Will’s Blog

Stuff that happened since Hongkong:

Tue 11.23.2004

HK -> Tokyo
New energy! New focus! New goals!

Wed 11.24.2004

Back to work and already super busy! Worked all day and night today trying to pick up where I left off… Club AP Appli passed testing and just needed to be released. Done. Next: Collaborative Research Project with Tokyo Daigaku grad students to create a demo iAppli to be shown in a research forum this Friday! Two days…

Had to create an iAppli that uses IrDA and HTTP to: connect IrDA-enabled PCs with the controller servers in order to initiate a direct communication session between the PCs. Hours: 10:30AM - 03:30AM i.e. about 16 hours today! Tyler & Kobayashi-san assisting me with the project, working on the wrappers for both the server and PC while I try to finish the iAppli. Plus a 3-person team at Tokyo University working on the controller servers and communication protocol. All 6 of us, each responsible for different modules. Too many modules. Worse, we only have general specs because this was a last-minute decision to demo our research. Inevitably, quite a bit of miscommunication.

Integration was hell. Everyone was stressed…

Thu 11.26.2004

Worked all day all night again, this time at Tokyo Daigaku in one of the lecture rooms… Hours: 10:30AM - 11:30PM i.e. another 12 hours! I was glad our team and Tokyo Daigaku team could meet up and work in the same location. Many design decisions and changes were made right there and then. Gotta get the demo to work somehow!

11:00 PM - The iappli for the demo was finally completed. Spent another 30mins or so to fix the look and feel. *Phew* At least we were done, so we could go home and get some rest. The team at Tokyo Daigaku stayed up to setup firewalls and to make sure everything is ready for the demo tomorrow. Worked almost 30 hours in the two days right after coming back from a short vacation. Feels like I need another one already…

Fri 11.26.2004

The Forum! Ours was “Session Layer Architecture”. The Live Demo went well!! The PC’s were connected and were sending webcam video capture back and forth! Yay! Anyway at this point I was just glad it was over.

Met and talked with visiting researchers from Europe and a bunch of Tokyo Daigaku grad students from all over Asia. There were grad students from Malaysia, China, Korea, and one guy from Indonesia! All seems very highly intelligent, and are really friendly. Very interesting folks! Hopefully I’ll meet them again when we continue the research project to the next stage i.e. using Bluetooth instead of IrDA.

Another project success! Otsukaresama!

ただいま！

香港に行ってきたよ～　

初めて香港のDragon Airに乗った。
行きはビジネスクラスにアップグレードしてもらった。＾＾　

Cool Logo!

香港は・・・毎朝ヤムチャヤムチャ！

I love Char Siew Pao!

見たことないカニも食べてみた・・・

そして、このデカイ鮑！

香港は・・・ショッピング！VAIOを買っちゃった。＾＾

A short vacation to meet up with my parents. It’s going to be my first time in HongKong. Looking forward to the good food…

今日は東京大学に行ってきた。東大は日本のナンバーワンだね。
東大の研究者たちと一緒にプロジェクトする。共同研究。
どうなるんだろう。２６日に発表があるから、デモアプリを作る。
赤外線やHTTPやUDPやTCP/IP等の通信を行なうシステムだから、
結構複雑なんだね。一週間しかないし、急に忙しくなっちゃった。＾＾；

写真に写ったビルは有名なんだって。どういう話しがあるんだろう。
古そう。色んな物語もありそうだね・・・
怖い物語は？ありそうだね。

明日もまた行く。

I went fishing with the guys at work yesterday and I got stung by a poisonous fish!

The fish is a real punk with spiky hair!

I quite like J-pop in general. Being in Japan, I hear new songs played around me a lot. Even though my Japanese listening skill is still very limited and I can’t catch most of the song lyrics even after hearing the same song many times, I still find many of them to have very catchy tunes and some even stick in my head for a long time.

Recently, however, there is one really cute song that even hits the right spots in my heart. It goes like 「あなたが恋しくて・・・大好きだよ」、 which to my foreigner ears sounded pretty light at first. Just another cute but common I-love-you-oh-so-much ballad I thought. But somehow, the way the singer’s voice and the melody went… it was very sad. Very painful. 切ない. Yesterday while channel surfing the TV I saw parts of the music video for this song. Flashes of a young couple looking so much in love. All romantic and lovey dovey and pink. Kinda kawaii.

But when the scene switched to the singer, I saw tears flowing from her eyes.

So sad. How can something so sad look so kawaii? How can something be so kawaii and be so sad at the same time?

「大好きだよ」 is a new song by 大塚愛. I like this song a lot. After reading more about it on the Net, I found out that this song is actually about a very cherished love who has passed away. *sigh* That pain in her cute voice… so sad…

Today’s lunch.

Most of the guys at work prefer to eat on their desk, while I like to check out the places around the office. So a lot of the time it’s just me and 2 female colleagues. On rare occasions, like today, I get to hear some ‘girltalk’. Yup. Scary. Brutally honest opinions about guys and relationships and stuff…
Things are never what they seem…

Handy Dessert.

Saw this at the FamilyMart near my house. Mango pudding and almond jelly trying to look like those sports supplements thingy.

Found a cool device!

Take photo. Send by IR. Blog.

For a single photo, this is much simpler and quicker than to transfer via USB or miniSD. Only about 15 seconds or so, and no need to hassle with cables. Perfect.

今日はバドミントンの練習に行ってきた。

週に２回、一時間づつ。全然たりないな～。
筋肉が減ってお腹がでかくなってきた。やばい。
スタミナはシニアの選手たちにまけてる。＾＾；

なにかしなきゃー

え？なんだって？食べ物の量を減らす？うそ～　やだ～