Category: Uncategorized

Receiving Earthquake and Tsunami warnings which are out of my region can be quite alarming.

Around 8:10AM started to receive Tsunami warnings on my cellular phone.

Tsunami ? Where? why ? – I didn’t notice any earthquake.

Checking further showed that there was an Earthquake off the coast of Iwate, which may cause a Tsunami.

Definitely worth the alerts, yet a bit disorienting.

The image shows the alerts which provided more information on location.

Really enjoying writing Matlab/Octave code for the Machine learning course.

It has been a while since I used Matlab. Was it during a signal processing course, or was it at the Air Force?

Can’t post my code, but can definitely post the result of my calculations.

 

 

 

Hope I can blog about this…

This blog is active for more than 5 years. Actually, active intermittently.

What I noticed is that although the traffic to my blog is almost the same level as it used to be 5 years ago, less people click on ads.

I don’t rely on ads to run my website nor do I expect to earn money, but I do want to figure it out.

Is my placement bad?

Are the ads chosen by Adsense not effective to my audience? -> How do I check that ?

Is it that users block ads or just don’t click ?

 

I don’t block ads, but I don’t think I clicked on one in the last month.

 

Yahoo Japan has an Alert applications which can provide Alerts to disasters, Weather as well as alerts on suspicious people.

Awareness is important. I am sure that such alerts can reduce the number of such events, as parents will report (and catch) suspicious people in the vicinity of the alert.

On the other hand, it is scary. I immediately check the location and try to figure out if my kids are in the neighbourhood.

I often hear that “it wasn’t like this back in the days”, but I truly think it is all about the availability of information.When I was a child we probably received a warning “stay away from that area, that man. he is strange”. We now get a warning about events as they happen including location.

In the image, a warning about a suspicious person, which performed some indecent act. Terms in Japanese are not clear enough to understand the nature of the act.

Taking the Coursera Machine Learning Course   .

So far, so good.

Clear, interesting and fun to remember Linear Algebra.

A good reminder that I enjoy studying and should spend more time doing it.

 

With the recent Technology “advances” of being online all the time, getting emails on smartphones, I feel we lost our accuracy.

Why bother being accurate and concise in emails when you can fix that later. We definitely engage more, respond more but it takes more of our time.

I try to practice the following when writing/answering emails:

1) Do I really need to send this over email? Can I get a better result with a simple call ? If so, call

2) Read again before sending. Is it clear enough ? Is my point or questions emphasised  correctly ?

3) Is my “To:” list good enough. Target , not broadcast

4) When responding, apply (2) but also Do I really need to respond to this ?

 

I was thinking about a credit system of each employee getting a specific “email credit” per day. For each email sent, the credit goes down until the employee is blocked to respond to urgent email only.

Obviously, this is difficult to implement without understanding the contents of the email. Would not like to block an employee from working, but still thinking how to improve effectiveness.

 

 

 

Started reading Chihaya Akane’s “Male Friend”  (千早茜、男ともだち).

Though I am struggling a bit with slang and figure of speeches, I enjoy the writing.

Telling a story of a successful illustrator, cheating on her husband , meeting sometimes with her old University friend. A Male friend. I like the way she created the characters and tells their story, although I feel annoyance reading some parts.

Searched for information about the writer, I found her twitter page. I agree it is not that interesting, but was shocked to see she has only 1115 followers (well, 1116 if I decide to follow her as well).

There is something really strange in our culture if a valued writer has 1115 followers and a TV personality has 3.73 Millions

 

I am always puzzled how our mind plays tricks on us. Extracting memories, hiding others.

Was waiting for the train when I saw a woman smile to her friend. Her smile reminded me of  a former Japanese teacher who is no longer with us.

In a split of a second, a smile turned into a painful memory

Many (many) years ago I remember being able to focus on a programming tasks for 3-4 hours continuously.

Nowadays, I feel lucky if I can focus for more than 20 minutes. Email pop-ups , messages , “urgent” , “urgent”,  but are these really urgent. When did we become “always available”, “always responsive”.

Need to:

1) Find a better way filter the emails I handle/respond to during the day

2) Educate my colleagues not to “shoot emails” ,be clear and concise

 

For a while now (more details later), my MacBook Pro trackpad was misbehaving. Constantly shifting, clicks were not recognised.

After researching the web, I found out it is a known problem which can be easily resolved by “tuning” the trackpad screw.

So, I opened my MaBook, removed the battery and to my surprise I found out that the trackpad is floating around with screws missing.

On the left, two screws were present but not connected. On the right, both screws were missing. Found one of them inside the box, but one of them is still missing.

 

How can this happen?

Not sure, but a few months ago I had to go Apple to fix my Macbook after the fan made very loud noise which resulted in Macbook not booting.

Apple replaced the chassis which made my very happy, BUT trackpad problems started shortly after.

So,

1) What caused the Fan issue – a screw , broken plastic or similar – I was never told

2) Is it possible that Apple Service (Genius) failed to assemble my Macbook ?

I will never know.

In the meantime, I reassembled, trackpad works well. … Still missing a screw.

Where can I find one?