Ok, this is some stinky fish. I wanted to try the my.hamachi.cc website with our Hamachi network, so went to go create an account there. Only I can’t, because I won’t accept the license agreement for a license that is “TBD”.

Uff Da!

Bad Hamachi! Bad!

I surprised myself recently — FB friends may have seen a note to that effect. What surprised me is that I am significantly more conservative in my investing profile that I thought I was. Ask around and my guess is that the people who know me best (Although not Jan when I asked. After this long, she knows me better than I know myself it seems…) would say that I am a risk-taker. In many ways I think that they are right — I’ve started companies, invested in start-ups, eaten from street vendors all over Asia, and do any number of things that a typical Type A personality might do, but when it comes to investing for retirement I’m a complete stick in the mud.

The following charts come from E*Trade Brokerage’s Risk Analyzer function. You can click on them to get a larger size chart.

1 Month Chart as of June 14, 2009

3 Month Chart as of June 14, 2009

  YTD Chart as of June 14, 2009

1 Year Chart as of June 14, 2009

  3 Year Chart as of June 14, 2009

When I first looked at one of these charts, it happened to be the YTD chart. My initial reaction was “Wow, I’m getting my hat handed to me compared to the S&P 500 and the Russell 2000.” But when I started to look at what was actually happening, it became apparent that my risk appetite was what was driving the difference. If I went to the 1-Year chart compared to the YTD Chart, the performance results switched places, and if I went to the 3-Month chart the difference became even larger (The 1-Month chart has me beating the S&P, but there’s too much noise in only a month’s worth of data, particularly with current levels of volatility.). What is absolutely apparent, however, is that according to E*Trade (Well, Riskmetrics, who runs this particular service.) my portfolio is significantly lower risk than either the S&P or the Russell.

I was floored at this, because in my portfolio now I include names like the ProShares UltraShort 20+ Year Treasury (TBT) and Linn Energy (LINE). I have had a significant commodities position since about 2007 through Freeport-McMoran Copper & Gold Inc. (FCX), the Fidelity Select Gold (FSAGX) mutual fund, and various oil stocks, including over the years British Petroleum (BP), Conoco Phillips (COP), PetroChina (PTR), and Pengrowth (PGH). These, I was sure, were pumping up my beta and making my portfolio generate a higher return and well as a higher risk profile.

Wrong! Obviously my beta is nowhere near where I thought it was (And thankfully so…). So what’s going on? I’d like to make sure that I can keep these long-term trend lines and alpha compared to the S&P, but for the last 3 months I’m underperforming by a huge margin.

It comes down to two things: First, I don’t like risk that I can’t measure. For that reason I went from almost 100% equities in late September to about 50% equities before the first big drop in early October. I stayed there until late February-early March, when I went back to about 75% equities until late early April, when I started going back to cash and dropped to about 60% equities, which is where I am now. I did this because the biggest driver for me in investing is a  macroeconomic focus over 12-18 months, and right now I can’t get the macro-economic picture to agree with the stock market. The US government has spent or committed to spending somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5 trillion dollars. To put that in perspective, let’s say you’re a world-class auctioneer and can count 1 to 10 in 1 second. If you counted for 7,925 years you would just get to 2.5 trillion, and that’s without toilet breaks… That has certainly propped up the market, but like a cripple leaning on a crutch, unless the source of the problem is addressed the problem doesn’t get better. And in the case of this analogy, it must be noted that the crutch is borrowed and must be returned at some point in the future.

This $2.5 trillion figure is interesting as well because it also happens to be about how much money the US government raised in taxes for the 2008 tax year and give or take a $100 billion or so is also about how much they plan on getting this year. What is more telling is how US government debt is growing. — and let’s not forget those “off-balance-sheet” debts over at the Fed. To think anything other than that this is ultimately US government debt is just ridiculous. In the end, the investors in US Treasuries, such as China, the Gulf Oil States, and other net creditor nations, have to make a decision that their money is generating a return that will at least counterbalance the risk of investing in those securities. At some point we’ll reach that final dollar that breaks the proverbial camel’s back and those investors will flee. Scarily, this will not be an orderly, long-term trend, but in most probability will be a catastrophic “singularity” type occurrence after which the history books will refer to something other than “Pax Americana” when referring to the era.

I just can’t make the numbers work between this worldview and the current stock market performance.

