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