Posts Tagged: office

Miscellaneous — 17 Comments
22
Jun 08

My New Office 2008

I previously wrote a post titled, My New Office 2007, in which I showed you a photo of what my home office looked like in January 2007. Here’s quick reminder:

My office in January 2007

Although a bit messy, that layout served me quite well, but things got even more busy when I added an extra desk and a second monitor. Not only was I running out of space, but I couldn’t reach the dead cockroaches and centipedes that were falling behind the furniture after a quick blast of Gokki Jet Pro.

The time had come to apply the 80-20 rule.

What’s the 80-20 rule?

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, Haddad’s Theorem, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Business management thinker Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of income in Italy went to 20% of the population. It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., “80% of your sales comes from 20% of your clients.” Source: Wikipedia

In this case, I decided to throw out 80% of the things I use just 20% of the time, and keep the 20% of things I use 80% of the time. Here are the results:

Another picture of my office in June 2008

My office in June 2008

Okay, so maybe I didn’t quite reach 80%, but I did a good job, particularly clearing out the closets. In the end, I hauled two car loads of stuff, mostly old books, CDs and shelving, to the massive Kakamigahara incinerator where I said goodbye to a huge chunk of my past.

Now that my office has been detoxified, I feel refreshed and more productive than ever! So how about it? Have I convinced you to do the same?

Technology — 36 Comments
13
May 08

Microsoft Banishes Japan from Language Pack Market?

It’s been well over a year since I bought a new Japanese PC with Windows Vista and Office 2007. I did my research and made sure to buy Vista Ultimate so that I could switch Windows to English at the click of a button. That was no problem when Microsoft made an English language pack available as a free Ultimate Extra download.

Office 2007 in Japanese

I was already a bit of a whizz with the old versions of Word and Excel in English, so using them in Japanese was easy if you could remember what belonged where.

Now though, the whole layout of Word and Excel has changed with Office 2007. I mean, it’s completely different. There aren’t even any proper menus anymore, and figuring out where everything is takes so much time, especially when it’s all in a foreign language.

Did Microsoft Japan forget to make an English Office language pack?

If you live anywhere except Japan, you can get language packs for Office 2007. Just go here, choose the language you want and the country you live in, and after that, I have no idea. I failed at the “Choose country” stage.

No Language Packs for Japan

Japan, banished from Microsoft’s world of language packs?

Even if you live on the sinking island of Kiribati, or in Africa’s war-torn Burundi, you can buy an English language pack online thanks to the marvels of the world wide web. Unfortunately for us stuck in Japan with Office 2007 in Japanese, we aren’t as lucky as the 920 people living in the world’s smallest country, the Vatican City State, or even Malawi, arguably the world’s poorest nation.

What about buying it offline?

The official word from Microsoft Japan is:

Still no single language packs

Which roughly translates to:

How do you purchase a Multi-Language Pack?

Multi-Language Packs are sold through retail stores and a volume licensing program.

When will Single Language Packs be available?

Single Language Pack will be released sequentially. (Whatever that means)

All is not lost though, because if you follow their tip about retail stores and go to Yahoo Shopping, you’ll find they are selling the Multi-Language Pack! However, 25,000 yen is a hefty price to pay if you only want English for home use.

Stuck with Japanese Office 2007

There doesn’t seem to be much choice but to wait this one out. I do love Vista and I’m very impressed with Office 2007, even if it does take me three times longer to do anything.

Am I alone with this problem? Are any of you scratching your heads over the language pack issue? I’d love to hear from you!

Miscellaneous — 3 Comments
18
Jan 07

My new Office 2007

With the impending release of Microsoft’s Windows Vista and Office 2007, I thought it was only appropriate to give you a tour of my new little home office for 2007. (Sorry if you came here looking for news on Vista and Office 2007!)

So, having moved house, I now have a whole room for my stuff. Check it out:

My home office

Starting with the room itself, you can see the floor is made up of six traditional Japanese tatami mats, which I like to cover so as not to damage them too much. The windows are bay windows, so if you pull back those Japanese paper windows, you’ve a got plenty of room for flowers, or junk you want to hide!

Speaking of flowers, I just got those plastic yellow chrysanthemums the other day at the 100 yen shop. I thought they’d be perfect, but Mami says they are used at funerals in Japan, and as a gift to send when someone passes away…. hmm… oops!

The computer stand isn’t a computer stand at all, it’s really a recycled microwave stand, and the clothes rack is actually a coffee table!

No office is complete without a “president’s chair”, which isn’t looking so royal covered with that rug, but it’s freezing in the mornings and that leather isn’t half cold. You might also be able to see a small electric heater under the table next to my bright green foot massager from the 100 yen shop. That damn heater is so easy to forget to turn off, I swear it’ll cause a fire. Still, in this weather it’s worth the risk.

Other than that, there’s a stereo, bookshelves, built-in wardrobe (for my boxes of wires, cables and adapters I’ve collected over the years). a packet of multi-vitamins, an empty bottle of lemon water, an empty can of beer, and oh, a couple of neat things like the cordless phone which goes “ding-dong” when someone’s at the front door, and my new wireless internet radar (that white thing by the flowers).

So, you may be wondering what exactly I do in my office? Well, it’s where I spend about six hours a day (two before work and four at night), working on my websites and planning various internet projects to make me rich and famous!

Ah, good timing, the cordless is ringing which means Mami must have made me a cup of hot chocolate. Better go downstairs…