Tokyo is far cleaner and safer than you would expect even if you have been told about it, women walk seemingly unafraid down dark alleys and litter seems to be an endangered species, but you do have to be more aware of your surroundings, several times I turned round to discover my lack of attention had lead to a queue of 10+ people waiting for me to get a grip and start moving again.

As a city Tokyo was the first one I had been too that felt much larger than London, unsurprising at its population is 13.4 million vs London’s 8.5, we went to at least 5 districts that could have easily passed for the city centre and all of them were packed.

We barely touched on what Tokyo had to offer (avoiding all traditional culture in Tokyo on this trip), however the artificial island of Odaiba was my favourite day

Tokyo had about 4 or 5 areas (it may had had more but we did not get to them all) that are like Times square or Piccadilly filled with neon and all dedicated to a different purpose

Akihabara anime central for the WOOORLLDDDD

The national Kabuki theatre, looks nice but a bit too rich for my blood (loads of other stuff to see)

Living space in Tokyo was a strange mix, rooms and such were very small but they seemed to confine this to only certain areas: corridors, pavements and gardens were all spacious and appear in the strangest places, it made walking through even the poorest areas a pleasant and sunny experience.

Look at this road, clean, no rubbish but Ivy is still allowed to spread, a mixture of nature and modern life we rarely see in the west (its the little things)

A real Sacred Tree, its Anime made real!

The gateway to the massive Meiji Shrine, we never got past the outskirts on this trip but next time we will dedicate the time it deserves.

A view from the automated rail, how can this be a capitol of a major world power, it’s so clean it looks like a model.

“Up from the depths, Thirty stories high, Breathing fire, His head in the sky” …… MY HERO!!! <3

I like a nice subtle sign post, nothing flashy or showy :p

For those who think that the Japanese regard Anime as just a fringe interest you may be wrong. To them its bigger than Disney is to Americans

This is a SEGA foot massage machine in an arcade, you get little plastic bags to put your feet in to keep everything clean and it works really well (but I have to say I could not follow the instructions)

Now this is how you do a show trailer!!! the whole set lit up

I have seen these before but this was the best use of space and the first flip one that I have ever Seen

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Its been a bit quiet on the the old blog with my parents updates wildly out numbering mine, but it has not been quiet in life very much business as usual (if chaos is usual) however bullet points are better than waffle, so lets got for that:

• LDC Via is going great guns with features and real world solutions coming out of every orifice, uses for the platform have come from clients that we never even dreamed of, from the compliance angle (which meant we had to produce SHA-2 checksum reports for archives) to @MattWhite’s “Lens” UI which give you instant customisation for migrated and synced data.
• Full Blown freelance work continues to be the roller-coaster ride it always is, you can go from “no work next week…Rats” to calling in the other members of LDC with a “FxxK FxxK FxxK any one got spare capacity to help me with XX?” in the space of 10 mins, it is still a constant search for work but when you are busy its hard to keep up to the social media stuff that brings more work in…and as for technical articles…
• Technical articles..once the life blood of this blog seem to have dropped by the way side, I have to get back to them… but the problem with that is: one of my clients is true NDA so I can do anything to do with their work, another client for whom I’m doing lovely cutting edge blog fodder has requested that I keep the technical details secret and finally there is LDC Via stuff which I’m hoping to make a living off so don’t want to give away the crown jewels for and even on the stuff we really want to share it should really be one the LDC Via Blog its self (which I will cheat on and cross post)

That’s it really just a wave hello so you know I’m not dead

At the end of 2015 a major financial commitment I had been servicing for 5 years finally finished and with the aid of my awesome wife’s bargain hunting abilities (who knew you can get nice rooms for £20 per person a night) we decided we would combine our missed honeymoon and our first holiday in 6 years and go to Japan, this is a record of that trip.

You will have to forgive my selective observations, the world interests me in different ways.

