Photo taken on June 24, 2006.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Sunday, July 23, 2006
This Ninja Never Sleeps
It was raining on July 16, 2006, at Kyoto Studio Park, but there's at least one ninja who never sleeps.
I Stay
Management on both sides of the Pacific worked out their differences and, with my agreement of course, I will be staying in Japan, most probably until June 30, 2007.
UPDATE: Will I stay in Japan or will I live somewhere else in Asia? A little uncertainty surfaced yesterday. Stay tuned, blog readers.
UPDATE: Will I stay in Japan or will I live somewhere else in Asia? A little uncertainty surfaced yesterday. Stay tuned, blog readers.
Saturday, July 22, 2006
Bali Hi
I've had a somewhat strange travel week. A customer wanted to meet in Bali for several days, so on Tuesday I boarded the one Japan Airlines nonstop flight. When I arrived I learned that the customer decided to postpone the meeting, so I spent some of Wednesday on the beach. At about noon one of my colleagues asked, "Could you come to Kuala Lumpur then visit Singapore?" So I did.
Unfortunately Bali is not crowded right now. There's a persistent U.S. State Department travel warning, so lots of Americans avoid the place. (There were several vacationing Germans, however.) My flight appeared to be mostly full when I booked it, but the recent news about another Indonesian tsunami that killed hundreds in Java, not Bali, nonetheless largely emptied the 747 I boarded Tuesday. The hotel was likewise sparsely populated, and right now is supposedly high season.
I think lots of people consider the State Department warnings to have veto authority over their travel plans, but I have a somewhat different outlook. I do read them and take them seriously, and I do not like to take unnecessary risks. However, we all take risks. Crossing the street is risky, for example. As another example, last year I received a call asking if I would be willing to travel to Manila to teach an IBM internal class. One of my colleagues declined because there is a State Department travel warning for the Philippines. I did a little bit of research and determined the number of people in greater Manila who suffered violent death (murders, terrorist or otherwise) over the past few years. I compared that number to the same number for Dade County (Miami), my colleague's home area. I gave greater weight to more recent violence, and I also looked for differences in targeting Americans specifically. (There did not seem to be any particular targeting by nationality in either city.) Then I told him it would probably be a good idea to pack all his belongings and bring his whole family immediately and permanently to Manila because the rate of total death-inducing violent crime was about three times higher in Miami.
He went to Manila to teach the class.
As a side comment, I understand that the 9/11 deaths do not appear in official U.S. crime statistics or airline fatality statistics. Why? They should. Dead is dead.
There's a lesson here for computing. Sometimes staying put — inertia — is the riskiest move of all. That's especially true when your business changes and your information technology doesn't. For instance, in 1981 American Airlines introduced the AAdvantage frequent flyer program. Had Delta, Northwest, and other airlines not responded quickly with their own programs (and significant associated IT changes) they would have suffered grievous financial difficulties. "Our systems are stable, so we don't want to take the risk of changing them in any way" would have led to liquidation in that highly competitive industry. I try to explain this idea to my Japanese colleagues with partial success — many Japanese companies do not yet fully feel the effects of competition in what is still a highly cartelized domestic market. That's not to say that IT organizations should change systems and infrastructure just because there's a new whiz bang technology — that happened a lot in the 1990s — but IT should be highly responsive (or better yet anticipatory) to business needs. Perhaps this argument is obvious, but it is amazing how many IT organizations fail to serve business goals. In many such cases the CEO becomes incredibly frustrated, so he/she outsources the whole IT operation to, among others, IBM.
Unfortunately Bali is not crowded right now. There's a persistent U.S. State Department travel warning, so lots of Americans avoid the place. (There were several vacationing Germans, however.) My flight appeared to be mostly full when I booked it, but the recent news about another Indonesian tsunami that killed hundreds in Java, not Bali, nonetheless largely emptied the 747 I boarded Tuesday. The hotel was likewise sparsely populated, and right now is supposedly high season.
I think lots of people consider the State Department warnings to have veto authority over their travel plans, but I have a somewhat different outlook. I do read them and take them seriously, and I do not like to take unnecessary risks. However, we all take risks. Crossing the street is risky, for example. As another example, last year I received a call asking if I would be willing to travel to Manila to teach an IBM internal class. One of my colleagues declined because there is a State Department travel warning for the Philippines. I did a little bit of research and determined the number of people in greater Manila who suffered violent death (murders, terrorist or otherwise) over the past few years. I compared that number to the same number for Dade County (Miami), my colleague's home area. I gave greater weight to more recent violence, and I also looked for differences in targeting Americans specifically. (There did not seem to be any particular targeting by nationality in either city.) Then I told him it would probably be a good idea to pack all his belongings and bring his whole family immediately and permanently to Manila because the rate of total death-inducing violent crime was about three times higher in Miami.
He went to Manila to teach the class.
As a side comment, I understand that the 9/11 deaths do not appear in official U.S. crime statistics or airline fatality statistics. Why? They should. Dead is dead.
There's a lesson here for computing. Sometimes staying put — inertia — is the riskiest move of all. That's especially true when your business changes and your information technology doesn't. For instance, in 1981 American Airlines introduced the AAdvantage frequent flyer program. Had Delta, Northwest, and other airlines not responded quickly with their own programs (and significant associated IT changes) they would have suffered grievous financial difficulties. "Our systems are stable, so we don't want to take the risk of changing them in any way" would have led to liquidation in that highly competitive industry. I try to explain this idea to my Japanese colleagues with partial success — many Japanese companies do not yet fully feel the effects of competition in what is still a highly cartelized domestic market. That's not to say that IT organizations should change systems and infrastructure just because there's a new whiz bang technology — that happened a lot in the 1990s — but IT should be highly responsive (or better yet anticipatory) to business needs. Perhaps this argument is obvious, but it is amazing how many IT organizations fail to serve business goals. In many such cases the CEO becomes incredibly frustrated, so he/she outsources the whole IT operation to, among others, IBM.
