I should point out that the new apartment is on the fifth floor of a very old pre-war walk-up building. You never realize that you've been taking elevators for granted until you suddenly don't have one.

In general, my new residence seems typical of apartments in the Upper East Side. It'll take me a while to get used to, and it appears that I've grown used to thinking of Harlem as home - despite having lived in the area for only seven months. I am at my old apartment on 120^th street as I write this, and I'm still feeling regretful of my decision to move. Today is the last day of my lease. It's only natural that I feel this way: This apartment was unusually spacious for Manhattan standards, had a great view, an elevator big enough for my bike, and a washer and dryer inside. It was a much higher standard of living than I anticipated before I arrived in the US. But the real reason I am sad to leave is the neighborhood - despite it's stereotypical reputation as a 'dodgy' neighborhood, El Barrio is not only very safe and peaceful, it also has a lot of charm, great food, lots of family run businesses and restaurants, hardly any chain stores, and a sense of community which you can find in only very few other neighborhoods in New York. There were several times I felt guilty about the comfort I was enjoying. It's a well known fact that gentrification has been forcing local residents out of the area for a few years now, and newly-built 'luxury' apartments such as this one - which sticks out like a sore thumb among beautiful old townhouses - are to blame for the rising rent.

Prices seem to have fallen badly this year, though. We were offered a decent reduction on the monthly rent by our landlord, as were our neighbors. The offer came too late; I had by then, already signed up for a new place (the UES apartment), and plans for the move were pretty much irreversible.

On the bright side, I will be saving some money (I had better, given that the new house is nowhere as comfortable as the last). I'll also be closer to work/University, which means my bike ride will be shorter. The most interesting thing is my room: It is connected to the house by a spiral staircase, and leads straight to an almost private terrace!

"Scottish-fold-style sitting contest, for cats."

SETL is incidentally one of the languages we will be studying as part of the 'Honors Programming Languages' course. SETL is said to have indirectly influenced Python. It is based on Set Theory and allows very succinct list-comprehension-like one-liners. At the start of the course (in January), we were told that it was decided to drop Python in SETL's favor since SETL would be more 'fun'.

Another drink I know from a Steely Dan song, again one with rampant Manhattan imagery?

Bad Sneakers and a Piña Colada my friend
Stompin' on the avenue by Radio City with a
Transistor and a large sum of money to spend

This is a ThinkPad X301 (see this ThinkWiki entry for non-biased specs). Probably not the sort of laptop you buy on a grad-student budget, but it was available for a discount at the University computer store.

Debian 'Lenny' is now happily running on it, no major problems in installation or configuration except:

• Wifi is non-free. I overlooked the fact that Intel wifi drivers need proprietary firmware blobs. It works but to depend on the non-free firmware is a shame. Customizing the laptop from Levovo directly may have yielded some free (albeit costlier) options. I wonder what other non-free devices I may encounter. I'm happy with whatever is working out-of-the-box, though.
• There is a stupid glitch that prevents me from using the TrackPad (unless I choose to sacrifice the wonderful TrackPoint scrolling feature famously associated with ThinkPads). This is a problem only for distributions that use fully HAL-automated hardware configuration; it is too late, however, to revert to hand-customized configuration files (xorg.conf, etc).
• Minor suspend/resume issues which I am sure will smoothen out soon.

I still have a few left.

New York is very cold, but the snow is gone. East Harlem, where I now live, is obviously in every way imaginable, a huge change from the various Tokyo localities where I've lived over the last few years. But it has a lot of character. Not far away is a Mom-and-Pop joint that serves delicious Dominican food. Many a five-dollar meal was had there until a home-food routine was finally established this weekend. A trip to Flushing, Queens has provided a reassuringly high selection of Korean (Kimchi here is delicious) and Japanese groceries. In Manhattan, I have been spoken to in Spanish a few times; I probably ought to start learning it. I am taking the subway until I get down to re-assembling my bike. (I carried it with me on the plane!)

Initial impressions of grad school:

• Fewer classroom hours than I expected, but much more than everyone else (who asks me how many courses I am taking) did.
• There are too many interesting courses, and too little time.
• Homework is harder than lectures.
• Both the central NYU library and the department library are to me, utterly awe-inspiring.
• Lecture-halls (at least the ones I've seen) are strictly non-posh.
• Superficial differences at the inter-departmental level (appearance and styling of infrastructure, etc) are enormous.
• Efficiency: Things are so fast and low-ceremony (at NYU). I got an ID card in less than a minute.
• Campus food is good.
• I think it might be more fun than I expected.

The Computer Science department at NYU is part of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. The department seems nice, and there's a decent amount of interesting research they do. While the program is more computer science as opposed to engineering (which is what I want anyway) it appears in line with NYU's reputation for interdisciplinary research/study.

