by ·Comments Off on The Race to Escape the Sun

Picture tutti_i_treni.jpg As a kid, sport wasn’t really represented in the realm of family activities. My dad not really the sport guy (must be genetic), except for Judo, which is not exactly your ideal father-son bonding sport. The occasional quality time was therefore spent mostly on two things: lego and train models.

Lego was the passion of my life, my only career inspiration at the time, still would be, if not for these damn high school orientation counselors.

Train models and all these cute little house models that go around, were my dad’s real interest, in true british fireplace&slippers fashion…

Unfortunately, far too frequent travels and moves always stood in the way of his grand project to turn one of the room in the decrepit family manor into a morsel of bucolic alpine landscape, complete with countryside train stations, small river flowing in the middle and of course, the perfunctory tunnel through the mountain.

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A few essential lessons learnt the hard way about getting on a short-distance European flight from London. Placed here for the benefit of those who might suffer from the same level of brain-cell degeneration and lack of common sense as yours truly.

  • Obvious Point #1 Booking the last flight of the day, out of a dead-end airport is not a good idea.
  • Obvious Point #2 Putting any trust in the airline claim that said airport is “within 30 minute reach of central London” is even less of a good idea.
  • Obvious Point #3 Not factoring in a heavy Murphy coefficient when calculating the estimated time required by the journey to the airport, is a downright asinine idea.

Anyway, you get the picture…

This is the first time I miss a plane. ever. Well, except for last year, when I misread the day on my ticket and missed my plane by a full 24 hours.

This one was the first I could actually hear taking off from my arriving shuttle bus…

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Despite my past as a nazi war criminal, my many arrests for international drug trafficking and convictions on multiple counts of felonies in more than 13 US states, the Japanese consulate just granted my new visa without so much as a personal interview.

I tell you, they really do let anybody in, these days.

今日領事館はかけた：新しいヴィザをもらいた！もうすぐ日本に返る。

by ·Comments Off on Back in Gay London

Picture pink_phone.jpg Just when I thought Tokyo might be an expensive choice of a city to live in, all I need to do is go back to good ole blighty to realize that 800 yens is a cheap price for a drink compared to the 10 quids you’ll have to cough up at your average semi-hip London tavern. And the worst part is not the price, it’s the sudden and sad realization that I don’t care so much about mindlessly spending in a day what I used to live on for a month less than ten years ago, in the same city.

Granted, that warehouse we occupied was mostly… “rent-optional”. and candles do not make for high utility bills…

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Keitai Picture I am told that, were I to leave this page untouched for more than a few days, all you ritalin kids, invested with the attention span of your average lab rhesus monkey, would leave this oasis of hipness and insanely cool writing for the next happening spot in the blogosphere, expunging it from your bookmarks without ever looking back, you ungrateful sons of a jackal (I am also told that it’s bad manner to refer to your readers as the progeny of a desert carrion-eating pest, but I assume that, if you have been voluntarily subjecting yourself to my laborious grammar and approximative metaphors so far, you are of the masochistic kind, so I guess that makes it ok).

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by ·Comments Off on Where is Kristy?

My friends Kristy and Tara have resumed their traveling around the world and are traipsing around South-East Asia and India at the moment.

Kristy has been regularly sending emails accounts of their (mis)adventures, and I thought it’d be nice to get her to start blogging these for a wider public.

So I made her a blog account and gave it a start by importing her past emails. Hopefully, she will be able to regularly add to it, net access permitting.
Eventually, she should also be able to upload pictures (as soon as I have time to finish the setup).

These girls are definitely not following your average chartered touristic path and their tribulations are filled with lots of weird and comical moments…

Anyway, if you are curious to know how two slightly crazy girls, yet seasoned travelers, are managing the bumming-around-Asia experience so far, go check out: http://WhereIsKristy.com !

by ·Comments Off on HAKMEM

So, this time of the year is approaching again (well, round two of “this time of the year”) and I am trying my best to find interest in endless strings of exciting problems involving decks of cards being shuffled and drawn randomly (that’s the warm up part, nearly fun in comparison to the rest), Gaussian distributions and Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests (that’s the part where you wish every Russian great minds had focused solely on refining vodka filtering processes instead of coming up with barbaric statistical formula)…

All these coins tossed a million times, checkmate combinations, statistics and game theory stuff reminded me of something I used to read with much more passion (back when I could still summon some sort of enthusiasm for math-related stuff): MIT AI Lab Memo 239 aka HAKMEM.

