Shallow Grave

I watched a British film in 1994, Shallow Grave.
The director is Danny Boyle, who also directed Trainspotting.

This is about friendship, but it's not so simple.
I think friendship is very emotional relationship, therefore once the relationship gets wrong, it's just getting worse and worse.
Let's imagine that you go for a trip with a friend of yours and have serious argument. You might forgive him or her if they were not your friend, but sometimes you couldn't do it because they ARE friends.

This film shows the complexity of friendship very clearly. You might feel uncomfortable seeing this film, but it is interesting anyway.

SANPELLEGRINO / SANPELLEGORINO

I just drank it in a cafe. I thought the name was “sanpelleOrino”, but it was actually “sanpelleGrino”. The shape of “G” is a bit special and similar to “O”, so I just misjudged.

http://www.sanpellegrino.com/index.html

Maybe it is not unusual drink, but since I have never seen it in Japan, it is exotic for me and tastes better than other sparkling fruit drink. It is not so strongly carbonated, so it feels subtle and sensitive.

A good tutorial for texture mapping on 3ds max

http://www.max-realms.com/modules/tutorials/intro_to_next-gen_modeling.php

The following site, although it is in Japanese, introduces a lot of useful information about 3ds max, most of which contains sources in English.
http://www.maxuser.com/index.html

How to motivate myself?

How to motivate yourself?

This is one of my largest problems I have now. I have to find a work placement for my next academic year, but actually I’ve just sent my CV to few companies.

My methods of motivating myself are:
1. Change the place/ mood
2. Don’t think too much

Basically my character tends to be too careful about anything, so when I need to take some action, I try to think it is not a big thing if I make a mistake. However, they don’t work well so far. Maybe now is the time to learn a new way to solve the problem.

Fujita vs. Thompson

I bumped into a video of MMA.
This is really exiting and shows the lesson that you should never give up.

Fujita used to be one of few heavy-weight Japanese MMA fighters who could compete with fighters of other countries. I don’t know who’s the next generation.

The Royal Tenembaums

I haven't updated it for a long time. I'd like to start it again to improve my English writing.

I watched “The Royal Tenenbaums”. I watched it before, so it is actually the second time. To be honest, I almost forgot what I felt when I saw it at the first time. I felt it much better this time. I might have become more mature to be able to understand what the good point of the film is. The loneliness of Royal was the key point for me. He tried to be funny, positive and humorous, but he’s lost his family and there must have been loneliness. This film seems to be about compensation and forgiveness.

Designers don't only draw anymore

I had an opportunity to talk with a director of a design consultancy. My question was how people who have business background can contribute in the agency, and he explained there are so many tasks designers are not good at. However, my impression from his answer is that designers are not just involved in drawing anymore. They need to think about experience of users and it is also true in terms of branding. Some other classmates are interested in branding, so they ask him about branding, then he told us that no one talk about branding itself, but experience.

Reflection in a hard time

I haven’t written diary for a long time again. Right after the last post, something happened personally and everything bad suddenly appeared. Now must be a good time to reflect who I am and what I have done and what my value is and so on.

The address of Steve Jobs in the graduation ceremony of Stanford University is quite inspiring for me. It might mean that my life is not coherent, but I need to believe myself or something driving me. I am who I am. I am not anything else. In a bad time, everything looks dark, but in a sense you can see everything clearly. In daily life, I might have wanted not to see what is inconvenient for me, but now I need to face it. I am who I am. I am not anything else. I can have some illusion about myself easily, friends, fun time...but I cannot be anything else but me. I can hide it, but I cannot escape from who I am.

Struggling in internship

Recently I haven’t kept diary not because I’ve been very busy…
I just might have lost my motivation to keep it because basically keeping diary was for studying English and I started to feel some question it would be effective, but now I’ve begun to feel it would be useful again.

To reflect daily life is really important sometimes.
Recently I’ve felt as if I got lost and my goal is a bit vague now.
I’ve taken a place as an intern, but now I feel it is just working for free.
In the first place, I thought I could learn how to work in the UK, but actually my work is just maintaining the website. I don’t need to learn about it and it has nothing to do with my career. I expected I could get some experience of marketing and promotion work in this internship, but actually it is different from my expectation and I can’t realize that I learn something. What makes me keep going is that if I quit it now I learn nothing.
If I think positively, actually I’ve learned some things.

-Some artists don’t have basic IT skills to promote themselves and there are some opportunities.
-How the website is maintained.
-Basic strategy and structure of the company.

Anyway I should ask my boss a lot of questions. I still cannot see how great he is, but he must have some strong advantage. Any crowd has silver lining.

Communication is the most important thing to solve problems, I suppose. It is my motto at least.

This case is included in what I usually have some trouble. I think sometimes I don’t see the goal or purpose when I do something. Sometimes it’s ok because I can try new things quickly, but in most cases it turns out to be wasting time. Any experience could be a good experience if I can turn it into some lessons.

