When you just look back

A friend of mine recently wrote about how convenient the kindle is, a reading device provided by Amazon. After writing to his wall, he suggested I should go for one as well, given that I understand many of the contents provided bat kindle store.

I have to be honest here. Before I decided to go for an iPad more than half a year ago, I had to ask myself more than twice whether I should, or rather would like to go for kindle instead. A that time, I already had kindle.app installed on my iPhone and my MacBook Pro and knew what sort of contents were available. Eventually I decided to go for an iPad, because of number of the applications available for the iPad.

One of the reasons why I didn’t go for kindle, and why I still haven’t, is it’s response time. Looking at the introduction movie clips, it looks still very slow on it’s display, dispute the fact it’s been improved. Sure, it is human-eye friendly, but am I going to be able to endure e-ink’s rather slow response time? Although I still haven’t touched kindle myself, this fear hadn’t gone away, each time I touch an electric reading device, such as the ones from Sony.

When I look at myself, on the other hand, most of my iPad use is spent on reading purpose. Surprisingly, I still am reading news paper contents on Financial Times, using the provided application, ft.app. Tis is one of those moments when I think going for kindle might not have been such a bad choice after all.

Recently Apple has announced a new policy for those subscription applications such as ft.app. In response to this event, Financial Times has launched new HTML and JavaScript based application. I was already asked, or rather suggested to use www based application, although, after using the HTML5 version for a while, I still think the FT.app (on my iPad) is the best news-reading application I’ve found so far. I don’t think they would abandon the existing iPad application. But I would not be surprised if they apply extra charges for those uses who use iPad to read the news articles – I personally think they should actually apply such a plan. After all, it is a private company, which can decide its price (whether customer accepts that price is another question).

Another thing I have to think of is the network feature, enabled in the kindle reader. Currently I’m using WiFi version of iPad, so need to download the contents very morning before I get on the train. Of course going for 3G iPad was an option, but I wouldn’t have bought that one, even if I knew I would read ft contents on that device. It seems I still hate my life to become more complicated than it already is. For this matter, kindle seems to offer much more attractive option to customers, even though it also shows how much they would like their customers to read only those contents offered at kindle store, by not supporting ePUB format.

So going for kindle makes my life easier? Frankly speaking, I don’t know. iPad made my life already a bit complicated. I don’t even know if having kindle on top of iPad would be within my capacity reach.

My Financial Times subscription ends at the end of the year. Perhaps it would be a good tine to think about it again.

It’s been more than 1.5 years since I came to Austria for my job. Things have been great, and I like both my work and the city. There is, however, one small issue in this. Every Friday afternoon, shortly before I finish my work for the week, I had to ask myself the same question : “how should I spend time over the weekend?”

It may sound a bit unusual. but it was easier to come to the office on Monday morning than leaving the office on Friday, because it’s quite clear what I’d be doing in my office : my job! I didn’t know what I was going to do (or what I would like to do) over the weekend.

I started reading books, and moved onto going to different places. Doing something with my friends was also something nice and I eventually ended up going for bouldering regularly or learning how to dance. On the other hand, I’ve been thinking if there was a more efficient way to spend my time.

I remembered one of my friends was saying something about going for MBA or doctoral program, shortly before I was leaving for Austria. Going to PhD program wasn’t really an option (I didn’t think (and didn’t find) there is many available, given my situation). I started to look for available MBA courses and what they offer to me. Some of them were almost completely in German¹, and some of others were quite far away from Vienna (that I couldn’t imagine going there). Eventually, I found a course of which the education level seemed rather high and distance-wise feasible. At least the course seemed interesting enough for me to pay for tuition fees and to spend much of my free time (the course says we’re expected to spend 12 to 14 hours per week). It’s a part-time MBA program, that you’re supposed to complete while working.

Luckily, I didn’t have program in enrolling to this MBA program. It’s been almost one month. The very beginning is always the easiest (with self-introduction, etc..). Now it’s gotten more like what we’ll be doing for next few years; reading through the materials, reflecting, and trying to understand something new in one’s words. It is not an easy stuff, it takes time and it takes some concentration. But I feel I’m spending (using) my time in a better way than before, when I used to get down to arbitrary readings.

There would be an activity initialized by me. The idea is to apply the theory I’d be learning to my own environment. It requires active engagement of students (at least so I understood) and something new from other study programs I was involved. There is certainly many things I need to get used to this new system, but I (still) feel rather optimistic.

At least that’s something new I introduced to my life. I’m curious what I’ll be learning, doing, and understanding in next few years.

