This week was “Golden Week”, a sequence of usually 4 days off at the start of May. This is one of the big holidays in Japan, and people usually have big plans for the break, including overseas travel and the like. The gas prices always seem to go up a bit before Golden Week, and miraculously return to normal a few days afterwards. This year, things are even crazier because of the reinstatement of the lapsed “temporary gas tax” (temporary since 1954! – well, 1974 for the actual temporary part, but there have been gas taxes in effect since 1954.), which are about 50 yen a liter.

I don’t really want to write about that – it was reinstated in a recent push by the upper house that overrode the lower house and probably angered a lot of people – but just wanted to quickly jot down the things I’ve been doing on my “vacation”.

I wanted to get some work done over the four day break. Usually the holidays are four weekdays, but timing is particularly bad this year, and two of the holidays fell on the weekend, so we only got Monday and Tuesday off. I brought my work laptop home so I could do some programming, but as often happens high hopes clashed with reality and I didn’t get as much done as I wanted.

On Saturday I slept in, and did some needed cleaning around the apartment. I watching some TV, and started looking at my email backlog (that always takes longer than expected.) I have family coming to visit soon and spent some time planning for that, and then in the evening decided that I would take advantage of the holiday and play a game. Quite a while ago I bought Galactic Civilizations 2, a space war and conquest game. It is really cool, and I was totally obsessed with it for a while. Because I’m the obsessive type, I just drop things cold-turkey when I think they are taking up too much of my time. I think by the time I realized what had happened, it was 6am on Sunday morning, and I had wasted about 14 hours in a blink.

So I’ve put that away again, and won’t go back until I can learn to set a timer or something.

I woke up Sunday afternoon, went down to the local cafe for lunch, and read a bit more of “Kafka By the Sea”, the Murakami Haruki novel I’ve been working on for over a year now. I’m about a quarter of the way into the second book and it is really getting interesting. I wish I had more time to devote to reading in Japanese – it is a great way to study, and lots of fun – but it seems hard to take the time. (I say, as I blog.)

Back at home I spent a few hours reading up on the FrameNet project, which I’m using in some research. The framenet book is pretty large, but does not cover the xml file format and all that stuff. Since the data files are pretty large, it is a daunting task to dive in and start using them right away. I’m very surprised that there are not more well-developed interfaces to accessing FrameNet in Java – there are two that are kind of old, and don’t look very well adopted, unlike the state of affairs for WordNet, which has many Java interfaces.

On Sunday night I went out and met a friend for dinner, which was lots of fun. I’ve been cooking at home a lot lately and it is really nice to eat something that I didn’t make myself. I have started making lots of Mabo tofu lately, which is pretty good and very easy to make.

Monday I spent some time doing work email, and a bit of programming (getting a feature set developed for a CRF learning system) and in the evening I went to my finaceé’s parent’s place for dinner. Unfortunately, L. was sick, and holed up in bed. Still, dinner with the in-laws was nice (more food I didn’t cook!) and I helped L.’s dad set up his email on a new computer.

Today I’ve spent the day working with a FrameNet semantic labeler from the NLP group at Lunds University. It looks really great, because it will save me the trouble of having to build a learning system to map from syntactic dependencies to semantic roles. Since that is a pretty tough project in itself, I wouldn’t be able to do it justice because really I just want to use a bit of the semantic information in FrameNet for sentiment analysis.

As vacations go, it was nice because I spent maybe two days goofing off, and then a bit of time working but in a more relaxed environment than usual.

Unusual things that happened while walking around Oyamadai: another new restaurant opened up. I’m amazed at how quickly they tear down and construct new buildings around here. For the first time since I’ve been here, I received a benefit for having signed up for the local supermarket’s “rewards card” thing. They gave me a coupon for 500 yen off. Not bad. That’s almost a pint of Hagen Daaz ice cream here. (Or two gallons of Blue Bell back in Dallas.)

While I was dozing off in the afternoon, I heard something strange out my window: English! I poked my head out and it looks like another foreigner is moving in nearby. Neat.