This does mean that all of you out there need to get a TypeKey id to add comments, but that should not be too hard.

Hope to put some new content on this blog very soon.

If you want to do something concrete to help the USA, try this site out!!! (And enjoy the lovely DHTML!)

. Mr. Yamazaki gives examples of companies that successfully used KM to improve their performance and agility. I had assumed that tradtional Japanese companies like Q.P. Mayonnaise and Sumitomo Life would not be interested in or ready to use these ideas yet. I was wrong.

The idea that IT departments and young workers were leading whole companies into KM is a very hopeful sign. The individualists will make a difference in Japan, despite all the efforts of the "salaryman". This is a ray of hope for me.

Let's hope that this trend continues, and that Japanese companies shift from being "stagnating information swamps" to "flowing rivers of information".

One big topic that was on everyone's mind seems to be SPAM. It sounds like the IETF community is going to get serious about fixing some weaknesses in the e-mail infrastructure by standardizing a way for authorizing SMTP senders withing a specific domain (for more info, see the charter.)

I also went to the night market at Dongdaemun, and saw how much people in Seoul like to shop at night.

I hope to put some pictures up here soon.

Some impressions from walking through Shibuya and my old neighborhood of Tomigaya: the youth are very different from their parents. They have rebelled against the contraints of tradition, and are going to live life on their own terms.

Cell phones are now in everyone's ears. The Internet has become a commodity, and everybody is using it, all the time. Many people I speak with feel that the Japanese economy is improving. Consumer electronics seems to be selling well. Everybody seems to be upgrading their digitial camera or their cell phone.

After seeing so much positive energy in the street, I feel like Japan may improve a lot in the next few years. It's great to see it firsthand.

Thanks to everybody who read my blog in 2003, and I promise to write more thoughts down in 2004.

Happy New Year!

For now, if you have comments, please e-mail them to me, and give me your permission to post them to the blog.

I hope someone finds a reliable solution to blog spammers! This is a start.

"Manbiki" is a colloquial word for "shoplifting", and it goes like this: a person with a new, high resolution digital camera cell phone enters a book store. They find a guide book that they like. They browse the guide book, and find information about a hot spring that they would like to go to some day. They whip out their phone, and before the shopkeeper even knows what has happened, they have taken a picture of that page. At some later date the person can print this picture and use it to call or drive to the hot spring.

With cell phone cameras becoming ubiquitous, Japanese society seems to be absorbing many of these unexpected ramifications of a mobile multimedia communications enabled populace. There are going to be many other problems down the road: invasions of privacy, camera predators, and others. After looking at the thread about Digital Manbiki on Slashdot Japan, I think that the debate about all these issues will be a lively one.

I hope this can be commercialized soon!

I think to myself "oh, just another fire drill". We had a fire drill in the office last month, and I thought that the building management were giving us a pop quiz. I went out into the hallway, and saw that it was pitch black. It was only then that I realized it was a real power failure.

I ran back to my office and shut down my computer (without a screen to help). Despite the fact that so many people were in trouble, stuck in elevators and subway cars, all I could think about was that my UPS was working and that all my data on the computer were safe. Then I ran around guess what I should do.

The phones were working, so I called my father, and he said that he still had power in his office, about 5 blocks away. Only later did I find out that his building had a backup power source. This made me think that it was a local outage in only my building, but it turned out to be the whole Northeast!

At that point I decided to give up on doing any more work, and I ran down 20 flights of stairs, and got to the street. After talking to some people on the street, I found out that the subways were all stopped, so I went to Pier 11 to see if I could catch a ferry uptown. The roads were already badly clogged, and police cars were trying to get through. There was already a giant crowd at Pier 11, and I quickly gave up on taking a ferry and started walking uptown.

[I felt a memory rush into my mind... A discussion back in 1998 with a manager of the Tokyo Electric Power corporation. He said that Tokyo could never have a giant blackout. The grid was so well designed with redundancy in mind that a surge blackout was incoceivable. Now I am beginning to wonder....]

The heat of the afternoon sun was excrutiatlingly hot. Thousands of workers walked with me, and we all headed north. I had a plan in mind: get the ferry across the east river at 34th St. About 1.5 hours later, I arrived at 34th St, and it was a bedlam. There were fistfights in the ticket line which was hundreds of yards in length. I asked a cop what was going on, and he said that the police had just convinced the ferry operator to allow customers to pay on the boat instead of forcing them to buy tickets before boarding. This news gave me hope. I jumped into the end of the shorter ferry boarding line, and was able to get on the 2nd boat that arrived. On the first boat, a woman fainted and had to be put on the dock by the police. She looked green with heatstroke, so I gave her one of my bottles of water. She drank some, and seemed to get better.

As the ferry pulled away from the dock, I was able to see the thousands of people still waiting at the ferry terminal. No one looked happy!

After the 7 minute ride across the east river, I started walking to Roosevelt Island. I arrived home at 8:30, four hours after leaving my office in downtown Manhattan. My feet hurt, and my Teva sandles were worn down, but I was happy to be home. It was only then that I remembered that I had to climb up the stairs to the 19th floor! (It was then that I wished I could post a rant on I HATE NYC.)

Since the cell phones had stopped working immedieately after the blackout, I had no idea how my wife and son were doing. Luckily they were fine, and so were my sister and parents. Our landline was still working, and it felt great to get some good news.

I listened to the radio in the dark for a while, and then lit some candles. Soon Kerstin and Darius came home.

After a night of deep sleep in the warm muggy bedroom, I woke at 6:00 am to the cries of my son screaming "The sun is up! Time to wake up!" In my dream, the one that had intruded upon, all the power had been restored throughout New York. I was shocked to see that reality was very different. Most of the city was still without power. My home regained electricity at around 5pm today.

It feels great to have a computer to work on, a light to see by, a ice cube from the fridge. I appreciate them much more today than I did yesterday.

But I also feel that our dependence of technology and electricity has gone too far. 2 more days without power, and the whole region would have become a living nightmare. I now want to become less dependent on the Grid, if I can.

I think some young people are intentionally refusing to pay because they disagree with the way the goverment is operating, and they find it a simple way to protest. The majority are just looking for a way to help make ends meet in the short term.

Japan needs deep reform soon.