The last straws (?)

So, my last working week has started, and things are nowhere near where I want them to be. New things keep on popping up, both inside and outside of work, and things never happen exactly as I want them to. At work a lot of last-minute problems are suddenly popping up, and problems that never occurred before now need urgent solving. At work I'm keeping busy with transfering my knowledge on the projects that I was involved in by way of meetings, writing documentation and deploying fixed versions of tools. It's hectic until the end, and I guess that's not bad. During the past 1-2 weeks I've barely had time to think.

My room is a mess right now. There's boxes and garbage bags everywhere. I'm throwing out a lot of things but there's not a lot of progress. There's so much stuff that I don't really want to keep, but don't really want to throw away either. The stuff that I really care about only fills a very tiny cardboard box, and the meh stuff fills the other three big ones. And even then I'm throwing away/giving away/selling more than half of my earthly possessions.

My most prized possession is my hard disk. One might call me over-protective, but I like to take good care of my data. I've got two 1.5 terabyte drives set up in a mirrored RAID 1 external case, which I plan to send back home insured and by priority mail. On this (encrypted) hard disk are the originals of all the photos I took since I got my first digital camera. That's a lot of memories. If the hard disk somehow gets lost in transit then I have a backup on a different hard disk that I will keep here in Japan, and another backup on blu-ray discs. I also keep a copy of the last 3-6 months of pictures online, on a private fileshare.

I'm not sure how to feel about all of this. Like I said before, I haven't had much time to think, but sometimes I suddenly realize what I'm about to do, and I wonder what in life's name I am doing. At times I am so excited about the upcoming trip that I can't sleep, and at other times I am so worried about what I will do after the trip ends, and I also cannot sleep. The remainder of my nights I spend writing semi-coherent blogposts and cleaning my room.

It's still raining. It's been raining for weeks. I wonder when it will finally stop.

Posted in Daily Life | Tagged , , ,

Gait der haart vandeur!

Cycled to the beach today. Did not realize there was a tsunami expected until after I saw the fire trucks. Don't know what they were doing though. There were lots of people on the beach walking their dog or just looking out in general, maybe waiting for the tsunami. I left before anything happened though.

I'm trying out the circular polarizer filter that I bought a couple of weeks ago, but so far I can hardly see any difference, even when the conditions for using a CP are supposedly very good. I think  I need to play with it a bit more..

(Yes, I know I'm supposed to rotate the filter to get the best effect... -__-)

Posted in Daily Life , Photography | Tagged , , , ,

Super Awesome Cycling Pants

Last week after going to the Dutch embassy in Tokyo to renew my passport I decided to stop by a nice cycling store. I was looking for a long-sleeve shirt, but found that I look ridiculous in a professional cycling shirt as my belly sticks out.. I did buy cycling pants, and the reason that they are awesome is because they repel rain, keep me warm and prevent me from sweating too much. I didn't think it would make a big difference, but it really helped. Too bad I had to cycle in the rain to find out about the rain-repellingness..

I documented some cycling routes today, which I figured I'd share here. They're probably only useful for someone who lives in Atsugi, is interested in cycling and can read English. I think that's only me.

Click here to go to the Google Maps page.

(If you're wondering, today I did Mountain Long)

Posted in Cycling , Daily Life | Tagged , ,

Calling my own bluff

It's cloudy and rainy today. I'm writing this on my netbook while sitting in a cafe at the center of Atsugi. I haven't used my netbook much since I bought it in the beginning of January. Starting April, this will be my only means of communciation, so I'd better start getting used to it. The things on my mind right now are not related to the trip at all. It still seems unreal. Right now I'm thinking that the screen is so small, and how sleepy I'm getting from the cafe's air-conditioning. I'm not in a traveling mood at all.

Thanks to a national holiday it's a rare four-day weekend this week. Two days have passed, all rain. The forecast says there'll be more rain on Saturday and Sunday. I'm thinking how much I enjoy my time in my warm room at these days, and then I realize that soon I will no longer have that luxury. So I went shopping today. I bought a lens pouch that's slightly more waterproof, and a (rain)waterproof laptop case. Rain will perhaps be my worst enemy. Rain, and weight.

Besides my own heavy body I've also committed to carrying some decidely un-lightweight things with me on my trip, like a DSLR and a couple of lenses and a netbook. I'm also bringing relatively lightweight stuff like my iPod classic and a Canon S90 compact camera, but it does all add up, especially if you consider the myriad of wires and adapters that I'll have to bring for this stuff. Even though I already made up my mind to bring all of these things, I even considered bringing my half-broken Ixy/Ixus and underwater case so I could take pictures in the rain. I've instead decided to get a cheap rain cover for my S90 instead. At least that'll be foldable so it'll take in less space on the way.

Since we're on the tech topic now anyway, remember that I bought a Solio Classic a while back? I bought it with the intention of charging my netbook with it, but that seems to have been a bit too optimistic. I did find a 12V DC - 19V DC adapter on ebay, which can charge my netbook from a car's cigarette lighter plug, but the Solio doesn't seem to be strong enough to power the adapter. Alas, that's too bad, but it was never meant to work this way anyway, so I'm not too sad about it. I can still use it to charge my iPod and my mobile phone. Not on days like these though: on gray days the Solio stays dead.