The second thing is that I *do* have a risk appetite that is higher than most people if we structure that statement to only be valid  for the stocks in which I invest, not my entire portfolio including cash. I have no idea what my beta is over the last two years (I’m way too lazy to go back and calculate all that.), but for the stocks I have now, my beta is around 1.2, meaning that over time my portfolio should move at a rate of 1.2x the S%P 500. In other words, if the S&P 500 moves 1 percent, my portfolio should theoretically move 1.2%, and if the market moves 10%, I should move 12%.  However, if  my cash position is laso included in the calculation of my overall portfolio return, it works as a stabilizer. My inherently conservative Scandinavian soul sleeps better at night right now with cash in the bank, some gold and oil stocks as proxies for not directly holding more foreign currency, and some some yen-denominated assets here in Japan to complete the balanced picture.

In the end I, like most other people, have lost money in the stock market over the past three years. What frightens me is that I don’t see the next three years being better than this one, so I’ll sleep with that cash a bit longer. Get me back to 750 in the S&P or around 7000 in the Dow and I’ll be back to 100% equities for at least a while. At S&P 850/Dow 8000 I’ll probably get to 80% equities. Failing that I’ll stick around 40% cash and the rest in companies with strong balance sheets and fat dividends.

There’s a cost to being a pain in the ass (PITA). Whether we are on the cost generation side or cost bearing side, we all know this. A lot of businesses, however, don’t explicitly work these costs into their business model. By not doing so they implicitly create a system where their good customers (Low PITA factor) subsidize their bad ones (High PITA factor). This is *exactly* the wrong result you want from a pricing strategy.

In the system I have used for years, the base PITA value is 1 (one). When you start with me or with my company, your PITA factor is 1, which means that when we quote you, we do so on a purely traditional cost basis. The following example shows that with a PITA of 1, there is no change to keeping or dropping the PITA factor from the calculation.

Input Cost *( Mark-up * PITA) = Selling Price

becomes

Input * (Mark-up * 1) = Selling Price

becomes

Input * Mark-up = Selling Price

So, by increasing the PITA factor we increase the selling price. If PITA=2, then we get the following.

Input Cost * Mark-up * PITA = Selling Price

becomes

Input * Mark-up * 2 = Selling Price

becomes

Input * Mark-up = 2*Selling Price

The customer now gets a price twice as high as they would if they were less finicky, less pushy, required less handholding, or any number of other reasons that would drop their PITA factor. Likewise, if PITA=0.5, the customer’s price drops in half.  Obviously these are extreme examples, and my typical PITA factor swings between 0.9 and 1.2.

On thing that becomes apparent here is that (At least in my case…) customers get penalized more for bad behavior than they are credited for good behavior. Why is this so? Well, to be a bit snarky about it, because we can. To be more precise in the answer, there is a lower limit to the price we can offer a customer and still make money. On the other hand, there is no theoretical limit to how much we can charge. To make another extreme example, the price that a US company will sell a military component to a British company is many, many multiples less that the cost of the same component sold to Kim Jung Il, whose PITA factor include legal risk, payment risk, sovereign risk, and get-kidnapped-and-held-in-a-North-Korean-prison-camp risk.

Nothing in the idea of a PITA factor is new or revolutionary, but I have seen very few companies that make it an explicit part of their pricing activity. One reason is that it’s hard to explain to a customer that you can’t lower your price any more because they are a pain in the ass. You can and should, however, explain to them that with certain modifications to the business relationship, price reductions could indeed be possible. This forces both you and the customer to evaluate where the costs lie and it changes an implicitly unfair and ineffecient system into one where you make the relationships more explicit, and then use that additional information to drive sales and pricing activity.

The spam trollers will hit this, bounce to any one of 3.2 trillion randomly generated pages, and then start downloading an infinite number of completely random e-mail addresses. Once their database of e-mail addresses has been sufficiently polluted, it becomes unusable due to the high number of resources required to successfully send e-mails, and therefore it becomes unsalable.

 Uff da! (In a good way!)

Something strange happened just before the holidays and XP (Pro) became very unstable. At the same time, our router stopped working completely — no power-on light — and three hard disks developed sector errors, so my guess is that we had a spike that fried the router and crashed/rebooted XP in such a way that things died. My account was the one that was logged on at the time, and among the various oddities that occurred were things such as minimized programs not appearing in the task bar, not being able to access certain shared directories that other accounts could access, etc., etc. After spending several hours trying system restore points (all failed), I did a repair installation of XP.

After the repair installation, XP appeared to work fine for everyone except me. My account still had issues with minimized programs, etc., so I created a new account, moved my data to the new account, deleted the old account, and then renamed the new account with the old account’s name. Now everything looks like before — and actually works again — unless you go and look at the directory structure. Renaming the new account with the old account’s name changes things on the surface, but inside the new account keeps the new directory name. C’est la vie.