Saturday, July 01, 2006
Still Looking for These Items
Tokyo's shops stock almost every product, but there are a few items I have found difficult to locate. Here are some examples:
1. Decaffeinated coffee. I like the taste of coffee, and coffee does have newly appreciated health benefits, but the caffeine increasingly bothers me. So I brought a one pound bag of chemical-free Swiss Water Process decaf from Chicago. There are two places I've found that serve a cup of decaf, probably the chemical kind. At the IBM coffee counter you can ask for "mild koh-hee" and you'll get decaf. It's 110 yen for a small cup, so it's a (subsidized?) bargain. Starbucks also serves decaf, although you have to wait several minutes because it's brewed in a decanter, on the spot, since it's an unusual request. There it's about 270 yen for what in the U.S. would be called "short" (a "secret" size in the U.S. that Starbucks sells but doesn't list), the same price as regular coffee. Presumably one could order decaf vanilla latte espresso hazelnut Sumatra mocha (or whatever) and, after considerable confusion, you might get it. I've never tried, primarily because I cannot fathom wrecking the taste of coffee with 16 other ingredients.
2. Unsalted peanuts. Haven't found them. Often the peanuts have MSG. Similar problem locating natural peanut butter.
3. Dried natto. A Japanese product that's hard to find in Japan! Refrigerated dried natto, yes, and it's pricey. Japan Airlines serves dried natto (snack) in business class, and they sell mail order dried natto for about 6000 yen (!) per box. I haven't found JAL-style dried natto in any of the shops yet. I really like dried natto snack, and supposedly it's an amazing health food. It has a wonderful yeasty flavor. There's a U.S. company that started to import dried natto snack, but unfortunately they have suspended orders at present while reorganizing.
4. English-style cider. I found "apple beer" in a restaurant once, but it was simply beer with some apple flavoring. Not even the giant Carrefour in Makuhari stocked hard cider. There's a bar ("pub") close to my apartment that lists a bottle of cider for 900 yen, but they were out during my one disappointing visit.
5. Dark beer. Guiness Stout (which I don't like) is reasonably popular, but a good, dark beer is a little hard to find. One of the Japanese beer companies makes a dark beer — I think it's called "Asahai Dark" — and it's quite good but oddly hard to find. (Asahai is a giant Japanese beer company.) One Japanese restaurant I visited served a 1400 yen boutique Japanese dark beer in a fancy brown bottle, and that was also good but obviously expensive. Carrefour stocked Newcastle, and I think Don Quijote does as well, at about 300 yen per bottle. The average Japanese sushi, yakitori, or other establishment only stocks pale beers.
6. Whole grain bread. Paul, the French-style bakery, has it priced at 400 yen for a small loaf. However, the last two trips they've been out of stock.
Of course there are many Asian products that are difficult to find in the U.S., and I like a lot of those products.
1. Decaffeinated coffee. I like the taste of coffee, and coffee does have newly appreciated health benefits, but the caffeine increasingly bothers me. So I brought a one pound bag of chemical-free Swiss Water Process decaf from Chicago. There are two places I've found that serve a cup of decaf, probably the chemical kind. At the IBM coffee counter you can ask for "mild koh-hee" and you'll get decaf. It's 110 yen for a small cup, so it's a (subsidized?) bargain. Starbucks also serves decaf, although you have to wait several minutes because it's brewed in a decanter, on the spot, since it's an unusual request. There it's about 270 yen for what in the U.S. would be called "short" (a "secret" size in the U.S. that Starbucks sells but doesn't list), the same price as regular coffee. Presumably one could order decaf vanilla latte espresso hazelnut Sumatra mocha (or whatever) and, after considerable confusion, you might get it. I've never tried, primarily because I cannot fathom wrecking the taste of coffee with 16 other ingredients.
2. Unsalted peanuts. Haven't found them. Often the peanuts have MSG. Similar problem locating natural peanut butter.
3. Dried natto. A Japanese product that's hard to find in Japan! Refrigerated dried natto, yes, and it's pricey. Japan Airlines serves dried natto (snack) in business class, and they sell mail order dried natto for about 6000 yen (!) per box. I haven't found JAL-style dried natto in any of the shops yet. I really like dried natto snack, and supposedly it's an amazing health food. It has a wonderful yeasty flavor. There's a U.S. company that started to import dried natto snack, but unfortunately they have suspended orders at present while reorganizing.
4. English-style cider. I found "apple beer" in a restaurant once, but it was simply beer with some apple flavoring. Not even the giant Carrefour in Makuhari stocked hard cider. There's a bar ("pub") close to my apartment that lists a bottle of cider for 900 yen, but they were out during my one disappointing visit.
5. Dark beer. Guiness Stout (which I don't like) is reasonably popular, but a good, dark beer is a little hard to find. One of the Japanese beer companies makes a dark beer — I think it's called "Asahai Dark" — and it's quite good but oddly hard to find. (Asahai is a giant Japanese beer company.) One Japanese restaurant I visited served a 1400 yen boutique Japanese dark beer in a fancy brown bottle, and that was also good but obviously expensive. Carrefour stocked Newcastle, and I think Don Quijote does as well, at about 300 yen per bottle. The average Japanese sushi, yakitori, or other establishment only stocks pale beers.
6. Whole grain bread. Paul, the French-style bakery, has it priced at 400 yen for a small loaf. However, the last two trips they've been out of stock.
Of course there are many Asian products that are difficult to find in the U.S., and I like a lot of those products.
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