300 Words
04/01/10 00:01
30 AUG2010: The Heat is on
Some people are saying this has been the hottest summer in 80 years. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it sure spices up the conversation. As I am so firmly ensconced in middle-age, I am usually surrounded by people who are either considerably older, or considerably younger than myself.
Take this last weekend for example:
There were two groups in attendance, I was, of course, a member of the adults group, as usual acting as translator and cultural liaison between the overseas students, and the hosting committee. The next youngest member of the adults group was 12 years my senior, and his grand-daughter is the same age as my youngest son. The oldest member of the adults group was nearly twice my age. It can be nice to be young.
Then there was the students group. The oldest young lady in that group was exactly half my age, easily could be my daughter had I married a little younger. The youngest in the group was just about a year younger than my second son. To them, I’m a pretty old guy. But one who happens to sing in a band, which fortunately still carries some semblance of coolness.
So what does this have to do with the weather?
Well, what else do we have to talk about? We were all together for the weekend, we had meetings and presentations, and our time was fairly well booked up, but in those in-between times, we talked about the weather.
A young lady from France, another from Belgium, a young man from Germany, and one more young lady from Canada, along with a bevy of young Japanese men and women (not quite kids), and the adults, all Japanese, with the exception of me.
Talk about the weather.
19JULY2010: July?!
Well, this is certainly not turning out like I planned. Got a kid back in the house for (American) summer vacation, another one coming to home-stay with us for two weeks pretty darn soon, a house halfway re-arranged to accommodate everyone, and the usual work related scheduling nonsense. Add to that a healthy does of insomnia and here I am.
I just got a little test from my friend Kevin http://iwl.me, and according to it I write like “Cory Doctorow”, whoever that is. Check it out, it could be fun, or enlightening, or depressing, depending as usual on your expectations, familiarity with the results, and confidence in your ability. As I have neither any expectations, familiarity with the author I’m being compared to, nor confidence that my writing style is worth any more that the electrons used to display them, I’m rather ambivalent about the results. But your mileage may vary...
14 MAR2010: Oops
Oops is right. An entire month just slipped by without me even noticing it. Lots has been going on to say the least. I have (obviously) moved the entire school, attended my oldest son’s graduation, been to Kyoto twice, and by the time this gets written, been to Kobe once. All in the name of getting this boy a place to live when school starts. Here’s where the American education system shows its one bright spot: Between graduation and the start of the new school year, there is time to get things taken care of. Here it’s crazy. He graduated two weeks ago, got his results from his final entrance exam a week ago, and starts school in two weeks. In the mean time, the three grand registration/entrance fee that we paid to the university he will not attend is non-refundable.
8 FEB 10: Sleepy time
Oh man, I just missed my self imposed deadline by 10 minutes. That means it is 12:10,
We,, Monday morning. We all just spent the last two days completely (and I mean completely there is nothing left but a vacuum cleaner, which I need to pick up in the morning) in our former offices in Sanarudai. We are set up and ready for classes to start at the new location in Sunayama in the morning.
I owe all my staff major props for the energy and drive to get such a huge task completed I the time frame I set for them. Everybody really rose to the occasion and pitched in with everything they had. I hope all get a good rest tonight! They deserve it.
Thank you all for your efforts.
I was fortunately able to make it home just in time to read Harry Potter to the younger two boys before they went off to bed, and then I sat down with my oldest and watched the second half of Troy on TV
A million questions from him, it’s a pretty confusing tale if you aren’t familiar with the mythology. Heck, even if you are, many of the key scenes from previous telling of the story were altered enough in the movie that I had to look a few things up to clarify some questions.
After the movie, he changed the channel and we spent the next half hour discussing ancient Greek and Roman mythology, while at the same time watching sly Japanese variant aflictees skyrocket.
:Well, I gotta close. I’m sitting here, typing my way, falling fead asleep . I’ve noticed that when time is moe of an issue issue, Spell Ceck reallly comes in handy, cause I’d be lost without it. Until the next time, Me.
