I’ve been in Japan for a bit now, and as I’ve subtly alluded to, I’m not sleeping on the streets. Previously, I’ve mentioned that some sort of apartment exists, but I’ve not really gone into more detail than that. The purpose of this post is to shed some light onto the nature of my living conditions. To that end, this post will probably be pretty short because the apartment is small and generally, apartments are not very interesting. This post will be divided up into 4 short sections: my room, the kitchen, the toilet, and the bathroom. (more…)
I was going to write this awhile ago, but I broke my chair again. They haven’t replaced it yet, but there’s a second hand shop below my apartment, so I bought a real chair there for about $10. It’s so amazing. One of the best decisions I’ve made in my short life.
The title of this post is pretty vague; this isn’t going to be some kind of guide. Really, I’m just going to describe some of the hoops I had to jump through as a foreigner in the land of the rising sun. Foreigners are called gaijin in Japan, so I’ll use that term from now on. Unlike in the US, the term is not considered offensive, and it’s not uncommon for people and signs to address outsiders as simply ‘gaijin.’ (more…)
Another installment of my life in Japan.
Narita is a pretty simple airport so I didn’t have much trouble with it. I changed about 100 dollars into yen, and then withdrew about 300 more from an ATM. I did the cash exchange simply because you never know when an american bank will decide to not let you have money overseas. I had let them know beforehand of course, but this was to be on the safe side. (more…)
So the point of short blog posts was to make them frequent in easy to digests bits of goodness (or badness I guess). I think I would have been able to achieve that if it hadn’t been for an unfortunate accident. At the beginning of last week, I sat down in my chair and it broke. I believe there were two reasons for this terrible accident.
- The chair was small and crappy.
- I’m pretty damn heavy.
It took about a week for me to get a new chair, and then I went away for the weekend, so now during the last few minutes of my lunch break, I’m writing a post about airplanes. (more…)
Summer is fully here and once again I find myself in Japan. This time, however, I’m not here as a tourist but as a productive member of society. Or something like that. Through the MIT Japan program (info here), I’ve landed an internship with everyone’s favorite gaming company Square Enix. Square Enix is great because not only do they make games (which is fun but not always exciting) but they also have an Advanced Research Group which does cutting edge work in fields related to game technology.
My goal (with this blog) this time around is to have short posts which generally concern one thing. We’ll see if I’ll actually be able to work that out or not, but I’ll try. This post represents the introduction to my stay and won’t cover anything specific. As a preview of the next episodes, I’ll talk about my flight over here, my apartment, registering as a foreigner, and opening a bank account. Of course, I also have posts written about non Japan related topics which I’ll post intermittently as well. I’ll try to post some explanatory things which will help people get only the topics they want.
For now, my room:
So, I’ve been pretty bad about posting but I don’t really care because I have plenty of other things to do when I’m not posting.
A lot of times when I post, I just talk about everything since the last time I posted, which is in general not the optimal way to post. Post get long and have all sorts of different topics. What’s the point of having categories if every post has all of them.
So this post will be about my classes. I only have 4 classes which is the smallest number of classes I’ve had since the forced credit limit my first semester at MIT. It’s actually pretty nice not having to do work every second of the day. Even so, it always seems like I’m rushing to finish things, but I write that off to inefficient use of time.
Now for my classes:
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So, I’ve been meaing to do it for quite a long time, but I finally have pictures of my Japan trip uploaded. There are no comments but if you have questions about any of the pics just ask.
Find them here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2043889&l=2fe3d&id=707991
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2043890&l=14685&id=707991
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2043893&l=47d1c&id=707991
Well, people, enjoy. Those are my favorites. I have many more pictures of statues and what not, but I didn’t think they were interesting enough to bore everyone with.
So, I was having a blast writing all sorts of colorful prose for this post and then realized that long posts are crappy mcCrapCrap, and this is my attempt to improve upon that.
My semester is over. It is again best described as mediocre in terms of results, which seems to compound my growing belief that I can’t cheat time. Here’s a list:
- Secret to School: Always attend classes, ALWAYS.
- Grades are a poor measure of understanding due to their arbitrary nature.
- Thus a Corollary to 1: Become friends with the people who assign grades.
- 5 classes + 3 jobs + 2 extracurriculars == A not sustainable schedule.
- Patrick H. Winston is a good person and a great teacher.
- I like coding quite a lot.
- Square-Enix? I still have hope.
So, it was still a lot of lines, but concise, and not as full of my usually verbose pageantry.
Well, it’s been slightly more than a month since I last posted and sadly the reason isn’t that I have little to say just that I have so little time to say it. I keep a list of things to blog about but I never get around to the interesting things because I’m just trying to talk about the less interesting things which make up the majority of my life. So, in the interest of that, here’s a recap.
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So, the other day I took a few hours out of my busy schedule to fix things on my site that have been needed to be fixed for a few months. Here’s a description of the changes:
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