So… I knew this would happen. I totally knew this would happen. But I kept thinking, you know, “it’ll happen, I’ll twitch, I’ll panic, it’ll be lots of running in circles, then it’ll just return to normal and I’ll figure out a way to keep things on level ground.” Hah.. yeah.

What’s going on? The yen is speeding ahead of the other currencies in the world at a pace I didn’t know was possible. What does this mean? The USD, the euro, and, more importantly (for me), the swedish crown, are all steadily losing their value against the yen.

(Yen/SEK is not “yen per second”, but “yen per swedish crown)

The above is a *very inofficial* diagram based on my own plotting of the yen versus the swedish crown as I’ve lived here — I’ve kept good track of it since all my cash is in Sweden, which means that whenever I withdraw money from an ATM, the amount of money I actually “lose” from my account varies depending on the above chart. As you see, there’s a nice downward curve there at the end, starting at the end of this summer, and, well, so far not ending at all.

I thought this was something “local” at first — as in, local to Sweden, and/or to Japan, but it seems everyone around me is talking about this now, and even the folks back home are saying that the market is looking hairy. I’m sure you guys have felt it too one way or another (stockholders, in particular).

It’s no trifling matter, though. I now pay about 44% more for everything that I buy here, compared to this summer. Imagine if your rent, your gas bill (if you have one), your electricity, your groceries, your bus tickets, the alcohol at your bars, cigarettes, gasoline for your car… imagine if all of that, in one single sweep, got 44% more expensive.

What usually cost $1 suddenly costs $1.44. What usually costs $20 now costs $29. What usually costs $50 suddenly costs $72. And the big bad one — rent. My rent here went from something like $210/month to $320/month. A $110 increase. In about 2-3 months’ time. It hurts, lemme tell you.

There are varying theories on why this is happening, some more disheartening than others. We swedes have speculated that this is a temporary deal, because Japan is so extremely dependent on import/export. The yen simply cannot stay stronger than the rest of the world, because the rest of the world will refuse to buy from Japan (the Japanese will want payment in yen, and the rest of the world will not wanna buy at 44% the higher price), especially with companies like Sony and Nintendo who don’t want to fall behind Microsoft in the console competition. If Sony and Nintendo are forced to cut prices by 44% just to keep up, it won’t look pretty on their financial reports.

Then there is the theory which stretches back 7 years or so. One of the women I teach English to told me today that when her daughter went to Sweden (yep, her daughter has lived in Sweden) back in 2001, the swedish crown cost 12 yen. That’s close to where it’s at now, if you take a look at the chart above. According to her, things have simply fallen back from being out of proportion for the last 7 or so years. Since 2001, she claims, the yen has gradually dropped in value against the other currencies and kept dropping steadily until it was what you see if you look at the chart around summertime — 17.88 yen per swedish crown. If I had only known. Well, in hindsight, I’m not sure I’d have done any differently from what I did, but I think I might have at least saved up 1/3rd of my buffer in Japanese currency if I’d realized the yen was so outrageously weak compared to 7 years earlier. Live and learn.

Update: The real reason appears to be panicky international investors;

“The yen’s recent jump, so lethal for Japanese exporters like Sony, was set off by panicky international investors rushing to unwind yen “carry” trades, which had taken advantage of Japan’s low interest rates to borrow yen to invest elsewhere. Reversing those trades means buying back the yen, lifting its value.”
– http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/081029/as_japan_earns_sony.html

In any case, now I’m twitchily trying to not spend money on anything if I don’t have to, and I’m also trying to find a(nother) job while studying. It’s quite a pain for me, because I’m a spoiled Swede who’s never ever worked and studied at the same time in the past (student aid and such), but now is not the time to go all “but my studies must not suffer — I cannot allow myself to take time away from them” on myself (they call it “iiwake” over here) and just get to it because I’ll ruin myself otherwise.

Wish me luck. (The next post will probably be about how I lost that job teaching those kids that I wrote about earlier…)

The community house, aka “Kokusai kouryuu kaikan”, is a truly beautiful place in Kyoto and I recommend anyone visiting to go take a look. I’ve been meaning to take pictures of it but I only have my damn cell phone camera at this point so I haven’t bothered.

Anyway, some of the language students in my school literally go there every day. It’s quite different from the shoebox apartments we all have, and they have air conditioning and a café and so on. And besides, as I already mentioned, it’s a truly pretty place.