Now I have updates to do. The downloads begin and I go to sleep. The next morning, I shut down the account and see that 88 updates are going to install. That’s going to take a while, so I go get coffee. When I come back up, XP has restarted, so I force another update and am surprised to see that I still have 88 updates to install. Time to run the cycle again…

This time I watch, and as XP starts to shut down it begins by saying “Installing update 1 of 88″ and gives the various warnings about not powering down the machine. Seeveral seconds later, however, it gives the “shutting down” message and indeed shuts down. When I reboot and check, nothing has been updated. Off to updates.microsoft.com where I  manually go through the update routine and get a failure message. I search Microsoft support for various terms, including:

XP update failure
XP update fails no error message
XP update downloads but will not install
XP updates will not install
etc.

Nada. Zippo from Microsoft. Don’t get me wrong, the knowledge base has hundreds of entries which show when searching for the above terms, but nothing relates to my problem. I eventually search using a whole sentence from the failure message.

“A problem on your computer is preventing updates from being downloaded or installed.”

But this still gets me nothing. Finally, I search all of the above terms on Google, and on that last sentence I find what I need. It seems that when you do a repair installation of XP, certain modules may not get registered in the kernal properly and must be manually registered. Some of these modules affect the operation of Windows Update. The process to register them is shown below.

1. Click your START button and go up to Accessories.
2. Find  “Command Prompt” and start it. An ugly black box with some white text in it will appear. For those of you who never got to experience DOS, this is what it looked like.
3. Now you need to type in some text. Type each line below exactly as you see it and press enter. After you press enter, a confirmation box that the “DLL was registered” will appear from Windows. Just click OK and proceed to the next line.regsvr32 wuapi.dll
   regsvr32 wuaueng1.dll
   regsvr32 wuaueng.dll
   regsvr32 wucltui.dll
   regsvr32 wups2.dll
   regsvr32 wups.dll
   regsvr32 wuweb.dll
4. When done, you can rejoin the modern era by closing the Command Prompt window by clicking the ‘X’ in the upper righthand corner like a normal Windows program, or you can type ‘exit’, followed by enter. Either way, Command Prompt goes away.

At this point, Windows Update should work fine.

Uff Da!

I don’t know when this started, but PHX now has full and free wireless access across the entire airport. I just read this morning that Denver will do the same thing starting this week, but with advertisements that will need to be clicked through in order to get to the web. So be it — nothing is absolutely free. Either way, this is a great set of developments.

One other thing: At Sky Harbor’s Terminal 4 at the Southwest gates they have set up these little podiums with power strips and USB ports for charging. Southwest always got the business traveller, and no more so than now.

Man, it has been a *long* time since I said good things about an airline or an airport. Feels good!

I’ve been tossing around the idea of setting up an Opdahls-only VoIP network for a while. We live in Tokyo (Although I travel 50+% of the time), my brother and his family are down near Los Angeles, my sister and her family are in the Portland, Oregon area, and my parents split their time between Colorado and the Northwest. A VoIP network would be an elegant solution to keeping us all in touch, and by assigning each of us a virtual extension number on the system, a free phone call takes nothing more than picking up the line and dialing the extention of whatever location you want to reach. Conference calls at Christmas or other holidays are a no brainer, and in the future I may actually start trunking some channels in for calls out to actual phone lines.

So…what to do. As I said, I’ve been thinking about this for a while and have already played around with a PBX-in-a-Flash system a couple of times. It works great and I am currently nosing around for a system on which to host a full Linux installation (I’ve VMWare’d it until now.). I was at Fry’s in Tempe today looking at the Intel ICH7-M as a system base and decided to go look at what they had for ATAs (Analog Telephone Adapters). They had the usual Vonage PAP2 systems there (Both old and v2), but what caught my eye and my pocketbook was a shelf full of Earthlink-branded SPA2002 systems (So the SPA2002-ER) at $29.95 each. I now have two, and after tonight’s successful testing in my hotel room I will go and buy several more tomorrow.

The SPA2002-ER is locked into Earthlink, so in order to use them in my OpTel plan my next step was to unlock them. A quick search around the internet showed that the unlock was pretty straightforward, but I didn’t find a step-by-step guide. Here’s a write-up of how I “upgraded” my unit.

First, disconnect your network from the internet to prevent the SPA2002 from contacting the mothership. I don’t know what will happen if they do connect, but some links seem to indicate that once they’ve done that, you’re doomed — Perhaps they update the password when they connect and make it so that you cannot get in as admin any longer. In any case, unplug your cable or DSL modem from your router. If your modem is your router, unplug it from whatever is bringing it the internet signal. You need to keep the router portion running so that you can assign an IP address to your SPA2002 and your PC, so a hub alone will not do it unless you are handy with Linux and setting up a DHCP server yourself. If I’ve just lost you and you can’t figure out how to keep your router alive while not connected to the internet, this project isn’t for you. Go spend the extra $20 and buy an unlocked one.

