Business Meetings in Japan

If you're used to doing business in the US, business meetings between Japanese companies seem very strange at first. In the US, a meeting generally lasts several hours and is planned well in advance. The discussion is focussed, with an agenda and a deliberate progression towards a conclusion. At the end, though there are generally no formal minutes, there are action items and agreements. You know what you've achieved, whether it was a lot or a little.

When I first started working closely with my Japanese colleagues, I just couldn't understand what was happening. Meetings, even at a high level, can happen at short notice. They're rarely longer than an hour. And at the end, as a Westerner you have little idea what has been discussed, and no idea at all what has been concluded. It's just like a cosy chat amongst old friends. Very often, it's not at a formal conference table, but sitting in armchairs around a low table. For this reason I call this meeting style the "Fireside Chat".

An OL ("office lady", a kind of general administrative assistant, invariably female and fairly young) brings in drinks - hot tea in winter, cold barley tea in summer. The head people from the respective teams start a conversation, others join in occasionally, showing due respect. At the end one of them looks at their watch and says, "ah, I think it's time to finish" (actually what they say is a lot less explicit than that). Everyone stands up and files out to the elevator, performs the ritual elevator bow, and the visitors depart. "What was that all about?" you're left thinking to yourself.

Since business does get done in Japan, just as effectively as anywhere else, you can't help wondering how this works. Of course the well-known Japanese dislike of conflict plays a part. But there are as many reasons for business partners to disagree in Japan as there are anywhere else - price, specification, availability, all that stuff - yet they evidently do get resolved somehow.

In the end I realised that geography has a lot to do with it. In the US, such meetings typically involve a plane journey, often an overnight stay. They're expensive and it's important to get the most out of them. In Japan, most large companies have their offices in Tokyo. It's rare that it takes more than a half-hour taxi or subway ride to get there. So meetings are cheap, and you can afford to do them quite often. They don't need to be so focussed, it's OK to let things kind of evolve naturally over several of these apparently rather loose discussions. That coupled with the natural Japanese way of doing things just leads to this completely different style.

Of course, as with everything in Japan, it may be that I've missed the point completely.

boost serialize - not such a good idea!

I'm a big fan of the boost libraries for C++. Mostly, they are a huge productivity gain - things like regex, function and bind can reduce the work involved in a complex program by half or more. So when I needed to pickle a very large (gigabytes) and complex data structure between restarts, boost was the obvious place to look.

Boost serialize certainly looked like the answer. Just add a few lines to each class saying what you what to save and restore, then with a single function call, you can pickle the whole structure and later reload it. It takes care of loops, diamonds and all the other things that happen in real-life data structures. And if you don't like the default way of saving something, it's easy to write your own. How good can it get!?

Well, that's the theory, and it could have been the practice too. But it isn't. For some reason known only to themselves, serialize's authors decided that the C++ inheritance mechanism wasn't for them. They invented their own completely parallel mechanism for dealing with polymorphism and subclasses. The effect is that trying to save my structure results in an exception thrown from somewhere in an enormous depth of function calls. I persevered, and tracked down what was happening. For some reason - and it's just impossible to plough through all the code and figure out the details - it silently ignores some of the calls to the subclass registration process. After several days of trying to figure out the details - on a live application because that's the only place the data can be collected - I have finally given up. I'll live without this capability in my program.

Unfortunately this is a common problem with boost. It seems to be de rigeur to invent new ways of doing things even though they are more complex and don't work especially well. The build system is another case in point - instead of using make, known and hated by generations of programmers, they invented their own, bjam, which is unknown and incomprehensible. If it works for you, great. If not, forget it.

I'll carry on using boost, but you do have to be selective. Unfortunately.

More thoughts on Boost here.

Divisumma, the Star!

A few weeks ago I got an email fom someone saying, in essence, "Can I come round and get some pictures of your Divisumma please?"

I was surprised, especially when I discovered he was coming from Detroit - I would have thought there would be more around than that. He is making a video about architecture for Yale, and had been specifically asked to include some footage of the Divisumma. He'd evidently had trouble finding one in the US but - thanks to this blog - he found mine.

He came by today and spent half an hour or so in the sunshine, shooting very close-up footage of the keyboard and the case. And, when he's finished putting it together, Divisumma will be a movie star!

Halfway to Upside Down

When I started this blog it was with the intention of writing regularly about aerobatics - hence the title. But you know how things are... I got involved with learning to fly the heli, which dramatically reduced the amount of acro I fly.

