The Extended Phenotype

The Extended Phenotype --- The Gene as the Unit of Selection ---
Richard Dawkins
ISBN 4-314-00485-1

This is the second book of Richard Dawkins, and it says basically the same thing with his first book: the primary unit of natural selection is the gene. The essential new point of Dawkins in this book is that a phenotype of a gene can appear in other individuals which actually do not carry the gene. In other word, genes can cause effects remotely.

At first, I thought that this could relate genes and memes, but it was a hasty conclusion.
Meme does not follow even the central dogma of biology. Here I mean that in case of Meme acquired characteristic can be inherited against the case of Gene. Thus, there must be different theories from the ones of Gene. Anyway, I need to read some literature on Meme, for example, ones by Susan Blackmore.

Day 386 : Ritual of Mouse

Hahaha, here is another shot of my daughter's rituals. :)

I'm wondering when I should give hear a PC and show her the Internet world...

Day 377 : Ritual of Cellphone

This is another version of the Ritual of Cellphone. :)

Last time, she did the first version of cellphone ritual when we visited her granma's house.
It's was actually a toy cellphone (precisely speaking, her granma's old one) at that time. But, this time, she found her father's live one which means the cellphone emits lights responding various operations.

Thus, she looked happy like the below. :)

BTW, her father was anxious looking at the ritual of course. :o

Nishi-Dori Pudding

Today, I met old friends about 5 years interval and had a drink with them in Tachikawa.

On my way back home, I found a nice pudding shop within JR Tachikawa station.
Nishi-Dori Pudding ('西通りプリン') seems to be a Fukuoka based hand made pudding shop. It looks like the shop I saw does not regularly open there but now they are placing a limited time branch shop in various areas around Tokyo.
So, I was lucky. :)

Day 371 : Studio Alice

Today, we went to Studio Alice with our daughter and took commemorative photos.
The below is a sample shot.

Ha ha, 1 year old! :)



BTW, today was a good day for taking pictures of the Shichi-Go-San festival, and there were lots of families at the studio. Of course, my daughter wept copiously because of fear for strangers, and the above smile is a lucky snapshot. :o

Day 369 : Ritual of News Paper

As I wrote before, our daughter does a kind of rituals (or dances?) when she gets something intersting. :)

In the below picture, she performs the Ritual of News Paper. :)


I'm wondering when we should begin to teach her how to reading and writing. :)

Day 367 : Happy Birthday!

Finally, my daugher reached the first birthday. :)
Today, her granma (my mother) visited our house, and celebrated her together.

Guin Saga 123

Signs of Storms
Guin Saga 123
Kaoru Kurimoto
ISBN 978-4-15-030938-1

Summer Festival 2008

Ha ha ha, it's the Summer Festival Season again!
Finally, my daughter saw the festival. :)

Day 339 : Pulled Herself Up!

Finally, my daughter pulled herself up. :)

BTW, it happened during our stay at her grandpa's house.
I guess one reason would be that there are more flat furniture which she can use to pull herself up compared to our house. Now, I'm wondering if she would do it again in Tokyo...

Pomegranate Soup

Pomegranate Soup
Marsha Mehran
ISBN 4-560-02746-3

Day 320 : A Duck

Recently, my daughter loves playing with toys of ducks when she takes a bath (with me). :)

In Japan, there is a famous duck.
It's not Donald duck but 'アヒル隊長' (Ahiru-Taicho) which roughly means the Captain Duck.
The duck appeared in a TV show, 'ザ! 鉄腕! DASH!' (Tetsu-wan DASH). Literally, the title means the Iron-Arm DASH. But anyway, it's one of popular varaiety showｓ in Japan, and the duck appears there. I like the show, and I'm wondering if I can enjoy it with my daughter someday.
Well, one reason why I'm worrying is that the show features TOKIO, a Japanese idol band and their leader is almost 40 years old now. :o

Java World Day 2008

Today, I went to Java World Day 2008 held in Shinagawa, Tokyo.
Actually, I wanted to listen to a talk by Gregor Hohpe of Google, which is titled "Programming the Cloud : Internet as a Platform."

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/gregor-hohpe-conversations

Basically, he talked about fundamental technologies constructing Google
those of Google File System, MapReduce, sawzall and so on. He introduced also
Google App Engine and furthermore gave us a small live demo using that.

