Minimalism - Online Income - ESL - Japan
I’ve only been with Bluehost for about 7 months, and for the most part, I’ve been very happy with the speed and service they offer. However, recently, as many of you are aware, all my websites have been shut down for 5-10 minutes, multiple times a day for exceeding the CPU limits. I’ve studied the error logs and it appears that these errors are caused by slow MySQL queries to […]
Three times a week, when Mami goes to her part-time job, I watch over Rikuto. Now, I know our 1-year-old son would be quite happy to watch YouTube all day, but that’s not going to happen. Instead, I try to take him to some of the sightseeing places around town. We’ve already done a lot in Kakamigahara, so today we headed south and crossed into Aichi prefecture where we would […]
There are a lot of programs filling up my hard drive, but only a few of them are useful enough for me to use everyday. Here’s a list of the top 10 most used programs on my PC, in reverse order: 10. Word 2007 Perhaps not as high up the list as you’d expect, I use Word for writing school curriculum, and that’s about it. Maybe if there was an […]
I recently asked my parents to dig out my birth certificate because I need it to get Rikuto his own British birth certificate. When my mum emailed me to say she found it, I started to reply…”Thanks mum! There aren’t any surprises, are there? I’m not adopted from a small African nation, am I?” I thought it was funny when I wrote it, but the smile was wiped off my […]
Rather than sit in front of the TV all day while keeping an eye on Rikuto, I decided to take him to the Kakamigahara Aerospace museum instead. Kakamigahara is home to the Gifu Self-Defense Force Air Base and the Kawasaki Aerospace Division, so perhaps to make up for the noise of fighter jets flying overhead, the public are treated to a museum dedicated to flying machines. The museum was better […]
SWCMS stands for Social Web Content Management System, and it is the social news software that powers JapanSoc.com. SWCMS is open source, meaning anybody can contribute to its development, and I’ve been busy doing just that. I’m not a professional developer by any means so I usually report bugs and suggest improvements. Recently, I’ve tried my hand at making modules (the equivalent of WordPress plugins) and I’ve come up with […]
Nearly two years ago, in “Copycat Japanese“, I wrote about how I thought the media’s sensationalistic reporting of teenage suicides was to blame for spurring on more suicides. Recently, this suspicion was confirmed when I found out about researcher David Phillips’ studies from the 1970’s that showed a significant increase in not only suicides, but also car accidents and plane crashes in the days after a suicide is reported in […]
Here’s a quick video of Rikuto at the shopping center playing on the keyboard. If you missed the video of him playing when he was just 4 months old, watch it here. We think he plays like an angel. His music is poetry to our ears! If you can’t see the video, try watching it here on YouTube. IMPORTANT! I must tell you that Ricky’s granny wrote a lovely poem […]