It’s been two years since I left my first repressive employer, Opera Software, which means that I am finally free of all non-competitive agreements as of today. Of course, disclosing that fact might in itself be against said (or non-said) agreement. So I’m not saying it’s the case, just that it might be. Anyway, it’s cause for celebration.

I was young and free, still enrolled at university, and eager to put my l33t coding skillz to use so what was I to do? No, looking back I realize – thank Providence – it was a good decision. It kick-started my career and set me off on an an interesting path.

But let me tell you kids: non-competitive agreements and the like are bad. Stay away from them and stay away from companies that will only offer you employment after signing one. I was lucky, but I don’t think most people are. Of course, whether or not they’re enforceable is another matter, especially when the nationality of the parties and the country where work is carried out are all different. But it smells of bad employment practices.

I was actually contacted a little more than a year ago about an interesting employment opportunity that I would definitely have been interested in if it weren’t for said (or non-said) agreement, so it’s not just all hypothetical. And regardless of the probability of such an unmentionable agreement being upholdable in court, I am a man of my word when signed in triplicate under witness and after review by lawyers. And specific knowledge of the Opera source code wouldn’t have been an advantage either – so it’s all just self-flattering from the oppressive party’s part.

Not coincidentally, today is also two years since I joined my second repressive employer, Picsel Technologies (also known as Picsel Research, Picsel Malta, Lescip, Picsel Holdings, Lescip H, Picsel Trustees, Lescip Seetrust, not to mention the Geurnsey-based Picsel Group Holdings, and a number of other names). Picsel was fun in many ways. If I get the salary they still owe me it’ll seem even funnier. But at least they didn’t require me to sign anything oppressive.

If you’re interested in understanding what happened to Picsel, a seemingly flourishing mobile software technology company, there’s a site for that. Highly recommended reading.

Anyway I’m better off now, thanks largely to these two repressive employers. Happy independence day!

Now, the other day I came upon the Wikipedia entry on Knock Nevis, the largest ship ever built – with “large” defined as “long”. That page has a thought-provoking graphic comparing the length of this ship with some of the tallest building in the world. Here’s my spiffed up version of it:

So if you were to stand on top of the bow of the Knock Nevis standing on its stern, you’d essentially be at the same height as the observation deck of the Shanghai World Financial Center, inside the thing that looks like the head of a bottle opener to me.

But of course, ships aren’t built to be standing on their sterns. That’s what got me thinking… If someone had asked me which was longer; the length of the longest ship ever built or the height of the highest building ever built?, then if I had to answer impromptu, I would probably have said the ship. Why? Because building horizontally seems so much easier to me than building vertically. When building vertically, you have to fight gravity all the time, haul things up and down, and the whole thing has to be able to stand on its own.

When you give it a moment of thought though, it’s obvious a ship has to be able to maneuver, and not break during harsh seas, so ships of the length that the Knock Nevis is probably just not economically feasible. Also, there’s of course a great difference between building something that can not only move but is also self-propelled, and something that just stands still.

Nevertheless, my conclusion from this drivel is that not only is it a bad idea to compare apples and oranges, such as meters and kilograms, with each other, but it’s also a bad idea to compare meters in one dimension with meters in another dimension. Stashing apples in a row is a lot easier than stashing them on top of each other.

I started learning Japanese in my second year at the university, where I was studying engineering. I had somewhat liked studying languages before, except French, and felt studying only engineering was tedious. So I figured I should study a language on the side, as long as it didn’t harm my engineering studies.

It was either Chinese, Japanese, or Latin. I wasn’t then, and am not now either, very interested in learning yet another normal European language. Japanese had a good selection of classes at my university, and seemed to be the most difficult, so I ultimately went for that. I was lucky to get in, on a reserve spot, on that over-crowded class. That really did change my life, much for the better, I think.

So in the beginning I wasn’t interested in Japan at all. I wasn’t particularly interested in Japanese either except it seemed like a good challenge. That came to change later, of course. I think choosing to study Japanese because it’s hard was a very good starting point – you can’t really give up with the ever so often heard “it’s too hard (for Westerners)” then can you?

And Japanese is tough to learn. I’m not convinced “hard” is the right word though. It just takes time and effort and determination and method. I very much believe it when I hear people saying it’s the hardest language to learn for Westerners – although there might not be any real scientific proof of that.

