Elly arrived safely in Okinawa. She sent us an email from her cell phone which my sister-in-law got for her.

We sent Elly to Okinawa for ballet. By the time we settled down here and were able to discover that most of the better students auditioned for professional ballet company summer schools, the auditions were long over. So we decided to send her back to the studio(Japanese) in Okinawa where she has studied all these years. Its here home away from home, if not her home. Even when we lived in Okinawa, the only thing she did at home was sleep really. She was either at school, or at ballet.

She'll be spending the summer in Okinawa. She is staying at the teachers house and will be studying during the day with the teachers two daughters and some professional dancers from Mongolia. Then at night with the normal ballet classes. Well, at least until summer vacation which doesn't start in Japan until late July.

Good luck and work hard, Elly. But enjoy your stay with your friends too!

Yesterday, Elly emailed me some pics she took with her cell phone:

To me, that is just a good picture. Of course I know that she went to the beach, but didn't have a swimming suit so they were only wading. The picture I really liked though was this one:

Okay, I am definitely not the artistic type, but to me that second picture is artistic. And it was taken by a 14 year old with a cell phone. Those of you whom have a better sense/understanding of "art" and/or photography, whaddya think?

So far I have gotten 5 pics, which you can see here. Hopefully will be getitng more.

Update: Re-added pics and fixed link to gallery as they moved...

It appears that North Korea has test launched a bunch of missiles. 6 yesterday, and the latest from the BBC is that launched another one "today". Of course, with the timezone differences, yesterday, today, and tomorrow become problematic. But it does look like they have launched a total of 7 missiles.

This isn't the first time they have launched missiles in the general direction of Japan. Probably about 7 years ago, they launched a missile that sailed over Misawa Air Base and landed in the Pacific. The latest round of launches landed in the Sea of Japan (East Sea).

Apparently, the UN Security Council will meet to discuss the situation. According to the Ryukyu Shimpo there is concern that the launch of the missiles will speed up deployment of Patriot missiles to Kadena Air Base. At least that was the concern expressed by the Mayor of Kadena. The Mayors of Chatan and Okinawa City appeared to be more cautious in their comments.

On the 13th, Elly went scuba diving. While the main purpose of Elly going to Okinawa was to study Ballet, Okinawa is really home for her. So it was also a chance to see friends, most of whom are in her ballet classes anyway. As long as she was there for the summer though, I thought it would be a good idea to have her go scuba diving. So I contacted a friend of mine who owns a dive shop there.

After many emails, etc., mostly trying to convince Elly to take the time to go diving, my friend was kind enough to take Elly and a friend out. See the pictures below. Man, I'd have loved to join them!

A couple of weeks ago, Elly got to go scuba diving. I am sooo jealous

Just noticed that the Japan Postgresql User Group uses plone. I discovered this because Shibata-san, the developer of Coreblog which powers this blog, announced a seminar on creating content for plone.

The Japan Postgresql community is extremely active and do a fantastic job of promoting the use of Postgre. At OSPI, we had them come down for a two day seminar and man did they have it down. It was really well done. And it is done by volunteers!

Note that they will be at OSC 2006 in Okinawa this weekend. The first OSC in Okinawa was something I was trying to get done for years, finally got it done, but moved back to the U.S. before it was actually held.

Today, I was im'ing with a friend of mine from Okinawa. So for the first time in a long time, I was going to check out some of the goings on in Okinawa. So I head over to the Prefectural website, and what to I see?

Banner Advertising!

Okinawa is the poorest prefecture in Japan, the equivalent of a state in the U.S. A hefty percentage of the tax money spent in Okinawa is actually from the national government, the amount of which is largely due to the presence of U.S. Military bases there. However, as the national budget will most likely continue its downward trend, the Prefecture has to make that money up some how.

Apparently, it was successful enough that they have doubled the number of banners you can add to the page from six to twelve. The do not include pricing on the site, but provide an email address to the outside ad agency to whom they have subcontracted the advertising business. They do include the fact that they average over 400 thousand hits(unclear whether that's hits, page views, or whatever the web ad industry calls them these days).

I gotta admit, I don't know how much revenue they generate this way, but you gotta admit its at least creative. Or more creative then I would expected from the Prefectural bureaucracy. I guess Gov. Nakaima, a long time businessman, is having an impact. I'll need to ask my friends what they think.

I also gotta wonder how much they are charging.

Update

Acutally, I also posted about this on my Japanese blog, and for that blog I did a little research. I took a look at the Ryukyu Shimpo's banner advertising rates. And without really analyzing it or thinking about it, I saw that they charge about 160,000 yen for one month banner placement. At $1 to 100 yen, that's about $1600. If you take that apply that directly to the Prefecture's site, (and making the gross assumption of 100% banner placement), 160,000 yen x 12 spaces x 12 months, for 3.8M yen in annual revenue. That's enough to completely pay for one employee.

