Out of nowhere strategy for Fly Fishing

As for a successful fly fishing, there exist three ways to achieve it. Those are to be

1. a Fly Fishing master with excellent F.F. skills and tactics
2. a wealthy person who can fly to north in a long distance.
3. a healthy person who can climb up/down through mountains from/into rivers.


The latter two approaches adopt an “out-of-nowhere” strategy, in which we can go to a promising place dedicated only for my company. None except us can do F.F. there.
On August 30th, I woke up 3:00 AM, and I drove my car 100 mile to north. Moreover, 10 mile trail walk and 1000 foot cliff climbing brought me to such a promising place.

I was so tired and exhausted though, I got three trouts of 1 foot size.
This F.F. concludes this season.

Somewhere in north

Fly Fishing (F.F. in short) is one of my favorites. I think F.F. is completely different from other fishing sports which use real baits such as worms. Thus F.F. by definition is an artificially difficult sport. I prefer dry fly fishing, with line and artificial flies that float on cold mountain streams. Targets are trouts.

Have you ever watched the movie called “A river runs through it?”

The movie shows American F.F. which is in wider and deeper rivers. I prefer small cold streams in high mountains. This summer I enjoyed such trout fishing in north. Doing F.F. in mountains relives me of stress and pains in urban life.

There was a perfectly peaceful atmosphere. I felt an illusion I almost met the Forest Spirit (Shishigami in the original Japanese), described as a "god of life and death" which appeared in Princess Mononoke.

I caught trouts, some of them had beautiful parr mark, bigger trouts became pseudo smolt.

Nice weather, goof friends and beautiful trouts were there.

A yamame, a kind of trout

Last weekend, I took a train and hit the road to Fukushima, a northern prefecture 200km up from Tokyo.
Cherry trees were still blooming  with pink color and the atmosphere showed early spring.

The reason why I was there is fly fishing(F.F.). I don't like fishing, which is time consuming and boring in general. As for  F.F., however, it is not fishery, but shooting sport, which really implies "deportare" in Latin meaning.
On April 29th, Greenery Day, I got just one chance to hook a yamame, a small nimble trout, and caught her into my lading net.  She was beautiful and released to the stream.

Bordeaux Wine Tasting Party

I had a wine tasting party with my regular friends on April 18th
The main theme was to enjoy Bordeaux.

Wines were
1.Les Forts de Latour 2003 from Pauillac, Cabernet Sauvignon 78% Merlot 22%
2.Chateau Prieure-Lichine 1998 from Margaux, Cabernet Sauvignon 52% Merlot: 42% Cabernet Franc: 1% Petit Verdot 5%
3.Chateau Canon 2003 from St Emilion Merlot 55%, Cabernet Franc 45%
4.La Chapelle de La Mission Haut-Brion 2006 from Graves, Cabernet Sauvignon 48%, Merlot 45%, Cabernet Franc 7%
5.Chateau Clerc Milon 1973 from Pauillac, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc
Those are shown from left to right in this picture.

Five participants enjoyed gorgeous rich tastes gifted from Bordeaux.
Food was also great. Thanks to the host family.

Latour was said it was of the best year, and Parker point is around 93!

My score was two out of five unfortunately. I correctly told Canon and Clerc Milon because of those different Merlot & Cab Franc and aged tastes respectively.

Les Forts de Latour was marvelous though, I made a permutation error by taking Haut-Brion as Latour, Latour as Prieure-Lichine, Prieure-Lichine as Haut-Brion. Four of us made the same score “two,” and the host marked three right tastes, which includes Latour in addition to the two. Congratulations on his win.

Crowd Computing (not Cloud Computing)

This week, I completed a technical report draft, which was submitted to an IEICE MoMuC workshop , at Yokosuka, on Mar 4th 2010
The panel title is “Real Value of Cloud with Devices” and my document is entitled “Mobile, Cloud, and Crowd Computing”, which was uploaded to my home page.

