Office move

Yes, it’s been planned for 6 months. On February 13th my office will not be in small town of Kohnan-machi anymore but in the much bigger city of Kumagaya.

Actually, my office isn’t moving to the city, it’s more of the city that’s moving to my office. As of 02/13/2007, Kumagaya will officially expand and absorb Kohnan-machi. This happens all the time in Japan, small towns regroup whenever they become too close to become a bigger entity and have more weight in the political system.

Why is it good for me? Well I’ll get to change the address on my business card from 江南町 (the meaning “small shitty town”) to 熊谷市 (the meaning “slightly less shitty city”). It’s still the boondocks of 埼玉県 (Saitama is commonly viewed as the lamest prefecture in Japan), but at least it’s looks a little less like as the dull manufacturing plant in the middle of the rice fields and rusty shacks that it is…

Best Effort

Working in the IS/IT management team of my company, I’m copied on any IT related announcement made by the local infrastructure, and there is always something interesting/funny in there. For example here’s one mail I received this morning: (I cut out the japanese part)

(Important) PC Network stop to the Yoyogi headquarters office on 04th Nov(Sat)
We planned Yoyogi bandwidth upgrade from “best effort 10Mbps” to “fixed 10Mbps“. Although a cost does not change, a little improvement in the speed is expected.

Best effort bandwidth, that’s a really nice concept, I can just see the network infrastructure manager giving a speech to the switches in the server room to encourage them in giving their best for the comapny…