Interview: Tyler Brulé

It's very honourable that his favourite magazine is Japanese magazines!!

Finally succeeded in installing elgg

This morning, I struggled with installing elgg (version 1.2) again, and I finally did it!! I tried to do it on streamline.net, but it seems to me that they don’t allow their server to be contacted directly from the outside (which means without some html files like index.html), so I looked for some other free web hosting service and I finally found http://www.noadsfree.com/, and it’s worked!! It doesn’t look a decent service (sorry no offence, but to be honest…), but works properly. If you also try it a bit without any fee, you can try this service.

Hustle series 5

BBC TV series, Hustle series 5 finished.
My favourite is the first episode, because I’ve never seen it but it attracted me enough to see the whole series five. The episode about Spider’s Web is also interesting. The ending scene is funny and surprising.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007gf9k

BBC iPlayer

Now it has a function to show subtitles on streaming videos. It is amazing to study English, I suppose.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/

Leadership with emotion

Our course is now, in a sense, in a bad mood. The reason is from our director. He works very well, but now he’s almost lost his respects from students. It’s really good lesson about leadership for me, because his explanation and responses about our questions and disbelief sounded very logical and appropriate, but the thing is that there are no satisfaction and respects for him. Of course, it might have been just because of stupidity and laziness of students, but anyway the situation taught me that for building proper leadership, logical validity is not enough. There must be some emotional factors.

Innovation Policy in Japan

ITPS, Swedish Institute for Growth Policy Studies
http://www.innovation.lv/ino2/publications/japan.pdf

The large apparent difference in economic performance between the USA and Japan during the last decade has been seen as evidence that the American innovation system today is more effective than the Japanese. Especially two differences have been emphasized. One is the creation of new high tech venture companies in such fields as IT and biotechnology, of which there has been very little in Japan. The other concerns the internationally leading position of American research universities and their seemingly effective system for transfer of technology and knowledge to industry. p.9

This is the concern about innovation for Japan for long time, but it might be difficult to change the situation because it would be strongly connected with conservative aspects of Japanese business culture.

Where am I and Where will I go?

Our next essay would be interesting, which is about our positioning. Actually it is not interesting, but it is quite important to decide our future career. In my opinion, it must be a bit surprising that the course work includes an essay about this kind of personal concern. It might be telling us our course still has no clear-cut directions.

My last essay discussed disruptive innovation in design process, and this essay must be related with it, but my concern is slightly different about it, so maybe I need to come up with a good idea for connecting two essays.

Firstly, I was interested in Marketing Innovation, such as viral marketing, Web 2.0 and so on, but I found it a little bit difficult to articulate it because it is a sort of cutting-edge discipline and it is difficult to find proper books about it.

Basically, my concern was to support creativity of creators like designers and artists, so now I’m interested in making network for designers, artists and customers, but actually it has little to do with innovation, so if my argument in this essay relates with this activity, I should find why it is important for innovations. In a way, I think it is very important for innovations, because driving creativity of designers could be a critical factor for innovations, and now I guess it must be possible with making network between creators, but, for that, I need to articulate what the creativity of designers is. According to the research of my last essay, it is supposed be the ability of observation to identify potential opportunities behind what customers say, and maybe I also need to show what designers need to extend their creativities.

slumdog millionaire

That’s a stunning film!
It’s like city of god, which is a Brazilian film, but you can feel much happier after seeing it.
Although I’m not sure how real this film is, but you can see lives of some people are very hard and how lucky you are.
Sometimes seeing film makes me upset, because there are many people who struggle to live over there, but how is my life? It’s quite easy and nowhere near difficulty.
I might be just happy, and I should be satisfied.
In a sense, you cannot measure our happiness objectively. Anything might be unmeasurable.
The modern age is long gone, which had a “big story”, but I still can’t adjust the reality. I still want some objective answer for life. Personal feeling is much more important now. Thinking objectively is still important, but it’s not enough.

We need passion, feeling and emotion. Sometimes life suddenly becomes quite bright, but on the other hand, life also suddenly becomes dark.
Life could be perception.

meeting, meeting

We have a presentation this week, so in order to prepare for it we’ve been having a meeting and a meeting. Sometimes I feel my brain is too slow in English. I can’t understand something and make my opinion at the same time, but the other members can. Anyway it is a good exercise for me to think in English.
My bad habit is that I can’t feel motivation right before deadline whatever it is, but how can I change it? I usually try to take advantage of the tendency, but sometimes it’s too late. Making priority for my activity is very important. I should try it more systematically.

Recently I’ve been reading Clayton Christensen’s “Innovator’s Dilemma” and Ronald Norman’s “The invisible Computer”. The former is more theoretical, so maybe it’s easier to get the point, but the latter is more experiential and it also tries to include the theory of Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the chasm”, so some points are confusing.