Jeremy Chrimes

Melbourne based Software Engineer

Blog

  • Japan Day 2: Back on the Yamanote Line at Last

    Japan Day 2: Back on the Yamanote Line at Last

    Today I woke up at about 8am, I turned on the TV and had a coffee and paracetamol to relieve my headache. I stayed watching TV for about an hour before having a shower. 

    I left my hotel at around about 10am first going to the local Lawson’s convenience store to get some breakfast and then to the Yodabashi Camera in Akihabara. I loved how there were so many books about programming languages like C#. 

    I then went around the corner to find a bookshop so that I could plan the trains that I will be taking on my holiday, it opened at 11 so I walked down the street I saw the Kanda River. When the bookshop opened I went up to the 5th floor, which was pretty much filled with books about trains and train merch. I bought the timetable book it was about $15AUD and contains all of the JR train times for my holiday it will be imperative. 

    The books timetable books on display at a bookshop in Akihabara

    I got my first train of the day the Yamanote line from Akiba (Akihabara) to Tokyo Station. At Tokyo station I got on the Shinkansen (Toki-319) to Ueno. I spent about half an hour at Ueno just seeing Japanese trains made me happy. Ueno is my favourite terminal station in Tokyo and has quite a few memories dating back to my first trip (2018). I saw a  Shinkansen “Dr. Yellow” (maintenance train) called the “East i” seeing one of these trains is meant to give you good luck. 

    The “East i” Dr. Yellow Shinkansen

    I walked from Ueno park to Uguisudani the station on the Yamanote line after Ueno. While walking into the station I got a call from mum she was not surprised that I had already used the Shinkansen and was happy that I was having an amazing day. I got the train to Ikebukuro and had a chat to the person who was sitting next to me who was using english flash cards on their phone. 

    Ikebukuro is the second busiest station in the world (after Shinjuku) and has a high volume of Tokyo Metro and third sector railway passengers as well as JR. At Ikebukuro I found a Starbucks to sit and have a coffee. 

    After having my coffee I walked through Sunshine City a large shopping centre, and eventually made it to Nishi-Ikebukuro (West Ikebukuro) subway station. I found out there was a tram stop here and got the Sakura tram to Waseda, much of the exisiting subway lines in Tokyo are the legacy of the tram network and this line is one of the few that remain. 

    The Sakura Tram

    Waseda is one of the main university areas in Japan and it was about a 2km walk to Takadanobaba Station. On the way there were many interesting signs and it was just nice to have a walk in the streets in Japan. 

    I got to Takadanobaba at about 3pm at this time the wind had started to pick up and I needed to wear gloves whilst walking into the station. I then got the Yamanote line to Shibuya. 

    Shibuya is where the famous cross is, since I have been there many times I did not take any photos of the crossing though I will definetly be going back. I went to my favourite McDonalds in the world for some lunch. The Loft department store (my favourite store in the world with a whole floor dedicated to stationary) and Muji were next stop they are just around the corner. 

    I then went to the newly opened Shibuya Ikea. Ikea in densely populated areas of Japan is quite different from the Ikea we have in Australia there is no real circuit it feels more like a department store with escalators going up. I bought myself a yellow water bottle and coffee mug as the hotel I am staying in does not have large mugs. 

    The yellow water bottle and blue mug from Ikea.

    I got a rather busy peak hour yamanote line train back to Shinjuku, since it was peak hour I did not feel like getting on another train and the sun was still up. So I decided to go the free observation deck at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building (10 minutes walk away). I texted mum so she could guess where I was she guessed it first time. There was no queue to get up to the elevators. I got quite a few photos including this one that I put on my instagram. 

    The photo I posted to instagram, showing me at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building.

    I got the Oedo subway line back to my hotel as it is only 1 train that takes about 20 minutes. Luckily I was able to get a seat. I got back to my hotel room at about 7pm and called my parents to talk about my day and posted my blog post from day 1. 

    For dinner I went to a place in a Curry restaurant and had Chicken Curry it was nice. On the way home I went to the convenience store to get some milk. 

    That was my day it was really amazing I am so happy to be in Japan again. 

    To be continued… 

  • Japan Day 1: The Adventure Begins

    Japan Day 1: The Adventure Begins

    Today is the day that I have been waiting for, for over 3 years, I am finally returning to Japan. It has been a very big day of travel starting with leaving the house for Melbourne Airport at around about 03:45 (of course I did not get much sleep before leaving because of the excitement of it all). Mum on the way had forgot her handbag so she needed some help with some cash to organise the parking. 

    Once at Melbourne Airport I had to find the right Jetstar Check-In counters (because there were multiple there was one for flights to NZ and another for flights to Japan). After checking in I said goodbye to mum and Anna of course in the traditional fashion of me going to Japan I took a photo with them and then waved goodbye.