We started out at 6am on Tuesday, with a very twitchy Mark, twitchy from the idea that I have multiple clients and taking a holiday had disrupted them all. It had taken til 3 am to reach a stage I was at least comfortable with the idea of not completing every job that I had outstanding, however my clients had been very supportive with only the odd self-centred manager attempting a form of guilt trip (a special thank you to both LAN2LAN and Bluewave who both covered for me really well)

The Lufthansa planes were clean and nicely on time (if only they could get your meal choices right and that 50% of their staff are rude), and Frankfurt airpoint had a good free wifi enabling be to answer a few more emails and start to let go. before I get on the fun stuff I’m just going to make a point that this twitchiness was something that had to be got over, this holiday was not only the first holiday in 6 years, but the first proper one for even longer. As had been pointed out by many of my long suffering friends I had become a little work centric (read obsessed) and not only was this holiday a dream trip and belated Honeymoon but it was therapy 🙂

Right! On with the interesting stuff.

As a tourist arriving in Japan internet was a must. Thankfully not only can you get prepaid sims out of vending machines but with a couple of days notice you can get a mifi with unlimited data (I had a few slowdowns but on average I was using about 3Gig per day) I would heartily recommend the company I ended up with, they are called http://www.globaladvancedcomm.com and you pick your mifi up at the airport then drop it back in the same place with a pre paid envelope, simple and fast.

We did all our traveling via public transport, both the tube and train systems are clean and cheap, we did not bother with the travel cards as if you are doing less than 1000 yen worth of travel in a day it is cheaper to just buy tickets as and when you need them, all the city’s we travelled in had English tube and rail maps and everything is well sign posted (there are a lot of sign posts but the one you want will be there somewhere)

As far as navigation on foot went, I found Tokyo to be a dream, what I would call a dirty grid, in that there are big blocks of building surrounded by major roads, but each block was a chaos of tiny streets and mad shaped buildings, so finding roughly where you want was easy but narrowing it down to the actual building was more an exercise in orienteering than following an address (Google maps has a whale of a time and gets things wrong about 40% of the time)

On money: the 100 yen coin is your friend you need them for far more than you would think so if you see a change machine (and there are lots round ) make sure you use it.

Living ancestors: if everyone is walking slow with no obvious sign, try looking down, you will often see a tiny old person and I do mean tiny (maybe up to my waist) DO NOT PUSH PAST most of these people are older than God and have seen many things (including a nuclear bomb fired at their country) and deserve a bit of patience.

Bullet train : called the Shinkansen, this train costs about the same to ride as a British train ticket bought at the station but for the same money, you get a clean fast on time train with nice facilities and tons of leg room.

That’s it for the general stuff, will post specific stuff in the next few blogs

All the bathrooms we had were these nice small wet rooms with excellent showers in them, beats any posh hotel

A perfect little Airbnb room in Osaka

Every creature comfort and all with simple easy to understand labels

The third flat we got via AirBnb was by far the poshest but as it was new we got it at a discount, it was 10 floors up in a tower block and had all the mod cons such as an auto fill bath and one of the cool tables with heaters built in

Lots of toilets have the bolt on seats that have built in bidets which I WILL get when I go home, why the rest of the world does not use these I just don’t know

The power sockets surprised the hell out of me, they use Type A only so no earth, none at all (WTF), if you need an appliance with an earth you have to do this extra screw-in earth cable (shudder), but for the rest of us don’t bother bringing a power adaptor with an earth pin ( type B ) as it wont fit.

Tactile paving in Japan is far more widespread and uniform than for example in England and very obviously for the blind, with raised lines for travel and raised dots for intersections or danger areas, you see it in all tube stations and a huge number of pavements next to major roads

Given my freelance and paranoid status the chances of not bringing my work with me was nill, but thanks to my love’s understanding nature (and the fact she sleeps 4 hours more than me per day) I was able to deal with most issues before they became a problem, a great aid to this was the fact that Japan is 8 hours ahead of the UK, so I had those four hours to get stuff done before clients came in for the day, and finding things fixed BEFORE they come in gives every client that warm loved feeling.