31 JAN 10: iPad madness
It’s really past my bed time. But I feel I’ve gotta put my two cents down on this whole iPad thing. The name conjures up some rather unfortunate images of feminine hygiene, but it also hails from Star Trek. The ubiquitous ‘Pad’ that everyone seemed to carry around with them in some (most?) of the later shows, especially ‘Enterprise’ (which, although it was not much of a hit, I thoroughly enjoyed). I’ve also read about such devices in a number of non-Star Trek related Sci-Fi novels, enough that I am convinced that once again Apple has come up with a device that nobody (well a vocal community at least) doesn’t want, and firmly believes they don’t need.
I, however, believe they will.
Once people get their hands on one, and feel how liberating not having a keyboard dragging you down when you just want to surf the web, check Wikipedia, e-mail or any of your number of social media outlets, not to mention watch a video or organize and share your photo library, it’s going to be one of those ‘How did I get along without it?’ devices. There will be others, some better in some respects, many far short of what Apple has traditionally provided in a user experience (but perhaps with more bells and whistles, not to mention buttons).
Mark my words, and come back to me on this in a year or so, but I am seeing the start of a whole new section in the personal electronic market. One positioned smack dab between the handiness of a smart phone, and the features of a laptop.
Once again Apple has shown us the future, and it is now.
Naturally, I’ll wait until the 2nd generation before actually buying one, just because it gets better.
30JAN10: Why Do Today What You Can Put Off Until Tomorrow?
This seems to be the modus operandi for me these days. I just can’t seem to get things done on the day I want to do them. Sure, there’s always so much going on; moving our school is a pretty time consuming project. Personnel changes naturally come when least expected, and when the least amount of viable time is available to find suitable replacements, which lends itself to the possibility of not finding the ideal candidate, but rather the best available in the allotted time. And that of course is where I am today.
Technically I am a week late getting this piece out, or if I skipped last week on purpose (wink, wink) I’m a day early. Splitting hairs as my father would say.
I need to recreate some company forms, on, unfortunately, in Word. I actually did the thing in Apple’s Pages, and it turned out peachy keen, but when printed from Word using the export function, it was awful. So I’m trying again in Word, from scratch, and pulling my hair out doing so.
I still have to finish making everyone’s business cards, and some promotion materials, but they’re gonna have to wait a few days. I keep asking myself why I am doing all this myself, when I have an able bodied staff, but the short answer is I need (?) to show them how to do it in order to get it done, which makes it faster for me to do it myself. This must change.
Anyway, I wanted to get this done before bed, as I have to drive to Gotenba tomorrow for a Rotary function, and I’ll be to tired to get it out after I get home. Wish me luck!
Until next time...
17JAN10: Time waits for nobody.
So much to do and so little time. Ain’t that always the case? And yet, I know so many people who always have the time. The time to listen. The time to call or e-mail. I know that I am easily distracted, and therefore do not end up spending the right amount of time when I plan to. That’s why I’m furiously trying to beat my self imposed deadline of midnight, Sunday night to get this written. I was trying to brush up on making templates in Word while watching Mr. And Mrs. Smith on T.V. I’ve been try to watch that movie for years. But I needed to read to the little ones before bed (Sunday night is Harry Potter) and then once they were asleep I had to drive to the train station to pick up my oldest, who just went through his second grueling day of college entrance exams. We talked about it on the way home; he feels he totally blew the Math section, and didn’t score high enough on the Biology section to compensate. I feel for him.
When I got home and turned on the TV to try and watch the second half of the movie and work on template creation, my wife popped her head in to ask a few work questions that needed answers before she could go to bed.
So once again I watched the last thirty minutes of the film, and tried to work during commercials.
But because there is no written manual, and I always feel that Microsoft’s built in help section is too difficult to find what I need to know, I generally turn to the web. Do you know what’s out there? Wikipedia for one. There are too many distractions. Heck I have the DVD here!
10JAN10: Confidence and Competence.
These are two words that have been on my mind for some time. One does not necessarily go hand in hand with the other. I’m sure we have all met the person who has all the confidence in the world, but not an ounce of competence to actually back it up. And then there’s (in my mind) the worse situation of a person with oodles of competence, but not the slightest bit of confidence to ‘show off’ what they can do.
