Sunday, December 07, 2003
Bread & Cheese
11/21/03 - Friday
I had to give my presentation on this day. It was in the evening, so I wasn't able to go to the Bible Reading Club. The presentation went OK, but not as well as I should have been able to do it. See, Yoshizawa-sensei had given me a paper to read and said that I should do a PowerPoint presentation on that paper. So I read the paper and prepared a presentation outlining it. I did it the same way that I would have done it for a book report at school or something like that. Basically, something to let the teacher know that you read the paper. Unfortunately, after the presentation I discovered that this wasn't exactly what they wanted. Neither the professor nor any of the other people in the lab had read the paper, and my presentation was supposed to teach them everything they might want to know from the paper. This meant that instead of saying what kind of modeling the group that wrote the paper was using I should have explained all of the equations that that consisted of. I had left all of the equations out of the presentation, since they were just details about how exactly those modeling methods were used and I thought the presentation was supposed to be more of an overview. I guess I've learned my lesson now, and next time I'll try to do it right.
After the presentation Yoshizawa-sensei assigned me to work with the lady (Suzuki-san?) in our lab who is working on lower body rehabilitation. He said she should first teach me how to use a VR programming API called WorldToolKit. He also said that I should present my progress on Dec. 18.
Suzuki-san gave me a really big book about how to use WTK. Thankfully it's written in fairly simple English, so it's not that hard to read (except that it's not all that interesting so I have to fight to stay awake). She also provided me with a PC to use when programing with WTK, but it was running the Japanese version of Windows2000. I asked if it was possible to switch it to English, so we got the English version of Win2K from Paul, and I installed it in a separate directory. Unfortunately, despite trying various different things, the English version would not display any of the Japanese text. Installing the Japanese component of Win2K let me type Japanese text documents, but it still would just display gibberish when I tried running the Japanese version of MS Visual Studio. I ended up going back to the Japanese version of Win2K because having an OS in English is useless if it means all the text is your programs is turned into gibberish. Better to have a Japanese OS and Japanese text, since then I have a chance of being able to read things.
After giving up on getting the computer to be usable with English I headed back to the kaikan. Kaikan is the Japanese word for "meeting hall," and is also the last part of the Japanese name for the International House (the Japanese is literally "International (cultural) Exchange Meeting Hall"). Most of us have been calling it "the kaikan" when we're talking with each other, so I'm going to call it that instead of the Int. House.
When I got back, Mitsu, Chris, and Chris's (Japanese) girlfriend stopped by to see if they could play DDR. Unfortunately I'd been having some severe problems with my hard drive in my laptop, and was in the middle of running fsck to try to fix it enough to boot again. Starting about a week or two before, I'd been having my computer freeze up about once or twice a day, usually when I launched iTunes or plugged in my iPod. Often, I wouldn't be able to boot the machine until I'd run fsck once or twice after the crash. Most of the time it fixed some problems, but for quite a while there was a problem with the catalog extents file that it said it fixed every time, but which would show up every time I ran it. Anyway, after running fsck once or twice I would be able to boot the machine and use it for a while before it would crash again. I'll talk more about this in my Sunday entry.
Since we couldn't play DDR, we headed to Mitsu's room to play Mario Kart Double Dash (it's a GameCube version of Mario Kart). We played a bunch of Match Races (4 player, each player driving a car), but since this was only my second time playing it I lost almost every race. The other time I played it we were playing Battle Mode. There are now several different types of Battle Mode. The one I played earlier was where you drove around, picked up bombs, and then tried to hit the other players with your bombs. If you hit someone, you gained a point, and if you got hit you lost one. The first player up to 5 points (or something like that) won the round. There are also at least 2 ways to play Match Race and GP: one where each player is driving their own car, and one where players are teamed up. If you're teamed up, one person is driving the car and the other person rides on the back of the car and is in charge of the objects. I'm not sure if they can do anything to affect the speed of the car or anything like that.
After playing all of the courses at least once, we headed back to my room where we played DDR for a little while before finally going to bed. I think I didn't get to bed until after 2:00 AM.
11/22/03 - Saturday
Saturday I took the bus downtown. I was planning to go to Yodabashi to finally look at digital cameras, since I still don't have a camera and I've missed a lot of good photo opportunities. On my way, I stopped at the Sakurano store near the station, because I'd heard that they had a bakery with good bread in the basement of the store.
I felt a bit self-conscious walking into the store since it was a clothing store and I saw only females inside. However, once I went down into the basement there were enough males around to make me feel like I wasn't out of place (if you ignore the fact that I'm not Japanese). After wandering around a bit I succeeded in locating the bakery I'd heard about, and proceeded to acquire 2 loaves of bread at 200¥ a piece. One was a sort of white bread, while the other was probably similar to half-rye bread.
