RiC#Code

There is a cool temple located near the Harajuku Station (原宿駅), was there last week and enjoyed the scenery, the place is called Meiji Jingu.

One of the things I like the most is the old fashioned lanterns you can find in the shrine.

One thing that stands out is the sake in display

Recently, wine has also been put on display on the opposite side

I prefer the way the sake in display looks like

There is a nice bridge where I took some video footage of a small river.

No post about a Japanese shrine should be finished without a picture of the typical shrine gates.

And that was pretty much it for that trip :)

loved it.

I’m thinking of posting something about 新宿 next time

I will use this post as a way to share some of the pictures I took on my last trip to 代々木.

Starts off with a nice lunch in a small Indian restaurant in front of the station:

Typical in Tokyo, a building with a different restaurant on each floor.

Then walking after lunch, I found this box interesting, the fact that graffiti art tends to drive itself so well into any shape and form is really interesting to me.

A fuller picture of where this box can be found below:

The sign reads “Yoyogi station”, the same box below:

The famous 自動販売機 (vending machines) of Japan, you can find them anywhere and buy from cold drinks to hot soup.

On the way to 原宿 (Harajuku) and as we get close to 代々木公園 Yoyogi park, we already start to see a clean well organized part of the area.

I like the signs on the floor to guide us as to what to do, like.. stop here! This is the graphic use of information to a degree I have only found in Japan.

The sign reads: “Stop here!”

Entering the Yoyogi park, you find it guarded by a guard house that actually fits in with the surrounding area.

Entering Yoyogi kouen.

(Yoyogi park)

Cool guard dude in Totoro style guard dude house (probably) doing sudoku

and then.. that’s it, Yoyogi park

(maybe I will post about it another time)

Join me in a quick journey into the world of Exploitation Driven Software Development (EDSD) methodologies.

The word criminal may pop up, here and there, as I describe my personal experience in the world of software development in a company that had no sense of smell, when handling the developers they had and their customer base

What is EDSD? When a company doesn't respect its workers and customers, its exploiting them, unfortunately, this still happens in this day and age...

When I say exploitation, sadly in this case, I don’t just mean the hiring of cheap labor and have them work over 20 hours a day, which unfortunately I did see happen at a previous company (more about it below), but I want to focus on the exploitation of both the work force and the good will of the customers.

In order to have a sustainable, maintainable business, and not have both your employees (the ones good enough to be able to go somewhere else) and customers, not stop renewing their contracts, first treat them both.. with respect. (Should be obvious, no?)

Respect goes far beyond the niceties of saying hello and please, I talk of respecting the work people do, to you, as an employer, and the work you present to a buyer, as a retailer.

Work right(s)

Something that is very well established in developed countries (at least legally) is:

• People work for you, the work they do, should be based on what they have specialized themselves in.
  
• Work should be done to meet a requirement, this requirement is to be detailed, specified
• The results of their work are to be measured against clearly marked deliverables
• The deliverables are to be measured with real metrics, (something besides pub talk).

Take all that away, and we're all back to slave camps, where people just do as they are told and only stop working when they are "sent" home.

After what should have been considered to be a full 9 to 5 work day (one that ends up going into the late evening hours), calling an employee at around 3 am (without prior consent) is not only unprofessional, its disrespectful and criminal.

When the only objective of the management team is to have the customer buy something rushed into existence without any thought of quality, usability or general presentation, with no regards to coherence and competence, the end result is a work force made of bad apples (spoiled by the abuse) and a very disgruntled customer base.

Always take a step back to remember: as important as shipping is;

Shipping should never be the ONLY factor to consider.

1. Ship now
2. Develop the product later at the customer's expense
3. Have the same customer pay for all the work done
4. Rinse & repeat

The EDSD process detailed above, may work once or twice, but its criminal and obviously not a long term, sustainable business plan:

How to have your application developed with EDSD:

• Pay the development of the software completely at the customer’s expense, by selling vaporware
• Have the same customer find
  all of the bugs while using the product in production
• Have the customer report these bugs in detail, because you never even tested the thing in the first place, so you really need some pointers
• Get the customer to pay (extra on top of support) for fixing these bugs.

This is not only a recipe for disaster; it is also to be considered as a criminal offense to the customer in question and the community at large.

Not to mention the damage this does to all software companies and professionals all around the world.

So I am honestly and naively amazed at having seen this as common practice at a previous work place.

