Oggy Live Today

It has been really a long, long time since the last update.

Basically I am doing all right. Many things happned after that, but I just wanted to give you the latest update as of today.  I have left the company I used to work for at the end of April, and also completed the master program in June. So, I left Evanston (near Chicago) already and am currently staying in Silicon Valley in Calofornia to meet my old friends. Then, I will go back to Japan next week finally.

I would like to thank everyone for the amazing years, and hope to stay in touch!

Quote from http://www.chicagoevents.com/event.cfm?eid=123 

The Fountain Square Art Festival boasts two-and-a-half decades of success as one of the most important art festivals in the Midwest. In 2005, Fountain Square Art Festival was ranked by the Sunshine Group in the top 50 of the best art festivals nationwide.

The festival is located on six city blocks in downtown Evanston amid newly built luxury condominiums, offices, restaurants such as Wolfgang Puck’s, a bevy of coffee cafes, stores and hotels. A large sculpture garden located in the middle of the festival serves as its focal point. This urban setting creates the perfect ambience for this event, which embodies the word sophistication. More than 250 fine artists show and sell their art to an audience of sophisticated, discerning, upscale, art aficionados and collectors. The event draws approximately 50,000 people who come from the upscale North Shore suburbs as well as Chicago.

This festival has been held at 2 minutes walk from where I live. I enjoyed walking around the area with my wife and just had a cup of lemonade on the street. There was also a cool blues performance.

MMM New Product Innovation Fair is an exhibition event where our MMM (i.e., MBA + MEM program) students display and present their design projects done by their teams during “The Design of Services and Products” class. This spring quarter, each team has been going through an iterative design process including observation, brainstorming, prototyping and so on, and finally had the chance to show the design concept to people now. Although at the beginning of the project there was a little pain until our team came up with a solid design concept, overall it was a fun event and we had a great team collaboration.

This friday we had Japan Night party at the lounge in McManus (Kellogg’s dormitory). It is an event totally run by students and we, Kellogg Japanese student group (mainly 1st year students), provided foods like Sushi, Udon, and Yakitori, unlimited Sake, Japanese games (such as Yoyo-fishing) and performances like Kagamiwari-openings, Enbu (a Japanese martial-arts-style performance), Skit and Dance and so on. Thanks to the great marketing effort, around 350 tickets were quickly sold out! I played Taiko (i.e., Japanese drum) for Enbu, acted in the skit (“Post-MBAs visit Yakuza office”) as a lover of the Yakuza boss, and danced (music: “DJ OZMA”, a Japanese artist)…It was a blast!! It has been a great opportunity to showcase Japanese cultures and people to the non-Japanese classmates, as well as to deepen the internal teamwork and friendship among Japanese students through such intense preparation efforts.