2015 New Year resolution (belated)

After several short trips to Korea, Japan, the US, and Spain within a few weeks, I finally came back in London, (caught a cold again), and successfully extended my visa to remain in the UK as a happy dependent :-p.

Now, belatedly, is the time to set new year's targets as every year. This year, again, I should stick to rather simple targets (rough allocation of time); this year is going to be a year of totally challenging new stuff:

• Career: to success in seed financing for the startup (50%).
• Private: to learn anew not to be bored; through studying Finance (MSc-level) and Economics (BSc-level) (20%), learning programming (20%) and absorbing various contents to write up a short fiction (10%).

Happy New Year 2015 monument, in a sort of traditional Japanese way with an orange.

Regrettably, last year I did not achieve much regarding my revised targets:

1. Keep exercise every week: Not really at all. After an accident in golfing, I stopped playing it. 
2. Complete the Cambridge MBA with writing up the final dissertation on 'innovation and corporate governance': Done, but not fully satisfied with what I wrote up.
3. Confirm a place, likely in London, for researching management in the UK while working on the entrepreneurial project: The startup goes well so far (definitely this is the greatest achievement unexpectedly), yet failed to secure a research position.
4. Draft a story of science fiction. An idea of multi-worlds/minds structure is there, yet still too vague to start writing.

Anyway, my life to get busy living goes on.

From a new year's trip to Grand Canyon in the US

It's a wonderful life (by Nomad Cinema); yes it is, indeed.

After suffering from a cold for days unfortunately, I just got recovered by seeing the movie. Yes, 'no man is a failure who has friends.' (It's a Wonderful Life, 1946, directed by Frank Capra)

If there's a chance, I utterly absolutely indeed recommend to see it in a cinema, with good audience who clap their hands to thank to the truly wonderful movie. Today's fantastic event was was organised by the Nomad Cinema, who is supposed to donate 100% of their profits to The Sustainability Institute a pioneering environmental and educational charity in South Africa.

It's a Wonderful Life by The Nomad Cinema at the Look Out in the Hyde Park.

Indeed it is one of the best movies to wish a merry Christmas. The ending is so beautiful and heartwarming and the performance by James Stewart is just incredible. Just for my foot note, I did not know the fact that Frank Capra was from Sicily, Italy, like Giuseppe Tornatore, who directed Cinema Paradiso. I see they believed in the power of cinema, arguably.

Learning Ruby on Rails

As I have been managing the company website, I realised I have to learn basics of web development. Therefore, last weekend, I joined a two-day workshop by Codecourse, which was a great opportunity to practically learn how to code with Ruby on Rails. This is my work-in-progress web applications.

It was really worthwhile course; what I essentially learnt was following:

• All the important setups for web application development: online console by Nitrous, html and CSS frameworks by Bootstrap, online application platform by Heroku, Static Maps API by Google maps, voice and SMS APIs by Nexmo,  some gems in Github, and online e-commerce platform by Stripe.
• How to practically develop (1) a personal website, (2) a web app to record locations and display in the map, (3) a web app to send a SMS text message, (4) a web app to upload pictures and purchase an order online, and (5) a web app to post status updates. So basically they are what you do mostly online nowadays (i.e. Wordpress or blogging, Messenger, Instagram, Amazon, Twitter etc.).
• While following instructions by the organiser and facing unexpected errors, essentially my learning was about how to identify an error (mostly typo or undefined class or method) and how to crack it mostly by yourself.

Nitrous' console image

The following is my personal memo on the very basics on Ruby on Rails so that I would not forget about it at all.