Like most things in life, it comes down to a matter of balance. The ability to be confident in the things you are competent at, and not over confident in the things you have no ability in whatsoever. If you are good at something, other people will notice, and the majority of the time they will give you support by encouraging you to be more confident in your abilities. On the other hand, there is a glove. Sorry, wrong story. On the other hand, there is also the buffoon, who thinks that he or she (usually possessing an inkling of skill in the given task) struts around portraying themselves as the end all be all of whatever it is (often management, but not exclusively) and then leaving their subordinates to pick up the slack, often doing so good a job of it that it feeds back to our overconfident boob giving them the impression that they can and do possess the magical competence to complete the task at hand.
I endeavor to match my confidence in my own self to the level of competence I have in the tasks I usually perform. And I’m constantly working to make up the shortcomings by relying on my staff members who have what it takes to complete the tasks.
Back next Sunday!
3JAN10 300 words.
How many is that exactly, and what can one say in such a restricted medium? I'm about to fin out. The plan here is to write a weekly 300 word only, blog type entry every Sunday for the year 2010. I will be adding these entries to my own homepage for the time being, as I expect they will be rather rambling and somewhat incoherent at the beginning, with the goal of increasing my skill as I gain experience.
Todays topic: 2009. A horrendous year financially for my school, (as with everyone else...)
From the very first business day of the new year, I received a curt e-mail from one of our largest clients that their English program would be shutting down completely. All further requests for classes would heretofore come from the Nagoya office. I was given an e-mail contact with a last name to contact. I jotted off an e-mail to the new contact person introducing myself, but never received a reply.
Not long afterwords, I received a summons to one of our other big ticket clients informing us of the cancellation of their English program as well. I have, fortunately, been able to keep in constant touch with this company in the hopes of restarting their program as soon as they are ready to do so.
A number of smaller (by volume) clients also decided to cancel or aggressively cut back on their English programs, and finally the Hamamatsu Board of Education decided to turn their ALT program over to one of the national providers.
Naturally I have had to cut back on our teaching staff to compensate, and I have reduced staff benefits as well as my own compensation. Finally, we will move into a new office in February for kicks.
Back next Sunday!
Some people are saying this has been the hottest summer in 80 years. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it sure spices up the conversation. As I am so firmly ensconced in middle-age, I am usually surrounded by people who are either considerably older, or considerably younger than myself.
Take this last weekend for example:
There were two groups in attendance, I was, of course, a member of the adults group, as usual acting as translator and cultural liaison between the overseas students, and the hosting committee. The next youngest member of the adults group was 12 years my senior, and his grand-daughter is the same age as my youngest son. The oldest member of the adults group was nearly twice my age. It can be nice to be young.
Then there was the students group. The oldest young lady in that group was exactly half my age, easily could be my daughter had I married a little younger. The youngest in the group was just about a year younger than my second son. To them, I’m a pretty old guy. But one who happens to sing in a band, which fortunately still carries some semblance of coolness.
So what does this have to do with the weather?
Well, what else do we have to talk about? We were all together for the weekend, we had meetings and presentations, and our time was fairly well booked up, but in those in-between times, we talked about the weather.
A young lady from France, another from Belgium, a young man from Germany, and one more young lady from Canada, along with a bevy of young Japanese men and women (not quite kids), and the adults, all Japanese, with the exception of me.
Talk about the weather.
19JULY2010: July?!
Well, this is certainly not turning out like I planned. Got a kid back in the house for (American) summer vacation, another one coming to home-stay with us for two weeks pretty darn soon, a house halfway re-arranged to accommodate everyone, and the usual work related scheduling nonsense. Add to that a healthy does of insomnia and here I am.
I just got a little test from my friend Kevin http://iwl.me, and according to it I write like “Cory Doctorow”, whoever that is. Check it out, it could be fun, or enlightening, or depressing, depending as usual on your expectations, familiarity with the results, and confidence in your ability. As I have neither any expectations, familiarity with the author I’m being compared to, nor confidence that my writing style is worth any more that the electrons used to display them, I’m rather ambivalent about the results. But your mileage may vary...
