My Octopress Blog

A blogging framework for hackers.

The Switch

I know what I’ve said that I would be making the switch to Apple, but I made that leap today when my brand new MacBook arrived at my doorstep. I got my case in the mail about a week ago, and I assumed the computer would arrive in a similar fashion (a note in my mailbox would tell me I received a package and to please pick it up). Apple told me it would be here on or before the 18th, but my case got here the day after it shipped, so I had been hoping.

After checking my mailbox, I returned to my apartment somewhat disappointed, but looking forward to Monday. A few hours, a knock on my door and a signature later, I was ready to make the switch. I have since spent the last (too many) hours installing my favorite software and setting preferences and whatnot. (You see, this isn’t really my mac switch per se - this last year I started using the schools Macs for my programming needs and was blown away. School ended, no more Mac - what’s a boy to do?)

Heart-throb

My latest little heart-throb has been the reason behind more than a couple sleepless nights as of late. It’s called Visual C#.

We met under the shade of iTunes’ beautiful SDK and it was love at first sight. It’s the comfort of an old friend, C++, combined with everything I love about scripting languages, and it’s really easy to make solid GUIs (graphical user interface) with it. Not that there aren’t problems in our relationship - it runs almost painfully slow, but what it lacks in speed it makes up in flexibility.

As I mentioned before, the only reason I’ve been messing around with it is because of iTunes’ API (application public interface for those playing at home; an API allows you to write your own program that interacts with the functions of another program in a publicly described fashion; for instance, Amazon.com publishes an API that allows other websites to grab information from their website using tools that Amazon.com has written). iTunes has this habit of keeping tabs on how many times you play any given song, and when you last played it, but if you play it on your iPod, it doesn’t keep track of that. Your iPod grabs the play counts from iTunes, but when you synchronize your iPod with your iTunes library, the times you’ve played your songs on your iPod seem to disappear. One way to solve this problem is to write a script using the API published by Apple.

There are a couple of other little tricks I’d like to teach iTunes, and so I’ve been putting together this little bundle of random tools with C#. It’s a lot of fun, and I figure it’s better than me playing Mario Cart.

Snow

It’s snowing today in Sendai, and although it’s not the first time this year, it certainly is the most it has snowed. It’s not to the point that it’s accumulating, and it’s not likely to change this time, but that’s not indicative of what the rest of the winter will bring. People have told me that when the time comes, Aobayama campus (where my lab is), will remain frozen over for like three months, and there will be snow on the ground every day. Sounds like fun!

Yesterday I finally got the internet in my dorm. It’s not very good by any means, and I have yet to be able to download anything more than a couple of megabytes, but at least I can do some of my research at home. The States clock me at around 400 kbps, Japan clocks me around 1.5 Mbps, but I haven’t gotten downloads faster than 35 kbps. I guess I’m spoiled from the dorms at Mines.

Yesterday is also when I ordered my brand new macBook. I know I boasted before that I was making the switch, but now I have. I couldn’t place my order through the US site as they don’t ship internationally, so I went to Apple’s Japanese site. The only trouble is, it’s in Japanese. And also, you have to input your shipping address in kanji. Who wants to deal with that? I’m very fortunate that they have a service hotline in English, and I called up, greeted with Japanese, and I asked them as best as I could in Japanese if they spoke English. The woman explained in a phonetically-memorized script that she was sorry that no English speakers were available, and if she could please have my phone number, a representative would call back shortly. A few minutes later, I was on the phone with Kuni, whose English impressed me. He helped me place my order, get my student discount (interestingly enough, I didn’t need to provide any authentication that I was actually a student) and all that.

I got the white macBook Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz, upgraded to 2 gigs of ram, and even a US keyboard layout. They said it should be a few days before it ships, and then it should be on my doorstep between December 15 and 20. In retrospect, I think I may have chosen a poor time to order.

She Cannot Love

On Friday night, some friends and I got together for a little bit of drinking, and some public humiliation. Stan was supposed to ask this girl out by Friday, and since he didn’t, he had to be publicly humiliated.

At any rate, the point of all this is that while there, we played on David’s Playstation 3, for which he paid about $650 US. I think that’s a little much for a game console, but it is not without merit. Amazing graphics.

While there, I met this Guatemalan man and his girlfriend. He was a philosophical drunk, and he was trying to tell me about love. “I’m going to marry this girl,” he said, putting his arm around her and pointing. “Except, she has an artificial heart and cannot love anyone.” He kept asking me to speak to him in Spanish, but my Spanish was never that advanced to begin with, and so we ended up speaking this confusing melange of Spanish, Japanese and English. Every couple of minutes he would turn to her and make out for about 30 seconds and then turn back to me to continue talking. Maybe it’s a Guatemalan thing?

Earlier in the week, we had our kanji midterm, and I’m pretty sure I got an A, but I think they had mercy for us and made the test easier than they had to. I was more than a little nervous going into it, and the thing that troubled me the most on the exam was the pronunciation of the kanji. Glad to have that done with, and it was my only midterm. It’s weird to be only half-done with the semester when stateside people are starting finals.

On Saturday we went to a nomihodai place (one of my favorites because they serve a bunch of food and the drinks are pretty decent), and I tried umeshyu (I’m uncertain how to spell is in romaji - 梅酒), but it translates to plum alcohol or plum wine. It’s very very sweet, and though I do not enjoy a plum, this was amazing. I’m not sure about its availability in the States, but if you get a chance, try it.

Grace a Yamaya (which could literally be translated as mountain store) - a store that specializes in alcohol and imported foods, we found cachaça (fermented sugar cane). Alan tells me that it’s the favorite drink of Brazil, and this particular bottle we bought was actually a Brazilian brand. Most of the people here who are even remotely social drink quite a bit, and so I’m hoping to host a cachaça night so we can socialize and discover Brazil’s culture through alcohol. The only problem is, we can’t find limes, which you need to make caipirinha (why we wanted the cachaça).

Drinking isn’t all I do here - there just happened to be two parties this weekend. And, don’t worry mom - we’re all responsible adults and take care of each other. Smokey the bear says, “Friends don’t let friends bike home drunk.”