Sunday, February 18, 2007

Failed!

Today was the PMP day.
Of couse, FAILED! :(

I should have:

  • left home earlier because I had no time to have lunch. PMP exam takes 4 hours!
  • Studied more overall PMBOK areas. My score was about 60% on average.Especially project finalization process groups.
  • Bought another PMP exercise book and work on that.I think the text books provided by the consultant who gave me the PMP training course was very good. But, exercises accompanied with them were not enough. There were many questions which I was not familiar with.

Anyway, it depends on my employer if I take a revenge test or not. :o

BTW, today there was the TOKYO Marathon 2007, and I had a trouble
to pass a crossing on the way to the test center. :(

Here is a picture.



Wednesday, February 14, 2007

TOEIC Result

Today, I received result of the TOEIC exam that I took about two weeks ago.
A bit surprised because it takes usually one or two months to receive
the score sheet. At least till the last time.

I got 60 points down, but it's not the point today.

Here are two interesting graphs which I draw using my TOEIC score data.



The right one above is a time series Listening versus Reading scores ratio.
A value greater than one means I got better Listening score than Reading.
In general, it's often said that usually practical English speakers
are better in Listening than Reading. As for me, I'd been good at
English classes during my school days. I'm not sure the current
school English teaching system well, but anyway in those days the English
classes were Reading and Writing oriented. I mean it's not oriented
for oral comprehension in English.
I think that's why I got better result in Reading than Listening
in the first two years when I was not used to communicate with foreign people
in English. I didn't speak English almost at all last year, thus a bit
surprised. Maybe it kept my Listening score that I listened to reading
of my favorite books such as Narnia Chronicles on my way to office
and back to home.

The left one shows time series development of my *relative* TOEIC scores
where 1.0 means the first score I got. The red line is a fit curve using
a quadratic function, y = a*x^2+b*x+c. The point is, the first coefficient 'a'
is minus! The graph says that I have already passed my peak around autumn
of 2005. :(

Oooooops.....

2007/02/14

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Ms. Dewey

Recently, there seems to be a new kind of search engine.

http://msdewey.com/

Umm....
I like this idea, an entertainment search engine(!?), but Ms. Dewey gives me boring answers. :(
At this moment, most of the answers to my questions are links to Wikipedia.
Is she really going to rule the world? :o

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Guin Saga 112

Guin the Gladiator
ISBN 4-15-030878-0

112!

BTW, according to the author, we can enjoy monthly guin saga two times this year.
She also mentioned in the postscript she had already finished writing up the 114th book in the beginning of this year. :o
Really amazing!

2007/02/08

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

PMP

Finally I had a reservation of PMP test today
after almost one year hibernation days when my boss first asked me to have that.
Anyway, I will have the test on Feb 18, 2007.

Oops, I have only 12 days left. :(

2007/02/06


Google Maps

I was wondering why we cannot embed maps from Google Maps
here since I wrote this entry.

Blogger simply says you cannot include <script> tag in the entries, and
that means we cannot use Google Maps API there.

I know of course it's because Google organization is now very huge, and there are various
independent teams there. But, recently sometimes I feel the situation is now like Microsoft. :(


Sunday, February 04, 2007

TOEIC

Today, I took the TOEIC test after one year interval.
The test was not a public one, but a private called IP (Institutional Program) test held by my company. Yes, my company pays for me. That's good. :)

But, today I had to work not only as an examinee but also as an examiner.
Here, an examiner just means a helper at the examination halls for the supervisors
sent from the ETS.
At my company, usually the work is assigned to second years.
This time, I had a reason which I cannot deny the assignment by my boss.

In Japanese, sometimes we say such situation 'Batsu game'. It can be translated as
'punishment game' if I do direct one-to-one mapping translation. But, I think
the nuance is different, and I'd be happy if anyone can tell me the correct the expression. :)

BTW, I found a good article for people shooting for good TOEIC scores.
Hey you, Takeuchi-kun and Furuta-kun, are you reading? :o

2007/02/04

Saturday, February 03, 2007

SO903i Again

Since my new cell, SO903i, died in the beginning of this January, I used a Panasonic P900iV by just putting my FOMA card
(it's like SIM card in the GSM world) into that.

Actually, P900iV is cool for me. For example, good mechanism for taking pictures, or so. But, as it's a bit outdated one, its response time of Japanese input method was
beyond my patience. So, I bought another one. :o

Here is a museum of my cells history. :o



From left,
NTT DoCoMo
Mova P503i --- Panasonic, worked for me more than 6 years
Foma SO903i -- SONY, drawn after 1.5 month:(
Foma P900iV -- Panasonic, second hands from my wife :o
Foma SO903i -- SONY

2007/02/03


Korean Restaurant

We went to a Korean restaurant tonight.
It's about 10 minutes walk from our room, and
we can enjoy very good Korean homestyle dishes. :)

Here are details of the restaurant.

http://tokyo.gourmet.livedoor.com/restaurant/info/14772.html

The restaurant's name is in Korean '다람방', and in Japanese 'ダラッバン'.
According to the Japanese notation, it's pronunciation would be like 'Darabban.'
But, I'm not sure if the alphabatical notiation is correct or not. :(

BTW, according to an online Korean-Eglish dictionary,
'다람방' means a garret or an attic. Good naming.

