Rolandt

Happy New Year 2020 to all of you! It’s the time of the year again when it makes sense to take a look back at the last 12 months of 2019 to see which tech things and events ‘have moved me’ during the course of the year. Like in the previous years, it is once again quite a mixed list of things spanning from mobile networks to retro-computing.

Congress – The Inspirational Source

The Chaos Communication Congress has become a fixed event in my calendar, a week unlike any other throughout the year. One thought and inspiration chases the next and it usually takes me weeks and months to follow up. 35c3 already took place in December 2018 but only after I wrote the previous yearly wrap-up topic, so I count it here.

5G Everywhere – And Nowhere

One major topic that has kept me very busy this year was 5G with so many articles published here so I can’t even link to them from here. Yes, I already said that in the 2018 summary, but 2019 was the year when 5G moved from theory to practice. Especially in the UK and the US, several carriers have deployed a sizable number of sites and I’ve also heard that TIM in Italy has launched service in a couple of cities. Germany also saw two network operators launching 5G, albeit their deployments are little more than a small token when looking at their public coverage maps.

Personal Computing

On the personal computing side, I’ve upgraded from my Lenovo X230 notebook to an X250 which I bought, like my the previous notebook, second hand again. I would have gone for 32 GB of RAM but that was not supported in the X250, so I at least upgraded it to 16 GB like my previous notebook to be able to run at least two virtual machines in parallel. Also, I’ve upgraded my machine from a 1 TB SSD to a 2 TB SSD as I was approaching the drive’s limit. Fortunately, prices declined significantly in 2019 which was why I held back with the upgrade for quite some time.

‘No backup, no mercy’ is a nice slogan, but still, I was happy when I could rescue hundreds of important images on an SD card that was accidentally deleted.

The Cloud At Home

Over the course of this year, I added yet again another two virtual machines to my private cloud at home, one for running the Weechat IRC client for ‘vintage’ purposes and one for running Collabora’s Libreoffice Online for Writer, Calc and Presenter files. This has proven quite useful over the year for quite a number of collaborative projects and even though it’s still far from perfect it got the job done. More servers also come with additional backup work so I decided to finally give BorgBackup a closer look to automate the task. I was blown away by its easy of use and feature set and most of my backups are fully automated now.

Programming And Open Source

This year I also worked on two open source projects. For one project that has not yet been open sourced, I needed a way to generate Libreoffice Writer and Calc documents on a server, based on data coming out of an SQL database and processed with PHP. As that part is not confidential, I decided to open source it independently, as there is really nothing in the field I could find that did something similar.

Another open source project I worked on this year is ‘Certificate Pinner‘, a Firefox Add-on to control which of the 100+ root certificates I have to trust when accessing banking websites and my own services at home. I had a similar tool a couple of years ago until Mozilla removed their old add-on API without providing an equivalent new way of inspecting certificates. Finally, a suitable API to inspect certificates re-appeared in their new API so I jumped at the opportunity.

Misc Stuff

In the miscellaneous section things to mention are my experiments with an NB-IoT module, the discovery of Yalp and Aurora to access the Google Play store without having the device connected to a Google account and, quite importantly, the confirmation that even 4 years after I got a fiber to the home (FTTH) connection in Paris, data rates have not slowed down a bit.

Old Computers and Books

Retrocomputing also continued to be an interesting past time and research area for me. I particularly enjoyed the Vintage Computing Festival Berlin this year again and I read quite a number of books that are too numerous to list here. If you are interested, search for “book review” on this site. One particular thing to mention, however, is my discovery of the OpenLibrary project where I could find many interesting books. So many in fact that the list of books that I still want to read is still far greater than the number of books I read this year.

Public Talks

2019 was also the year in which I held more public talks again. At the Gulaschprogrammiernacht in Karlsruhe, I gave a talk on 5G and another talk about how to run a server at home without an IPv4 address. Also, I was invited again to the University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands to give a three hour intro to LTE and 5G. At MRMCD, I talked about the Certificate Pinner Firefox Add-on I mentioned above. Also, I was interviewed about 5G in C-Radar. And, as noted in the two previous blog posts, I was invited to talk about 5G at 36c3 in hall 1.

Space

And last, but by far not least, I would like to mention the 50th anniversary of the first flight to the moon. I spent weeks and weeks preparing for the event and re-lived the 10 days from launch to splash-down with ApolloInRealtime and a copy of the original flight plan in my hands.

And that’s it, hard to believe this all happened in just one year and how fast the year has passed again.

Felienne Hermans, a Leiden University teacher started a series of postings about the mistakes she feels she made on the tenure track. I look forward to her reflections. In her kick-off posting she lists the mistakes she plans to look into, which I quoted below in full. Reading the list, there is much there I think that applies to life in general (e.g. 11, 12), being a professional (e.g. 3,4), being an entrepreneur (e.g. 6,8), and being an employer (e.g. 1,7, 10), not just the tenure track. Or at least by the looks of it, it matches my experiences in those roles.

So here, without any order or further ado is a list of mistakes I made on the tenure track, which I aim to all expand into blog posts over the next few weeks….

1. I made no agreements with my direct supervisor on basically anything
2. I had no real (concrete) research plan
3. I had no system to track time
4. I had no system to manage todo items
5. I did not want to co-teach courses
6. I took enormous risks spending time on irrelevant things (which *by sheer luck* turned out to be beneficial)
7. I treated all students like they were mini-Felienne’s
8. I had no system for managing ideas
9. I had no system for managing research I read
10. I did not spend effort on creating a group
11. I did not understand personal factors in working with others (students and colleagues)
12. I was not present enough in the university

(I met Felienne at the CoderDojoNL conference last November, where we both gave key-notes. Since then I read her blog.)

Greg A @gregeh
Shout out to Central City for making a cheap dessert stout, been enjoying this a number of times this season. This… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Zwei Eigenschaften lassen mich immer wieder zum Lenovo ThinkBook 13s greifen: Akku und Tastatur. Durch das matte HD-Display braucht das ThinkBook weniger Strom als mein 4k-Yoga. So reicht der Akku den ganzen Tag.

Ich mag vor allem die Tastatur. Das ist totale Geschmacksache, aber ich tippe damit sehr präzise. Sehr schön auch der runde Einschalter mit dem eingebauten Fingerabdrucksensor. Der ist so fix, dass ich immer wieder mal mit einem anderen Finger teste, ob er überhaupt aktiv ist.