Here is the highlight.
"Cloud Computing" is a marketing buzzword in some communities with no real user experience. Does cloud computing mean gigantic scale server integration with scale-out technologies? The question is hard to respond for people who haven't experienced benefits from cloud applications without knowing those are from clouds. More insights are needed to understand what it really means.

Don’t stick to server technologies when trying to understand “cloud computing.” We should pay more attention to “cloud devices” also. Cloud devices with personal data integration will be an extremely fertile incubation environment for new and innovative killer applications.
Let me explain the reason. In 1990s, we saw the dawn of personal communication with always-on anytime anywhere connection by phone, e-mail, and web browsing. Many web services emerged. Years 2000-2010 are characterized by social network services. i-phone has become an irreplaceable gadget for Facebook and Twitter in US and Europe. People are now using cloud devices to share (quasi) real-time information with their friends and family. That is a different communication style besides the personal communication in 1990's. Recent five years, cell-phone has become an information hub in our daily life. ``always-on'' mobile infrastructure has brought a community-based popular communication culture that was never seen.
The author is using Apple's MobileMe, Evernote, Google's services, SugarSync
, and DOCOMO's address book backup service. Those applications represent data store and integration as essential functions in communication.
The core data must be not only personal ones but also community ones.

With the recent popularity of Facebook, Twitter, and similar microblogging systems, we must note that it is increasing "social capital." Twiter is used for (1)daily chatter, (2)conversations, (3)sharing information/URLs, and (4)reporting news. Those usage are shared over people by clouds, specifically information source, information seeker, and friends.

Now, the personal data is surely being stored into clouds through information hubs (i.e., cell-phones). All the data is not necessary to carry. Those are stored in the clouds, and invoked over wireless broad band networks when necessary.
The race just began on to aggregate and to integrate the data over people so as to promote the data to social capital. Location, identity, schedule, addresses, and SNS connection of people online with whom we have a shared connection will create interpersonal functions. A system based on the integration may foster relationship building by allowing users to interact other members of their community, and consequently contributes to harnessing collective intelligence.
Let me call it “Crowd Computing.”

My Talk at Japan Android Group

Japan Android Group invited me to give a talk, given two keywords:cloud and Android.
Here is the abstract and snapshot of my presentation at Japan Android Group, Tokyo, Jan. 18th, 2009.


An Operator's View on Cloud Device Era
This talk conveys three major messages: 1.Emergence of cloud devices and its impact to communication culture among people, 2.Role of broadband wireless, especially of 3G Long Term Evolution (3G LTE) in the era of cloud devices, and 3.Operator’s imperatives to foster a new ecosystem with innovative content providers (CPs), e.g., Android Market participants.The concept of cloud computing is not far from Tim O’Reilly’s insight: Web 2.0 (see http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html) . What is changing from the original web.2.0 concept is that data aggregation and integration over clouds is in full progress and those have reached to a critical stage for communication paradigm shift. You can see those examples in Google applications, Twitter, mobile SNSes, etc. (see also my blog article at http://micketoh.blogspot.com/2010/01/my-2010-r-plan-beyond-web-20-and-cloud.html) The 3G LTE technology will support such cloud devices in two years by providing a fat pipe with very low latency, say 10msec. Lessons learned from AT&T wireless' case in launching i-phones are reported and discussed so as to emphasize inevitable broadband wireless. As for the last message, operator’s imperatives, we point out operator’s customer base, with payment systems and customers’trusting data, leverages creating a new ecosystems in the cloud device era. Those imperatives are (a) providing service charging system, (b) customers’ data aggregation and its fair use, and (c) providing network APIs especially of location, presence and AAA, to CPs in the new ecosystem. Detailed discussion follows in the talk.

