{"id":316,"date":"2008-10-26T12:03:54","date_gmt":"2008-10-26T03:03:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/26\/a-quick-update-and-get-more-convenient-japan\/"},"modified":"2008-10-26T12:03:54","modified_gmt":"2008-10-26T03:03:54","slug":"a-quick-update-and-get-more-convenient-japan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/26\/a-quick-update-and-get-more-convenient-japan\/","title":{"rendered":"A quick update, and get more convenient, Japan!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ever since I changed jobs, I&#8217;ve been pushing pretty hard to keep up with all my commitments.  I&#8217;m organizing a track for <a href=\"http:\/\/research.nii.ac.jp\/ntcir\/\">the NTCIR 7 workshop<\/a> 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&#8217;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.  <\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;ll be busy until after the workshop in December.  <\/p>\n<p>But there are a few things that are worth noting.  First, I don&#8217;t know how I had missed the show <a href=\"http:\/\/abcfamily.go.com\/abcfamily\/path\/section_Shows+Middleman\/page_Detail\">The Middleman<\/a>, but it is a funny show.  I heard about it on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tor.com\/\">tor.com<\/a> from someone there.  It is a sci-fi take on Superheros and Supervillians, and is a perfect live-action match for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.adultswim.com\/shows\/venturebros\/index.html\">The Venture Brothers<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Otherwise, I haven&#8217;t been watching much tv, but R. has been putting the Fox Channel on TV when she&#8217;s home.  I really like listening to Dr. House in dubbed Japanese.  <\/p>\n<p>So there are two other notable events.  Really, I&#8217;ve been working 12+ hours a day, so very little has been going on.  These little stories are all I have.<\/p>\n<p>The other day I decided that I would cook some curry.  I went out shopping and saw that there is now &#8220;low fat&#8221; 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&#8217;t come apart for easy washing.  <\/p>\n<p>Later on, I asked R. about that.  &#8220;Why don&#8217;t the meat scissors in Japan come apart for easy cleaning?&#8221;  &#8220;What are meat scissors?  We don&#8217;t own any such thing!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Oops.<\/p>\n<p>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.  &#8220;What are you trying to do?&#8221;  &#8220;I&#8217;m trying to mail this.&#8221;  &#8220;By putting it in the junk mail garbage slot?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s get moving here!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ever since I changed jobs, I&#8217;ve been pushing pretty hard to keep up with all my commitments. I&#8217;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, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fugutabetai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}