Ma Tasse de Thé

Our second daughter is born yesterday, this is well worth writing a post

Her name is Camille, and the Japanese transcription is 迦実 (kamii). Since I am often asked about the meaning of the name, here is a word of explanation: the first kanji, 迦 (ka) has actually no particular meaning in Japanese and is mainly used for transliteration of names. This character appears among others in the word shaka 釈迦 (which means Buddha), but the meaning I assign it personally is rather based on the ideogram structure: the central part 加 means “to add”, and the external part is “the path”, which I (very freely) translate as “the path of Life”. The second character 実, has a more obvious meaning: “fruit” or (in a different context) “certainty”. My own translation of Camille’s name is therefore “the fruits of a pathway of Life”. You can find it back in the little haiku (Japanese poem of 17 syllabes), which I composed for her:

Douce pluie d’automne.
Camille, tu portes les fruits
d’un chemin de Vie.

I have actually included this little haiku in the birth announcement card in Flash, which can be found here (don’t forget to turn the pages with the mouse!).

And here is a picture of Camille, and one of her elder daughter Manon, taken 2 and a half years ago. Did you say they look like each other?

 

I just finished reading a book entitled “An introduction to Steiner Education: the Waldorf School” by Francis Edmunds. The reason why I read it, is that the kindergarten we have chosen for our daughter happens to be a Steiner school, and I wanted to better understand the underlying thinking.

I am not going to try summarizing Steiner education here (see the book, which I think gives a fairly good overview), but I just want to share with you an excerpt of the book which I felt particularly interesting:

[...] Waldorf education is based on man as a threefold being. That he thinks, feels and wills, that he is head, heart and limb, is taken to be obvious. Event that he consists of body, mind [...] and spirit [...] is widely accepted. Yet it can hardly be said that these distinctions have entered deeply into educational practice. There the intellectual approach has grown more dominant at all levels. [...]

The headwise approach, as we have called it, has serious consequences. Is the child brainy, will he be able to pass exams, are questions that weight greatly on parents. The non-exam child, the child in whom heart and limb do not keep pace with the head, comes to be looked on as inferior. Art and the crafts play second fiddle. Thus all the three phases, infant, child and adolescent, are pressed forward intellectually and this has consequence for the whole life. The clever ones are extolled, but where are the artists and the craftsmen who embellish life and give it greater quality? They are rare to find.

But the effects of overemphasis on head and brain learning go further than this. We see how children in the kindergarten lose their spontaneous genius for play. They grow restless, are bored or get uncontrolled, and then they need adults with their thought-out games and learning devices to engage and entertain them. What belongs properly to the first years of schooling is pushed down prematurely into the pre-school years. That means drawing the children into their nervous system, making them ‘heady’ too soon; but that in turn also means robbing them of their early powers of imagination, the source, if allowed to play itself out naturally, of greater creativity in later life. Then, as is seen so clearly in public life, we arrive at adults who fall short of demand, who cannot enter with imagination into the problems, mainly human problems, that confront them, and therefore cannot arrive at the needed solutions.

I personally completely agree with this analysis, although I reckon it may be seen as extreme and likely controversial. But I would be really interested to know what you think about this. Are our schools indeed too “intellectualizing”, or do you think it is just a normal evolution of the 21st century in which we live?

Last week Saturday, we took part in a festival organized every year at the kindergarten which my daughter will attend from next year. Interestingly, we took part to the same event (almost) exactly one year ago, and the proposed activities were the same as last year.

You may want to ask why this is interesting. Well, because it gave me the chance to observe my daughter in the exact same situation as one year before, and see her evolution in one year. Amazing! Last year, Manon was 19 months old (this year 2 years and 7 months) and you really can see the difference: she was a “passive” baby last year, and this year, she became an active child, who really takes part to the activities.

You can get a feeling through the pictures below (left are from 2007, right from 2008).

 
 
 

It’s been a while since my last post. Is “Ma tasse de thé” being abandoned?

I have to admit I was quite busy, among other things by the acquisition of a new house (!) and by preparing the birth of our second child (!!) And while I hope coming back on these later, it is not about this I wanted to write today.

A question which occupies me these times is: How to keep myself up to date?

