April 30th, 2016 - 電車の風 - Tokyo​

As expected, Kaylee and I arrived at Narita Airport in Japan extremely jet-lagged. Even though I was lucky enough to have only one connecting flight in Chicago, the 18 or so hours of travel and 14-hour time difference took their toll on me both mentally and physically.

Kyle, my close friend from college who lives in Tokyo, greeted us right outside of customs after we landed. We exchanged our「お久しぶりですね」 greetings and headed towards the train station. It never ceases to amaze me how Kyle and I are always able to just pick up where we left off. Even though I hadn’t seen him in over a year, it felt like our conversation only had a momentary pause. The dumb running jokes and philosophical life conversations seem to run forever in a loop like the train that we were about to board.

Motivation​

I have long battled my internet service providers, and they have waged war on their customers for many years as well. Poor customer service, data caps with obscene overage charges, and many other issues have plagued me for years like many other Americans. Like many of these people, I’m stuck with only one viable option for a provider due to their monopolistic practices. Recently, I was forced to upgrade to a more expensive monthly plan after going over my data cap three times non-consecutively over a year and a half period. Rather than charging me the usual absurd per-gigabyte overage charge, I’m now stuck paying more per month for the remainder of my time with my ISP.

“You’ll also get an increase in speed as well,” the representative told me. Well, I’ve decided to hold my ISP accountable. Since my ISP was so diligent in tracking my overages, I’m going to be diligent in tracking the speeds that I’m getting. Inspired by a post on Reddit, I built an application to let my ISP know whenever I’m not getting my promised speeds, and I’m running it off of my Raspberry Pi. Here’s how you can use it too.

Getting Started: Convention Over Configuration​

This software development paradigm has become prevalent in many modern frameworks and tools. It can be described as streamlining and standardizing aspects of development similar to all or most projects while specifying configurations for those that deviate from the established convention. For example, most Node.js developers call their main file server.js. Let’s say that I want to write a generic deployment script for Node.js applications. It’s much easier to include a simple command like node server.js than to try to determine the developer’s intended start file. This simple agreement saves a great deal of time and configuration details. The emphasis of this paradigm is that the knowledge will hold for any team or company, and so organizations full of old tribal knowledge become a thing of the past.

Personally, I’m a huge proponent of convention over configuration. Amazon Web Services use this paradigm as well as part of their Platform as a Service offerings, but unfortunately the documentation is sparse, which is the main downfall of convention over configuration. Simply put, if no one knows about your convention or which conventions you’re opting to use, it’s ultimately useless. Soapbox aside, I’m going to cover how I got my initial Python environment setup and some conventions necessary for successful deployment.

It feels strange waking up in the Lower 48 again. When I left Alaska, the sunlight was already making people and plants manic again. The grass that was dead for months bloomed vivaciously in a matter of days. The snow was long gone, but the rain hadn’t shown itself quite yet. The midnight sun was already creeping and beaming over me.

My company’s office building is located in the heart of downtown Anchorage. This shimmering, golden beacon of American capitalism seems to cast a shadow over the Downtown Transit Center and its transient residents. Many are drunk and high; many are homeless and hopeless. Some even sell their bodies either for a quick fix or as a means of survival. They spend their dark days on the cold streets of Anchorage.

On Saturday night, I handed in my last final exam. Honestly, it was an extremely anticlimactic ending. The final had no bearing on my graduation or GPA for that matter, so it wasn’t really the concluding push that I envisioned being the end of my undergraduate stay. After a brief test, I said to my professor, “終わりですね...” and stole away into the chilly evening.

My blog is nearing its first anniversary. Admittedly, I have failed to maintain it as I would have liked to over the past year. My instinctive response is to attribute this to a lack of time. As my college graduation swiftly draws near, I’ve been obsessed with the notion of time lately. With classes, work, side projects, and graduation rituals at hand, I find myself constantly thinking that there’s just not enough time in one day. Not to mention that my exercise routine, Japanese studies, and myriad of other hobbies have suffered as well. Inevitably, there isn’t enough time to do everything, but as I found myself updating my old articles about Japanese study, I realized that what I was trying to teach others about language study I should be applying to my own daily life.

Cold air fills my lungs as I inhale deeply and behold this marvel of geologic time. I feel introspective and insignificant as I imagine my short life span juxtaposed with this ancient, undefiled landscape. I try my best to take a mental snapshot of this moment near the peak, knowing fully well that nothing can ever recreate this moment. Gazing down over the untrodden path that led me here. Imbibing water to replace the icy sweat now soaking my clothes. Savoring a brief reprieve from a steep journey. Noting some clever metaphor. Solving the profound, metaphysical intricacies of life.

I finished the first thousand kanji recently, and I can honestly say that in addition to learning a slew of new characters, I learned a lot about my study habits as well. I wanted to share some of the knowledge I obtained along the way.

There is a wealth of tools, applications, and media available to facilitate the study of Japanese. It is truly amazing people managed to learn without them. The following is a list of these tools and brief description of how I integrate them into my personal studies.