1. I asked them why they didn’t offer courses in English, the answer was surprising : “because student’s don’t like to learn in English” [↩]

There are many “switches” to remind me of the time in the past. This evening, I was listening to some old music to which I used to listen in the high school time. I couldn’t help myself thinking about the places I’ve been and things I’ve been doing. So I took a night walk in the hope of refreshing my mind.

As I was walking on the street, my thoughts went onto my past experience in Europe. Especially those I had during my first visit in Germany. It’s amazing that it’s been almost 9 years since I came to Europe for the first time (it was sometime in the middle of August 2002). I still remember the moment when I stepped down to Frankfurt airport in Germany. I still think of the welcome I received from my friends in Germany (and the fact that my friend drove the car at around 150km/h in highway and went to bakery rather early in the morning).

There have been many things happened to my life and to those of my friends after that. It’d be a lie to say that I don’t feel sentimental (it’s that typical “it was a good time” feeling). I think that’s the price I have to pay, in return to the freedom which only very limited people had decades ago.

I think it’s more or less the same to feel that way for many of those who are, or are to be moving one place to next. Sometimes you take a short stop and look back. Suddenly you realize how far (and how long) you’ve been going. Is it going back to be how it used to, rather simple but dull lives? Most likely not. Is the life going to be more complicated? Likely so. Perhaps it’s a good time I call up my parents in Japan.

I’ve been bothered by what seemed to be a cold or a flu at first. It started as headache, followed by fever and soar throat (and coughing). One of the first things I did was, of course, to go to a doctor. Because I’ve been caught by virus in Europe few times in the past (and they turned out to be pretty tough to go through), I first suspected it was another virus-bases case. Doctor’s opinion was somewhat different.

He couldn’t see the symptoms of virus (as I understood his German). When I went to his place second time, he took my blood sample. The result was, unlike what I expected, negative against the virus. The medicines I was prescribed didn’t seem to be taking much effect on my throat.

It’s been several days since my throat started moaning. I knew something was certainly going wrong.. Suddenly I thought of the bronchitis I had (and suffered) when I was in the undergraduate. Looking at the Wikipedia entry, it was amazing to see the overlaps between the text and body reactions.

No matter if it’s the bronchitis or not, what I should be doing doesn’t change : eat, sleep, take medicine. On top of that, I should probably write down “don’t talk”. When I had bronchitis last time, I was instructed explicitly by doctor not to talk verbally. That is, do not use your mouth as verbal communication means. So my communication platform was limited to the keyboard-based (or written-based) character exchange (well, since the other people could still talk to me, it was rather one-way communication).

Since I’m currently living by myself and not very much verbal communication is needed at work, I might even be able to live for 2 weeks without speaking a word! ..except that tomorrow is a mother’s day and I was planning to call up my parents..

What was interesting with the past bronchitis was that many people started liking me a lot, when I stop speaking out loud. I knew I was sometimes talking too much, but that was an unexpected surprise..

Recently I realized how complicated my life has become, despite the efforts I’ve been making to keep it as simple as I could. I usually carry iPad, iPhone, and iPod. That’s fine, as long I’m on the move. The trouble becomes present, when I come back home and start plunging them in.

For the sake of synchronization, I usually plug them on my MacBook Pro. That’s fine, as long as the number of synchronization stays one. The problem is, that’s normally not the case. Typically, the battery of my iPhone would be close to zero, which is (to be surprised for some people) not an unusual thing for iPhone.

iPad is better in that sense, but it usually take much longer time to recharge itself. I plug it in shortly before going to bed, and plug in other divide next morning.

I do have a solution; buying an outlet-powered loudspeaker with appropriate interface to those gadgets would solve the problem from the outset. As you anticipated, it is most likely going to make my life more complicated on other aspect.

Usually I take some time before going for shopping or ordering something from Amazon. The idea is, of course, not to spend too much money. But more importantly, I believe I could keep my life surrounded by less physical elements. There have been many “offers” which I intentionally missed because of this reason. I still don’t remember if or when I regretted not going for such an offer.

Although the speed is rather slow, I’m afraid number and volume of my goods have become bigger than now it used to be when I moved in to Vienna. It is a nature, I may be able to say. It may be a good time to digitalize some of my paper-based books into PDF files.

It’s been bothering me to read about the news from Japan recently. Yes, there’s earthquake followed by tsunami, reconstruction is on its way (and I’m sure things will be back in normal sooner or later). There is, however, one thing which worried me a lot.

In some cities where tsunami hit the most, all the information in the local government office have been thrown into the ocean (if not somewhere else). After that, there is no way for you to identify yourself (in Japan, there is no nationwide centralized personal identity management system). You might have your passport, but it does not have your mailing address on it. I have no idea how they’re going to recover the previous information. By “real social network trust”? I wonder how long it would take (if ever to be finished).

