What I'm Thinking
Zurich Business Trip
12 February 2023
My first intercontinental business trip ever and my first international business trip since my Seattle trip at Zynga!
I stayed a week in the Bahnhofstrasse city area: Flew in Saturday afternoon, worked Monday ~ Friday, and left Saturday morning.
It was my first time flying intercontinental business class since 2000 (when I immigrated to the US as a child), and it was so nice!
The office that I went to was pretty barebones, and the work was busy but fun!
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Viking Mediterranean Odyssey Cruise
11 February 2023
Inspired by my friend’s travel blog, I’m determined to record my experience going on a cruise with my spouse and my parents-in-law. The cruise was with Viking Cruises and it was called Mediterranean Odyssey. It was just under $8k per person, and our first all-inclusive trip experience.
We didn’t really take much vacation during the pandemic – a small trip to Napa in Summer 2022 served as a mini vacation but the others were mostly going here and there for weddings or family stuff.
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Machine Learning for Game Developers
5 September 2021
This past June, I had the unique experience of publishing a bite-sized representation of what I had been working on for a little under a year and a half to the world:
Google AI Blog Post: Quickly Training Game-Playing Agents with Machine Learning Falken Github Repository One and a half years seems like a really short time, and most of it was spent during quarantine.
During that time I started driving for real (I had a license for license sake for 10+ years), purchased a home, moved, and handled more than a couple family changes, including welcoming a cat.
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Chat Horror Novel Game: Swole Squad
4 July 2021
💪Swole Squad🥊🐜🥗 is a game I submitted for the LD48 game jam back in April.
Play at: https://hinerz.itch.io/swole-squad or http://hinasakazaki.com/ChatHorror/
GitHub: https://github.com/hinasakazaki/ChatHorror
Overview Inspired by some story-telling chat apps, I decided that for this Ludum Dare, I would make a chat based novel game.
Rather than aesthetics or technology, I tried to focus on the emotions text and sound can trigger.
A chat screen is something we’re used to seeing – the more realistic it is, the easier it is for the player to immerse as the recipient of the messages, and someone making choices on what messages to send.
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New House, Too Many Persimmons
12 December 2020
Late Summer of 2020, my spouse and I purchased a home (a whole heap of fun which I don’t want to think about). While the various fruit trees that it came with weren’t the deciding factor, it certainly seems that they will become a large part of our lifestyle.
We’ve only lived here for almost three months, and we’ve already spent quite a bit of effort on the hachiya persimmons for a good two months:
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