Japanese Raumen Museum

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Today, 4/25/2014, another busy but great trip to Japan is ‘in the books’ as they say.  All that’s left is a short walk to the train station, a 1 ½ hour express train ride to the airport, a few hours of waiting and then a joyous 10 hour flight home.

This is the part of traveling to Japan that gets particularly interesting.  It’s basically Groundhog Day where I get to relive a period in-time in which I had already experienced.  I’ll be leaving Japan at 3:55pm on Friday afternoon and arrive home at 12:40pm Friday.  Do the math for yourself.  Yes, that’s right; I will land in the US 3 hours and 15 minutes BEFORE I left Japan 10 hours earlier!  Living the same day two times is absolutely a trip.

As I have written previously many times, one of the consistent great things about traveling to Japan is the wonderful people and culture.  That part of visiting never disappoints.  This particular trip featured some new highlights and I would like to share those experiences.

Raumen Museum

musuem

We visited the Shin-Yokohama Raumen Museum.  It was great fun and we ate two lunches.  One lunch was a mild-flavored ramen and the other was a more hot-and-spicy flavor.  Both were delicious!  The Museum itself was awesome.  All the storefronts had a different theme and felt like a Hollywood movie-set with all the various settings.

The environment was so much fun.  In the courtyard of the museum, pictured left, the security officers were teaching young school-kids how to play games and such.

Below is a brief summary of the Raumen Museum:

http://www.raumen.co.jp/english/  Shin-Yokohama Raumen Museum was founded on March 6th, 1994 as the world’s first food-themed amusement park. From the start, our concept has been to be the one-stop place to enjoy the flavors of this national dish from renowned shops across Japan without stepping on a plane.

Tokyo Dome Baseball

tokyo dome

Another highlight for this particular trip was attending a professional Japanese baseball game.  This game featured the Rakuten Golden Eagles and Seibu Lions.  eagles vs lionsThe Eagles were the home team and their fans were extremely passionate however the Lions also had some extremely loud supporters as well.  Some of the Lions fans included drums, trumpets, flag-waving, organized chanting; showing great team spirit.

The game itself was a blow-out and the end-result was never really in question.  The Eagles scored at-will in the first few innings and built a 5-0 lead, never to be relinquished.  The final score of 6-1 did not accurately portray how much Rakuten dominated this game.

Baseball Beer at Tokyo Dome!

beer

The game was held at the famous Tokyo Dome.  The Dome was pretty typical of traditional stadiums with a few exceptions.  First, there was no parking lot for cars.  All the fans, including us, were transported via train or some other means of public transportation.  Second, there were no, or meager, lines to enter the stadium or get food and drink.  Everything is always so efficient.

The food at the game was quite similar to American baseball with a few exceptions.  The concession stands included typical items such as popcorn, souvenirs and drinks.  The extreme enthusiasm in which the Japanese people celebrate friendship is a noticeable, positive, experience.

One of the extreme highlights of the baseball game was the ‘beer girls’.  There was nothing not to like about this.  They had quantities of them (check), they had kegs/booze strapped to their backs (check) and they all had cheerful attitudes (check)!  All kidding aside, the sincere enthusiasm for working and having fun was absolutely refreshing.

Kevin’s Birthday Surprise 2014

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Kevin’s Birthday Surprise 2014

fairmontSo Brandee decided to sweep me away recently for my birthday.  When it comes to birthday time I usually get grouchy because, after-all, what’s the point of aging another year without any tangible benefits?

Basically between the age of 21 (when you can legally drink) and the age of 65/67-ish (when you can supposedly collect your retirement money) then what’s the use of growing older?

Nevertheless, Brandee pulled a wonderful surprise for me and it was very special.  She had arranged a full evening and night at the San Jose Fairmont Hotel.  This is not your Motel 6-type facility.  Rather it’s a classy, high-price establishment where U.S. Presidents and other famous people stay.

Let’s have a pop to begin

drinksThe night began with her insisting that we have drink(s) in the hotel lounge area.  First of all this was very suspicious because she never drinks.  Second of all the amount of booze she consumed was impressive so I knew something was up because this was seriously unusual behavior for her.  However, not sure exactly what was going on; I rolled with it.

It was a lovely lounge with beautiful decorations, nice artist displays as well as great service by the hotel employees.  Overall I have to say that the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose is Five Star for this reason; they have great service!

After a few drinks in the lounge Brandee suggested that we have dinner.  A wonderful idea but the restaurant wasn’t fully staffed when we arrived just as they opened for business.  So we decided to head to the bar for a bit and wait for our table to become available.

The Feast begins

foodThe bar area was extremely nice.  There was plenty of room to get our groove-on so Brandee and I waited about 30 minutes and our reserved table was never called.  This was perfectly fine with us actually and eventually Brandee went and cancelled our formal restaurant reservation because we were perfectly content in the bar and could still order off the full menu.

