Let me clarify that. It’s nice to be thought of, most of the time. It depends on what the thoughts are I guess. For example, if someone is thinking of a way that they could annoy me from afar then I’d rather they thought about somebody else.
Case in point: my friend in Tokyo spotted this note at a temple in Tokyo. I’ve something of a penchant for cryptography so I found this incredibly frustrating. After some (okay, a lot of) research I thought it must be some form of Vigenere encryption and attempted to break it with some frequency analysis. Unfortunately I think that this was always doomed to end in failure as I suspect that the original message isn’t in English. The clue was the Roman numeral used to denote the month in the date which is apparently used in Poland, Serbia and Hungary. All I need to do now is seed the algorithm with letter frequencies from these and other languages.
Oh well, it’s not like I actually need to sleep.
I enjoy working with like-minded people: the kind of petty pedant1 that immediately spots the flaws in statements like “only five people died during the construction of the Empire State Building” or spends time debating whether replay television channels should be named +1 or −1. I believe that it’s something inherent to jobs that involve some level of computer programming and the precision required. Computers are still pretty dumb but they make up for this in terms of sheer processing power. If you’re not precise when giving instructions then strange things happen.
It took me longer than I care to admit to remember how to concatenate strings in JavaScript last Monday morning but things started to come back to me pretty quickly and, by mid-afternoon, my muscle memory had kicked in to aid with passwords and the like. I may no longer remember how to work the toaster in the office but my OCD / kitchen Nazism is still as rampant as ever.
My first week back at the coal face was rounded off with a bit of excitement and a surprise visitor on Friday afternoon when a young seagull wandered into reception for a quick look around.
1 These same people will no doubt check my HTML source code to ensure that I’ve used the correct character at the end of this sentence.
It’s Sunday night and I have the mother of all Monday fears. It’ll be my first day back in the office tomorrow after taking three months off. Thanks to keeping this blog updated on my travels, my typing isn’t too bad but I think getting my coding back up to speed may prove to be more of an issue!
I’ve been meaning to sit down and attempt to kick-start my mind a little this weekend but I’ve been otherwise engaged with catch-up drinks, birthday celebrations, leaving parties and soaking up the early Festival atmosphere on the Royal Mile and Spiegeltent. It’s apparent that I have missed the brief respite granted to the denizens of Edinburgh that occurs after most of the students depart and before the tourists arrive en masse.
In between the aforementioned distractions I did manage to get my head around a lookaround-based regular expression that was bugging me before I went on my travels so the weekend wasn’t a complete write-off on the programming front.
So that’s that over and done with. I traveled westwards by train, plane and automobile for over 31,000 miles until I got back to where I started out from a few months ago. I beat Phileas Fogg by a few days. I’ve eaten subs, grinders and hoagies. I’ve renewed friendships and forged some new ones. I’ve experimented with facial hair, driven for the first time in a decade, jumped from a really high building, rolled down a steep hill in a ball, fell out of a perfectly fine airplane, shaved my head, met my baby niece and just about melted my credit card to boot.
Continue reading ‘There and back again’
I was quite pleased to leave Japan behind. Don’t get me wrong: I quite like it there but, after nigh-on three months of living out of a bag, I was ready to go home. I was also a little fed up with not understanding practically anything that was going on around me. Most places that I’ve traveled to before I spoke a little of the language or could at least make an educated guess at what signs were telling me. Being immersed in a kind of audio/visual white noise for a week was pretty disconcerting.
Continue reading ‘Tokyo - London - Edinburgh (6,622 miles)’
Now I’m back home I’m going to take a couple of weeks to get used to the idea of actually working again. I can kind of still type thanks to keeping this blog but coding may be something else entirely.
I’ll be using the time to visit relatives and catch up with friends before heading back to Edinburgh so blog posts will be far less frequent than of late. I’ll be back with my thoughts and reminiscings from the last few months soon though!
Let me get this straight. Blowing my nose or eating while walking is considered to be extremely rude but apparently you can cough up a huge gob of phlegm and spit without anyone batting an eyelid?
Welcome to Japan: land of contradictions. It was supposed to be the rainy season while I was here but I didn’t see a drop of rain all week. I also didn’t experience an earthquake which I’m delighted about.
Here you can still smoke in restaurants but signs try to dissuade you from smoking while you are walking down the street.
I learned that those masks you see people wearing aren’t due to worries over pollution. They’ve for combating the spread of germs. Specifically, your germs. You know, so if you’re ill you can still go into the office and not contaminate anybody else. Surely, any culture that has a specific word set aside for death from overwork can’t be all that healthy. On the other hand, in the longevity stakes, Australia (even with its new-found fattest nation status) is number two to Japan.
It does kind of make me wonder what age people would live to here if everybody did suddenly stop smoking.
Today I purchased a day ticket for the Tokyo Metro and set off exploring, armed only with my iPhone subway map. I started off in the Sony Building, mainly slobbering over the 70″ Bravia (a snip at ¥4 million) and the stunningly slim XEL-1 OLED unit. After that I had a shoe shine outside Yūrakuchō station before jumping back on the tube and heading towards Tokyo.
Continue reading ‘Going underground’
Yesterday I took a trip to Akihabara - the electronics center of Tokyo. Gadgets, toys and flashing lights are everywhere there. It is quieter than usual at the moment after the horrific attack last month and the subsequent attack on a policeman a couple of weeks after. All the same, I thought that it was still pretty busy.
Today I met up with a friend and his mum who is over visiting too. After wandering through the gardens of the Imperial Palace this morning and having a sushi lunch on the grass, we tried to go to the Sumo Museum but it’s closed for the week unfortunately. In contrast to the wrestlers themselves it’s very small so it was no great loss. We headed to the nearby Edo-Tokyo Museum as planned. About halfway through the tour a petite Indonesian girl came up and asked me if she could have her photo taken with me purely because I was so tall.
We finished off the day with a bite to eat in Andy’s Shin Hinomoto. I’m not the biggest fan of raw fish. In fact I’m with the school of thought that suggests an alternative name for sushi: “bait”. Even still, the food was very nice. The place was really busy (I’m told that this is as per usual) but we managed to squeeze even though we hadn’t booked. I would suggest you do book if you ever want to go there.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time exploring the streets of Asakusa and had to take in Sensō-ji while I’m here. There has been a scaffolding forest growing around the area around the temple over the past few days. I found out today that this is for the Hozuki Market where 600,000 people are expected today and tomorrow. Apparently praying here on July 10 is the equivalent of praying for 46,000 days.
You can see the attraction.