“On the way of the dark night trip, your shining nose would be very useful”

Today I sang my first Christmas song in Japanese. My teacher didn’t know that Santa’s reindeer had names and was quite surprised that we had named the one with the shining nose. She also thought that the song might have been a Japanese song that I happened to know an English translation of. But no, the song was written by the American songwriter Johnny Marks.

It’s strange being away from home when it’s so close to Christmas. Marty did point out to me that the only other time I’ve been away from home at Christmas was in 1992 when I went to Japan to visit him.

The Japanese have started to celebrate Christmas as a commercial holiday. I’ve seen some very odd things in the shops that claim to be traditional Christmas items. And strange signs that say things like “x-mas lapping set’s in store”. There’s a huge green Santa close to our apartment and I’ve seen pictures of Santa on his sleigh being pulled by what looked like a goose and a cow. I believe that Christmas is a romantic holiday in Japan and that men give gifts to women on Christmas Eve and that just like St. Valentine’s Day at home it’s not good for a woman to be by herself on Christmas Eve.

Christmas cards are really expensive – I think it’s cost me around £2.50 per card. The shops are full of imported American cards but I prefer the Japanese ones even if I can’t work out what how you display some of them.

I’ve been meaning to take some pictures of the Christmas decorations that can be seen in the area we are staying in. Hopefully I will remember to take my camera out with me some night this week. Christmas decorations in Japan are taken down on the 26th December so I’ll need to do this sometime soon. I have taken some pictures this week but was more interested in trying to capture reflections than Christmas decorations.

I wonder if Marty is going out of his way to look like an alien in Japan?

I’m not sure which image looks more alien to me – this one or the one in my previous post.

Today I felt like eating something for lunch that wasn’t Japanese. I had a bagel and cream cheese followed by a doughnut. It seemed like a safe enough choice until I bit into the doughnut. It wasn’t filled with jam as I was expecting but with azuki beans. Well I decided to try to eat it since lots of Japanese desserts use these beans. I thought that they would have been sweet but no they tasted just like cold red kidney beans. So the doughnut ended up in the bin. I think it’s going to take me quite a while to get used to some Japanese foods.

I have my first Japanese lesson tomorrow. One of the questions I was asked by the company who are providing the lessons was “What sort of teacher would you like?” This is not a question I’d ever been asked before. When I didn’t answer Ueda said “but you have studied before you must have a preference of the type of teacher you would like.”

I really don’t know what sort of teacher I would prefer. But we decided that I would like a strict teacher who was demanding and wanted me to progress. I was told that some students prefer happy teachers who don’t get too cross if the students don’t complete their work.

It made me start to think about the various teachers I have had during my life. And the one thing that I really need in a teacher is that they have the ability to teach. Did you have art teachers like I did? They handed out paper and pencils and said things like “draw a coke can”. Never did they explain how to draw a coke can or how to draw anything for that matter. They just assumed that, like them, I was born with the ability to draw objects that were placed in front of me. I hated art because I don’t find it easy to draw anything which looking back just makes me sad. They had reduced art to nothing more than being able to draw or not being able to draw.

In third year (I don’t know what they are calling these school years now but I was 13 at the time and most of my classmates were 14) my art exam was to draw a green pepper. I had three hours to draw it and what I ended up with was something that looked a bit like a potato. Recently I’ve been going through lots of old papers. In third year I came in the top 3 in my year in every subject apart from Art and PE. I don’t know what my PE result was but I was 41st in art.

My little sister is now at the stage in life were she is being asked to draw coke cans. She finds it really hard to draw and none of her teachers have explained how to draw anything. When she asked me about it I told her that I couldn’t draw one either and not to worry about it. What I didn’t tell her was that with the right teacher she could learn to draw adequately. She may never be considered a gifted artist, but like with ever other skill, there are techniques that you can learn to help you improve. Of course she like me is going to drop art as soon as she can – not realising that there is so much more to art than being able to draw something that looks like a coke can.

The view from the balcony of the apartment we are currently living in.

