Last saturday I went with some friends to see a Brazilian Samba parade here in Tokyo in the Asakusa area !
Here are the pictures. I made a public album with faces of shy friends removed. To do that I “copied” (it’s shortcut kind of feature) pictures from the private album into the public one. However PicasaWeb seems to lose the order of pictures when doing that, and so they are not in the proper chronological order. Not a big deal I guess !
By the end of September my duties at my current company will be over. I don’t have a next job yet, but there seem to be interest from the companies I was interested to. So far, so good !
I fear interviews as I will have to pull out my best Japanese.. of which I’m not particularly proud. Many times people ask “do you speak Japanese ?”. That’s such a broad question to someone that is struggling to do it. There are many levels and contexts that one has con consider to answer to that question.
On the coding side, I decided to give a try to Google’s project hosting. I’ve started gathering and fixing code that I’ve had laying around, to put it out as open source. That includes DSharingu and the related Pascalibs, a quick name I gave to my libraries for the occasion. I’ve grouped the whole OS coding thing under a new blog which I’m doing with Blogger beta.. just to make sure that I go the whole Google solution 8)
I don’t foresee much activity on this, but it’s nice to have something out there. Nowadays, personal code is hardly much of a trade secret. I’m more afraid to lose it on a system crash than risking to have someone rip off some pieces of my code… but who really wants to spend countless hours to understand somebody else’s code ?!
As far as “love life” goes.. well I remember now what relationships are all about. I remember as a kid I was somewhat forced by circumstances to watch those black and white love movies where the two protagonist are all happy and eventually break up out of some stupid situation and then get together again for good. Boring, but that’s one recurrent pattern. Relationships are a continuum of repeating patterns, an endless script.
My current state of things involves at least one quarrel per week. Spend one day fighting, a couple of days getting back on good terms and the rest is just waiting until the next fight. Most of the times it’s just a word a joke, a thing said with a different tone of voice. Sometimes I make some stupid mistakes.. but I hardly ever get any mercy. I basically have to admit being sole responsible of something and ask forgiveness as I whip my back in pain.
I think that I’m a very honest person but that’s not enough. Actually it’s not a good thing. To have a good relationship, I’m told, one is supposed to tell lies !
Language barrier is also a terrible thing. No matter how good of a thought you have, you are only as good as you can express yourself. But then again, even when language isn’t a barrier, there are so many issues with pride and different points of view.
ehhhhhh
Posted by Davide Pasca as Programming, Diary at 2:08 AM EDT
9 Comments »
Today (Sunday) I finally sent out a few copies of my resume. It took me a long time to get the whole thing right.
Most people kept telling me I was taking too long to write a resume. One problem obviously is that a resume is a rather formal paper and my knowledge of Japanese is very limited.
I had to do a lot of research to find out how technical terms are written in Japanese. Literal translation is generally both wrong and funny. The average native Japanese speaker also will find himself/herself at loss when trying to come up with translations of technical terms or even to describe an technical task. Nevertheless I had native speakers helping me with the process !
I also sometimes tend to get stuck with details, but I think that potential Japanese employers will appreciate that. Form shows dedication. Japanese are sensitive to that and so am I.
With the resume also comes a CD with a couple of demos. Nothing too big, just old stuff that I picked left and right (including JavaKazRace !).. because bringing demos tends to make quite a difference.
I am concerned however… I see that all the job descriptions for R&D programmer in the game business in Japan require the candidate to be not older than 35. I’m 34 and I’m supposed to feel like I’m at the end of my career as a programmer ?!
What is going to happen if, two years from now, I want to go code for another company ? Am I too old for coding ?
It sounds very much like getting in the military. It’s easy to convince an 18 years old to go risk his/her life just to get some action and a decent pay. But later in life, when one has a family to think about, keeping alive and healthy becomes more important.
Game business also requires one to work his ass off, all in the name of fame… because certainly if you want to make money programming you are better off doing Visual Basic and Oracle.
So, I suppose most people by the age of 35, either become managers (difficult decisions but simple work) or they get into other businesses where they trade the fame of doing “cool games” with more money and a more humane schedule.
