What took you to Japan, O peripatetic one?

Peripatetic is certainly the right word. Much like the reason I ended up in the United States - for work. Not to suggest that said decision was forced upon me, it was largely by choice. It's one of the wonders of being young and mostly unattached - you can do crazy things like go and work somewhere where your language skills leave you quite literally illiterate. Travel has also been my way of getting out of my shell - if I know I can survive a year not being able to tell "salt" from "sugar" in the supermarket, I feel less daunted by the future and what it may bring.

Your background sounds like mine. I'm here in the US for a PhD, as much as it's nice to be in the country, because here's where I can do what I wanted to do. And I'm fairly young and only lightly attached, which is still close enough to your young-and-free situation. Are you a pianist, then?

Travel is incredible, and I love it to pieces. Even within the same country... just moving around, experiencing different parts of it, different ways and foods. (Even, I confess, if I find them amusing.) I've been travelling since I can remember: originally within the UK, to Wales and Scotland --- the first foreign language I started to learn any of was Welsh, from the bilingual signage. Then France, the USSR, Russia, Sweden... Lived in Germany for over a year, and didn't speak a word of German when I got there. As you say, if you can do that and survive, you can do a lot of things.

Engineer actually, and while I do play piano, I never took it super seriously and it always remained a hobby to dabble around with in the evenings when I can't stand sitting in front of a monitor any longer. I'd still like to play Trombone on a more regular basis, but alas, they don't play so well with small apartment buildings. :'(

And very cool. It's nice to be able to travel for work or education - I had a go at starting my Masters/PhD after graduation, but sadly had to drop it after getting the job offer that dragged me over to the US. Not that I've regretted that decision, but still miss a bit of the academic rigor.

I've also spent some time in the UK a few years back - living in Scotland was a blast. Scottish humor seem to resonate well with us Antipodeans. Never quite got my head around Scottish Gaelic, but I'm told it's not quite so prolifically used as in Wales. Germany would also be another place I'd love to visit, if only to try and improve my splattering of Deutsch.

What branch of engineering, may I ask? And, if it's not too forward a question, where in the US are you? I'm pretty close to Albany, NY, myself: my school is just across the river thence. For what it's worth, I'm a computer scientist... well, I suppose in many ways I'm an artist (writer, musician, singer) who's trying to make sure he can scrape a living by having a trade --- and, to be fair, computer science *is* fun...

No, I can imagine a trombone wouldn't play well (sorry) with a small apartment building. One reason I keep my singing and such to times when people aren't at home, or I go to a nice old room at school which has the most beautiful acoustic, and sing there. I still dabble on the piano, but it's not something I take seriously any more.

Glad you enjoyed Scotland. I'm very fond of that country, though I never lived there. And Scots Gaelic isn't really Welsh - in fact, not at all. The closest comparison is Irish Gaelic. Welsh is very different. Lots of lls and dds and ws that sound like y and ys that sound like w... *chuckle* It's a funny language. Oddly, living in Germany make me capable of understanding Deutsch, certainly within the confines of the work environment, and knowing enough to go shopping and ask for things... Nothing like being thrown into a country, is there?...

Software of course (it's a real Engineering degree!), so a bit of a mix of compsci, electrical engineering and maths. A for where I'm based, usually out of SoCal, though not around much this year for the reasons described above. Maybe I'll get back to Uni at some point... we'll see.

Ah yes, singing is definitely a pleasure you can take with you anywhere, from the shower to the street. One of the few things that has kept me sane here with no other musical instruments around. I still take absolute pleasure in being able to bash away at the keys those brief times I get home.

And aye - learning languages in isolation makes it very hard to both practice and to motivate. I still feel barely skilled in the language, but at least I'm starting to pick up some stray bits of the language like grammar and simple characters. Hopefully by the end of the year I'll be at least able to hold a basic conversation. :D

*smiles* I'm sure you'll pick up more than I did. I was learning Japanese for my own fun, and got a little stuck at one point; this led to disenchantment and procrastination, and then life got busy on top of that and I never continued with it. Bah. I remain frustrated with myself over that to this day. *grins wryly*

What kind of software do you work on? I assume you work on software... a SoCal base and wandering around a fair amount. *chuckles* If you did go back to uni, do you have any idea what you might want to work on?

I love to sing. I was taking vocal lessons for a while, after I did a concert solo (with no formal training), and was given much encouragement from the professional soprano and bass soloists to do so. I miss the lessons, honestly... they cost a lot more than I could afford but... I felt so good. It felt good just to sing, and I miss that.

