Potpourri

Quotes

Scott McCloud discusses micropayments and Napster/music sharing in his latest online column. The format of the column is interesting as one of the very few examples of content that is designed for the Web. The modified comic strip format crystallizes the content in a way that pulls in the reader and presents a relatively large amount of information without having to read too many words. The content of the column is interesting as well: I completely agree that the new economy is on hold while we are waiting for micropayments and the associated ability for websites to connect to their customers in a two-way flow of services and money being exchanged simultaneously.

-- Jacob Nielsen, Spotlighted links, June 26, 2001

Quotes Archive

News

Sunday, July 1, 2001

Tomoe and I are getting married! Yep, after over 5 years of living in sin we're finally tying the knot... For those single people sometimes contemplating marriage: don't do it! You have no idea what you're getting into! It's about as much work as moving house three times in six months. The date is set for September 1st, and Tomoe's parents are not letting their last daughter get away with a quick visit to the city hall. This is going to be the works: church (St. Ignatius Church in Yotsuya), reception (at Arcadia Wedding in Ichigaya) and party (at Ben's Cafe in Takadanobaba). No, seriously, her parents have been great with helpful advise, but are at the same time very careful to let us make our own decisions. Much appreciated. Also much appreciated is Ben's kind offer to let us have the party at Ben's Cafe, and Rei and Chika's offer to do the food for the party.

From March, I stopped being a freelance programmer and joined my friend Katumi Hama's company Azzurri Ltd. as CTO and joint owner. Azzurri is a small software company that builds business applications for corporate customers, mostly web applications using Java. So far no regrets: Katsumi and I are totally on the same wave length with how we want to do software development and where we want to take the company. I'm finding that looking at software development from a management point of view and trying to run a company are great learning experiences.

I did a presentation on eXtreme Programming, at the TENTUG meeting in June. Boy, was I nervous the week before! The presentation itself went okay, once I got into it I forgot I was nervous. A few people even came up to me afterwards and told me they liked it, so I must have done something right. Many thanks to Robert Altena for inviting me to talk, helping with the preparations and being a great editor. Also thanks to Goldman Sachs who let us use one of their conference rooms. PowerPoint slides can be downloaded from the Azzurri homepage. Yes, thanks to this presentation we felt forced to finally put some effort into building a half-decent web site. "Too busy building web applications for our customers", used to be our (lame) excuse, but no more... When we get some new servers we plan to host the site ourselves so that we use Java servlets and a database, and do more interesting stuff with less work.

Something completely different

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.
-- Albert Einstein

The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made.
-- unknown

I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants.
-- A. Whitney Brown

Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.
-- Sam Levenson (1911-1980)

There are two essential basic strategies for success in business:

1. Never reveal all you know

Lonely in Takadanobaba? You shouldn't be! Try one of these...

• The Fiddler - First English pub in Tokyo. Live music, good beer, good company. (Pass on the wine, though...)
• Ben's Cafe - Beats Starbucks by a hair in coffee quality, by 2 miles in ambiance. Internet-enabled, go boards, weekly go lessons, art gallery.
• Footnik - HUGE screen with continuous football games from the English league.
• Mickey House  - Shy, but want to meet new people? This is the place to go.

Stale news

Sunday, September 3, 2000

I finally took the time to scan in my holiday photos. Many thanks to my parents who paid for most of the scanner as a birthday present! Wow!

Saturday, June 10, 2000

I passed the Sun Certified Java Developer exam (whoop, roar & howl)

Saturday, May 27, 2000

I started to experiment a little with Meerkat, a Web-based syndicated content reader. It is based on Rich Site Summary (RSS), an XML specification used for distributing news, product announcements, discussion threads, and other assorted content as channels. Meerkat provides a simple interface to these stories.

You can incorporate search results in your own web pages. For example, this page gives an overview of the 15 most recent Java stories on the web.

See this article for details on how to do this yourself.

Tuesday, May 2, 2000

Thanks to Rob, Ben, and one of the many professional locksmiths of this great city, we were able to move into our new appartment yesterday. We actually had to break into our own place, as the building's service company replaced the lock on our front door just the day before! By some misunderstanding we still had the old keys, which only got us into the building itself... So there we were, at eleven at night, packing the hallway with two people's worth of stuff, talking to a not very cooperative representative of the service company with our portable phone batteries running out: a great stress-resistance test and personality-building experience!

Eventually we gave up on the service company and their "emergency hotline", and borrowed a friendly neighbour's Yellow Pages to locate a locksmith, who took care of our lock in less than 10 minutes. So far for security. (From the number of locksmiths that are At Your Service 24 Hours A Day, there must be a surprising amount of people locking themselves out every day at weird times...)

To the credit of the building's service company, somebody came by this morning with copies of our new keys and the money we spent on the locksmith.

Gratefullness bordering on rabies to Ben and Rob, who drove the van, carried stuff and were a great support in general! Thanks guys!

Saturday, April 29, 2000

Today we signed the contract for our new place! Many thanks to Rob and Ben who will help us move, it's very much appreciated! Gosh, I'd forgotten what a pain it is to move house... (I am really way too busy to be able to work on this page...)

Saturday, April 22, 2000

Looks like we're finally going to make it! Tomoe and I are moving in together in a new shuck in Takadanobaba (if the landlord won't refuse us at the last moment, that is...) Kind of scary, though. Will she still like me when I leave my dirty socks all over the appartment? Can't she cut her toenails at a safe distance from the bed? Will I still be able to do programming until 3 in the morning? I'm sure I cooked yesterday! Today is your turn! Can you get off the phone? I want to use the internet...

I'm sure we'll be all right. The future's looking bright! Maybe her parents will want to talk to me now... Hmm. Let's not hold our breath.

Anyway, when we're all set, we'll have a huge housewarming party! Watch those emailboxes!

-- Remko