    Jeremy standing in front of departures sign at Melbourne Airport with his suitcase. He is wearing his Northface Jacket a black cheque shirt and blue pants.

    I cleared immigration and security in Melbourne in about 5 mins and after walking through duty free I got myself a coffee and some fruit toast. At this time I spent a bit of time chatting to people like Di. 

    I then proceeded to walk to gate 12 at MEL where the first of my flights (a JQ11 relay flight from MEL – Gold Coast) would be departing from Gate 12 (in the T2 – Satellite terminal). In no time the plane started to board. The first leg of the trip, I was sitting next to a newlywed couple who were on their way to the Gold Coast for their honeymoon. This flight took 2 hours and was relatively effortless. 

    I arrived in Gold Coast at 09:15 QLD time (straight up to departure lounge),  I had time to get a coffee and walk into NSW as the Gold Coast international terminal is situated on the border between NSW & QLD. I was pretty overwhelmed at this point but managed to get on my next flight to Narita. 

    The next flight was 8 and a bit hours long. There was some really pretty scenery going up the great barrier reef. I slept while we were flying over PNG waking up when we were at latitude of 1 S because crossing the equator is a milestone of any flight (though it always takes a long time). I had a toastie on the plane as food with 2 coffees and a can of solo. 

    On reflection I think that the Dreamliner (B787) is a much better plane for the trip to Japan as it is a lot more comfortable when compared to the A330 that Qantas use. In all honesty I would likely fly to Japan on Jetstar again. 

    We arrived into Japan at roughly 6pm local time I shed a tear or two as I saw that lights of Naruto Chiba. As per the Narita Airport website immigration procedures were done through terminal 2 even though we arrived into a terminal 3 gate. There is a corridor between the 2 terminals that they guide you through. Everything was rather seamless though there was lines. The visitjapanweb app being really helpful especially for someone who struggles to handwrite. 

    Getting the JR pass was relatively easy there was not much of a queue the station attendant booked me on a 8:47 train into Tokyo so there was a bit of a wait. I bought myself a zero beer for the ‘NEX into Tokyo and I tried to call the hotel to let them know that I would be there at 10pm. 

    I arrived at Tokyo station at 2143, prior to arrival at Tokyo I was chatting to some of the other people that were on my flight that were also taking the ‘NEX. I went straight to the Yamanote line platforms and took the Kehin-Tohoku line, I got the womens car which was fine since it was after 21:30 at which time it is free for everyone to use. Some salarymen who were also in the car commented that I was using it. It was the first time I really had an organic conversation in Japanese in over 3 years though it was in broken sentences. 

    I got to the hotel just on 10pm and checked in the staff were waiting for me and left once I had finished checking in. I called mum to let her know that I was safely at the hotel. 

    I then went out for a bowl of Noodles. I had Noodles that contained pork they were ok, however pork is not my favourite thing in the world but none the less it was nice to be eating in Japan. The store I went to had Radio Tokyo on in the background which was cool. 

    On the way home I bought some Nescafé from the Convenience Store for the next morning and then went to sleep. 

    To be continued… 

  • The lockdown ritual of going to Dales Park

    This morning I woke up at about 9:30. After waking up I stayed in bed for about 20 minutes just scrolling on social media.

    I went downstairs at about 10.20 and had a tea with mum and dad. The morning went quite slowly and I watched the start of the New South Wales press conference they recorded 124 new cases which is quite a lot. At about 11 I had a quick shave and got in the shower I was remarkably ready to leave the house at 11:30.

    I walked down to Dales Park so that I could meet Elias. He was good but mocked me a bit for wanting to social distance. We went to the Continental Bakehouse on Old Dandenong Road I had a coffee and a meat pie. They gave me a complementary donut as well which was nice (although they always do this 😄). Elias was quite concerned about not being offered a position at job he’d applied for and said that he felt as if he’d interviewed well. He is really stressed that his contract at his current job is not going to be renewed. It was nice to catch up with him.

    On the walk back I walked down Warrigal Road the traffic was not too busy. When I got home mum and dad were both asleep, Will left when I was chatting to mum it had turned out that he’d gone to the shops to get some flowers for mum.

    I went for a dog walk with mum and dad after they had had their lunch. I was stuffed for this walk because I had walked such a long distance.

    In the evening I sorted out my emails watched a uni video about FIT1008. At about 9 O’clock the movie Lost In Translation was on SBS World Movies. I watched this with mum which was quite nice.

  • My first hackathon

    Over the mid-year university break this year I participated in the Monash Association of Coding’s Hacksprint. Hacksprint went over two weeks with the first week being a learn week and the second week being the hack week.

