Minimalism - Online Income - ESL - Japan
Miscellaneous
I’m not much of a photographer, but Mike convinced me to get a new camera after writing about his Nikon Coolpix S200. I’ve been looking a lot at stock photos recently, and thought it would be great to submit my own photos for sale on the web, but I’m going to have to put in a lot of practice to get to that level. Here’s a photo I took of […]
About four years ago, I took the plunge and bought a 37-inch wide screen plasma TV. At the time, it was awesome. I hooked it up to a surround sound home theater system and invited all my friends around to my place for video games and movie nights. As the years passed, my TV looked smaller and smaller compared to the newer, larger models in the shops, and my beloved […]
When I was a kid, I had the best attic in the whole world. I used to share a room with my brother and to get into the attic, all we had to do was open the closet and climb up the ladder. My dad had built a huge toy room up in the loft, with a massive toy train setup , two Scaletrix tracks (race car tracks), and all […]
When you have a one-month old baby in the house, it’s hard to get much sleep. It also doesn’t help when you have to sleep on a futon. Trying to sleep on a hard mattress, no thicker than a paperback book, with the sound of a baby crying ringing in your ears makes you wish you had a big, comfortable, wooden bed. It just so happens that Wooden-Beds.com offer exactly […]
Back in October last year, I wrote about long distance friendships and how video conferencing is bringing people closer together despite huge geographical divides. In response to that post, I got an email from a company called SightSpeed who encouraged me to try their own free, video conferencing software. What I didn’t realize until now was that you can actually video yourself and embed that video in your blog, without […]
Apart from a few Action Man and Star Wars figures I had when I was a kid, I’m not really into dolls. However, there’s a website called The Doll Palace which has a new section that should appeal to parents. The new Coloring Pages section has a wonderful choice of ready-made, black and white drawings. All you have to do is choose one, use the color palette to add bright, […]
I’m back in the classroom this week for a new school year, and my students are a year older than they were last month. During my week off, I kept myself busy working on my new technology blog Nice4Rice.com, which sees me, as Spud Oregon, reviewing tech-related websites and giving blog owners a chance to get free links by giving ‘rice’. On the subject of blogging, my article on High-tech […]
I started writing this blog on September 23rd, 2006, with a post describing my arrival in Japan. Now, one hundred posts later, I thought I’d take a look back through the archives and point out some of my favorite articles which you may have missed. September 2006: What is Yakudoshi? I wrote this when we were looking for a house to buy. There were all kinds of problems at first, […]