I uploaded several keynote presentations which I made in the past.
If you are interested in mobile multimedia, content delivery over wireless network, and cell-phone sensors, please visit this URL http://micketoh.web.fc2.com/keynote.htm

My 2010 R&D plan beyond Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing

Here is my My 2010 R&D resolution (to be exact, that is my consolidated R&D plan.)

Nowadays, I am often invited to several conferences so as to present my thoughts about “cloud and mobile devices.” I have been saying that killer application enablers will emerge from these ideas:

1. Cellular Fat Pipe (will be available soon)
2. Cellular Phone as Sensor Hub, where cellular phones are now equipped with GPS(commodity) +Compass +Gravity +Motion + Intelligent Processing of Image and Audio data
3. Cellular Phone as Information Hub over Cloud that integrates the data: mail, address, schedule, .whatever!
4. Application Market as Incubation Platform toward Cambrian Explosion of Killer Application Candidates.

See one of my presentations for further details (MS IE is recommended to see).

As for the new term, “cloud”, personally speaking, I don’t have a strong opinion. “Cloud” is a buzz word recent two years. As for the definition of “Cloud Computing”, you can refer to the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
A more important point is that the recent technology and market trend are still in good accordance with Tim O’Reilly’s web 2.0 concept.
On 09/30/2005, Tim O’Reilly described “What is Web 2.0” at his home page
The key concept consists of

1. The web as platform,
2. Harnessing collective intelligence,
3. Data is the next Intel Inside,
4. End of the software release cycle,
5. Light weight programming models,
6. Software above the level of a single device, and
7. Rich user experience.

I admire his and his colleagues’ insights in what was going on mid 200X.
“The web as platform” implies “cloud computing.” Of course, the web as platform doesn’t explain web-scale (i.e., gigantic scale) computing technologies such as Google File System and Amazon EC2 virtualization for Platform-as-a-Service. Nevertheless, the concept expressed by the buzzword “cloud” has been mostly covered by the heart of web 2.0.

What is changing from the original web 2.0, in other words, the noteworthy point of change is that data aggregation and integration in cloud servers is in full progress and those have reached to a critical state for a communication paradigm shift. According to O’Reilly remark about “Data is the next Intel Inside, he said “the race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces. In many cases, where there is significant cost to create the data, there may be an opportunity for an Intel Inside style play, with a single source for the data. In others, the winner will be the company that first reaches critical mass via user aggregation, and turns that aggregated data into a system service.”

Yes, that’s why I started a data-mining project in 2006 inside NTT docomo, given tons of data (tera-byte order) every single day. Data has been and will be vitally important.
The discussion point is what type of paradigm shift we are facing.
When looking at people’s data from the viewpoint of communication, what we are experiencing can be depicted by the following figure.


Before the cloud computing emerges, cell-phones have been at cross-roads of personal data. There have been several research topics to utilize the data for service coordination, where a scheduler launches a mailer, vice versa, and there is also some limit of coordination benefit due to poor computation power, battery and amount of data.

Now, the personal data is surely being stored into clouds. I’m a user of Apple’s Mobile ME, Evernote, Google’s services, SugarSync, a teleco’s address book backup service, and its GPS tracking service, etc. All the data is not necessary to carry. Those are stored in the clouds, and invoked over wireless broad band networks when necessary.

Thus, in Earth, we individuals are living with personal handheld devices, i.e., cell-phones. In Heaven, the cloud servers are taking data integration over people. How far we can integrate the data over the people? That depends on the consensus of our society. If the society and individuals allow the data under our trusteeship, we may have the paradigm shift in communication. It’s going to be beyond “Harnessing collective intelligence” and to be a communication facilitator. I hope the society doesn’t see any similarity to Big Brother of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
My 2010 plan is to facilitate a virtuous circle of People’s trust as depicted here. We have done it to some extent, by initiating the inner circle of individual personal data integration. More important and essential one is to rotate the outer circle. We need a couple of killer applications with people’s data integration. That is one of my year 2010 wishes.