Next Friday I will make a little seminar with students from Nagoya’s Meijo University. For those of you who have been pointed here by Mr. Onishi here is a brief outline of what I want to talk about.

It will be a short summary of my experiences in Japan so far, mostly about the things that I found interesting, strange and intimidating. I will briefly introduce myself and my country and then talk about your country from my point of view. You will probably think that I am wrong or that I do not understand Japan at all. That’s okay, because in fact, I don’t. : ) But I will try my best to make it at least a little interesting and I hope you will enjoy a nervous German person talking to all of you.

If you like me to talk about something specific or just want to leave a note, please leave a comment here. I would be happy to read anything you have to say.

Okay, that’s it.

See you Friday, please be kind to me, and have a nice time until then!

Last friday I had to present the program I have been working on before my Manager and some colleagues. It took me rather by surprise.
I was expecting that two people will come to my desk and just take a look at what I have programmed like they did before. This time however I was given a notebook just one day in advance and an email with room number and time.

I almost would like to say “of course” when stating that my program did not run on the notebook. But I had a few hours to fix two minor bugs and had it running by thursday afternoon. I prepared a handout and a one slide PowerPoint presentation. Figured it would make it easier to make my points, especially since most co-workers did not speak English very well.

To make a medium sized story short, I presented my software, it worked, everyone, especially me, was happy and the discussion afterwards was interesting. My co-workers mainly pointed out that the user interface could use some improvement.

April’s fool day is the start of a new fiscal year in Japan. Therefore during the first weeks of the month companies celebrate parties and my company was no exception. On the same friday at 6:30 we went to a nearby hotel where a hall was reserved for us. It was nice, especially since people from the Tokyo office came, so did the people from Nagano. However, I think none from the branch in Africa joined up with us.

The newbies, that included me of course, had to introduce themselves on stage. AND they also had to sing karaoke, one after the other. I was terrified since I cannot sing at all. I mean, I have been to karaoke in Japan a few times, but standing in front of an audience of approximately 100 people, on stage, spotlight on, was a whole different story. Person closest to the stage : the ceo.

I asked around if some people would like to sing my song. Nobody did. However, after singing for two minutes two of them, guy and girl, hopped onto the stage and helped me. Yeah, they saved my ass up there. : )

I would have been much less nervous had I known that most of the people present would make fun of themselves on stage. We had YMCA performed in leather by the Tokyo people. We had acrobatics performed by the Nagano people. And something I would like to call the “Money Dance” because it included masks of that cat lifting up one paw performed by others including the ceo.

It was a fun day.

Good morning everyone.

This is the second time I try to write todays entry. I wrote a few paragraphs then Internet Explorer crashed and I will NOT type it again. It was my fault anyway, why did I even use Internet Explorer? Okay, time to work.

I was not planning to post three posts a day on this blog and I will definetly not do so in the future unless they invent some great side-effect free drug that allows me to stay up 24 hours and have a long and happy life anyway. But I have time and a cola at the small restaurant just across the street (coffee was sold out?!) and a computer so why not.
This is a happy-mood post, because something unexpected occured to me at the company today.

I wish I had started this blog earlier, just about the time I got to Japan (which was about two months ago by the way), so I could tell you about the problems and struggles I had in the beginning in a fashion more close to real-time. So let me just sum up two months in one sentence : It was difficult because I did not understand ANY Japanese and my co-workers kinda struggled with English, it was difficult because the tasks I have been given were Windows-programming tasks, something I have never done before due to lack of interest, forcing me to learn everything Visual C++ almost from ground up (it is overwhelming at first) and finally, it was difficult because I had a hard time getting in touch with my co-workers which is related to the first part of the sentence.

Alright, having this said, let me mention another thing. I have met a guy here, he actually works for a big German car manufacturer (he is from Bulgaria if I am not mistaken though) and now he’s on a trip to Japan to learn about Japanese work methods and report about them when he gets back. He works for Toyota while being here, which is a big player when it comes to economical importance for the whole Aichi area (and probably Japan as a whole). Now I have met him twice and each time he was complaining.