14 MAR2010: Oops
Oops is right. An entire month just slipped by without me even noticing it. Lots has been going on to say the least. I have (obviously) moved the entire school, attended my oldest son’s graduation, been to Kyoto twice, and by the time this gets written, been to Kobe once. All in the name of getting this boy a place to live when school starts. Here’s where the American education system shows its one bright spot: Between graduation and the start of the new school year, there is time to get things taken care of. Here it’s crazy. He graduated two weeks ago, got his results from his final entrance exam a week ago, and starts school in two weeks. In the mean time, the three grand registration/entrance fee that we paid to the university he will not attend is non-refundable.
8 FEB 10: Sleepy time
Oh man, I just missed my self imposed deadline by 10 minutes. That means it is 12:10,
We,, Monday morning. We all just spent the last two days completely (and I mean completely there is nothing left but a vacuum cleaner, which I need to pick up in the morning) in our former offices in Sanarudai. We are set up and ready for classes to start at the new location in Sunayama in the morning.
I owe all my staff major props for the energy and drive to get such a huge task completed I the time frame I set for them. Everybody really rose to the occasion and pitched in with everything they had. I hope all get a good rest tonight! They deserve it.
Thank you all for your efforts.
I was fortunately able to make it home just in time to read Harry Potter to the younger two boys before they went off to bed, and then I sat down with my oldest and watched the second half of Troy on TV
A million questions from him, it’s a pretty confusing tale if you aren’t familiar with the mythology. Heck, even if you are, many of the key scenes from previous telling of the story were altered enough in the movie that I had to look a few things up to clarify some questions.
After the movie, he changed the channel and we spent the next half hour discussing ancient Greek and Roman mythology, while at the same time watching sly Japanese variant aflictees skyrocket.
:Well, I gotta close. I’m sitting here, typing my way, falling fead asleep . I’ve noticed that when time is moe of an issue issue, Spell Ceck reallly comes in handy, cause I’d be lost without it. Until the next time, Me.
31 JAN 10: iPad madness
It’s really past my bed time. But I feel I’ve gotta put my two cents down on this whole iPad thing. The name conjures up some rather unfortunate images of feminine hygiene, but it also hails from Star Trek. The ubiquitous ‘Pad’ that everyone seemed to carry around with them in some (most?) of the later shows, especially ‘Enterprise’ (which, although it was not much of a hit, I thoroughly enjoyed). I’ve also read about such devices in a number of non-Star Trek related Sci-Fi novels, enough that I am convinced that once again Apple has come up with a device that nobody (well a vocal community at least) doesn’t want, and firmly believes they don’t need.
I, however, believe they will.
Once people get their hands on one, and feel how liberating not having a keyboard dragging you down when you just want to surf the web, check Wikipedia, e-mail or any of your number of social media outlets, not to mention watch a video or organize and share your photo library, it’s going to be one of those ‘How did I get along without it?’ devices. There will be others, some better in some respects, many far short of what Apple has traditionally provided in a user experience (but perhaps with more bells and whistles, not to mention buttons).
Mark my words, and come back to me on this in a year or so, but I am seeing the start of a whole new section in the personal electronic market. One positioned smack dab between the handiness of a smart phone, and the features of a laptop.
Once again Apple has shown us the future, and it is now.
Naturally, I’ll wait until the 2nd generation before actually buying one, just because it gets better.
30JAN10: Why Do Today What You Can Put Off Until Tomorrow?
This seems to be the modus operandi for me these days. I just can’t seem to get things done on the day I want to do them. Sure, there’s always so much going on; moving our school is a pretty time consuming project. Personnel changes naturally come when least expected, and when the least amount of viable time is available to find suitable replacements, which lends itself to the possibility of not finding the ideal candidate, but rather the best available in the allotted time. And that of course is where I am today.
Technically I am a week late getting this piece out, or if I skipped last week on purpose (wink, wink) I’m a day early. Splitting hairs as my father would say.
I need to recreate some company forms, on, unfortunately, in Word. I actually did the thing in Apple’s Pages, and it turned out peachy keen, but when printed from Word using the export function, it was awful. So I’m trying again in Word, from scratch, and pulling my hair out doing so.