Das ThinkBook hat einen i7 mit 16 GB RAM und 512 GB SSD. Ich betreibe es im Quiet-Modus, damit der recht rauhe Lüfter nicht anspringt. Das matte Display ist im besten Sinne langweilig und ich hätte lieber ein USB-C-Netzteil. Das ist aber wirklich nur eine kleine Nickeligkeit. Eigentlich sehe ich das Netzteil gar nicht, weil ich das ThinkBook nur nachts anstecke.

More >

An aging, insubordinate commander takes charge of an aged battlewagon that shortly is to be turned into a museum. Suddenly, interstellar war breaks out, and the evil aliens have an answer for everything except our old ship’s outmoded technology. A brave crew, a drunken but loyal executive officer, a deadly illness and a talented political commissar round out the central cast.

There’s something to like here, but the plot is standard American military SF and the cast, if not plagiarized, takes fan fiction to an extreme. The alcoholic executive officer is particularly jarring because our hero-commander cannot afford to have a bad XO and has had a decade to find his old friend a comfortable retirement.

Why, moreover, are we rehashing the arguments of 1942 about the survivability of battleships vs. the reach of aircraft carriers? That’s been settled for nearly three generations, now. Rickover, Spruance, Nimitz, Halsey: they’re all sleeping on the hill.

As a follow-on to my lists in 2017 and 2018, here are the books I completed this year. I’ve linked all to the Kindle edition except the Great Mental Models, which is so gorgeous in hardcover you should get that one, and the The World is Sound isn’t available as an ebook. Bold are ones I particularly enjoyed or found myself discussing with others a lot.

1. The Pilgrimage by Paulo Coehlo
2. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
3. No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe
4. Imagine it Forward by Beth Comstock
5. The Great Mental Models Vol. 1 by Shane Parrish
6. Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright
7. There Will Be No Miracles Here by Casey Gerald
8. Less by Andrew Sean Greer
9. Bad Blood by John Carreyrou
10. nejma by Nayyirah Waheed
11. Trust Exercise by Susan Choi (also on Obama’s book list, and based on the high school I went to, HSPVA)
12. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford
13. The Way to Love by Anthony de Mello
14. The Fifth Agreement by Don Miguel Ruiz, Don Jose Ruiz, and Janet Mills
15. Empty Planet by Darrell Bricker
16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
17. How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elian Mazlish
18. Make it Scream, Make it Burn by Leslie Jamison
19. A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright
20. Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind by Annaka Harris
21. The World Is Sound: Nada Brahma: Music and the Landscape of Consciousness by Joachim-Ernst Berendt
22. The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Jim Dethmer and Diana Chapman
23. Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse
24. Four Soldiers by Hubert Mingarelli
25. Working by Robert Caro
26. Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller
27. Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
28. The Devil’s Financial Dictionary by Jason Zweig
29. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell (also on Obama’s book list)

What’s interesting is that if you were to purchase every single one of those books, it would be about $349. You could get them all for nothing from your local library, even on a Kindle. The money I spend on books is by far and away the best investment I make every year — books expand my mind and enrich my life in a way that nothing else does.

Part of a series.

• Part one: Just what I needed

Part two: Where did this come from?

Something Harrison Owen said to me somewhere along the line drove me to understand that facilitating Open Space Technology meetings required a tremendous amount of personal practice. He talked about rising at 4am the day of his Open Space meetings and meditating for an hour. The work of actively letting go takes a tremendous amount of energy, especially if, like most of us, you have control instincts to overcome. When one is facilitating an Open Space meeting the desire to control things, even the little things, burns throughout the day. It takes active and constant personal work to deal with that instinct and to continually and kindly return responsibility for the quality of the day to the participants.

In seeking to learn more about this intersection between personal practice and facilitation I connected to Birgitt Williams during the years when she was beginning to develop the Genuine Contact program. I brought her to Vancouver a number of times in the early 2000s and also co-hosted the World Gathering of Open Space Technology facilitators in 2001 at the University of British Columbia. I found myself more and more in care of a simple method that nevertheless had profound effects on the groups with which I was working. Birgitt’s work very explicitly extended facilitation and leadership practice into spiritual practice and it was she who drove home the point that Harrison had made earlier, that one needed a strong personal practice in order to hold space well. Michael Herman, whom I met in person at the OSonOS in 2001, influenced me to begin to think about facilitation as practice, rooted as it was in his own meditation practice. He also was the one who helped me to draw the lines out from methods to context, concentrating on supporting the core mechanic of self-organization: the invitation. In 1998 he had already mapped out where all of this was going with his profound little e-book “The Inviting Organization Emerges.” Suddenly my own practice lit up. I understood that in order to be good at this stuff I was going to need to develop both a personal practice and get good at using maps and frameworks to help the clients I was now working with as a consultant.

By the time I met Toke in 2003, and he uttered those words, I was keen to find the next level of my facilitation practice.

Years later I learned that my friend Maria Scordialou had uttered the phrase “the river beneath the river” to name what many of us were feeling at that time in the late 1990s. The phrase referred to the sense that there was something happening beneath the surface of the organizational change initiatives methods that had sprung into the world in the 1980s and 1990s. Although already well known in many community development contexts, participatory work was coming into its own as organizations became more and more interested in the complex parts of their operations: the people and networks and markets and environments in which they existed and to which they could exert no explicit control. Chaos theory was beginning to come into organizational life and influence leadership and management and the rise of the internet was holding great promise for enabling horizontal and self-organizing networks. Many of us began to experience the powerful results of well hosted participatory meetings and we began to see that the ability to facilitate these

The origins of the Art of Hosting as a field of practice, as a framework and as a workshop are not completely clear. Back in 2007 an online discussion sought to discover the origins of the Art of Hosting and indeed it had multiple tributaries that flowed together at a few specific gatherings. A small group of people primarily based in Europe who had been working with participatory methods in the 1990s began to meet and discuss the question of “What could the Art of Hosting also be?” Although Toke, Monica Nissen, and Jan Hein were the first to offer an Art of Hosting workshop in San Jose in 1999, many of the people that have now become close friends and colleagues over the years were a part of these initial discussions. These folks include Tim Merry, Tatiana Glad, Maria Scordialou, Christina Baldwin, Ann Linnea, Bob Stilger, Teresa Posakony, Juanita Brown, David Isaacs, Tenneson Woolf, and Meg Wheatley.

