Ryan
Chasing greatness

I had my private lesson today for the first time in almost a month.  I teach one of Megan’s student’s fathers.  He is a really cool guy.  Hard to believe he is Japanese actually.

He has his own company that specializes in custom motorcycle seats.  That is a pretty awesome job.  They do a lot of work to get their name out there by doing things like contributing to extreme around the world races and such as well.

Today we talked about love hotels.  He gave me some great information about how things can be there.  Things like there will always be a minibar with drinks and sometimes with sex toys.  During holidays when women tend to dress up in Kimonos they have “Kimono service.”  Essentially a special staff member will come up and help they young lady get tied up into her Kimono again because it is a 2 person job.

Crazy.

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So I don’t really have a whole lot to report in this entry.  I’ll just write some stuff thats going on.

First off, my dear friend Courtney is writing quite a lot about how she misses Japan.  That makes me feel like we were able to help her and Jason have a better trip.

Also, a lot of the differences between Japanese and Americans that I have written about somewhat bitterly have mostly faded away.  Sure, the facts of the matter haven’t changed, but you learn to just accept it or ignore it and go on with your life.  When that happens, the country opens up and becomes a pretty neat place.

This morning I wrote  a new template for our lessons and presented it to the boss and some others.  I didn’t make the new template to insinuate that things are bad, and I don’t think that is how it was received, but it could certainly be taken that way.  I don’t know how I would feel if I had been doing a job for 15 years and then someone shows up with 6 months of experience and proposes a completely different way of doing things.

Still, this is one of the first jobs I have had near complete autonomy in.  That is a great thing.  It allows you to put yourself in the situation where you can have an honest moment to take pride in the good work you have done, and fix the gross failures along the way.  There is nobody looking over my shoulder except me, and that pushes me harder.  That is what drives me to make new things.

In other things I have started reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne.  I’m about half way through and nothing has happened.  Good stuff.

I have almost finished my Login Tracker program that will securely store your user names and passwords.  I have come to find out that when you wish to authenticate a user in MacOS you are encouraged to use C instead of their own Objective-C due to the fact that Objective-C is full of security holes.  I’m really pleased that Apple admits it, but I’d like them to get on the ball and handle that.

I’ve also been seriously thinking about my next project.  A zombie game.  Completely done by procedural generation.  My biggest obstacles so far is that it is a huge undertaking, and I lack confidence that I can produce a game that will actually be fun and worth the effort.  I have a million ideas, but are the ideas of high enough quality to warrant the work?

I guess we’ll see.  I was told the biggest thing game companies look for when they hire is that they want to see that you have moved from a dreamer to a doer.  Thats he goal.

If you don’t know what the title of this entry is about, well you aren’t nerdy enough.

Spore was one of the most anticipated games in a long time.

My family got it for me for Christmas.  It is everything it should be.  Its really great.

Before I nerd out too much on that, let me say some stuff about Japan and what not.  Now that I’m here and working again (First day) I’m thinking about what would really have to change to make this country a viable option for me to live in.

The reality is, that if you can manage to live here for 6 months without unbearable hardship, then all the things you miss and want fade away.  Sure, when we went home we were foaming at the mouth for Mexican food and red meat, but we just missed the taste.

When we were home buying things to bring back, there really wasn’t a whole lot that we can’t find here.  Sure the prices are higher, but we’ve changed our habits to reflect availability of things.  Its kind of amazing how quickly we adapt.

To sum everything up.  If Japan had Taco Bell and central heat/air, it’d be a pretty OK place to live.  Think about it.  You’re obviously a foreigner, you’re taller, have that foreign mystique about you, and nobody thinks you understand anything.  That means you can live without any confrontation.  Even if you are fluent or conversational and you don’t feel like dealing with something, you can totally glass over and pretend not to understand.

Sure, you miss speaking English with people, but you find out quickly that when you do find the rare opportunity, its really annoying.

Now for something completely different.  We brought some candy back for everyone to try.  Before we handed it out though, Megan took all of her favorites out.  Thats my wife.  I think I can look forward to a long life of not-quite-complete Chex-Mix.

On to nerd.

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Around 10:30PM last night we made it back to our apartment.  The travel wasn’t to bad this time around either.  We have discovered some important things though.  American is kind of crap to fly with for such a long time.  The flight attendants were rude and unavailable, and the planes themselves just weren’t that nice.

When we flew NWA we were much happier.

We got to Tokyo and then hopped another flight to Nagoya.  We flew a 777 to Nagoya with Japan Airlines.  For those of you who don’t know, a 777 is a big damn plane.  The same size as what we made the flight across the pacific on.  The differences were that the JAL one was super nice.  I can’t begin to tell you how nice it was.  It was the nicest plane I have ever seen.  We were put in business class for free.  If I stretched my legs, I still had about a foot until I would touch the next person’s seat.  God it was the best 1.5 hour flight.

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Couple of things.  For all you millions that love to read my dribble, I’m sorry I didn’t notice that my RSS feed is hosed.  This is some weird glitch with WordPress and Permalinks.  There don’t seem to be any solutions to the problem and I don’t really feel like playing with it.

Second, for my pam_quiz login security project I still need to study its effectiveness.  Essentially I have to set up some VMs, one as an attacker, and one as a victim with my pam_quiz on it.  The attacker will simply brute force its way in and I will find out if it succeeds or not.  Then, after that I can hopefully put this on a real honeypot that is exposed and see how it works.

For now, I have moved onto another project.  I’m riding high on the fact that I finished a project and I’m not wasting time.  This time my project is a Cocoa (MacOS 10.x) project that will manage your various online accounts.

Essentially it will be a like a little spreadsheet to keep track of all of your user names, passwords, sites they correspond to, and some other little features.  I want this little application to give a good consolidating solution to the myriad of online accounts people keep now.

Some future features:

• Password/Passphrase generation
• Automatic login to websites.
• Encrypted/dencrypted password view

For now though I’m just getting my hands dirty learning to make a Cocoa app in XCode.  I’ve never used any of that stuff before, so it is a challenge.  I’m hoping I can get a lot done over break, but that is pretty unrealistic I think.