The flavor is gone a little bit sadly.... That's my fault.
What I want to say to enthusiasts of Pliny the elder is that don't keep its bottle longer in your refrigerator, otherwise its great flavor is gone. Today is the last day of the year of 2013, but this is one of what I have regretted this year. I bought many bottles of Pliny the elder when I went to the Russian river brewery to enjoy its brother, Pliny the younger, last February. Since that time, I opened the bottle one by one at the time when I felt great. Finally I kept it by the end of the year, and I opened it today and tasted it a little bit, but its flavor is gone sadly. I mean that it is gone completely, but it is as much as I can tell the difference. This was what I did not hope. Actually I knew that I should have kept IPA longer because hop flavor is gone gradually with a bottle. That's one of the reasons why the Russian river brewery seems not to bottle the triple IPA, Pliny the younger. This is what I knew from a YouTube video featuring Pliny the younger.
BTW, Pliny the younger I had last February was the greatest I have ever had among the IPA. I went on weekdays last February, but It took 1 hour to go inside and additional 1 hour to get a table. It was the greatest moment to stay there because everyone there came to enjoy Pliny the younger, and it was really fun to talk with enthusiasts with the same mind about beer. As you might know, it seems to take more than 5 hours on the weekend, but I think that it absolutely deserves it for IPA lover.
First of all, the Japanese semiconductor situation is worst as far as I feel and it would be worse in the future. Japanese big electronic companies used to lead this industry to make many reliable, useful, and cost effective products and sell them in the world, and those companies definitely are companies which made "made-in-Japan" one phrase meaning great quality of products. As many people know, it is the old story of good times. Now such companies are not doing good totally. There are however many departments even in such companies which are making money well, but there are more departments which are losing money, so totally companies' profit is in the red. Managing people in such companies originally used to be good engineers and are not used to run companies and make decisions of a business properly, so they are not able to cut non-profitable departments by hoping something miracle and keep them until it's too late. Such companies are almost going bankrupt and are now struggling to cut such groups, cut people, and reorganize companies, otherwise they will be gone, which cause temporal collapse of Japanese economics. It is easier to attribute this to external factors, but internal factors are also cause of this. I do not mean to analyze the reason why this has happened and how Japanese electronic companies lose their competitiveness here, but I would like to mention what I felt these days about job hunting of the semiconductor industry in Japan as far as I can know.
Two months ago, I had opportunities to be an interviewer of a young engineer position because a group which I'm in now had to employ one engineer to compensate one engineer who left the company. When I got a list of candidates from HR, I was surprised and shocked to know current job hunting situation. Our company is small and unknown, but almost all peoples in the list are working or worked at well known big companies and their age is around 40s and 50s. (It's common to show age in Japan job hunting market, although it's uncommon outside Japan.) I thought that they would not apply for the job in this small company. I, of course, asked HR if there were young engineer candidates because they would be overqualified and we looked for young one, but it looked like that there were not actually according to HR. Our group did interviews for a few persons and I attended as an interviewer of technical discussion. However what I felt was that interviewed people looked having huge pride of working at big companies and they did not look like desperate for job hunting. I guess that they would be just asked an early retirement which is soft layoff with benefit, and jobs hunting itself coming from negative motivation, so they did that reluctantly. One guy said proudly that he has been involved in XX module products last ten years, but he did not know inside the module when I asked how it consists of inside and draw brief figures like how signal is processed. I was wondering what he has been doing so far, and what people have been doing in big companies. What I heard is that each person's job is so focused on one thing that people don't know whole view and how what they do contributes to final products.
Two weeks ago I met one of my friends whose works for a recruitment agency, and asked him what's going on the semiconductor industry market. He did not specify names, but foreign companies in Japan have already closed their design department in Japan and kept only support and sale departments. His jobs is busy by nature regardless of business condition. What he said was that situation in the semiconductor is negative right now because people look for jobs with negative reason like I mentioned above. People with negative reason is definitely more than people with positive reason like career up. He said that his job is great because he is able to support people get jobs regardless of reasons, but today's market is too tough for engineers who have not improve own value and done what they are asked to do and stick to companies which they thought are too big to fail.
This situation is so sad, but only feeling sad makes nothing at all. Positively I try to think that I'm lucky to know this serious situation at a relatively young age before the age when it becomes too late. The most important thing which I can do is to have crisis awareness and to improve my value in the market anytime.
The picture is from
http://higheredstrategy.com/recession-not-going-as-planned/
I have heard of the news that Japanese people was arrested due to be suspected of using fake credit card in U.S. The credit card is this.
Many people in the U.S would think that a card like this must not be a credit card and could be probably a fake like toy cards for children. This makes a little bit sense to me because the design of Japanese credit card looks cheap and does not look like an issued credit card in U.S. If you go to the link below which is google image search of "Japanese credit card", then you will be able to figure out how Japanese cards look like.
google image search results
I have used Japanese credit card at the U.S many times, and I have many experiences that cashiers looked at my credit card for a little bit longer time and asked me to show my ID card like my car license card or my passport. This would be because of a similar reason like the new. Nobody is asked to do like this when I hang out with my fiends.
One of the reason of this is coming from a fact that many Japanese companies collaborate with credit card companies and make own credit card which has companies' logo printed on credit cards. Therefore, such logos are not familiar to people in the U.S. As far as I can remember, this trend does not exist from long time ago but became popular last 15 years. Before that, using credit card itself was not popular in Japan by culture, rather people used to prefer to use cash. However, people became aware of convenience of credit cards and at the same time many companies also began to make own logo credit card so that user can get benefit by using that card at that place. This positive feedback has made credit card become popular in Japan. For example, a supermarket has issued their card and people use that card at that supermarket, then people can get points and use points to buy something foods.