Now in the grand scheme of things, that may not be a huge amount, but for the Prefecture even a single yen of revenue helps them. And you also need to remember that that 400 hits or whatever was for the top page only. The Okinawa Prefecture has a huge amount of sites, much like the State of Ohio would. If they could tap this banner system into all their sites, and even add targetted advertising they could generate quite a bit of revenue I would assume. They must have tens of thousands of pages, if not hundreds of thousands. Targetted advertising would be possible since many of those pages/sites are centered around specific topics.

The more I think about it, the more I like it. It generates money that the gummint can use to provide services. More of this non-tax based revenue, particularly since its most likely for-profit companies that are paying the advertising fees, the more I like it.

This came across my Planet Uchina. Yes, it's in Japanese but it's the pictures I really wanted to point out. Ignoring the first two, it has pictures of Okinawan "Ryukyu Glass" and Okinawan pottery. In particular, I like the third picture and got a kick out of the two sitting Shisa.

Makes me wonder what kind of Arts & Crafts I'll see at the Cain Park Free Arts Festival. Elly has a mini-recital this Friday for the summer program at Cleveland School of Dance. After that, we decided to head up to the Cain Park Arts Festival. The main purpose is to see Lisa Lock present Gravity Well which she'll be performing at the 2007 Ingenuity Festival.

I don't know whether I'll get a chance to take Elly down to see Lisa perform at Ingenuity, and since they are doing a preview at the Cain Park Arts Festival on the same day that Elly has her recital, we decided that we'd make it a day. My mom, with her college roommate who's in town, will come to Elly's recital, we'll head over to park at Severance Center and take the free shuttle bus to Cain Park. The pefformance will start around 6PM so we'll have an hour or so to stroll through the Festival. I have actually never been there so I'm looking forward to it, and I know my my wife (Japanese-language blog) enjoys arts and crafts.

We intend to have a picnic on the lawn while Lisa performs.

When we lived in Okinawa, we lived in the Village of Yomitan which is well known for its Okinawan Pottery, the exhibit was held in Onna Village.　There was one sort of community, called Yachimun no Sato, that still made Okinawan pottery the old fashion way with kilns fired up with wood as fuel. Looking at the kilns, they all seem to be hand made. I've got pictures somewhere, but there on a dvd so it would take me too long to find. But check this one out on Flickr

Besides Lisa's performance, I'm looking forward to seeing what's exhibited and/or on sale at Cain Park's Free Arts Festival.

Received a email this morning that really made me smile. Actually, the email said nothing other than, "Rob, you were three years early", and then linked to the Okinawa Prefecture's RFI(Japanese) for a 5000 client solution. The email was also in Japanese, as it was from a friend who lives in Okinawa. So the above quote, is actually just my translation, and any errors are mine and mine alone. ^_^;

At first glance at the RFI page, I didn't see it. But I knew it was there. There was only one reason my friend would send me a one line message saying I was too early and a link to the Prefecture's RFI. I KNEW Open Source had to be in one of the PDF's listed on that page.

I was not disappointed.

You see, I had been spouting to anybody would listen that Open Source was the future, and a key component to Okinawa's future. At least in some form or fashion. In 2001, after successfully getting the words Open Source into Okinawa's 10 year economic plan, we launched a non-profit organization to promote the use of Open Source Software; OSPI, short for the English name of Open Source Promotion Institute. Until I left to return to the U.S. I was Deputy Executive Director. Until last fiscal year, I was still a Board Advisor.

We had some successes, including a couple of government projects to develop some open source software, and in the process I got to travel around Japan, and even Thailand, to talk about what we were doing in Okinawa with Open Source. But to be honest, I never got close to achieving my vision.

Well, this RFI lays the groundwork for that vision to become reality.

To be clear, the RFI does not specify Open Source source. What is does layout is the following:

Current Client Platform

Windows

Issues

Cost

Cost of Maintenance, including license management, configuration changes, etc.(emphasis mine)

Security Issues

Meet National Government requirements for fairness, transparency, and flexibility in regards to information systems.

The then go on to ask for information from those whom will respond to the RFI. Ah, at last! They specifically ask the responder to detail their experience with deploying OSS desktops/thinclients and servers. Hot diggedy dog!(does anybody really say that anymore?)

Since it doesn't specifically indicate they will consider only open source, and since it is only at the RFI phase, there is still a chance I will end up disappointed(particularly if Microsoft comes in with the type of discounts they did for Munich Germany).

But boy, what a start! That really made my day.