hey all,
A bunch of my preparation time at work this week has been taken up with extra private lessons, teacher's meetings and meetings with the boss, plus doing an extra job or two for the boss. Which means that I've spent a lot of time after hours typing up tests, making worksheets, and making the schedules for my classes next week.
I've finally caught up on all of that. So the news about Michi is that she has a stress fracture in her right ankle. That pain she's been experiencing ever since September? Yep, stress fracture. Apparently they don't show up on the X-rays very frequently, so you need a CT or MRI scan, which she only got done a few weeks ago. And then she had to wait a week and a half to see a doctor about the results of the scan. She's got an ankle brace coming in the mail this weekend, and she's been ordered to take it easy for the next 4 months or so. She's pretty upset about it. It will be a difficult few months ahead, since we won't be able to go rock climbing, hiking, or backpacking.
In fitness news, I joined Fitocracy, which is an interesting take on keeping fit. It was featured on xkcd (warning: mature content) a while back, and it looked fun. Basically, it turns keeping fit into a role-playing game. Each exercise has a certain number of points attached to it, and after you accumulate enough points, you level up. Getting to the next level takes more points each time. It kinda makes me want to find a pool that I can go swimming to again, although this time I'll make sure that I don't jack up my arm like a few summers ago.
Cheers,
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Monday, February 20, 2012
Fatigue
hey all,
The fatigue in the title has several meanings. I was planning a much longer, more in depth blog post about school, some news concerning Michi, and some pictures of a meal.
But then the weekend happened. We had a medium sized earthquake earlier today, not too far from Tokyo. No real damage, but still unnerving. Michi and I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey on Saturday and made homemade Gapao rice, a sweet-spicy ground chicken dish, originally from Thailand (I think).
I did a bunch of typing for work on Saturday morning, but managed to get some Battlefield 3 time in with Brian.
Today, I've been sorting through files on my computer, doing laundry, vacuuming, playing Skyrim and Battlefield 3, and I cooked my lunch for next week: mapo tofu.
That'll have to be all.
Cheers,
The fatigue in the title has several meanings. I was planning a much longer, more in depth blog post about school, some news concerning Michi, and some pictures of a meal.
But then the weekend happened. We had a medium sized earthquake earlier today, not too far from Tokyo. No real damage, but still unnerving. Michi and I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey on Saturday and made homemade Gapao rice, a sweet-spicy ground chicken dish, originally from Thailand (I think).
I did a bunch of typing for work on Saturday morning, but managed to get some Battlefield 3 time in with Brian.
Today, I've been sorting through files on my computer, doing laundry, vacuuming, playing Skyrim and Battlefield 3, and I cooked my lunch for next week: mapo tofu.
That'll have to be all.
Cheers,
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Class and Directors (Finally!) Done
hey all,
I finally got back the feedback from my curriculum class. On the final assignment I got 37/40. I think I forgot to fill out the course learning outcomes in sufficient detail and she said my style was not very learner-friendly. That is, I hadn't considered what information and what format would be easiest for my students to understand. Still, she said I did a good job on my rubric, since it was clear, well-constructed, and not open to interpretation ("What do you mean I got a C-?!" type arguments).
And the directors finally came today as well. I'm not sure if they were impressed, but we had the mothers from the youngest class come in to see it as well, and the boss said that they were impressed.
Randomly, one of my PM students seemed to be really sick and couldn't even stand up at the end of class. Luckily, his mom was there and took him home, but I hope he gets taken to the hospital to see what is wrong with him.
Cheers,
I finally got back the feedback from my curriculum class. On the final assignment I got 37/40. I think I forgot to fill out the course learning outcomes in sufficient detail and she said my style was not very learner-friendly. That is, I hadn't considered what information and what format would be easiest for my students to understand. Still, she said I did a good job on my rubric, since it was clear, well-constructed, and not open to interpretation ("What do you mean I got a C-?!" type arguments).
And the directors finally came today as well. I'm not sure if they were impressed, but we had the mothers from the youngest class come in to see it as well, and the boss said that they were impressed.
Randomly, one of my PM students seemed to be really sick and couldn't even stand up at the end of class. Luckily, his mom was there and took him home, but I hope he gets taken to the hospital to see what is wrong with him.
Cheers,
Monday, February 13, 2012
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Valentine's, Hiking, Last Assignment
hey all,
So we are rapidly approaching Valentine's Day here in Japan. And boy does it show. Girls and women are rushing around everywhere buying supplies to make chocolate sweets for their lovers/husbands, or they are rushing to stores to buy some "giri-choco" (that's something like "obligation chocolate") for their coworkers and bosses.