Among his presentation, what was impressive for me was new ACID idea.
(Ha ha, I knew the new ACID thing for the first time at the conference at this time of day...)

• NewACID
• A - Associative
• C - Commutative
• I - Idempotent
• D - Distributed
• OLD ACID
• A - Atomic
• C - Consistent
• I - Isolated
• D - Durable

Under the Internet environment where unpredictable amount of transactions
arrive at a web site, I can understand that application must have the new
ACID property in order to scale out. But, I'm wondering what we can do to run classical multi-tier web systems with RDBMS on cloud computing environment...
Maybe it's an open question...

TOEIC '08 Summer

I had a TOEIC test again about two weeks ago, and today I found the result notification in my mail box.
Last time I had the test I got the best score and this time 45 points down.
But anyway, the score matches well with my expectation which I had after finishing the test.

BTW, above graph says that my Listening/Reading scores ratio again goes down below 1.0 which means my reading section score was better than listening section one. One reason would be that I didn't speak English almost at all except the business trip to New York in June. I'm wondering what my employers want me to do...

Day 312 : A Cell Phone

In Japan, mid August is the season of lantern festival.
Of course, I took this year's summer vacation in this season and stayed at my home town.

The above is a snapshot when my daughter got a (toy) cell phone from her grand mother and was doing some kind of ritual(dance?) to express her pleasure. :o

BTW, in the lantern season, it's believed that ancestors visit their homes and stay there several days. The altar behind her is her (late) grand father's one, and I hope that he enjoyed the stay of this year well. :)

Day 308 : Tachikawa

Today, we took our daughter to Tachikawa. It's her first trip by train except the one when she got back to Tokyo from my wife's home town.



The above is a snapshot when we had dinner at Din Tai Fung, a Chinese restaurant there.
She looked like enjoying the small trip, but her mother was enjoying window shopping at department stores more. :o

A Small Everyday Innovation Goes a Long way!

A Small Everyday Innovation Goes a Long Way! (なぜシリコンバレーではゴミを分別しないのか)
Noriko Takiguchi
ISBN 978-4-8334-1874-4

This book is a collection of columns on Nikkei BP, PC Online.
To tell the truth, I'm not sure if "A Small Everyday Innovation Goes a Long Way!" is really the correct English title or not, but anyway it's on the cover page.

BTW, the Japanese (original) title can be translated (literally) like "Why they don't separate the trashes in Silicon Valley?", and I like the reason. :)

Ichiro Ramen

Today, I went to Menya Tenho after a long interval.

My choice of today is Ichiro Ramen, a pork bones soup with sliced roasted pork ramen.
But, I'm not sure if the name comes from Ichiro. :o

Day 306 : A Swing

Today, my daughter got on a swing for the first time.
Of course, precisely speaking, I got on the swing holding her, but anyway she looks like she loves it. :)

BTW, there were only I and my daughter, thus unfortunately I couldn't take a picture of her first ride. :(

Day 304 : Melon

Today would be a memorial day for my daughter.
She had a piece of sliced melon for the first time today. :o



Well, she looks like eating something strange in the picture above, but anyway she seemed to enjoy melon. I'm wondering what she would say looking at the picture years later. :)

Guin Saga 122

Panther-King In Pain
Guin Saga 122
Kaoru Kurimoto
ISBN 978-4-15-030931-2

Pluto 6

Pluto 6
Naoki Urasawa
ISBN 978-4-09-182127-0

I was really looking for the 6th book of Pluto by Naoki Urasawa.
This story is based on a sub story of the Astro Boy, "The Greatest Robot on Earth" by Osamu Tezuka as you can find it out in the link above, and in this 6th book Urasawa's story turned the corner.

Note that Urasawa's story is not just a simple remake of Tezuka's original story. Urasawa is one of the best manga authors in today's Japan, and because of the difference of historical backdrops he focuses on other point of view than Tezuka's original works, humanity. Here, I don't mean Tezuka's work does not contain the view point of humanity, but I think Tezuka focused on more social view point such as citizenship of robots.
Anyway, it's worth reading, and I think it's a good time to begin reading the series. :)

68th Birthday

Today, it's the 63rd memorial day of Hiroshima.

But, for me it's 68th birthday of late my father who past away 8 years ago.
My father was very much looking forward to attending at my wedding ceremony and seeing grandchildren.

