Waking up!

I'm too lazy, too busy and a bit too schizophrenic to maintain my blog. I'm trying to balance my computer brain with the Japanese context. And I've woken up to my European roots. I like to listen to German, from Berlin via http://www.inforadio.de, which is Hoechdeutsch and quite easy now. Then there's http://radiogrischa.ch which is southeast Switzerland. They speak Hoechdeutsch with an accent when they read the news, but often off the cuff interview with a skier is incomprehensible. When I'm tired, it's http://www.franceinfo.fr/ because it's easy (I mortgaged my soul for that 20 years ago, and it's just wasted).

But I live in Japan. With the hanami, fukushima dai ichi and the brand new 'Abe-nomics'. Japan had a lost decade and I think I did as well. I love my kendo, Iaido, calligraphy. My daughter has just started to study the famous tea ceremony. This traditional Japan is beautiful. But along with the beauty comes the Confucian-derived hierarchy and, as some famous anthropologist said, the culture of shame - if no-one sees you, at least no-one you know, it's alright. This leads directly to a complete lack of manners. In shops, people push me all the time.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to an Iaido competition. For the lower dan grades, there are 5 people doing any 5 of the 12 ZNKR Iai kata. One person wins and 4 lose, but we don't know why. I guess I have to talk to teacher (grovelling, or am I too arrogant).

 Tokyo Budo-kan, with the Chairman of the Tokyo Kendo Renmei.

There are samurai in Japan in you know where to look.

But I'm a software engineer. The iado is interesting and if I was rich, I'd be 100% into it. But I'm broke and I'll be 47 years old in 2 weeks. I don't know how to get a job. In a 'Hail Mary pass' I looked at CERN a couple of weeks ago. That's where it all began. They want experience with Java Spring. I got this book on Spring which is quite readable. What I've understood so far is called Dependency Injection. It's like the Factory pattern but goes much further. Every thing is a Java bean and implements an interface. Actually looking further, Java language defines annotations to help with DI. I wasn't quite sure what annotations are (they're interfaces used as comments on steroids, or as processing instructions). I got through all of Java Language Specification last week. I strongly believe that Spring, a container for DI and support for AOP, will contribute to productivity and code quality.

I'm taking a break from big project. Phase Ia is done. There are 7 Android apps to help learning Japanese syllabullaries 'hiragana' and 'katakana'. Phase Ib will be the completion of the kanji apps.  I'm musing Phase II should be recognition of the language and then maybe Phase III will be translation. It's early days still but the first cut is at http://www.kanji-teikoku.com/. And the beat goes on!