This week has been birthday week! My brother’s was on Monday and my best friend Daniel’s was yesterday. Happy Birthday to them both!

Well, after Anastasia’s laptop died last week, I spent most of this week re-setting up my desktop PC at university. Installing English-version Windows, gradually adding bits and pieces to set it up into the environment that I need. That way Anastasia has been able to use my laptop at home. It’s been kind of peculiar, actually… there are a few things that I just kind of take for granted being on my computer, and I’ve needed to set up remote access to them, or come up with other ways of accessing the information. I think even after Anastasia heads back to the US, I’ll try and leave my laptop at home as much as possible and see how I cope with needing to access information remotely on a more routine basis. At the very least, I’ll probably end up with a better back-up system.

My computer woes continued somewhat actually when I woke up to a Blue Screen Of Death on Tuesday this week. It was apparently at 8086 error… which when I investigated, eventually finding a solution. I installed it more as a preventative measure rather than waiting for it to reoccur. Sigh… when Anastasia and I went to Akihabara looking for a drive enclosure for her so she could at least recover some of her hard drive stuff, we didn’t manage to do that, either. We did return a cable we didn’t need, though.

I managed to get out and run around at a basketball practice at the Hongo campus. Lately, I haven’t really been able to get to practice because it’s been too early and on days that clash with my classes. It felt really good to get out and run around. Sadly I don’t think that many of the practices this month are at times that I can get to, so I might have to make a more regular habit of going to the gym to practice on my own.

Another visit to the psychiatrist this week, things with my sleep have been progressing normally, so I’m finally down to taking a single pill every other day. I didn’t actually sleep very well on the first night without the medication, however I’m going to do my best to keep going until I’m off this stuff. I don’t particularly like using sleeping medication, and it messes with my body too much. That and I can’t drink at all, which is somewhat limiting of my social engagements upon occasion. And annoying.

I went to OLM Digital for another visit this week, this time for a presentation from a visiting researcher. I still haven’t actually heard back from the guy I emailed last time, but he said he’s been really busy and apologised about it. The research was fairly interesting, using the accelerometers in Wiimotes to control animated characters. He was also doing some research into how people recover from tripping… which had some hilarious videos, actually. I also got to see some demonstrations of the current research that’s being done there. Hopefully I’ll get to do some work in that area, it was pretty interesting. I talked to Todo-san about his research in a bit more detail after the lab meeting this week… he was talking about doing research into an idea that I had while I was visiting at OLM – looks like he was already thinking about it! Right now I’m kind of hoping that I’ll be able to work with him on the project, even though it won’t be my own research (i.e. I probably won’t be first author on any papers). I suspect that my supervisor will want me to work on my own stuff. Who knows?

Speaking of school work, I also submitted my UI assignment this week. As well as doing the user testing for it. Unfortunately I couldn’t get the Wiimote interface to work properly, which meant that my original plan was out the window. Luckily I did a naive mouse interface implementation first. Still… a bit disappointing. I’m going to try and get a Wiimote version working this week anyway, since I’d like to experiment with the Wiimote anyway and it’s a nice small project to test it out on. My supervisor actually praised me at the lab meeting this week for my automatic delivery algorithm, which made me very happy and made me feel not quite as useless as I have been lately when it comes to my school work. I skipped giving my seminar this week because I had zip to show for it… actually I ended up feeling not particularly well that morning and slept in, but I wasn’t going to present anyway. My next one has been scheduled to be in a couple of weeks, although at the rate I’ve been going I don’t know if I’m going to be any more prepared for that one. Since it’s right before Anastasia heads back to the US, my head is probably not going to be in the right space, either.

I introduced Anastasia to some more anime this week… she was in the mood for some ridiculous fun, so I showed her Asu no Yoichi and To Love Ru, which went down a treat. For those of you in the mood for some silly fun, both are good anime for that, somewhat in the spirit of Ranma 1/2. Actually while I’m thinking about shows, one of my favourites started back up this week – Eureka! Don’t even get me started on the Sci-fi Channel changing its name to SyFy. Ugh. Idiots.

This weekend I managed to get a little bit of work done on one of my pet projects, which was good. I haven’t managed to do anything on my LeithBank system though, which is a bit frustrating. Now that I’ve added in the income side of things, it’s just getting more and more complete for what I need it to do. Mostly I guess I should spend a bit more time doing some back-entries of data so the analysis tools can be more effective. After transferring all the photos off of my phone onto my computer, I also put up the little couch I got onto Craigslist, since we acquired a bigger, nicer one a while back. Hopefully I can get rid of it… and also hopefully get a little money for it.

It’s been a bit of a rough week and I’m still feeling kind of listless. But, I’m at least hopeful that I’ll be able to get lots done this coming week!