Here is the main dish of tonight. :)



In Japanese Kanji notation, it's '部隊鍋', pronunces like 'Bude Chige'.
In English, roughly speaking that means something like 'corps hotpot.'
So far as I know, it comes from how it's invented.
That is, after the Korean War around US Forces bases
some Korean people tried to put instant noodles which they got from the bases
into hotpots, and that tasted good. Thus, people seemed to call it corps hotpot.

Anyway, it's not so spicy and very good. :)

2007/01/20

Friday, February 02, 2007

Mixi

Mixi is the biggest SNS in Japan.
Similar to other SNS systems, Mixi has its original built-in diary system.
We can have notifications when our direct friends added new entries via e-mail daily or weekly.

Of course, we can use other diary / blog systems outside Mixi.
In this case, it's OK just filling in RSS feeds URL to the profile form.
Currently, Mixi supports only RSS format, not Atom, and here was my problem.
Actually, I didn't know Blogger supports RSS 2.0 format feed untill recently.
It finally worked, and I was a bit surprised seeing a lot of friends of mine on the access list there.

BTW, I'm wondering why orkut doesn't have one. Does anyone have any idea?

2007/02/02

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Binary Hacks



I know one of the authors and one of the contributors of above.
They are really excellent and the book is too.
The book should be translated as soon as possible!

ISBN 4-87311-288-5

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Labels!

Wow!
I didn't know that Blogger supported "Labels."
I've been waiting for that since I wrote this entry. :)


Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Eustace, Useless

Eustace, Useless.
If you read Chronicles of Narnia, you might know the phrase.

Esutace is a boy who appears in "the Voyage of the Dawn Treader",
the book 5 of Chronicles of Narnia. It's just a phrase that
creatures of Narnia teasing Eustace were shouting.

But, today at work, a co-worker of mine really reminded me of the phrase.
Goddamn! :(

2007/01/30

Saturday, January 27, 2007

Tonkatsu Saki-Tei

Today's dinner.

Tonkatsu Saki-Tei, Shinjuku Isetan, Tokyo.
http://r.tabelog.com/tokyo/rstdtl/13010717/

Tonkatsu is 'pork cutlets' which is a very popular dish in Japan.
If you have a chance to visit Japan, try it. :)

2007/01/27

Saturday, January 13, 2007

LinkedIn

Recently, I got two invitations to LinkedIn within a week.

Google gives me 210,000 Japanese pages about LinkedIn at this moment.
What is interesting is that LinkedIn is a business oriented SNS and there seem to be more than 8.5 million users according to an article which Google gave me. Building business relationships, recruiting, etc. This can be a powerful tool even for us Japanese...

BTW, one of the invitations I got was from Germany and the other was from Lithuania. :o
Obviously, there must be two waves traveling through the earth toward west and east from the United States. For me, the second one was faster than the fisrst one.
I guess this is a bit irregular case.

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Oh my SO903i

Oops.

I dropped my cell into the water at the lavatory of my grama's house.
Of course it died... :(
I used the previous cell for more than 6 years, but this time only 1.5months.

In eastern agian coutories, men have unlucky 3 years called "Yaku Doshi"
which seems to be translated "climacteric" according to my dictionary.
Usually, we ask the priests of Shinto shrines to give us sort of exorcism,
in Japanese Yaku-Yoke or Yaku-Barai.
I should have had one at Ooi Jinja Shrine. :(

2007/01/03

Saturday, December 09, 2006

Tomb

Today my family had the 13th anniversary of my father's deth.

I asked the priest (in casual Japanese Shizuoka dialect, Ossan) to have
a small funeral ceremony for my daughther together with the anniversary.
She got her posthumous Buddhist name, Shin-So-Sei Musoh-Gai-Shi.
In Japapanese Kanji, it's spelled like the following:




Roughly speaking the posthumous name means 'a baby of a dream
who pasted away very early', and it comes from directly from her name, Yume,
which means a dream in Japanese.

I hope she will have happy time with her granpa.

2006/12/09

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Guin Saga 111

The Fiendish Fencer
ISBN 4-15-030872-1

The 111th anniversary(!?) book.

2006/12/07

Sunday, December 03, 2006

Jumbo!


Kappa Ebisen Jumbo!

Today we went to Aeon Akishima Shopping Center and found (encountered?)
a strange object. :o

What my wife holds is an extra jumbo size Kappa Ebisen.
Kappa Ebisen is one of very popular snack food in Japan.
I like it very much. :)

BTW, she is 151cm tall. Please guess the size. :o

2006/12/03


Sunday, November 26, 2006

Forbidden Colours



I really love this tune.
Lyrics here.

BTW, someone might say, "You just wanted to test an embedded object from YouTube!"
So what? :o