So, after five years of working in Japan, writing software and programming in too many languages (for my own good) I find myself headed off to academia. I honestly never thought this would happen. But I'm looking forward to it, and as much as I am dreading actually leaving Tokyo, I am excited by the prospect of change. Classes begin as soon as I get there. I arrive on Monday morning, and with any luck I can make it to the semester's first lecture on Programming Languages.

While my research interests and long term goals are still fuzzy, I'm looking forward to a semester of course-work, and most of it seems like fun.

Having moved out of my apartment, I am staying with Thilo and his wife Cissy and their seven-month old son. My visa finally arrived (i.e., in hand - I was told that it would be approved but after a delay), thus making me feel somewhat confident about announcing that I am actually going!

The show was pretty much fantastic. The band was super-tight, the legendary showmanship was there, the sound was excellent, despite the high volume - the levels at the Budokan are much more bearable than a monstrous venue like the Tokyo Dome where I saw the Police perform earlier this year. The Budokan is also relevant because it's where so many great bands have performed in Tokyo. This was where The Beatles made their debut in Japan. Apparently, this is The Who's first visit to Japan. Unlike the Beatles, and the countless British bands that blessed Japan with concerts and tours in the 70's and 80's, The Who never made it here until now.

Roger Daltrey noted this fact with regret as he expressed how impressed he was by this "beautiful city and it's wonderful people."

The Budokan was as I expected: that Showa-era feel and interiors of a building constructed in the 60's. It wasn't hard to imagine the Fab Four walking around in it's corridors, since the place has probably never been renovated since. I'd seen videos of performances at the Budokan earlier (most notably Dream Theater and Yellow magic Orchestra), and it really does have that 'rock-and-roll' history feel. Before the show began, Thilo and I looked around at the mixing consoles, trying to guess what kind of software all that impressive array of equipment was running. We noticed the R.A.F Roundel motif everywhere.

The set began with Can't Explain, at a volume loud enough that made it impossible for me to excitedly ask Thilo if he'd heard/heard of the Scorpions cover version. The sound was muddy when it began but smoothened out rapidly. Maybe it was my ears getting used to the volume, but the later into the show we got, the better the vocals and guitar tone sounded. Pete Townshend actually changed guitars for every song - all Fender Stratocasters except for the acoustic guitar that appeared in the second encore. Despite their age, their on-stage antics were almost identical to what you can see in footage of their 70's performances (ask YouTube for Baba O'Riley) - Windmill strokes, and Thilo joking that 'a wireless mike would not work for him (Roger Daltrey).'

Obviously the most brilliant part was Baba O'Riley and the performance of a significant part of Tommy in the first encore.

I've noticed that while enjoying myself obviously make me happy, seeing other people enjoying themselves (to a greater extent than I am) actually not only makes me happier, but adds to it a warm, fuzzy feeling. I realized this during the ASIA concert in February 2007, when this forty-something lady in front of me simply went wild when the music began. Today, there was this quiet, fifty-something unassuming gentleman next to me, I guessed either a salary-man or a mid-level executive of some local company - who had come alone after a normal day of work, and I imagined that most likely he was suffering from that guilt associated with leaving the Japanese workplace earlier in the evening than is usually expected, skipping the almost regular overtime. When Baba O'Riley broke out, he went nuts, in a good way. I mean, imagine a suit-attired man like any other fellow you are squeezed against inside a crowded train, and here he is, sleeves rolled up, jacket thrown off and ecstatically singing along next to me, waving his arms in that rock and roll high. There's too much sentiment and joy to classify an experience like this as 'entertainment'.

At a time when keyboard solos were being done to death by all the other British progressive rock bands, Richard Wright was unique in his sense of coloring and complimenting the Floydian sound in unobtrusive, perfectionist yet emotionally powerful ways.
I've spent the last thirty days listening to a great deal of music from Pink Floyd's 70's phase: from Meddle to Animals - but with special attention to those fabulous sections where Gilmour and Wright harmonize (Us And Them, Echoes), and also where Wright sings lead - In Time for instance, his articulation of Roger Water's classic line about 'Hanging on in quiet desperation..'

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say

The Classic Albums documentary on the making of The Dark Side Of The Moon features interviews where Alan Parsons takes these best vocal sections apart on a console, while Wright himself demonstrates how he borrowed a chord from Kind of Blue for Breathe.

Not that I was hoping to see a Pink Floyd reunion concert anytime soon (I think they all gracefully gave up that idea a few years ago), but one can't help feeling, as Waters himself states - that Rick's was a premature death.

I'm watching Echoes / Live at Pompeii: great organ sound, great harmonized vocals, no shirts on.

Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me.