w00kie’s ramblings

Last July I wrote about a popular Japanese webservice that built an image of your brain out of your name. Everyone at work and on TV was talking about it. The concept was even copied overseas (replacing the kanjis with emoticons).

This weekend I saw on TV another of those websites that you know everyone will talk about. Its name is 住所パワー which aims at calculating your "Address Power" from the number and proximity of restaurants, schools, train stations, etc.

My address, even though I live out in the relative boondocks, 20 minutes from 池袋 - the closest station on the Yamanote line - into 埼玉県, scored a nice 3,321 points and is ranked A-class.

Here are the results by criterion, with the number of shop and the distance to the closest one (I added the translations). I probably owe my good score to being extremely close to the station and across the street from a supermarket on one side and a mall on the other.

Note that the number of Love Hotels and 風俗 - basically any kind of shop/bar/club/salon related to the sex industry - comes as a criterion, although they probably need a broader databases because there are at least 2 dozen hostess bars/キャバクラ in a 200m circle around my place that should have gotten me a lot more points...

January sees its share of administrative tasks for the new year that just started. So I received some new forms from my office's executive assistant and as usual the English information sheet is of great help:

Special Tax Credit
Inform of special tax credit (deduction of housing loan) system like house loan etc. of residence tax. It comes to be able to deduct the amount of a special deduction like the house loan etc. that were not able to be deducted from the income tax is able to deduct from the residence tax in 2008 fiscal year.

Okay... As usual I'm going to stamp the paper with my hanko and give it back praying that I have not signed over my soul to the devil...

I just received the new Health Insurance Bulletin from my company and we have a new installment of my favorite healthy advice series about dental hygiene:

A tip about teeth
Winter is here.
Do your teeth feel sensitive when you bite into something cold?
It might be a gapalong the line between your teeth and gums.
This happens when you brush your teeth with a strong scrubbing motion from left to right.
Brushing this way can wear down your teeth.
Try visiting your dental clinic to ask which method of brushing is best suited to your teeth, before they become damaged.

Japanese people must really have weak dentitions, seeing as most of the toothbrushes you find in the stores here are softer than mohair, I really doubt you could damage your gums with that. Not as funny as the last one where they we're looking to cash in on any opportunity to remove my teeth...

My job consists of writing functional specifications and generally managing the architecture of a big R&D information system based on a wonderful jack-of-all-trade application called eMatrix from Dassault.

I often delve deep into the application with the MQL console (for Matrix Query Language) to dig out some insight into the data we manage.

And, more often than not, I find things that makes me cringe:

MQL<45> print bus ECO ZCO3171 - select history.promote;
business object ECO ZCO3171 -
history.promote = time: 10/22/2007 9:56 state: Design Work
history.promote = time: 10/22/2007 17:23 state: Review
history.promote = time: 10/22/2007 18:28 state: Release
history.promote = time: 10/24/2007 21:33 state: Implemented
MQL<46> print bus ECO ZCO3171 - select history.promote[1];
business object ECO ZCO3171 -
history.promote[1] = time: 10/22/2007 17:23 state: Review
MQL<47> print bus ECO ZCO3171 - select history.promote[0];
business object ECO ZCO3171 -
history.promote[0] = time: 10/22/2007 9:56 state: Design Work
history.promote[0] = time: 10/22/2007 17:23 state: Review
history.promote[0] = time: 10/22/2007 18:28 state: Release
history.promote[0] = time: 10/24/2007 21:33 state: Implemented

If someone has any insight on how a query language can be this flawed, I'm all ears.

PS: If you don't understand anything about this post, I'm deeply sorry for boring you with my tech rants...

In Japan, the new year is a big thing. Unlike in western countries, it's a family holiday when all come, eat traditional food (new year soba) and go to the temple for a blessing and good luck in the coming year. It's also a rare time when all all shops, banks, etc. can close for a few days straight.

Do not get caught without cash on new year. Most banks will close all operations between January 1st and 4th, and that means everything, even ATMs. It's advised to pack your pockets with cash, at least 100.000¥ for the duration of the black-out. Countless foreigners have been found sleeping under the bridge after not taking heed of this warning.

Anyways, back to my story, another service that shuts down during the first week of the year is trash collection. Just a week isn't that bad you'll say, but:

Bring together the Japanese love of over-packaging, presents for the kids, family reunions... all in a 15 storeys building (that's 60 apartments), and you get a wall of detritus filling up from floor to ceiling the trash room.

This photo was taken on January 2nd, I can't wait to see what happens by the end of the week.