1 Year's worth of Expenses

As of the end of March, I logged one full year's worth of living expenses information. At first I wasn't entirely sure that I'd be able to keep up collecting all this data, but it seemed interesting enough to me that I kept updating my spreadsheet every so often with new purchases. The results are posted below:

Figure 1. Spreadsheet of total categorized costs

Total money spent: 1,626,189 Yen = 16,142.66 CAD (April 25, 2006. Source)

Annual costs in yen (divide by 100 for approximate costs in CAD)
Food = 369,667
Goods = 446,661
Transport = 113,246
Service = 226,081
Room = 324,560
Entertainment = 145,974

If there is one important number to look at it's the number in bold, that's how much in a year I spent-- that's $16k in a year. Actually this number should be closer to $20k because I was living somewhere really cheap, but this is approximately what it costs to live on your own. If you live at home and pay for 1/2 of your food then your yearly costs would be in the ball park of $11.5k/year. Yes, I am willing to bet that although you might not notice it, that you are spending around $10,000 a year in personal living expenses. A lot of money right? This includes dining out with friends, going on adventures, trips and buying stuff, add it all up and this is what it costs.

Personally, knowing the amount of money needed to survive at home isn't all that interesting. It's easy to survive when living at home, the real trick is determining how much money you need to make and how much is costs to live on your own. This essay would have been a little more provocative sounding had I said things in reverse... that you spend $10k living at home and mused at the question of the costs of living on your own. Too late, I've already said it backwards and I'm not too interested in reversing the order (I've already spent a considerable amount of time typing this log as it is already... and no, I didn't write this linearly [actually this was the last paragraph I wrote] :P).

So I served the main dish first. Prepare yourselves for appitizer and dessert next!

Up next, a pie chart of expenses:

Figure 2. Percentage break down of expenses

If the numbers on the pie chart are too small for you, the numbers are provided below:

Food 23%
Goods 27%
Transport 7%
Service 14%
Room 20%
Entertainment 9%

What is interesting to note is that my significant living expenses of living are food, goods and rooming fees which are all in the 20% range. Of an interesting note is that the amount of money I pay for services, like cell phone, gym subscription and etc. is low compared to the rest of my expenses. Now for those of you people that think I'm a total party animal, look at my entertainment expenses which sit at 9% of my total expenses. Considering that 2 days out of 7 are weekends, you'd expect a little more right? Perhaps I'm easily amused. But anyways, just as a note to everyone, it doesn't necessairly have to cost a lot of money to have fun. Just about $1,460 CAD over the course of a year (that equates to about ~$100/month in entertainment).

There is one jewel of information in this report that I should mention-- my transportation costs. Now compared to most people living in Vancouver my mode of transportation is totally differeny from what you guys are doing -- ie. I scooter! Now I did a short analysis of what is costs to have a car in Japan (link). My calculations showed that it costs an average of $200/month (including maintenance and not including costs to own!).

In Japan scootering costs me approximately $30~40/month including fuel, insurance and tire change (no maintenance for scooter yet). If you're wondering, I spend $20 on gas/month for transportation. I travel about 25 km/day, which is about a one way trip to UBC from Richmond. Of an interesting note, for a car, I spent $80/month going to and from UBC per month and other misc travels. To be fair, doubling my gas costs for my scooter will put it at $40/month for the same distance. --> scooters are considerably cheaper than a car just gas wise... but I made that point already after I gathered a month's data on my scooter and it's fuel efficiency :) With maintenance included that costs goes up to approximately $50/month. In comparison to a car, it's 1/4 the cost of maintaining a car for a similar level of mobility. Just as a note I have rented a car on several occasions for road trips and I have found that renting a car for when I needed is cheaper than owning one just from a maintenance perspective.

So let me make some more comments about my finances and the interesting things that I've learned... let's take a look at the next figure:

Figure 3 . Categorized costs by month

Figure 3. is where some deep information is; "pay" close attention. If you look at my data, you'll see that my food costs and rooming fees remained relatively constant over the entire year. The room fees took a huge spike in the last month due to me moving. The costs incured were paying down the first month's rent, 2 months worth of deposit and one more month's worth of money as the real estate's agent's cut for "finding" us the place and doing some of the paper work for us.

My food costs remained at about $300/month and rental costs remained at $150/month (utils included). These are fixed living expenses and the important thing is that fixed expenses are uninteresting parts of finance. But in finance *boring* is good, because it means stability! Now for the interesting stuff-- variable costs.

Now if you looked at my data, you will notice some blips in my chart. Those blips come from large purchases, in particular my trip to Taiwan ($500), my new camera ($1000), scooter ($600) and moving into a new appartment ($1200). These are my most notable expenses from my speadsheets. Adding these together the total becomes $3300. Now if you compare this expense with my total fiscal expenses of $16,000 you'd see that these 4 significant expenses made up 20% of my total expenses!

Compare this data to my expenses and you'll be able to notice that that's equivalent to an entire year's supply of food! That's how significant how a few big price tag items can inflate yearly expenses. I most humbly believe that if there was something overlooked, it's the variable costs when it comes to financial managment because you're never going to know how much these things are going to cost. Now, over a long enough time span, you'd should be able to determine on average how much extra cash you should expect to spend in variable costs (ie random large purchases or expenses).

I should also comment that making large purchases does not happen randomly! Actually, the size of a random large purchase is proportional to the amount of money you have saved and the amount of money to expect to earn (hence, it determines how willing you are to spending it!). I fully expect that my expenses to change with time if/when I start making more money (or when I have more money available). This means that your finances will change over time as your income changes... but that should be obvious. The intereting question is, "how does it change?" (Assuming your living conditions stays fairly consistent). The question boils down to.. if you had more (or less) money, what would you do? And that's a question that many economists ask themselves and a question that (maybe) Apple's iPod is answering (as a random example).

So there you have it. $16k in a year of living expenses (not including savings), aim higher everyone because you need savings and more. That's it for me. Comments welcome.

Note to self: 1,400 words written in 3 hours.

Spring is here!

Spring has finally arrived in Sendai! The flowers are out and the scenery is looking alive again. I don't know how I survived the winter but I did (and it was quite brutal at times :P). I spent part of the weekend out and about taking photos of the trees and blossoming flowers. What a sight, not a single cloud in the sky.

Spring in Sendai is immensely important, it's the best season I think that Sendai has to offer. The only problem is that it's too short lived. After the second week of May, most of Japan goes into the rainy season for 1~2 months then we head into the dead of summer which is smouldering hot (with high humidity). I've only got 2~3 weeks to enjoy this... live it up!


The sun on white flowers in full bloom


Sendai's Boulevard. In 3 weeks, it'll be all green!


Trees sprouting green. People at play in the fields


In front of the library in town

More pictures to come! Got class in 10 minutes, gotta scoot!

Who do you think we are?

I am having a few small parts built for one of the vacuum machines. The problem, I think are the ceramic insulating spacers are coated with carbon depostis (conductive) causing sparking and messing up the plasma. Also one of the insulating spacers got cracked, meaning that some sparking is happening through the cracks which is also screwing with my plasma. If you want to know what a plasma looks like, here's what it looks like:

I am currently using a vacuum chamber, pumped out to about .01 Pascals and then hydrogen gas is flown in to the chamber till about 1 kiloPascal. A votlage of about 600V is applied between the red hot stage below and the electrodes on top, resulting in the purple plasma. Currently, systems like these are used to grow Carbon Nanotubes, which are up there in tensile strength in comparison to diamond (actually, even stronger).

Anyways, the long and short of the story is that I finished the mechanical drawings of the new spacers today (after much pain... CAD is not a friendly tool for a beginner). I picked up the phone and made a call to Tokyo, "Hi I'm from Tohoku University, I'd like to place an order." I hear a noisy background and the person on the other side of the phone tells me "one moment please." I get switched over and start talking again, "Hi, I'd like to place an order for some insulating ceramics."

"Huh?"
"Insulating ceramics? You know, against electricity and heat?"
The guy on the other side of the phone tells me "what kind of store do you think we are? This is a *RAMEN* (noodle) shop!" and the phone gets hung up with a clank.

Whoops, looks like I dialed the wrong number. I dialed again and got the right number and faxed off my drawings to the company. That little event made my day!

First Week!

First weeks for all Universities are always the most lively. All students come out to attend classes, the clubs are out soliciting for members and showing off, events and more. I guess it is a universal truth for Univesities around the world.

University life in Japan is quite different where students spend more of their focus on joining clubs intead of doing their work in class. Actually, joining a club is really like a class-- you're expected to put a lot of effort in to the club, attend events and more. In a club, everyone's a core member. For people that aren't into the hardcore-ness of a club, there exists "circles" where things are much more loose and people can come and go as they please.