An S.A.P. derived startup delving into the world of “real” software development, thinks:

Software development is easy, because with Visual Studio you can have a lemming program just about anything in under 5 minutes.

You may be a good salesman, but there are limits to how far you can get away with this kind of abuse, so sure enough, the ONE paying customer this sad company had, stopped renewing the contract that was paying for this madness.

It’s almost laughable to remember the management team, at the time the contract was cancelled, wondering why the customer drops them like a sack of rotten potatoes after the third run of the same EDSD process.

Quite frankly they dumped them once they had a good hard look at the source code, some of which, the developers had to key in, by having a non developer management person dictate insanely non engineered code sitting behind them. Yes, Wimp management and EDSD go together hand in hand.

Sadly, there was logic to their madness (via a complete lack of ethics) as that company now intends to re-sell the same product developed with EDSD methodologies to other customers for a reduced price. (after simply changing variable names, since the IP rights actually are supposed to belong to the previous customer…)

I wonder how many such cases exist, of parasitical survival, due to this kind of immoral corruption of the theory of evolution in business. (Plenty, I would imagine).

As successful as the companies using this kind of work practices may be, I am just happy to have the luxury to keep my moral high ground and back away to do something else with my time.

Please don't get me wrong, I like the business world, look around, everything we see, seems to have the purpose of making us buy something else.

Also I send my sympathies to everyone and anyone who "doesn't have a choice" and keeps having to put up with working in a place they don’t feel happy in, but here I have to make the argument for refusing to work for the "wrong people"

A Natureza procura sempre o equilibrio, parece me ser um bom exemplo a seguir.

Os extremos parecem muitas vezes ser o unico caminho disponivel, ou interessante, mas quando se entende o metodo intermedio, a evitar a vida de ou 8 ou 80, encontra-se uma compensacao directa, se nao imediata.

Ha um entender e habituar ao estado de equilibrio, que aprendi: requer treino. Hoje em dia as pessoas associam “paz de espirito” com “tedio”.

Na busca de uma fuga ao tedio muitas vezes se acha a razao de querer fugir de novo do que se encontrou ou atingiu ao evitar esse tedio inicial. 

A vida de um constante evitar isto ou aquilo eh um ciclo vicioso e cansativo. estar sempre muito contente ou muito triste: cansa.

Nao se precisa estar feliz ou triste, eh bem normal estar apenas, sem qualificacao emocional .. simplesmente estar.

Deste tipo de ideia deriva a frase: "curb your enthusiasm".

Muitas vezes so nos apercebemos, depois da euforia, que a nossa excitacao sobre algo que gostamos ou desgostamos eh exagerada e como um bom vinho, um bom queijo, um bom dia.. eh bom deixar o gosto ou sabor ou a ideia de algo que se experienciou, se estender por um tempo..

Esperar ate (quem sabe) dias ou meses, ate o evento se tornar nada mais que a memoria, e entao tirar, ter e talvez dar uma apreciacao sincera.

Onde nao eh a apreciacao que importa, mas o estar se bem (equilibrado).

…Now for the human condition, add marketing to the problems: when most of what you (think you) want is what someone else wants you to buy (from them).

The whole idea of searching for the one true happy state, that when you’re alone you’re not enough (complete), we are told that enough is not enough: this is a sales pitch.

It’s when you stop consuming, when time stops, that’s when your natural state falls into being “satisfied”, but propaganda everywhere teaches you that satisfactory is not enough.

Want to be happy? Stop trying to aim for happy, and give value to satisfactory states of mind, euphoria is overrated.

Nothing beats peace of mind.

'tis the season to buy ear plugs, lalalala lala lalalala ...

I know one day isn't enough to buy so much whiskey, chocolates and postcards, sexy underwear, video game consoles, etc..so it grew to a whole month of shopping excuses.

"lets bankrupt daddy day"

becomes:

"lets put everyone in deep financial and emotional stress month"

Last year, I made the mistake of attending a choir night at a Baptist church, and the only thing I remember, is the priest going on about how people keep saying: "merry Christmas", here in Tokyo and haven't a clue that:

“this is the time Christians celebrate the birth of Christ” ..

..so lets all stop saying that then :)

Since Christmas now takes the whole month of December hostage anyway, we should say:

"happy December" 

"December man" or “December girl”, instead of “Santa Claus”

..That would be awesome too.

