Daniele Cereghino comments

@Alex80: I found someone who had my same experience! (I am Italian too). I also start to discover a new world by watching Japanese anime, showing a different culture. It gave me an imprinting, with some traditional values from positive Japanese culture. If I can be a little off topic: do you know from which anime comes the kotowaza: "la candela fa più luce prima che si spenga" I am trying to recall which old anime was, but even after years I couldn't find it! Any help is appreciated!!! Thanks!

Well, Japanese immigration should revise the way they recognize "highly skilled" certifications, at least for IT. Anybody checked which ones they will consider? Are all stuff very local, and not including the ones the market needs. Personally I hold tens of worldwide recognized IT certifications (some held by limited number of people globally), that allowed me to be hired in specialist roles around the globe (included Japan), but those are not in the list of recognized IT certifications the immigration officer checks (so I could only achieve 60 points, and there was no way to convince them to consider them. After 25 years of career up to CIO level, he asked me to go and take the simplest one as videoterminal operator... No comment). Please note even stuff like Microsoft MCSA, or Cisco were not considered, and those are the ones companies look for when hiring. When defining these classification criteria, Japan needs to engage specialists not bureaucrats, who don't know anything about real market needs!

Interesting that the premiere was held in Osaka, not Tokyo... Maybe they worried about radiations?

In these days there is a lot of talking about how to save energy. Leveraging my technical background,I wanted to help Japan not only providing donations as food, money and clothes, but explaining techniques for lowering the energy footprint, related to IT field. So I organized a seminar at Italian Chamber of Commerce in Japan (ICCJ), covering also strategies for quickly restore operation in Tohoku affected areas, as like as ensuring the business continuity in case of other disasters or brown outs. The economic impact of these scenarios will be seen not only in the short term, and will affect Japan as a whole. The presentation is available here http://www.box.net/shared/re89gpszc0mvv3114a7z for free, the seminar doesn't want to sell anything and is not sponsored by any Vendor, it is just evangelization. The speech was thought for beginners/intermediate audience, but the Q&A session went in details for specific scenarios, also covering social and economic implications. One of the technology I think it will be particularly useful is Virtualization. Even if it is a well known, tested and widely used technology outside of Japan, here is still not adopted massively. It is the only technology that proves to be efficient from economic and energetic point of view. I am happy to explain the concepts to anybody interested in adopting....