See if you can figure out the post title before the end of this post.
Been busy posting on the new course's website. For this course, you are required to post on a certain number of other people's posts each week, in addition to answering the questions the prof. assigns. It is actually part of your grade of the class.
Work has been busy. My private lessons seem to be dropping like flies, but the ones that stay are doing well on the Eiken tests. The Eiken is a well-known Japanese English test. My morning class and my PM class are both improving little by little, and in general I can't complain about it too much.
I took a break from Dark Souls to enjoy Batman and Battlefield, but now I am dying too many times and too easily when I try to progress further. It seems like my playing has deteriorated and/or I'm trying to get into areas that are designed for characters that have higher stats than I do. The main thing that has got me frustrated is that my character has been cursed, which reduces his health by half. The only way to cure this is by buying an item from a particular merchant, or by visiting a healer in a particular area. By accident, before I was cursed I attacked the merchant, and now she won't sell me anything because she's angry. The only way to fix that is by collecting about 66,000 experience points (for comparison, most enemies drop around 50-200 xp, which means farming about 330 enemies at minimum, and at my current level, it takes about 6,000xp to level-up). And I spent a good hour or so trying to get to the healer, but I needed to fight through these ghosts which can take away a lot of your health easily, and which can hide in floors, walls, and ceilings. I can't remember how many times I died. The other thing is that these ghosts don't give you any xp.
If anyone is allergic to math, you have been warned to turn your eyes away. As part of my work on the biome packet, I thought it might be interesting to have graphs which would show each of the biomes compared to every other biome. The idea was that the graph below has too much information on it.
And that graphs like the ones below would be more useful.
OK. So how many do I need? Take a few minutes and try to figure it out.
Done? Actually, I would need 63 total. This is basically a combinations problem. There will be six graphs which just show 1 biome by itself. That is the easy part: there are six biomes, so if you show one at a time, you need six graphs. OK. But what about two biomes together? It turns out that there are 15. How about three biomes? We need 20 different graphs to show these possibilities. For four biomes we need 15, for five biomes shown on the same graph at once we need 6 graphs, and of course only one graph to show all at once, like the one at the top. 6+15+20+15+6+1=63.
For those of you who were or are math geeks, this should sound familiar. That's right! Pascal's triangle and/or Newton's binomial theorem. If we go down to the 7th row, we see it: 1 6 15 20 15 6 1. If we add these up we get 64. So what happened to the other one? How come we only need 63 graphs, not 64? Because the last graph is an empty graph: it contains none of the biomes.
If you are thinking that 10,585 has something to do with this, in fact you are wrong. 10,585 is the number of days in 29 years (not counting leap days, because they are annoying). Today is my birthday and I find myself wondering about my life. I'm in a steady relationship and it seems to be going relatively well. But I have yet to be made a devout member of the church of Let's Have Babies! And although my job is pretty decent, I don't have too much job security and I'm basically taking training right now that will let me change jobs some time in the future. I still have a large amount of student debt from my MA, but I'm slowly whittling that down. I pay my rent on time, and for the most part I'm able to take care of my other bills etc without others reminding me about them. Yet in some ways I still feel like a child.
Perhaps adding to the "problem" is that I've been teaching an essay called "The Quarterlife crisis" to my Eiken students. It is an essay about 20-somethings that find themselves kinda stuck in a rut after finishing college, either in dead end jobs, jobs they hate, in relationships that aren't working or are heading towards commitment that they're not sure they're ready for, etc. While I don't think that the above points apply to me 100%, I still have some feeling that I'm not really sure what I want to do "when I grow up."
Although Michi is 6 years my senior, it seems like she is facing the same problem right now. She is the most competent person at her company, yet they refuse to raise her salary or give her adequate vacation time or bonuses. Yet because her company is small, she doesn't feel she has the necessary skills to cut it at a larger company. And she worries that her English would be inadequate for getting by abroad. So what are our options? I don't really expect answers to be forthcoming, but I do find myself wondering and feeling a little uneasy.
Cheers,
Dave