I just can’t believe that 2 years from now, people will look at my resume and trash it on the basis that I’ll be 36 !!
zzzzzzz melatonin is starting to make effect.. zzzzzzzz
Posted by Davide Pasca as Programming, Society, Diary at 1:58 AM EDT
11 Comments »
Last Thursday I resigned from my current job. I worked there exactly 5 years this month. Not much boding ever went on the premises, but I do have a couple of friends and acquaintances that I’ll be missing !
I’ve been planning to leave for a while now, but I suddenly decided to resign as the start of a new project was approaching. It wouldn’t have been nice to leave in the middle of a project and, frankly, I was disappointed by the unrealistic time line (3 months to develop a game that is not yet well defined).
I was also disappointed by the fact that my skills have perhaps been misunderstood. I was going to be given a fairly difficult task, but definitely not one where I could have given my best. I think that things could have been better if the process of accepting projects and defining tasks were a bit more democratic.
So, I left in a heartbeat. The night before the day or resignation, I spent a few hours looking for a resignation letter template.
While it’s nice to write the whole letter by hand, that would have been a daunting task.
I took a quick 30 minutes course from a “native writer” to properly (form is important !) write just the 3 kanji for the envelope’s title..
I had quite a few days of vacation accumulated, that will give me time to breath and, most importantly, to find a new job and a new apartment. The current one is rented by the company and I will have to leave it !
I have already selected a few game companies which I think would be good for me. But, obviously my main problem is still the language. There are just too many words I don’t know and my grammar is just too poor. I doubt I can sustain a meaningful job interview in Japanese without any help. I’ll definitely need the interviewers to be patient.
The prospect to have to sustain tests also scares me a bit. I’ve never been very good at tests. I’m not a very sociable animal, I tend to be pretty nervous when meeting new people. I’m hoping that the resume and a couple of demos will speak for me. Because I don’t think I will excel at any tests or that I’ll sound too knowledgeable in Japanese.
I’m going to be 34 soon and I noticed that there is a recurrent 35 years old limit for being a programmer !! I guess that at my age one is generally some sort of manager&family-man and less of a programmer/researcher.
I may have to select companies which make some room for English or possibly even not in the game business. I have to admit that I somewhat envy those that work less and make more money. I like to work on the latest technology, do research, etc. But work is work, and more often than not, the most interesting research I do is on the subjects I pick, the stuff I make on my free time.. so I learned to value more free time.
Now I’m a bit worried. I think that generally my problem is that I like to be extra safe. I had to throw myself in a this situation, but by my nature I like to have all angles covered before making any step. That’s obviously not possible now, and it’s perhaps good: one also needs to learn to grab opportunities, to stretch beyond the safe limit to risk something in order to get more.
Fear is what locks almost everyone in place. Fear helps to stay afloat but isn’t going to propel any career.
wooo !!!
Addition: here is a song that sums up how’ve been feeling at work.. nobody should ever have to feel like that.
Posted by Davide Pasca as Diary at 11:56 AM EDT
12 Comments »
Everyone likes to waste time in a way or another. Ever since GMail, Google has come up with a wealth of stuff to test and play around with.
I use Google Desktop daily. It comes with a sidebar and the SDK to add gadgets to the sidebar.. but honestly I can’t bear losing the space that the sidebar takes. It only comes as a distraction and I feel that I’d be wasting too much time programming something that I wouldn’t use myself.
One thing I was curious to find out about is AdSense. I get around 230 page views per day and most of them are Japanese users that come to download the GPU plug-in for PSX emulators !
With those numbers, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t become rich anytime soon. And so I effectively subscribed to AdSense just to find out how it works.
One month into it and I’ve earned $2. One has to make at least $100 before being able to get any money. That means that, at this rate, it will take me 4 years before I see any money 8)
..I wonder how much of Google’s business is based on people like me that do AdSense just to try it, or on people that hopelessly try to make a living with it (Americans are very adventurous when it comes to business 8).
Well, my lunch break is over.. back to the boredom of another useless day in the office.. no wonder I grab every opportunity I get, to mess with Google’s stuff.
woo !!!
Posted by Davide Pasca as Diary at 12:58 PM EDT
2 Comments »