Once you are sandboxed, plug your SPA2002 in to your router and then into power. Once it has booted up, plug in a phone and dial ****. Once the voice starts speaking in the phone, dial 110# and then note down the IP address that gets read back to you. It will probably be something like 192.168.1.2. Now make sure that your PC is also connected to the router (Could be wired or wireless. I was wireless.), open a browser, and in the address bar at the top type in the address you were given. For me it was 192.168.2.2. This will open up the main configuration page. Click the ADMIN LOGIN link in the upper right and enter the following as your username and password:

user: admin
pass: 0rLhnT34vBg2SqwbSoDyGslvF (Thanks to the unknown source of this password! That one didn’t come easily unless you worked at Earthlink…)

After that, click into the ADVANCED link in the upper right of your screen. Now we are going to scrub out all references to Earthlink to prevent the SPA2002 from knowing it was ever anything but an unlocked box. If you don’t see some of these entries on your screen it is because you didn’t click the ADVANCED link and get into the detailed configuration screens.

In the System tab…
1.) Kill everything under System Configuration in the “Restricted Access Domains” field.
2.) Kill everything under the Optional Network Configuration (Hey — It’s optional, so my theory is that unless they prove I need it, I don’t.)
Now click Submit All Changes. When you get your screen back, go back to the Systems tab and check your results to make sure you are clean. Note that you can also change the Admin Password in this tab as well. If you do, you will need to log on as Admin again with your new password after you Submit All Changes. I highly recommend changing the password as it will prevent your SPA2002 from being accessed and changed if for some reason it does talk with Earthlink servers.

In the Provisioning tab…
1.) Kill the profile rule in the Configuration Profile Section.
Submit All Changes.

Congratulations on your new unlocked SPA2002 box… :-)

Now that your SPA2002 is clean, it’s time to update the firmware to get rid of any possible remaining Earthlink nonsense as well as get you current on what features are available. At the Linksys website they have firmware version 3.1.2. At the Sipura website they have version 3.1.5. I went with the Sipura v3.1.5 and it seems to work just fine. This version seems to add some features and fix some bugs that are still in the Linksys v3.1.2, so unless I have problems, I’ll stay here. I’ll post if I change for whatever reason. For reference, out of the four units I have unlocked so far, 3 were already v3.1.5 and one was v3.1.8. Despite there being no change in the version number, I decided to re-flash the firmware on all the v3.1.5 units with the Sipura firmware as a precaution.

To upgrade the firmware, download whatever firmware you decide to use and unpack it. As far as the upgrade itself, run the .exe file, follow the instructions, and you will be fine. One note is that if you have Windows Firewall running, it will attempt to block the firmware install routines. Even if you allow the program through the firewall the first firmware upgrade attempt will fail. I simply ran it again and it worked the second time. If it doesn’t work, go back and check that upgrades are allowed under the Provisioning tab. They should be allowed by default, but you never know. Once you’ve upgraded, you can re-enter the configuration screen through your browser again and in the first page you can check the version field to see whether the upgrade was successful.

A last few notes. The above process worked for me for 4 units and should work for you. That said, unit #3 (v3.1.5 firmware) choked during the firmware upgrade and refused to do anything until it had sat without power for a while. Even then it wouldn’t connect with my router so that I could access it through my browser. It did, however, respond to the telephone prompts, so I reset the unit to factory defaults (****. then 73738#, then 1 to confirm) and was able to recover it. When it had reset to factory defaults, all of the Earthlink settings were recovered as well, so I had to go back and clean them out a second time.

That’s it! Now it’s a matter of actually putting together the VoIP network, but I’m going to play the fool at first and follow the smart guys over at www.nerdvittles.com. I was waiting for the Asterisk 1.4 version to get established, and they did a good job of it. Now all I have to do is get off of my duff and implement it… :-)

So, we now have control of opdahls.com again. Thanks to Registerfly and Kevin Medina we lost control for several months. There’s not much to say except to give a hearty UFF DA! and get on with life. Interested parties can read more at the Wikipedia article.

BTW, we now own opdahls.net and theopdahls.com. Anyone interested? :-)

This e-mail was just wrong on so many levels that I saved it and am posting it here for everyone to laugh at and enjoy. The names have not been changed to protect the innocent, and although I have considered the karmic effect of putting all of these harvestable addresses here, my assumption is that these are also the same kind of people who respond to Viagra and breast-enlargement spam and are already on every large mass mailer’s list of known idiots. I imagine some of them are even starting to wonder when that check from Nigeria is coming. Maybe if they just pay that last “transfer fee” that was requested…

Uff da!