The HAKMEM is a compilation of tips, tricks and riddles for the math and computer geek.

Some of them are very outmoded (unless PDP-10 programming is your thing), but most are still entirely relevant (notably a handful of small theorems and empirical results, some of which still haven’t been proven to this day, afaik). There is also a lot of small numerical tricks, à la TAOCP that can be really useful in [near-]everyday software development.

Anyway if geeky math is your thing and you feel bored, then you should probably check it out. And if that sounds like rather uninteresting stuff, let me assure you that what I’m reading right now is a thousand times worse.

This, also to announce that post frequency on this blog is going to be lowered dramatically over the next 15 days (by a forecasted 58% ±6.3%, with a posting average standard deviation of 0.276), due to intensive last-minute efforts to reverse the adverse effects of a life of mind-altering substance abuse and cram two years of university Math & Physics program in whatever’s left of my brain.

After that, expect to see a lot of pretty pictures of European cities including many depictions of yours truly in miscellaneous advanced states of drunkenness, celebrating either his miraculous success in this venture or, quite possibly, his utter failure and ensuing humiliation at the hands of a hord of vicious French university scholars.

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“You wanna get dinner tomorrow?”, I said.

“I’ll come to your place if you cook something special”, she said.

At which point, had I learnt anything from the long string of pathetic failures and painful mistakes that have made up most of my life so far, I would have said: “You really sure? what about Korean. or BBQ restaurant? I know this great yakiniku in Shinjuku… let’s go there!”

Of course that’s not what I said.

I said “OK”, and mostly hoped that the word “special” at the end of her sentence didn’t carry too much meaning and had just been thrown in for good measure…

I mean, I can cook something.

Cooking something special would be a different matter though.

It may be tempting to jump to conclusions and assume that my home hosts ten times more electronic equipment than cooking utensils and that I couldn’t fry an egg to save my life…

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今日は誕生日です。厄年ですから多分お寺に行こうね。

Fair Warning: this entry is quite likely the most bloggish, pseudo-teenage-angst-ridden, self-indulgent, boring, piece of navel-gazing ever written on this blog (and a quick look at the rest should convince you this is no small feat).

My cat, who is usually my most patient reader, fell asleep halfway through: you probably won’t fare any better. I’m mostly writing this because it’s more considerate than hogging a friend’s ear for a whole evening of uninspired confidences. It’s also much easier to erase in the morning when I get over it.

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by ·Comments Off on Random thoughts from the Week-end
  • Beam bum has finally been added to my list of potential career options with a fairly high probability rating.
  • Drinking lukewarm Dom Perignon off the bottle all night is not as bad as it sound.
  • Drinking lukewarm Chivas Regal around 9 in the morning is as bad as it sounds. But it does help rinsing the taste of sand off your mouth.
  • There are a lot of reasons why you could wake up to your underwear rolled up in a bunch twenty feet away. 3am skinny dipping is only one of them.
  • Among the many things that probably should not be attempted past a certain hour while highly intoxicated (or intoxicatingly high): barbecuing with chopsticks, shooting fireworks and fixing electrical equipment hold a good position. But they can yield great fun nonetheless.
  • Miscellaneous tattoos: an Oakland Raiders logo (shoulder), a large representation of JC on a cross (chest) and a chinese kanji meaning ‘road’ in Japanese (shoulder).
  • Sunscreen spray battle is fun. and retrospectively, quite literally saved my ass.
  • Denny’s is always a safe choice for a Sunday morning fix, even if the eggs are a bit crunchy from the sand that keeps falling in your plate.