angrymoose.org typepad edition

Hoppy Trucks

Hoppy Trucks
Originally uploaded by angrydicemoose

Kind of enjoyed this line of Hoppy Trucks outside the office.

会社の外にホッピートラックの一覧。

South Korean forgets you can't use your hands in football - Dirty Tackle - World Soccer - Yahoo! Sports

High profile handballs are trendy right now. Starting with Thierry Henry's against Ireland last year and peaking with Luis Suarez's goal-saving effort against Ghana in the World Cup, both sparked outrage and debate, but both also helped their respective teams. South Korea defender Jeong Yeonga's handball in their 5-1 semifinal loss to their German hosts in the Women's U-20 World Cup did not help her team, though. Granted, it didn't really hurt her team, either, since they were already losing 4-1 at the time. But still...it was weird.

via sports.yahoo.com

Spiked a ball once during a varisty soccer match my senior year in high school. Sorry coach, I've gotten better.

Jeff Bezos commencement speech at Princeton

Jeff Bezos's speech can be found here.

Parts that hopefully will stay with me (13 years after graduating from college. . .) after reading the speech.

Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy -- they're given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you're not careful, and if you do, it'll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

And

How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?

Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?

Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?

Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?

Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?

Will you bluff it out when you're wrong, or will you apologize?

Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?

Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?

When it's tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?

Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

Steve Blank on work/life balance

We would have a family dinner at home most nights of the week.  Regardless of what I was doing I had to be home by 7pm.  (My kids still remember mom secretly feeding them when they were hungry at 5pm, but eating again with dad at 7pm.)  But we would use dinner time to talk about what they did at school, have family meetings etc.Put the kids to bed. Since I was already home for dinner it was fun to help give them their baths, read them stories and put them to bed.  I never understood how important the continuity of time between dinner through bedtime was until my kids mentioned it as teenagers.Act and be engaged. My kids and wife had better antenna than I thought.  If I was home but my head was elsewhere and not mentally engaged they would call me on it.  So I figured out how to spit the flow of the day in half.  I would work 10 hours a day in the office, come home and then…Back to work after the kids were in bed. What my kids never saw is that as soon as they were in bed I was back on the computer and back at work for another 4 or 5 hours until the wee hours of the morning.Weekends were with and for my kids. There was always some adventure on the weekends. I think we must have went to the zoo, beach, museum, picnic, amusement park, etc. a 100 times. Half a day work on Saturday.  While weekends were for my kids I did go to work on Saturday morning.  But my kids would come with me.  This had two unexpected consequences; my kids still remember that work was very cool.  They liked going in with me and they said it helped them understand what dad did at “work.”  Second, it set a cultural norm at my startups, first at Supermac as the VP of Marketing, then at Rocket Science as the CEO and at E.piphany as President. (Most Silicon Valley startups have great policies for having your dog at work but not your kids.)Long vacations. We would take at least a 3-week vacation every summer.  Since my wife and I liked to hike we’d explore national parks around the U.S. (Alaska, Wyoming, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Maine.) When the kids got older our adventures took us to Mexico, Ecuador, India, Africa and Europe. The trips gave them a sense that the rest of the country and the world was not Silicon Valley and that their lives were not the norm.Never miss an event. As my kids got older there were class plays, soccer games, piano and dance performances, birthdays, etc.  I never missed one if I was in town, sometimes even if it was in the middle of the day. (And I made sure I was in town for the major events.) Engage your spouse. I asked my wife to read and critique every major presentation and document I wrote. Everything she touched was much better for it.  What my investors never knew is that they were getting two of us for the price of one.  (And one of us actually went to business school.)  It helped her understand what via steveblank.comVery interesting read for all of us who tend to work a bit too much...

via veroniquep.typepad.com

ほー

Blow to Freedom in Japan

My feelings about the movie "the Cove" are not a secret, it's a horribly researched movie about an important topic. That doesn't mean that the movie should be blocked from being shown in Japan. If "The Cove" is in fact a horribly researched movie like I believe it is, then people opposed to the movie have nothing to fear. Now, I unfortunately have to admit that there is some form of censorship in Japan and it is blocking a movie from being shown.  Even idiotic and lazy view points deserve an airing, it should be up to the viewing audience to make their decision not mistaken groups opposed to personal freedoms.

「ザ・コーヴ」の日本上映が中止になった。前もブログで映画を見たあとの感想を記したけど、事実の観点から言えばあまりちゃんと作られた映画とは思わない。しかし、映画を見てそれを思う権利、研究して知る権利は憲法によって守られているはず。どこの団体か分からないが、映画の上映を中止に追い込むのは映画の製作者の思惑通りにことがすすむようにしているだけ。大変に残念、日本に住む人にとって残念。

Ken Griffey Jr.