Actually, I wonder how I would have done in the first place had I known how much time it would take. When I signed up to transfer to the Tokyo office it was initially for one year, and I thought that spending one year in Japan should leave me decently fluent in Japanese, as you’d imagine it would with a European language for instance, but that was of course not the case. (Even now, three and a half years later I still would definitely not call my self “fluent” in any way, although I do have an advanced understanding and decently good conversation level to use Japanese in daily life and business.)

I might actually had abandoned the idea of studying Japanese had I known only this at that time. But if I had also known the pleasure of being able to read a book in Japanese, or listen to and understand advanced topics discussed on tv, or everyday conversations between the neighbors, not to mention it has lead me to living a more fulfilling life than I probably would have otherwise, then beyond any doubt I would have taken up learning Japanese when I did. The thousands of hours I’ve put into it has started to pay off now, and I’m sure the return on this investment will multiply in the future.

Anyway, shortly after I started studying Japanese, I realized it was a lot more fun than engineering, so in a way, I did let the engineering classes suffer some (not much though – I passed them all with pretty good grades). On the other hand, if I hadn’t had the Japanese studies to keep me motivated, maybe I would have failed completely and stopped studying altogether. It’s been pretty much the same way since I started working as well – work has never been challenging enough, so if I hadn’t had the Japanese language studies on the side I might have become too understimulated to do anything. (Yeah, someone should give me a more challenging job, or I’ll have to take up Chinese soon…)

Now I’m gonna stop babbling about the past.

If you haven’t heard of Mixi that means you aren’t Japanese or Japanophile. To put it generalized and bluntly: Mixi is the only social networking site in Japan. Japan is the second largest economy in the world (★pause for reflection★). The reason it’s so popular is basically the same as why Microsoft products are: they were there first, and everyone else uses them, and the basic functionality is actually good.

Mixi, technically, is stone age. Although recently they’ve introduced video upload etc that we have become accustomed with on the modern web, the basic technology is just server-side perl scripts outputting broken html with a table-based design. In other words: it’s web 1.0, although they have a pastel color, but it’s the wrong hue, and pastel color alone doesn’t make web 2.0 – you need rounded corners and rss too.

But as a consumer-oriented product, Mixi is really state of the art. It’s actually statier than the statiest art. I started using the predecessors to nowadays’ social networking sites in junior high school, back in Sweden. That was like 10 years ago now I guess. (Heh, when I think back, that was about the time I got my first mobile phone. Was that only ten years ago?!) . Even though they used about the same technology then as Mixi does now, the culture and usage patterns are completely different. They were about kids doing their best to make their pages look as hideous as possible (like today’s Myspace) and presenting themselves as generally emo and cool. And guys (both young and very old) trying to pick up young girls, of course. But Mixi is not like that.

Oh well, there’s that too. But Mixi is much more woven into the fabric of Japanese society. It’s like an ad-sponsored public service page (fortunately, and strangely, the mobile version doesn’t have ads). And fortunately, you can’t design your own page, and there are no widgets etc, so it’s actually possible to browse around people’s profiles and community pages. Really nice, although I bet it’s more because the Mixi people haven’t figured out how to implement it technically than a conscious decision.

I joined Mixi when I realized my Japanese language skillz had gotten good enough for me to actually understand pretty much all of the communication taking place there. And the reason I keep using it is still mostly to practice reading Japanese; every day on the train I read some new, interesting tidbits from the parts of Japanese society that concern me. Like what’s happening in my town, what’s happening along the train lines I use, what events are going on at my favorite bars and clubs, or if there’s a Swedish-speaking off-kai soon (off-kai: オフ会, people who talk online meet up in real life), etc. I give it three thumbs up!

Anyway, now for the real anecdote here, and the reason I figured I’d write this blog post at all: In their reception they had this wall with all kinds of catchy words and phrases written on it in the style of a tag cloud. Very, very web 2.0 hip I must say… If anything proves that you’re falling behind current developments in the world of the web, it’s that you’re trying to mimic a Google office, I’d say. (I’d like my office to look classical and sophisticated, and there’s always music in the air.)

Now, you can notice that, just beside “web 3.0“, they’ve included the word “self-fertilization“. I don’t suppose I’m the only one who kinda gets a bit suspicious because of that. And I find the graphical proximity to “web 3.0″ especially intriguing. I don’t suppose it’s a statement of theirs? Nah, it’s probably one of those engrish.com kinda moments, you know, when Japanese people confuse R and L, or use Google Translate to translate business emails. Anyways, it’s funny.