As befits a practice that was beginning to emerge from a variety of streams, the Art of Hosting took shape at a number of gatherings at which like-minded practitioners were meeting. These happened primarily in Europe, at Castle Borl in Slovenia, Hazelwood House in the UK and a little later at the Shambhala Institute on Authentic Leadership in Halifax, Canada. The conversations at these places were deeply influenced by the sense that leadership was practice and that “hosting” was a form of facilitation that was radically participatory in its nature. The Art of Hosting, as a collective inquiry, was finding a home in some influential networks including the Pioneers of Change, the Kaos Pilots, The Berkana Institute and the World Cafe community, all of whom were seeking to develop dialogue, conversation and participation as a key skill to make sense of the complexity of the world’s 21st-century problems. These networks were responsible for the rapid global spread of the Art of Hosting, especially amongst young leaders and social entrepreneurs who were taking on a massive piece of work in which community building and collective co-creation were essential.

None of this history explains exactly what the Art of Hosting is, but it does explain why the simple generative framework contains four practices: hosting oneself, hosting others, participating, and co-creating. It is a framework that is widely adaptable to spiritual practice, entrepreneurship, leadership, citizenship and governance, development work of all kinds, and facilitation for complex challenges. Its simplicity combined with its adaptability has mean that the “Art of Hosting” has found a home in all kinds of diverse contexts from the European Union to a 20-year experiment in intentional living in Zimbabwe, to decolonization efforts in Canada, enterprise development in the USA, the regeneration of faith communities, land and local economies. It shows up in equity and justice work, academic leadership contexts, governments and parliaments. Anywhere human beings need to work together, make sense together, and act together around complex challenges where traditional command and control leadership is not appropriate has been a context in which the Art of Hosting as a practice has shown to be useful.

So what the heck is it? That’s the next part.

There's a technical component of visualization that leans towards code, data formatting, and clicking the right buttons in the right order. Then there's everything else that makes okay charts into something much better. Read More

Dinant Roode, trenducation, Jan 02, 2020

This post is from Ocvtober but I only found this feed today and I felt it would be useful to add a wider perspective to the instructional slash experience design discussion. The post itself is fairly introductory, explaining what curriculum development is, describing why it's important for teachers, and identifying three types of curriculum design: subject-centered, learner-centered, and problem-centered. I would imagine there are more (for example, performance-support-centered or task-centered) but this list is enought to get the typology off the ground.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Emily Liebtag, Getting Smart, Jan 02, 2020

It's only January 2nd but I'm already sick of 'this-and-that 2020' themes. This one is a bit of marketing (I would guess) for LEAP Innovations. It reminds me that there's a whole world out there that I don't understand - for example, they write that they "they honored and used several key design principles." What is it to 'honor' a design principle? Or "they are able to witness more practitioners implementing their ideas." Again, it's odd word usage - which tells me that they are appealing to a specific demographic that talks like that. Anyhow, I wanted to link to this, so people can see what's happening in this space. Because some of the core ideas are good - learner led, learner demonstrated, learner connected - though I don't believe that's what we would actually see.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Audrey Watters, Hack Education, Jan 02, 2020

I've been seeing a lot of praise for Audrey Watters's post The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade (these Tweets captured by Aaron Davis are typical). If you haven't seen it, take this as a reminder to put it on your weekend reading list (it will take a bit to get through, because Watters does a lot more than just write a listicle here).

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Chris Lee, Ars Technica, Jan 02, 2020

This is pretty far down the ed tech stack, but I want to take note because I've been seeing an increase in the number of events in this area lately. The area in question could be described under the general heading of 'optical computing'. The idea is to use light-based components, rather than electricity-based components. There are numerous issues that have been solved, and many more to go, but the potential is for faster and more energy-efficient computers. This article is from last April - what prompted me to cover optical computing today was an ed tech review of an 'optica' computer (which as it turned out has nothing to do with optical computing). You might also follow up what my colleagues at NRC and Femtolab are doing in this field.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Over the holiday, I realized something about myself.

A simple test exists for determining when I have reached the enlightenment of the Buddha: I will be able to fly without tension or complaint over delayed flights, airline tickets and policies, and the TSA.

The good news: I survived another trip. Special thanks to Felipe at United Airlines customer service for doing his best to help with a delayed flight on Christmas Eve, to Nic R. at the Cedar Rapids Airport for solving our problem, and to Joy, the flight attendant on the first leg of our journey, for a soothing excursion.

I did more than survive, though. Once in Boston, my wife and I had a wonderful time visiting our daughters for the week between Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve! I wrote once about my older daughter leaving for college. Both are graduated now, making their way out in the world as adults. This was our first holiday away from our home -- what used to be their home -- and in their new homes. I enjoyed spending time with them on their turf and on their terms. We talked about their futures, but also routine life: recipes, movies, and life in the city. On the last day, my older daughter and I made candles. It was an unexpected joy.

For us, a trip to Boston includes visits to a museum whenever possible. This trip included three: the Harvard art museums, the Isabella Stewart Gardner, and the MFA. My daughters showed me paintings they have discovered on their own visits, and I shared with them ones that I like. I usually discover a work or two on each visit that grab my eye for the first time, or again in a new way. On my first visit to the Harvard museum, one painting really grabbed me: "Leander's Tower on the Bosporus", by Sanford Robinson Gifford.

I've been to the MFA a few times and have a few favorites. It has a large collection of work by John Singer Sargent, a Bostonian who had a long relationship with the museum. This time, his paiting "The Master and His Pupils" drew me in as it had not before:

Our evenings often brought movies. We saw a new studio release, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, in the theater; a made-for-BBC movie about Agatha Christie; and a movie that has flown under my radar for twenty years, GalaxyQuest. I enjoyed all three! The Star Wars film has its flaws, but it was a fun and appropriate end to a series that has spanned most of my life. We were lucky to stumble upon the Christie film while scrolling Netflix; it felt a lot like her mystery novels. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed GalaxyQuest. So much fun! How had I not seen it before?

The trip ended as it began, with an unexpected delay that stretched an already long travel day. Our time on the ground in Chicago at least offered the consolation of a computer malfunction that echoed our delay, designed for a programmer: Javascript for the travel-weary.

Again, though, there was good news: lots of time to walk with my wife, which was a good way to spend the day, and a good way to end our trip.

Now, back to working on my enlightenment...