Though most students that join clubs are undergrads (because they have more free time), most grad students don't have the time to come out and join these clubs (these clubs are also mainly located at the undergrad campus of the University). Dispite this, I decided to head down from the Engineering campus (which is only a little ways off from the undergrad campus) to check out the lively undergrad campus.





I caught a jazz band performing on campus which were pretty good. Actually there are plenty of musical groups on campus. From Jazz, rock & punk, classical and more.



Actually what struck me most was a mandolin-banjo club who were quite talented playing the sort of music you'd hear in comical old cowboy-flicks. I hung out and had a pretty good laugh as I'd never expect to see something like this in Japan-- always be prepared to see something unexpected!

Well, I was quite right about seeing the unexpected. Now, during my time at UBC, I've never seen a guy in an old looking suit with a top hat riding through campus. I saw exactly that at the undergrad campus. The people from the horse riding club at Tohoku University brought out a horse and took a little walk around campus drawing much attention. Once thing's for certain, they have very intersting clubs at Tohoku University, probably more interesting than the clubs I've seen back home. I've even seen a gliding club where members actually fly in large gliders. I have no clue how these guys get the money to do things like this.



When I went out to check out the campus on Wedensday and it was particularly warm. What I always used to do when I was studying Japanese at the undergrad campus, was have lunch outside with my friends in front of the International Exchange Building. The secretaries would always go in and out during lunch time. So we'd invite them over to have lunch with us it it used to be a sort of a tradition since the summer. I had since stopped taking the Japanese course so I have rarely seen the secretaries since then and only sporatically over the course of the year. I decided to drop by the office to say hi and invited Hiroko (one of the secretaries) out for lunch.


Left: Me, Right: Hiroko

Hiroko's taken the international students out from time to time to the mountains and more. I had the chance to hop into a trip to a big acquarium a whiles out of Sendai and she'd drop by a few events at the old dorm. To put it short, she's pretty damn awesome and I think that the international students are quite lucky to have her as the Exchange Division secretary because she does a ton load of things to help out the students.

After lunch, I headed out to check out the Sakura blossoming around campus. Unfortunately it was still a little early at the time and most trees on campus were not in full bloom yet. But they will be in a matter of days. At 1:30 pm, I headed back into lab to continue my unfruitful work in trying to do a simple CAD drawing. (I've got no CAD experience!)

More life in Briefs

Last Friday-- Impromptu drinking party at home

Sachie, a friend of mine had some spare time Friday night and dropped by the home to hang out. We ended up making a big batch of bean dip to go with some nachos. Oh how I missed good bean dip. We got a call later on that some of her friends were planning on going drinking. So we said that's we'd be in if anything transpired. What transpired was that a horde of people appeared at my doorstep with booze and we all hung out till about 4:00 am drinking and talking (well, it wasn't solid drinking).

Olympia, my roomie was sort of complaining before that she didn't have enough Japanese friends. Looks like she has a fan club now since she can also teach English. Some people ended up staying over because they had a few too many drinks.

One guy ended up telling us that he recently got a girlfriend so everyone ended up asking how did he ask her out. His response was "Well when you meet someone as nice as that, it's as natural as the sun rising and the moon revolving around the earth." I'm really glad to finally meet a Japanese guy with some nice wit :)

Saturday-- International student party, Master Student drinking party and Clubbing

International Party:

Allright so I sound like a party animal right about now. But... let's say that I'm living the busy life. Recently a new batch of international students on a scholarship like mine have arrived in Japan and the foreign student organization hosted a welcome party for these people at the dorm. Meaning food and dancing. I only stayed for the food however since I had to attend a drinking outing with the masters student that time (we tried to go out and do something 3 times and all were failures because we were all to busy!).

I hung out at the international party for about an hour to meet the new international students. No other Canadians arrived however. I did meet a person at the party that caught my attention. I was sitting down at the reception desk with a few friends when a girl goes by me and tells me " I remember you" and goes off to tell me "you're the guy that learned Japanese from video games right? I met you last year here" I was thinking, "oh crap" because I didn't know anything about her and she was pretty cute (d'oh!) and how did she remember about me for so long!?!? We end chatting for a bit and I had to run off to meet up with the Masters students for our drinking outing.

Drinks:

I meet up with the people near the Disney Store in Sendai, which is one of the major meeting spots for all people preparing to head out to a group outing. 7:00, I was late for about 10 mins. That's what happens when you have too many people to catch up with.

The 7 of us met up and then headed out to this old fashioned bar with sort of a 50's feel to it. The food and everything was pretty damn great and we spent atleast 3 hours on 20 bucks. Not bad at all. We had a great time and everything talking about whatever. According to my friends, they're wondring why I wasn't labeled as a "dangerous chemical" and included in a "how to handle dangerous chemical" presentation at lab! Who meeee? Who'd get the crazy idea that I'd be dangerous? Muah ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Where ever I go, some parts of my life always stays the same. Especially when it comes to the girls and rumors. In high school there were 4 rumors about me going out with different girls (for those that know me, you know that I ain't a player). I denied everything... a 5th rumor emerged-- that I was gay. There's just no winning in life sometimes eh?

Anyways, I'm pretty friendly with one of the master’s students at lab and stuff like that. Anyways she's from China, real nice person too. She really likes spicy food and when ordering some friends asked the waiter "what the spiciest food you got for her." I blurt out "just get her some raw chili peppers and she'll be happy." Some of my friends give me an odd glare for a second and I tell them "what? You should see the walls in her room, they're covered in dried chili peppers!" *D'oh!* My friends look back at me "Oh the walls in her room eh???" Great, so another rumor is born. The difference with these people is that they're a lot more forward which kind of put me on the spot. After some jabbing, we pretty much got to the point where they said, "well why don't the two of you go out?" Whoa. Dangerous stuff!

Well we're good friends so there'd be none of that. That and since we're in the same lab and knowing how news and rumors fly around I'm kind of against that. Hahaha, I got the response from my friend who told me "you'd be fun to go out with but there'd be no way I'd marry you because you play too much!" We had a good laugh over that, I never heard a person be so direct but it was true in a sense. I do my best to have fun! The real magic is to do good work and have fun...the ideal world would be the marriage of the two. Perhaps they'll learn the secret someday... either that or I have my formula wrong, but I'm willing to see if my objectives work out for me. Drinking ended at about 11:00 pm.

Clubbing:

The international party ended by about now and the people from the party (I knew) would be relocating from the dorms to the city. I was already in the city (takes only a little bit to get out to the city from the dorms fortunately) so it would only be a matter of waiting. A sub group was already down there at Karaoke but I didn't know where. I tried calling a few people but the singing must have been a little loud for people to pick up the phones. After about 30 mins of trying, I decided to give up and head into a club and hang out. Not to self. The club was dead at 11:30 pm! It didn't start picking up until 12:00 pm! In Canada it's pretty filled by atleast 10:00 pm! Well after milling about at the club for about 15 mins, I thought I'd jet from the place (and take the club entry as a loss). I picked up a drink from my drink ticket and decided to have a short drink... right after finishing my drink, hordes of people started coming in and the place got pretty damn lively.

A bunch of friends also came in that evening so I ended up spending the evening having a few drinks, chatting and dancing with them. I didn't get home till about 3:30 am. Long day indeed.

Sunday-- Work!

Slept in, but that should've been obvious. I woke up and scratched out 2~3 essay topic over a few essays in a notebook over a few hours. I'll write about them later on when I can put them all together. Taught English in the morning, went to lab in the afternoon till the evening to run some experiments before out bi-weekly meeting happening on Monday. Dropped a friend a line to see if I could catch dinner with her in the evening after I finished experimentation (turned out she was busy). Dinner got postponed till Monday at 9:30 pm.

I came home that evening famished. I dropped by the grocery store and bought tons of food. Cooked fried pork with bean sprouts, chicken and fried scallops in butter and soy sauce. I made a ton of food that evening thinking that my roomie would be back and we could have some dinner together. She never showed, turned out that she was out with friends at a going away party for one of her colleagues. I had a great dinner however (and more scallops for me).

Monday-- Labs and Drinks

Lab life as usual, classes in the morning, experiments in the afternoon and lab meeting in the evening starting from 6:30 till 9:30 pm. I left the lab to catch up with my friend to catch up over some dinner at this really interesting Japanese bar/restaurant. Things are kind of miniature, made of wood and stuff. As an interesting note, the places in Sendai do have really nice interior design!

My friend works as a make up artist for hostess (no, they don't usually sleep with their clients... some do however) so I got to learn a little about that world. It seems that these hostess for expensive bars are really for higher up people to show off (to which I think is kind of stupid, but that’s the culture). So anyways, what happens, a pretty and dressed up lady joins a group of well of businessmen recommending expensive drinks to them. The idea is that the expensive things that you buy shows off the amount of money you have. At the same time, the hostess also requests drinks for herself (of the expensive variety) and so since the guys also want to keep her pleased, will end up buying the drinks for her. In the end the restaurant makes a bundle of cash for selling expensive drinks and the hostess gets a cut. Something like could never exist in Canada; it's a cultural thing (well for some people atleast over here).