I own MSFT as an investment, so some would say I am at cross-purposes with this post, but one has to wonder at some of the moronic things happening in Redmond. Like this…

Today Jan and I decided that (once again) we would input all of our investment data, etc., etc., into the PC and get a better feel for where our financials are. We used to be very good about this, but the move to Japan made everything multicurrency (Actually, some of our investments before the move with in JPY as well…), and our version of Quicken didn’t handle them. It turns out that the current version of MS Money does, and with aplomb, so today we went to www.microsoft.com and purchased MS Money 2007 Premium. Note that we purchased it directly from Microsoft.
It turns out that Digital River handles online purchase/download transactions for Microsoft. So far, so good — I’ve used DR before. Money also has a rebate going, so even better. The purchase goes through and we get to the final download page. Money (The software, not the real thing, unfortunately…)  is coming down the pipes and I go to download the rebate when I get this little spitball in the face. The boldface italics below are mine to make it easier to find.

Order Information

Order Date: 8/13/2006
Order Number: 3*******3
Order Total: $79.99
The charge(s) will appear on your credit card as “DR*Microsoft Money”.You will be sent an email with your order details at the address provided.

So, if I don’t want to be on their spam list, I can’t download what I just purchased? This seems more than enough justification to call out “Foul!” in a loud voice. DR disappoints me, as does MSFT. This is just plain blackmail of the lowest order. One more reason to support open source. Did I mention that I have an employee now who although running on XP is using Open Office, Thunderbird, Firefox, Sunbird, and Ghostscript? It’s an experiment to see how many problems he has, (He’s pretty good on computers, so if he has problems, everyone will…), and none to late.

< UPDATE>

Thunderbird and Firefox are still a go (No surprise — It’s what I have been using at home for the last two years. Thunderbird routinely munches up Japanese filenames when they are placed as attachments and gives them names such as “AT00090.doc” instead of “議事録.doc,” but I knew that. Sunbird is still pretty useless because you can’t easily share the information, but it’s still alpha software, so I knew that as well. Ghostscript works great, but so do a thousand other freeware PDF creation programs (Although the commercial Fineprint/PDF Factory products are still by far — by far! — the best. I have an ancient version from years ago and it blows even the real-deal Adobe products away. It’s been one of the best productivity software purchases I’ve ever made — They even responded the same day and sent a software update several days later to an e-mail I sent them about a formatting problem on a PDF file I created that had a Japanese font embedded in a WMF in the footer of an English language DOC file. Adobe Acrobat Elements still can’t get that to appear correctly, BTW…).

But here’s the kicker: $70 NFR (Not for retail.) MS Office 2003 Standard, available at multiple, reputable sites. (See Surplus Computers, #9Software,, etc.). That’s less than an hour of my staff’s time, so the first time that I avoid OpenOffice’s crappy compatibility with PowerPoint, I’m ahead of the game. And that’s what it’s all about in business. I’ll use 7zip, Shareaza, or FileZilla because they work well and work seamlessly with my other software. I’ll also use OpenOffice at home, but it’s not ready for he workplace yet.
Uff Da!

(An episode where Peter screams out loud at stupidity in the Japanese service industry…)

I’m a businessman, and businessmen (Or businesswomen, businesspeople, drunken monkeys, or lobotomized fleas for that matter…) will tell you that in order to win or keep business, you do things to make your customers’ lives easier. Japan is reknowned the world over for its service industry’s fine attention to detail, its uncompromising quality control, and the pedestal upon which it places the consumer.That is, of course, unless you are a Japanese bank.

Case in point: Our main bank here in Japan is SMBC, or the Sumitomo-Mitsui Banking Corporation. Now I owe SMBC a lot — Without them Jan and I would have been up natto creek without any soy sauce (More on that in another post at some point.), but today I was stopped in my tracks — I actually cringed, and you know that knot you get in your chest when you feel helpless rage? Well, it grew to the point that I thought I would explode all over my LCD screen. Why?

The SMBC website only allows one to access information on their mortgage during the period between 9am and 9pm, Monday through Friday, excluding holidays.

UFF DA!

Good article here –> http://blog.fastcompany.com/archives/2006/03/08/chinas_wondrous_web.html

The whole Chinese take on the internet (Do I get credit — or snarls? — for the term “Chinternet? :-) ) is really amazing. I first noticed this about 4-5 years ago when taking business trips to China. It was the easiest place in the world to get internet connections, because every municipality had a free dial-up service. All you had to do was ask at the front desk for the number and voila!, you were on-line (Albeit at 56Kb back then…). It didn’t take long to figure out why the Chinese government was so beneficent — Giving free dial-ups means that they control what you get to see (And perhaps that they get to filter your emails for any interesting commercial or other information…). It’s a bit different now, but only in the sense that you get free ADSL at hotels — The Wizard of Oz still sits behind the curtain pulling levers and issuing puffs of hot air to make you believe only what he wants you to see.