Now all we need are some songs for that and you’re done!

I decided to talk about weird things in Japan, some are not so weird, but I haven’t seen or noticed them elsewhere.

Probably not the weirdest thing, today’s topic, is the Yakult lady!

Yakult ladies in Japan will visit your office and ask you if you would like to buy a bottle to stay healthy.

They are given bicycles or motorbikes to drive around town to do their daily rounds, its both weird and enchanting to see them, and you can bet your life they will always have a smile and a wonderful attitude whenever they see you.

Japan is a country of extremes, sometimes contradictive, this is one of them, where the sexism is so strong that we have a job description with lady on it.

Having lived here for almost three years, I have slowly and painfully finally understood how hard it can be for women to pursue a career, with the hopes of progressing upwards within a company to say a managerial position or an executive post.

Usually women are seen as wives, either as in effect or prospective, which means they either don’t get promoted much or they are given jobs where they will not hold much responsibility (not officially, but in practice they actually will inherit the responsibility of quite serious tasks, just not awarded or recognized for it).

The excuse to refuse women in responsible, high grade jobs is so that they can go home early and look after their families. Its funny because having said that, women are in fact given the choice of pursuing a career in an office or a responsible managerial position in Japanese society, but the chances are, they will give up with utter frustration because what tends to happen is that their male counterparts will give them all the work to do while they slack off and perform complicated political dances and dinner parties.

These drinking parties, where the use of hostesses are the norm, are usually compulsory, paid by the company and will help men promote themselves without doing any “real” work. Here is a very good link to Salaryman  night out.

Another reason women avoid the office work is because most male co-workers (salaryman) will tend to look like this

Yep, this is a typical young male office worker in Japan (maybe I will be like this if I stay here too long), now add body odor and air-sucking noises and you can sense the full experience of office work here.

The older male co-workers will look more like this:

I am talking from my personal experience, and from listening to anecdotal evidence from friends, but the stories are quite usually the same, where women will have to constantly be proving themselves working until late, and crying themselves to tears to family and friends and most men, here in Japan that go up the career ladder, do so through nepotism and unrelated reasons like (real example) becoming the Head Manager of the Weapons Importing Department because of having been the captain of the baseball team in high school.

Then to close it off, there are the frequent news reports of women feeling incredibly happy when they surrender to the status quo, like this one from the Japan times.

No summary here, I went off on a tangent about political repression on women in Japanese society, but all I wanted to say is that I think the image of the Yakult lady is cute and nice!

Something I have only seen in Japan and was surprised by it when I first saw it.

Hope to post some more on oddities I find here and there later.

Since I haven't been able to do any coding that I can even hint at posting here because of IP rights and confidentiality agreements, I decided to post some movie reviews:

"GI JOE"

 
Its a teen summer block buster movie, nuff said: explosions, pop music and nice looking people doing expensive cosplay with guns, which of course, enabled the women to show off some teenage-crush-inducing oversized breast shapes. 

(the super hero costumes were even more generous than usual this time round)

All that, plus the usual product placement and that’s a rap.

Story? oh.. yes, it actually had one to be honest.. if only I could remember it, I could tell you how good it was.

No need for score points here.

"How to lose friends and alienate people"

or “Watch my movie because Megan Fox is in it”

If you know the main actor, Simon Pegg, you know what to expect: him being a dumb brit with a masters degree insulting the Americans until submitting himself to brown nosing because it produces results.

The movie does go beyond the typical easy fish and chips comedies he’s done in the past with the help of a full-hand of Hollywood names who seem to be enjoying themselves too much to be wanting to throw any convincing acting in the mix.

Without thinking of the genre, this movie gets a 2/10 but as a comedy, it can go as far as a 4/10, because I think brainless comedies can get some slack and because it may just work for you if you’re in a good mood to start with. 

The long review above and below actually means I did have some fun watching it, but I must think twice when reviewing it to others:

• Starts off with almost-toilet-humor-like “funny”, but not as bad as what we usually get  this time of the year.
• Then it turns to watchable but predictable semi-romcom with hints of being OK at times.
• Ends abruptly when its about time.

To sum it all up:

You can enjoy it if you just want something light to go with the wine and the woman/man/person/creature sitting next to you, not something you buy/download go to see on purpose.

I personally saw it because I read 3 pages on a book with the same title and this actually seemed really funny.