In Japan, girls give chocolates to their boyfriends on Valentine's Day, and boys reciprocate with a present 3 times as expensive a month later on a holiday called White Day. Why the sexes are separated, I don't know, but that's how they do it.
Michi and I decided to make a some chocolate cake, so I picked out the Fudge Cake recipe from Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food. Instead of going for the cake, we went with cupcakes, and I swapped the chocolate frosting out for some cream cheese frosting. The only hitch was the toaster over. For some reason the thing just did a terrible job of cooking them, so the second batch we did in her microwave (which doubles as a toaster oven) and they turned out fine.
Today is the last day of my current curriculum design class. I submitted the last assignment, a syllabus for a hypothetical class and a class rubric, yesterday. I think I'm going to take the next "semester" off, and sign up for the following class after I get back from my trip to the US.
And today, we finally went hiking for the first time since Hakone. We went to Kamakura and hiked from the Big Buddha statue over to Kita-Kamakura station. There was a somewhat mysterious shrine halfway along the path, and there was also a shrine that featured money laundering. No, not the illegal kind. You bring some coins or bills and wash them in a stream, and the money is supposed to multiply.
Michi found a absolutely hilarious movie on Hulu. The English title would be something like The Brass-Knuckle Boys (少年メリケンサック) . It is about a young girl who works at a record company. She sees a video of a punk band from the 80's on youtube, and decides to try to reunite them.
Over and out.
Cheers,
So we are rapidly approaching Valentine's Day here in Japan. And boy does it show. Girls and women are rushing around everywhere buying supplies to make chocolate sweets for their lovers/husbands, or they are rushing to stores to buy some "giri-choco" (that's something like "obligation chocolate") for their coworkers and bosses.
In Japan, girls give chocolates to their boyfriends on Valentine's Day, and boys reciprocate with a present 3 times as expensive a month later on a holiday called White Day. Why the sexes are separated, I don't know, but that's how they do it.
Michi and I decided to make a some chocolate cake, so I picked out the Fudge Cake recipe from Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food. Instead of going for the cake, we went with cupcakes, and I swapped the chocolate frosting out for some cream cheese frosting. The only hitch was the toaster over. For some reason the thing just did a terrible job of cooking them, so the second batch we did in her microwave (which doubles as a toaster oven) and they turned out fine.
Today is the last day of my current curriculum design class. I submitted the last assignment, a syllabus for a hypothetical class and a class rubric, yesterday. I think I'm going to take the next "semester" off, and sign up for the following class after I get back from my trip to the US.
And today, we finally went hiking for the first time since Hakone. We went to Kamakura and hiked from the Big Buddha statue over to Kita-Kamakura station. There was a somewhat mysterious shrine halfway along the path, and there was also a shrine that featured money laundering. No, not the illegal kind. You bring some coins or bills and wash them in a stream, and the money is supposed to multiply.
Michi found a absolutely hilarious movie on Hulu. The English title would be something like The Brass-Knuckle Boys (少年メリケンサック) . It is about a young girl who works at a record company. She sees a video of a punk band from the 80's on youtube, and decides to try to reunite them.
Over and out.
Cheers,
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Buckminster Fuller was right!
hey all,
According to the video below from TED, at least mammalian brains seem to use a triangular grid to map locations. It appears that the neurons in the hippocampus fire when we perceive that we are in a particular spot, and when you graph these spots, they are laid out in triangular grids! OK, so what, right? Well, good ol' Bucky Fuller figured that nature abhorred the rectilinear grids that humans have for some reason latched onto. He argued that space could actually be best represented as triangular or tetrahedral.
More later.
Cheers,
According to the video below from TED, at least mammalian brains seem to use a triangular grid to map locations. It appears that the neurons in the hippocampus fire when we perceive that we are in a particular spot, and when you graph these spots, they are laid out in triangular grids! OK, so what, right? Well, good ol' Bucky Fuller figured that nature abhorred the rectilinear grids that humans have for some reason latched onto. He argued that space could actually be best represented as triangular or tetrahedral.
More later.
Cheers,
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
New PC
hey all,
I probably failed to mention this in my last post, but Michi and I went computer shopping for her last weekend, and she actually bought one. It is a Dell, like mine, but the HDD, CPU, and RAM are all higher spec than mine. I think my graphics card still beats hers, but mine is a quadcore 512MB for games, and her laptop is built for documents and the internet.
