:: The Ruminant ::

The Ruminant's first visitor, amayamaya, left a nice comment requesting more posts. Just as retailers often display their first dollar, I am going to display this first comment for a while. Rest assured, amayamaya, when I get my thirty minutes of fame, you will have your fifteen. I hope I'm not too selfish to keep some of the fame for myself.

:: Sunday, June 29, 2003 ::

My Quest

I just got back from the opening social at the conference. I had wine and beer and gin and tonic and possibly some olives. I didn't take any videos this time though (especially not of myself...). Now that I've been here three years in a row people are recognizing me and talking to me like I'm a real research guy. Its neat.

I have to admit something: the Kirin beer, the sushi, even the Pocari Sweat are all things that I can acquire at home. I've been slightly frustrated in my quest for something truly Japanese, that I can't get at the grocery store by my house. I've decided to seek out octopus ice cream. I've also heard that there is a kind of canned sake that has an auto-heating button so its hot when you pour it. These and other strangely authentic Japanese items are my quest for this trip. I already found sesame ice cream. As soon as I figure a way to get some Japanese cash, I'm having a scoop.


:: Chris 4:26 AM [+] ::
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Beer or Something Like It

Ohayo! I am now in Japan. I am upside down, and it is currently tommorrow. I am staying at the Navios Yokohama, which is a hotel built to house foreign seamen such as myself. There's an International Seamen's Club downstairs. I can't seem to get any cash out of the ATMs here, but there's a market next to the hotel that sells grocery items and all other products of human design. And they take VISA. I feel pretty dehydrated after my long trip (especially after my long trek through the wrong side of town), so I picked up a bottle of Pocari Sweat to replenish my ions


The label says "Pocari Sweat is a healthy beverage that smoothly supplies the lost water and electrolytes during perspiration. With the appropriate density and electrolytes, close to that of human body fluid, it can be easily absorbed into the body." It tastes like sea water sweetened with lemon.

I picked up a sushi lunch at the market and brought it home. The housekeeping staff had been by (and they had been nice enough to prop my door open so I wouldn't have to fish for my key). I was amazed by what they did. They restored the room to the state it had been in when I arrived, and the organized my things for me. They even folded my dirty underwear:


I decided to wash down my lunch with what I think is a Japanese beer. It's called "Gokunama", and while it doesn't identify itself as beer, it is brewed. On the can is printed "Kirin's passion combined with its brewing technology brings you the masterpiece of Happo-shu. A refreshing taste you will never forget. Enjoy it on any occasion." It tastes like PBR.


My hotel room has broadband internet service (although there's an extra charge for it). It also has a smart toilet which works as a bidet, although I'm not into that French stuff. There's a big sign on the toilet warning not to spill water of it because of electrical shock risk. Actually, I've noticed, there are large caution signs on almost everything in Japan. In the back of the manual of most electrical appliances and gadgets there is a page of warnings, disclaimers, and compliance notices. I guess in Japan they have to actually make that page into a sticker and put it on the product.

Well, I'm off to do some more exploring. Here is a photo of me, which clearly confirms my claims that I am in Japan.



:: Chris 9:17 PM [+] ::
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Yin and Tang

Edmonton is green and beautiful, now that summer has technically arrived. Its been cold and rainy over the past few days, but now the sun is out again and things are warming up. I kind of like the cycles; by the time I get fed up with the heat, the weather cools off, and vice versa.

There are a lot of nice things about living in Edmonton, but there sure does seem to be a lot of stupid, petty crime. Some punk keeps sneaking into our parking garage and stealing things and setting off the fire alarm. It must be hilarious to watch dozens of people pour out of the high rise and wait while the fire department looks for signs of actual fire. I'd almost find it amusing, except that last time the building actually was on fire. Someone decided to throw fire down the garbage chute. Burning garbage. Jeezus.

I have to write about this eventually: someone keyed my car. They put a big, deep scratch in it running from the back of the car to the front on the passenger side. The scratch covers both doors and the front and rear side panels. The parts I just had fixed. If I caught the little bastard who did that I'd be selling his internal organs to pay for the repair work.

In better news, my chip has been approved for fabrication in August, which I wasn't expecting since I applied two weeks after the dealine. The bad news is that now I have to start working on it again. I'm going to Japan on Thursday. I'll be back on July 5. Then I go to a conference in Calgary on the 10th or so. Then there's something in Banff a week or two later. Its nice to be so active at conferences and to have so many publications, but it would be nice to have the time to do some actual research work. I suppose I'll have to work 'round the clock on the three or four days when I'm not traveling.

I need a bulldozer to clear my workload. Failing that, I take solace in large amounts of coffee. I also indulge in orange soda, and various other orange products such as Cheetos. According to Oprah, I should have diabetes by the end of the summer. Truly the good and the bad dwell in each other.


:: Chris 8:40 AM [+] ::
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Frenzy

It has been eons since I updated the Ruminant. After I got back from Montreal I had to scurry to finish my chip design. I started working 10 hour days, then 12 hours, then 16... As of the deadline -- June 4 -- I had only slept a handful of hours during the week. In the last hours approaching the dealine I had a layout-vs-schematic error. Of about 100,000 connections, 256 were in the wrong spot. The error was fairly basic, but in my sleep-deprived state I couldn't seem to fix one error without creating another one right next to it. In the end, the design didn't make it do to a single error in a single cell, which I simply couldn't track down in time for submission. So now we're postponed for a few months.

Of course that doesn't mean I've been sleeping; over the past three weeks I've been feverishly working on a book chapter and journal and conference papers. My advisor suggested that an old report of mine might be updated and used as the basis for a chapter in a new revision of his book. This sounded great to me, although as the work progressed "updating" evolved into "completely replace the content with new, comparatively unfamiliar material." So I've had to make myself a minor expert on the subject. Back to 16 hour days...
:: Chris 11:29 AM [+] ::
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