Juggling in Tokyo

Cascade in space

2007-12-03T04:58:00.001-08:00

photo by ken

On a whim, I picked up this book I didn't read even half way through. The Mathematics of Juggling, I found, is actually very readable and interesting book. In the former half of the book, the author goes on in depth about siteswap theorems and proofs, which is kind of boring. But, the latter half is a wealth of surprising and interesting topics.

Here's a picture of some relatively new solutions to so-called n-body problem. Celestial objects like suns obey a simple newtonic gravitational rule, however, solving such a system has long been known quite a tough problem to solve. Only two solutions were known until recently. Both solutions were found in 18th century.

In 1993, some guy found that the 3 body cascade is semi-stable. After his founding, somebody did a numerical analysis and predicted that there might be a combination of 3 suns in a galaxy or in the universe, where the 3 objects are doing the cascade! Amazing...

Tips for making your photo skill better

2007-11-28T02:46:00.001-08:00

I should re-visit this site again. So, as a note, I put the link here.

http://blogs.photopreneur.com/60-sources-of-inspiration-for-photography

Testing Flocker

2007-11-04T19:52:00.003-08:00

I'm just trying out this new thing from Mozilla project?? Flocker is a social browser.

Blogged with Flock

Sony's aquarium

2007-08-07T07:58:00.001-07:00

photo by ken

I found this at the base of the Sony building near Sukiyabashi Crossing in Ginza. This weird notion popped up in my mind that this water tank could be a Sony's state-of-the-art display. I couldn't make out each fish but it seemed sooo real. People were gazing into it. Nobody gazes at fake fish? Nah, if it had been fake fish displayed on a device, it makes perfect sense to me that people can't take their eyes off from it. Taking a glance at a distance and hurrying, I didn't have time to check it out.

I googled it, and found that it was a real tank. The fact that I needed to google to be sure is something. Sony could have done it. Actually, they show super high resolution displays inside the building in which you can see every detail of a fish. Gotta check that out.

I took this photo with my cellphone. Not bad.

Hot summer day

2007-08-05T06:16:00.001-07:00

photo by ken

My daughter was quite happy playing in a tiny pool we set on a balcony. It was a nice summer day.

Matsuri

2007-08-01T06:07:00.001-07:00

photo by ken

There was an anual festival near my house. Surprised to see so many locals gather on a hot and humid summer evening, selling foods and drinks, providing games for kids. Where the hell do they come from? I thought my town is a new urban highly populated are where nobody knows neighbours. Local community is still alive, not that thriving, though.

street performance

2007-07-25T07:22:00.000-07:00

On the way back to the office, I saw this street performance near a TV broadcaster in Shiodome area. Wish that had been a juggling act. The performance wans't that bad, though.

You need to have a license to perform in the street in Tokyo. Some peformers find it completely nonsense. I have heard foreign jugglers complaining about it.

World Jugglng Day 2007

2007-07-02T06:45:00.000-07:00

Lately, I take a lot of pictures. Here's a recent one I shot at World Juggling Day 2007. I liked how it turned out.

Nations who have not yet adopted the metric system (pic)

2007-06-19T04:30:00.001-07:00

What does this prove about the US? Arrogance? Ignorance? It's really cumbersome for people outside the US...

read more | digg story

first step

2007-05-27T07:03:00.000-07:00

This blog has been quite sporadic lately. While I'm offline, my baby started to walk.

juggling photos

2007-05-05T05:10:00.000-07:00

I think that my wife is a better photographer than I am.

Disposable cups are better to the environment

2007-04-13T17:20:00.001-07:00

An interesting paper conducted by a University of Victoria professoer in 1994: Reusable vs. Disposable Cups(http://www.ilea.org/lcas/hocking1994.html).

There are many arguments like this one, which teaches us not to judge by its sterotype image, in this case; disposable cups are bad to the environment.

Dropbox, it's huge

2007-04-12T05:55:00.000-07:00

I wrote a relatively lengthy article about Dropbox a couple days ago, and to my surprise and joy, the article has drawn so much attention from our readers. I was a bit worried that not as much readers would appreciate the huge potential that this venture company possesses as I do. The result; I saw the most huge response on a famous Japanese social bookmark service. Even though virtually nobody knows about Dropbox even in the US at this moment, it could have a gigantic impact on computing. It could change the whole picture of consumer computing. Go check this demonstration movie by yourself, if you are a techie. They'd blow you away. The idea, services and technologies are not necessarily impressive on their own, but just imagine what could be done with it. One example which occured to me as soon as I knew the service was putting your photos directly to your local Windows folder to publish them on Flickr. You can edit those pics without downloading and uploading them each time. Now, who needs a local hard drive? They are woking on Web APIs.

