More Labwork

The cafeteria is interesting. Japan has vendo machines for all sorts of things
you can imagine. For drinks, for food, for newspapers, for cigarettes.
In the cafeteria, you pay for your food by buying a ticket from the vendo machine.
Then you give the stub to the cafeteria people, who'll then prepare the food for you.
These past days, I've always ordered noodles - ramen and udon cause I'm afraid of
not finishing my meal if I eat rice with chopsticks, I think the rice will all fall off.
But I noticed that they eat curry with a spoon, so maybe I can eat rice after all.

Anyway, yesterday was labwork again. I got the script to work on the project
I built Monday. But then after running the script, Ubuntu crashed again, so I
left the lab with my computer still rebuilding the whole thing. I also got to understand more
about Program Slicing and its applications.

So the next morning, that is this morning, I arrived to find my project rebuilt.
but since I didn't want to crash the OS again, and rebuild again for another hour,
yes, the build takes one hour. I tried to figure out how to build the hello project.
As we all know, every basic programming language introduction begins with
"Hello world". but this had some variation - you could select language - French
or English. So anyway, after much attempt and after reading the files, I got it to
build. This is where I practiced running the slicing and trying to understand what's going on,
really. I also got the script to run, and modified it a bit so that instead of output to screen,
it would output to a text file. It worked without problems. So, next step is just to dump it all in a database. While doing this, I was really very thankful for that programming class
with Doc Mana, where he taught us Haskell. The scripts were written in Scheme,
but learning Haskell was good enough to figure out Scheme.

What I wanted to accomplish today was really master the basic concepts behind
Program Slicing and create a new script to get a line number, and automate the slicing
per line number. What my tutor wants me to do is to automate the slicing of all the generated
nodes, I think, well, if I understand correctly.

So anyway, I did not accomplish that anymore today. He just kept telling me,
hey, don't work anymore. Interns shouldn't work, you should eat and sleep.
I really want to get to know them more, their research, where they're from,
what they like doing. The guy who looks the friendliest is Katayama-san,
and he's quite good in English, but I'm really very shy and they all look so busy,
I'm quite hesitant asking them stuff. Maybe I should ask. No, seriously, I should.

They had their weekly meeting today where everyone reports their progress.
Everything was recorded on Wiki. And planning is done with shared calendars,
using Sun Convergence. Great tools. Maybe we should do our meetings that way.
And hold them weekly. Yes, I do believe.

Yesterday I was feeling really down, and I wanted to go home.
Now, it's quite fine, but still I'm not convinced that I should be studying here.
Maybe if there was at least one other girl in the lab. Why is it that there are none?
Maybe I should just talk to them and get to know them more.

Anyway, so tomorrow is Spring Seminar. I'll be joining the visiting undergraduates
and high school (yes, high school) students. It'll all be in Japanese. I think I understand
just 10 percent of what they're saying. I hope I get something from the demo.
Maybe I'm just so uptight, I don't know. Or maybe the internship is just too short.
Or maybe I don't know as much Japanese as I need, it's the limiting factor.
But, no, I don't think so. It's probably just me. I'll try to ask more questions.
I can speak in English anyway. The other interns are doing quite fine without any Japanese
language.

Anyway, I still need to do my paper. Oh, I'm the great procrastinator. Procrastinating
like I'm doing fine.