Ken Griffey Jr.
Originally uploaded by angrydicemoose

Ken Griffey Jr. announced his retirement today. Last time I went to see Safeco was the first time I saw Jr. play in person in over twelve years. He hit one of his pretty homeruns in his first at bat and the past nine painful years of being a Seattle sports fan faded for real (Jr leaving, the Sonics leaving, the Seahawks getting screwed in the Superbowl). Thank you Jr. for everything.

今日、シアトルマリナーズの歴史で一番偉大な選手であるKen Griffey Jr. が引退を発表した。昨年の9月に12年ぶりに彼が出場している試合を見に行ったが、初打席で野球でもっとも綺麗なフォームからもっとも綺麗なアークを描くホームランを打った。シアトルに帰ってきた時には感謝の気持ちでいっぱいだったし、あのホームランを打った時にシアトルスポーツを愛することによって過去９年ぐらい味わっていた痛みが全部消えていった(グリフィーの移籍、ソニックスの消滅、シーホークスのスーパーボール)。本当にありがとうございました、お疲れ様でした。

OS Reinstall

Stanford
Originally uploaded by angrydicemoose

Was helping set up and operate a ustream feed for a concert last night which seemed to go over well. Behind the things were a bit less calm. My computer was acting up like there was no tomorrow and when it finally settled down the wifi at the venue died on us. Somehow the emobile CDMA wifi router was able to stream the rest of the concert so I'd like to think that we spread some happiness. However I've decided to reinstall OSX since I haven't done a real reinstall in a while now and some of the stuff on my MBP has been around since Tiger.

昨日は弊社の卓と181さんとCarnationのライブのUstreamのお手伝いをした。反響は非常によかったと思うのだが、実現するにはいろいろと大変な。。。まずマックブックプロが死にかけの状態で動くときは動くけどそれ以外の時は。。。かくかくかくにも至らないぐらいに遅い。ビデオカメラも持ってきていたが、コンピュータに取り込む機器がないためウェブカムに変えた（卓のお財布から1万円弱が消えた）。やっとストリームがうまく行っていると思っていたら、会場の無線LANが不安定、途中で落ちる。タイミングよくGW中に購入したイーモバイルの卵（D25hw）が会場内でもつながっていたので、ダメもとで使ってみる。アップロードの帯域が少なすぎると思ったがうまく行ったらしい。

音がすばらしかったが映像がひどいってコメントが多数あったけど、答えは映像はウェブカム、音はミクサーから直接線を引いていました。ウェブカムなので逆光に弱いし、ズームができなかったのです。もっと素晴らしい音は近日Livecarnation.jpで発売予定です！

さて、コンピュータもここ5年間ぐらいOSをちゃんとインストールして使っていなかったツケがまわってきたんだと思う。０からインストールする決意をして、秋葉原に向かった。

Went out to Akiba for a new HDD and picked up a copy of Win7 to also install. Started out trying to erase the HDD and got this error Disk Erase failed with the error:

POSIX reports: The operation couldn’t be completed. Cannot allocate memory.

秋葉原でHDDとDSP版のWin7を購入して家に戻る。ディスクをEraseしようとしたらこのエラー。
Disk Erase failed with the error:

POSIX reports: The operation couldn’t be completed. Cannot allocate memory.

Thankfully for today my technical skills extend as far as Google, Yahoo! or Bing Search does and I found the solution on CNET. I did have to remap the partitions to change how the disk boots, but I'm installing OSX now. . .and then all the apps and then Win7 and then. . .

検索任せの技術力を活用して見つけた手段が ここ。最後にもうワンステップ、パーティションを再度設定する必要があったが、OSをインストールできる状態になった。

Finally watched the Cove

神倉神社
Originally uploaded by angrydicemoose

I originally wrote this as a comment on this blog post I found about the Cove, after I posted the comment, I noticed that Takepart.com had actually sent an email to the blogger which he followed up here. All three of the posts are must reads in my mind as it outlines issues the filmmakers of the Cove missed completely.

Anyway, I haven't posted on my blog in a while, so I decided to just grab my comment and post it as a blog post.

Some background though, my maternal grandfather is originally from the town adjacent to Taiji (where "The Cove" is). Whenever I've visited the region, the people there have treated with amazing warmth and kindness. I had an opportunity to learn about Taiji's whale hunting from a relatively young age. Having been educated in the United States, I could easily see myself as blindly joining in the anti-Japanese outrage stirred up by the Cove. It's fun and easy after all and I love fun and easy causes. Unfortunately, the Cove is such a poorly researched movie that aims for entertainment. To compound the situation, people without an opportunity and/or an interest to actually learn are bound to swallow everything that the filmmakers of the Cove are serving up.

High mercury content in the food chain is definitely a frightening issue, I'll think twice and thrice and not eat whale or dolphin meat and would not feed it to any child. The pollution of the waters is an important issue for a country like ours that is heavily dependent on the resources from the ocean. So's the issue of overfishing the limited resources that are in the ocean. But, the Cove isn't about that.