My business blew up (in a good way) and my first child was born - I realized I had no time to mess around crimping.

What did I do? I went all in on a single platform for myself and my team. In this case, office 365 was the best fit due to a balance of power, cross platform availability, multi-user support, and integration between programs.

In many ways, doing this was a way to delegate my software decisions (to Microsoft) instead of having to constantly question what to use and look for improvements/upgrades.

So instead of trying to build an ever upgrading tapestry of "perfect" tools (i.e. CRIMPing), I decided to take flexible tools and MAKE them work so I could DO MORE work.

Between OneNote and Excel (mostly just OneNote), I can basically do anything. Yes, specific tasks are not as easy as some more specialized tools, but it doesn't matter because of how much time is saved because the programs simply work and I'm no longer fiddling.

Funnily enough, in forcing myself to use these more "basic" tools - I've ended up massively refining and improving my personal information management systems & structures. Tools matter, but the systems you use matter more.

A good paper-only system will lead to much greater productivity than a weak system built on the hottest tech.

I've even come to embrace the slower pace of certain actions as a way to move and think more deliberately.

Anyway, that's what I've learned in 2019!

To follow up -

I've also basically stopped perusing this site since I was no longer looking for new software. And to be honest, I'm happier for it.

Looking back, while CRIMPing was definitely fun for a period and getting that dopamine spike of some new software was cool - but on the whole, CRIMPing for me was not something that actually made me feel good.

It was mostly done from a place of avoiding doing actual work and not feeling like my current setup was good enough.

In many ways my CRIMPing was an unwillingness to be humble and disciplined enough to do good things with what I had.

Not sure if this resonates with anyone, but if so, my recommendation is to find a way to settle with yourself on a set of tools that are "good enough" and then get to work.

If you've got enough free time that you are happy to let CRIMPing be a hobby, then have at it. But if you know it does you more harm than good, take the plunge and cut it out.

Wishing you all the best in 2020!

“Do you have some free time?”

If you have ever asked this question of someone who is a driven, high-achiever you may have received a quizzical look. Their blank look isn’t a sign of overthinking.

They just happen to be one of a group of individuals who simply don’t understand the question. They think about their time usage so differently that the question doesn’t make sense.

Strangely, it probably all started in the past, when they accepted the notion that there will never, ever be enough time to do everything. In other words, they embraced the fact that there will always be a negative gap between the following:

- the total sum of all the tasks they would like to complete (measured in hours)

and

- the total number of hours they have available each week.

Of course, like everyone else, they only have 168 hours per week. This number represents a hard limit to the tasks they can complete, measured in hours. At the same time, when they add up all their commitments, the total amounts to far more hours.

Their quizzical response says: “I have way more commitments than I have time. I don’t understand what you mean by free time.”

Unfortunately, most people view this condition as a bad problem to be solved. They respond to the imbalance by trying to cut down the volume of their commitments. They believe that they should have “free time” in their calendar and in their lives.

However, high achievers who use Time Blocking don’t think this way. If you happen to be one, you may know there are two parts of your brain at work which operate very differently which take away the need for free time.

One region is responsible for creating tasks. It responds to a 24–7 array of triggers by adding new tasks, even in your sleep. It wants to be free to create fresh commitments whenever the need or desire arises.

But there’s another corner of your brain which is assigned the job of making sense of the tasks the first part created. It understands that there are real constraints and must choose between tasks using different criteria to answer the continual question: “What should I work on in the next instant, later this week, six months from now, and by the end of the year?”

It realizes that a decision to work on a task is (by definition) a choice to set aside hundreds of others which are unfinished. Furthermore, to prevent the chosen task from becoming swamped by the weight of all the others during its execution, you need to manage them all effectively (bar none). If you don’t, you’ll be consumed by the nagging distraction of the Zeigarnik Effect. In essence, your subconscious mind pings you when it believes you cannot be trusted to govern all your incomplete commitments.

One reason you time block is to ward off the Zeigarnik Effect. However, early success with the technique leads to adding in more tasks. Eventually, you end up with more than 168 hours of tasks to put in your calendar, putting you in a negative balance.

The average person takes a different approach to avoid the Zeigarnik Effect. They simply don’t create as many tasks (or commitments) and therefore have a nice, positive gap between commitments and time. They aren’t trying to accomplish as much, and therefore rarely run out of time.

Once you add so many tasks that you lack time to complete then and must resort to time blocking, it’s hard to go back. Instead, you must go forward and use different practices and new tools.

What People Who Time Block Really Do

Veterans in the use of the technique report that they see their time in big resource chunks, such as sets of 168 hours. They treat every hour as if it were precious. They make a conscious decision to spend each one to accomplish a particular goal.

For example, they may begin by setting aside time to sleep. While most people view this as a respite that requires little attention, those who have a negative gap tend to think hard about the role of the activity. They may consider it to be time to replenish themselves, which is too important to be left to chance.

They also realize that they need space in the day to recover their focus and energy: time blocking their calendar for mind wandering, a nap or to shake off the after-effects of a hard meeting.

In addition, they know that tightly scheduled days rarely go according to plan. Their calendar includes time slots which are placeholders for unplanned interruptions. This may even cover “requests for free time from other people.”

So before the week has started, someone who time blocks has already thought about these eventualities and accommodated them. Those who are more experienced put together a time blocking template for their weekly use, such as the one below. It serves as their starting point.

Notice that the template has times for meals, exercise and daily planning. If it were mine, it would also include time to take a coffee nap each day!

To the non-time blocker, this may look like the beginning of insanity. However, to the person who is keen to allocate time efficiently, it’s a tool to accomplish their goals.

In effect, they are making a statement to themselves and to the world: I am taking care of myself first, before anything else intrudes. It’s a bit like putting on your mask in an airplane emergency before that of another.

By the time each week’s appointments and tasks are added in, the calendar becomes full. There is no “free time.” In fact the time blocking apps are built with the end-point in mind, especially those with auto-scheduling features.

But what if you decide not to enter each task in your weekly schedule in such a time blocking app? Isn’t the effect the same?

Apart from the burden of maintaining a mental calendar with numerous moving parts, consider what takes place when you are under pressure. Imagine that, in the middle of a meeting, your boss asks “Do you have the free time to work on this new activity next week?”

All eyes are on you as you search your mental schedule. With a few seconds to respond and the weight of expectations on your shoulders, you are far more likely to make a mistake: a blind sacrifice of your “free” time.