Future Outlook:

Friday -- Probably will be going out with friends again
Saturday -- Lab party under the Sakura
Sunday -- Olympia's B-day party, need to reschedule another party to the week after
Week after Friday -- Lab New Student party

Huh... so fine, I might be a party animal! :P

Through another pair of eyes!

Still no internet at home so, posting has been a little sporatic. Hopefuly I'll have internet this Wedensday perhaps? Here's hoping.

Of an interesiting note, Ida has finished and posted her travel logs of Japan on the net (yes and including the little bit of visiting Sendai and me) right here. And no, I didn't think my room was *that* messy :P Also, another travel log that I've been flipping through from time to time is another one going by the name "Justin in Japan" right here. He doesn't update any more since his adventures are over I believe but read it if you've got the time-- it's a pretty good read (and looks like he spent his time in Japan very well :P)

Pictures? Um...er... ah.. well... later :P

How Embarrassing (Whoops!)

There are some people out there that think I'm really smart. I studied Engineering Physics, finished it in the standard 5 years (dispite losing a year when I transfered departments) and then I came to Japan to study Nanotechnology. Some of my friends "oooh-ahhh" at me when I tell them my background. Today, I intend to dispel all notions that I am an intelligent being.

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe. --Einstien

What did I do today? I screwed up one of the electron-microscopes at lab by putting in the sample holder in upside down, sliding it past the stage holder and then unscrewing it with it fall ing off somewhere unretrievable with the samples I made today still stuck to it. The machine a $500k+ machine; and yes, after a series of unfortunate events requiring a degree of stupidity to pull off in direct sequence, I have managed to screw the machine up. The best part, it is one of the most used machines at lab. I am feeling particulary clever right now.

The best part is that I've just finish sending an e-mail to oh.. about 100 people that use the machine that "A sample holder is stuck in the machine." Sigh.

In honesty I don't mind screwing up. I revel in my mistakes... and I have a most interesting history of them. The only mistakes that I care about are the ones that screw other people up... if it screws me up, well~ that doesn't change things that much now does it? (ha~ha!)

Ces't la vive.

Hell of an Awesome weekend

Friday:

Got invited to a friend's performance at country pub and hung out listening to him and a guitarist perform a bunch of old songs from the Eagles, Beatles etc etc. I called out a few friends to come out and join for the evening. Had a few beers, nachos and good coversation. What else could I want?

After the performance was done we headed outside to visit a baloon artist my friend, Kayo, knew. I got an Elmo made and we hung out with the other street artists for the evening. I ended up buying a book of poems from a nice guy that's got some disease (unforutnately I couldn't make out what), so he spends most of the week at home in bed and only comes out for the weekends. During the weekdays, he spends his time thinking and writing from bed. He writes 3 kinds of poems, encouragement (green), caution (yellow) and warnings (red). I'll be looking forward to reading them soon.

I headed out to grab a few more drinks with Kayo to warm up from after hanging out outside for so long. It is still *cold* in Sendai, even though it's about 500 km south of Vancouver. Doesn't make sense but we had snow on April 1st (and no, that isn't a joke!). My Japanese friends laughed that Vancouver is having the cherry blossoms bloom several weeks in advance compared to Sendai (nothing's started budding yet!). Crazy eh?

Well the good thing was that we found an all you can drink bar for only 6 bucks. We did have to order some food however (well just one order and it wasn't expensive anyways) and ended the evening at 2:00 am before parting ways. A good evening was had.

Saturday -- House warming

We held the house warming party about 3 weeks after moving in. We finished settling in after about 2 weeks and we spent the rest of the time trying to figure out when we'd be able to do house warming. It is tough trying to coordinate the schedules of 3 busy people!

So, we finally pulled it off about last weekend. We decided that we'd call up 5 friends each and invtie them over and have a potluck party (I ended up calling up 7.. but that's a different story :P). A good time was had and we did have the chance to meet each other's respective friends.

We started at about 8:00 pm, Kuni was off at his friend's place with his bunch of friends cooking food. I was at the home cooking with my friends... and Olympia? Well... she had work that evening and couldn't do any cooking. There was the "Chili incident" but that (again) is another story :P.

The other plus about having the party was that it gave me the right excuse to do some more cleaning in my room to have it fit for people to crash... and crash they did!

The food!

I decided on making mashed potatoes, fried spaghetti, spinach salmon salad and mango pudding for dessert. Kuni brought in tempura and stuffed peppers. The rest of the friends brought drinks, beer and etc.

A few pictures below :)

Me, Tetsuya and Youn ji

People crashing on my bed!

Friends making friends (cell number exchange!)

The party lasted until about 2:00 am. I really hope we didn't piss off our neighbours. It'd be kind of ironic to get complaints to get kicked out from the house warming party... but it seemed that things were pretty allright. I should have taken a picture of all the shoes at the entrance since they were all over the place, but I was too busy having a good time :).

The next day was Kuni's b-day... and we went motorcycle touring with friends the next day in the morning. Bikeless people would go by car as we headed out to the ocean to the fish market to get ingredients for his B-day BBQ (try and say that fast 3 times over).

I'll save the rest of that story for my next post. As much as I would like to spend more time writing up these posts, I'm still at lab and got work to do unforutnately, so that'll have to wait until next time. Going to get hooked up into an optical fiber network (ie. Internet on crack!) on the 16th. I'll be pretty happy when that happens.

Cheerio!

The world is small

2 weeks ago, at a festival I met a guy from Victoria BC and a long lost friend of about 8 years that lives in a town outside of Sendai. Last weekend, I meet a lab mate who is on travel in Tokyo by chance with his family (1 person out of 10 million) and today I get an e-mail from a Japanese English teacher that did an exchange in Vancouver and had friends from Steveston High and Richmond High (though I probably wouldn't know them). Um... wow.

On a side note. As of April 5, I had 129 posts on this blog. On average, I make a post once every 3 days.

Moving (Happy Anniversary Me!)

As of today, I have spent 365 days in Japan. Where did the time go? Nobody knows. Since October, I have been keeping track of most events things I've been doing on my computer calendar. It's it's quite interesting to see what I've been up to for the last year. I guess it's true-- time does fly when you're having fun.

It's been about 3 weeks since I've moved into my new place. Now that things have finally settled down, in terms of lab work. I've got a little free time to post about the moving process.

We were officially tenants of our new place on the 18th of March. We rented an open back truck (one day for about $70 bucks) to load our goods and have it shipped over to the new appartment.

Oh I should mention a little about my roomies. One of them is Kuni, Japanese master's student the same age as I that went to Canada for a year. He speaks pretty good English just your all-round awesome good guy. My other roomie is Olympia from (dum dum dum) Calgary, who came to Japan to teach English and plans on staying over in Japan for a few more years before moving on to see other countries such as France. Now that I've introduced the cast a little (pictures another day), I'll post a bit about my moving experience.

Boxing match!

I started boxing my belongings the night before the move. Started at about 10:00 pm and kept going till about 3:00 am. The only real things I needed to box were my cutlary, spices and goods. Clothes went into suit cases, most large belongings had boxed they came in and I threw all of my smaller things into plastic bags.

Moving in; boxes all over the floor

Most of those were things scrambled all over the kitchen floor. For the most part, our kitchen looked something like this for about a week while we slowly started migrating our belongings into our respective rooms. It took about a few good evenings of work to get the boxes unpacked and put away. To be honest, not a whole lot of my stuff went into my room-- most of my stuff were cooking utensils so those were unpacked and stayed in the kitchen.

My room before

Actually this is a bit of a lie. This picture is quite similar to my room but it's actually a room from another unit within the building I took while looking for a new appartment. I didn't have an exact before picture of my room so I posted this one instead (note that the window is in a different position!)

The "after" picture!

The room was still quite bare after moving most of my basic belongings into the room. At this point I hadn't moved put my books away nor had the curtains in my room been installed. Of an interesting note, the rooms we had didn't come with light fixtures included. I spent a week using my heat dish and Chrismas lights to keep keep my room illuminated.

I have since moved all of my belongings into the room however and things are looking a little more cozy. The bed I have there, I bought from a other people that were moving out for $40, the desk and book case I got free from other people leaving Sendai.

The last day of my life in the dorms ended on March 31st. I had officially moved out by 1:00 pm after having my room inspected. Apparently the inspection people that came by were surprised at how clean my kitchen was that they asked me if I didn't cook. Well, that was sort of a back-handed compliment.



