Wednesday, 11th February: "Just Nippon out to the shops"

"660 BC - The traditional founding date of Japan"

Celebrations for National Foundation Day in Japan

From planettokyo.com:

Kenkoku Kinen No Hi (also known as Kenkoku Kinenbi) is celebrated on February 11 and is a national holiday. The purpose of National Foundation day is to celebrate the establishment of the country -- it is a patriotic holiday.

Subsequent to World War II, Kenkoku Kinen No Hi was abolished, In 1966, law re-established the holiday as it is now celebrated.

Early Japanese history books indicate that on this day in the year 660 BC, the first Japanese emperor was crowned. When the holiday was established to commemorate Emperor Jinmu's taking the throne, it was known as Kigen-setsu. Historians disagree on the details of Emperor Jinmu's enthronement to this day, but the legend remains part of the holiday.

And, from perpetual internet smart-arse wikipedia entry on the Nihon Shoki, the book of Japanese classical history:

Most scholars agree that the purported founding date of Japan (660 BCE) and the earliest emperors of Japan are legendary or mythical. This does not necessarily imply that the persons referred to did not exist, merely that there is insufficient evidence to conclude that they existed or can be assigned to a particular period of history. It is much more likely that they were chieftains, or local kings, and that the polities they ruled would not have encompassed all, or even most, of Japan.

For those monarchs, and also for the Emperors Ōjin and Nintoku, the lengths of reign are likely to have been exaggerated in order to make the origins of the imperial family sufficiently ancient to satisfy numerological expectations. It is widely believed that the epoch of 660 BCE was chosen because it is a "xīn-yǒu" year in the sexagenary cycle, which according to Taoist beliefs was an appropriate year for a revolution to take place. As Taoist theory also groups together 21 sexagenary cycles into one unit of time, it is assumed that the compilers of Nihon Shoki assigned the year 601 (a "xīn-yǒu" year in which Prince Shotoku's reformation took place) as a "modern revolution" year, and consequently recorded 660 BCE, 1260 years prior to that year, as the founding epoch.

Brilliant. More Taoism stuff here.

Today's slice of ugly truism:

"How does a project get to be a year late? One day at a time."

Apparently this quote is from Frederick P Brookes, and his book "The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering"... Amazon describes it as "The classic book on the human elements of software engineering"...

The first link I got to which referenced this quote was from an absolutely frightening-looking website for a piece of software for software managers, Ketura. This appears to be a way of tracking to the last detail employees' actions over time, all in the name of project management. I know nothing more of the program's abilities, it just struck me as an immediately slightly sinister bit of purchaseable control freakery:

"Want to know who worked on an issue, milestone or project? How long it took? How much it cost? Whether team members have managed to spend the intended amount of time on a project? Want that data filtered by a particular time period? Ketura makes all this information readily available."

At the click of a button, no doubt!

Some shouting in an office, yesterday

It's this kind of thing that makes us depressed at work. Micro-management. This from softpanorama.org, "The (slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society" website, and an article called "Type 3 Corporate Psychopaths: Micromanagers" article:

An unmistakable sign of paranoia is continual mistrust which simultaneously is the most distinctive feature of any micromanager. Paranoid managers are suspicious, touchy, humorless, quick to take offense and slow to forgive, self-righteous, argumentative, often litigious. Prefer to keep distance and avoid any intimacy; often they seem tense, cold and brusque. Paranoid personalities find causal connections everywhere; for them nothing is coincidental.

All PIMM (Paranoid incompetent micromanagers) are bullies but the reverse is not true: not all bullies are PIMM. Still both types of psychopaths have a distinct a tendency toward sadism and derive perverse gratification from harming others. They like to hurt, frighten, tyrannize. They do it for a sense of power and control, and will often only drop subtle hints about what they are up to. At the same time they polish their aggressive, domineering manner in such a way to disguise any intimidation as legitimate corporate behavior.

And with computer programs like that mentioned above now available, it looks like these characters have themselves a new whip! Onward and upward!