Right now, she's tugging on my sleeve and bugging me to go out and buy her a blank DVD so she can make a backup of her new computer. I don't really see the point, seeing as how she doesn't even have any data or programs installed on it that didn't come with it out-of-box.
I'm still adding books over at Goodreads. It is a little interesting to see the change in my reading patterns. The exclusivity of fantasy books slowly gave away to classics of literature and philosophy, supplemented by some science and science fiction, then the invasion of books about magick, self-change, and our perception of reality. By then sci-fi was in strong evidence, and upon entering college it outweighed fantasy. The fascination about reality led to French postmodernist/post-structuralist/deconstructionist/etc authors. As my interest and knowledge of linguistics grew, so did the number of books that I read by linguists. It seems the years 2005~2008 are relatively dead in terms of what I read. I must have started reading my way through Hunter S. Thompson, and I know that I read some Salman Rushdie, but I think I was putting in a lot of hours at the pool, and spending more time watching movies and playing video games. Plus, of course, actually studying for my degree.
I'm actually not sure where my fascination with this kind of thing comes from. Whatever OCD promptings that may or may not be part of my heritage from my dad? Some ill-founded quest for completion through material things? Or at least through what material things I have known/possessed? But I can see the same drive in my use of Google Maps to put in location markers for all the places that I've visited, in my wondering about how to use my profile over at IMDB to see whether I can make lists of all the TV shows and movies I've seen (looks like you can), even in the journal that I kept during high school, and even in this blog. Is it merely the desire for there to be some record of the past, so that it doesn't slip into the aether?
It seems like it may be due to my own view of my mind as a faulty and untrustworthy thing. As long as the knowledge exists outside of my head in some semi-permanent form, it may be preserved.
Anyway, work has been OK. They put me back with my previous class in the AM, but I'm not sure if I'm impressed with where they are. They seem more or less the same, but they have made some progress. Especially in math. I've been following a set schedule now with my PM class, which I hope will push them all to pass the next level of the Eiken test.
Cheers,
I probably failed to mention this in my last post, but Michi and I went computer shopping for her last weekend, and she actually bought one. It is a Dell, like mine, but the HDD, CPU, and RAM are all higher spec than mine. I think my graphics card still beats hers, but mine is a quadcore 512MB for games, and her laptop is built for documents and the internet.
Right now, she's tugging on my sleeve and bugging me to go out and buy her a blank DVD so she can make a backup of her new computer. I don't really see the point, seeing as how she doesn't even have any data or programs installed on it that didn't come with it out-of-box.
I'm still adding books over at Goodreads. It is a little interesting to see the change in my reading patterns. The exclusivity of fantasy books slowly gave away to classics of literature and philosophy, supplemented by some science and science fiction, then the invasion of books about magick, self-change, and our perception of reality. By then sci-fi was in strong evidence, and upon entering college it outweighed fantasy. The fascination about reality led to French postmodernist/post-structuralist/deconstructionist/etc authors. As my interest and knowledge of linguistics grew, so did the number of books that I read by linguists. It seems the years 2005~2008 are relatively dead in terms of what I read. I must have started reading my way through Hunter S. Thompson, and I know that I read some Salman Rushdie, but I think I was putting in a lot of hours at the pool, and spending more time watching movies and playing video games. Plus, of course, actually studying for my degree.
I'm actually not sure where my fascination with this kind of thing comes from. Whatever OCD promptings that may or may not be part of my heritage from my dad? Some ill-founded quest for completion through material things? Or at least through what material things I have known/possessed? But I can see the same drive in my use of Google Maps to put in location markers for all the places that I've visited, in my wondering about how to use my profile over at IMDB to see whether I can make lists of all the TV shows and movies I've seen (looks like you can), even in the journal that I kept during high school, and even in this blog. Is it merely the desire for there to be some record of the past, so that it doesn't slip into the aether?
It seems like it may be due to my own view of my mind as a faulty and untrustworthy thing. As long as the knowledge exists outside of my head in some semi-permanent form, it may be preserved.
Anyway, work has been OK. They put me back with my previous class in the AM, but I'm not sure if I'm impressed with where they are. They seem more or less the same, but they have made some progress. Especially in math. I've been following a set schedule now with my PM class, which I hope will push them all to pass the next level of the Eiken test.
Cheers,
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