Ultra deep field

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is the name of a small region of space that the Hubble telescope observed. I thought I’d just mention the awesomeness of this endeavour here. The result of the observation is an image that looks too fantastic and science-fiction-like to even appear in Star Trek, yet it’s real.  The HUDF is awesome because of two reasons. First, because it shows in great clarity how utterly insignificant we humans are. And second, because it shows, despite our insignificance, how far we’ve come that we’re able to accomplish a thing like this.

Yay human race. Now get a move on and start colonizing other planets.

Nostalgia

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That big warehouse-like building is where I grew up. For twenty and one years I lived there with my parents and my little sister. The building may not look like much right now, and even when we still lived there it didn’t look very cozy, but the inside was a whole different world. Large, spacious and warm. That’s how I remember it. Well, only some rooms were warm because there was no central heating and there were only heaters in some of the rooms, but we were young and we didn’t know any better! Thanks to Google Street View I spent the last two hours looking around the area where I used to live. Call me old but I am still very impressed that I’m able to do a thing like this from the other side of the world.

I really enjoy walking, cycling or driving around the area I live in. It’s something that I’ve learned from my father, who used to go out driving with me when I was little. He would always show me a new road that I hadn’t seen before. After I got my drivers license I did the same thing by myself for a while, before I moved to Japan. I never owned a car here in Japan, but as you can see from this blog I do go around on foot and by bicycle a lot.

I used street view to follow the route from my parents’ home to work, to my old house, my old school, and so on. On the way I saw a lot of people. Young people, who were probably not even born when I went to school there. Yup, I’m getting older, but I’m still young enough to make enthousiastic “vroom vroom” noises while following the road in street view

I do miss Holland. I miss my family of course, and the scenery, and I miss how relaxed I used to feel when I lived there. I realized that it’s not impossible to go back, if I wanted to. I have two homes to choose from. It’s a luxury not many people have.

Thank you Google! This is a service I would gladly pay for, and you’re offering it for free. Google will save the world one day, mark my words.

Achievements

Winter is starting to make itself known here in Atsugi, but it’s not quite succeeding yet. One day it’s freezing cold, the next day the sun is shining and I can walk outside in just a t-shirt. Autumn and winter are when every important thing happens in my life. Biggest example of this is of course my coming to Japan, but there are numerous other events that happened in winter. For years now I’ve been stuck in the same cycle, where cool stuff happens in winter, which makes me feel happy for months until the golden week in May, and after that nothing interesting at all happens for the rest of the year. I’m sure it has to do with the yearly pattern enforced upon us by the weather and the fiscal year. In any case, experiencing the onset of yet another winter in the same place makes me think about what I really achieved since I came here. Yup, it’s one of those ‘Sunday-night-at-2AM-the-brain-can’t-stop-working” topics.

But it’s a rather short topic really, because I haven’t achieved much at all. On a global level at least. On a personal level I’ve taught myself a lot of stuff, and I’m very happy to have seen and done so many things during my travels. But all of that will disappear when I die. As for things that I’ve contributed to this world, or the human race as a whole, there’s not much I can be proud of. At my job I’ve done a lot of stuff related to speech recognition, and I’ve developed a lot of software that could potentially be useful on the short term, but I wouldn’t say that my work is unique or vital to the development of a better speech recognition system. Ultimately it’s work that other people either don’t need or have already done themselves. Despite that, my work gave me the chance to improve my skills as a programmer, and I’m very proud of that. But that’s not exactly ‘giving back’ to the community.

If I had to list the achievements that I was most proud of in terms of value for others on the long term, then I would probably put this blog and the photos it contains at the top of the list. Which puts things into perspective, because I don’t want my single best accomplishment in life to be this blog. It’s decidedly un-engineer-y to favor my amateur photographic results over my professional programming knowledge, which is what I use to make a living. I guess in role-playing-game terms I’m like a swordsman who uses magic spells instead of his sword. To continue the analogy, right now I feel like I’m just leveling up my skills to face the end boss at the end of the level.

Back to the point: what have you done that could potentially benefit others? Did you ever make other smile? How? And did you do it my using the same skills you use to earn money? Or was it something else? And if it was something else, do you believe your career path is correct, or would you rather switch? All of these questions make it seem as if I would consider a career in photography, but that’s really not true. I think I can contribute more to the world as a programmer than as a photographer, and part of the reason why I think that way is because of all the time that I spent studying and practicing the art of programming over the years. I guess I’m just wondering when I will get a chance to make it pay off as much as photography.

Please don’t blame me if this post is incoherent. I am only half conscious. And I don’t know which half.

