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!

Moving to Kyoto

I recently received final confirmation for my PhD scholarship at Kyoto University, which means that I'll most definitely, awesomely, be moving to Japan very soon. I start in early October 2006, and the course is three years full-time. Hence I'll finish up my work at CSIRO in September, by which time I will have worked there for 7 years.

Although I'll have ample opportunity to improve my Japanese, the program I applied specifies that I write my thesis in English. I'll be researching information retrieval in real world and virtual environments, in Tanaka Lab. The lab works on interesting projects like video and geographical search, Croquet, and massage chair interfaces for web browsing.

Nearby:

• Mt. Lambda, where a god of lambda calculus lives.
• FSIJ runs a Kyoto Codefest, involving some people from my lab.
• wikitravel:Kyoto