An aside: I added a comment to the blog after the Fastcompany article. Some people just don’t get it at all. They need to step outside of their box, breathe some air from the real world, and then get on with it.

Uff-da!

“A revolutionary way to send cargo into space, the LiftPort Space Elevator will consist of a carbon nanotube composite ribbon eventually stretching some 62,000 miles from earth to space. The LiftPort Space Elevator will be anchored to an offshore sea platform near the equator in the Pacific Ocean, and to a small man-made counterweight in space. Mechanical lifters are expected to move up and down the ribbon, carrying such items as people, satellites and solar power systems into space.”

February 13, 2006: “…LiftPort successfully launched an observation and communication platform a full mile in the air and maintained it in a stationary position for more than six hours while robotic lifters climbed up and down a ribbon attached to the platform. The platform, a proprietary system that the company has named “HALE” (High Altitude Long Endurance), was secured in place by an arrangement of high altitude balloons, which were also used to launch it. The robotic lifters measured five feet, six inches and climbed to a height of more than 1500 feet, surpassing its last test record by more than 500 feet.”

http://www.liftport.com/

You gotta wonder about stuff like this. Is it possible? Is it a scam? (It’s a ‘C’ corporation, so they’re looking for lots of investors — Otherwise it would have been set up as an LLC.) They’ve made it up 1500 feet or a bit more than a quarter mile. To be successful, the orbiting anchor of such an elevator would have to be in a geosynchronous orbit, or around 36,000km up in the air. In other words, they’ve made it 0.001% of the way there so far. :-) Another way of thinking about this is the speed the elevator would have to reach. The fastest elevator in the world right now runs at around a kilometer a minute, or 60Kph. At this speed it would take about 600 hours to get from the earth to the anchor — That’s 25 days. Of course most orbits are much closer. The space station, for example is at 345km, so only 6 hours away.

Anyway…seems like a pie-in-the-sky idea to me. So much to go wrong and so little one can do about it.

Why is it that in the United States one sometimes still cannot get a WiFi link at an airline lounge? It’s bad enough that we have to pay for them most of the time (Admitedly this is also true in Europe. There are also enlightened airlines, such as Continental, that make the service free.), but to not even have anything available at all? It costs what, a few dollars a day in service fees to maintain an ADSL line into a WiFi router? I know that United is in trouble, but this is exactly the type of service that makes a lounge more useful than slumping over to your gate and waiting there. I ended up walking 10 minutes over to the Continental Lounge and leeched a weak signal from outside in the hallway where I huddled down protecting the lone wall outlet providing me power from several others doing the same. LAX doesn’t even offer paid WiFi in the general airport areas!

Uff da!

It is fine to have the electrical outlet at one’s house or work under the desk, yet I think that all of us who move notebook computers around would agree that having one on the desk surface or on the wall above the desk makes it easier to connect and disconnect when necessary.

It is poor design to have the electrical outlet in a hotel room be under a desk. It is ridiculous to actually have to move the flippin’ desk in order to get to the outlet. Yet one could assume that the person will likely be in the room for several days and that the initial inconvenience is not so bad.

It is unbelievably stupid to have the electrical outlet be under the desk in the business area of an airline lounge. The average time a person spends at the desk is likely less than an hour, and yet there we are in suits or business skirts hunched over trying not to swear while we fumble around in the darkness under the desk trying to get juice. Why? The wall unit and desk are made of the same material, so they were installed together. I guess the architects and interior designers still use rulers, a compass, and slide rules in order to get their work done. Someone really ought to introduce them to the concept of a computer.

This is the first of what I have unambiguously called “Ridiculous Things.” It will be a blathering (As opposed to blistering…) attack on all things ridiculous that one finds in the course of living one’s life. An entry could range from the prosaic (It’s ridiculous that the plastic bags in cereal boxes are so damn hard to open properly.) to the sublime (It’s ridiculous that the US Government has spent approximately USD1.2B on travel and associated expenses over the past two years for government employees to attend conferences and seminars in far-flung areas of the world.). Of course, it’s equally ridiculous to think that my input will have any affect on the situation(s) mentioned, but I’ll enjoy less stress and live longer.

Uff da! I’ve screwed up and deleted a post. Blog spammers hit me with 20 posts of online casino crap this morning, and when I tried to delete the first comment, I instead succeeded in deleting the original post. A quick search of the web shows no way of recovering it, so goodbye to my Shenzhen post.

Sigh.