For comparison, this is what my desk looked like before and after moving out. Striking difference no? I spent an entire day on Saturday cleaning from about 10:00 pm till 5:00 am. I hucked lots of misc. things like quarter full bottles of soy sauce, misc dirty tupperware, left over sheets of paper, unused tissue paper and such. Felt kind of wasteful but it wasn't worth the effort to carry the stuff to the new place. Many kilos of garbage was thrown away.

I ended giving away atleast 5 kg of flour, several kgs of sugar, powered cream and much more to one of my friends in the dorm as a going away gift. Atleast 10 kg of cooking material (yeah, I had crap loads of stuff!)


Looks like I was never there!

After all the cleaning this what what my room looked like. It's kind of amazing, the difference. I have since returned to the dorms on a few occasion and noticed that a Chinese student had moved into the room. Perhaps I'll meet the guy one day.

This is Kuni, one of my roomies working in bed.

That's it for now!

Dilemma

House warming party Saturday. I've already told about 8~10 people that I'd invite them over. The problem is that my roomies have decided to limit the number of guests that we each can bring down to 5. Crap! Now how the hell am I going to choose?

In other news. I bombed my presentation, but that's OK. One of the professors had a great time chewing me out but I could care less (and there is a bit of a story behind that too). I now have a reputation for good and horrible presentations. I couldn't care less.

I learned far more by bombing then I did by doing a "good job." Presentations here are rather formal in the sense that people seem to expect that they are to know the answer; anything less is embarrasing. Not knowing isn't embarrasing, not learning is embarrasing. I think that is the subtle difference.

Pictures of the home later on. Will post some pictures of the new place later on. Will start working on my moving in experience post later on (and will post plenty of pictures :)

Lament

I finished my 50 slide presentation 2 days ago. I looked at it again today and realize that there is probably lots of information that no one cares about. I have decided to remove that information and reduced the presentation to 38 slides. According to my estimates, I will be going after a short presentation time of about 30 minutes. Perhaps longer if there are questions.

I did my department wide presentation 3 weeks ago. The funny thing is that I had the chance to talk to someone that listened to my talk to hear his opinion from me. Most of the other presentations by Japanese students have slided loaded with big charts and text boxes with arrows pointing all over the place. The speaker ends up pointing all over the place with the lazer pointer while rambling on.

As for me, I am very different in the sense that I keep my slides sparse with only the few main points that I want to make. The person that I spoke to told me that he liked my presentation but his professor told him that it wasn't good to have slides that are so empty.

Perhaps there is a point to what the professor wants to make. I'm not sure but from my point of view, I'd rather be easily understood rather than just looking grand with fancy text boxes with arrows pointing all over the place.

Presentation complete

I started working on the presentation at about 8:00 pm today... (I went for dinner right before the cafeteria closed [ie. 7:30 pm]). I sat through the group meetings happening and finished my power point presentation at about 12:10 am today. Now, just to fix up some hand outs to give out to for my presentation this Saturday (adapting it from my last presentation) and it'll be all done.

My current presentation currently weighs in at 47 slides; my lab mates are going to hate me when I present on Saturday.

Time is short

Well I just finished my last post, but I felt like I should follow up with another...

In a week, it will be my one year anniversary since my arrival to Japan. In retrospect, a lot (and a little) has happened since I came here. It's already been a year, where did all this time go? Back in Canada, I would probably never have noticed that a year has passed like this. I lived in Richmond for so long and I took my time there for granted in the sense that my time was never limited there.

After comming to Japan, that perspective has changed significantly; now that I realize that I have 1.5 years left over here (1 term into my masters). After watching the graduating masters students get ready to leave the lab, I have mapped out the life of a masters student in Japan.

The first 6 months they sort of bust ass surviving classes and learn how to do experiments (with no real success), the next 6 months they take classes, try and find a job (job hunting season starts 1 year before all students graduate, it's really crazy... I'll talk about it some other time) and do experiments with more success. 1 Year later, they have no classes to take but realize that they need to write up their masters thesis by the end of the year. They start working like mad to get data and experiments down for the next 6 months. The remaining 6 months, they start writing their thesis over a period of 4 months while doing experiments to fill gaps of information from other experiments. After all that is done, they graduate and they're gone (unless they stick around and do a Ph.D).

It's a go-go-go kind of life and seems pretty busy to me. On top of that, I want to learn more Japanese, make friends and hang out with friends... in addition to trying to be productive at the lab. Time is short and it's going to be all done too fast. I'm just starting to have a good time and meeting all sorts of interesting people (with what little time I do have :P)

I still remember taking my time in Japan for the first 6 months for granted. I just had really easy Japanese courses, loads of free time (in the sense that I was sleeping in all the time) and not a real care in the world. I did want to learn more Japanese on my own during that time, I wanted to learn more about my research during that time but I took it pretty easy (well I taught english 6 hours a week at the YMCA during my free time) and I sort of regret it. There is lots of travelling learning that I want to do. Can I do it in the remaining time I have left in Japan?

Only time can tell.

Well, back to work on my presentation.

Night Life (Lab Life)

Been getting home no earlier than midnight for the past few days. I've been sort of making that up by sleeping in till 9~10 am and then heading into lab and then sleeping in between experiment runs recently, I am pretty back to my normal sleep levels. It's 10:00 pm here and I am fairly awake. There is a group meeting going on right behind my seat as I type this, but everyone is staring at the projector screen while I type this (and also work on my weekend presentation).

Turns out for the presentation, I have lots to talk about. At first I was worried all week that I'd have nothing to talk or present about, but fortunately for all bi-monthly lab meetings, I've been making powerpoint slides and saving them that I can quickly review what I have been doing for the past 3 months. Turns out to be much more than I realized and I am very grateful (in the copy and paste sense), I was worried for the entire week that I wasn't geting any real work done for the past 3 months.

I have been working on the presentation, I now have 32 slides as of this moment (I've copied probably 15~17 of them from other presentaitons I have done) and still have about another 10 to go. Then for tomorrow, I need to update a hand out from my last presentation, print things out and then I should be complete for my presentation! Yay.

Looks like I can go out and play this Friday. Yay!

No real updates yet

Life right now is pretty intense, both in the work and play sense. It's the good life and I'm paying for it through sleep.

Last week:

Thursday-- get called out by a volunteer friend of mine to hit a nice restaurant/bar with them. I met an owner of a large food chain (runs lots of cafeterias), a pharmacist and a wine make

Friday-- Graduation ceremony for graduating students (duh!). Go out with the graduating students to celebrate with them

Saturday -- Lab meeting runs from 9:00 am till 5:00 pm, return to my old room to clean out the last remaining things. Stay up till 5:00 am cleaning. Will need to move out remaining things another day.

Sunday -- "All you can eat cake" at a restaurant. Me, 3 other guys and my friend's g/f hit the cafe. We are the only group with men and get lots of giggly looks from Japanese girls. Note that most of the other guys were big and gruffy foreigners.

After, stumble on news of a St. Paddy's event going on at a part. We hit that. I meet a ton load of Canadians and a very wide multitude of European people. We hit the Irish pub in the evening. I find a table to play poker. I mop up really good in the beginning and lost $10 at the end when I didn't expect to see something happen. Very nice people...

This week (planned):

Monday - purchase some furniture for the room and a light fixture. Have mailing address for Cell phone and foreign registration changed. (still more address changes to make)

Tuesday and Wedensday -- Haul ass on experiments, prepare material for presentation on Saturday.

Friday - Check out of my old room, have it inspected. In the evening, got invited by a musican guy I met on the Sunday to attend his live performance at a bar in the evening.

Saturday - Lab presentation (1 hour long). Need to get results this week and make presentation. Took me atleast 3 days last time to prepare, just the writing part. I also need to run a bunch of expreriments.

Sunday - Tokyo. Meet friend comming back in from Hawaii at Narita airport with a few friends that are hanging out in Tokyo for the day. Using Ida's rail pass (will have to pass as a girl.. somehow since the name is written on it), who came a few weeks ago (thanks Ida!).

End Update Snippets

Crunch Time

It's been really busy, but I am still alive.. but sort of. I have another lab presentation to make next weekend (not enough results for me to present!!) and then I have to finish cleaning my room to check out the day before the presentation. This is going to be really tight!

The new appartment is pretty nice. I lack a dresser so clothing is all over the place at the moment. No internet until April 6th at home either (but we will be on a fiber optic connection). Gotta run, it's Saturday meeting time at the lab!

Where'd that go?

Looking for my camera battery charger. I know I put it here somewhere...

Moving is largely complete. Boxes, Skis and Clothes have been moved. A bed and desk has been acquired.

Things needed:

Hanger for dress clothes
Dresser for normal clothes
Light fixture for room
Big ass spice rack/cabinet
Extra shelves for plates, pots and pans
3M wall stickers for me to hang things

Partition wall :

The room between my room and a friend's is only partitioned by a set of Japanese sliding doors. The problem is that sound isolation between rooms isn't so good. Meaning that sound travels to easily. Time for some dry wall and sound insulation research.