Even from a distance mount Fuji looked amazing (at least I think this was mount Fuji, it was in the right place)

The Shinkansen felt like the heyday of air flight or how you hope your seat will be as you get on a plane (but then you pass business class and continue on to cattle class)

Your spacecraft will be boarding on platform 2

“Atomic batteries to power, turbines to speed”

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I don’t get up to Yorkshire half as much as I would like (it being my home for about 8 years of my life and where my dad took me hiking), I miss it a lot and any excuse will see me at Kings-Cross piling into a GNER train, however this time I had a great excuse, Rob Wills my fellow LDC’er asked me to come up so we could sit down and do a nice development to production environment for his latest project using Maven, Vaadin + plus plug ins, GIT, and AWS (some of the components were not playing quite as they should should so he wanted a second set of eyes)

I got to stay at their fab house, well it’s actually 3 houses, the main house and the 2 guest houses you can see/rent them here http://www.holmefromhome.co.uk/

It has amazing views (and its not even a nice day)

The house is practically off the grid but has all the proper comforts, a wind turbine provides plenty of electricity (they feed more back to the grid than they pull from it, enough to run the awesome outside hot tub), the property has its own spring so is self sufficient water wise, but still has internet (my 3G even works up there), much to my surprise I even discovered they even had electric car charging port.

Its set in a few acre of its own land (moorland and lawns) more than half a mile from anyone else (perfect for parties)

After a hectic day of coding and swearing at Eclipse I was sent home with fresh picked kale (for my better half)…sigh!

Looking back on this year, it has been the most varied in my working life.

Making the move from contracting to pure freelancing early in the year I worked on some interesting smaller-scale projects before getting the chance to work for the guys at http://www.midpoints.de and in particular Rene Winkelmeyer who turned out to be a truly awesome person to work with (well I knew he was awesome, but he turned out to be awesome’r). The midpoints work was really interesting and I recommend that you go and look at their new products.

The mid point work was the largest single chunk of work this year with the rest of the time filled with tons of individual projects for well over a dozen clients. none of which was either boring or unchallenging (lucky man that I am)

The skill set used this year has taxed my tiny tiny mind, from core java upgrades (1.3 to 1.8) through lots of infrastructure work with Node, Jboss, apache, and IBM connections past a wide variety of database stuff for DB2, MYSQL and MongoDB to lots of serious front end stuff with Vaadin and Domino… all in all…I say…bring it on!!

This year has had 2 challenges for me as a freelancer, the first and obvious one is to manage and maintain a steady flow of projects, its harder than it looks and I am lucky to know people like Matt White and Mike Smith to provide advice and tips, the second is Working primarily from home has been a new experience and not one I am used to. But it’s helped me focus and I’ve worked out some great tools and methods to help me:

1. The use of https://slack.com/ enabling me to chat to the rest of LDC and The Turtles but not get bogged down with the general flood of the internet.
2. The use of the http://pomodorotechnique.com/ that keeps me on course during the day and ensures I do a solid days work
3. Office rental, I use a mixture of Regus Lounges and a desk I rent at http://www.hybrideye.co.uk/ to actually ensure I see some humans once in a while.

Through all of this has run LDC and our first product LDCVia, something I am really excited about as having helped build it I can see the massive potential for what it can do also building a product with spanking new technology has taught me tons of new stuff and given me a chance to activity work again with some of my favourite people: Matt White, Julian Woodward and that evil bugger Ben Poole

Finally we come to being an IBM champion, a groovy thing but basically a product of other peoples work and support, particularly Gabriella Davis, who prodded me up on stage for LotusIdol years ago, hired me to do IBM Connections development when it was just starting out and generally has provided me was a metric sh*t load of support through both this and previous years, she does not get half the credit she deserves.

By the way, I have spare capacity opening up from the second week in Feb 2015, so if you have Java/Scala work, Connections customisations, complex website stuff or even some good solid Domino stuff, give me a kick.

Thinking of an image that sums up 2014 for me would be one of my bl**dy cat who because I have been working from home this year is the creature I’ve seen most of. and as you can see he provides tons of support (the lazy swine)