Phil’s Blog: Hope and Disappointment

If this is out where people are reading it, then I’ve obviously overcome an initial unease about whether to post publicly on this topic or not. The initial post is over 7 months old, so the adage about sleeping dogs perhaps comes into play. At this point I am writing, as I often do, to force my own head to wrap itself around what I feel or think about a complex and complicated issue. Jan said that if I feel strongly, I should post, but I shouldn’t post just to engage in debate. The truth is that I feel strongly about very few things. This, however, crossed the line.

As a preliminary statement, I would like to say that I only heard about this on Saturday night, so whatever has happened since the May posting is not within my scope of comment. However, other than the September posting, Mr. Clinton has not clarified, modified, or otherwise changed the scope of his original post. It would seem to me, then, that there has been no change in thinking, and that therefore my comments, however delayed, are still valid. Also, I have no pet projects at Nishimachi and no strong sense of maintaining the traditions of the school other than to make sure that the ones which are still useful are retained. Finally, I invested the time to go and read Mr. Clinton’s other posts — all of them — in the hope of gaining a better understanding of what, as he put it, “makes him tick.”

I heard about Mr. Clinton’s blog in the context of a group of Nishimachi parents who had gotten together for a dinner. Two were full Japanese families (Both parents were Japanese nationals.) and two were American. Of the American families, I’d say that we fall less into the typical expat mold and more into that of the international cross-cultural. Jan and I, for example, have lived on and off in Japan for a long time and are both fluent in Japanese. We also have traveled extensively and speak languages, however poorly, other than Japanese and English. I bring this up not to brag, but because it is important to the mindset we had when selecting Nishimachi. I’ll leave the details of the other families out of it — they can decide to add comments or not as they see fit.

When my company pulled me back to Japan in 2003, we had to make a decision about where Ellie would go to school. We discussed Japanese schools both because of the impact that would have on Ellie’s Japanese language skills and because I am an “inpat” rather than an “expat.” That is, I was hired here locally out of graduate school and then later sent to the USA. As far as my company is concerned, I came home in 2003, so my package doesn’t look anything like many of the parents whose companies pay for their children’s schooling. Ellie, however, was very concerned about her ability to read and write well-enough to participate fully in a Japanese school, so we all decided to look at the international schools that were available.

We spent a long time looking. I was coming to Japan monthly anyway, so it wasn’t a big deal to make sure that we learned about, talked with parents about, visited, asked consultants, and did everything else possible to make sure that we made the right decision. In the end we chose Nishimachi. I’m the misbegotten child of typical US public schools through high school, while Jan was in a private all-girls Christian school through high school. Jan’s experience led her to initially lean toward Seisen, but that changed after she visited NIS and spoke with faculty and parents there. She felt exactly the same thing that I did when I first visited NIS: Nishimachi just feels “right.”

Now that’s a hard statement to explain, but it’s at the crux of where, in my opinion, I feel Mr. Clinton has made a mistake in his efforts to convince others of his arguments. “Right” for Jan and me, and “right” for someone else can easily be different things, so I hope to not make the impression that by my use of this word that anything else is “wrong.” Perhaps it would be better to say that NIS suits us, but that seems almost too detached for something as profoundly important as where one decides to send one’s child to be schooled. No, the best word for this is “right,” but without the negative connotation that anything else is wrong. NIS is right for us.

So why is it right? It is right because it is not an American school. Likewise, it is right because it is not a French school, a British school, a Christian school, a Japanese school or any other nationality of school. Yes, it has a distinctly American flavor, but NIS is at its heart both literally and figuratively an international school. That is what drew us to Nishimachi, and in talking with many of the other parents who send their children up the hill every morning, that is what has drawn them as well. From the focus on bilingualism to the actual mix of Japanese and non-Japanese in the school’s population, NIS provided and still provides to us the rounded international framework for which we were looking.

Mr. Clinton vented a frustration that many of us who have worked for any length of time in Japan have experienced — that of pushing against a wall that refuses to budge. But to be in Mr. Clinton’s position and say something as volatile as ” My culture places value on movement over stagnation” is just wrong. There is no positive connotation for the word “stagnation,” and there is no way for someone coming from the Japanese culture to read that statement and not feel wounded. To follow it up by saying “I’m predisposed to seeking the best way, not the oldest way…” rubs salt in that wound in a way that actually caused me to cringe when I read it. Seeing as how he comments earlier that “these people” may have “lost a sense of self and a confidence in self,” one would think that he could have perhaps been just a bit more sensitive. In any case, while acknowledging that America’s model has been very successful, let us also spend a moment thinking about how much Japan has changed in the past 60 years and compare it to the USA. One has only to walk from Shibuya Station to Harajuku Station some weekend afternoon, passing though Meiji Jingu on the way, to see living examples of both Japanese tradition and a techno-pop modern world culture in the space of ten minutes. For that matter, let us think about how the Japanese word kaizen entered the English language: Continuous directed change, anyone?