On this day, I always pray for him that he would enjoy his next life calmly since 8 years ago.

On this day, I always think about my father and my lost first daughter buried in our family grave since 3 years ago.

On this day, I feel that it's a great pity that he could not survive the 20th century nor hold his grand daughter on his birthday since last year...

Interface Magagine '08/09

Hahaha...
Again, I bought Interface Magazine almost automatically.



This month issue, '08/09, includes a FreeScale ColdFire board as a supplement.
Especially, its chip, MCF52233 has an Ethernet controller! :o

BTW, there are NEC V850 board, dsPIC board, Fujitsu FR board and this time FreeScale's board in my toy box. Anyway, I have to make time to play with them. :(

Day 301 : Stand Up!

Well, actually it's not yet. She needs her parent's help.
But, anyway here is a piece of memorial and happy photo of my family. :)

A Simple SysV Shared Memory Load Generator

Again, I wrote a stupid program.

This time, I wanted to see the so called memory access cost under virtualized environments like VMware or Xen.
From another point of view, I wanted to see if large page support really improves business application performance such as PostgreSQL running on top of VMware especially.

Thus, I read LINUX_SRC/Documentation/vm/hugetlbpage.txt and began to write a (stupid :o) program which generates various memory work load using SystemV IPC shared memory.
The program, shmload, is available here as usual, and I was a bit surprised comparing results of large page enabled and normal ones on top of Centos 5.1 and VMware Workstation 6 running on WindowsXP.
In the ultimate case where the whole share memory segment is accessed via only one memset() API call, a large page enabled test with a 4MB share memory segment performed 20% better than a test without large page. Here, 20% means that the elapse time was shorter than the test without large page by 20%.

This could explain the performance degradation I saw at work, and I'm going to try the program there next week. :)

BTW, here are other issues I felt working on the stupid work.

• I want to use PostgreSQL for RDBMS at first, and it does not have large page support at this moment. :( Thus, my next work could be a patch for enabling large page support in PostgreSQL (on Linux).
• Xen does not have large page support at this moment. Thus, the only resolution is buying servers with AMD RVI enabled processors. I'm wondering why they do not support large page.
• Note on 2008/08/09. I found patches adding large page support on xen-devel ML.
  
• In case of Linux, a large page is handled as an unpageable page. In other word, a large page is locked down. Oracle looks like using large page, and I'm feeling it could potentially cause peformance problem.
  

VMware ESXi for Free

As I wrote several times, I'm working on virtualization at work recently.

Two days ago, VMware made an announcement that they will provide VMware ESXi for Free.
According to their press release, ESXi seems to be the next generation hypervisor. But, so far as I know, ESXi is a subset of VMware ESX Server and the only difference is that ESXi does not contain the service console which is actually RHEL3 based Linux dedicated for management.
In other word, ESXi is the same as Virtual Infrastructure 3i. Here 'i' stands for 'Installable', not 'i' of something cool or superior like the 'i' of iMac.

I'm wondering what kind of revenue model they are thinking about from now...

Xen Summit 2008 Fall

I didn't know that the next Xen Summit (2008 Fall) would be held in Tokyo, Japan.

I was wondering it would be difficult going to both VMWorld and Xen Summit in this fall, but that means it's not impossible doing so because I do not need to making business trip abroad twice in one quarter. :)

In addition, yesterday I got an idea about a DBMS performance issue on top of virtualization environment, especially Xen hypervisor. :)
So, the only problem is that if I can really make time working on the idea...

Day 294 : First Clinic

Today was the first day she went to a clinic except regular health checks.

Recently, my daughter had a runny nose and we thought she caught a cold.
But, it turned out that she had a glue ear. :(
Anyway, it's lucky that we found the glue ear got correct medicine.

BTW, she cried out loud at the clinic, and I think she got tired there. So, she fell asleep just after finishing the last milk tonight. I hope she has a lovely dream tonight. :)

Day 293 : Growing Chair

I wrote about the first chair for my daughter in May, but actually we rent the chair at that time.

Recently, my wife found a good wooden chair, and it looked very cool for me too.
So, we bought it. :)

Here is a piece of picture of my daughter enjoying(?) the chair.


