Parentheticals

Apparently jet lag from Japan to the US is worse than the reverse (that or the fact that I have been staying up late reading (even though I know that I shouldn't be)). Being back is good, though. Sara and Andrea are adjusting to being back with the family again and we are getting back into the swing of things. I recently discovered  androminion , a android phone version of dominion which you can play against bots. The bots are pretty dumb, but it is fairly fun if you have a few minutes to kill. My Haskell neural network has run into some problems. When I try to train it with too many training examples all at once it runs into stack overflows. I need to figure out how to convince the Haskell compiler to compile my training algorithm to not use recursion (which is apparently possible, just not entirely easy to do). I have been really tempted to rewrite the NN in C# so that I can just get it to master tic tac toe and move on to Polynesia or Dancing Robots, but I really would l...

Monday we checked out of our hotel and went to the beach north of town. We accidentally missed the beach because we didn't get off of the bus at the right time, but the bus driver saw our concern and expelled us from the bus with directions on how to get to a bus going in the opposite direction (he also didn't charge us for our ride since we didn't get to where we wanted to go (Japanese people are very kind)). We saw a shrine by accident on the way to the beach and ate some Chinese food by accident on the way back from the beach. The beach was cold and windy. The sand was blowing everywhere. They also had large cement Xs and jacks all over the place (by large I mean 6 feet across or more). I realize that I should have taken pictures of it now that I look back at it. My picture discipline on the last few days was pretty lax. After that we got on a night bus to Tokyo for our final day in Japan. We decided to blitz Tokyo and visit every major site in the cit...

Unexpectedly I met someone from home today. Small world isn't it? He said to tell his mom and Daniel hi.

Wednesday We tried to take it easy for the day. We planned to go to Kiyomizudera, one of the top 5 sites in everybody's lists. It was very beautiful, but it was also under construction, so it wasn't as cool as it could have been. It was also a much farther and steeper walk than we were expecting. We saw an 11 story stone pagoda (which was way smaller than we were expecting), a beautiful forest, and a large shrine. On the way back we bought honey and sesame ice cream (tasty), a kimono for Alison (which was purple), and we stopped at Fushimi Inari and got a gift for Andrea. We couldn't find one for Sara. Thursday We packed up and left our apartment for the final time and left our luggage in a coin locker for the last day that we spent in Kyoto. We went to Kinkakuji and saw the golden pavilion (which is actually plated in gold (apparently some people have nothing better to do with their money than use it as siding)). While there we ate a 'Coolis...

We spent yesterday in Osaka. We bought a lot of food while there: takoyaki, okonomiyaki, yakisoba, a bun filled with melon flavored cream, a crunchy angel food bun, and various beverages. I need to do a post on all of the beverages that we have had while in Japan. Takoyaki is fried balls of octopus that have been breaded. Ours were served in the traditional manner (super hot with barbecue sauce, dried octopus flakes, and other toppings). They were crisp on the outside and gooey in the center. They were very tasty, though you couldn't really notice the octopus with all of the dough. My pictures turned out blurry, so perhaps we will have to have them again. The okonomiyaki we had had shrimp, octopus, and pork in it (also cabbage - they always have cabbage). It was topped with barbecue sauce as well as Japanese mustard. It was hot on the outside and gooey in the middle just like the takoyaki. It was very tasty, and when we make okonomiyaki in the future,...

Yesterday we went to the castle Nijo-jo . It was very beautiful (albeit in a different way than European castles.) The first thing to strike me was the massive thickness of the surrounding walls. It was truly cyclopean in construction. The castle itself was very comfortable feeling. The rooms were reasonably sized, the castle was warm, the floor was smooth, and the walls were painted with beautiful paintings of animals and scenery. One pattern that we have discovered in Japan is that everything burns down. If you go to a historic site and read the history of it, it will have burned down. Probably it will have burned down multiple times. You would stand the same chance as a blind rat has in a room full of pumas to find a historic site in japan that has not burned down. If you did, it is probably under water. Nijo-jo castle burned down, and then was replaced by another castle from a completely different part of Japan. They moved the whole castle. My guess is that the enti...

...and every corner has it's shrine. Our first full day in Japan was a stunning success. Apart from aching feet we sustained no injuries. We met a guy from each of Singapore, Malaysia, France, and Sweden (This lady who is doing the home-stay has a sizable house and is renting a lot of rooms out.) We walked up to  Shimo Daigo-ji  temple, and then to numerous other smaller temples and shrines. As we walked down the road we would discover small Shinto and Buddhist shrines all over the place. We saw small unlabeled walking paths all over the city which ended in shrine after shrine. One place in particular we found what looked like a graveyard of idols (It looks as if some construction crew gathered all of the stone idols in a complex of shrines and piled them up outside of the place where they were constructing a complex of buildings.) Shimo Daigo-ji was beautiful. We spent the better part of a day there. There were still some cherry...

We were awoken by a crow this morning. It was cawing outside our window. Here is our homestay. We arrived last night one hour later than we expected to (Which is pretty good all things considered since the plane had some 'Routine Maintenance' (Which also had some 'Routine Paperwork' associated with it Which took about half an hour) not to mention that it took us two days longer to get to Japan than we had expected and we missed our chance to stay in a Manga cafe.) We decided while we were waiting to get out flight to Japan that we have a vacation jinx. The first night of every vacation that we have ever traveled to as just the two of us has had some sort of disaster and we have never slept in the location that we planned to. This has happened three times, and it seems to be getting worse. (this time it lasted for two days for instance). The plane ride was fairly uneventful. We watched Brave and Galaxy Quest, practiced out Japanese, read various books, and ate...

We are now in our homestay in Kyoto. I will do a more extensive post after a full nights sleep (it should suffice to say right now that we are healthy, happy, and exhausted.) 11 hours of flying is quite a bit.

We are now in Seattle. Our next flight leaves in 2 hours. Alison and I came up with a word game. Try to find a word that maximizes the following function: let c = Number of consonants in word let v = Number of vowels in word let s = Number of syllables in word fn(w) = c*v/s Our top three words so far are: 3) Stretched (14) 2) Schooled (15) 1) Stealthed (18) All Japanese words tend to  have a low score. French words are pretty high. Double vowels and consonant blends are important to get a good score. I am now judging all my friends by their score. People with high scores will be more important to me emotionally.

After intense wrangling we are flying to Japan today. We missed our chance to spend the night in a Mangakissa , but that was mainly for fun. Perhaps next time we go to Japan we will try it out. We will be getting home at on Tuesday the 23rd, so until then don't expect us to be super responsive to inquiries. I will post updates to Google+ as well. I got an email about Dancing Robots from a guy who was reviewing the game recently. He made a lot of good observations. I have incorporated a lot of stuff from his comments into the game, but am not yet entirely done. I have removed about half of the symbols from the game, but I am having problems with figuring out what to do with Disco cards (as they have a slightly different set of requirements than other cards). Perhaps on the flight I will finish the modifications and be able to post them when we arrive in Kyoto.

The first day of our trip to Japan was not successful. We will be flying out to Japan some time this week for sure, but when you have tickets with the wrong names on them things don't go so smoothly.