It's going to take another 2 weeks atleast before the home is up and running the way I want it to. After that, it's house (appartment) warming party!

Where did all this stuff come from!?

I am now 5 hours in to packing... how did I acquire all this stuff? Drawer after drawer after drawer, it's still going. I haven't started packing my clothes yet and it's 3:30 am. This does not bode well for the hero. Better now than later I guess.

I move things by truck tomorrow, the main objective is to get everything that I can't move on my scooter into the truck and get it hauled off. Get most of my main stuff out of here and I can deal with the smaller things over a 2 week window and clean this place out. Pictures of my stuff later.

FYI, my spice cabinet has been packed-- it took 2 boxes! Pictures of the mess another day (I am taking pictures of it!).

Moving

The amount of stuff one accumilates over the course of a year is amazing. Slowly working at packing most of my belongings into boxes ready for shipping to my new place tomorrow. It's 11:30 now, only fitting that I be packing the night before. It's allright though. My contract in the dorm runs to the end of the month, so it's still good. I'll linger here a little longer before I kiss this room goodbye.

More stories later, I've got stuff to do!

Pack pack pack,
I've got a load of boxes to stack!

Ida was here but I'm not totally

I always tell my friends that the kind of life I'd like to have is one where I can work hard and play hard. It seems that it is comming into a reality. I suffer from lack of sleep.

I took Friday and Saturday off (you read that right about the Saturday), after pulling in some late hours during the week to retrofit one of the machines I use at the lab. Having a friend to show how carbon nanotube growth works was well worth the incentive to get the machine going (it worked ok before, I wanted to install a bunch of things into it). We also got to play with an electron microscope too!



We hit Matsushima, a region famous in Japan for it's views. I'd describe the place with islands with trees growing on them that looks exactly like bonsai. We got to cook our won fish cakes and try out the local oyster.

We then hit Yamadera, the mountain temple (which is starting to become a favorite spot for me). And of course, I had to have her take a picture with the famous post box on top of the mountain.



Finally, the next day (day 3 really), we hung out at the dorms and Ida got to ride my scooter.



If you're reading Ida, the scooter is more stable when you go faster :P. But you did good anyways, 30km/h on your first day is about what I did at first too. Ps. Thanks for the dried mangoes and almond chocolate from COSTCO! I didn't even realize how much I missed those!

The morning Ida headed home. I had a farewell party to attend for the lab for the students graudating out of the lab. We would head out to a ski and onsen resort to spend to days. Needless to say, I didn't sleep much.



We skiied, soaked in hot springs, talked, played games and then soaked in hot springs some more. I got all of 3 hours of sleep on that adventure.

Yesterday, I would not come home till 4 am from lab after going though a full day tutorial (ie. 24 hours+ over 2 days) and then teaching electronic circuits to a friend at the lab. I called it early today and came home at 5 pm to get some sleep. I will go to the gym tonight to unwind.

I start moving this weekend to my new appartment with friends, 2 weeks after I have an in house presentation to give on Saturday to the lab. I'll be spending next week getting results and the week after writing a presentation up (presentation is April 1st, heh heh heh). After that, classes start. Life is intense. Hope I can keep up.

Yarrrrrr!

My hat is off to the boys at The Pirate Bay for their ridicule of the ways that media companies continue to push the little guys around. Seriously though, the little guys definately could use some backbone, and these boys have it.

Wired published an article about these guys in action, most amusing is the legal threats they get from media companies and their responses. Takes some balls to pull it off, apparently there is quite the movement in Sweden that there is actually a political party comming together that supports piracy (see wired article). For all the time it took to finally see this happen, I am comming to the conclusion it is easier to organize a small group of influential people than it is to coordinate a mob of... well less influential people (for the lack of a better term).

I do wonder, how does a small group of media companies have the right to enforce their will upon millions of people? Not that I'm saying it's wrong (I choose not to pick a side for this article), but if this were a battlefield, they'd be crushed a million to one. If this were true, then the death knell would already be sung, the media industry would be dead and the public (most likely) would be at a loss (for me, I probably could care less in most cases). Would the public lament if this were the result? Probably, but let the will of the majority have their way. If they screw up, they'll learn it the hardway and be the better for it. If it doesn't turn out the way we want, then we'd be the better off either way. What is there to lose? Just the rich guys, who don't really care about us.

The Short Date Problem

Excerpt from a conversation from a Canadian friend of mine over a sushi lunch. My friend, finishes her lunch in half the time it takes me to eat my food.

Me: Are your dates short by any chance?

Her: Yeah, I don't know why.

Need I say more?

Hina Matsuri -- Girl's Festival

Hina-matsuri, also known as girl's festival in Japan... also known as doll's festival where the Japanese pray for the well being of their girls. The girls end up getting taken out by their family for a dinner and occasionally dress up in kimonos. I finished my presentation on Friday and jetted from the lab to hit the festival as my way of celebrating for working like mad on my presentation. Enjoy the pictures!


That's Xavier, from France, yeah I guess I can see why girls can dig French guys :)

A normal picture!

Now with 50% more smile!

My presentation suit (western Kimono?) with the ladies

Some people thought we were married :P

The Kimono master putting on my clothes ("Excuse me, you're going to have to take off your clothes!")

General sillyness

More general sillyness!

I've got more but, I'm sure you get the idea :)

Playing with my camera

I was doing some playing around with the lighting in my room this evening, (more like at 3:30 am) and came up with this. Um yeah... I love my camera :)

I'll be posting pictures later on a Japanese event to last Friday later on. I've been up a while and need some sleep.

So I lied... and Comments on Public Speaking

Turns out that I don't have access to the server's webspace at the lab, meaning that I can't post my presentation online. I'll do a write up instead later on. Ooops.

I went to University today to attend the department wide presentation series, where the graduate students will be presenting. I'll eat my words from my previous posts and tell you up front that these presentations *weren't* as stupid as I initially thought. (Note: It's important to keep track of things that come out differently than you initally thought because it keeps you honest, and I personally think that's very important).

Presentation format: 10 minutes to speak, 10 minutes question/comment period. Professors from other labs attend to give comments from a different perspective from instead of just your own advisor. Students are encouraged to be active (and also required to attend 10 lectures and ask atleast 1 question from all of them). This is a decent format because it gets people to stick to the point.

I've found the presentations to have some varience in quality some have been quite good and the rest pretty okay and the good presenters are able to answer questions in a thoughful manner. So I'll have to revise my position on the Japanese students that they're not as bad as I initially thought-- I needed to get out of my little hole and see the world.

My presentation occurs tomorrow morning and I'm currently rehearsing in my room. I am very comforable presenting in an informal situation with just a few penned out notes and a chalkboard or something. I have all the freedom to go wherever I want. The problem with a power point presentation is that I'm stuck to what I've got written down. At different times I'll be thinking differently and often if I were to make the same presentation informally, it'll be subtly different depending on how I am thinking at the time. But I'll still be making the same main points and I don't necessarly have to follow my format.

It's kind of fascinating discovering that my mind works like this. I've written about this once but I'll not bother link to it (it's an essay on language I've written over the summer and I made a link to it last month or so). But say if this post was deleted in a crash right now. I'd still have the same ideas, but you can be sure that it'll turn out slightly differently. It's something like that. I wonder if this is how the brain compresses information (or is it something I learned to do because I like to find ways of remembering the most with least amount of effort [ie. I like to remember the main ideas and re-figure out the details as I go along.. saves on the memorizing]).

Wish me luck on my presentation.

As for tomorrow, I'm going to celebrate in a cool kind of way. I'm going to jet out of the University to check out a festival called "Hina-Matsuri" where girls go out and dress up in Kimonos. So I'll be in my suit after my presentation and I'm going out take pictures with them. Not a bad way to celebrate to me :)

Wanna know what I do? Part 1

I've been saying that I'd tell everyone what my research project is for the last little while. Since I've been preparing for my seminar happening this Friday, I've been spending the week preparing handouts and slides for my 10 minutes worth of fame this Friday. I figure that now is a better time than any to introduce my work to you (sort of).

Let me start with my first research project, (I will post my current project later today when I can post my presentation online).

Since comming to this lab, I was interested in developing micro-machined wireless communication devices and was looking for medical applications. I was initially set to work on a micro-technology implantable based glucose sensor and spent my first month at the lab researching papers and reading online materials to figure out what is going on in the field.

The proposed system was to use a semi-permiable membrane (remember that word from high-school science?) to glucose that would let glucose diffuse into a chamber containing a sensitive fluid. This fluid would change viscosity which is telling of current body glucose concentrations (note: viscosity is how sticky a fluid is). The viscosity could be detected using a vibrating cantiliver (read: vibrating stick) in the chamber that could be excited by an ultra-sonic pulse from outside of the body (think: sound exciting a tuning fork). You see, the viscosity of the glucose sensitive fluid would determine the vibrating frequency of the cantiliver. This means that if I listen to the cantiliver, I can determine the glucose concentration in the body using ultrasound. Get it? I'm sure you did (research doesn't necessarily have to be tough).