You will tell me to read the paper, or to browse RSS feeds. I (almost) don’t read the paper, but I do use Google reader at best, but although the tools is there, I realize it’s all about how you use it.

Google Reader

Which feeds to choose? Pierre told us about the importance to keep your feedreader “alive”, by adding new feeds and getting rid of those you don’t read, and I agree. But it requires you to be proactive. I sometimes see myself scrolling from one post to the other in a feed, without remembering a lot from my “reading” (apart being a good exercise for my mouse scrolling wheel, it’s not very useful). You need to throw away what’s not useful. Example: during the “D conference”, I thought it’d be nice to register to the “All Things Digital” feed, but now, I sometimes feel all these topics are not so interesting. –> Get rid of it!

But more importantly: how to find new feeds? This requires to surf more widely, which I don’t do often enough.

My favorite sources in Software Engineering are InfoQ and SE-Radio. I like to download the new episodes of SE-Radio and listen to them while I bike to work. It’s an excellent way to learn (more than being “up to date” because not all topics are really new).

This links me to what Pierre wrote in his post “What do they learn at school?” (waow, second reference to Pierre, he’ll become my guru!) It is even more important to continue learning, especially when you realize you didn’t learn anything at school…

Besides this, I enjoy entrepreneurs blogs, and blogs in the medical computing field, like this one or that one.

What about you? What are your sources of information?

Have you ever tried Google Streetview? It’s really cool. It apparently started a few days ago on Google Maps, and it allows you seeing the details of the houses across the streets. Of course, the streets need to be covered, which means the Google car has to have gone through and taken pictures with the 360 degree camera, but it seems that coverage is not bad. I just checked it and found our apartment!

Google Streetview

Maison japonaise

Damned, we were so close…

Last Sunday, we found a house which we liked very much: a little far away from the station, but on a land of more than 70 tsubo (about 233 sq m) with a two-story building of about 165 sq m, which is really huge for a Japanese house. Nice garden, underground car park, a large terrace, quiet neighborhood, with a park and a school close by. Moreover, the style is very special for a Japanese house: besides the dining room and bedrooms with wooden floor, the living room floor is made of marble! Doors and window frames are made of imported materials, not Japanese at all. There is a washitsu, but even this one doesn’t look very Japanese, more kind of a western-style tatami room. Needless to say we were really excited, but…

Maison japonaise

The real-estate agent told us there was already a potential buyer, and that the contract would be signed on Tuesday, which is… two days later. Not much we can do, they said, except make an offer for the whole price and hope the first buyer was offering less (seen the number of parties involved, it is often difficult to know who offers what). And this is what we did, without much hope. But…

On Tuesday, our real-estate agent calls us to let us know that the contract has not been signed, and asks us when we’d be available in the following days… Well you can imagine how we were: we really thought this was our chance. For two days, at least. Because on Thursday, we get another call telling us the contract has been signed. The house is sold… What happened? We’ll probably never know, but it is likely that the law of supply and demand has been applied. The first buyer probably offered less than the proposed price, and had to revise his offer (which he did because he really wanted the house).

That’s is. I’m sure we’ll never find again a house like this one. But I’m also confident that we will find a nice house for use, when the time comes. But one thing is sure now: we saw a really nice deal, and the way we look at houses from now on will likely never be the same again.

Just came along a conversation started by my friend Ledretch (Nutritionist 2.0) on Seesmic and I decided to share my favorite food: you guessed it, I’m talking about nattô (納豆)! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here it is. Enjoy!

I recently wrote about my research on the real estate market in Japan (here and here).

However, as I read this post on Seth Godin’s blog, I thought it might not be a very good idea. Seth says: “Only borrow money to pay for things that increase in value.”

So if I were to buy a house in Japan, either:

• I’d need to be rich, or
• Japanese houses should increase in value.

Better think some more about it…

A while ago, I wrote about the real estate market in Japan. Discouraging? Maybe so, but I don’t want to give up, I want to see whether a deal is possible.

The two houses we visited last week are quite different, but they do share some common features. We are looking for a rather spacious house (according to Japanese standard at least), that is more than 100m2, while the average is around (max) 80m2 in Tokyo, but not necessarily close to the station.