The chair is 'mobo' by 'Timkid', a German company.
'mobo' is a kit of knock-down chair, and the below are pictures during the assembly process.
Actually, the chair is highly flexible in adjusting its height, and so it seems to be usable from 7 month to 10 years old. Actually, the chair also grows with babies. :)

One thing I felt happy is not the do-it-yourself activity but that my daughter crawled to me and pecked my arm. :o

Day 293 : Stand Up! (Soon)

Well, recently my daughter shows surprisingly rapid progresses. :)



I'm looking forward to walking around with her soon. :)

Randy Pausch Last Lecture

I have to confess that I didn't know about Professor Randy Pausch in neither his speciality area nor his last last lecture. :(

Today, I read that finally he past away in a news paper and listened to his last lecture at CMU, "Achieving Your Childhood Dreams."

Here is an excerption from his slides, "Important Advices":

• Be good at something: it makes you valuable
• Work hard... "what's your secret?"
• Find the best in everybody; no matter how long you have to wait for them to show it
• Be prepared: "luck" is where prepration meets opportunity

I like the first one best, and now I'm wondering what kind of advices I can give to my daughter. :)

Time to Say...

Today, I heard that one of my colleagues would leave our workplace next month.

I'm working for a special organization for one of the most bureaucratic and legacy company in Japan, and its purpose is putting together engineers working on the same kind of technology area from its subsidiaries and make their activities more efficient for all of the group companies.

The colleague is excellent in terms of skill driving an organization for a practical direction. Furthermore, he understands wide range of technologies sufficiently including from emerging ones without working on the new ones by himself to legacy ones. But, sad to say, according to traditional way of career track of the company, a person especially on the fast career track would stay at one place at most five years or less, and he is. Thus, he was also to move to other workplace. In a sense, it's time to say good-by for him.
Anyway, I hope he can get a challenging workplace from next month.

Here, recently I'm wondering what kind of actions should I do in my career path.
I quit a company about five years ago, and one reason why I did so was that there was actually no career path being an engineer not a manager in the company, and one of my bosses who interviewed me told me that they were trying to design a career path for those engineers. But, after all I'm feeling it's was an illusion.

Thus, I'm wondering if it's time doing something also for me recently.

Day 288 : Crawling

Hoho, my daughter finally began to crawl around the room. :)

One thing I and my wife are talking about is that we have to do up our rooms.
Especially, there are a lot of cables and PC related things in my room. So, it's the most dangerous(?) area in our house. But, my room is also a lumber room, and I'm wondering if I really can find any room for gadets there. :o

Day 288 : A Tooth

Finally, my daughter got a tooth. :)



To tell the truth, we found the tooth yesterday at Aeonmall Musashi-Murayama, but it was difficult to take pictures of that. The above picture was taken when she was in a good humor after taking a bath and had milk enough. :)

Day 287 : Anpanman

Anpan-man is one of the most popular cartoons for children in Japan.
Today, we went to Aeonmall Musashi-Murayama and found the below at a bakery shop there.



My daughter does not understand Anpan-man yet, but I'm wondering someday I take her to cartoon movies such as Anpan-man. :)

BTW, Anpan means a Japanese original style bun with read bean paste.
That's why it makes sense that a bakery creates those things for advertisement. :)

Day 279 : One-piece Dress

Today, we had guests and it's the first time that my daughter wore her Sunday's dress presented by her granduncle. :)

BTW, the guests were colleagues of mine at work, and they are well known around me that they are very much education-minded. I was a bit surprised that their 5 years daughter created a toy credit card by paper craft during their stay our home. Especially, she recognized lines printed on the back side of the card as "patterns" not "characters" and copied them. The characters were of course Japanese Kanji.
A great pattern recognition engine... :o

Day 275 : 9 Months

It's my daughter's 9th month birthday today. :)

In the above picture, she wares Jinbei (甚平, じんべい) which is one of traditional casual Japanese clothing presented by her grand mother. It's made of gauze, and very good for this Summer season. :)

BTW, today I was very busy and stucked bya trap colleagues of mine at work (Hey, Furuta-kun, Morisa-san. I'm talking about you guys. :o)
Although I've kept taking a bath everyday with my daughter since she got back from my wife's home town to Tokyo(*1), the record was terminated today. :(

(*1) The only exception is my business travel to New York in the last month.

Osaka Groumet?

Today, I was sent to Osaka in order to do a kind of trouble shooting work.
It's a damn all-night work :( , but it's not the point of this entry.