Thinking about myself, I store some data in digital format. In case I lose the original one, I usually scan the letters I receive, and I already have some hundreds of books which I scanned, shortly before leaving Japan.

Of course, backup is there. I should feel thankful to Apple for making Time Machine, with which I could easily backup my HDD data on external device. But that does not quite make me relieved. What if my flat would be on fire? What if both of my devices are broken down? I wonder if having RAID-1 would make it any better.

So I looked at the cloud. I don’t know (and I’m not sure if anyone knows) where exactly my data is physically stored, but it is somewhere in the storage of a private company. Probably the most well-known service currently is the Dropbox. Now some of my data is stored somewhere far away from where I live. Do I feel secure now?

Than I heard information breach at PlayStation Network (PSN). It wasn’t the first one of such a news, and most certainly not going to be the last one. Where there is a person concerned, there is always a security shortcoming.

So the requirements I have for my cloud-storage service are following :

– It must be capable of password-protection.
– And the password cannot be compromised by service provider (unless they use bruth-force method).
– It can be mounted as a drive.
– It can (also) be handled by GUI (meaning I don’t have to type CUI command each time I need to synchronize).

I could find only a couple of such services. Then I was told by one person about using a DiskUtility application, which can also handle password encryption.

– Create a .dmg disk with password protection (you can use AES-256!)
– Type your password and disk would be mounted
– Work on this disk as needed (copying files, etc)
– Umount the disk and place the .dmg file “somewhere” you can retrieve later on

Now I feel much safer. It’s surprisingly easy to use this method and I should be feeling happy with it, at least for a while.

In the TechCrunch, which is an online tech magazine, I got to know about the massive crash down of Amazon EC2 service. A while before that, one of my friends in Japan wrote his qualm about his information being on the GMail service.

He wasn’t exactly talking about infrastructure blackouts, but about its safety. What happens when the data, stored somewhere in the cloud would be used by third party? Evernote, an online recording service, was recently exposed to a XSS vulnerability, meaning your information could have been leaked (this issue is now fixed). Who knows what can happen with Amazon?

However, I soon thought about other potential dangers in contemporary time. Suppose you’re one of C-suits in your company, what are other potentials you’d have to keep in mind? Information leak, I think logistics is as big factor as the former.

As the system goes more complicated than ever before, the risk (or uncertainty) grows with it as well. Sure, it provides opportunity of rocket-start, but we could think a bit more about its dark side.

The type of uncertainty that company (or individual) should concern changes, depending on the time. In 1950s in the United States, the main concern that presidents of big names had was to plan the line and execute it accordingly. It seems (to me) its importance has become (relatively) less important, as more operations are outsourced and flexibility is provided.

I wonder what would be most important (i.e., big) uncertainty factor to an organization in 10 years.

A while ago, I read a book with the following quote (I think it’s written by Hiroshi Morisu, who is my favorite) : “What is the average number of Japanese people’s legs?”

If you think for more than 5 seconds, you would probably reach the answer, “less than 2″. A person with 3 legs in itself has a big news value (whichever direction this news leads to). Most Japanese people have 2 legs, but some have only one or none. Whether it’s 0.01% or 0.001% is not the substantial difference for this argument.

On the other hand, I’ve met some people in Vienna, who are originally from Japan and say “If you’re Japanese..”. The complete sentence would be something like “If you’re Japanese, you cannot help yourself feeling sorry” or “If you’re Japanese, you know what I mean”. Does it mean a person who doesn’t feel sorry (in this particular example) or who doesn’t understand what other(s) said (again, in this example) should not be considered as Japanese? That’s when my inner alarm starts to ring.

My definition of Japanese is simple : if you have Japanese nationality, you’re a Japanese. Since I still hold my Japanese nationality (together with my Japanese passport), I consider myself to be Japanese. If (for whatever reason and after however long it would have taken) I become an American or an Austrian, I would consider myself to be an American or an Austrian respectively. Japanese, American, Austrian, etc.., those things can be changed and dynamic (though however difficult it can be).

My guess is that the persons who said “If you’re Japanese” have his/her own image (or model) of a Japanese person. I wonder how this person’s reaction would be, once (s)he meets a person who holds a Japanese passport and doesn’t fall into any, if not many, of those characteristics. My experience tells me that the most frequent reaction was denial.