I'm too lazy to translate my Japanese article, but it contains a whole lot more info that I heard from the CEO via email. He seemed like a nice guy and revealed the technologies that they use or developped on their own.

Does age matter? Sure, of course

2007-04-10T05:33:00.000-07:00

Here's a blog entry which contains an interesting graph: http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/pingpongjuggler/16895006.html.
(The text is written in Japanese, but it should cause no problem).

This graph shows the progresses of 5 ball cascade by hobby jugglers, who are a father and the son, 38 and 11 years old respectively. The number on the X axis is the number of days past, and Y axis shows the best record(the number of catches).

The father is the pink, and the green is the kid. As you can see, the kid has been making a bit faster progress, however, I don't think the difference is significant considering the fact that the father practices less while the kid practices long hours after school.

Having said that, I lately saw a graph of visual acuity in general population, which shows an undeniable fact that the ability to catch fast moving object peaks out at the age of around 21-23 and then slowly goes down with age. Memory, whatever it means, should play a significant role in learning a pattern, and we all know that it decays slowly as you age.

Having a positive attitude may be an essential key that keeps someone going, but if every factor is the same, age must be a defining factor. ``Hell, age doesn't matter!'' sounds nice, but it would be just a non-sensical bullshit if you mean what it literally means.

DxO Optics Pro rocks!

2007-04-09T05:39:00.000-07:00

OMG, DxO Optics Pro rocks! Here's some photos corrected by the superb software. Put the mouse cursor on the photo and you will notice the differenc beteween before and after the correction I'm using Nikon D80 and Nikkor VR 18-200, which suffers from annoying distortion.

http://d-code.org/blog/archives/2007/04/dxo_optics_opti.html

6 in 1 hand juggling video

2007-03-25T05:47:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-22T08:59:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-16T08:21:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-03-05T06:19:00.001-08:00

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

2007-03-04T05:48:00.000-08:00

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.

surgery

2007-02-17T20:30:00.001-08:00

My baby daughter had a minor surgery to remove a rather big mole on her face. It's so big that I spotted it right away when she was getting out to this world. I thought it was just some sort of tissue or blood, but soon found out that it's a mole. Since then, we have discussed what we should do about it.

After a copule of weeks, we completely got used to seeing her with the mole, we didn't care as much as others who meet her for the first time. Actually, we even think that the mole makes our baby look cuter.

It's not about what WE think about it, but about what people react to it. Everytime she meets new people, she gets compliments like, wow how cute, she's so adorable etc., at the same time, they pause and look at the mole saying, oh what happened? ah, she's got scar, hey, she's got something on her face...

We cannot leave the mole, and let her future friends tease her. She might get along with it when she gets 30 years old, but I don't think she will be better off without it throughout childhood.

I thought it would be just a quick and easy laser operation, but laser turned out be not the best choice. Cutting it out with a knife seemed the best way and we chose that. The doctor says it will be almost unnoticeable by the time she gets 20 years old. Even though it wasn't a good thing for a little baby to be anesthetized, she got by somehow.

Now, she has a skin-color bandage over the stitches, and I can imagine how she is going to look when the scar cures. She looks much better without the mole. 10 to 20 years later, we, including herself, will not remember how she looked with it.

Wedding party

2007-02-12T05:34:00.000-08:00

With my wife, I went to a wedding party in Aoyama. I've looked forward to this day since I bought a nice new flashgun and wanted to try it. Superb French food was another one that I was looking forward to. Wedding, good for him. :)

Aauarium

2007-02-11T05:57:00.000-08:00

Would've been nice if she had known what she was looking at.

valentine's day

2007-02-11T01:03:00.000-08:00

Februray 14th, Valentine's Day is just around the corner. My 7 month old daughter gave some chocolate. Here in Japan, Valentine's day is the day that women show thier affection or infatuation to men.

Is our small world really that small?

2007-02-10T07:33:00.000-08:00

You may have heard of Kevin Bacon Game or Six degrees of Kevin Bacon. It's based on Small world phenomenon found and theorized in 1960s by a pychologist, Stanley Milgram.

As popular as it may, this small world hypothesis could have been wrong. This guy is saying that Milgram didn't have enough evidence to support his hypothesis. (See: Six Degrees of Separation: An Urban Myth?)

