A few days ago I came up with an idea. I’ve been making worlds in my head for as long as I can remember, but coming up with stories in those worlds was a whole different deal. So I figured I’d just practice writing by picking a random word every day I go to the gym (which is most weekdays) and write 200 words (at least) around that.
Today’s word was “juntocracy.” (Somewhat amusing that my spellchecker doesn’t know it.)
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 (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.
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?
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).
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 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).
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).