After doing some reading on biotech MEMs technology, I had reached the conclusion that this device would *suck.* The human body has an inherent reaction to foreign objects implented the body by covering them in the body with an isolating protein layer from reading bio-tech books. What this means is that the sensitive permiable membrane gets covered after a few months and is rendered useless. Immuno responses to implanted microsensors that require a physical interface to the inside of the body are impractical. This means that until we figure out a way to prevent the body from gumming up the sensors like these, these sensors are useless. But to solve this, is an entirely different problem (which is also not in my realm of expertise).

Had I accepted the projet at face value, I would have been screwed. Remember, do your homework properly because it'll save you from trouble and reward you later. Read on.

So what next? I discovered some technology being developed by Animas Corporation, who have a bright idea (literally) on the subject. They are currently developing technology to use light in an implantable sensor to determine glucose concentration. By observing how much light is absorbed (or was it frequency? I don't remember anymore), they can determine glucose concentration. The smart thing is that this technology is using light frequencies that don't get blocked by the insulating protein later. Smart, no? There is a detail of keeping it powered, meaning they are going to need either a battery or a wireless way of transmitting power, but I think those are more managable problems.

Anyways, I thought that it was much smarter than my idea (and my professors weren't too keen on my idea of using micro-needle patches on the outside of the body as a work around) that I decided to drop the project all together. Animas corporation was bought out by Johnson and Johonson a month later after I finished my analysis, sending the stock of Animas Corpotation to spike by 33% in a day in December of 2005. I was on the money for my analysis. Too bad I didn't put my money where my mouth was.

My real project will be posted later tomorrow.

Backbone and Revolution

I don't know if this is going to bite me in the ass one day, but I'd rather put myself on the block for something that means something to me instead of just dealing with it.

I made a stand for what I believed in a while back at lab. There are things peculiarly wrong about it-- like the way students are learning, poor guidance, no real motivation or indepth understanding. Even I do not understand the full extent of this problem, I don't grasp it all but I can feel it.

The first years masters students are preparing for a department wide seminar occuring this Thursday and Friday. All students are expected to make a presentation and attend atleast ten (10) other seminars which are 20 minutes long. Students have been preparing 7~8 hours+ writing a 3~4 page handout. I talked to a Korean student about how things were going for him... I told him how I felt about this presentation-- ie. that it was rather stupid that we spend so long for a short presentation. He agreed with me and then we got into a conversation about how he is very bored with his reserach. The reason being that he doesn't understand much of it.

Electrical Engineer by training and working on a mechanical system (thermally actuated mirror using a laser). It seems to me that he's expected to produce something when he doesn't understand the basic principles behind what he is doing. Studying something in depth takes time, possibly like a few weeks or more but everyone is afraid of looking like they're not producing... "they've got to be doing something."

He wants to change reserach themes, I think this is do able because he has another year left at the lab. Masters students do their thesis in 1 year in Canada and America, during their second year, yet he is afraid of switching themes (I know of one other student that did here). He's afraid of telling the professor that he isn't happy with this theme, he's also worried if he will have enough time to finish a new theme if he does get one. He's also worried about switching advisors from within the lab (we have 4 advisors) feeling like he'd be backstabbing the guy he's working under. Working like this can be very freightening for a person in this situation. I've been there before in parts of my undergrad life and the inital part of my life here in Japan.

If there is one thing I have learned from living in Japan, it's that life isn't solely about keeping other people happy while giving up on your own. It takes backbone to disappoint or take criticism but I'd rather disappoint (or take criticism) rather than suffer. The only person that is responsible for your happieness is you and if you can't take responsibility for it, well, you'll get whatever that's comming to you.

I spent a good part of my evening last night talking to my labmate after midnight. I spent atleast an hour telling him to switch. He kept worrying that the professor would not be happy about it. Can you imagine people thinking like that (even his advisor is pretty nice too)? But I can... but even so, to hell with it.

I joined another conversation happening in another part of the lab about problems that students weren't learning here (like at 2 am). The guy I was taking to is Japanese and he's been in this lab since 4th year Undergrad and is moving into his 2nd year in his Phd. 5 years he's been here. This is the first time I heard him talk about this, but from what I learned, there are many others that are unhappy about how things going on here. The PhD students have been working on and giving seminars on some of the fundamentals of MEMs processing (only say 3 so far) which I feel do not meet all the needs of the new students that come into the lab... but it is somewhat of a good start.

This is the first time we've talked like this since the day I made my presentation to try and change things at the lab... and I only so happened to stumble into this conversation. If anyone believed in what I was saying, why didn't anyone step up to me sooner? Communication problems anyone? I hardly got any responses from the students from when I did make my presentation over a month ago.

What transpired from my conversation from the PhD student is that there are others in the lab that don't feel well supported in knowledge or guidance. He don't know what do to about it. But one thing we've both agreed on, is that asking the professors to change things isn't going to work. So what do we do?

He's asked me what would I do if I was the head of the Saturday meetings (because he doing that job now). I told him the first thing I'd do is cancel it because it's useless. He asks me what I would do to encourage knowledge sharing? Hold formal discussion groups and schedule them in? I don't know about you, but you just can't mandate information sharing or an open discussion forum. If it's one thing that I feel these people don't understand, it's how to inspire real motivation. Because there is a difference between just going through the motions vs really doing something because it means something to you. But most fundamentally, we need to find ways of learning because right now, the proffs are sure as hell not doing a good job of teaching.

I talked to another friend of mine, a masters student from China. She's lost interest in her project and the only thing that she's focusing on right now is trying to get a job in Japan. Right now, I have mixed feelings about getting a job in Japan because of this. I told her that "what's the point of finding a job if the working culture is similar to lab culture" (and by working culture, many people want to go corporate I'm not sure if it is different or not). All she told me afterwards was "that's probably true, wonder what'd I do." In English this sounds absurd, but I've heard it in Japanese on several occasions, like it was something natural (you might even be fooled into start thinking it's natural). I think it's absurd.

Honestly, I do want to change this lab. This lab is one of the best equpped labs in Japan and had a history of great work. I have heard that the old students of 5~6 years ago were really keen but they are now gone and no one knows how to foster the right atmosphere to bring out the best out of people. It is kind of sad that things are in this state right now.

So what am I going to do? For now, I'm going to sit down and talk to the other lab people and see how they feel and if they have any desire to try and change things from the bottom up. I've heard so far from my Chinese friend that she's given up on it and is going to live with it, I've heard a few more responses like that too. If that is what people feel like here, then I'm fully willing to pack up and leave (well not yet, everyone has full access to all equipment here, the problem is learning how to use them... and that does seem kind of fun to me). Atleast, I feel I'm lucky that I do keep a life out of lab and that I'm satisfied with many other things that I've learned out here... it's unfortunate that I can't say the same for the rest of them.

Anyways, excuse the babble. Even I don't see clearly about this, this whole thing is still jumbled in my mind, it probably shows in the writing.

A Ten Minute Presntation

A presentation occurs this Friday. It's a general presentation to students and faculty. I've got 10 minutes to present my material and 10 minutes of question period. All students are to provide handouts of their materials of approximately 2~4 pages. Ok fine, I'm working on the handouts now. But why oh why must preparing handouts take over 5~6 hours!? That I cannot figure out.

I have so far spent time wirting out a point form outline of what I wanted to write, jumped around through the other research papers I've read to reference information I've gathered. I've spent 2~3 hours writing material, inserted images from my own research and from other papers. Cross-referenced figures in my document.

Have the document reviewed by my professor, whom decides that I should remove some of my background work reserach and focus on what I have produced so far (the problem is that I haven't done enough analysis to talk about what data I have). I need to add simple sketches of my system which is taking me 2 hours to do in Adobe illustrator. I need to make another figure which might take me another hour so. Rewrite sections, add new information have it reviwed again.

Why does making a 10 minute presentation have to be so painful?

I've lectured calculus, physics, chemistry, computer science and English. I can lecture for easily an hour with little preparation with just pen and paper (a chalkboard would be even more fun). But why must writing handouts, making diagrams on the computer and blah blah blah take 6 hours+ to prepare for a 10 minute presentation? Ineffectiveness of publishing technology? Incompetence? I haven't a clue but if I can spend 30 mins to an hour preparing what I want to scribble down on a chalk board in advance (even that is being generous with time) to prepare for a 10 minute presentation, I'd take that in a heart-beat.

I've been in lab since 10:30 am and it's mid-night right about now. I'm not amused... the sick thing is that I'm getting used to it too (never thought that was even possible for me).