Now, Mr. Clinton had spent almost a year at NIS charged with developing a new curriculum, and having just gone through a year of re-engineering many of the processes and structures at my company, I can sympathize somewhat. That said, insulting people by disparaging their culture is not the way to get things done anywhere in the world. We can have our personal opinions and still function professionally without those opinions affecting our work. By posting these statements in a public forum as he has, Mr. Clinton has damaged not only his ability to interact and work with many of the parents at NIS, but it appears to me that he has also come dangerously close to damaging the school’s reputation and standing. The “For Nishimachi Readers” post in September could have done a lot to fix the situation and make this post unnecessary, but it offers only a statement of innocence and nothing more than an invitation to read the blog for proof. I did, and it didn’t help.

I do not believe that Mr. Clinton is a racist. I do believe that in the May post and in some others he shows an ethnocentricity (and here) that does not do NIS justice. Jan and I are sending our daughter to NIS because it is not an American school and because it is an International school.. We are sending her there because the unique international culture at NIS is going to provide her with a perspective that acknowledges that we do not live in a world of black and white but in one cloaked by myriads of gray shadows that are brightened or darkened depending on our own backgrounds and perceptions. Change can be good, but change for change’s sake isn’t necessarily so. As Mr. Clinton says, Americans tend to thrive on change, but it seems to me that both Japan and NIS have done quite well with their own set of standards. How typically American, I am sad to say, is the viewpoint that we know best. How typically black and white. And lest anyone think I am not proud of being American, I stand and sing when the national anthem is played, it brings tears to my eyes, and I can think of no other country on earth of which I would rather be a citizen. It is a great nation, but it is no greater than any other nation whose people work, pay taxes, elect leaders, and do their best in an ever-chaotic world. NIS will help teach my daughter that.

Maybe I should just let this go, but now that I’ve spent a couple of nights thinking about and writing about this, the post will go out within a few minutes. Mr. Clinton talks about the Japanese woman who approached him with her concerns and his own naiveness in hoping that she would understand his position. What he doesn’t seem to understand is that by even approaching him and broaching the topic, this lady did what many Japanese would be unable to do. She came forward and spoke in a culture where this is sometimes difficult to do — particularly in a culture that places teachers and school officials in such a position of authority. I hope that Mr. Clinton did not speak directly to her as he has spoken to us in his blog, but unfortunately I can deduce from his post that he did not attempt to meet her halfway. The lack of direct feedback on the blog is probably also an artifact of the Japanese desire to avoid direct confrontation. I don’t have those reservations.

I hope that this post starts a dialogue that improves everyone’s understanding. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Plato writes in Socrates’ voice and argues that the written word is deceitful. It is deceitful because although the words on the page appear to speak to us as if they were alive, if we question them they maintain a deathly silence except to repeat what they have already said. For this reason Plato wrote almost exclusively in dialogues while Socrates himself refused to write at all. We must continue to communicate, or our words become cold and dead, only fossilized remains of the original living idea.

In closing, here’s a quote I like. I think it draws a bead on the whole “global ambassador” aspect of NIS very well. We must always be aware of our own paradigm — even more so when operating in a culture other than our own.

Your paradigm is so intrinsic to your mental process that you are hardly aware of its existence, until you try to communicate with someone with a different paradigm.

Donella Meadows, The Global Citizen

Hmm…Up to w.bloggar 4.0 now.

No problems with the install or anything (So far, that is…), but I wasn’t planning on an upgrade only a week after getting the first install running. Uff Da! I suppose if this were commercial software, I’d instead be talking about installing a patch rather than an upgrade, so I it’s really 12 of one or a dozen of the other. Anyway, this is a full rev upgrade, so here we go. WordPress is now officially supported, so we’ll see if that means anything.

Yeah, this is all real interesting, I know. I promise to start some content of merit once I get through setting the all up and getting my photo site secured – Do you know how long it takes to upload 4000 photos!?

Andrew Harris Wines

My favorite vineyard ever (Well, so far, anyway, and it’s stayed in this spot for almost 2 years now…).

The “Vision” series is a shiraz-cabernet blend that is so dark you could use it as ink to write a novel, and it’s about as easy to sink your teeth into as a good book as well. Just watch out for the sediment — I know some people like it, but this is a bit over-the top! Uff da!

“Double-Vision” is a velvety sparkling Shiraz that isn’t as dark as it’s blended cousin, but if you want something a bit more interesting that the average Brut, try this.