Resolution Month 5 Report

Sorry for disappearing these past few weeks. The adult life is kind of limited when you submit the majority of your waking hours to The Man. This is the progress report and update to the New Years resolutions I submitted back in January. I guess most people forget about these kind of things once the year gets underway, but I've been establishing some metrics to get a feel for how successful I've been. Things have changed a bit since January, so things have been added and things have been removed. Things that have been removed are no longer here because either I've accomplished the task, the task is no longer applicable, or the public domain status of the item has been placed under scrutiny. Now that the boring talk is out of way, let's get to the meat of the discussion:

1. Sleeping Hours
Done. Pared my sleeping hours back to a regular 8 hour nominal per night. Things get a little messy when accommodating for taiko practice since I get home from practice around 11 and need to be up for work the next morning at 6... but things are working out atm.

2. Study Goals
Stalled. I'm long overdue on ALL of the 600 kanji that I managed to shovel through the Heisig method. I hope to be starting that up again. Pimsleur is also stalled somewhere around the second lesson set. GRE hasn't gone anywhere either. =/ I'm hoping to get Heisig and Pimsleur back off the ground. The good news is I found some good Japanese language partners. Now I need to work on my Chinese so that I'll have more things to offer to the discussion table.

3. Physical
Starting to get back underway. My arms have completely recovered from the pull-up death I experienced a few months back. I gotta get back into running and work on the abs. The latter is kinda important for playing Yatai moreso than aesthetic appeal. The pull ups are purely aesthetic though ha ha... as long as the lats don't get in the way of taiko I should be good.

As for running, there seems to be a good running community at work. Part of it is because I work in one of the most beautiful (and exclusive...) parts of San Diego ^__^. Might as well make good use of the area.

4. Weight
Stable is good.

5. Daily Planner
FAIL. Fortunately the calendar system is still up and running. That is getting me through my day to day.

6. Meditation
This has kind of fallen on the back burner. Things have been super busy since work started but maybe in the near future I can find a few good spots at work to do battle with my mind.

7. Eating
Things have been much better especially with the structure of work. I kind of have to eat at specific times otherwise I won't get much of a chance to eat at all and have to deal with being hungry. One thing I need to do is cook more... and by cook, I mean properly cook as opposed to my usual task of making raw foods not raw anymore.

8. Taiko
I'm nearing the end of this unexpected Taiko Month. I kinda got tossed into it where I interacted with the taiko community like 9 days straight which then tapered off into into something like 4~5 times a week from practices to concerts to attend. The best part... I don't have to perform so the pressure is real light. Things are looking up for me in the Taiko world. I found a fue mentor. My goal with fue is to be able to play it like the way I whistle and sing. That will probably take a long long time... but... it should be good. The taiko part should be just as good too.

Project 59... my first song... Hopefully I can actually pull through with one this time ha ha! Maybe I should try writing something a little easier first... =/

I finally have a good practice pad. If anyone wants one, I can make them one. I think cost in terms of material and labor should be around $5.

9. Writing
heh... that's suffered lately just as much as my studies. I really need to get these letters and packages to Japan. I also need to re-establish contact with people not only over there... but on this side of the Pacific as well. Sigh...

I guess a part of that will be stabilizing my operating systems both on my blackberry and my laptop.

10. OS
Finally found a pretty decent solution to my computing. CCRMA on Fedora 10. I have to compile SAGE from source, but hey... if I can get everything under one roof... It means I'll be far more likely to actually use all the software I want to use. So what if the nay-sayers think Fedora is an unstable and experimental POS. Atleast I can do what I want and not have to worry about latency issues and configuration issues... and the show stopper of them all: random kernel freezes. I don't think i'll ever go back to windows for my personal computing. Not when I can get thousands of dollars worth of software for free without the whole pirating issue nagging my back.

So I gotta get Fedora into a more permanent set up configured to taste. My Blackberry also needs to be upgraded. Hopefully I can get Japanese input working on the damn thing. We'll see though I guess.

11. Recording
I've gotten into the habit of recording all my expenditures. Its helped me determine where my weak points are in terms of finance and has increased the transparency to the whole 'where the hell does all my money go' conundrum. Mint.com and relegating most of my expenses to credit cards help a lot... but the use of cash is also an issue which is why I do the recording by hand. I need to figure out a good system for dealing with receipts (keep them? or shred them? How to organize?). I'm trying to do this with taiko as well so that I can monitor the minutes that I throw at various aspects of the artform. I don't know what I'll get out of recording the amount of practice I toss at something, but I'm sure it'll be useful at some point. Just the act itself should be sufficient because it prioritizes my intentions.

12. Math and Physics
I really need to brush up. This might couple into 'Study' but this kind of warrants its own point. I've spent too much time outside of the math world... Granted I never really completely stepped into it, I think there is a lot to gain from modelling. This doesn't just apply to work and my technical expertise, but stuff like Taiko too. If I could model the way a drum head vibrates (it uses a 2 dimensional J-Bessel function for an infinitesimally thin membrane if I remember right) and parameterize the strike point, you can predict the different types of sounds you should be able to hear. This would be pretty useful for Kris' whole theory behind Shime... or heck... any drum... becoming a sort of melodic instrument.

13. Graduate School
For anyone that's talked to me about work in any sort of depth... I've probably been flipping back and forth between a buttload of general issues regarding career path and graduate school. The latest argument seems to predict a return to UCSD for a PhD. I don't know when it will happen and how Taiko will fit into the picture then... but it looks like I'll be in San Diego for a LONG LONG time.



All in all... life is starting to stabilize again. With this stability comes the ability to branch out a bit more and re-establish those niche parts of my life that got uprooted when I left for Japan and subsequently got a job. I sorely miss the experience that I had over there... but there are plenty of adventures to be had on this side of the Pacific too!