Having made my purchase, I headed through the station to Yodabashi Camera. There I spent a fair amount of time wandering around just looking at stuff (computer stuff, speakers, CD-Rs, etc.). I eventually went to the cell phone area, and after failing to locate a Bluetooth adapter for my cell phone I finally asked one of the attendants if they had one. He didn't know what I was talking about, so I showed him the note in the handbook for my phone that said there was a Bluetooth adapter for my cell phone. He went to ask, and eventually came back and tried to explain to me what he'd learned about it. I understood that they didn't have it in the store, but then he tried explaining something that I didn't understand. He took me over to their stand where they had a guy with a badge that said something like "Ask me. I speak English." Unfortunately, of all the people who have tried to speak English with me in Japan, he seemed to know the least English. I think what they were trying to communicate to me was that they didn't have it in stock because my phone is a newer model, but that they were getting a shipment of equipment from au (the company my cell phone is from) on Tuesday. In addition to that, I think they were trying to say that they didn't know if it would be in that shipment or not, and that they couldn't call au to ask since it was a holiday weekend (Monday was national labor thanksgiving day or something like that). Anyway, they said that I could come back on Tuesday and ask.
After thanking the cell phone salesmen I went over to the digital camera section to look for a camera that wouldn't be too expensive or bulky, but that would still take good pictures. While I was looking at them, a saleswoman came up to me and asked me (in really good English) if I had any questions. She was also wearing one of those "I speak English" badges, so I guess some of the people there can actually speak English after all. I told her I was just looking for now, and went back to browsing the displays. There were quite a few people looking at cameras, so it was fairly hard to get to some of them, and all of the ones that didn't come with a dock to charge the camera had dead batteries. I saw two that I thought I might like, and brought home the brochure for one. I couldn't find the brochure for the other, but figured I could look it up online. My plan was to read up about those models online before making a decision.
On my way back from Yodabashi I decided to take a look at the stores in the basement of Sendai Station. There I went to an import store, and ended up buying a small block of mozzarella cheese imported from Germany. I took the bus back, and cut up one of my loaves of bread and had mozzarella cheese sandwiches. I really miss being able to eat cheese and good bread. Back in Wisconsin I thought I didn't eat much cheese, but I guess I eat a lot more than Japanese people do.
11/23/03 - Sunday
I spent a fair part of the day on Sunday trying to fix my computer. Since my computer automatically launches iTunes when I plug my iPod in and iTunes had been freezing up my computer quite frequently I had was having quite a few freezes when plugging in my iPod. I use iTunes to sync my music to the iPod, and the iPod charges it's battery from the computer when it's plugged into it, so I really wanted to figure out what was wrong and fix it. While looking through one of the error logs after a crash I noticed that there was an error message about the file system on my iPod, so I booted from the System CD and scanned the iPod for errors. It turns out that my iPod also had a corrupt catalog extents file. My guess is that the problem started on my laptop's hard drive and then at some point when this caused a freeze while I was syncing my iPod it corrupted the iPod, after which syncing the iPod would fail because the iPod's filesystem was corrupt. Anyway, I then succeeded in running the iPod Software to reformat the iPod, after which the iPod once again had a clean filesystem. I then tried using iTunes to put all my music back onto the iPod, but this froze my machine after about 30 songs. When I rebooted fsck listed 2 of my music files as having problems, so I manually removed them and ran fsck, which then came out clean. I rebooted, and ever since then I haven't had any more problems.
11/24/03 - Monday
Today I used up the rest of my pancake mix and made some pancakes, since it was a holiday. I get the impression that Japan has quite a few more holidays than the US.
11/25/03 - Tuesday
We had quite a lot of rain on Tuesday. When I got back to the kaikan I was completely soaked. That morning I'd gotten a notice in my mailbox that they had a package for me, so that evening I went and got the guard to go get the package out of the office for me. It contained a bicycle helmet my father sent me. I'd also received the RAM I'd ordered for my laptop that morning, so I borrowed a screw driver from Mitsu and installed the RAM. I'd read many reports about RAM not working in my particular laptop model, but thankfully the RAM I got seems to work just fine. I ordered it from a place that said they tested all of the modules in this model to make sure that they work before they send them, since I didn't want to have to worry about trying to return faulty RAM. Later that night there was a power outage in the kaikan. I was using my computer at the time, and all of a sudden the lights went out, then came back, then went out, then came back, and then went out again and stayed out for several hours.
11/26/03 - Wednesday
I've got nothing written down in my outline of what to write for this day, so I think nothing interesting happened. Sorry.