Although arguing something based on a few personal experiences is nonsensical, I really felt that my world is really small for the reason pointed out in the article above; educated people gather in a small circle, which gives them an impression that the world is smaller than it really is.

At a press conference, I approached a guy, whom I was certain that I had met about 13 years ago. He's a graduate of Waseda University like me and we drank some beer together at a small meeting. I remember him saying that he would start working for a well-known publishing company.

I hadn't met him since that occasion, but when he spoke and said his name at another conference, I suddenly recognized his face. We both wound up with a very similar occupation.

That's not all. I googled his name and found that both of our web pages are linked from the same page, where there are only 4 links. I found his name next to mine, meaning that he once was an active member of Mensa, a world-wide organization only puzzle-addicts can join. Mensa Japan is a really small group and we could have met at one of the Mensa meetings.

So, after the conference, I stroke up a conversation with him and said that we had met once before. He didn't seem to remember me. I told him about the Mensa and some names from Mensa Japan, and yes, we could have met if he hadn't stopped going to them on a regular basis.

What a small world, huh? But, come to think of it, we both graduated from the same University almost at the same time, and the reason we met 13 years ago was because we both were fascinated by computer technologies. It's not because our world is small but rather because I live in a small world.

Funny thing is that even though he didn't recognize my face, he knew my name. There's somebody in his company who says to him that I am a very good writer and he should pay attention to my ariticles. There's somebody that I don't know who appreciate me for what do! I was just ecstatic!!

I lost confidence with my job years ago. I felt like I was useless and indeed, for the last 3 years or so, I didn't do much, thinking about the next step. Our industry didn't seem to have a rosy future. Neither did I. All of a sudden, we were put aside from the rest of the world. That's how I felt when working for a paper magazine. Nobody wanted to get IT information from magazines any longer. PC has become a comodity and nobody wants to learn about it, they just want to use it for web browsing and emailing, or whatever.

Actually, the weekly PC magazine I had worked for for the last 3 years was selling well. It still boasts a circulation of around 200,000, which is pretty good for a PC magazine in Japan. Yet, the problem for me was the magazine is rather boring. Articles are short, shallow and stupid.

I learnt how to layout pages in order to make an article more apealing, easy to digest; ideally, no more than 3 seconds to read one page. There are certain rules, techniques and skills required to creat a good page for a weekly magazine.

To learn those kind of things was a good experience, however, my expertise on computer was almost useless. My experience of writing, interviewing meant nothing. On a late friday night, then my boss said to me, ``Look, you have been doing this job for like 10 years. It's a shame that you can't do this easy task''. He was really really bossy and threw my plans away again and again.

I know that I have a negative personality that when accused of something, I tend to admit that, at least I would try to find my short-falls. I was really devasted when the bastard boss made that remark. He wasn't right since what I had been doing was not to make a stupid page for a weekly magazine. I was good at understanding cutting-edge new technologies and writing about them, but not good at page layout. I was a writer, not an page layout guy.

Looking back, he should have given me time to learn. In fact, I think he was the worst boss I had ever had. He was supposed to encourage me, not discourage. There's a reason, I think, for that, though. Once he was transferred to a monthly magazine that I was working for, which was a very technical magazine and all staff members were techy writers. The bastard boss could not write a line since he's not a tech-savvy. I sympathyzed him since he can't write anything interesting. Jokes and wits are banal at best. Then, he ended up sleeping at the desk everyday, compaining that he would quit the company. So, at that magazine, I was good and he wasn't. He was pushed to the verge of nervous breakdown. Therefore, he had a good reason to take a revenge at me when we both got transfered to the weekly magazine, which he had been working for for ages.

Anyways, I had not been confident in what I do for quite some time. Then, somebody in my new office appreciated my article and gave me an in-house award. And then, somebody from a competing company knew me as a good technical writer. Since I joined the new office, page views have been going up on a weekly basis. Things are getting better.

This is why I feel like I am back in MY pool.

Wow, I have never written this much in English. Hope it makes some sense. It's good that my Japanese speaking collegues and friends wouldn't read this. I can't write things like this for my Japanese blog.

Paper or online

2007-02-09T08:05:00.001-08:00

I feel exactly the same way as this guy.

Consumer - Magazines vs. The Web: End of an Era

Of course, when I worked at the magazine I rarely questioned its ability to compete in the marketplace with all the Web upstarts. But now that I’ve been immersed in the Web world for awhile, when I stand back and look at the situation, I think magazines are destined to fail at this enterprise.