We will fix it

Being an employee for a speech recognition company that, until recently, always hired a lot of interns from various countries, allows me to count a large variety of people as friends. I know people from all over the world, and I’ve kept in touch with a bunch of them after their internship here in Japan was over. Whenever we talk about what they’re doing now and how they feel about it I always get the same answer.

Life slows down after you get a full-time job. Life becomes more serious. We get our own apartment, we furnish it with nice new furniture, and we live our lives just like everybody else. We go to work every weekday, then we realize that work is not as much fun and a lot more stressful than university. Then we realize that we have to make new friends, cause all the people we knew from university have mostly disappeared or don’t have time for us anymore cause they are also starting their own full-time job.

It takes us time to get used to this. Some people adapt quickly and become content with their situation, perhaps because they are striving for something better in the future, and they’ve already decided their plan. Others might not be happy with it, but they have no choice, cause we all need money to survive. And an even different kind of person might not be happy with the kind of normal life, no matter how luxurious he can make it. But of all the friends I have made here, we all have one thing in common: we love the time that we spent in Japan during our time at AK speech solutions, and we miss it a lot.

If we all feel that this kind of situation is preferable over our current full-time job, shouldn’t the task fall to us to improve this society? We should work hard not to be a boring salary(wo)man, but to create a society where we can enjoy ourselves just like we did before. If it’s us, then I’m sure we can do it.

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Face to face

When it comes to communicating, a lot of people I know seem to prefer the most convenient method of communication that’s available, usually text messages or e-mail, and if that’s not available then chatting online. If that also fails then maybe a phone call, and in the worst case a face to face meeting is unavoidable. I’m all for efficiency, but I sometimes hate talking to people online because of the lack of information available, and the risk of misunderstandings.

Especially chatting and short text messages are horrible. The usage of smileys seems to be a cultural thing. A message full of smilies from a Japanese girl might mean that she’s dumping you, while a completely undecorated message from some foreigner that looks like an insult might actually be meant in a funny way. It’s hard to guess the true meaning, especially if you don’t know the person, or haven’t spoken to him/her face to face in a while. Fortunately there is a smiley etiquette that most people I know follow, and usually when somebody says something that could in any way be interpreted as insulting, it will be followed by ‘:)’ or a ‘:P’. I use this a lot with friends who lack the sense of sarcasm, which can completely twist around an entire conversation if I’m not careful.

I very much prefer face to face conversations, especially with people who I know, but don’t yet know well enough to guess what they mean just based on text. Important conversations or decisions too absolutely have to be done face to face in my opinion. There’s just so much subtle information in a person’s face and body language, and you can only pick that up if you can see the person you’re talking to. Webcam is not good either, cause it doesn’t convey the same amount of information, and the environments of the two people talking can be completely different. Having access to all this information is like a sixth sense that I think a lot of people are forgetting about. A single look, a moment’s hesitation, a slightly different tone of voice. Pick up on these things and you can form a better mental image of the person you are talking to and the situation of that person. You’ll be able to understand better how he/she feels, and you’ll be able to predict what he/she is going to say. It’s a valuable source of information that should not be forgotten in this age of text-messaging.

So please, people, stop twittering. For pete’s sake.

Connection mismatch

Connections between people fade over time. Does this seem obvious to you? It’s obvious to me, and it’s perhaps less obvious to some people I know. But even though it seems obvious to me, it’s still difficult or perhaps impossible for me to explain why connections fade over time, but a select few don’t. I know some people who I still feel very connected with, even if I don’t speak or interact with them. The number is small enough to count with one hand though. For most people I know, I will feel closer to them if I interact with them more, either by doing stuff with them in daily life, talking to them, or chatting with them online. Still sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? I’m guessing we all recognize this. But then, what happens when such a connection, into which both parties have invested a lot of time and effort, stagnates and/or breaks down? Here I think is where individual reactions might be different. In particular, some people I know don’t consider a connection to ever break down at all: once a connection is at a certain level, it can only go stay stable or go up, but it can never go down. I am not this kind of person. For me, when a connection stagnates because of lack of activity it gets cut off. It may be reconnected later, but at a much lower level than before. It bothers me if for me a connection has been lost (or is at a much lower level than before) while the other party acts as if we only met yesterday, even though it’s been ages since we did anything together. This, by the way, rarely happens in my life. Most of my close friends have similar opinions on this topic, and we can comfortably pick up a connection even years after it’s lost. I’m quite happy about that. Though on a rare occasion, when a connection mismatch happened to me, I did feel the need to write about it.

I guess I just wanted to make things clear for myself. No matter what kind of connection I’ve had with people in the past, I don’t focus on that. What matters is the present, here and now. Some connections don’t fade, but others do. Don’t be surprised when other people place a different value on your mutual connection.