In his most recent post Barbie mentions a programming contest. The thing that interests me is his reaction to the word “professional”. What exactly is a professional web-site? For some people it’s going to be Amazon, Google or Ebay but for others it’s merely going to be a web-site that was paid for. Of course a professional web-site for a small business can be produced in 30 hours with a team of three people. Just think about how much that would cost. If we give a low price to each member of the team – say £35 per hour – that brings the cost of the site to £3,150. Most design companies I’ve worked with charge closer to £50 per hour – giving us a site that costs £4,500. This is nothing if you consider how much it costs to build something like Amazon. But for a small business it’s a lot of money and most of them would not agree to spend that much on a web-site. There are so many companies now claiming that they can build professional web-sites that it is not shocking for someone to pay around £1,000 for one and at prices that low they must be producing them really quickly. I’ve even come across a company claiming that they can build a web-site for a small business for around £250.

The other thing that interests me is that amount of time it would take to reproduce some of the large professional web-sites such as Amazon. It’s much easier to copy than it is to create. Lots of the time involved in building any software system is taken up with requirements, analysis and finding ways to make the interface useable. If you already had all that how long would it really take?

I really like using internet based services because I rarely have to talk on the phone to people in call centres. Last night I tried to cancel my subscription for ScreenSelect. Before ScreenSelect became part of LoveFilm it was possible to cancel the service by filling in a form on their web-site. Now, when you go to the cancellation link, you are presented with the following message:

“A member of our Customer Services team is standing by waiting to speak to you they will be able to take you through the rest of the cancellation process as there are a couple of questions we need to ask you.”

So instead of clicking on a button and filling in a cancellation reason on a form I have to ring them. It was after midnight when I wanted to do this and I really couldn’t be bothered so I made a note to cancel the service this morning.

When I rang today I had to wait 6 minutes before anyone was able to take my call. When my call was finally answered the person I was speaking to couldn’t understand me. Mind you I had difficulty understanding them as they asked me if they were talking to Alicia. Once we established that I wasn’t Alicia and they actually bothered to ask me what my name was it took another 4 minutes just to explain my name and address. The only other thing I was asked was “do you have any positive feedback” which is an interesting way of asking why I’m cancelling.

I can understand why businesses don’t think it’s a problem irritating the customers who are trying to leave as they won’t be making any more money from them. But I think it can backfire. I didn’t leave because I didn’t like them; I would have considered using them in the future, until I tried to cancel. And my cancellation isn’t finalised yet. Now I’m going to have to make sure they don’t take any more money and also check that they acknowledge receipt of the disks I’ve sent back. I also won’t be recommending their service to any of my friends.

Tony’s recent post regarding using a wiki as an accounting system details some of the problems we have had with traditional accounting software and how we have been able to use a wiki to overcome these.

The thing I love most about having information on a wiki is that I can see it from multiple locations. I no longer have to go into the office to use the one machine that holds the accounting information or to check a folder full of paper when I want to know which suppliers need to be paid. Of course the web has given me this ability for years so there must be more to the wiki than that. And there is. I believe the power of the wiki is in how easy it is to use. People actually take the information we receive in the post and put it onto the wiki instead of leaving it in files with a note to work out what to do with it later.

Financial information falls into a class of information that no-one wants to touch. If you want anyone to update your accounting information they usually require specialist training. And some accounting software makes it really hard to change data once it’s been entered. If we had created a web-based accounting system we, like so many others, would probably have ended up recreating something like Sage only with the ability to use this remotely with multiple users. Although this would probably be more useful than the system we used to have we wouldn’t have trained all our staff in how to use it. As we use wikis to store all information all members of staff are comfortable with them and can enter the financial information. We have removed the complexity that used to be involved in entering financial information because it’s no longer seen as a special class of information. It’s just more data about the business that it would be useful to have on the wiki.

It still requires specialist knowledge to understand and make use of the data we are storing to improve the business but now information can be entered easily without the wiki user having to understand how to use nominal, purchase and sales ledgers or to even know what a journal entry is.

I was amused to read on the front page of this week’s Computer Weekly that Richard Stallman “was a prolific programmer for his open source GNU Project”. Glad to see that it isn’t just me who sometimes forgets to use the phrase “Free Software”.