In there we had bread with accompaniments of whole butter, tomato jam and an herbed olive oil and aged balsamic dip.  We also had Sliced New York Pepper Steak with Bacon, Cracked Pepper & Onions, Topped with a Green Peppercorn Sauce.  And just when you think that is too much, we had a gorgeous Charcuterie board for us to snack on. Toasted Levian, Stilton, aged Parmigiano-Reggiano, Nicoise olives, amazing Prosciutto, Sopressata, house-made whole grain mustard and candied spiced walnuts.  OMG – it was delightful!

Heeerrre’s Johnnie!!!!

johnnySince Brandee knew that I clearly hate to celebrate my birthday and she had such elaborate plans, she probably knew she was skating on thin-ice with my patience.  This was absolutely true and she decided to step it up a notch, like you wouldn’t expect a reasonable person to do, but she did.

I guess at some point while I was checking my Facebook to make sure that my ‘lovely’ wife wasn’t posting embarrassing photographs she was making a wicked embarrassing deal with the waitress to bring (and sing) birthday cake to my table.  Yeah team!

So what do I do?  Turn the tables of course.  Instead of a nice, innocent smile with gratitude, I give a sarcastic looking smile just exactly like Jack Nicholson on The Shining in the scene where he busts down the door with an axe and declares: “Heeerre’s Johnnie!!!”

Fantastic Birthday Result

bottleAfter Brandee and I had our fill of snacky-food and birthday cake I decided that this old-man needed to hit-the-hay so we headed to our hotel room.  When we opened the hotel room door I was surprised by not one, but two, sets of chocolate/strawberry and wine/champagne arrangements!  Apparently Brandee had already arranged one set with her friend and then another was provided by one of our mutual friends.  Needless to say, we were not thirsty for delicious drink or fantastic fruit the rest of the night or early morning :-).  Champagne, strawberries and chocolate on a lazy Sunday morning is something all of you should experience on your bucket-list.

In the end, and through all the personal suffering, I had a great weekend and it’s because people made it happen.  I want to personally thank Brandee (of course) and also many others including Natalie, Cookie, Jonathan and Steve for making such a great memory.  You are all the greatest.

Getting the most out of your document capture solution – Multistream, color dropout for forms processing

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Leveraging an investment in scanning hardware and software should always be a priority.  After all these are typically not cheap investments although the ROI can be outstanding if implemented properly.

In this blog I would like to share some little known, yet extremely useful, features that can dramatically improve forms processing automation and accuracy.  I am occasionally asked about these features and I believe if more people knew these were available then it would help improve efficiency in the capture process tremendously.

Multistream – Multiple versions of one captured image

The first feature I would like to explain is “Multistream”.  As the word would indicate this means that for each image captured, the scanner can output two or more versions of the image.  Why in the world would anyone want to do this you ask?  Good question and the answer is to improve Forms Processing data extraction accuracy.  Typically when people use Multistream they will output a color version of the image and a bitonal (black and white) version of the image.  The color version is stored for the purpose of retaining an electronic version of the original document.  This version of the image is for human’s to retrieve and view images.  However, the bitonal version is used for the capture technology such as OCR to process by computers.  Bitonal images are preferred for OCR because the color is unnecessary for a computer to interpret pixels and might actually decrease the level of accuracy.

As you can see in the image below the OMR (Optical Mark Recognition – checkboxes), ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition – Handwritten) and OCR (Optical Character Recognition – Machine characters) are much cleaner on the bitonal image on the left.  While the color image on the right is good for human viewing but not as good for capture and data extraction.

Dropout Color – Remove form background color

Another useful feature to use, in conjunction with, or just use in general on certain types of forms, is called “Dropout Color”.  This means that either the scanning hardware, sometimes the scanner driver or even capture application, can remove the forms background color.  In the image below the form color for the Healthcare form is a red color.  This red color is a good way to guide humans completing these forms to which area of the form to fill-in information.  However, this color is unneccasary and not needed for a computer to read this information via OCR, ICR or OMR.  Therefore, we can “dropout” the color to expose only the information on the form that we really care about.

 Forms Processing – Automatically extracting data from forms

Now, after using Multistream and/or Color Dropout, as you can see in the image below, you can now expose all the data you wish to capture in a neat manner which a computer can better understand and interpret.  The combination of using these advanced features can certainly help improve your data capture automation and accuracy levels.

Gaining value by using tools available to you

Enabling these features is quite simple so I encourage everyone to consider if these, or other features, might be available to you in your document capture solution that might help improve productivity.  These are just a few examples of using available functions to enhance process.  Within the entire capture process there are many techniques, functions or features that can be incorporated that would make capture much more efficient.

What do you think?  Are you getting the most out of your capture solution or do you think that there are possibly areas of improvement had you known about capabilities such as Multistream or Color Dropout?