It’s got a number of things related to “internationality”, if that’s a word, among others a T.V. running american news channels, as well as a big posting/bulletin board where people can have notes set up regarding various things, such as English teaching lessons.

It so happens that I put a note up on that board today regarding English lessons. It wasn’t a very good note, so I doubt I’ll get many responses, but they only keep them up for 3 weeks anyway so I’m going to put another one up around the beginning of October.

In any case, I’m now looking for English students here in Japan. I know it may sound odd to some of you that a non-native English speaker is teaching English, but the mistakes I do make are on such a different level from these people (whose primary concern tends to be “where to put in an ‘a’ or ‘an’, and where not to”) that the mistakes I make are more or less completely unrelated to their current “education”.

In any case, wish me many happy and simple students who wants to pay me lots of money for doing very little. *grins*

So, today I went to meet up with the guy who had that English teaching job I was possibly interested in. In my previous blog post, I said that I’d had a rather odd conversation with him on the phone, and that I was a bit concerned over how this would all work out — if at all. Today I met up with the guy and was in for a few surprises. Well, one big one at least.

I met with Mr. O outside McD’s as we had arranged. Well, I was there but he wasn’t, so when I called him up, he had mixed the times up. As I said yesterday, the class began at 3.30 pm and we were supposed to meet at 3 pm (30 minutes before class). Well, he somehow ended up thinking we were supposed to meet at 3.30 pm. In any case, he finally arrived and as we walked to the “school”, we talked a bit about what kind of school this is. And here’s the surprise.

Me: So, what is the name of this school anyway?
Him: Kyoto Kids’ Academy
Me: “Kids’”? So does that mean I will be teaching children?
Him: Yes.
Me: Uh, how old are they?
Him: Between… 1 and 12 years old.
Me: Wah.

Well, that was unexpected. I’d presumed this was a regular old fashioned “drill English to bored adults who, against their better judgment, decided to give ‘that english thing another shot’” but alas, not that easy.

When we arrived at the school, I noted that it was, well, not a school. It was more of a house, but it somehow fitted with the “daycare center” atmosphere that this whole thing was starting to take on. At the school, I was introduced to an American lad who was the head teacher of the facility. He was nice enough, and explained to me that basically, I wasn’t really supposed to do anything other than to make them speak English as much as possible. Now that may sound simple to the untrained ear……. In any case, there seem to be very loose “rules” regarding the teaching itself. No strict guidelines and such, since the school is just an outside regular school hours kind of thing. It’s basically the parents who place their kids in school in order to give them a headstart in the oh-so-important subject of English.

Personally I think it’s a great idea. I just wish it didn’t have the upper-class stamp on it that it appears to have.

Regardless, the pay is all right, but it’s only 2 hours and 40 minutes a week, so it doesn’t exactly pay the bills, and I will be spending 15% of what I make on train fares alone, unless I can muster up the energy to take the bicycle there and back (not impossible but then again, I doubt they’d approve of me arriving drenched in sweat from a 1+ hour bicycle-ride).

Dress code. Now there’s a mystery if there ever was one, but I’m not allowed to wear jeans. That’s it though, but unfortunately I don’t seem to have any non-jeans pants with me to Japan. I may have to go buy some, worst case.

The kids were actually cuties. There are two classes. The Thursday class has 4 kids, 3 girls and a boy, all of them between 7-8 years old. Actually, I didn’t realize until they pointed it out to me, but two of the girls are actually twins. You know, the “same-egg” kind of twins (I forgot the word for that in English). And they’re turning 8 next Thursday. Go them.

My biggest concern really is how to stop them from spazzing completely and not get anything done whatsoever during the 80 minutes I have them in class. Today, I was admittedly unprepared, but for the 40-something minutes that we were actually “teacher-student”y, I managed to make them do something useful for maybe half of that time. In between sporadic bursts of “running in circles around the table” or “making paper planes and tossing them at each other” and so on. I wasn’t too concerned, really, but instead tried to catch the attention of individuals as I got the chance. I will definitely have to figure stuff out to keep them focused in the future or people will probably wonder why my pups aren’t making any progress.

