Japan Day 8
Today marked my last full day in Japan, a bittersweet finale to an incredible journey. I left the day’s schedule deliberately open, giving myself the flexibility to soak in every last moment without the constraints of a fixed itinerary. My morning began with a reservation at TeamLab Planets, a mesmerizing exhibit that promised a blend of art and technology—a fitting start to the day. The experience would deposit me near the iconic giant Gundam statue, a symbol of futuristic innovation that has long captured my imagination. With only these two anchors, the day was wide open, and I was eager to see where it would lead me. I woke up early, as had…
Japan Day 7
Oh man, was I excited for today. As a giant nerd who’s always loved anime, manga, and video games, exploring Akihabara, the electronic entertainment district of Tokyo, had always been a dream of mine. Despite being exhausted from the previous day, my excitement kept me awake in bed around 6:00 a.m. With a full day of walking ahead, I needed to relax a little before starting my day. I tried the provided slippers but soon realized my size 13 feet weren’t going to fit. So I grabbed my own sandals and made my way to the third floor, where the men’s bath was located. The bath’s quality and cleanliness pleasantly surprised me. Though…
Iterate to Succeed. Part 3 – AI Avatar Workflow
Have you seen Part 1 and Part 2 of this saga of learning how to train a Stable Diffusion model locally? If not, there may be some gaps in what I explain here, but I will give as much context as needed in this post. If you want the full background of how I made it to this point and gotchas to avoid, I suggest reading those posts first. I’ll be going into detail on each line of the code I share. If you’re a lifelong Python dev or familiar with ML training already then much of this will be over explained. If you want to skip all this and don’t care about…
Iterate, Fail, Part 2: The deep dive (aka the pain)
This is a continuation of my learning from Part 1, it will make more sense if you start with that post first. After all the discovery I did in part 1, I was feeling very confident that I could get everything up and running locally. My first step was to get Stable Diffusion setup and be able to generate images locally using prompts on a standard model. Once I was confident I could generate decent quality images, I would move onto DreamBooth and use that to train my face into the model. Simple two-step process, right? Shouldn’t take long at all. I started with some tutorials that relied heavily on CompVis/stable-diffusion to generate…
Iterate, Fail, Iterate…
What an adventure this last week has been! I’ve seen mentions of AI generated art in many of the publications I read. I’ve seen friends bringing AI generated art to tabletop games to show off their character. However, my first direct interaction with AI art was through the iOS app by the name of Lensa. With this application you can upload 10-15 images of your face and have a bunch of avatars generate for you. These avatars now grace my Gmail, LinkedIn, and other social media accounts. The developer in me wasn’t happy. I couldn’t let this black box just run on some cloud server and give me results. I had to know…
Japan Day 6
Another full day of travel today. I woke up very early and decided I would just walk around a bit in the morning. I didn’t know what time the first bus ran, but I did know that where I left my luggage would not be open until 8am. I gathered up all my stuff and headed out to the lobby to hang out for a minute and get a little bit of stretching in. The lobby of the hostel was pleasantly peaceful at 5:30am. I’m finding that I’m fond of waking up early and watching the world come to life. I was going to stop by Lawsons and grab some Monster to wake…
Mistborn – Book Review
Warning: This post will contain MANY spoilers for Mistborn, the first book in the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson. This is more for my memory than a traditional review, so I will be going deep into plot points. I’ve been a huge fan of Sanderson’s books since I was introduced to him through the finishing of The Wheel of Time series. I’ve read through many of his series and I’m anxiously awaiting the finale of Skyward and the next book in the Stormlight Chronicles. However throughout this time I’ve never taken the time to read Mistborn. I just finished the first book in the series and I’m unsurprised with how much I love…
Japan Day 5
Today was a trip to Hakone, and I may have bit off a little too much for 1 day. Honestly, with all the traveling I did in Hakone I should have scheduled two days to see everything. Despite wracking up 15 miles of walking today, I had a great time seeing all the sights. Traveling in Hakone presented some of its own challenges that I’ll get into, and I missed out on some things that originally I had planned. I woke up early and grabbed a taxi to Kyoto Station. This was my first time managing to communicate my intent fully in Japanese. No need to use a phone or map to show…
Japan Day 4
Another early start to the day. My goal for today was to make it out to Nara park in the morning, take a look around and get to see the “cute” deer out there. Spoiler alert, the deer were not cute and I would go so far as to call them assholes, but we’ll get to that soon. I had my days crossed and my train mishap was actually today, not on the trip to Osaka, but the outcome was the same and I made it out to Nara well before things were open and all was quiet. In fact, today was full of new public transportation challenges. The subway station right outside…
Japan Day 3
Today had a day trip to Osaka planned. The train ride did not go as planned by any means. I’m still learning how the train system works in Japan and the JR Line that I boarded this morning was the correct line to get to Osaka, but the particular train I boarded only went as far as Uji! I didn’t realize my mistake until we stopped at the Uji station for about 10 minutes, afterwards we started heading back to Kyoto! I hopped off at the next train stop, caught the next train and double checked it was bound for Osaka, I lost about 20 minutes on that one. Thankfully, my jet lag…