Infinite State Automaton

So far so good. I've had too many good starts that ended with a tragic nose dive, though, so I won't be gloating til my assignment is done.

Shopping: Tick.
Haircut: Tick.
Washing: Tick.
Cleaning House: Ti.....mmm...well...I did SOME. More work to do.
6 hours of study: Fail. The haircut and shopping took a lot longer than I planned it to. However, I made up for it somewhat today when I was supposed to be working >.>;;

Shopping went well. I did something I never did before - I took an inventory of what I already had, so that I didn't wind up buying things I didn't need which subsequently went off and had to be thrown out. Surprisingly, I actually had a lot of vegetables. Taking Warren's advice, I bought wholemeal bread. Um. I ate a piece and now I am kind of addicted to it. I just eat it straight from the packet. Bread, hand, mouth, gone. Probably I should put some jam or something on it first but, uh...well...

Today was my first day back at work. It was dead! There are about four staff total, which quickly went down to three when Gerry locked himself out of his own office. Nobody was available to let him back in, so he went back home. A cunning strategy. I'll have to remember it for myself next time. I also took my new camera to work on the off-chance more baby birds were around, but nothing remotely cute showed up today.

The DOORS server was offline, which meant I wasn't able to work on the tools task at all except for moving bits of paper around and putting different colored post-it-notes on other pieces of paper. The rest of the facility are under the impression I designed this system and then started programming. In actual fact I didn't know any of the capabilities of the programming language, so hacked up something first and then retro-designed it around what it could do. It passed the inspection last December by some miracle, but it needs a lot of work to save it from being an endless blackhole of spaghetti code.

The Director has made some indication that they are prepared to send me to the US to get some training in the DOORS program. I expect I will have to pay a big chunk towards it so I am starting to save now.

After I hit 'publish' on this I am going to cook dinner. It's a low quality bachelor meal, just lamb chops, some pasta and boiled vegetables, but it's a hell of a lot better than the usual crap I eat. My eventual goal here is to get in to the habit of cooking dinner, and then I can start to play around with the fun recipes people have been sharing with me.

It's really an active, interesting time for me. I hope I can keep this up. I seem to have a lot more free time than I remembered having, and am feeling more capable and independant. It's only been a few days.

Another thing that I want to share - I am watching an interesting anime series called 'Ghost Hound'. (This is where Anna rolls her eyes, sighs, and says something about watching tv shows for little girls.) Prior to meeting Anna, I was actually part of two clubs - one was AJAS, literally an anime watching club, and the other was JClub, which was supposed to be about Japanese and Australian students doing fun things together but gradually became an offshoot of AJAS. At this point I left it. After my assignment is done, I'll have to invest more effort into looking further than just anime.

Ghost Hound is an interesting one because, on top of the usual supernatural storyline, there is another, normal-human story. The rural village has a brewery and the main character, Tarou, is the only child of the couple that own it. His older sister was supposed to inherit the brewery but died in suspicious circumstances (that are linked to the supernatural storyline). There is a great deal of pressure on Tarou to inherit the family brewery. It's clear even at this early stage that he doesn't want to do it, but feels some great loyalty to his family and will abandon his own (unspecified) dreams to meet his obligation to his family.

At this point in the series, Tarou's Aunt has taken over the brewery, having left her own job to take up the family business. Even people unrelated to the family make comments - a reporter who observed Tarou and his aunt automatically assumed and stated Tarou would be taking over the business when he was old enough, and everybody (even the aunt) agreed.

Shortly afterwards, the aunt and Tarou were talking about yeast and from this conversation, the aunt told Tarou he was never going to be the master brewer (in a polite way).

I'll be very interested to see the next stage of this story.

I'm well aware that tv is not a good way to learn about another culture; but right now I can't devote enough time to do it the right way.

So. I reached my time limit. It's time to make dinner. See you next time.

--EDIT
The television made this sound: *CRACK* then the picture went all funny.
Then the ominous smell of smoke, closely followed by actual smoke.
So Shane turned the TV off. Somehow he broke my TV with just the power of his mind. Very impressive. I'd be angry, except he gave me that TV for my birthday. What he hath given, he can also taketh away...