Rich Seymour's stochastic statements.

Almost too much to say so I’m just going to throw down some bullet points:

3 earthquakes while in Izu on the last night and day.

KISS wrapped up well. Great workshop I think.

Got to Yokohama, checked into our nice hotel. Went into these super malls and super electronics stores.

Met up with our advisor who took us out to dinner with his Mom. They are such nice people!!! (seriously, three exclamation points doesn’t begin to do justice)

Went to a mini… hard to describe like… street box with food simmering on a tray in the middle (pictures of all the food is the main thing that happened today… including natto this morning)

Then we went to one of those photo booth craziness things that my boyz & girlz in the IE are into. We now have our own pictures… We’ll upload those as soon as we get to a scanner back in the states.

I think we are going to hit a pub tonight then go to sleep… see more of Yokohama (first port opened to trade with the west in 1854) then head 30 minutes up to TOKYO!

The work part of the trip is done so now it’s just… trying not to spend more money than I have and continuing to have more fun than I have any right to have.

[edit] PS I think there is a post from the missing day hiding on my iPhone.

I’m watching a presentation by one of my mentors A Nakano. I’ve seen him give similar presentations. The slides are in English, but he is presenting it in Japanese.

I seem to have no knack for Japanese. I can pronounce Chinese pretty well since I took a couple semesters in college, but that is no help here.

It’s nice to see a group in Japan take cues from our computational science workshop for underrepresented groups and turn it into their own. They are teaching a lot more system administration stuff. Maybe I said that already.

Also it’s neat that the computer code, etc doesn’t need translation. Sometimes they throw in Japanese characters in strings, but the config files and source code are still in the stunted English of computerese.

Heading to Yokohama tomorrow. More good times around the corner.

Editing iptables config. That’s something I haven’t done in years. Yup.

Had an American style dinner last night. Pretty good. The French fries were pretty authentic. The pizza was tasty very little sauce and a good amount of cheese. We drank a fair amount. I played a Clark 8 song (never said) for the folks and they liked it. I think it would go over better if I played covers, but I really don’t commit other people’s songs to memory much.

Then speaking of covers, we went to the karaoke room of this compound… (if I ever have a compound it will have a karaoke room) and then true Japanese karaoke madness began. If you have Facebook you can see various pics of me singing Livin on a Prayer, some aerosmith, some Simon and Garfunkel. Japanese karaoke is usually done with two people, which kind of takes the pressure off a bit. I have done two singer karaoke in the US just far less often. Also the sound system was rad with a couple crazy clear plastic sphere speakers hanging from the ceiling, in addition to the big monitor size speakers.

So yeah, getting a good slice of Japanese culture here in this small town of Izu. Can’t wait to see Yokohama and Tokyo tho!

Also there is one analogy I would like to make:

coffee flavor:Japanese coffee::vermouth:dry martini

It’s strange to me. Japanese coffee kind of tastes like watered down and filtered Turkish coffee. Like the beans have been lightly roasted and ground into a powder and somehow in that process lose the oily tasty parts. Leaving a sort of afterimage of coffee, like a picture of coffee or a scratch n sniff coffee bubble sticker. You get what I’m saying?

That said there was that starbucks in the narita airport. I don’t know if I want to drink starbucks in Japan. If it tastes like American starbucks I will bemoan the Americanization of Japan, and if it tastes like crazy weak Japanese coffee I will be sad that I can’t get a real cup of joe. But then what is a good cup of coffee? I enjoy everything from Folgers crystals to sunset junction’s intelligentsia coffee to brooklyn’s gorilla coffee. Gorilla coffee would be my overall fave. Followed by LA’s groundwork and Urth Caffes.

I have time to pontificate on coffee because in spite of being here a few days, I still don’t understand Japanese.

Configuring our 5 machine cluster. Pretty straight forward except we are doing something crazy with LDAP which I’ve never used for a cluster. Wacky, huh? Forgot to take a before picture of breakfast, but it was big with fish and clams. Also some spinach and a nice egg custard, replete with meat.

I grew up eating the standard middle American veggies and only after I moved to NYC for college did I get to try more adventurous foods. My general rule for eating a bunch of unfamiliar foods is try everything. Then eat in order of weirdest (least appetizing) first. that way you end on a high note.

Also this morning I discovered why I detest those day-glo yellow daikon radish pickles. They have saccharine or something in them. blechhh. I’ve been assured that proper traditional daikon pickles don’t have any fake sugar in them.

I’ve been blogging on my iPhone and then uploading via wifi. I connected to NTT once when I took my phone off airplane mode. I received one txt message in that one minute period. Probably the most expensive txt I’ve ever recvd.

One more thing Japanese coffee is sort of like watered down Turkish coffee. No roasted taste, just sort of a hint of coffee flavor. Also in related news about me enjoying the labors of underpaid workers in 3rd world countries, I haven’t had chocolate in 2 days. My skin has lost its greasy pallor, but at what cost!? How will I reintegrate into my corn syrup and partially hydrogenated oil regimen when I return to the US!?

Went out to walk around Izu, by around I mean like a block and a half. I came across a bunch of spiders, the same spider species, but huge. Red, black and yellow. I took some pics and I have been assured that these are peaceful spiders. That’s cool.

As I mentioned previously there is a guitar here. I have played it now. People were diggin it. The guitar is somewhere between ten and thirty years old by the looks of it and oddly made in Korea not Japan.

Now we are in the workshop and we are installing the CentOS linux distro. I could pretty much do this at 4am while drunk driving the length of the 110 with a laptop on my dashboard but it’s still fun to do it with a guy telling you how to in a language you don’t understand. Their presentation is very detailed so I can follow it mainly. That and English pops up every now and then such as ‘root password’ and ‘time zone’.

The bento lunch was awesome. Breaded pork cutlet with some worchestershire sauce. That w word is simply pronounced uster in Japanese. Not to be confused with oyster sauce.

In closing Izu iz rad. There’s a jacuzzi, hot indoor pool thing, pool tables, a karaoke room and as mentioned a guitar and crazy spiders (outside). You can see the ocean or bay or whatnot and it looks gorgeous. This is the most vacation I think I’ve ever had. And mainly I’m not running around playing tourist. Yay!

Riding a bullet train. This fulfills a childhood fantasy of some sort. Smooth, clean, etc. No iPhones or service out here and that’s ok.

Japanese people at least in Tokyo and whatnot are sharply dressed. I suppose it’s a business thing. But yeah even the hipster are in designer distressed garb that somehow seems to work.

I’m waiting in a cab to go to LAX. Flying from there to Japan. Hoping to catalogue this journey in full multimedia and may or may not distribute it on CD-ROM at a later date. I am quite sure that my main interactions with Japan, outside of knowing awesome Japanese people, have been through video games. Also, big fan of ninjas. This is the prototypical boring blog post before something exciting happens that I won’t write about.

oh and there will be photos.