Ramsay Ramblings – August 10th, 2021

Ramsay Ramblings is back after a 10 year absence – woohoo! This is where I clear my head of all the things I want to say, smashed together in a single blog post. Let’s get started: The Covid Olympics Like 80% of Japan, I was opposed to hosting the Olympics in the middle of a pandemic. The Coronavirus outbreak, days after the closing ceremony, is currently the worst it has […]

Betty Botter Bought a Bit of Bitcoin

When I first started taking an interest in Bitcoin, I thought, “Hmm… maybe I could just buy one Bitcoin.” Little did I know that a single Bitcoin costs a year’s salary! A few days, and a little research later, I was gung ho about earning my first satoshi instead. A “satoshi” is the smallest unit of Bitcoin, worth one hundred millionth of a Bitcoin, or 0.00000001 BTC. Apparently, it was […]

Putting On My Big Boy Pants

During my first few years in Japan, I was fairly proactive in figuring things out for myself. That changed after I got married, though. Time and time again, I deferred anything that required Japanese to my wife. That included booking doctor and dental appointments, hiring handymen for home maintenance, planning family trips, running the administrative side of our English school, and most significantly, managing our finances. Not surprisingly, she reached […]

Seeing Purchases as Hours of Work

Since I started teaching online for $5 a lesson, I’ve found myself weighing up purchases based on how many lessons I have to teach. Take, for example, a single cup of Häagen-Dazs ice cream. That would cost me half a lesson (15 minutes), which is certainly worth it! Some real examples Looking through my orders on Amazon this year, here’s how much time I’ve spent working for each item: A […]

13 Years since “My Dot Com Lifestyle”

It was way back in 2008 when I wrote about My Dot Com Lifestyle in Japan. In which I egotistically described how I’d quit my teaching job and was living off internet earnings while sitting on my ass. So how did that turn out? Not quite as well as it started. You see, I had seven websites in the childhood education niche – the ones making money, yet I spent […]

Ways to Learn and Earn while Teaching Online

Since I started teaching on DMM Eikaiwa, I’ve been wondering if I can get more out of my time when sat at the computer. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far: Learning from students I have so many students that work in Medicine, IT, Engineering and Finance, or teach at high schools and universities. These are clearly highly educated individuals doing quite well for themselves, so I can probably […]

Teaching with DMM Eikaiwa (aka Engoo)

When I finished teaching at kindergarten, something I had done for nearly 20 years, I found myself needing to replace the lost income. I had assumed that I could get some private students, but living 5 kilometers from the nearest train station, and only being available on weekday mornings really limits the potential for that. So I looked online. I was surprised to see how little the big companies pay […]