• To create a new project, command 'rails new the_name_of_the_project'. After run 'cd mysite", type 'rails server' starts the server so that you can check your code updates in your browser.
• application.html enables every page to contain the same code that is in the application.html.
• To add a new page, (1) open the routes.rb file in the config folder, (2) open the static_pages_controller.rb in app/controllers/, and (3) create a new file under the static_page folder.
• To use Bootscamp CSS, first you have to copy Bootstrap CDN to the application.html.erb.
• After you install in Gemfile (c.f. gem is a function defined/developed by someone already, e.g. Devise: sign-in and sign-up/authentication), you have to stop the server (Ctrl+c) and then run the "bundle install" command to reflect the changes while.
• To upload updated pages, command (1)"cd the_name_of_the_project", (2) "git add . ", (3) "git commit -m"Finished the project", (4)"git push heroku master".
• To create a database, run 'rails generate scaffold the_name_of_database', followed by name and definition of each column. (e.g. 'rails generate scaffold location name:string address:string latitude:float longitude:float')

Interstellar

Admittedly, the story was a bit long and ended too happily? But that is not the point of the film. I would say, the story (e.g. going through a wormhole to reach another galaxy) and characters (e.g. the captain's son, Dr. Mann, etc.) were rather made up and thoughtfully ordered to just let a person (and a machine) going beyond the event horizon into the black hole (and somehow, however weirdly, he has not experienced 'spaghettification' by the strong gravity of the black hole). Period.

I know people love spacecrafts, but this was not super cool unfortunately.

Our imagination is highly bounded in timespace, or three dimensions and time. This film at least tried to reconstruct the boundaries of audience's imagination. Also, it amazingly showed how a film can show the advanced science of modern physics into the screen (of course with its budget of $160 million and more).

The last quarter or half hour or so was just amazingly structured to put all the mysterious pieces/scenes into one great big, clear picture on how this film ends. That part made it worth seeing the bit boring first half of the film. As some said, a good Science Fiction is also a good Mystery, indeed.

Might be a good idea to see 9 films that inspired the director. I should start with Metropolis as it was also recommended in the Film History evening classes at Imperial College London, as it affected a lot of science fiction films, notably Blade Runner.

1. Star Wars (1977)
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
3. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
4. Alien (1979)
5. Metropolis (1927)
6. Blade Runner (1982)
7. The Right Stuff (1983)
8. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
9. The Mirror (1975)

* Happy is here half questioned because all the scenes after the event horizon could be just an imaginary memory of the farmer-turn-back-pilot who dreams a feasible return to the earth to see his daughter. Who knows?

The Imitation Game

We saw the film in the first day of its running. It was a good entertainment film for a Friday evening, but not a thing that moves you, indeed. I enjoyed how Benedict plays one of the most intelligent people the world once had (and miserably lost). Frankly speaking, without Benedict Cumberbatch, the storytelling was rather boring and could not go beyond my expectation. Yes, maybe I was not the target audience of the film, since I am a big fan of Turing Machine etc. as a Science Fiction lover.

The Imitation Game (3.5 stars out of 5)

Who do we think we are?

When I was in Japan, I used to watch plays at theatre every two to three months. Yet this was for the first time in the UK. This opportunity came from a network of my high school; one of the actors is my senior, senpai, who is very attractive and charming; I want to be like him after 30 years.

The play is about different lives from 1914 to 2014, the period when people experienced a bunch of cruel wars, ideological conflicts, changes of social cultures. It was like condensing 10 stories of 100 years each (or 1,000 years in total) into just 2 hours. For example, it featured WWI (trenches in France, Siberia camp etc.), the communist revolution in East Europe, WWII (the ghetto by Nazi, atomic bomb at Nagasaki, India and Gandhi etc.), Woodstock, Apollo on the moon, Vietnam war, and even dementia issues at NHS. It gave me a real touch of the world's 'history'. Maybe only lacking viewpoints were about Africa and China.

While seeing it, I just wondered what my great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers was doing in 1914, when the WWI commenced. They should have been doing something alive, otherwise I won't be able to be here now:-p I have to question my parents and uncle/aunt about it.

The poster of 'Who do we think we are?'

Moved out of Cambridge to London; whatever you end up doing, love it.

Whatever you end up doing, love it. (Cinema Paradiso)

Open air cinema organised by The Nomad Cinema: 'Cinema Paradiso', the best loving movie with fantastic musics. 

And our new life started here in London:

The entrance of our new accommodation in London.