Ever since I changed jobs, I’ve been pushing pretty hard to keep up with all my commitments. I’m organizing a track for the NTCIR 7 workshop so after work at my new job, I head home and spend anywhere from two to six hours on NTCIR-related stuff. The big push has been for this week, when I have to get the evaluation results back to the participants. I’ve just about finished the coding I need to do that, and then I have to spend a few hours working on some human-in-the-loop semantic matching.

So that has been keeping me very busy. I hope things will get a bit better after this week, but I am pretty sure that I’ll be busy until after the workshop in December.

But there are a few things that are worth noting. First, I don’t know how I had missed the show The Middleman, but it is a funny show. I heard about it on tor.com from someone there. It is a sci-fi take on Superheros and Supervillians, and is a perfect live-action match for The Venture Brothers.

Otherwise, I haven’t been watching much tv, but R. has been putting the Fox Channel on TV when she’s home. I really like listening to Dr. House in dubbed Japanese.

So there are two other notable events. Really, I’ve been working 12+ hours a day, so very little has been going on. These little stories are all I have.

The other day I decided that I would cook some curry. I went out shopping and saw that there is now “low fat” curry. There were 50% off and 30% curries. I was pretty sure that 50% would be pretty bad, so I gave the 30% a try. Back home while preparing the meat, I saw that R. has some meat scissors, which I just love. They are so convenient. So, I cut up the meat, set the curry going, and then tried to wash the scissors. Huh. Funny. The blades don’t come apart for easy washing.

Later on, I asked R. about that. “Why don’t the meat scissors in Japan come apart for easy cleaning?” “What are meat scissors? We don’t own any such thing!”

Oops.

And just yesterday, as R. and I were going out of the house to get lunch on a nice Saturday, we stopped down by the mail room in the apartment building because I wanted to mail something out. I was about to drop it in the outgoing mail slot and R. stopped me. “What are you trying to do?” “I’m trying to mail this.” “By putting it in the junk mail garbage slot?”

Oooh. That explains why a bunch of the forms I mailed out over the past three months never seemed to actually arrive. Come on Japan! Outgoing mail in the building is really convenient! So are meat scissors! Let’s get moving here!