Kindness of a random stranger
April 27th, 2009
This weekend something interesting happend to me. I was sitting in McDonalds (I know its unhealty) and eating a Hamburger.
The thing costs only 100 yen and for that price its a really cheap and quick supper. It was already quite late so I just wanted quickly to eat something. Well I was sitting there and eating while a elder japanese woman was staring at me. She was maybe 70 or so. So, well she stared at me and I got annoyed for a moment and looked back, smiling. She smiled back and left me alone (looked some other way). I didn't think much of it and continued eating my food. I didn't have anything to drink but I thought, hey, just buy yourself later in the late-night supermarket something.
She got up and went to the counter to buy something leaving her things unattended at the seat. I found that not so good but hey, it's japan and here its a bit safer than in other places around the world. Well, she came back and put a coffee cup with extra milk and sugar in-front of me and said I should drink something.
As you can imagine I was totally baffled and kindly refused. I tried talking to her and seemed she just found it too terrible just eating something and the coffee was so cheap too (120 yen) so no problem. I thanked her and tried to talk to her until her husband came who was totally confused why she was talking to not only a stranger but a foreigner here in japan. Very amusing.
This was the first time a random stranger was kind to me here. I'll not forget that.
Anyway I just wanted to share this interesting, friendly and memorable coincidence with you.
Have a good start into the week!
Tynt copying on the fly - or Graffiti for the Web.
January 24th, 2009
Have you ever heared of Tynt? Well, if you have no own homepage you can ignore this. Also if you have a homepage or a blog and you don't care what people do with your content you can also ignore this. Lastly, if you run advertisement on your page and you don't care about the money, you can also ignore this.
Tynt is a service for people to add or overlay comments and annotate things on your www pages as they see it. Well sounds harmless right, but take this for example.
Source: Eric Lander's blog.
You can add your Grafiti, yes you heared right to any page. They even explain it to you here in the Tynt help pages.
Unfortunately you can't sign up for an account currently (beta) phase so I can't give you more details. In anyway if you are interested, try Eric Lander's blog, here for the Offical Tynt blog.
In those ressources you can also find ip ranges you can block but this probably won't do as it could change quickly. One alternative could be to embedd a noindex tag into your pages, but thats a hack for another day.
If you want to try it out for yourself just use this schema: YOURURLHERE.tynted.net.
What do you think?
D-Process or World Financial Crisis explained
January 22nd, 2009
Since Q3 and Q4 of 2008 we have witnessed how the financial crisis progresses. It has since then turned from a so-called ``recession'' into a ``depression'' or D-Process. Ray Dalio coined this term because people tend to understand and interpret depression differently, for more info on that please see the D-Process link. The stock markets throughout the world have plummeted by more than 50% of their original value from 2006 to 2009. This is just the beginning, optimists see a recovery at the end of 2009, negative and realistic thinking though predicts a much longer downturn until 2010 and 2011.
The crisis is a global problem due to the importance of the US Economy on the World Markets. So far I had trouble understanding what really was the root of the problem and those Videos here make an excellent introduction to our current problem. I highly recommend to watch them.
Part 1:
Part 2:
The point and the problem of the current crisis is that the companies, banks, actually everybody has to restructure their entire company and modus operandi to cope with this situation. Many companies don't want to face this and instead fire people to adjust their monthly and yearly targets. This works until a certain point when that is not possible either.
Another effect which we can see is that Banks are getting more and more under Goverment control. What they will do is probably enforce more rules, laws and so on. Past economists like Milton Friedman (Nobel Prize, 1976 in Economics) were fighting for the strict deregulation up to a total free market. This strategy seems wrong and recent economists tend to dismiss this now and focus on reverting this to a mixture of ``commu-capitalism'' and recommend now a shift from the external locus focus to a internal. This means that e.g. countries should focus on their domestic instead of their international markets. This was one reason why Malasia for instance survived the Bubble burst so well in Asia.
I am looking forward to your thoughts on this.
A true WTF Microsoft style
February 20th, 2008
It doesn't happen very often that I see stuff which will make me speechless or just *really* give me this strong WTF feeling.
This one though which I stumbled upon did a great job.
What will be next?
The arch enemies GNU/Linux troll, MacOS imp and the ugly UNIX beast in the list? What do you think?
PS: For more happenings like this I recommend this reading literature for further study ;)
Invasion of the garden gnomes in Japan
January 2nd, 2008
Sometimes on the way I find some funny things as here in Setagaya-Daita. Remembering a funny (,,the invasion'') picture Martin a friend of mine took, I counter with this one. Its outside a barber shop, which makes this even more interesting.
Not quite as good as his, but hey we are here not in Germany right ? ;)
(Sorry for the poor quality but its from my mobile phone).
New Year joke the Japanese way
January 1st, 2008
Between the 29th december and the 3rd january even japanese people tend to have holidays. I know its incredible ;).
Anywho, in Shinjuku some construction workers had some fun with glowing pylons which are normally used to redirect traffic. Have a look what they did :
Nifty smiley ;)
,,Tasty'' food in Japan made Chinese style
June 7th, 2007
Some time ago I had the chance to go to a nice Chinese restaurant here in Japan located near Ikebukuro. After being surprised how huge the menu was (at least 40 double sided pages full with text) and the trouble with actually being able to decide something from that vast input I found these ,,delicious'' and amusing items.
Freshly fried silkworm larvae
Delicious fried scorpion on rice.
I don't know if you would have enjoyed that but I stuck to the ,,normal'' stuff. ^^
Sleep maximizing the insane way
March 29th, 2007
Crazy !
You want to learn how to maximize your sleep ? Sure, about now you think take many short naps, early bedtime, stop
wasting time at work etc. Well, nice and good thoughts but everything has an extreme and today I met one literally while walking here in Tokyo.
I nearly collided with a woman who seemed to try to sleep while walking. I mean really closing her eyes,
walking a couple of meters then opening them again to repeat the cycle.
I have seen a lot, especially the funny japanese who manage to sleep in various postures in the train while holding on to something but this is a sort of improvement the insane way. So much for working culture, eh?
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