That's definitely the hardest part of learning any new skill - the "getting stuck" and not feeling any progress. About the only solution there seems to be a hell of a lot of discipline (which I must confess I lack heavily in). So I go for the next best thing - routine.

Software, aye. Was hired as a general Software Engineer, but my interests are in system programming, application design and networking. Kind of a bit of a jack of all trades, but often end up sinking towards more Linux or multimedia related stuff. As for traveling - well, I just got lucky and my company had a good opportunity open up. If I did go back to Uni, probably something related to communication or network theory. Not sure I could take by-coursework unless it was part time on something very specific.

Nearly all my vocal training is from a boys choir, so far too often I try and sing like a choir boy. Thankfully I've had enough experience outside of that environment to know that there are other valid styles to perform in. Again it would be fun to do again, but would have to find a good time and place to squeeze it in.

Mmmmh. Routine is a very good way of solving the lack-of-discipline problem. Unfortunately, that feels too much like discipline to me, too, although when I have followed a routine, stayed with the good habits I've tried to get into, then good things have taken place. I confess that I was one of those kids for whom most things came easily when I was young and so I never really learned how to buckle down and struggle. I admit that such a lack has cost me, here and there.

Software engineering is fun. Well, mostly. When it's not being a ravening pain in the tail. *grins fangily* I think there's nothing wrong with being a jack-of-all-trades, either: it allows one to see multiple options, to see the intersections of systems that perhaps other people who are more specialised than you might miss. Given my own background, I'm arguably nothing but a jack, but I don't see that as any bad thing, really.

I'm glad you got lucky and got to travel. Few enough people really do it, and fewer, it seems, want to, these days. It's a good thing.

I think that singing like a choirboy is no bad thing. *grin* My vocal teacher was training me in bel canto, which stood me in very good stead for the theatre stuff I've done at school... I think I have the singular honour, though, of being turned down for all the a capella groups on campus that I could join! (One is all-female, so I couldn't even audition there.) Now, sadly, it's what I hope to be my final year, so squeezing even the theatre in is going to be difficult.

*smiles* What do you enjoy to do in your evenings, if I may ask?

I was in quite a similar boat. It really wasn't until the final year of high-school that things like the physical sciences got hard. Kinda sucked since it left me flailing around a bit right before my final exams - I think I disappointed my Chemistry teacher a bit. Thankfully it was a skill I managed to pick up a bit in University. I won't say I'm great a it, but I know that I shouldn't just give up immediately it doesn't come naturally. Thank god I've got a bit of a stubborn streak.

Heheh. Best thing about computers are they're completely logical. Worst thing about computers is that they're layer upon layer of bug-filled abstractions just waiting to do horrible things to you and your data. As you said, it's one of the things I like about working with an open source system - if you're willing to invest enough time you can find out all the magic under the covers. And it's great when it lets you do truly evil things once you understand what's going on down there. It's just nice not having to do it to chase down some obscure bug. xD

At the moment, pretty busy with work, so my evenings are scraping some dinner together, checking up on news/email/FA and then heading to bed about an hour or two later. Though I'm trying to make sure I don't work myself to death - one of the reasons I took up swimming a couple of nights a week. It forces you to be out of the office before 6pm.

It's taken me a little longer to become good at sticking with things, I'm ashamed to say. This dragon still isn't as dedicated at things as he would like to be: I'm still fairly easy to make frustrated and want to walk away. Fortunately, I've learned to walk back again, if only out of sheer bloody-mindedness. *grins a fangy grin* I can relate, too, to things unravelling a bit towards the end of school: my last couple of years weren't particularly great, either, for reasons that aren't really important; suffice it to say that I was starting to become ill with things that weren't diagnosed for many years, and leave it at that. Simply put, it's difficult to do well when one's own body conspires against one. But never mind.

I've always loved the logic of computers, but long despaired about it as well. I work in AI, and one of the things that fascinates me is the fundamental similarities between the human cognitive system and how we program computers to do things. I keep poking and prodding and doing as interesting a set of things as I can with what I have - which is really just my computer and myself. *grins* And yes, doing truly evil things is a lot of fun... Worked for a game company for a while and one of the fun things was rewriting some of the common STL containers so they were smaller, leaner and meaner... my implementation of a fixed-size linked list resulted in a 40% speed improvement over the STL XD Mwahahaha :)

That sounds like you have quite the long day, dear liger! Including the commute, I suspect it is. I've never visited Tokyo: I just don't have the money. But I've heard that days are long and travel is long and frustrating, and people try to out-do each other being in first and out last, and... And I'm afraid I see there being more to life than work. I'm glad you go swimming a couple of times a week. I expect you're lean and graceful in the water, and above all it's very good exercise.