Tag: english

Decaf

It was almost a running joke among my coworkers that I’d sooner than later die of a heart attack due to a caffeine overdose. Apparently my body needs at least 8 hours of sleep to function properly, if not more – at least so I thought. Since getting 8 hours of sleep would require me to either cut down on working out or go to bed right after eating, and neither of those sound like very good options.

As it always is with substances, resistance builds up, so on bad days I’d need 3 cans of energy drinks just to remain functional (and still far from optimal). I got fed up with that eventually (and judging from the signals, my body too), and I decided to go no-caffeine on my birthday. I didn’t decide how long I’d keep it up, but the bare minimum is a month.


28

Hi, I just turned 28 two weeks ago. Not much has changed since, so I thought I’d do the unusual and sum up what’s been up the past year. Interestingly enough, it was right last October that I decided to leave the anime business and accept a friend’s invitation to working as a programmer.


Just a little torture

I stumbled upon an article on Guardian about Yanagiya, a restaurant in Gifu that apparently might just be the best restaurant on the planet. Of course I’d love to go, but I fear that even calling on the combined web of all my social networks, I might still not get an invitation. But it’s definitely worth giving a try, seeing all these accolades. I’ll still have to find someone to go with, but I doubt that’d be an issue.

And why is that torture? Because I’ve had the worst lunch today in… a very long time. My coworkers were singing tales about the cafeteria of the nearby Senshu university, so we went to give it a try. It was simply horrible. I had no idea miso soup could taste bad, but now I know. It feels like my stomach is giving extra care to that trash because 10 hours later I still don’t feel like eating anything.


Grand Kirin IPA

It’s been ages since I last had any alcohol at home (though I still have a bottle of Jura in progress). Tonight I went to the supermarket to pick up some snacks and on the way I spotted Kirin’s IPA. I’ve tried Kirin craft attempts before, so I wondered what this one is like.


Shit manners

This is about the title in most possible interpretations. For the years now I’ve been working in Japan, I noticed certain (really annoying) things about shit. This wasn’t much of a problem during university when most I’ve seen my Japanese fellows was when we were getting drunk together, but actually working at a company means I have to endure actual people around me most of the day. And their various smells.

I’ve got a sensitive nose, apparently. I can smell what the family in the next house are having for dinner with my window closed. There is one smell that I could never really pick up, and that is alcohol. Sadly, shit is not one such.


Yoshida Hiroshi exhibition

There was a Yoshida Hiroshi exhibition in the Sonpo museum in Shinjuku. I had no idea who the painter was, but I saw the ads during my commute and I liked the style of the art, so I decided to go. I must admit that this all was the last weekend of July, I was just too lazy to write about it so far.

It’s been a while since I last went to see an exhibit (years, even). Recently I rather spend my free days more actively – in the sense of doing creative stuff (or wasting my day playing games). I don’t regret braking that habit though.

The Yoshida exhibition was just plain fabulous. The different styles of art, from Japanese-style woodblock paintings and hanging scrolls and expressionism to a more realistic depiction of war and suffering were an exciting trip. It’s interesting to see the quiet scenery of a snow-covered farm next to the sight from the cockpit of a dive-bomber.


Android and Unicode ID3 tags

For a while now I’ve been noticing that certain songs’ ID3 tags are broken when played on my Android phone. I use Black Player which in turn uses the built in Android music libraries – but I’ve checked in a number of other players too just in case and the problem persists.

My music library is extremely multilingual (and most of those languages I don’t even speak), so it’s full of UTF characters. Some of them seem to break Android’s encoding recognition. Sadly some of these triggers are pretty common, resulting in borked last.fm scrobbles. (And of course last.fm can’t be expected to be so smart as to fix all those automatically.)


Ports below 1024 can only be bound by the superuser

Today I learned that ports below 1024 can only be bound by the superuser. It’s amusing that I’ve never run into this problem before considering how much I play around with various servers.

The reason for that might be that most servers just tell you that “you need to be root to do this”, but not explain why so I wasn’t aware. Until today, when while trying to build a lightweight Compojure thing, it just refused to start.


Adding Spotify support to my #nowplaying script

Spotify had a really charming summer sale, three months for 100 yen, and that was more inviting than what I could resist. As a result, I’ve been listening to various artist radios at home too (without premium it wouldn’t let the desktop client on).

Now that it works, of course I’d occasionally want to post #nowplaying tweets/toots too, so I added that functionality to my script. From the experience with fixing it for Clementine the other day, it was really easy.


Adding an SSL domain

Setting up SSL at first was a laugh. The other day though I fell victim to a sale where they gave away 10 year .tech domain registrations for a measly $40. Considering that’s basically 90%, I enthusiastically picked up a personal domain for future use.

Then again I don’t have plans of setting up a personal portfolio site for now (though I used to have one a decade ago), so I wanted to just redirect it to valerauko.net instead. That’s where things got ugly.