That's about it for my tech prep. In terms of camping I'm not very well prepared at all. I have a tent, but I haven't used it for almost two years. It might be rotting and mouldy by now. Sleeping bag is fine, but I'm not sure yet about my sleeping mat. It's very, very thin. I didn't consider this to be a problem on previous trips cause they only lasted 1-2 weeks. I don't know how long I'll be sleeping on the mat this time, so maybe I"ll bring a slightly thicker one, or an inflatable one.

My bicycle is in good shape. I recently had the gears fixed, cause it's always been nearly impossible to get the front gear to change up again after changing down. Right now the gears are in even better condition than they came in when I bought the bicycle, three years ago. There are still some minor things that need fixing though: the front suspension's never worked with the luggage rack mounted, and nor I nor any bike shop has been able to fix this. I may have to apply some brute force to get this to work. Another issue are spare parts: I need a spare inner tire and spare brake blocks. In fact, I'll see if I can arrange that today.

I'm trying to be prepared for anything, this time more than ever. During the trip I won't be able to say "Ok, I'll just go back to Atsugi, stay in my room for a couple of weeks, then go cycling again". There's no going back. Anything I don't bring with me, I don't own. That's why I don't want to compromise on taking a netbook or my DSLR. They're part of my life, and I can't do without them.

I'm fairly serious about my material preparation. On the other hand, I'm trying to leave the route and the schedule as vague as possible. I have a clear idea of where I want to end up, and which points I want to visit on the way, but as for which road that will take me there, or how fast I could do this, I don't really care about. I've got a rough outline of where I want to go, and it's mostly places I'd like to avoid. I don't want to be in big cities like Nagoya or Osaka. That would probably force me to find a hostel, and increase my expenses. I also want to avoid routes that are too mountainous, but that seems impossible in some cases. I want to go to the Fuji five lakes, so I'll have to climb at least 1 kilometer. Much later in the trip I want to visit both the north coast of Japan (west of Kyoto) and Hiroshima. I'll have to cycle through the mountains to connect those two points.

It still seems unreal. I feel like I'm playing a game with myself, first claiming I can do all of these impossible things, then seeing if there's an inner voice inside of me that says "I can't do that!". Bluffing, then calling my own bluff. I don't really know if I can do all of these things. I'm just saying I can, and then we'll find out later how it goes. The game hasn't started yet though. I have until April to place my bets :)

Posted in Cycling , Spirit of Japan , Tech , Thoughts | Tagged , , ,

There's never any earthquakes in winter

Yesterday was a great day that didn't feel like winter at all, so I said "winter is supposed to be cold, cloudy and rainy". Today it's cold, cloudy and rainy. Let's see what happens with the statement in this post's title.

As human cultures are becoming more and more developed they start to find out how and why things work. For example, if you lived in the middle ages and caught a fever, people would probably know the procedure of healing, but they wouldn't be able to tell why. The whole process of becoming a more advanced civilization involves analyzing a problem and something that affects the problem, either negatively or positively, finding out the true reason behind it and using that information to improve life in some way. You can imagine this happening when fighting disease, but also in technical areas like bridge building and other architecture. The formula is quite simple: analyze something that you implicitly know is true, find out why it's true, and use that information to improve something.

Interestingly enough programmers, whom you would expect to be the first to accept this scientific approach to things, are doing the exact opposite. Instead of going from something vague to something clearly defined we are resorting to a simulation of the way our own vague brains work when trying to solve complex problems like speech or image recognition. We take that beautiful, efficient and exact world and use a neural network to simulate the way a human brain would judge things. The beauty of this is that it actually works, and gets much better results in a wide area of expertise than most exact alternatives. Yet somehow that doesn't quite satisfy.

Are neural networks and genetic programming just a quick fix to solve problems that are too complex for us to think about? A book I'm reading currently by Ray Kurzweil suggests otherwise. Kurzweil suggests that the only problem humans are supposed to solve is that of creating an intelligence smarter than us, and if we cannot understand that intelligence then that's ok, because we're not supposed to. It's the whole my-children-understand-how-to-use-the-tv-remote-and-I-don't story applied to a grander scale. I rather don't like it.

Take image recognition for example (or speech recognition if you will). I believe that an algorithm developed and tuned by hand by the smartest scientists in their particular field would perform better than a dumb neural network being trained with a bunch of training data. The problem is time. For a human being to create such an algorithm it may take a lifetime, or it may never happen, depending on the complexity of the task. At some level our human brains just can't keep up any more, and suddenly it pays off to brute-force the solution with a neural network or a hidden markov model. We're working on improving our tools, but we're not working on improving ourselves.

If the human brain could work faster, or could process more information simultaneously, then the range of problems that we could solve would be increased. If we spent more time studying the fuzzy logic of our brains, then in the long term we might be able to create better exact solutions to the problems that are troubling us right now. That topic would lead us in the direction of genetic engineering, but let's save that for another time.

It takes a fuzzy human brain to understand the art in exact solutions.

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