And I still have to prepare a powerpoint presentation. Grr!

Don't Trivialize the Math!

I was surfing the net today and came across an article about Willard Boyle, the man that co-developed the CCD or Charged Coupled Device (ie the imaging sensor used in almost all digital cameras) with George Smith. Nice stuff, he's Canadian (Boyle). My only disappointment is that the authors dumbed down the aritlce a little too much for my liking. When it came to describing how they developed the invention, the article describes it as:

They fiddled with some math and drew some sketches on the blackboard showing how this new device could be made. After not more than an hour and a half Boyle said, "OK, this looks pretty good."

If I could fiddle math like other people could fiddle the violin I'd be a (very) happy camper. I could care less about the CCD ray right about now.

I poked around the site where the Boyle article some more to find this, an article about a Canadian scientist that came up with a "Triple axis neutron spectroscope," for which he wond the Nobel Prize. What was www.science.ca's explanation of the development?

He fiddled with some math on his notepad for a while and then went to the coffee room. As he passed the lab that housed the radioactive nuclear pile, a controlled nuclear reaction that emitted one of the most powerful sources of neutrons in the world at the time, he wondered whether he could put it to use. In the coffee room he met Hurst. Brockhouse went up to the blackboard and said, “Don, there’s something I’d like to show you.” He sketched out some equations on the blackboard. The math described a device they could build that would use a neutron beam as a better type of spectrometer, a kind of flashlight that could probe into the mysteries of crystal structures and other solids such as metals, minerals, gems, and rocks.

Makes me wonder if I should've gone into the arts where I could learn a little more about "fiddling" and "sketching" mathematical equations. Really, I'm being sarcastic.

How did these guys get the math like this? and how do I get it? That's the million dollar question, literally. If you didn't get it: the Nobel Prize is 1 million dollars! Get it? See? [Har har]

Appartment Search!

I have 1 month to find a new place to stay. Currently searching with a Japanese guy and a gal from Calgary to find a new place to stay. Room mates might be fun, that is, if we can find a place to stay.

Doable, dunno. But we'll see how it goes. I'll post what I have learned with regards to appartment searching later on. But prices look somewhat comparable to what we pay back in Vancouver... for Sendai atleast and Sendai is very much like Vancouver population wise... also with beaches and mountains...???) Yeah, I really picked right, I'm living in the Japanese version of Vancouver sans the really pretty buildings we have in downtown.

Prices and my adventures talking with agents later on. First, I need a place to stay.

Wish me luck.

Need HP?

On sale, March 7th. Need I say more?

Breaking Molds

So I've been at my lab for almost a year now (well sort of), officially accepted in October but been dropping in since April. I'll tell you a story about my life in lab and I want to let you guys know, as peachy and as much fun as I look like I'm having, there are some rough parts to life too. Who said that life was easy, right? And remember hindsight is 20/20 and that you can make things look like anything you like in hindsight...

When I first came to lab, I shared a set of desks with 2 professors and a research assistant. These people come in at 9:00 am and leave at midnight usually. I kid you not. Before I was officially accepted into lab, I came in in the afternoon hung out until the evening and then left. What I did was kind of crazy (more like scary for a normal person in the lab to do). I'm talking about this lab culture (not to be mistaken for other labs!) where people don't take their backpacks home in the evenings, the reason is because if they walk out with their backpacks everyone worries that the professors will know that they are going home. Heaven forbid that someone is going home EARLY, you know, like *before midnight.* No, it's just because it just feels a little embarassing to them.

I will have you know that not all labs are like this. There are other labs where the people are very cool, very friendly and easy going. Hell I played a little game with another lab where people played paper-scissors-rock with 12 people and the loser buys ice cream for everyone. It's silly but lots of fun (like many things in life).

For 4 months I stayed at my seat. Hell, I know that I didn't get along with one of the professors. The best part what that I sat in front for several months and I almost always came in later than him and left earlier.

I always said "good morning" or "hello" when I came into lab and I said "good night" or "bye" when I left. No one in lab ever says "good bye" to their professors when leaving. Honestly, I was always freaked when I said "bye" for the first while. Later on when other students graduated from the lab or moved up to other seats leaving vacancies in other parts of the lab, I was invited to move to another seat. Why? Because my seat was always the most "stressful seat" to sit in. I declined and decided to stick it out.

Part of me wanted to move to get out of that seat and another part of me wanted to stay to challange this culture. I learned this much, to anyone that is good at making choices, you have my respect. Making choices is real tough stuff, especially when it has implications for later on. Would it be something I regret later on? I wouldn't know. But I don't now, so things worked out (the entire lab got reorganized and the professors got their own desks away from me :P).

People feel like that they have to be working hard here. Fun? What is this fun you speak of? Work does not necessarly have to be serious, nor do you have to be serious while you work. Comming to these decisions (conclusions?) is not easy, life is exceptionally subtle, I will finally come to realize (I used to believe when I was younger that life was inherently obvious). There are many things that we take for granted, why things that the way they are... sometimes you just walk into a place and accept it for the what it is and sometimes because you're pulled into a spiralling trap without noticing it. I couldn't accept that lab life should be so serious. Don't get me wrong that everyone in lab is really serious, there are always exceptions and there are times when a few people are goofy. But do I need to explain everything with precision detail? Use your own reasonable judgement here...

But anyways, I am on a little bit of a tangent. Too many ideas in my head, screaming to get out. My only regret about the written medium is that it's linear and that one idea flows from one to the next. In reality, ideas are like nodes that inspire many other ideas. Remember that... anyways, back from tangent x2.

I am stating to become known for being the most "light hearted" person in lab. I leave early come in late sometimes and I do my best to disregard this entire "stress" thing. So far the professors have been happy about my presentations (though, presenting vs doing lots of real work are different things) so I've got a little bit of an image that I'm riding on. Realizing this, it becomes more so evident that if you can do the work efficiently put out some results that people are happy with then the amount of time you're spending at the lab shouldn't be an issue. But wait, it takes confidence to do that... and sometimes these people are a little lacking in that department (as for me, I think I'm gambling a little :P).

From now on my main working objectives is to work effectively as possible so I can make time to go out have fun or learn things that I'm interested in. Enough of this "pretending to work hard" bull crap, because if you're spending long hours at the lab, getting no reults (note, it is common for people to fall asleep at their desks here) and then get rapped on if you're a little behind then of course you're going to feel terrible! If you don't realize why things are happening the way they are then it'll eat you up pretty quick. I already know a few of the newly arrived students feeling the pressure, but for the most part, the other students are doing just fine.

Yeah, I have to say that the first part of my life here was a little rough and pretty stressful. It's easy to forget about the stress when things start to get better but there are times that I haven't slept well because of worrying too much. My 1 year anniversary of being in Japan is comming up and it's going to be interesting to look back at some old posts.

Moving to another country has been quite the educational experience.

Return from a Road Trip! (Picture Previews)

I spent this weekend on a road trip with Mike, myself and Mona. The 3 of us decided to rent a car for this weekend and headed out into the country side. After much discussion we randomly decided to head west into Yamagata prefecture for the weekend. The red lines lines on the left map wsa the route we took.

None of us knew what to expect for this trip, but suffice to say, I have pictures to show and stories to tell. I won't be able to post the whole spiel today as I'm at the lab at the moment, but I'll post up a short preview of our adventures.

So I lied, there was a particular reason why we wanted to head West this time around. For the past few months, I've been hearing on the news of the immense amount of snow fall in the western region of Japan.

Our first stop, I made a return to Yamadera, the mountain temple which I went to back in November of last year. For comparison's sake, I took a picture in November beside a post box the first time I went to Yamadera which looked like this:

I came back to the same post box this month to find this.
See the difference?

It's really funny, all Japanese people I talk make the suggestion that I'm really used to the cold, that it snows like crazy where I come from. Sometimes, I'd tell them that all Canadians live in Igloos and we go by dog sled everywhere. Well, no I don't, but the thoughts have crossed my mind.

We climbed to the top of Yamadera to be greeted with scenery in white.

To the right, that's Mona. In the background, that's the view from the top of the mountain. It was breath taking to be there again in the winter. The next picture below is a shot of the icicles we caught on the way up the mountain.


After climbing down the mountain. We caught lunch at the local restaurant that specializes in hand-made soba. I had duck soba that evening.

After about a 2~3 hour drive further North-West through a mountain pass, we were greeted with snow banks that were...taller than me! Incredible.

I will a more indepth review of our trip later on (so I hope). I took about 100 pictures during trip. I'll need to sort them get them together and post them as an album when I get some spare time. Enjoy the previews... and also people that live in the country side rock.

Happy Valentine's day everyone.

On Writing

Note to audience: I am currently tipsy --> finished off about 400ml of a bottle of wine after writing a material science report.

