Nomikai Times

March 13th, 2008 by kalin

Now I’m getting a bit more settled in at work and getting stuck into coding. It’s been a long time since I had a job, it will take a little bit to get used to full-time work again; but it’s been fun so far. Tomorrow night work is having a 飲み会(nomikai)!

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To infinity and beyond!

March 7th, 2008 by kalin

Next tuesday I’ll be starting work at Q-Games. Hooray! The work will be on PixelJunk titles for Playstation 3. It will be good to get stuck into some games coding again. The titles are fairly small, with just over 6 month or so turnaround; a welcome change from my previous project which went quite a long time.

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Suprisoidal Wave

February 21st, 2008 by kalin

Lots of things around here are a continual suprise, no matter how many times you see them. Every day a van comes through the area beaming out some sort of music and voice, I’ve no idea what it means. It appears to be some sort of garbage collection. There are alot of company vans and trucks around with loudspeakers always blasting out something (also very popular leading up to elections).

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Experience may change during online play.

February 6th, 2008 by kalin

Today I’m going to provide some pro-tips. When you go out to a bar, at which there may be karaoke, you should be sure to choose a song that you know the lyrics to quite well. The karaoke machine at the bar I was at was this small handheld touch device, which changed the monitors/tv’s around the bar to the song you select, wirelessly. The microphone was a small wireless thing too. Convenient and simple! Not a big fuss to be made like there would be for getting up in front of a crowd or something.

I was cruising along to a nice song, I knew most of the words, and then I hit a section I was never really aware of, despite listening to it alot.

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Kyotosaurus

February 1st, 2008 by kalin

After 13 long days in a hotel in Osaka, we’ve finally moved into the apartment in Kyoto. The hotel was nice, but it gets dull after a long stay. It’s good to have a personal space again. And a desk. And a chair. Except the chair sucks. The apartment was built last november, so the engineering is quite modern.

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Is it the future yet?

January 30th, 2008 by kalin

It’s been a little while since I wrote a post, and I’m posting this to let everyone know I’ll be putting it off a bit longer. :P

In the meantime, I’ve added this page, upon which I will add interesting (or not) tidbits of information, hopefully one-per-day. I also took some photos of the apartment on this page.

That’s all for now! I’ve got to go eat THE CURRY.

Traversity

January 22nd, 2008 by kalin

The transport system in Japan is superb. The subway trains are very frequent, very punctual, and very heavily used. The few times I’ve caught a train so far, I’ve not waited more than 4 minutes; and these were not peak-hour times. Getting a ticket is fast and simple too, at least once you realize how it works.

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Continuity

January 22nd, 2008 by kalin

It’s been nearly a week here now and we’re getting into a bit of a routine. There are some nice restaurants around, we’ve managed to eat nice meals for about 500-600円, although it’s a bit hard to tell what you are actually eating. It still continues to suprise me how cheap things are compared to Australia.

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Breakfast of Chumpions

January 19th, 2008 by kalin

So this morning I ventured out in search of breakfast. It was cold and a few people were setting up shops and stuff. Everything seems to open a little later in the morning, it was nearly 9am and most stores were closed.

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Osaka Osaka Osaka

January 19th, 2008 by kalin

Yesterday we did a big walk around Osaka, from our hotel, up past Tennoji Park, and through Shin-Sekai to Namba. The first thing you notice around is how incredibly dense the city is. Every street and alley is packed with shops. Noodle bars, Cafes, and Pachinko. There are pachinko places just everywhere, it’s crazy. Most of the pachinko places have arcades too, and seem to have a bunch of people in there pretty much all the time. The arcade games are about 50円 or 100円 to play, which is fairly cheap.

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