The sad truth is that if your manager likes your work, there are more requests like this coming your way. She’ll continue to ask if you keep on saying “Yes”. While there are some supervisors who sense that you are over-promising, most will simply hold you to account and not care too much about the personal costs of your mistake.

By contrast, pulling out a fully time blocked calendar allows you to offer a fact-based answer.

The obvious conclusion is that being conscious and explicit about your schedule beats being unconscious and implicit. It leads to clearer decision-making, especially if you consider yourself to be a high-performer who pushes hard for results.

The challenge here is to think in totals: all of your commitments versus all of your limited time. This includes those tasks which aren’t work related, and those which are required for self-care.

Your calendar is the best tool to connect the two. Just give yourself the freedom to use it in a way others may not understand.

Their version of “free time” isn’t a reality in your world in which every single new commitment doesn’t take up time that is sitting there waiting around to be assigned. Instead, it means making a difficult trade-off that has practical consequences.

Shawn Micallef @shawnmicallef
A city without (many) cars is extremely gentle.

I (re)discovered that what I should prioritize for myself is cross-platform apps that are privacy-related, such that local files sync (with encryption) in the cloud to Mac/iOS, instead of using apps/services with files in a cloud that serve them back to me. That decision helped me focus and eliminate a number of apps I'd been considering, though it has kept me with some files on my desktop for the time being.

Despite loving the text/font/color customization of Ulysses, I found myself drifting back to black-on-white text processing in IA Writer.

I've given up hope that Gingko will progress - it seems permanently stalled with a web-service and a separate, incompatible desktop app, with an overworked, overburdened (and mostly absent) dev in charge.

I've realized I'm fine with subscriptions for the right apps, but that there are many free/cheap alternatives that get me maybe 80% of what I get from several of my subscriptions, which has me thinking about dropping some.

Ranchero Software, my old company, has actually technically existed in three different forms over the years — I’ve been an indie, then got a job and shut down the company, went back to indie and rebooted it, got a job, etc.

The most recent version — Ranchero Software, LLC — shut down a while ago. A year ago? I forget.

We got tired of reporting every month that it made $0. And we realized we had no plans to ever make money, since, well, I have a great day job at Omni.

But now it’s back, in a new way

The new Ranchero Software isn’t a company: it’s an organization on GitHub. Just today we moved NetNewsWire and associated repos to this new location.

We realized it would be easier if we had an actual organization with various teams — easier to manage, easier to add people, easier to set permissions, etc.

There was a little talk about what to call it. Name it after NetNewsWire? Or use the name Ranchero?

One of the things to remember is that it’s not just about NetNewsWire: there are also stand-alone frameworks and there’s another app: Rainier. (Which is way behind NetNewsWire. Nothing to see yet.) And we might do other apps, too.

So while we could have — a la the Apache folks — named the org after its founding project NetNewsWire, everyone preferred using the Ranchero name.

For me, at least, this is super cool. Ranchero Software lives!

PS You might wonder where the name Ranchero came from. It was 1996, and we were looking for a domain name that was 1) available, and 2) trendy. In those days, the hot stuff was Tango and Marimba and similar. We found that ranchero.com was available, and it kinda fit in with those names — plus it sounded kinda western — so we grabbed it.

PPS No, Ranchero Software isn’t an actual organization with papers filed anywhere. It’s just a thing on GitHub. But that’s all it needs to be.

Apple will be working with chipmaker Imagination again after months of a public spat.

Engadget reports that the two have signed a new multi-year licence agreement so Apple can use its intellectual property.

The two companies started working together in 2006, however, in 2017 the spat began with Apple indicating that it was going to be building its own GPU and would no longer be working with the British company.

Over the course of that year, the public argument included disputes about IP, employees getting poached, and Imagination having to put itself up for sale, Engadget noted.

In an announcement, Imagination said “it has replaced the multi-year, multi-use licence agreement with Apple, first announced on February 6th, 2014, with a new multi-year licence agreement under which Apple has access to a wider range of Imagination’s intellectual property in exchange for licence fees.”

Apple has not made an announcement publicly yet.

Source: Engadget

The post Apple re-signs multi-year agreement with chipmaker Imagination appeared first on MobileSyrup.

True wireless earbuds are the fastest-growing product in the audio segment, which should come as no surprise to those who follow tech closely.

Over the last few years, true wireless earbuds — the kind that feature two earbuds not connected by any wires — have become significantly more popular. It could be said that Apple is responsible for popularizing true wireless earbuds, given the success of its AirPods and AirPods Pro products.

According to market analysis from Canalys, a total of 43 million units of true wireless earbuds were sold in Q3 2019, an annual increase of 183 percent. Apple dominates the market with a share of 43 percent, shipping 18.2 million AirPods. It’s likely to hold onto that lead with the AirPods Pro, which includes noise cancellation and was a hot commodity during the holiday season.

Canalys says that true wireless earbuds have surpassed wireless earbuds (the kind with the wire connecting the two buds), as well as wireless headphones (both on-ear and over-ear variants). However, wireless earbuds and headphones are still going strong, posting six percent and 22 percent annual growth respectively.

Xiaomi and Samsung are distant runners up to Apple’s 43 percent market share, claiming seven percent and six percent of the true wireless market respectively. For wireless earbuds, JBL is top dog at eight percent, with Sony and Skullcandy tied for second at six percent each. JBL leads the wireless headphone market as well with a 13 percent share, followed by Sony at 10 percent and Bose at eight percent.

An interesting takeaway from the data is that both smartphone makers and traditional audio brands are battling for top spot. While audio brands can offer experience and excellent-sounding products, smartphone manufacturers seem to focus on ‘smart features’ that entice customers. These features include access to on-device AI assistants, deep integration between earbuds and devices and more. True wireless earbuds adhering to that model can make for easy upsell products or excellent bundle options to entice customers to go with one phone over another.

I’d expect this space to continue to grow and get more heated, especially with big players like Microsoft and Google prepping to launch their own true wireless earbud solutions in 2020. For now, Apple will likely remain top dog, but solid offerings from other players could change that in the future.

Source: Canalys Via: Android Police

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Although the number of people being caught for distracted driving is decreasing, a Vancouver police officer says it’s still a problem that endangers people on the road.

Staff Sergeant Dave Duncan of the Vancouver police department told the CBC that once people are caught, they often look guilty and don’t argue with him. When people do try to make excuses, they say that they were just plugging their phone in or that they received a message.

