Every year on Feb 9, the Fisherman’s Cooperative in Tokyo offers fine torafugu (Japanese puffer fish) to the Imperial Palace. The picture is from NHK TV. Fugu has become one of the most celebrated and notorious dishes in Japanese cuisine. It must be meticulously prepared to remove toxic parts and to avoid contaminating the meat with the lethal poison tetrodotoxin found in the little fish’s organs. There is no antidote, and the poison is not affected by cooking. It attacks the nervous system and leaves its victims unable to breathe. The best the emergency room can do for you is to pump you full of active carbon (to absorb the poison from your stomach) and put you on life support to see if you make it !
Wedensday/ lady finger bananas
I got these ‘lady finger’ bananas from a colleague. She got them from a seller at a gas station a few hours away. The little bananas are sweet, and are grown in Australia as well.
Tuesday/ the outlook : still gloomy
.. and not only for weather, as I look out from the back of the hotel on the 8th floor over Dameisha at 7am in the morning. The Wall Street Journal reported on Feb 1 from Shanghai that the average housing price in 100 major Chinese cities fell for a fifth consecutive month in January as China’s property market continued to slow. But look at the graph : the declines are fractions of a percentage, and seem to decline at a steady pace. So not a sharp plunge in the Chinese real estate market for now.
Turning to the US real estate market, check out the S&P/Case-Shiller 10 city Index, a graph I found at http://www.housingviews.com. Home prices are down some 30% from the peak in late 2005. And there is no bottom in home values yet .. even with 30-year mortgage rates at a record low.
Monday/ Shenzhen shopping
These pictures are all from Shenzhen’s Futian district, from the Central Walk mall and the mix-C mall. There is still evidence of the start of the 2012 Year of the Dragon everywhere.
Sunday/ controlling the crowd
On Sundays NHK World TV shows the work of artists and graphic designers, and I liked the crisp look of these pictures of that illustrated how good layouts and some forethought can make it easier for everyone in the crowd. Of course, everyone has to play by the rules ! The website is www.mizuhiro.com.
Saturday/ more fireworks
Those of us ‘left behind’ by our colleagues – they go home to Shanghai and Beijing – did our usual beer-and-a-bite at the Sheraton hotel on Friday night. On Saturday night another fireworks ruckus erupted here in Dameisha, this time from behind the Sheraton. I noticed that the right section of the hotel is dark .. it is winter after all, and the weather not nice enough to go to the beach.
Friday/ the Korean mind
I am still looking for an opportunity to stop over long enough in Seoul to stay in the city for a day or two. This picture book I bought at Incheon airport provides very interesting insights into the Korean history and the Korean mind (a map of the Korean consciousness, says the cover of the book by Won-bok Rhie).
Formatting note : iPads may not display all the pictures in the correct orientation .. not sure why.
Thursday/ United-Continental ‘marriage’ update
Bloomberg Businessweek gives a very interesting update about the merger between United and Continental Airlines in their latest issue. The picture is from my iPad .. I’m still getting used to reading my magazines this way!
The new merged airline sent enough coffee into the sky last year to brew 62 million cups. (And Starbucks that was served on the old United has lost the contract for the new merged airline). Continental people in Houston have had to move to Chicago where the new headquarters is. But one of the biggest and most frightening challenges so far has been merging the flight information systems. If data were corrupted in the switch-over from two systems into one, the airline could find itself without vital information about its flights : destination and arrival times, flight numbers, or locations. For the final test last October, they flew an empty 737 Continental jet from Houston to El Paso, made believe it ran into a mechanical problem and made it turn around. At Houston they changed the flight number and sent it to Austin. Everything worked and the information was updated in the United system. Then on Nov 2 just after midnight, they took the United system off-line. For the next hour the United flights were tracked manually while the Continental system information was flowed into the United system. Plans were in place for mass cancellations of flights the next morning if there were problems with the cut-over. At 1.23 am the entire Ops Center was looking at the the tracking screens as the United system came back on-line, and burst into applause. The Continental flights showed up. The only small glitch was that flights that had crossed the international dateline during the outage had 24 hours added to their arrival time.
Wednesday/ dragon fruit ‘huǒ lóng guǒ’
We still go to lunch every day at 12.00 noon to the cafeteria : a welcome break from the slog at work. These dragon fruit are from a fruit seller close by. I didn’t buy any today but will get some next time and report back how much they cost.
Tuesday/ the Big Freeze
We are at the point of ‘freezing’ our test system, the same way the little water fall in the pictures from NHK World TV’s weather report has been frozen. At this point in an SAP project, all the moving parts of the Quality Assurance System come to a stop. No more tweaks to the custom code we added, no more changes to the extracted data which will be converted, and even on-going little defect fixes have now been put on hold. It’s not that the system is a house of cards that will collapse, but before you go to Production, you need to draw a line in the sand and say ‘This is it. This is the car, the Magnificent Flying Machine, the solution – we built’. We will go live (switch it on), and then after that any change to it is called Production Support.