I still have to finish making everyone’s business cards, and some promotion materials, but they’re gonna have to wait a few days. I keep asking myself why I am doing all this myself, when I have an able bodied staff, but the short answer is I need (?) to show them how to do it in order to get it done, which makes it faster for me to do it myself. This must change.
Anyway, I wanted to get this done before bed, as I have to drive to Gotenba tomorrow for a Rotary function, and I’ll be to tired to get it out after I get home. Wish me luck!
Until next time...
17JAN10: Time waits for nobody.
So much to do and so little time. Ain’t that always the case? And yet, I know so many people who always have the time. The time to listen. The time to call or e-mail. I know that I am easily distracted, and therefore do not end up spending the right amount of time when I plan to. That’s why I’m furiously trying to beat my self imposed deadline of midnight, Sunday night to get this written. I was trying to brush up on making templates in Word while watching Mr. And Mrs. Smith on T.V. I’ve been try to watch that movie for years. But I needed to read to the little ones before bed (Sunday night is Harry Potter) and then once they were asleep I had to drive to the train station to pick up my oldest, who just went through his second grueling day of college entrance exams. We talked about it on the way home; he feels he totally blew the Math section, and didn’t score high enough on the Biology section to compensate. I feel for him.
When I got home and turned on the TV to try and watch the second half of the movie and work on template creation, my wife popped her head in to ask a few work questions that needed answers before she could go to bed.
So once again I watched the last thirty minutes of the film, and tried to work during commercials.
But because there is no written manual, and I always feel that Microsoft’s built in help section is too difficult to find what I need to know, I generally turn to the web. Do you know what’s out there? Wikipedia for one. There are too many distractions. Heck I have the DVD here!
10JAN10: Confidence and Competence.
These are two words that have been on my mind for some time. One does not necessarily go hand in hand with the other. I’m sure we have all met the person who has all the confidence in the world, but not an ounce of competence to actually back it up. And then there’s (in my mind) the worse situation of a person with oodles of competence, but not the slightest bit of confidence to ‘show off’ what they can do.
Like most things in life, it comes down to a matter of balance. The ability to be confident in the things you are competent at, and not over confident in the things you have no ability in whatsoever. If you are good at something, other people will notice, and the majority of the time they will give you support by encouraging you to be more confident in your abilities. On the other hand, there is a glove. Sorry, wrong story. On the other hand, there is also the buffoon, who thinks that he or she (usually possessing an inkling of skill in the given task) struts around portraying themselves as the end all be all of whatever it is (often management, but not exclusively) and then leaving their subordinates to pick up the slack, often doing so good a job of it that it feeds back to our overconfident boob giving them the impression that they can and do possess the magical competence to complete the task at hand.
I endeavor to match my confidence in my own self to the level of competence I have in the tasks I usually perform. And I’m constantly working to make up the shortcomings by relying on my staff members who have what it takes to complete the tasks.
Back next Sunday!
3JAN10 300 words.
How many is that exactly, and what can one say in such a restricted medium? I'm about to fin out. The plan here is to write a weekly 300 word only, blog type entry every Sunday for the year 2010. I will be adding these entries to my own homepage for the time being, as I expect they will be rather rambling and somewhat incoherent at the beginning, with the goal of increasing my skill as I gain experience.
Todays topic: 2009. A horrendous year financially for my school, (as with everyone else...)
From the very first business day of the new year, I received a curt e-mail from one of our largest clients that their English program would be shutting down completely. All further requests for classes would heretofore come from the Nagoya office. I was given an e-mail contact with a last name to contact. I jotted off an e-mail to the new contact person introducing myself, but never received a reply.
Not long afterwords, I received a summons to one of our other big ticket clients informing us of the cancellation of their English program as well. I have, fortunately, been able to keep in constant touch with this company in the hopes of restarting their program as soon as they are ready to do so.
A number of smaller (by volume) clients also decided to cancel or aggressively cut back on their English programs, and finally the Hamamatsu Board of Education decided to turn their ALT program over to one of the national providers.
Naturally I have had to cut back on our teaching staff to compensate, and I have reduced staff benefits as well as my own compensation. Finally, we will move into a new office in February for kicks.
Back next Sunday!