So what could be the model of Japanese that those people think (or feel)? What is the border that separate the Japanese and non-Japanese? You’re a Japanese if you’re living in Japan (does it mean an international student studying (living) in Japan to be a Japanese)? You’re a Japanese if you practice tea ceremony (and what if you’re not?)? You’re a Japanese if you read “Bushido” by Inazou Nitobe (you know what comes here)? In any of those cases, there is no objective definition. Therefore the premise of the sentence with “If you’re Japanese..” can very much be asked with the question “What is Japanese?”, unless all the people in the same room share exactly the same aesthetics (which is not always guaranteed).

Many Japanese people have 2 legs. If you have 2 legs, it’s probably the case that more than 99% people you mean everyday have 2 legs as well (I may be wrong about this; way of social interaction may well be different in Austria). But it doesn’t extinguish the fact that there are people with only one or no leg.

It is up to a person what/how (s)he thinks. If you think that the average number of Japanese legs are two (in other words, if you have your own model of Japanese person, apart from nationality), you have every right to have your own (not too objective) definitions. The reason why I wrote “my alarm starts to ring” was that I feel warned that the following conversation can be waste of time. Yes, you have right to have your own definition. But right at the moment when you say something above and start discussion about something, I’d have to ask you for your definition. Consequently it usually takes time with not so much outcome, if any.

What I think as problem is that those people above seem to say “If you’re Japanese..” sentence almost unconsciously. You can say whatever you would like to say (and I believe in the right of yours). But I start to feel like leaving the table right at the moment when I hear this clause.

A friend of mine, who is originally from Japan (and is Japanese) and currently staying outside of Japan, contacted me to talk about things one can do for the sake of current situation in Japan from outside. My thoughts and answers are simple :

(1) Donate those organizations (such as Red Cross) who help rebuilding the country.
(2) Try to use (and spend some money) services from Japan.
(3) Work as usual.

(1) Donating money seems like an easiest (and most obvious) thing to do. Given that it is spent properly, it shall contribute to helping those get back to their normal lives.

(2) Currently, there are many services which you can participate in. O’Reilly Japan, a famous brand for computer-related books, recently announced 50%-off campaign for electronic books, in which the money (after subtracting for those who wrote and translated the content) would be used for revival in Japan. Personally I admire such an attitude of the company, which is probably the only who loses something (resources) among everyone concerned.

(3) Apart from those above, there is nothing one can do about. Work as usual, live as usual, laugh as usual (which is very important thing, I think). One extremely important thing is to keep the flow of the money running. This does not only apply to regions within Japan, but outside (no matter where you live on the planet, you’re already more or less connected to the global economy).

It may not sound too much or too many. But what else could I do? So far, above list is the best things came up to my mind.. Flying to Japan and helping people physically is the worst thing you can ever do, I think. What sort of help would you be? You’ll have to spend energy, which may be a crucial thing in Japan. You’ll need your own food, some of which are currently short in Japan. If you’re not trained, you can merely cause unnecessary mess for nothing. I’m very much doubtful if that is the sort of thing those people would like to have, who were hit by the earthquake, tsunami, fear of radioactive materials, and blackouts.

Maybe I should spend more money of things which I usually do not spend upon. I recently bought a printer, a very nice pan, and a pot. Perhaps I should buy another set of cloths or so.. It may sound very sarcastic. But I am serious.

After the earthquake(s) in Japan, I’ve been thinking about what I would be doing under such (extreme) circumstances and what I could be doing now (while I still could).

One obvious and first thing I’d be doing is to (try to) contact to my families. Among our family members, we’re using Skype as means of communication. It has been proven to be a good method; new messages in the group chat are synchronized once it’s in the position to connect to other peer(s). Using its VoIP feature, it could be used for voice-based communication.

Recently, however, I found out about one service called Beluga. It’s a new means of communication (many seem to think of it as an elaborated form of emails). It has “social network” notion together with grouping and real-time into communication.

OK, I was excited, there was an iPhone App for that as well (the service is available for PC users as well). Another means of communication? Might be useful under catastrophic situation (SMS isn’t exactly the optimal way to reach different people at the same time)? Why not give it a shot?

Second after I clicked “Get” button, I told myself, “would I actually like the word, real-time?”. When I was in the undergraduate, I was among the last (if not the last) people who got a mobile phone (it was few years before Apple announced the iPhone). It wasn’t really expensive, I just didn’t (and still don’t) like the idea of “being disturbed by someone”.

When I look at myself, I usually find myself surprised when I realize (from time to time) that iPhone can be used for making phone calls. I even prefer using email as communication method (both sending and receiving emails). I love using chat feature in Skype. So is my question : do we really want real-time communication (as opposed to asynchronous communication)?

You have your own agenda and schedule, so does the person on the other end of the communication line. I assume this trend that “every one has got his / her own business” continues to grow. One person told me about people in the subway talking on the phone. I wonder how that would look like in next decade.