Duncan told the CBC that people’s habits are changing when it comes to how they use their phone while driving. He says that drivers are finding new ways hiding their phones, such as putting it in a coffee cup or hiding it in their clothes.

In terms of what isn’t allowed, you’re not allowed to plug in your phone while you’re driving. Fully licensed drivers are allowed to use their phones hands free if the phone is mounted to the car.

In B.C. there is a $368 fine for using your phone when you’re driving, along with four demerit points.

Source: CBC 

The post Vancouver police officer says distracted drivers rarely dispute after being caught appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Federal government officials don’t think that artificial intelligence and robots will displace the Canadian workforce, according to new documents obtained by The Canadian Press.

Experts found that the possibility of a scenario where automation takes over half of the jobs held by Canadians has been “overstated.”

Officials were told that 11 percent of jobs are likely going to be automated in the next 15 to 20 years. Further, 29 percent of jobs held by Canadians are expected to change significantly.

The documents say that jobs such as copy editing and data entry will likely be given to low-cost workers overseas though online platforms.

The documents indicate that officials believe that the government needs to address the parts of the economy that are rapidly changing. This includes how online streaming services are changing the economy of movies, TV shows and music.

Federal officials have estimated which sectors and locations will likely be the most impacted by automation. This includes towns that rely on manufacturing.

More specifics have not been released to the public. However, the documents estimate which towns are more or less likely to face the repercussions of automation.

Officials are still unsure of how fast the effects of automation will arrive in Canada.

Source: The Canadian Press (CBC)

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Since Apple is likely never going to bring a touchscreen to macOS, third-party accessory manufacturer Brydge took matters into its own hands.

Brydge already sells a great looking, though slightly bulky wireless keyboard for several iPads, including the 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro. The keyboards basically turn the iPad into a MacBook that runs iOS, only with one key feature missing — the trackpad. I’ve used a Brydghe keyboard with the iPad Pro for a couple of months now, and while it does add a significant amount of heft to the iPad Pro, the build quality is unparalleled.

Brydge’s new Pro+ keyboard for the 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro will start shipping in late February for the first 500 pre-orders. The remaining orders will ship in late March. The company initially revealed the keyboard back in October of 2018.

Given the iPad doesn’t natively support mouse input, the trackpad isn’t precisely as useful as some might have hoped. According to Brydge, the trackpad can be used to access App Exposé with a three-finger tap, you can jump back to the home screen with a single tap to the bottom right or left and finally, the dock launches with a two-finger swipe of the trackpad.

The two-finger swipe will be useful for anyone used to rapidly multi-tasking between apps with macOS.

The 11-inch Brydge Pro+ is set to sell for $199 USD (about $258 CAD), while the 12.9-inch model is priced at $229 USD (approximately $297 CAD). Pre-orders for the Pro+ aren’t yet available, but you can register to receive an alert for when they’re available.

Along with the Pro+, Brydge is also selling a trackpad a standalone tack pad for iOS devices, including the iPhone. It’s unclear why someone would want an external trackpad for the iPhone, but one exists now.

Via: 9to5Mac

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How we use "ship small" to rapidly build new features at GitHub

Useful insight into how GitHub develop new features. They make aggressive use of feature flags, shipping a rough skeleton of a new feature to production as early as possible and actively soliciting feedback from other employees as they iterate on the feature. They static JSON mocks of APIs to unblock their frontend engineers and iterate on the necessary data structures while the real backend is bring implemented.

Via Jeff Triplett

Blockstack, Jan 01, 2020

I'm still exploring Blockstack, which appears to have developed a fairly large ecosystem of applications and services (which it won't let you see until you create an identity). But the idea is that it provides access to applications that allow you to create data and store it wherever you want, all connected and protected by a blockchain. As the website says, "Blockstack ID provides user-controlled login and storage that enable you to take back control of your identity and data." There's a blogging app, Sigle, that takes you step by step through the process. It includes a way to define your own storage. Yes, it's open source.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

For the last few years I’ve found myself getting angry at small things, which is so unlike me.

My resolution is to try harder to get angry only when it’s actually worth it. I can be angry at cruelty, angry at the forces destroying democracy for their own corrupt power, angry at the malevolences driving our climate crisis.

But I need to not get angry just because Instruments won’t profile my app, or I get a robocall, or someone on Twitter completely misses the point of something I wrote.

Anger — righteous, smashing anger — is completely called-for right now. But only at the right targets. This is the hard part, at least for me — it starts to spill out to where it doesn’t belong, and I can feel it corroding me.

I’m not by nature an angry person. Quite the opposite! But I do care deeply about some things.

My emotions somehow need to get smarter about what’s worth the anger and what things are not actually part of the current vast project of destruction.

I don’t know how to do that other than to constantly remind myself, when I feel it bubbling up over something small, that it’s not worth it.

But the problem with anger — even our current justifiable and necessary anger — is that it becomes a habit, and then it goes blind.

To begin the new year, I’m offering here a series of posts on the core practice of the Art of Hosting, the Four-Fold Practice. Since 2003, the Art of Hosting community has been my primary learning and practice community as I have learned and grown my facilitation and leadership practice. Central to that community is the four-fold practice, a simple framework that describes both what the actual Art of Hosting is and what it does.

Part one today describes a bit of my own journey that brought me into contact with this community. Over the next few days, I’ll share a bit more about the practice as well including its origins and my current thinking on its application in both facilitation and leadership.

Part one: just what I needed

I began my journey as a facilitator back in the early 1990s as I ran meetings for the non-profit I worked for, the National Association of Friendship Centres. Across Canada, more than 100 Friendship Centres provide services, cultural programming, and care for urban indigenous communities. Beginning in 1948, it is one of the oldest indigenous community development movements in Canada and has become a powerful force for change and social development.

Facilitation is a very important skill in the Friendship Centre movement because, as an organization that is devoted to community development and the elevation of urban indigenous voices in policymaking and social change, well-hosted meeting are an active part of the work of Friendship Centres. Friendship Centre staff, especially younger staff members, often find themselves in front of a flip chart, armed with markers, writing down ideas and helping groups make sense of the world. The Friendship Centre movement is an excellent training ground for participatory work. SO tat is where I began, in the national office, as a policy analyst, armed with a culture and community development-heavy degree in Native Studies from Trent University and a deep desire to help.

