Not Work

By zach | Published April 27, 2009

I suppose there are two pieces of news I’d like to relate that, believe it or not, don’t have anything to do with work. First, some sad news: my good friends Ben and Juliet, fellow EECS grad students, suffered the loss of their newborn son, Lachlan, this past weekend. Ben kept a journal of the experience. The funeral is tomorrow, but I am leaving for Japan and so will miss it. Many of my friends here are going, so they will not lack support.

There has also been good news recently. On last Sunday my brother Mike proposed to his girlfriend Anna.  (She said yes.) Mike had just finished his training on the blackhawk helicopter, and they took a vacation together to some beach-y type place in Florida.  They are getting married over Labor Day weekend in Pittsburgh. It is apparently going to be very laid back. I’ve also been told that they want me to do the photographing, which should be exciting. It will provide me with an excuse to buy a fancy flash for my camera, in any case. Mike is being stationed at Ft. Cambell, KY, which is about 50 miles northwest of Nashville. The unit he is joining just returned from Afghanistan, so it will likely be many months before he is deployed.

Now, I suppose I should pack!

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A More Substantial Post Will Follow

By zach | Published April 26, 2009

The three most unpleasant things about grad school for me in decreasing order:

  1. Initial culture shock, and finding a research advisor.
  2. Condensing two years of work into a 20 minute powerpoint presentation.
  3. Waiting for long-running experiments to finish.

I have been working on the presentation I’ll use for various retreats and PLDI this summer. Coding and even paper writing I find to be much more satisfying. Hopefully I can have a first draft of my slides ready before I head off to Japan so that I can make revisions and practice before the OSQ retreat in Santa Cruz. Other non-work things have been going on as well, but I’ll save those for a different post.

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Munakata sightseeing

By christina | Published April 26, 2009

Last Sunday (the 19th), I went out with some of my new friends/coworkers as well as my supervisor on a visit to some of the shrines around my supervisor’s home. He lives in a town called Munakata, which is about halfway between Kitakyushu and Fukuoka. They also had a surprise birthday party for me, with cake and lunch, which was delicious and appreciated!

Chinkoku Temple

The three places we went to were the Munakata Taisha (major shrine), Chinkoku Temple, and Miyajidake Shrine. The weather was quite perfect, warm and sunny, and I had a good time. Chinkoku Temple had lots of beautiful flowers, and Miyajidake had Japan’s largest Taiko drum (also Japan’s largest bell, though a particular kind of bell, and the largest shimenawa, which is a hay rope-like thing). Munakata Taisha had lots of various and sundry things which were more impenetrable to an outsider, I have to admit. My favorite was Chinkoku. It was right up against a hill/mountain, and it was quiet and nice and the flowers and gardens were really nice.

I feel like I should explore the local sights more, but I think I want to get myself a bicycle first, so that I have a better way to get to them, as I think most of the good parts of Kitakyushu for sightseeing are further away from the train lines. I guess I could also try to figure out the buses . . .

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Windy City

By christina | Published April 21, 2009

Apparently Kitakyushu is pretty windy. Although in the summer I feel like this may be a welcome element in keeping me from not feeling like a roast potato, right now it’s a little bit more of a nuisance. The weather has been pretty warm lately (around 70), mostly sunny and clear (as Japan gets, which tends to be pretty hazy), with the wind. It’s definitely been nice spring weather, the kind I associate with those few clear days that seemed to happen every year around Carnival time. Without the wind I’d be fine in short sleeves, but with the wind a light jacket is more comfortable. I heard some girls even avoid wearing skirts due to the wind!

However, a few days ago it rained. When you mix in real rainfall (not the Pittsburgh drizzle) with 15mph wind (gusting to 30), you get not so much fun. I got wet, whether I had an umbrella or not. I probably managed to be dry approximately from my elbows up. I saw a couple tragically inside-out broken umbrellas, and see why I was recommended to not get a folding one.

I do really hope, however, that this lasts into the summer. Being able to open my door and window and having a nice breeze come through could really help make some of the blistering summer days feel a lot more tolerable. I guess I’ll see in a few months!

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Ode to Un-run Code

By zach | Published April 18, 2009

Oh, that magical time between finishing a new piece of code, and testing it for the first time: In my mind, it works perfectly, and evidence to the contrary does not yet exist!

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Coding

By zach | Published April 16, 2009

Ocaml is a great language. The only major drawback is the lack of a cheap way to do shared memory multiprocessing. The Netshm module lets you share non-aggregate data types among separate processes, which would be sufficient for most of my purposes, but if you want to share something complicated you have to marshal to a string first, and then un-marshal on the receiving end. Do that a lot, and it wipes out whatever speedup you might have gotten.

Anyway, I was trying to get my compiler to process separate functions concurrently, but with only two CPU’s both can be kept busy by simply doing a ‘make -j’. When people have hundreds of cores sitting on their desks it will make more sense to spawn threads for each function, and hopefully by that time the concurrent Ocaml GC will be working.

