Hansei #1: Winter Break 2014

1. Hansei (反省, "self-reflection") is a central idea in Japanese culture. Its means to acknowledge your own mistake and to pledge improvement.

Now, I would argue that that's a bit of pessimistic analysis of Hansei (likely from a gaikokujin who had it a few times too many...), but I do believe in the principle of self-reflection, and enjoy the manner in which Hansei accomplishes this. It's important to take a step back and reflect before moving forward, and I feel like it is the cultural idea that has allowed Japan to be known as "the great optimizer" in the field of technology. 

Now enough seiza about hansei. I wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on my progress with projects over the winter break this year. I effectively had 2 weeks of break of because I chose to work the first week full-time at the Technology Center. While this took a bit of my time, it also supplied me with cash for presents for my family, gasoline, you name it.

Unfortunately, much of my break was really not ideal. We had some trauma in the family followed by my own sickness, followed by my friend's tragic car accident. Thankfully he's going to make a full recovery, and I'm feeling much better myself. 

I know this sounds quite soap opera, but it was not enjoyable. Thankfully it was still a good opportunity for my family and friends to come closer together to take care one another.

Though I was sick, and no good for circuiting or the stresses of ROS debugging, I figured it was a good time to start on the Raspberry Pi (B+ model). I went ahead and built my case, and also started playing with RetroPi. Though there's a lot of confusing configuration to be done, it was so cool to be playing late 90's classics on a small 35$ dollar board!

Back on the homestead I also made some progress with my ROS project, but not as much as I needed to. I believe this is because I got an idea of trying to outline all of the publishers and subscribers at once. I should make clear outlining vs. what I choose to implement step by step.

I did learn that I am capable of working on multiple projects though-- providing they are not to similar, and well, feel differently. If that makes sense. Learning that comes from my favorite games feels less stressful and more tangible to others than fine-tuning a state machine, or debugging an IMU. I'll keep this in mind in the future.

I think that's enough reflection for now. As the semester moves on, I will keep these points in mind. Thank you everyone.