Living in Kyoto

Autumn leaves are falling, and the days are becoming cooler. Awesome hacking weather.

It's now two months since I came to Japan. I spend half my time studying Japanese, half my time coding and doing research, and half my time partying. I've done a fair bit of sightseeing around Kyoto's temples, shrines and gardens, partied in Tokyo with Alex, Horms and Raster a couple of times, and learned my way around the local ramen joints. My favourite cocktail bar stocks over 20 different varieties of gin, including their own pepper-infused variety which tastes great with stingray (flambéd in your face, with spiritus). Student life is hell.

I've been car-free for two months now; it feels great to kick the gasoline habit. I ride a mama-chari, a steel-framed bicycle with a basket on the front. At first I thought of it as the cheap, chunky brick of a bike that it is. Then I realised that I have about the same strength to bike-weight ratio as I did when I was a kid on a BMX. So now I take every opportunity to bunny-hop random obstacles, get air off pavement and jump gutters. For some reason old people look at me funny when I do that.

As soon as I arrived and got my alien registration sorted, I sat down on a borrowed laptop to review the 350 awesome paper submissions for linux.conf.au 2007. The programme is packed full of more awesome than a noseful of wasabi. Go there or lose, your choice.

More recently I've been helping organise FOMS 2007, a developer workshop for free and open source media software, the week before LCA. It too will rock, and give us a great opportunity to plan some real integration between projects, like video editors + annodex + wikipedia. Rock on!

Recent hacking:

• HOgg: a new commandline tool and Haskell library for manipulating Ogg files.
• Blender Scripts: Getting Blender to model, animate and render non-interactively.
• Croquet: An open source, fully hackable 3D metaverse. I'm just learning my way around -- come play in #croquet on irc.freenode.net!