But today I flew the Pitts, and I took my camera with me. It's hard to take pictures of aerobatics while flying solo, I can tell you - trying to fly a tricky manouver left-handed while holding the camera with the right and trying to get it to focus on the right thing.

I did however manage to get a nice picture of a knife-edge. That's when you hold the airplane in a 90 degree bank, which means that the wings aren't providing any lift. So the only way to maintain altitude is to hold a very steep fuselage angle and let the fuselage provide the lift, which means LOTS of top rudder - in the Pitts S2C, full top rudder. Of course the drag is huge, so you slowly lose airspeed and eventually you will fall out of the sky. But you have long enough to take a nice pic, like this one.

Full size photo, and others from the same flight, here.

BBC News RIP

For years I've got my daily news fix from the BBC news site. It was well arranged and would give instant access to the top world stories and, when I was feeling nostalgic for good ol' blighty, the UK. There were always a few interesting tidbits. And it was free, too.

Then, a few months back, some genius in marketing (I presume) decided that the page needed a New Look. Ever since, I just can't find any news on it. It's not just me, I have a colleague (Iranian) who has exactly the same feeling. Somehow, they just messed it up. I guess all the same news is still there, but it has lost its interest and salience.

Today I signed up for a subscription to The Times (the London one). Goodbye BBC news. I'm sorry to have lost a friend.

Flying under the Golden Gate Bridge

I did it! On Sunday we flew the helicopter under the Golden Gate Bridge. It was pretty exciting. The picture shows us just approaching the bridge from the east. We're at 100 feet, about half the height of the deck.

The sight-seeing operators do this all the time. I was astounded when I first saw the red Jetranger that does these flights around the city zoom under the bridge. It's quite legal. There's a special exemption to the regulations that allows helicopters to fly pretty much anywhere without the distance requirements that apply to airplanes. (Take a look at FAR 91.119 if you're interested).

I'd discussed it with my instructor a few months ago. The plan was to fly through the SFO Class B airspace up to the city, under the bridge, then back again by the same route. Unfortunately though, since the incident earlier this year, SFO Tower is being much more cautious about Class B transitions. During the busy part of the day, they are generally not available. And indeed that's what San Carlos tower told us . Our second plan was to cross the hills at route 92 over to the coast, and go round the Class B. Although it was cloudy, there was plenty of room under the clouds to do this.

But then San Carlos handed us off to Norcal Approach, who cleared us through the Class B at 3500 feet. I've been given this transition before and it works well. Sometimes you have to ask for it, a bit like Special VFR. So we climbed before we got to the clouds, flying over the undercast and also the SFO departure corridor. It was very pretty, the airport and the city were both visible through gaps in the clouds, although I didn't manage to get a decent picture.

Then a very rapid decent once we were past the Class B surface zone, down to 700 feet and ready for the big adventure. We went over the south end of the bridge, slowed right down in a left descending turn, and at a stately 40 knots or so passed under the bridge at 100 feet. It was over all too quickly.

Although it's perfectly legal, we were both a bit nervous that people might react badly, so we climbed well away from the bridge, back over the south end, and then across the Bay to Oakland for the transition back south.

More pictures on Flickr.

Audrey Hepburn and the Eiffel Tower - twice!

There are two movies that feature both Audrey Hepburn and the Eiffel Tower (well, I suppose there could be more). One is well known and you will find it by googling those two subjects - Funny Face, one of her hallmark movies. It's a great movie, which we saw at the Stanford Theater last night. (One of the really nice things about living near Palo Alto is this movie theater, lovingly and expensively restored and specializing in classic movies, mostly pre-1960).

By coincidence, we had watched the other one the previous night at home. Any guesses? It's the Lavender Hill Mob, one of the greatest of the British Ealing comedies, from 1951. The main characters are Alec Guiness and Stanley Holloway, with other classic stars from the time like Sid James and Sidney Tafler. The Eiffel Tower has a central role in the plot, including a fantastic scene where the two heroes run down the emergency staircase. And Audrey Hepburn? In 1951 she was still an unknown. She has a tiny walk-on part at the beginning. You wouldn't recognize her unless you were looking. It was only when the closing credits rolled by that I saw her name.

Going back to Funny Face, there are some wonderful period-piece scenes. For avaiation fans, the scene of the TWA Constellation taking off is enough to make the whole film worthwhile. Then they land at Orly, where on short final they fly over Notre Dame and the Champs Elysees. Funny, this never happens when I go to Orly.


Another great detail is the Isetta, a 1950s "bubble car". It's a weird little thing, with a single door which is also the front of the car. For the movie they gave it a funny pweep-pweep horn, which the real thing didn't have.