"Don't touch! Don't touch! The bunny!!"!

There is nothing quite as nice as going out with friends to eat. Then, upon returning home, looking forward to a hot shower before crawling, exhausted, into bed. But something lacks when there is no gas in the house. Which means no hot water, and no functioning stovetop. What a curious bepuzzlement ensues when one is staring at the digital wall display that tells the water temperature, and it reads letters that one has never seen before! Maybe it will come back in the morning? But no. To wash my face with warm water this morning required microwaving a plastic bowl of water to desired heat. I slouch into school in a sweatshirt, wishing I had jeans without holes in to continue the unwashed "Saturday" feeling.

In other things, at school, the application I have been doing to teach elementary school come August has entailed my writing a page-long essay in Japanese. Without the help of my truly amazing, dedicated, and wonderful International Department, I sincerely doubt it would have been comprehensible. The head of the department and my supervisor put MANY hours into proofing, reproofing, helping me straighten out my goals, my ideas, and helping me tailor the essay into something that worked for the position. They also put together the evaluation of my performance that went along with the essay and application to the prefectural capital. A colossal amount of work, all told. My supervisor confessed to me this morning that she could hardly sleep last night, because she was thinking about my essay. Then she said, "If you don't get this job, I'll kill you!!" Yes, Ma'am, Kinu-chan!!! I wonder if I had managed to put that on my application, if it would make a difference to the people making the decisions?

I learned so much doing this this week. I get the distinct feeling that if I wrote essays every week for a year, I would be really good at Japanese by the end. We shall see. This thing has been top stress this week, against the constant static of job-hunting. Hopefully things will work out!

Thoughts

Several people took note that I have Martin Pelikan's book, Hierarchical Bayesian Optimization Algorithm: Toward a New Generation of Evolutionary Algorithms on my to read list. Once I'm done with it, I will be posting a review on my review site along with a review of Henri Cohen's A Course in Computational Algebraic Number Theory. The latter will be up June 2nd and the former will be up a brief time after that. Both books are available from Springer publishing. You can find other reviews at The Society for Reflective Consumption of Media, though not all pertain to technolgoy, you may find them interesting regardless.

Thoughts

Huzzah! It has been quite a while. Like all life, my current position is one of both perceived good and bad. The grant money I had hoped to get was not available to me, thus I will not, most likely, be giving a presentation at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. It wasn't going to be much, just a 5 minute talk about the current research I'm doing, still, it would have been nice.

So, while that is disappointing, I have had additional good news about the research. I brought some observations I had about the original project to the attention of my research advisor. He was quite ecstatic at what I was suggesting and then brought that attention to some of the top people in the field I'm working in. They had not heard of it, at least in public literature, so we've decided to go ahead with another paper after the original is finished.

I've started a website with my good friend Dan and some other friends. You should check out the Societey for Reflective Consumption of Media. We are hoping to develop a community of friends whose opinions can be trusted for making timely media choices. The new intellectual will be one that is able to filter information for relevancy and we hope to be a part of that filter for many.

I have a long booklist of things I have read and must review and things I want to read. The latest on that queue is Hierarchical Bayesian Optimization Algorithm: Toward a New Generation of Evolutionary Algorithms. It is about what the title suggests, a scheme for utilizing a Bayesian Network for promising solutions, while sampling the built network for other solutions, which the network interjects back into the genetic algorithm.

The Wife and I are in a limbo here, so this counts as more bad news I suppose. We're not certain if we will have jobs here, so we may be returning home after this August. This has more possible outcomes, which could be considered good or bad, but I'm going to let time adjust my perceptions in this manner. I think that about sums up my life so far. I know this has been terribly mundane, but most of my thought has been directed elsewhere.