Other than that little boondoggle, this week I’ve been sitting in the ParLab getting good suggestions from the OS kids about features to add to my compiler (and bugs to fix!), and coding them up as quickly as possible. Next week I should probably start working on my PLDI talk since I might have to give it the first time the day I get back from Japan. Oh, right: I’m going to to visit Christina in Japan for two weeks, in two weeks =) You can probably tell from this post that a vacation will do me some good since all I can seem to think (and post) about is work!

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Cooking in Japan

By christina | Published April 15, 2009

Japanese rice cookers make tasty rice but seem to take twice as long as the ones I’ve used in the US.

Easy Dinner

I’ve been trying to cook for myself most nights since getting my refrigerator. I’ve been cooking dinners pretty regularly for a while before Japan, so it isn’t too much of a challenge. The biggest trouble is remembering to turn on the rice cooker early enough so that I don’t have to eat dinner at 8pm. I’ve been experimenting with various non-challenging foods and some unfamiliar ones as well. I’m not a huge fan of prepared foods, so most of my stuff has been pretty basic so far, since I have exactly one pan, two pots, two burners, and no oven. I made beef soup, cooked gyoza (the only thing I’ve gotten premade–apart from ice cream, of course), and boiled kabocha (a smaller, more delicious relative of the pumpkin). I also made some fried rice-type food, which is a good way to use up my extra rice, since I don’t have a microwave.

I’ve also learned that Japanese people don’t really steep green tea. Actually, in the office, they essentially just pour hot water through the leaves and immediately pour it out into a cup. And reuse the leaves until it’s no longer tea-flavored water that comes out.

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Paperwork (mostly) done

By christina | Published April 9, 2009

Okay, so I’ve finally received my Foreigner Registration Card, and now have a bank account and a cell phone. AU ended up being the most reasonable cell phone company choice for me, as it was the one that allowed me to actually have a regular contract. SoftBank wanted me to pay everything upfront, and with a credit card. Meh. My phone is boring and plain, but I could watch Japanese tv on it if I so desired, and it makes phone calls and emails. Not that I have many minutes.

As opposed to the US plans, where 500 minutes seems like the minimum available, the Japanese ones have options which start at about 25 minutes per month (for about $10 a month) and go up to about 200 or so, after which it’s a per-minute charge, the cost of which depends on the plan you got.  I got the minimum one, as I don’t plan to call people if I don’t have to. The phone companies, however, also offer data plans, which have a weird cost structure where it’s essentially unlimited use for about $45, but if you use less than a certain amount in a month, it costs less according to how much you use. Phone emails are really the way of things here, it seems.

I went to the Mojiko Retro this past Saturday, but the weather was pretty dismal, so I didn’t get much in terms of pictures. Mojiko used to be a major international port in Japan, and there are a number of buildings built in a western turn-of-the-century style. Also some modern buildings, like the Drama Ship, which doesn’t have any actual drama that I could find, but is more a museum about the history (actual and mythical) of the Kanmon Straits, the channel separating Kyushu from Honshu, the main island of Japan.

I went to dancing again this week, and it seems that the membership is pretty committed–I think it was the exact same group from the previous week, as opposed to the Pittsburgh group where the attendees would vary pretty wildly from week to week (with a few die-hard regulars, of course).

Otherwise, my life has been mostly work. Not too much is happening yet, but it’s only been a week, and I’m not sure they’re entirely sure what to do with me yet. Apparently there was a lot of reorganization done for this financial year (starting April 1), so the group I was originally to be put in doesn’t exist anymore. Hopefully I’ll be doing more soon–I don’t need another boring job.

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Weekend!

By zach | Published April 6, 2009

Little Red Flower I had a reletively eventful weekend. On Friday evening, I had dinner with Alex, Louis, and Leon at Biryani House, after which I lost at Settlers. On Saturday, I slept late, then went to Juliet’s birthday BBQ. There was lots of tasty food. Leon grilled up some bacon-wrapped scallops, and there were two cakes. I was lazy this time and only brought a case of New Castle, but it seemed to have been appreciated! After the eating was finished, we sat around and talked, and then played Rock Band and Settlers.

On Sunday, I spent the early morning fixing a few bugs in the compiler, but then I went on a hike with Alex, Leon, and Louis. We hiked up to Eagle Peak in Mt. Diablo State Park. The weather was beautiful, though a bit hazy, so we couldn’t see Mt. Tamalpais, Sacramento, or the Sierra Nevadas, like one can on a really clear day from there. The biggest setback of the day was my camera running out of batteries a couple of miles into the hike. I managed to get a few good shots, nevertheless. We also encountered a setback that required rerouting around the very top of Eagle Peak, but this turned out to be a good thing because I got to see parts of the park that I hadn’t seen before. Here are Leon’s pictures and Alex’s pictures.

After the hike, Alex, Louis, and I had dinner in Lafayette, then visited Ben and Juliet for tea and leftover cake. We spent most of the time there chatting and harassing their cat Puma.

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Earthquake?!

By christina | Published April 5, 2009

Apparently there was an earthquake off the coast of Miyazaki. My apartment did some wobbling, and I am definitely not used to wobbly apartments.

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