Art exhibits

On weekdays I am basically totally overwhelmed by working and learning Japanese. (I wonder: will this ever change? :-) At the last 2 weekends, I found some time to relax at two art exhibtions. They were great!

The first one was called: The Unbuilt Monuments. The theme of the exhibition were buildings that were planned by famous architects (e.g., Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe), but never built. Some great models were on display. Even more interesting, movies of fly-throughs of the buildings were shown. They were created with 3D Modelling programs. The movies were beautiful, but had most of the time below 25 frames per second. This was a big turn-off for me, I even got a slight headache... Below is a screenshot of one of the movies. It shows my favourite unbuilt monument: The Danteum.

Yesterday, I went to the Japanese media arts festival. There were lots of futuristic, interactive pieces exhibited. I thouroughly enjoyed it! Some exhibits even used Mixed Reality. I guess I will try next year to submit my current project at Canon---it would have fit perfectly! A very funny piece was called Virtual Brownies. See it here.

Surprising Japan

Again, I am very surprised by the things you can buy in Japan! Let me quote an article from metropolis.japantoday.com:

Creepy cat Hardware-human interfaces made easy

Over the years, we’ve seen many odd things that plug into a PC’s USB port—from plastic models of sushi to desk fans and coffee cup warmers. Now, however, Angel Kitty has trumped them all with, um, a USB webcam that comes as part of a kinky cat cosplay outfit.

The webcam is actually stuck on the end of a detachable tail, which is in turn attached to a tacky French maid outfit—you know, the sort that creepy guys with white socks get their “girlfriends” to wear. The ¥22,575 package is supposedly intended to get folk in the mood for a little online lovin’, or whatever it’s called in Akihabara these days

The product's webpage is here.

PS: I do not wear white socks ;-)

Valentine's Day

Valentine's day in Japan is just lovely (for boys)! Because the girls are supposed to give chocolate to the guys they are interested in. Guys are not supposed to give the girls anything. That's too good to be true, isn't it? Today, some colleagues told me about the drawback: 1 month later (3/14), the guys are supposed to give something to the girls---it is called "White day" in Japan. Maybe payback-day would be more appropriate, haha.

Unfortunately, I do not have time to enjoy this Valentine's day too much. I am just too busy :-(
The weekend I worked on a bookchapter, which will be printed soon. Also today I had to work a little on it ...

Yesterday, me and about 15 colleagues attended a seminar on intercultural communication. Wow, this was very interesting! I have learned many new things. Mainly about Japan, USA and Germany, but also about other Asian countries. I should have taken this seminar before I went to the US. It would have saved me quite some trouble... The most interesting thing was what I have learned about myself. We had to do several tests to find out about our character. The result was: in some things, I seem to be a typical German (Socratic way of discussing, Low-context(=direct) communication style, appreciating friendship with colleagues). In some other things (contextual thinking, polychromatic time&relationship&responsibilty perception), my character is not German at all (in fact, just the opposite!)---much like a Japanese person. This was so interesting to learn!
Now I know why I am so fascinated by Japan :-)

Just 10 minutes ago, I have finished my Japanese homework. My teacher asked me to write a funny story. I have attached it at the end of this posting. No---I will not translate it. It is too silly. My vocabulary is just sooo limited. It reminds me of the stories in my first English school book: Gosh-the cage fell on the floor and cheeky (the dog) is under the cage and pips (the bird) flew out of the cage.

クリスの囲碁

クリスは囲碁がすきです。日本の囲碁センタへいきます。
クリスはすこし日本語がわかります。でもまだじょうすじゃありません。

囲碁センタできれいなあんあのことコーヒーをのみました。あんあのこは英語あまりじゃありません。
クリスはあんあのこのはなしがぜんぜんわかりませんでした。

クリスはとてもかなしです。あとで、かなじょははなしました「フランスへ三年いきました。」それから、フランスごでたくさんはなしました。クリスのせいかつはたのしです！

Party with live art

Yesterday night, I went out to some great techno party. I went with 2 friends working for Sony (German, Russian) and a freelance-designer (Swedish). We had a great time!! I could practice my Japanese a lot, since we were the only foreigners at the party!

One great joke from yesterday: What is heaven? Having an American salary, a Chinese cook, an English house and a Japanese wife. What is hell? Having a Chinese salary, an English cook, a Japanese house and an American wife.
The funny thing about that joke is that there is so much truth in it :-)

There was even some live music going on. In parallel, some guy was creating a painting! It was very interesting!
We analyzed the painting to be a cross-over between Pollock and Graffiti. See the development of the painting in the pictures below:

Research

I decided to finally post some things about my current research. Of course, due to my NDA, I cannot be very specific... Some things I am doing currently:

• using Eclipse in Python and C++ mode (who needs a clumsy language such as JAVA??): it totally rocks!
  
• using Gentoo Linux: I am very impressed! This is the way Linux is supposed to be! The performance of a Gentoo system is significantly better than Windows (of course) and rpm-based Linux distributions such as SuSE or RedHat. Also the package management system is incredible. E.g., it is a piece of cake to switch (on-the fly!) the whole system from one low-level library to another one (e.g. QT vs. GTK, KDE vs. GNOME, OpenGL drivers, etc. etc.). All dependencies are automatically updated. Can you do this in Windows (an analog task would be to switch from some MFC+Visual Studio version to another one)? I guess you would need 10 reboots and some stale dependencies would screw up your system, so you have to reinstall in the end.... Some colleagues have even started to use Gentoo, when they saw my system :-)
  
• Doing calibration. In my reasearch area, this is one of the hardest tasks (at least for me). It requires strong knowledge in maths. I was very excited to find a research paper that describes how to build systems without calibration. It's title is: "We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Calibration". Read it here.
  
• I am currently researching lots of patents. Let me tell you: there is nothing too insignificant to be patented (at least in the United States, haha).
  
• Asa sent me a hillarious link: there is a webpage that advertises a (fake) conference on software engineering. It mocks the bad practices of software development that lots of companies actually apply. In the past, I have experienced these anti-patterns myself :-) Check the webpage out here