The fisherman of Taiji have been whaling since the 17th century. Before the Meiji Restoration while some Japanese did lead a vegan diet, a lot of Japanese led a pescetarian diet. It wouldn't be a stretch to understand a diet including whale (and/or dolphin) meat was considered to be pescetarian.

My issue with the Cove (which I finally watched the other night) outside of outright falsehoods and lack of research is that I find their approach to be disingenuous at best.

While one would hope to make the assumption that the goals of the filmmakers were to educate their audience on dolphin hunting and capture in Taiji and to bring an end to this practice, I'm not so sure that the assumption would be true.

The filmmaker's answer to the point that dolphin hunting is part of the culture is to reply that certain cultures are wrong and need to be changed, and that if it's culture why don't most Japanese know about it.

The fishermen of Taiji honestly take pride in their craft and have the highest respect of the dolphins even as they slaughter them. They have a whaling museum right on the waterfront (it's hard to miss, it even shows up in the movie) as a tribute to their craft and the animals they hunt. To confront these fishermen without attempting to show any understanding for why they might hunt dolphins is nothing but an insult from the perspective of the fishermen, not the most effective way to start a conversation.

Any guilt that the filmmakers want to impose upon the fishermen isn't going to be effective either. The guilt that the filmmakers feel is completely the filmmakers guilt. Remember, the fishermen take pride in their craft and hold the whales and dolphins in reverence, especially because the animals they hunt are noble and "intelligent". While the practice might not always follow the teachings, growing up in Japan I was often taught that we should use all parts of whatever animal we eat, as there is no waste in whatever we catch.

This isn't shooting buffalo from rail cars to them, it's a craft and a tradition passed on that they are upholding. If anything, the fishermen on Taiji believe that they know more about dolphins than the filmmakers, so the filmmakers attempting to educate the fishermen by condescending is not an effective method.

There is no coverup about dolphin hunting in Japan, while it might be huge news for the filmmakers and anyone who has no understanding of Japan dolphin hunting just isn't a big story that everyone in Japan feels the need to know. When I visited Taiji well before the Cove came out I learned about the dolphin hunting, but then most people in Japan have not been to Taiji. They might visit the Kumano shrines, but Taiji is pretty easy to mix. Dolphin hunting isn't known nationally because it's obscure, no one is trying to hide it. Because it isn't practiced nation wide it is unique, but there is no coverup. The local newspaper does have an article about the hunt when it happens every year, the news just isn't big enough to be national. Though this year with the uproar caused by the Cove, networks have put up stories here and here. The coverage has not been all positive towards the Cove.

Taiji is located in the Kumano region of Japan. In the Kumano religion, people look upon nature as their god, the waterfall of Nachi and the rock on Kamikurasan being examples but the whole Kumano region is considered to be holy. This isn't a nationalist issue for the fishermen or the people of Kumano. It's the natural response that the fishermen have towards outsiders coming in and expecting to be able to have their will imposed. The filmmakers were not welcome because they were being assholes, it wasn't because they were against dolphin hunting.

The Japanese have held foreigners that come to engage in dialogue about environmentalism and nature in high regard. While C.W. Nichol is naturalized now and the Japanese do listen to him when he talks about environmentalism.

Attempt to impose anything on anyone and there's a decent chance that the target would be unwilling. If the filmmakers truly wanted to be effective they would have done their research and found that a different route might have been more effective.

The filmmakers could have learned why the fishermen hunt dolphins, if the filmmakers showed their respect and their willingness to learn.
common ground on the issue and a route to engage in dialogue. The Japanese and the people of Taiji do care about the environment and conservationism. Making a levelheaded argument for the conservation of the resources provided by the ocean are something that the Japanese are increasingly concerned with (dolphins are not endangered now, I can imagine it will get harder to get species of dolphins classified as such).

Whether out of ineptness or by design the filmmakers chose to focus on only spinning a good yarn, whether that meant building cameras on rocks in them or creating "facts" when the reality did not support the storyline they were creating. The Cove is a fascinating movie, with the kind of research and storylines that would make Fox News proud..

Where they could have engaged in dialogue, the filmmakers did everything to offend and belittle people with whom they could have found a common ground. An issue that didn't have to become a nationalistic one has now been turned into one. Once it's reached that point, dialogue doesn't matter as all sides aren't interested in having any rational discussion, but only in pandering to their bases.

Having said that, there is no guilt on the side of the fishermen of Taiji, but it is a living they are making. The guilt is something that the foreign audience could better identify with. Boycotting Sea World and other zoos/aquariums that have dolphins could kill the business of dolphin capture.

iPad

ラーメン afuri 恵比寿
Originally uploaded by angrydicemoose

Not quite sure what to do about this. I want to get something like the Kindle to read my PDF's, might as well loosen the purse strings a bit more and get an iPad right?

どうしようかな、どうせ読書用にKindle買うなら、少し待ってお金出してiPadにでもするか。。。

三崎 よし田

三崎　よし田
Originally uploaded by angrydicemoose

会社の近くで魚の昼食、最高。

Fish for lunch. . .fantastic.