It's my second visit to Osaka, and there were some discoveries for me.
For example, in Osaka there are good and cheaper plate menu restaurants than Tokyo. :)
The below is a photo of tonight dinner.
Well, the plate has a hamburger stake, a cream croquette, some pieces of fried chickens and a boiled sausage. It seems to be more than 1600K calories! :o

In addition, free for another bowls of rice.
Anyway, I had a happy dinner time tonight. :o

The below picture is a barbecue restaurant I saw on my way to the destination.
The red signboard says "情熱ホルモン" (Jo-netsu Hormon) in Japanese which roughly means "A Passion Barbecue." :o



If it was not before the work, I must have had a happy dinner with beer at the restaurant. But, unfortunately it's not... :(

Grand Central Oyster Bar & Restaurant, NY

I wrote several times about the Tokyo branch of Grand Central Oyster Bar & Restaurant, and I love the bar veeery much. :)

Today, finally I had a chance to go to the head quarter in New York. :)



Oysters were good, but the catfish plate I had was too well-done and actually it was a mistake. :(
According to a Japanese guy with me there who lives in New York, the Shinagawa branch is better, and now I'm feeling he is correct...

Day 258 : Oversea Communication?

Well, now I'm in New York (Of course, it's a business trip :o), and I had an oversea communication with my daughter.

The above is a snapshot during the communication via Skype at the hotel room which I'm staying at. :)

BTW, it's on June 22 for me, not 23 in New York local time. But, the day counter is based on my daughter's daily ife basis, thus the timestamp is June 23. :)

Day 254 : A Reverse Position?

My daughter moves well when she is sleeping.
In short, she is an untidy sleeper.

Today, I saw a funny scene after my daughter fell asleep, and the below is a snapshot. :o

Day 251 : Mama Down

My wife got a fever last night, and today she was in her futon whole day.
It's not so serious one and we're expecting she will be better soon.
But, anyway she was down today, and I was my daughter's baby sitter. :o



In the above picture, my wife is of course taking a rest, and my daughter is taking a siesta, untidily. :o

OpenSolairs 5/08

Well, about 8 years ago, I worked on SPARC/Solaris.
In those days, it was Solaris 2.6 which nowadays means Solaris 6.

Recently, I was trying to install OpenSolaris inVMware Workstation 6.0 running on Windows XP using ThinkPad X61. But, I got troubles and finally gave up it. :(

At first, I configured a VM with 512MB memory and saw progress bar of the OpenSolaris installer (which says transferring LiveCD image) stopped when it showed 84%. :(
After I read this discussion and gave the VM for OpenSolaris 1280MB memory, it passed the 84% barrier, but the installed instance of OpenSolaris never booted up. :(

So, I gave up VMware and tried VirtualBox which SUN recently acquired because OpenSolaris people mentioned that there many successful installations using VirtualBox.

The below is the first grub screen after my installation on VirtualBox.



The below shows the first OpenSolaris kernel message.
As you can see, the first line says "SunOS 5.11" that means Solaris 11, not Solaris 10 which SUN recently released the latest version of. In short, the relationship between OpenSolaris and Solaris is like the one between RedHat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Core.
That's why I wanted to try OpenSolaris. :)



BTW, there is one more thing I don't like.
The first line above says "32-bit," and this might be because of VirtualBox's limitation. :(



The above is the login screen of OpenSolaris, and I'm wondering if I can make time playing into Solaris Zones before setting for New York. :o
Well, yes, I'm looking into Solaris deeply (again) from a view point of virtualization.
Reading "Solaris Internals", sometimes I feel deja vu and at other times I'm concerned with the progresses of the years I was absent there.

BTW, I found that I forgot almost everything about Solaris system administration. :o

On VMI, Again

3 days ago, I saw linux console messages which says "VMI Rom detected" for the first time using VMware ESX Server 3.5U1 and vanilla linux kernel 2.6.25.

The below white paper by VMware says that we can get better throughput even using DBMS benchmarks such as sysbench.