    During the learn week we had several workshops teaching us some of the key skills required in participating in a Hackathon such as pitching, design and creating simple user-interfaces using the React Framework. I found the events to be rather engaging.

    The Hack week we had to produce our product I mainly worked on the development and wrote the entirety of the backend and some of the frontend components. As well as creating the backend I was the person that came up with the idea for our group. I also had to teach some of the other people in our team some programming skills such as how to effectively use Git & GitHub as well as good programming style.

    Our project was called Meeta a meeting management application designed to store the agenda for meetings as well has have tools to assist in the writing of minutes after a meeting.  Our product was no-where near finished when we submitted. I unfortunately didn’t have a lot of energy to put into the development of the pitch something that in future hackathons I think I should focus on.

    Overall it was a good experience and I am glad that I had the ability to participate.

    Links

    https://devpost.com/software/meeta-meeting-agenda-app

  • Why I fell in love with Todoist

    As some of you may know I am doing Year 12 this year. In order to combat the massive amount of workload that I need to complete daily I decided that the best way to not fall behind would be to have some sort of external system from my brain where everything can be visually represented.

    I tried the Bullet Journal for a while during the week I had off during exams and felt that the system worked really well. However once I got to school I struggled to apply it to the intense workloads of Year 12.

    I finished early commencement having been behind in both my maths subjects. I needed to find something better. I was watching videos from productivity YouTubers like Matt Ragland who makes videos about productivity using analogue systems like the bullet journal to organise his life unfortunately these analogue systems did not work for me. From there I found YouTuber Keep Productive he made videos about products like ‘Todoist’ and ‘Bear Notes’ which are applications that are known for being good for productivity. After that I jumped in and added all of my holiday homework into Todoist.

    The thing I like about Todoist is the fact that it uses a points system which encourages you to complete tasks and you can also schedule tasks to be done on a certain day. I will usually schedule a 1 Maths Exercise and some revision for all of my other subjects.

    I am able to achieve most of the tasks scheduled everyday with all the same advantages of the migration process of the bullet journal. I think Todoist is an application that has really helped me out over the past month and it would be interesting to see how it works in the wild of school.

  • Python (a love hate relationship)

    I have a love hate relationship with python. It was the first programming language that I learnt when I was around about 13. The reason that I began to learn it was it was already installed on most of my computers (it was on my school laptop).

    As time progressed on a little bit I began to learn other programming languages such as Java and JavaScript because I thought they were the proper programming languages. I only ever really learnt the basics of JavaScript and can to this day still program in Java but I would need to be using something like eclipse because there is not way that I can remember the syntax for all of the different packages that are used to create a user interface.

    The other programming language that I am familiar with is swift because I tried to teach myself how to develop iPhone apps. I don’t do this anymore as I found that Swift was limiting with the number of library’s that can be used.

    Fast forward to year 10 and I was doing Year 11 Computer Science we had a task where we had to write a code folio showing our coding works. This was in Python because it was an incredibly easy programming language to teach and would be accessible to everyone in the class given that it can run on pretty much any computer and also most of them did not know the first thing about programming. I however learnt that Python could be used in an object oriented fashion and is much easier to use library’s.

    Now it is my main programming language. I use it almost exclusively and use it when ever I need to write a program to solve a problem outside of school.

  • School Holiday Diary: Arden St / Melbourne Zoo

    Hey today I am going to be blogging about. Transport in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. In the morning I did not wake up to my alarm clock. Tried to have breakfast but we did not have any milk and the bagels were all mouldy.

    Left home at about 1005 hours and walked down to Warrigal Rd and waited 30 minutes for a bus. The even worse thing was that it was along the 903 Smartbus a route that is meant to have busses running every 15 minutes. SCREW YOU TRANSDEV MELBOURNE!!! I ended up arriving at Oakleigh at 1100 hours. I got on a train to Southern Cross where I would have to change for a Werribee train to go to North Melbourne. When I got of I had to look at the offline map of Melbourne that I  had on my phone.

    I met mum at the Arden Street oval. It is a local football oval that the North Melbourne football club use for training. The main reason that I went was to pick up the membership scarf for my family. The open training session was a bonus. My sister took photos of her and about half of the side.

    As suggested by my brother we went to the zoo afterwards. So yet again I was on a Comeng up the Upfield line (Bit of a tongue twister).

    We had rice for lunch near the elephant paddock. My sister wanted to see all the animals that were in Madagascar.

    Because I hate Comengs I decided to ride a B-class tram down the 55 route.

    I got on the train to go home to find that all platforms in the loop were stuffed but the one that the Pakenham/Cranbourne line runs on.

    Once I got to Oakleigh I was surprised that the bus that arrived was my favourite one on TRANSDEV. It is a volgren that they inherited from Invicta.