I had to give my presentation on this day. It was in the evening, so I wasn't able to go to the Bible Reading Club. The presentation went OK, but not as well as I should have been able to do it. See, Yoshizawa-sensei had given me a paper to read and said that I should do a PowerPoint presentation on that paper. So I read the paper and prepared a presentation outlining it. I did it the same way that I would have done it for a book report at school or something like that. Basically, something to let the teacher know that you read the paper. Unfortunately, after the presentation I discovered that this wasn't exactly what they wanted. Neither the professor nor any of the other people in the lab had read the paper, and my presentation was supposed to teach them everything they might want to know from the paper. This meant that instead of saying what kind of modeling the group that wrote the paper was using I should have explained all of the equations that that consisted of. I had left all of the equations out of the presentation, since they were just details about how exactly those modeling methods were used and I thought the presentation was supposed to be more of an overview. I guess I've learned my lesson now, and next time I'll try to do it right.
After the presentation Yoshizawa-sensei assigned me to work with the lady (Suzuki-san?) in our lab who is working on lower body rehabilitation. He said she should first teach me how to use a VR programming API called WorldToolKit. He also said that I should present my progress on Dec. 18.
Suzuki-san gave me a really big book about how to use WTK. Thankfully it's written in fairly simple English, so it's not that hard to read (except that it's not all that interesting so I have to fight to stay awake). She also provided me with a PC to use when programing with WTK, but it was running the Japanese version of Windows2000. I asked if it was possible to switch it to English, so we got the English version of Win2K from Paul, and I installed it in a separate directory. Unfortunately, despite trying various different things, the English version would not display any of the Japanese text. Installing the Japanese component of Win2K let me type Japanese text documents, but it still would just display gibberish when I tried running the Japanese version of MS Visual Studio. I ended up going back to the Japanese version of Win2K because having an OS in English is useless if it means all the text is your programs is turned into gibberish. Better to have a Japanese OS and Japanese text, since then I have a chance of being able to read things.
After giving up on getting the computer to be usable with English I headed back to the kaikan. Kaikan is the Japanese word for "meeting hall," and is also the last part of the Japanese name for the International House (the Japanese is literally "International (cultural) Exchange Meeting Hall"). Most of us have been calling it "the kaikan" when we're talking with each other, so I'm going to call it that instead of the Int. House.
When I got back, Mitsu, Chris, and Chris's (Japanese) girlfriend stopped by to see if they could play DDR. Unfortunately I'd been having some severe problems with my hard drive in my laptop, and was in the middle of running fsck to try to fix it enough to boot again. Starting about a week or two before, I'd been having my computer freeze up about once or twice a day, usually when I launched iTunes or plugged in my iPod. Often, I wouldn't be able to boot the machine until I'd run fsck once or twice after the crash. Most of the time it fixed some problems, but for quite a while there was a problem with the catalog extents file that it said it fixed every time, but which would show up every time I ran it. Anyway, after running fsck once or twice I would be able to boot the machine and use it for a while before it would crash again. I'll talk more about this in my Sunday entry.
Since we couldn't play DDR, we headed to Mitsu's room to play Mario Kart Double Dash (it's a GameCube version of Mario Kart). We played a bunch of Match Races (4 player, each player driving a car), but since this was only my second time playing it I lost almost every race. The other time I played it we were playing Battle Mode. There are now several different types of Battle Mode. The one I played earlier was where you drove around, picked up bombs, and then tried to hit the other players with your bombs. If you hit someone, you gained a point, and if you got hit you lost one. The first player up to 5 points (or something like that) won the round. There are also at least 2 ways to play Match Race and GP: one where each player is driving their own car, and one where players are teamed up. If you're teamed up, one person is driving the car and the other person rides on the back of the car and is in charge of the objects. I'm not sure if they can do anything to affect the speed of the car or anything like that.
After playing all of the courses at least once, we headed back to my room where we played DDR for a little while before finally going to bed. I think I didn't get to bed until after 2:00 AM.
11/22/03 - Saturday
Saturday I took the bus downtown. I was planning to go to Yodabashi to finally look at digital cameras, since I still don't have a camera and I've missed a lot of good photo opportunities. On my way, I stopped at the Sakurano store near the station, because I'd heard that they had a bakery with good bread in the basement of the store.
I felt a bit self-conscious walking into the store since it was a clothing store and I saw only females inside. However, once I went down into the basement there were enough males around to make me feel like I wasn't out of place (if you ignore the fact that I'm not Japanese). After wandering around a bit I succeeded in locating the bakery I'd heard about, and proceeded to acquire 2 loaves of bread at 200¥ a piece. One was a sort of white bread, while the other was probably similar to half-rye bread.
