Had an excellent evening yesterday - went to the annual Grey College fireworks display with Echo, a couple of her friends (whose names escape me because they were inexplicably hard to pronounce!) and some people from anime who we managed to loose very early on in the large crowds unfortunately!
When it came to taking a few pictures (or well over 100 in my case!) I broke the primary rule of firework photography - I didn’t use a tripod, mainly because I don’t have one with me and it would have been a tad inconvenient to lug around all night! Although well over 50% of the photos I took are unusable I did manage to get a few good ones that look pretty cool in my opinion 
Needless to say the display was excellent, lasting for about 20 minutes - well done to Simon and Katherine who helped put it on. As expected it was very busy, it felt like the entire student population had descended on Grey (which probably isn’t far from the truth)! Fireworks always bring out the pyromaniac in me - I greatly miss setting them of at home (it all seems a long long time ago now though)!
After it was over we headed over to Ustinov College and met up with Kanako (my Japanese sensei) who lives in the same flat with Echo and a few others. Here I learnt to eat an apple with chopsticks (see if you can work that one out!) and had a bit of a cultural exchange between the Chinese, English, Japanese & Turkish (it turns out they’re not that different really)!! I picked up a few words of Chinese (which is an exuberantly difficult language), I just hope I don’t confuse it with all the Japanese I’m learning otherwise I might end up with some very weird hybrid Chino-Japanese language (Korean possibly ;-))!!
Somehow we ended up in what I think was a vaguely Halloween-type party (lots of people wearing bed sheets) which was OK but I ended up with a raging headache from being close to some very loud speakers - I imagine this is how boxers feel after being smacked about the head so many times that they end up with brain damage (that’s certainly how I feel right now)! At least the clocks went back tonight so I got an extra hour in bed this morning!
You can see more photos in the gallery.
Update: Echo sent me some cool videos of the fireworks which you can download here and here (approx 10mb each - right click and ’save link as’).
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Found a cool visualization today [via kottke.org] called the ‘Map of Creativity‘. It’s aim is to present an “interactive database of innovative educational projects throughout the world“.
The map itself is very innovative, allowing you to drill-down to different projects by geographic region whilst the visualization dynamically re-arranges itself accordingly. I especially like things like this which allow meaningful interaction without detracting from what it is trying to achieve - something I hope I can carry through with my visualization project this year.
If you like this then you might also like to take a look at Netscan which is another good project that looks at mapping hierarchical relationships of Newsgroups in the Usenet. Variations in colour indicate a change in the number of posts for this month compared to last month.
An aside: If you like photography take a look at ‘Small World Gallery‘ which focuses on the fascinating art of photomicrography. The images were captured through a microscope and are quite incredible to look at.
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Another Wednesday is here and the nexus of the week has been reached! I like Wednesdays because I don’t have any Computer Science lectures, only a Japanese class in the afternoon which makes a nice change from the norm.
Today I thought I might pass comment on the two anime series we’re watching at the society this term - Paranoia Agent & Fruits Basket. Both are fairly wacky pieces, one with a fairly complex and mind twisting plot the other is just plain stupid, but very funny - I’ll leave it to you to decide which is which!
Paranoia Agent is primarily about a kid dubbed with the title “shounen bat” who has been going around on roller-blades attacking people with a golden baseball bat. Two detectives are on the case to stop this kid from any committing more attacks but they soon find that this is much more than they can handle…
The animation is excellent, if somewhat a little psychedelic at times! One thing which confused me was the volume of central characters which soon mount up so much so that I found it difficult to keep up with who was who, the less be said about the complexity of the story line!
Fruits Basket is a completely different animal (that was a very poor joke for those who have seen it!) which follows the story of a high-school girl, Honda Tohru. Having lost her mother in a car accident, she has come to live alone in a tent in the forest near her school. Never a quitter, she strives to honor her mother’s memory and work hard to do the best she can with her life but soon things overcome her. Who will turn up to help her out?
The synopsis makes it sound a bit depressing but in fact it’s absolutely hilarious - you’d have to see it to know what I mean! The story line is pretty random and at times it does feel like the same stuff is being recycled a bit but it’s still fun to watch.
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The Internet connection in college is pretty fast, in fact you can’t get much faster considering we’re directly connected to the SuperJANET backbone, the UK’s education and research network. The network is government funded and the largest of its type in the UK with cross-continental links to Asia and the US - quite impressive.
I was downloading a couple of fairly large files the other day and was pretty astounded by the transfer speeds I was getting, close to 1megabits per second through a proxy server.
I decided to run a bandwidth speed test with Ethernet being the base connection type. It worked out that connection speeds averaged out at about 2.6 megabits per second which is higher than average for the UK! You can see the results here. Now if only they allowed BitTorrent connections through properly…
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Had a great time this morning at the ‘Teikyo Festival’ of Japanese culture which was put on by Teikyo University of Japan in Durham (held in the ‘Lafcadio Hearn Cultural Centre’) -
Kimono wearing
After arriving at about 10:30am everyone was given a program of events which could be visited throughout the day - there was a wide range of stuff you could do and see including traditional games, origami, tea ceremony, kimono wearing (for girls), calligraphy, martial arts and music.
Tea ceremony
One of the highlights was being able to watch a traditional tea ceremony which is a ritual way of preparing and drinking tea - mostly done as a hobby by people today (apparently). Basically, the tea is first prepared by the host, and then drunken by the guests. The tea was a bitter matcha green tea made of powdered tea leaves - almost clear in color, nothing like you’d normally drink over here. I don’t usually like or drink tea but I thought I’d give it a go - it was surprisingly nice!
Origami crane
Dotted about the place were hundreds, if not thousands of tiny origami models, some plain whilst others were made out of brightly decorated paper. The Japanese attention to detail is incredible, the students had obviously put a lot of work into putting the festival on - no wonder they’re top of the electronics manufacturing game!
Kendo
Another highlight was the Kendo (a martial art) demonstration. Here two surprisingly aggressive girls dressed up in full protective gear and proceeded to bash the living daylights out of each other with long sticks! I managed to get some great pictures and even a cool video which you can download here (25 mb - right click and ’save link as’).
Food time!
After this we got some food (Japanese noodles with pork & cabbage) and I had my first experience of using chopsticks which was slightly tricky at first but I soon got used to it (photo’s available in the gallery!). The food tasted good and I managed not to make a fool of myself with the chopsticks!
Little person
I ended up snapping 170 pictures (!) of which I got a few good ones that I’ve placed in a new album in the photo gallery - all-in-all a very successful and enjoyable morning
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