6 in 1 hand juggling video

Here's a video clip I made lately. I just bought a new chair and couldn't resist to try it out with my baby's marbles. It took me a couple of hours of experiment to come up with some visually nice patterns.

It is easy and so much fun. If you juggle balls, you should try something like this yourself. Get a shallow bowl and small balls, now!

5b hi-lo shower

It's beginning to feel good. The pattern has fallen into a place. I'm getting a feeling that I will set a new record with 5b hi-lo shower soon.

still improving

Hmm, this is supposed to be a juggling blog at least in some part. I can't find time to practice juggling these days, but still I try to throw balls up once in a while.

Very slow as it is, I am making progress and set some new records.

• 3 ball 3 up, double pirouette(720): 1 -> 2 (in a cascade)
  
• 4 ball asyncro fountain 4 up pirouette: 1 -> 2 (in a fountain)
  
• (6x,4)(4,2x)*: 100 catches
  
• (6x,4)(8x,4)(4,4): one (8x,4) in 5b half shower
  
• d17171: once in 5b shower
  
• 3 ball backcrosses: 8 -> 13 catches (finally!)
  
• 7 ball cascade: 20 -> 22 catches
  

Good things are good.

My new cell phone isn't as bad. It's expensive and it doesn't do everthing I thought it does, but still, it has many cool features. For one thing, a voice recognition system is nice. Today, when I was rushing out of a building to go to another press meeting, I TOLD my phone where I was and where I was going. It then, analysed my voice and transcribed what I just said in text boxes. Pressing the search button, I got the result. Subway lines are too complicated in Tokyo and we need a computer aid system to look for the easiest, fastest and cheapest transition route.

Another thing I did with my cell phone today was to search a small hotel I'd never been to. I roughly knew where the hotel was and when I got off the subway, I thought it would be easy to find. And then, it turned out to be not as easy. After 5 minutes walk, I seem to have lost the sense of direction. So, I used the GPS and it showed me the way right away. Just like a car navigation system, I followed the colored path for like 10 minutes, not completely relaxed since I could not 100% trust the system. When the front lobby of the hotel came into my sight, I was glad I had a cell phone like this one. I would have been late for the meeting.

New messed up phone

Although I'm strongly against the Japanese cell phone business model, I bought a new cutting-edge model from au in order to try the new digital TV for mobile devices.

In a sense, it's really amazingly advanced; it has 3inch 800x480 pixel beautiful LCD, bluetooth, a digital TV function, with which you can watch about 8 broadcasts in metropolitan areas in Japan now, 3M pixel camera with AF and shake reduction, 1GB memory, 2.4Mbps internet access with a flat rate connection service, GPS system with a capability of 3D display etc. In short, it's a milestone of the Japanese state-of-the-art technologies.

I changed from the old one to this new one for about USD250. Way too cheap.

Japanese cell phone business is completely messed up. No matter how advanced the devices look, it will demise sooner or later.

There has been a lot of argument going around this issue. The biggest and almost the only problem is the vertically integrated business model. We cannot choose any services, devices and connection services on our own. You choose either NTT DoCoMo, au or Softbank, the 3 big players in the market. And, there are a bunch of devices for each carriers, all of which you cannot use for a different carrier than you originally signed up for. Your device can only connect to your carrier since they make the SIM card not reusable. And the services like GPS, news, online music, are all specific for your carrier. This is ridiculous.

I will have to pay about USD60-80 each month, 20-25% of which goes to the device manufacturer. Sellers get a hefty payback for each device they sell from a carrier. This is why we can buy a device so cheap. Old models are for free, well at least it apears to be 0 yen in retailers.

This model has ensured manufactures and application providers a certain income. They invested a lot and developped quite advanced devices and services, which no users in other countries would be intereted in, and unable to use.

Japanese are good at making small devices, but the world wide market share of cell phone is less than 1%. Japanese market itself is huge, but it looks to me that sometime in the future, this business model will not hold.

Oh, my cell phone can record a TV program even though I cannot do a reservation-record(why??) and with the recorde movie, a bluetoogh headset does not work(why???). It plays online music, but I cannot play like MP3, OGG, AAC, WMA, anything popular in the outer world(why???). It's a really messed device.