Today is the last day of 2004. We just finished writing our New Year postcards (a three week long process). This year's total is forty-one (one short of the magic number and down from about sixty last year), another eight cards could not be sent because we lost the addresses. We are leaving for Chiba now, where we will spend New Year's Eve at a friends' house, if possible go to the famous (and totally over-crowded) Naritasan Shinsho-ji shrine and maybe also to an onsen.

Here is another rather silly experiment: I set up a web site that only exists in Google's cache. Since Googlebot has yet to find it, it does not really exist at all at the moment ...

It is snowing!

Whoever wins... We lose. True. About 100 minutes.

4 points

New York City in the 1930s: Reporter Polly Parker (Gwyneth Paltrow) is investigating the mysterious disappearance of famous German scientists when the city is attacked by giant flying robots. She teams up with former lover Sky Captain Joe Sullivan (Jude Law), who runs a private fighter plane squad, to stop the evil Doktor Totenkopf (a digitally resurrected Lawrence Olivier) from destroying the planet.

The big selling point of this movie is its rather unique visual style, but there is not much else to it. Punch lines can always ameliorate plot holes, so the actors (especially Angelina Jolie, who is hardly in it at all) should have been given more screen time, which instead went to lots of very silly action scenes.

5 points

Yesterday after work I went to the Yokohama International Stadium (site of the 2002 World Cup final and its unfortunate outcome) to see the German national soccer team play live for the first time in my life, and they wore completely unfamiliar red jerseys. The colours did not stop them from beating Japan 3-0, however.

Part two - Harada-san.

After several months delay (I suspect that my files did not make it out of Manila until after I complained about it) my Oracle Certification Program Success Kit arrived today. It includes a certificate signed by a Senior Vice President (although if Oracle is like Citibank, where apparently everyone with his own desk is called VP, that is not as impressive as it sounds), a plastic card, the right to display the OCP logo on resume and web site, and a free subscription to Oracle Magazine. Interestingly, the certificate and card are dated at May 30, 2004 and the kit has been posted in Germany, even though I am Tokyo and the sender in Edina, Minnesota.

So what is next? There are four choices for me if I want to continue collecting Oracle credentials:

• 9i is no longer the latest Oracle version. 10g was released this year, and of course, there are upgrade paths to become a 10g OCP. This will get interesting once we start migrating to 10g, but for now we are still using 9i (even for new projects).
• While the OCP is only the middle tier in the certification track (above Associate, below Master), the road to Certified Master seems to be quite long: there are no more exams, but you are expected to have several years of experience in the field, attended two advanced courses at Oracle University and you have to complete a practicum.
• Probably because of this (or maybe because certification is a lucrative business), Oracle have introduced a step in between, the OCP Special Accreditation. The first (and at the moment only) choice here is Managing Oracle on Linux, which actually makes some sense for me, as half of our Oracle installations are on Linux (the other half is on Solaris).
• I addition to Certified Professional DBA, I am also a Certified Associate Developer. The developer track also has an OCP tier, and I see myself more as a developer than a DBA, but whereas the OCA exams where about PL/SQL (very useful), the OCP exam focuses on Oracle Forms, which is a technology I have so far had no contact with. I am not even sure what it is.

But now I have to go and print name cards with the new logo.

One would think that the famous Japanese politeness would also lead to some healthy sense of political correctness, but that seems to be not always the case. So you have the mayor of Tokyo publicly issuing very conservative (to put it mildly) statements about the role of women in society, and the prime minister infuriating China and both Koreas every year by visiting Yasukuni Jinja with all the class A war criminals enshrined there, and now I have to contribute to a racist dating site. The latest project I have been assigned to is an online dating service catering mainly to American soldiers and Japanese girls. I do not have a problem with that, but the fact that the company running this service will require the users to specify their skin colour and that this choice will be visible in the users' avatars seems more than a little tasteless.

I cannot help but think that they will be eventually forced to scrap this plan, it is just too bad an idea. In fact, I hope this will happen, as I am not enough of an activist to get myself into trouble by refusing to go along with this, but at the same time do not want to have helped bringing this beast to life. I also wonder if they have discussed this at all with any of their potential American customers, who are known to be extremely sensitive about these things (I could imagine this might even be illegal in the US). And even if they accepted the categorisation, many would probably not even know which colour to choose (there are only three options: Caucasian, Asian, and African-American, making it tricky for example for Latin-Americans). Is there even any need for this at all? I know nothing about the match-making industry, but in the classifieds section of a newspaper, people usually do not reveal much more than their gender, approximate age and their interests. Also, users of the site can (and will) upload their photos, so this particular piece of information is readily available anyway, albeit in a non-machine-readable (non-searchable) form, which in this case is actually good thing.

While baseball is still the most popular sport in Japan, soccer has gained popularity ever since the inception of the professional J-League and especially after the World Cup in 2002 to become a not-so-distant second. When J-League was launched it attracted a lot of foreign stars close to retirement age, and some of them are still here: Japan's national coach is Zico, and tonight is the championship final between the Yokohama F Marinos and the Urawa Reds (managed by their former player Guido Buchwald). In other news, tomorrow will see FC Porto and Once Caldes competing for club world championship in the 25th and last Toyota Cup (it will be replaced by a new format from next year), and it was announced yesterday that the 2006 World Cup qualifiers will have Japan and North Korea in the same group (together with Iran and Bahrain).

Short stories are ideal for the daily train rides to and from work. I was expecting some solid fifties' science fiction from this compilation of 25 short stories first published between 1950 and 1968 in various magazines ranging from Playboy to the Ladies Home Journal. And while there are stories about the Handicapper General, who in 2081 and accordance to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Constitutional Amendments keeps everyone equal, a society with state-mandated ethical birth-control pills, Thomas Edison's dog, mental powers fifty-five times more powerful than a Nagasaki-type atomic bomb, cosmic radiation that creates life-threatening euphoria, living outside of your body, the devastating effects of cheap anti-ageing drugs, and about computers that cover about an acre on the fourth floor of the physics building and develop emotions, there are also more than one story about small towns on Cape Cod, the celebrities that drop by, and how to sell them storm windows and bathtub enclosures, about teen romance, schizoid jazz musicians, American puritanism, barbaric Communist guerilla fighters, noisy neighbours, interior decoration, orphans in post-war Germany, jobs at big companies, private preparatory schools in Massachusetts, the miracle of birth, the North Crawford Mask and Wig Club, and a review of The Random House Dictionary of the English Language.

Tomorrow morning I am going to fail miserably in the 2004 Japanese Language Proficiency Test (Level 2). The biggest problem is reading comprehension. Even if I could get the meaning of those long passages full of kanji (which most of the time I cannot) it just takes me way too long. Judging from my results in the prep course (last lesson today) I can expect to get a score of about 40%. The downside of all this is that I can hardly justify getting myself a Nintendo DS or a Sony PSP now...

Every year, Mark Fowler of the London Perl Mongers puts together his Perl Advent Calendar which introduces a different Perl module every day until Christmas.