The first house we saw was a “light steel frame construction” (軽量鉄骨象 keiryô tekkotsu zô), built following “Hebel” (へーベルハウス = “Hebel haus”). It is 104.95m2 (land: 121m2), located at about 19 min on foot from H. station (uphill). The house is not more than 6 years old, with a ten-year warranty, and is said to be “a 60-year housing”. The company who built it (Asahi-Kasei) offers a maintenance program with regular check-up (every 5 or 10 years). The real estate agent told us that the land should be worth not less than 700,000 yen / tsubo (坪) i.e. about 212,121 yen / m2. And the house should be worth around 13,000,000 yen, which gives us 120 m2 x 212,121 yen / m2 + 13,000,000 yen = 38,000,000 yen. According to the agent, this is a really interesting price, given the fact that a new house in the area is about 40,000,000 yen. The house is “high-tech” equipped, with code-locking, whole electric kitchen, halogen lighting, etc. and (except the walls that need to be refreshed) it is available right away.

Japanese house

The second house we saw (see picture) is located about 17 min walk from T. station (next to H. station), with a living surface of 115.82m2 on a 132m2 land (somewhat bigger than the previous one). The big difference: it is a wooden construction (木造) and it’s 17 years old. The real estate agent says the land is worth about 800,000 yen / tsubo, i.e. 242,424 yen / m2 and the house worth 0! In Japan, a wooden house is completely looses its value in about one generation. This gives us 132 m2 x 242,424 yen / m2 + 0 = 32,000,000 yen. The house is sold at 31,000,000 yen with a possible 1,000,000 yen discount. The inside is however in bad shape: everything needs to be refreshed: walls, floor, plumbing, etc. … all this would cost about 4,000,000 yen. Also note that T. station is a bit more valued than H., because of the facilities and shops nearby. And the way to the house is flat.

My first impression: both houses cost about the same price, 35,000,000 yen (if you include renovation fees for the 2nd one). The big difference is that the T. house is considered as 0 yen worth, and the deal is therefore mainly about the land. The real estate agent also told us that a wooden house costs more in maintenance than a concrete building (about 10,000 yen a month for a wooden house). I am however tempted to think that the wooden house is more interesting, based on the fact that the land will (probably) not loose much of its value, and that the house can be inhabited although it is considered worth nothing.

Later, we went to see the second house again, and we met a neighbour, who told us the land was probably not worth more than 700,000 yen / tsubo (rather than 800,000 yen / tsubo). He also told us: “Many people came to see the house but it is still not sold yet; (I probably shouldn’t tell you that, but) this house is not worth much… Take your time to choose.” –1st lesson: don’t believe everything real-estate agents tell you!

The agent told us the house was now the property of a bank (it was taken away because the owner couldn’t pay back the mortgage), and if this house wasn’t sold 2 weeks later, they would sell it on auction (much less than the current price), most likely to a real estate agent who would renew it and sell it for a better price… (I told you: Japanese like stuff that look new)

Since I haven’t seen many houses yet, I can’t tell you whether this one would have been a good pick, but I still think if I had to choose, I’d opt for the wooden house. And you, based on these data, what’d be your take?

I was giving a try to twitter4r, a library for accessing Twitter’s API in Ruby, with Ruby installed on a Windows (Vista) box, and I was facing a the following problem:

My RoR server was crashing with “Segmentation Fault” somewhere in json/common.rb.

More specifically, it is when calling the timeline_for method that my server was blowing up.

I found the solution to this problem here, but since it is in Japanese, I thought some of you might be happy if I’d translate it in English.

In fact, it’s quite simple: the problem comes form the json library, on which twitter4r depends. If you install twitter4r with gem, as mentioned in their website, the json library is also installed, but the Win32 binaries seem buggy. The good news is there also exists a “pure ruby” implementation of json, and this one works fine. The problem is, if you install it with gem, it won’t be recognized. The solution is therefore to install both json and twitter4r manually.

How do I do that?

• For json, download json_pure package on RubyForge, uncompress it somewhere, move to the json_pure-x.y.z directory and type the following command in a console: ruby install.rb.
• As for twitter4r, download the twitter4r package also on RubyForge, uncompress it somewhere, go to the twitter4r-x.y.z\lib directory and copy both the twitter directory and twitter.rb file in Ruby’s library directory (type this ruby -e 'puts $:' to get the list).

Voilà!