All in alll, I’m both pumped and concerned about this all. It’s been a long time since I was “caretaker” for kids so I may need some warming up on this one, but eventually it might actually become something I look forward to. (Then fast-forward to a month or two from now, and watch my angst as I whine about the little brats… :))

http://enrogue.com/setp/ (link is broken and won’t come back up)

Sorry, I just had to brag about that one. Way cool. Next is WYSIWYG.

What?

Contributor License Agreements — or CLA’s — are a fairly new phenomenon in the Open Source world. IANAL, but I am going to make an attempt to explain what a CLA is, and why it is necessary today, where it previously was not.

The most commonly used CLA is that of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), and the purpose appears right at the top of the agreement:

“In order to clarify the intellectual property license granted with Contributions from any person or entity, the Foundation must have a Contributor License Agreement (”CLA”) on file that has been signed by each Contributor, indicating agreement to the license terms below.”

The agreement continues to in great detail explain that the person signing the document must both be the author (or hold rights or permission by the author), and be the copyright owner of the contributions they are planning on making to the project in question. It is clarified that the rights to use the contributions will always and forever remain with the contributor, and that the CLA simply extends this right to the project as well.

In other words, if you submit stolen code, you are breaking the CLA, but if you refrain from such follery, nothing’s changed. You’re still the copyright owner of your submissions, but you grant the other party these rights as well. Simple enough.

In the past, this has been a presumed agreement between the involved parties. If I help you out and patch up your code to make it run better, or submit documentation that makes your code more useful, or whatever, you and I both presume that I didn’t steal the code from someplace and handed it to you in evil. This presumption is no longer enough, for good or worse.

Why?

CLA’s became necessary as a direct effect of the SCO vs. Linux court case(s), which, summarized, are about: “SCO claims a bunch of contributors to the Linux source code stole that code without permission from SCO, and that thus, SCO is now the owner of Linux and may at their whim request that all users of Linux pay a royalty fee.” Pretty scary, huh? Be that as it may, the court negotiations are as of this writing ongoing, but things are looking bad for SCO (for what it’s worth).

But regardless, SCO’s claim was a bucket of cold water in the face of the many maintainers of and contributors to various Open Source projects out there, as a legal matter was suddenly making things a tad more complicated. What if someone helps you out and gives you a bunch of really good, professional code, and what if that code is ripped out of some commercial, copyrighted very-much-not-open-sourced product somewhere? How would you know? How could you possibly know?

A quick Google search on “contributor license agreement” shows 1.6 million hits. Obviously, a great deal of Open Source maintainers and organizations do care, and CLA’s are obviously the answer to this legal matter.

In the end, I think the majority of those who’ve followed the SCO vs Linux court case agree that it is exclusively a matter of halting the progress of the rapidly evolving Open Source world. Microsoft, the father of FUD, assuredly caught onto the dick-grip SCO had on Linux in particular and Open Source in general, and decided to sponsor SCO by handing $12 million dollars to SCO, “to purchase UNIX-type licenses so Microsoft customers can run UNIX-type applications” (this was in the year of 2005, and was reported by Business Week). In the end, though, did SCO win? Have they hampered the development of Open Source software?

In my uneducated opinion, yeah. They have won. They have won a fraction of what they aimed for, but yes, I believe SCO got if not the whole cake, they got a taste of it. But I also believe that what they won, the Open Source movement will ultimately benefit from. Ultimately. Eventually.

From personal experience, I know what a CLA can do to the quantity of contributors. A lot of people feel that they want to help a project out, but when they’re handed a big, scary paper which may be interpreted as giving up the rights to something you give away for free, they hesitate. And rightly so. Everyone should hesitate when prompted to sign legally binding documents; everyone should read the fine print and ensure they know what they’re getting into. But this, naturally, proffers a wholly different stage than the good old “wanna help out? just chuck yer code at me and I’ll eyeball it and if it looks good I’ll plop it into the svn tree, m8″ type of development.

In the long run, though, Linux and Open Source have been children until now, and it’s time to grow up and face the big crowd, and the big crowd usually wields lawyers like children wield wooden swords, and the difference is that more than a few bruises and tears are at stake. That SCO will ultimately lose to Linux I have no doubts of. And in a way, I am grateful that the world will get to see Linux prevail in court over the devil, and I believe companies worldwide will see this as a trigger to examine Open Source alternatives closer, au contraire to the belief that companies will shy away from it, due to its “run-ins with the law.”

… with crayons.