An eclectic IT career: Mayo Takeuchi

Mashable had an interesting report to show us from July 2011: It occurred to me that the North-East, Mid-West and South/West looked vaguely reminiscent of American political party affiliation data by state, so I found this Wikipedia map of the gubernatorial election results data from 2010 : L egend:    Republican gains    Republican holds    Democratic gains    Democratic holds    Independent win    not contested Well, a slight correlation can be discerned, anyway - California may be favouring Android overall, but Mashable's article did report that there are iOS-heavy cities (to be specific, they were reported as  San Francisco, San Jose, Modesto, Oxnard, Santa Barbara, Chico, Santa Cruz, San Luis Obispo and Napa). Given my personal history in Massachusetts and the fact that most of my friends (and colleagues) are iPhone owners, one might think I'd also jumped onto the iOS bandwagon. Apple had also been the most popular smartphone manufacturer in Japan. However, wh

One of the news aggregators that I visit is Mashable, and recently they published the results of a false correlative study of browser use and IQ score , which supposedly used data from 100,000 users (and was run by a Canadian company).  Here's the l ink to the Mashable article . Supposed correlation results from the published hoax: The fictitious study's conclusion was that " “individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers.”  Since I blogged about it well before the false nature of the hoax was published, I've decided to keep an amended version up (thanks to Caesar for the comment). My own anecdotal impression had been that on corporate hardware, vestiges of IE6 uses was attributable to bigger bureaucratic organizations, who actually do exhibit tendencies to resist change. Another variable that has historically influenced rates of browser use of course, is factory settings. Microsoft's IE certainly enjoyed year

I received the following album link from a friend: the photos consist of pages from a Hangul - English phrasebook. Commented samples from the publication "Living Englise Language Everyday" Aside from the implicit perceptions of "common" phrases that the authors seem to expect to be spoken or heard in English, the most noticeable grammatical mistakes seemed to arise from the unpredictable use of "to be" in place of "to have". This was actually something I noticed when studying French and German, such as the "j'ai froid" "I am cold" "mir ist kalt" comparisons (and it's "j'ai faim" "I'm hungry" "ich habe Hunger"/"ich bin hungrig") - in Japanese at least, the subject is so often omitted that just saying "寒い" ("[I feel] cold") and "お腹がすいた" ("[My] stomach has become empty", to attempt a literal interpretation). This would ex

Several of my fondest childhood memories stem from working in libraries. There, it was often my duty to take a crisp newspaper and clamp it to a wooden holder for broadsheets. My preferred paper was The Globe and Mail from quite early on; one of the alumni from my high school is a prominent columnist  there. The advent of the internet in the early to mid-90s happened to coincide with a period that I didn't subscribe to broadsheets and lived without TV (otherwise known as my time at university). To procrastinate from studies, I often read through some of the newsgroups, and played around with a personal set of HTML pages. Interestingly I was still working in the libraries during this period, but had moved to cataloguing new arrivals of periodicals, and didn't touch newspapers except for the occasional copy of the university papers ( The Tech  and  Tech Talk - I was saddened to learn the latter went out of print in 2009) or  Bay Windows , made freely available to the communit

I recently communicated with a newly hired colleague, who had just completed his Master's degree. After inviting me to contact him primarily by email or instant message, he remarked upon how he found teleconferences "old school". His comment gave me pause to think about my experience with globally distributed teamwork. While in my prior role at the software research lab, our team was distributed across CDT (UTC - 5 hours) through GMT and all the way to JST (UTC + 9 hours). Email was definitely the main form of having complex discussions, and as the centrally located team, we primarily conversed via instant messaging (where accents and bad audio quality couldn't interfere with comprehension) with the Japanese, UK and Egyptian colleagues in our mornings, and the American and Canadian ones in our mid afternoons. There were regular teleconferences (from which the Japanese were mostly exempt due to them being late in their nighttime typically), but those tended t