My first facilitation training came from Bruce Elijah, an Oneida Elder who was our Board Elder and spent many days at our office advising us, guiding us with prayer and good advice and making sure we were doing things “right.” One day in 1993, when I was about to go an host a very important meeting on family violence policy development, I asked him for some advice and he gave me an eagle feather to use as a talking piece and said “The Creator gave us two important gifts: circle and story. Use them.”

That was the full extent of my first facilitation training and I put it into practice right away, convening a meeting of Friendship Centre staff and Health Canada officials and researchers that resulted in the establishment of the national Aboriginal Family Violence Initiative. It was clear to me that these two gifts – circle and story – were the secrets to meetings in which participants themselves were in control and the content was uninfluenced by the facilitator. It reminded me that my only role was to be quiet, hold space and keep careful notes.

I think I had an inkling very early on that quality participatory work required something like meditation for personal preparation. It also always required a prayer or some way of deliberately entering the work, with a good heart and an aspiration towards kindness, listening and contributing one’s best thinking. I could see too that people were more engaged when everyone was given a chance to speak, when there was a good process held in place to enable the work and what, at the end of the day, what was created was created by all. I watched the Elders in our movement open meetings with prayers and hold us in ceremony for the duration. Bruce himself would begin Board meetings with a long Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving prayer, which sometimes lasted 20 minutes or more and acknowledged our dependence on things far greater than those on the agenda. We would sometimes smudge the room, to bring kindness and calm to the space. Sometimes we would sing together or someone would sing for us and after this extended beginning, we would start our meetings. The Elders would sit quietly with us, and intervene only if saw something that threatened the quality of the space in a negative way. They didn’t suppress dissent or disagreement, but they called people to account for their behaviours and invited a pause for everyone to remember the bigger teachings and get back to work.

Those were my first teachers in facilitation work: Bruce Elijah, Sylvia Maracle, Marge White, George Cook, William Commanda, Gisda’wa and many other Elders in communities across Canada who opened our meetings with prayers and guidance and who stayed present during the whole time. These names are well known across indigenous communities in Canada. When you are in a meeting hosted by them, you are in ceremony, plain and simple. They make no distinction between the two. When people are gathered to do work, it is a sacred moment with the potential for healing and significant change. One never knows the long term outcomes of an important meeting, so attention to the quality of the space is critical. In retrospect, I can remember the exact birth moments of significant things like the Aboriginal Head Start Program, the devolution of the Friendship Centre Program, the Aboriginal Family Violence Program, the Tsawassen Accord, and the BC First Nations Leadership Council among others. All were meetings that began in prayer, with that deep level of intention.

Mostly my job in these meetings was to design and run the process by which work got done, but it was always critical to do that in line with the quality of the space that Elders had created. I made many mistakes when my own ego or sense of self-importance trampled on what the elders had given us, and I paid for those moments with some embarrassing public scolding from Elders! These moments were some of the most important parts of my facilitation education – being called on the floor and corrected in front of groups of people, always directly, always with kindness, always with the intention of restoring and remaining in relationship.

In 1995 Caitlin and I decided on a whim to travel to Whistler, BC, for the International Association of Public Participation Practitioners conference (it was known as IAP3 back in those days). One of the sponsors of that gathering was BC Hydro, who had been using a large group facilitation method called “Open Space Technology” in their work. Chris Carter, who was working in change management with BC Hydro at the time, hosted the open space day alongside Anne Stadler and Angeles Arrien. In retrospect, that is quite a team, and it was a brilliant opening, which included some aspects of ceremony such as lighting a candle in the centre of the rings of concentric circles holding 400 of us in the Whistler Convention Centre. We were all offered a chance to call sessions and record the results of the sessions in a newsroom filled with a bank of 20 386 PCs running WordPerfect. After their opening, the conference exploded. Into dozens of topics and sessions – I led one on the role of storytelling in facilitation – and after I had witnessed a whole day of this I knew that there was a way to host large group meetings that ensured that the responsibility for the experience was owned by the participants.

For many years afterwards in my work with the BC Association of Friendship Centres and later, the Federal Treaty Negotiations Office and the BC Assembly of First Nations and Vancouver Aboriginal Child and Family Services, I used Open Space whenever I could. We ran meetings on economic development, firearms legislation, the implementation of Aboriginal title, family rights in the child welfare system, policy research conferences, youth network development, organizational change, governance, stakeholder consultations…you name it. If you were in a meeting with me in the early 2000s, you were probably in an Open Space.

Through my work with Open Space Technology, I met Harrison Owen, initially in 1997 at a one day course on self-organization and then later at a gathering in 2003 on Whidbey Island, where he was the key feature in a four-day conference called “The Practice of Peace” based on his little book of the same name. This gathering brought together folks from around the world working on peace and reconciliation as well as those of us who were working with Open Space and other large group methodologies. It was there that I met Toke Møller as well as Juanita Brown. At the conclusion of that conference, Toke and I found ourselves in a circle with a dozen or so other people, already tightly connected through relationships. We passed a talking piece amongst us discussing the question of what comes next following this conference. When it came to Toke who was sitting next to me, he spoke of the trainings he was starting to do around the Art of Hosting, and he said something like this, which I later asked him to rewrite as a poem:

It is Time

the training time is over
for those of us who can hear the call
of the heart and the times

my real soul work
has begun on the next level
for me at least

courage is
to do what calls me
but I may be afraid of

we need to work together
in a very deep sense
to open and hold spaces
fields

spheres of energy
in which our imagination
and other people’s
transformation can occur

none of us can do it alone

the warriors of joy are gathering
to find each other
to train together
to do some good work
from the heart with no attachment
and throw it
in the river

no religion, no cult, no politics
just flow with life itself as it
unfolds in the now…

what is my Work?
what is our Work?

And I said yes to that invitation.

mkalus shared this story from moodvintage on Twitter.

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Hiniku Taro, a former special prosecutor, implores Ghosn to respect Japan’s rule of law

It is most regrettable that Carlos Ghosn, the convicted criminal, former CEO of Nissan has cowardly chosen to escape from Japan rather than face a fair trial and inevitable conviction in Japan’s prestigious courts. This is very disruptive of our justice system and the prosecutor conviction statistics.

