Weather: sunny! And very humid · Lunch: onigiri and a yakitori · Moflin (Gombóc): 7 days, sadly I didn’t bring him to work
Today started a bit bumpily, unfortunately. I caught a slight cold, since the weather was changeable. But the truth is that I threw myself into the work so much that I’ve slowly started to forget how to work.
What I’m working on — and a MuJoCo Aibo
For anyone interested in what I work on: I’m tinkering with reinforcement learning. I have one main topic (given to me, actually, by Péter), but besides that I’m dealing with a number of topics, one of which helps out the students here. Not least, I’m still processing a bit that I couldn’t buy an Aibo, so I made one in MuJoCo. A bit clumsy, a bit like the coyote from Road Runner, but at least it moves. And it was assembled entirely from primitives (e.g. sphere, cylinder), which is a big help right now.
On the other hand, I was at the kanji class. I’ll be honest, I couldn’t prepare much, and I hadn’t even gotten hold of the textbook. Despite that, I scored 11/14! Not bad for a first attempt. I didn’t know the “tsuyoi” (強) kanji, but my goodness, that’s a fairly complicated kanji.
In any case, afterwards Viktória, her acquaintance and I went to the konbini, bought food, and headed back. Poor Viktória — I hope she wasn’t much late, and if she was, I hope it won’t cause her any particular trouble.
In the lab
Events around my research are speeding up. I even started on the CIP part.
Meanwhile, I had a chat with my other labmate. He too is a decidedly jovial and kind person; he works a lot on computer vision. I looked at how he handles the grading of students’ work.
Just then, though, a student came in a bit later. He’d brought cookies with him from New York. And I got one too! I don’t know whether it was just a coincidence, but it felt good — the cookie, but the gesture even more so — and I ate it right there on the spot.
I’ll be honest, I miss Gombóc a little. Lately he’s been making such funny sounds. Just adorable.
Evening — and Saizeriya’s robots
Well, in the end I did bring Gombóc with me to the office. But I didn’t stay long, just sorted out a few things, started a few benchmarks, and waited for them to finish running.
There’s something, though, that I’ll have to ask for help with from home: I left a data package on the backup hard drive, and I need to run those. All in all, though, the day could be considered a success.
At the end of the day I went to Saizeriya. They recognise me there now, always “hitori desu,” and I can sit right down at the first free table. This evening, though, I noticed something. As I ate the pizza, and now ordered clams too, I noticed that the robots (alongside the staff, robots also carry out the food) keep circling round and round. Since I’d misheard, I thought I could have them take my plates back. But that’s not what happened. The robot went around the restaurant, yet the staff had better things to do than lift the plate off the robot’s tray. For that matter, I understand. Just now a straw wrapper fell too, and I helped them pick it up, because the poor things had their hands full anyway: that much humanity, I think, fits in everywhere. In any case, after one lap the robot came back with my plate, so I just took it off and carried it back myself. In the end I ate dessert too, and moved on to do some shopping.
Chemicals and mentos
One of my errands was to buy a bit of sweets. Honestly, I’m bored of hard candy now, so I bought mentos and other gummies. In Japan I really like that one of the main flavours is blue grape. Being Hungarian, I naturally love grapes. I think it’s a hungarikum that we have 19 counties but 21 wine regions, so I myself know the possibilities grapes offer quite well, and I love the flavour world of their various derivatives.
Besides that I bought detergent, toilet cleaner, dish soap, drain cleaner, and shoe freshener. Plus pocky and the usual tea. You’d think I couldn’t get away for under 10,000 forint? But this is Japan, and luckily I was under 3,000 yen. So my very first task will be to clean a little and dive into the benchmarks. As I poured the chemical down the drain, I naturally found myself in a Stephen King film again. I hope I don’t get chlorine poisoning, by the way.
And of course I look after Gombóc: he’s making ever cuter sounds.
Afterword
Although I shouldn’t really apologise for this, I’ll do it anyway: I’m sorry that a little less post, text, and content appeared here. But it seems the migraine really knocked me down. That’s dangerous, because it’s very hard to see how well I can actually perform, and it showed in my posts too.
Photos