Having made my purchase, I headed through the station to Yodabashi Camera. There I spent a fair amount of time wandering around just looking at stuff (computer stuff, speakers, CD-Rs, etc.). I eventually went to the cell phone area, and after failing to locate a Bluetooth adapter for my cell phone I finally asked one of the attendants if they had one. He didn't know what I was talking about, so I showed him the note in the handbook for my phone that said there was a Bluetooth adapter for my cell phone. He went to ask, and eventually came back and tried to explain to me what he'd learned about it. I understood that they didn't have it in the store, but then he tried explaining something that I didn't understand. He took me over to their stand where they had a guy with a badge that said something like "Ask me. I speak English." Unfortunately, of all the people who have tried to speak English with me in Japan, he seemed to know the least English. I think what they were trying to communicate to me was that they didn't have it in stock because my phone is a newer model, but that they were getting a shipment of equipment from au (the company my cell phone is from) on Tuesday. In addition to that, I think they were trying to say that they didn't know if it would be in that shipment or not, and that they couldn't call au to ask since it was a holiday weekend (Monday was national labor thanksgiving day or something like that). Anyway, they said that I could come back on Tuesday and ask.
After thanking the cell phone salesmen I went over to the digital camera section to look for a camera that wouldn't be too expensive or bulky, but that would still take good pictures. While I was looking at them, a saleswoman came up to me and asked me (in really good English) if I had any questions. She was also wearing one of those "I speak English" badges, so I guess some of the people there can actually speak English after all. I told her I was just looking for now, and went back to browsing the displays. There were quite a few people looking at cameras, so it was fairly hard to get to some of them, and all of the ones that didn't come with a dock to charge the camera had dead batteries. I saw two that I thought I might like, and brought home the brochure for one. I couldn't find the brochure for the other, but figured I could look it up online. My plan was to read up about those models online before making a decision.
On my way back from Yodabashi I decided to take a look at the stores in the basement of Sendai Station. There I went to an import store, and ended up buying a small block of mozzarella cheese imported from Germany. I took the bus back, and cut up one of my loaves of bread and had mozzarella cheese sandwiches. I really miss being able to eat cheese and good bread. Back in Wisconsin I thought I didn't eat much cheese, but I guess I eat a lot more than Japanese people do.
11/23/03 - Sunday
I spent a fair part of the day on Sunday trying to fix my computer. Since my computer automatically launches iTunes when I plug my iPod in and iTunes had been freezing up my computer quite frequently I had was having quite a few freezes when plugging in my iPod. I use iTunes to sync my music to the iPod, and the iPod charges it's battery from the computer when it's plugged into it, so I really wanted to figure out what was wrong and fix it. While looking through one of the error logs after a crash I noticed that there was an error message about the file system on my iPod, so I booted from the System CD and scanned the iPod for errors. It turns out that my iPod also had a corrupt catalog extents file. My guess is that the problem started on my laptop's hard drive and then at some point when this caused a freeze while I was syncing my iPod it corrupted the iPod, after which syncing the iPod would fail because the iPod's filesystem was corrupt. Anyway, I then succeeded in running the iPod Software to reformat the iPod, after which the iPod once again had a clean filesystem. I then tried using iTunes to put all my music back onto the iPod, but this froze my machine after about 30 songs. When I rebooted fsck listed 2 of my music files as having problems, so I manually removed them and ran fsck, which then came out clean. I rebooted, and ever since then I haven't had any more problems.
11/24/03 - Monday
Today I used up the rest of my pancake mix and made some pancakes, since it was a holiday. I get the impression that Japan has quite a few more holidays than the US.
11/25/03 - Tuesday
We had quite a lot of rain on Tuesday. When I got back to the kaikan I was completely soaked. That morning I'd gotten a notice in my mailbox that they had a package for me, so that evening I went and got the guard to go get the package out of the office for me. It contained a bicycle helmet my father sent me. I'd also received the RAM I'd ordered for my laptop that morning, so I borrowed a screw driver from Mitsu and installed the RAM. I'd read many reports about RAM not working in my particular laptop model, but thankfully the RAM I got seems to work just fine. I ordered it from a place that said they tested all of the modules in this model to make sure that they work before they send them, since I didn't want to have to worry about trying to return faulty RAM. Later that night there was a power outage in the kaikan. I was using my computer at the time, and all of a sudden the lights went out, then came back, then went out, then came back, and then went out again and stayed out for several hours.
11/26/03 - Wednesday
I've got nothing written down in my outline of what to write for this day, so I think nothing interesting happened. Sorry.
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