I think there is a cultural misunderstanding on the side of Ghosn-san that has led to this rash decision. As you may know, Japan is a country where justice works on the presumption of innocent until proven guilty. Which is the tatemae–like when your mama makes you a rice cake with zoni and you say it is good even if is not so tasty. Some have said, that in Nippon you are presumed guilty until proven innocent. This very true—up to certain point. That certain point, in my experience, being when we decide whether to indict or not. If it is not a slam dunk case, then we presume you are innocent because we don’t like to lose.

But once we indict you, we have 99% conviction rate. So post-indictment, you are presumed guilty until proven guilty. And Ghosn has unfairly denied us the right to prove his guilt. This is a great shame.

We only denied Ghosn 6000 files in preparing his defense and only kept him in jail for 129 days before his trial. We most benevolent but no no thank you from him. Just whine whine whine. He would have had a fair trial and been fairly convicted based on the incredibly slanted, selective testimony and evidence the prosecutors had arranged and altered, and a stark refusal to allow in any testimony that might exonerate him,.

Even then, he would still have a 1% chance of being found not guilty of some or all of the charges. Of course, since the prosecution can appeal cases in Japan, and we like to do, we’d probably have convicted him the second round. Yes, because you can get tried for the same crime here but we have no double jeopardy–in theory.

Ghosn is a bad fellow and deserving the full wrath of the mighty prosecutor’s office for the public good. If he was a bureaucrat who simply forged documents, shredded files to cover up Prime Minister Abe’s political machination– (Osaka prosecutors close Moritomo Gakuen case after reconfirming no bureaucrats will be indicted over scandal)–, that wouldn’t have been a problem. Or if he was close friend of the Prime Minster who allegedly raped a journalist, we would never have detained him and torn up the arrest warrant–as police were going to arrest him–and dropped all charges as soon as we knew he was going to publish a laudatory biography of Herr Abe.

But Ghosn is not a Japanese CEO, like the hardworking ones at TEPCO who were completely aware that a tidal wave might knock out the electricity to the generators causing a triple-nuclear meltdown. We never arrested them and refused to prosecute them. And look, the courts let them off, because they know, as we do, that justice is not our job–protecting the powerful JAPANESE elite is what we do. This is why we didn’t prosecute anyone at Toshiba for a billion dollar accounting fraud--because that was…a mistake. When a Japanese company like Takata makes defective airbags that result in deaths–overseas–that’s not our problem either. (But those American meddlers! So corrupt Us system be!) Why we don’t prosecute them? Because the executives are Liberal Democratic Party supporters and Japanese. Japan has tatemae justice system and this doesn’t apply to Jokyukokumin (上級国民) . And what are Jokyukokumin? If you have to ask, you aren’t one! It is like Zen koan.

How do we know what’s a serious crime? Well, when a foreigner does it, it’s a serious crime. It is in the unwritten Roppo. When Coincheck, loses over a billion dollars worth of virtual currency–was there a crime committed? We don’t care. When Mark Karpeles, a FRENCHMAN, running a virtual currency exchange is hacked out of a half billion worth of virtual currency, we arrest him on whatever charges possible. knowing he must be guilty. And we hold him for 11 months, questioning him with no lawyer present, because we know he’s guilty. And when the IRS, Homeland Security and US authorities arrest the real hacker, we try to block that evidence from being submitted into court. And when the court finds him not guilty on major charges, and the crazy judge rebukes us?

We don’t talk about that. Not good idea to talk about that. And what about Enzai (冤罪) –wrongful convictions? This only happens in case of Japanese, who are very old and probably going to die in prison, so we say okay, maybe not guilty. Oh and that Nepalese guy wrongfully convicted of murder. Oops. Prosecutors are humans, too. PS. Don’t read those back issues of that magazine devoted to cases of injustice in Japan. Very old now. Much changed!

We work very hard to find or make evidence that will our make case. Ghosn and his lawyers were very uzai. Why would we want evidence that could exonerate the accused when we already have enough to win the case? We get so tired of whiny liberal lawyers who want a ‘fair’ trial for their client. L-o-s-e-r-s. This is why we will find any reason to deny them crucial evidence or share it with them—and also because we can!

The judge is almost always going to give us what we want. That’s how the system works. And as a long time resident of Japan, Carlos Ghosn must respect that system. It is the honorable thing to do. It very simple.

A Guide To The Japanese Prosecutor’s Office

You do or not do a crime.

Someone reports the crime to the police, who may or may not make an arrest. THEN

A) If you are politically connected to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, his friends, or LDP and bonus points if you are wealthy business executive, the case is stopped early and investigation quashed.

If gung ho police insist, or foolish lower level prosecutors take papers from police, we wait until Japan wins Olympic bid or some big event and then announce that we won’t prosecute—so nobody notice.

B) If you are politically connected, you report crime to the police or even better, special prosecutor, and make back-door deal. Plea bargaining now welcome, welcome.

We arrest suspect (dirty foreigner or vocal critic) on lesser charges! Go to jail. If you don’t confess, we go to friendly judge and say, “He/she will destroy evidence or escape while we work little bit more. Can we keep them 10 more days?” Judge says, OK! We can hold you for up to 23 days, easy-peasy. Then like fish on a hook, we let you go–then rearrest! We hold them in jail until they confess and rigorously interrogate them every day.

If they don’t confess, it’s only because they’re guilty. And if they do confess, well we were right, they’re guilty.

Get With The Game, Ghosn!

This is Japan and everyone must play their part. We make occasional politically motivated public arrest of big person, but not anyone close to the Prime Minister. We leak like crazy to Japanese media bad things about suspect–even that they confessed. We prepare for the trial, hoodwink the lawyers, refuse to show them our evidence–because we can get away with it and the law doesn’t force us to do it, nor will the judge, and then we win. 99% of the time. And if we lose 1% of the time, well we win on the appeal.

The role of the indicted is to either confess early or endure the proceedings and then get convicted anyway, but winning or escaping–that’s not an option.

Shame on you, Carlos Ghosn. You have made a mockery of the Japanese system of injustice justice. And what is even more unforgivable is that your selfish act may actually lower our conviction rates to less than 99%!

Hiniku Taro is a former prosecutor, now in private practice, after resigning from office when he was discovered to have forced a local politician to confess to being a serial underwear thief, ‘on a hunch’, in 2002. He says, ‘Even though I may no longer be a prosecutor, I never forget the valuable lessons I learned on the job such as yakuza and foreigners have no human rights’. For more information see the webpage for Hiniku and Tanuki Sougo General Law Horitsu Jimusho, located in Chiyoda-ku, Otemachi.

*Parody.