One of the reasons I quit the former comapany is because they seemed to be stuck in a rut doing the publishing business for way too long. They just can't make a move toward the web era. My new company is solely dedicated for online media. And, like this guy says in the article above, publishing online doesn't require quality as high as paper-based magazines. To publish article on paper pages, it takes a lot time to layout and count the number of lines, etc. It involves many staff members like a camera guy, writer, editor, page designer, director and such. You have to proofread at least three to four times before your page goes to the printing company.

Web publishing is a whole lot more easy, and I love the speed. It's more like blogging. Actually, I have this strange feeling that now I do blogging professionaly, which is good for me. I like blogging. I always want to tell somebody what I learnt recently, be it something about juggling, camera or, well IT news.

chosen

2007-02-07T08:32:00.000-08:00

My article about what could happen after web2.0 was chosen as an ``article of this month award'' or something like that in the office. Even though it's a completely in-houser award that almost anybody could get, I felt relieved. It's been a little over two months since I came to this new company. I seem to have settled down. Glad I changed my jobs.

6b half shower

2007-02-03T04:39:00.000-08:00

My 6 ball shower is just starting click. Seems like I need much more practice, though.

Tokyo Tower

2007-02-01T16:54:00.000-08:00

With my wife and baby, I went into the tower. We are such tourists or what? Nah, we live pretty near from Tokyo Tower. We just stopped by after buying some tofu.

4 clubs

2007-01-27T17:02:00.000-08:00

I've been sort of working on 4 club fountain for nearly a year. Still stuck around 40-50 catches. Since I only practice clubs once a month, I don't have any problems with this slooow progress.

Chocolate for 158USD !?

2007-01-13T20:45:00.000-08:00

After a press meeting, I stopped at this chocolate shop near my office. Thought it would be a good present for my wife. Even though she has a persistent cold, she cannot take medicine since she feeds the baby from her breast. There may be some medicine breast-feeding mothers can take, but for some reasons, almost every commercial medicine is forbidden here in Japan.

Anyway, the chocolate shop, ``Maison de Chocola Paris'', turns out to be way classy. I couldn't believe my eyes when I found that the tiny box was 18900yen(158USD). 100g(about a quater pound) costs 3800yen(31USD). 2-3USD each piece. Just crazy.

The plate chocolate I bought in my office was 100yen(0.8USD) for 50g. Didn't buy that for my wife, though.

Yoyogi park

2007-01-07T21:02:00.000-08:00

Went to the Yoyogi park to practice juggling. There were about 10 jugglers and 5 idaki players as usual. Since a strong wind warning had been issued in Tokyo, we could hardly practice. It's not the best season to juggle anyways.

With Shigaru-san, we moved to Nagareyama juggling club after the sunset. I can't juggle full-day these days because I'm supposed to take care of my little baby on weekends, so today's an exception. Here's some records I set today. I haven't juggled clubs for a couple of months, but mortor skills seem to persist.

5 ball hi-lo shower (b171) 20->22 rounds
(6x,4)* 46->58 catches
3 ball 2up double pirouette 1->3 times in a cascade
4 club fountain 46->48 catches

chairs

2007-01-04T00:07:00.000-08:00

Went to this furniture shop in Jiyuga-oka. Although I wasn't very much intrigued when my wife told me about the chairs we finally decided to purchase, by the time this truely enthusiastic furniture guy explained the detail about the art of Japanese furniture maestro, I was pretty much convinced that they are of the best kind and are worth the price, which is about USD500 each.

baby

2007-01-03T15:42:00.000-08:00

My baby, Lisa, has been getting mobile day by day. When given a toy on the floor, she makes a tiny cute leap using her arms, supporting her upper body with some trembles. I can tell the progress she makes each day. Babies really grow.

So, I will start this new blog

2007-01-02T04:28:00.000-08:00

So, I will start a new blog in English. This is actually my 3rd blog. I have a juggling blog in Japanese, which I lately proclaimed to slow down, and the normal blog also in Japanese.

My blogs are read by more people than I assume, including not only my close friends but also my families, relatives and collegues. When I started blogging in 1996, I never thought that my 50 year old ant would ever read what I scribbled online. There was no such a word like blog, either. The more, the merrier? Umm, it's not the case.

Most topics will be about my daily life, juggling, books, camera and my family. I will probably write a lot about Japanese topics, which I would very much like to talk about with foreign friends.