For the past 4 days, I have been working on preparing a report for one of my classes which is a study of fracture mechanics from the perspective of grain boundary engineering of bulk materials. What this means is that all sorts of materials are made of little itty-bitty crystals mashed together to form a big chunk of material. Metals and ceramics fall in to this category. Stuff like wood, might not and that knowing how these crystals mesh together can determing how strong a material is.

I have been attending classes for the last 3 months in Japanese and I did not grasp much of the course unless I was drawing from a pool of previously learned knowledge from my material science course back at UBC. It was not until I started pouring over a review paper provided by my professor, which I had to write a report on as my final exam, that I would finally understand the fragments and the bits and pieces of information that I would learn over the year would crystallize in my mind (excuse the pun).

It took 2 days of pouring over a 9 page document (while falling asleep several times) then dashing over vast knowledge-scape of the internet over another day that I would finally understand the paper. After that I would spend 2 days putting my thoughts together in order to produce a 1,500 word essay on how manipulating how crystals meshed together would improve the strength of bulk material (ie a chunk of material made up of itty-bitty crystals). I asked the professor for some slack to allow me to write this report in English as I do not have the grasp of the Japanese language to write a Japanese technical document.

What I did learn over the week of preparing for this report was that it becomes infinitely easier to write about a topic that you grasp and have a point to make of it. Without understanding and a point to write about, making a report or writing an essay of any sort is *impossible.* It took days to finally understand what was going on and it took atleast a day of some random writing to realize what points I wanted to make (I did a very bad thing, in that I didn't write an outline of the points of what I wanted to say at first to save me the trouble... as I usually do, for formal situations).

There is a reason I am writing about this. I remember a time when I was in middle school (when those existed in BC before turning into a grade 8~12 high school system) that I hated writing, like most other students out there. Writing was a chore-- it took a considerable amount of time to write a short essay on something trivial (ie. something I didn't think important) and then get a sucky grade on it. There were some years where my essays would be hits and I'd get a good mark in history and/or English, but there where other times where they would be misses. I even had an English teacher come up to me and ask me why my marks in Grade 12 dropped compared to grade 11... I had to write the damn English proficiency exam at the end of the year (I forgot the name) to get into an English course for my first year at university. As an aside, I got my butt whooped on the grammatical section but scored the mark in the essay section to have all other sections of the exam waived and have me eligible for the first year English course (Engl 112, as I remember exactly).

Back then in High School and some parts of university life, I hated writing (much like everyone else at the time). Writing, is immensely hard and different compared to speaking, because when it comes to writing, you as the author become vulnerable to your readers. Unlike speaking, your words do not transiently disappear into the abyss, nor can you support your arguments to understanding people with statements like "well... you know," or "you get the idea." It is different because what you say persists and you say is open to close scrutiny to other people. No more are semi-vague statements acceptable, nor are fallous or frivolous statements welcomed. Everything that you need to say, needs to be thought out and organized in ordered for you to make a point. Writing is a very naked and revealing act.

I have a profound respect for good writers. Most ideas begin with a feeling, a sort of hunch or a twitch of the mind. But for many people, these sensations remain as feelings that something clear yet fuzzy and thoughts are often left in that state. Many people become afraid of writing because they are afraid of "looking silly" or some sort of argument like that. At first is kind of embarrassing, but like a baby learning to speak, mistakes are necessary and it takes practice to get better.

There are more profound benefits than to just being a good writer, in that I mean a person that is able to put thoughts into words in an understandable manner. It is also the ability to be articulate or detailed about one's own discussions, for we all know that the devils are always in the details. To be able to write well, it take s a good understanding of what one wants to say, then to find the right words to say it. It doesn't end there, but it also requires good organization to present ideas in understandable ways-- not only must you understand how you might understand something, you must also understand how others think to present things in an understandable manner.

To have some sense of writing, it becomes important to know what you want to say. To know what you want to say, you must understand it and the basis of knowledge that you draw from. Without this start, it becomes a perilous journey to produce any sort of coherent writing. From the students I have taught, some of them believed that if they randomly started putting ideas together that an essay would appear in front of them. I used to be one of those people, I paid for it dearly from time to time when I wrote essays that were a hodge-podge of roaming points (my high school writing philosophy was to write some random body first, then make an introduction and conclusion to fit whatever I patched together :P). Sometimes it would be a hit and others would be a miss, but I always wrote best when I was pissed-- because when I was pissed, I always knew exactly why.

All of my meandering tangents aside, being able to explain things clearly, especially in writing, is telling of how well a person is able to think and understand information. Being able to explain something with ease is in reality, much harder than it looks (and most often, underestimated). For that, people that can explain complicated topics with depth and simplicity are well respected... and that person could be you.

Resolution

Random note: This is my 103rd blog post since coming to Japan.

It's been a weeks since my last presentation to the lab about trying to make improvements and getting shot down by the German guy. His name is Jan and actually he isn't such a bad guy., he just needs work on finding less aggressive ways of giving constructive criticism instead of bringing down the hammer on someone that he doesn't think is on the ball (he sort of has a habit of this when questioning others in our lab meetings during their presentations).

Since that last week, we still have been going for lunch and dinner as part of our group, still talking and he invited me out with a Japanese friend from a company for dinner. There is no animosity because in general, I do believe him to be a fairly nice guy. I was just incredibly pissed after getting hammered by him.

On a Thursday night while working in the electronics building of the lab I decided to ask him what was up with him with those questions of his. Apparently, some lines of communication were crossed and we weren't interpreting each other quite properly. I was giving the presentation in Japanese that day (not exactly that good at making detailed discussion but I was trying) and it seems that Jan didn't entirely understand me (this is my second language, for him it's his third). After a few questions, he thought I was dodging his questions... he was asking me about one thing (which I didn't think was relevant.. and hence trying to steer the questions in another direction to show things in a different perspective) while I was trying to move the conversation in another. As a result, he thought I was dodging and has an instinctual reflex to hold someone's feet to the fire and kept hammering on one point resulting in gridlock. I used to be something like that, but have changed since.

To give an illustration it works like this (some of the Japanese presenters are horrible for this):

1. Presenter gets asked question from Jan: "have you considered what happens when you do blah-blah to your sample?"
2. Presenter says: "no, it isn't an issue."
3. Jan asks a leading question: "So tell me what happens to (property) blah-blah to your sample when you do something-or-other?"
4. Loooong pause --> the presenter has been caught and embarrassed and is looking for a way out or for the question to blow over.

Sadly this is very typical at our lab with Japanese presenters. It is my opinion that they are very shy of admitting mistakes (they have a tendency of being embarrassed) so instead they try to pretend there isn't one and keep moving on. It's been happening since I've started attending these meetings. I don't believe that people should be embarrassed when admitting mistakes or limitations in knowledge, it's a fact that we don't know everything... just wish that people are more comfortable with understanding the limitations of their own knowledge.

Now that we've got some dialogue going, we have both come to an understanding that this lab does need improving. Communication wise, better understanding of why we hold some of these meetings... I have a great example when one very annoyed undergrad student complained about why we had to attend weekend meetings.

I was told the same story he explained, that these meetings are to help improve people's presentation abilities for conference proceedings and questioned why is it necessary for us to attend. The prof immediately quipped back that attendance is optional and that these presentation meetings aren't for conference practice, it's to present your research in more detail to the professors so they can keep track of the students.

It's communication problems like these that are major problems. If people don't get what is going on and why things are being done then how does one know that objectives are being achieved? It's incredible sometimes that things aren't explained properly. Is this a problem of a big lab? I'm not sure but it's a problem.

It's problem like these that sort of bother me; it's like people aren't communicating or thinking. Jan told me that when he was here close to 5 years ago, that the students at the lab were much smarter, people were much more involved. He was telling me about all the fundamental knowledge that these people don't know, that and they assume that it isn't a problem. Knowledge isn't passed around and it seems that people are inherently ignorant.

This is a little bigger problem than I initially thought (ie more problems) and after thinking about all of this, I don't see the "big picture" of what is affecting what. Jan and I have agreed to find time to sit down with some of the students to figure out more on how this lab works and what are the problems and how to solve them.

Of an interesting note, some of these problems are cultural (if I can go as far as to call them that). Poor communication with superiors is often a result of students sometimes being afraid of questioning their professors (ie respect of authority). If the problems we are trying to solve end up requiring cultural changes, things might get even more... "interesting".

A Short Blurb on Ideas

I was just reading on Slashdot today and found this article about some people at UC-Berkley doing research on the connetions between language and thought. Whcih is something I wrote about 5~6 months earlier. It seems that this idea was thought of over 70 years ago 1930, otherwise known as the Saphir-Wharf Hypothesis (SHF).

It's just kind of amazing to realize that random people in different parts of the world and eras comming up with similar ideas.