• Performance of VMware VMI
  

I did a kind of DBMS benchmarks, and I expected lower CPU consumption rate against the same macroscopic workload because in general lower CPU cost is one of the major advantages of para-virtualization. But, what I got was almost the same CPU consumption rate and I was a bit disappointed. :(

But, there is only 32bit mode of VMI support and I guess it's still early stage.
That means there can be a room working on that area. :)

BTW, for me, the biggest problem is that reducing sleeping time is the only way for me working on such issue. I'm wondering if someone can employ me instead of my current employer ... :o

Day 247 : Ayako Notes

My wife takes very much detailed notes of our daughter.
Of course, I also write lines sometimes such as, "Today, she began to laugh out loud and express emotion somehow."

The first notebook was "10 Little Rubber Ducks,"
the second was "The Very Hungry Caterpillar."

As we are finishing the second notebook soon, my wife ordered new ones several days ago, and today delivered! :)

The new notebook is "The Pippi Longstocking." :)

VMWorld 2008

As I have written several times recently, I'm working on virtualization at work.

At this moment, we are in a research and planning stage especially on gathering best practices of applying virtualization technology for production systems.
Thus, I often have meetings with engineers from various departments of my employer and various companies these days, but I got almost no useful information. :(
For example,

• What is the typical successful use case of virtualization?
• Can we say simple horizontal consolidation is one of best practices?

or so.
I just want to hear something from their actual experiences, but anyway they usually clam up as if they were being interrogated. :o

Today when I was searching presentations given at VMWorld 2008 Europe, I found a lot of presentations which give me what I wanted.
I'm wondering if engineers in Japan working on (at least) VMware read them...

BTW, here comes to the point.
Hey, Uchikawa-san, Ushida-san,
I want to be there at VMWorld 2008 held at the Venetian Hotel, Las Vegas, in September because there are many important and attendees only technical sessions. :)

Weight

Well, since I turned 30 years old, I kept getting weight almost monotonically.
It's more than 85Kg when I got married about 3 years ago, but since then my eating habit was greatly improved.

Today, I was astonished with my wife when we found that my weight is less than 80Kg now. :o



Hey Jade, are you reading?
I guess I lost about 10Kg since I met you in Tokyo last time. :o

Engrish

Well, I do not speak English natively, and I know there are a lot of mistakes in my English.
But still, today I thought the below was too silly. :(



Of course, what they wanted to say is, Ladies'.

BTW, the title comes from an web site, www.engrish.com, where they collect funny (and of course, wrong) English expressions found in Japan.

One more thing.
I wrote "natively" in the first line above, and Blogger's spell checker says it's wrong.
But, Merriam Webster indeed says it's an adverb of "native."
I'm wondering why...

Guin Saga 121

A Foul Flower
Guin Saga 121
Kaoru Kurimoto
ISBN 978-4-15-03092705

Hahaha, 121st book! :)
Guin got a big trouble (again) !

On VMI

Here, VMI stands for the "Virtual Machine Interface," not Vendor Managed Inventory, nor Virginia Militia Institute. :o

As I wrote several times recently, I'm working on virtualization these days.
At work, I did some benchmarks and saw not negligible CPU cost using VMware ESX Server.
But, I've been thinking paravirtualization using VMI would improve the situation greatly.

Since then, I got a draft version of VMI and tried to run VMI aware Linux kernels on top of that.
Although I'm still struggling doing so at work, today finally I saw VMI ROM detection message using VMware Workstation 6.0 and Fedora Core 9 (i386).
Hoho, what kind of benchmark should I do? :)

BTW, reading the VMI 2.5 specification, I thought why they didn't include a special I/F intended for SMP configuration, something like a 'SpinLock Ops.' As early implementation of Virtual Iron did, that can be a good clue for constructing SMP virtual machine.
I heard that a VMware guy mentioned at VMWorld 2007 that they made a design choice forcing to schedule all virtual CPUs of a guest simultaneously mainly because of spinlock consideration. But, I think the spinlock ops could be a clue for them.

Day 239 : Egg Allergy

Today, my daughter had the 8th month medical check.
Well, she suffered from eczema on April 25 just after having egg based baby food, and we were afraid that she could have an egg allergy. Unfortunately, that's the case. :(

But, it seems that usually the allergy will be cured till about 15 month.
I'm looking forward to eating egg based sweets with her. :)

Day 237 : The First Piggyback Ride

Today, we tried to give our daughter a piggyback ride.
I'm not sure saying the above "a piggy back ride," but my dictionary gave me the expression.
Maybe "on my shoulder", not "on my back" which I guess usually means "a piggyback ride."
Anyway, my daughter looked happy, and of course we were. :)