An eclectic IT career: Mayo Takeuchi

After a couple of vacations to a country under lockdown due to the novel coronavirus, my first experience taking a SANS course , a bout of (regular strain of) flu, and some consistently busy work weeks, I'm back with yet another analogy. In looking up a reliable reference page to link to describe the jawbreaker candy , I discovered that in the regions outside of North America they seem to be called gobstoppers. If you can't be bothered to follow the above link, here are some salient excerpts: Gobstoppers usually consist of a number of layers, each layer dissolving to reveal a differently coloured (and sometimes differently flavoured) layer, before dissolving completely. Gobstoppers are too hard to bite without risking dental damage (hence the name "jawbreaker"). [snip] As gobstoppers dissolve very slowly, they last a very long time in the mouth, which is a major factor in their enduring popularity with children. Larger ones can take days or even weeks* to ful

Those who know me personally may be aware that my main extra-curricular, spanning a full decade starting at age 11, was playing the viola in music ensembles which ranged from the intimacy of quintets to the power of 80-piece orchestras. In fact I'd taken piano performance the most seriously (read: via private lessons for eight years with a reputable teacher at the Royal Conservatory of Music) so I never became as proficient in viola. In contrast to the years-long solitary struggle that comprised my endeavour to passably interpret several Beethoven sonatas, a few of Bach's keyboard works, and a Chopin mazurka or two however, my most vivid memories at school are social, involving becoming acquainted with compositions by actively collaborating with my fellow musicians. My love for "classical" (more accurately, baroque to early romantic era) music continues unabated, and a desire to perform has now been channeled instead into haunting the Musikverein and Konzerthaus -

Congruent, yet independent. A Mallard mother and part of her brood, Stadtpark Pond in Vienna (July 2013) The above photo, of a duck and her ducklings, was one of my (unsuccessful) entries in an intra-organizational contest just last month. Coincidentally, the notion of "treasuring wild ducks", metaphorically speaking, had been one of the subjects covered during my employer's Centennial commemoration. There is a 14 minute video with beautiful animation and story-telling, if you happen to have the time and inclination. As those following my  +Mayo Takeuchi Plus  presence may have realized some years ago, ducks are the most common type of wildfowl that I can readily record, in both still and moving images. This year in particular, the local park has seen a bumper crop of ducklings. Their precocial abilities still manage to impress me: aside from the youngest ones emitting a high pitched, urgent peeping call when they lose sight of their mother, they know how to indep

Disambiguating "Taj Mahal" - structure or music band? Courtesy of Google's own blog Otherwise known as semantic web, Google has announced its roll-out of ways to prompt the user to help disambiguate query terms ("strings", as in sequences of textual characters) to more specific concepts ("things"). Very catchy slogan. The Mashable article provides a basic overview of what this news means, and as I read this, my thoughts invariably turned to my former job in LanguageWare (which has been partially described over four non-contiguous blog posts last year, related to Language Identification ). When one is first exposed to linguistic data which has been amassed for the purpose of spell-check, it becomes quickly clear that in order to use this same word lists effect grammatical checks and even orthographical ones (e.g. whether a proper noun needs to be title-cased even when it doesn't commence a sentence), the part of speech is important. The afor

Courtesy of Kojiro Fish Shop in Wieden, Vienna  Being a fan of various cuisines, I count myself fortunate in having had the opportunity to grow up in Toronto (and having spent time in gastronomical meccas such as Tokyo and New York). As my parents kept my household quite Japanese, I grew up eating what most of my classmates considered to be exotic foods: umeboshi, chirashi zushi, korokke, grilled fish with daikon oroshi and such. Thus, when I was recently asked by a virtual friend - by which I mean someone whose acquaintance I made online, and have not yet spent time with in person, as opposed to an artificial being - to review her classmate's journey of learning to make sushi , I thought I may as well take the opportunity to talk about how my views on  sushi preparation and enabling search optimization of online content actually have comparable points. Sound strange? Do read on... First, the sushi making (with the disclaimer that I am not a professional chef, nor would