April 2005 Archives
Last weekend, we went to Niigata to perform at Open Mic. This was our first performance - and it was Andrew, Heather and me. We weren't great, but we were better than I expected. We played Laid by James, and Go Walking Down There by Chris Isaak. Both silly songs, but hey, they were fun. We rehearsed together but once - for only two hours - but we weren't too bad. I had a couple of mental lapses and created some alternative lyrics for both songs.... We're really looking forward to playing again. I wonder what songs we should do? Maybe we can get Andrew's girlfriend Momo in with us for vocals and keyboard?
Earlier that same day we viewed some hanami at Takada park and drank some beers. A few of us threw a frisbee around. We thought that a game of Ultimate Frisbee was going to materialize, but it never did. I'm looking forward to the Joetsu Ultimate season as always. Heather told me about another group that meets near Tokyo. Maybe I'll give them a call.
So this morning, I signed up for senseisagasu.com for a little bit more money. We'll see if I get any hits. The basic idea for this site is prospective teachers put their profiles online, and prospective students pay about $30 to get a list of five teachers. All the teachers can set their prices on the page and adjust them as often as they like. I hope I get some students, but I don't know if anyone will bite since my rate is somewhat higher than the average; however, I have the specialty of technical English, so I'm hoping to leverage that. It will be a waiting game... the only problem is I'm not sure how long I should wait before I lower my price.
My time at work recently has been almost fully-occupied by developing a Perlin noise function for a terrain-building program. The problem is, the client wants to have realistic-looking cliffs that jut out above the heads of the players while they're walking through ravines. Perlin noise, developed by Ken Perlin, is part of our solution.
We're using the Libnoise library - available at SourceForge - for this functionality. It's a really cool library. As mentioned on that page, Terragen uses that library.
Speaking of Terragen, we've been looking a lot lately at Aaron Torpy's L3DT. What a great program this is - very sophisticated terrain generation from fundamental seeds, as well as generation of light maps, normal maps, terrain maps, texture maps, water maps - you name it. It's amazing that it was developed by one guy, and more so that it's free. Mr. Torpy is a very nice guy, by the way - he answered all of my questions about L3DT promptly and thoroughly.
We had some visitors this past weekend. Alexi and Carolyn stopped by on their way to (and back from) Korea. They toured Seoul for only a few days, but they said that they had an excellent time. They were particularly excited about the food - kimchi, temple food, vegetarian bibimba... it all sounds great. I've been there myself about three times but after talking with them I want to go back again. I guess they also attended a few shows, including a couple of dinner theaters that Heather and I had recommended to them.
Chuck, on the other hand, had a visitor from the states - Jen - that he took around and toured with. For the final leg of their tour they stayed with us in Koenji. She left, however, pretty early on Saturday morning.
In the evening Alexi, Carolyn, Chuck, Heather and I all went to our local, newly-renovated Indian restaurant just down the street. It looks like it's under new management, as the cook and the servers are all different, as well as the decor, and to some extent the menu. I was afraid that it wasn't going to be as good as before, but it turned out to be just as delicious as we rememebered.
After dinner, the five of us went to a "live house" - kind of like a small bar with some entertainment. And this bar was really small. But the entertainment - a couple of women playing guitars and piano - was really good. Koenji is famous for this kind of thing, and Heather and I have been meaning to go for a long time, but it took us visitors to prod us into going. The last, and by most accounts best, singer - Akira - is giving a free performance this evening, also in Koenji. It starts at 9:00, meaning that if I hustled after work I probably would be able to make it, but I don't know if I'm going to go. Heather can't make it tonight - she's giving her first lesson to a private student - and I'm not too pumped about going alone. We'll see if I go.
Sunday, one of my bosses had a hanami party. This was a really big, awkward disappointment. In fact, it deserves another whole entry. Besides, my lunch break is almost over.