While he was very impressed by Japanese working methods, shaking his head when I asked if they can be applied in Germany, too, he was disappointed about this country. I will not go into detail about his complaints regarding food and women, partly because I think it is off subject and partly because I think both are excellent in Japan, but he said something that made me think for a while. “You can work here for 10 years before you can expect anyone to put a hand on your shoulder and say ‘Well done’.”

I took that for an explanation for my impression that people do not look very happy while at work here. Well, not all do, but sometimes I think : “Gosh, that guy must hate his job.”

Anyway, and this brings me finally to the point of this post, today I showed a demo of my work-in-progress application to my department manager, and he actually congratulated me for doing such a quick and good job. I did not know what to say, so I just said “Thank You” and had a good rest of the day. I hope he really meant it (especially when it comes to this pesky Windows coding, I seriously question my abilities) but even if not, if I was a manager I would do what he did just more often, because happy employees are motivated employees. No one will seriously question this.

Okay, that’s it, but before I flip the display of my computer shut causing it to go into good night mode, I want to say something about programming Windows applications.

Bill Gates must be a marketing Genius. Or whoever is responsible for the fact that Windows is the most widely used Operating System. Because it just CANNOT be for technical reasons.

Maybe I am a crappy Windows programmer, maybe I am not objective here at all, but programming Automation for Excel (to give one example) was just painful. Browsing the MSDN to find information about Excel 2000 automation seriously - seriously - almost made me cry. MSDN is such a mess. Example : IF you describe a function that takes a struct for an argument, why don’t you link to that struct instead of having the user taking the detour via the (crappy) MSDN-search function? Why do you change so much stuff between program versions? What is the benefit of renaming a function called get_Property(…) to GetProperty(…) forcing coders like myself having to deal with it? Again, it is VERY badly documented. I could go on for hours. Actually I just have to open my drawer at work and look at the papers I have filled with my pencil while trial-and-error probing stuff that SHOULD be documented. So again, why is Windows so popular?

Okay, thats it. Now I will finish my delicious cola and go home. I had a good day.

My university in Rostock requires every student to go on an internship for at least four months. And most of the time the people just find something nearby, maybe in a town like Hamburg, which is not too far away. If close-to-home is what you want you might even accept a rather boring internship that consits of coding html or similar, but some people just want the opposite. Get as far away as you can.

So did I. I signed up with the AIESEC student organisation. It was founded in the late 50s or early 60s I think by a group of Finnish students if I am not mistaken who were kinda fed up with history so far (who wasnt..) and decided that cultural exchange is a good way to ensure peace in the future. But it does not matter if you are a pacifist or not if you want to go on an internship. Basically you sign up, visit a couple of meetings to get to know people, and your data including your resumee gets posted in their database which is searched by companies looking for interns worldwide. Thats how I ended up to be in Japan. Do I even need to mention that AIESEC is an excellent organization? No, I dont. It should be obvious by now. When I arrived at my destination I was picked up by a handful of AIESEC people at the airport and it was great from the beginning. They took care of most things, beaurocracy, housing etc. and spiced up my life here with meetings and parties. (Japanese drinking parties! Maybe more on that in a later post.)

So I am thankful to them for making my stay so far so enjoyable and hope that if you read this and if you are looking for an internship you just surf up their website to find out more and then go to the AIESEC office in your university to sign up. Chances are good your school has one. Just ask around.

The website is www.aiesec.org.

Hi, my name is Lukas and this is my new blog. I already have a website which is pretty much like a blog over at www.scrsite.org, but this here is supposed to be about work, in particular about my current internship, and I did not want to write about it at my website to seperate things a little.

So.. a little about me. I’m 25 years old, almost ready to finish my studies of computer science, now taking a break and a leap into the working world in Nagoya, Japan. I don’t regret for a second to have come here and hopefully I can get some of the mostly positive feelings I have about Japan across to you, dear reader, using this blog.

Now, FTL does not pay me to write this, nor do they know about it yet, which means I don’t feel obliged to be only positive about my internship, however, as so far I have only good things to say and will certainy do so in the near future.

Alright, thats my little introduction post, more to come of course, and in the meaning time just go visit my company’s website at www.ftl.co.jp. Be sure to bring your Japanese dictionary, too. Or use babelfish.altavista.com…