the new animatronic Obama, and finally getting to ride the Tower of Terror. There was also lots of delicious food! The picture above is from the Osborne  spectacle of Dancing Lights. It has a lot of lights =)

The reviews for the PLDI paper came back the week before last, and they were largely positive. I am expecting the paper to get in based on the scores it got, but I won’t find out for sure until Friday or Saturday after the program committee meeting is over.

The most exciting news, though, is that I am headed to Japan this Thursday to visit Christina! I am going for about two weeks, and we are going to take the superfast shinkansen up to Kyoto for one of the weekends. It will be exciting fun. Now is a great time to make  the trip since I won’t have much work to do until I get comments on the dissertation back from my adviser. Also, I just sent off a few job applications, and I don’t expect to be hearing back for a couple more weeks due to reference-letter-writers needing at least a couple weeks to write reference letters. While Christina is at work, I will likely start working on my “Job Talk,” which is an hour long presentation I’ll have to give about my dissertation work when interviewing for research positions. I will probably also do a little coding, as fighting with powerpoint for any more than a couple days in a row tends to drive me a little crazy.