Today the Arcarum summons got their fifth release and the associated characters (sages?) have been unlocked as well. They’ve finally raised the weekly/total point limits too, so now I’m less likely to bump into that wall when running the rounds.
Akadake loser
Akadake (often romanized as Mt Aka) is part of Yatsugatake, it’s highest peak actually. The range is known for being “active” all year round. Other mountains get inaccessible and deserted as winter starts: buses stop running, mountain huts close until spring and so on.
The Yatsugatake range has lots of ski resorts and it’s a friendly place for people like me who want to try climbing in snow. I’ve had a weekend’s fun in Tateshina already (which is the northern neighbor of Yatsugatake actually), so now I decided to jump into the deep water (snow) and go for Mt Aka. I didn’t expect the difficulty I faced.
Mapping
The other day I was thinking about Rich Hickey’s keynote at last year’s Conj. He goes into how the literal maps (or hashes or hashmaps or however a language prefers to call them) are really functions too. A function in maths is a mapping between sets and that’s what maps are.
Then that makes functions we normally write are just like that too, except the mappings are more abstract and defined through code. Because the mappings are so complex and indirect, we write tests to check (automated) that the mapping we defined through code is correct.
Obviously defining the exact mappings for every possible combination of the input set(s) is not feasible (that’d be a map, the end). But if “all” is not possible then how much is? What exactly is the absolute minimum amount of test( case)s that’s useful?
Gala
To keep practicing snowboard, the next target was Gala Yuzawa. It’s an apparently pretty famous snow resort, considering how it has its own shinkansen station (yes really) and probably the first destination for snow tourists seeing the huge number of foreigners (including the staff).
In motion
I don’t know how it’s at other schools, but my university had compulsory PE classes. Sure only once a week and only for two semesters, but it was still annoying. Except for one good thing: there was an option to take a few days long ski trip instead of the regular class in the winter semester. Which of course I did. It was my first time skiing and I loved it. That was in 2011.
2018 in retrospect
2018 was a trainwreck if I judge by the news, but a friend of mine wrote a quite positive post about their year, which inspired me to do the same. One of the first things that come to mind is that I should write about stuff when they’re fresh in memory, because I barely remember what I did last week, let alone last year (though currently the two overlap).
Getting that system dashboard working
Earlier I wrote about how I set up Beats – Elasticsearch – Grafana to visualize the various metrics (and logs, hate me) from Kitsune‘s dev server. There were a few tricky spots that didn’t work at first and took a while to figure out (or at least get working).
On Mount Buddha
I was looking for a mountain to climb. I wanted something easy for a change, but still preferably one of the 100 famous mountains of Japan. In the end I went with Mt Daibosatsu, which is relatively close, easy to access (that is when the buses run) and isn’t difficult.
Kumotori
Decided to back-date this post so that it won’t be so far from when it actually happened. It was the beginning of November and I had to start worrying about not being able to access mountains anymore. Most buses on mountain roads don’t run in the winter months, and honestly I’m not that a huge fan of renting cars.
Climbing Ibuki
During my university years I used to live in Hikone, pretty much walking distance (exaggerating here) from Mt Ibuki, one of the 100 famous mountains of Japan. It is (was?) a major ski destination that hosted some winter Olympics too.
