Minimalism - Online Income - ESL - Japan
After staying up late last night to upgrade JapanSoc, I was woken abruptly this morning by a loud smash, a scream, crying, a further scream from my wife, and then the vision of Rikuto’s face covered in blood! An obstacle course Rikuto is getting squirmy, and by that I mean he can squeeze through or climb over all kinds of obstacles. I thought we had done a pretty good job […]
This month’s Japan Blog Matsuri theme is The Language of Japan, and I’ve been scratching my head all month over what to write. I haven’t studied Japanese for years now, and although I have a few amusing stories of miscommunication, nothing worthy of an entire blog post. So, I delved into the LongCountdown archives and submitted an article I wrote back in March 2007. It’s about the confusion that arises […]
So I bought myself Rikuto a train set. It’s not a patch on the beautiful Hornby railway set that my dad made me when I was a child, but Tomy’s Plarail is a lot safer, which is important when you buy a one-year-old boy a toy made for 3-year-olds! Plarail, or “Tomica World” as it’s known outside of Japan, is awesome. There’s a huge selection of trains from all over […]
The U.S media is often criticized for ignoring major news stories or covering them with obvious bias, and more people are becoming aware that this is because the media is owned by just five major corporations – General Electric, Time Warner, Viacom, The Walt Disney Co. and News Corporation. The media is an incredibly powerful tool for social control, so I’ve been wondering if a similar situation exists in Japan… […]
If you live in the Chubu region, you’ve probably seen the TV commercials for Commufa Hikari, a product of Chubu Telecommunications. They run a pretty aggressive marketing campaign with door-to-door and telephone sales reps, and since I was not opposed to saving 2,000 yen on my phone bill, I agreed to take them up on their offer. A no-hassle changeover? At least I did at first. The problem is, although […]
I’m running a contest over on the JapanSoc Community Blog, with a grand prize of $50! All you have to do is make a promo video for JapanSoc, about 2 minutes long, post it to YouTube and send me the url via the JCB contact form The first entry into the contest is this video by Mike from Japan Is Doomed. Here’s Tony D. Puddlespuddle, Internet Expert… Mike is urging […]
Originally, all my sites were hosted with Host A. For a couple of months at the start of this year, my sites suffered so much downtime I moved them all across to Host B. Host A, for the most part, has been good, and I can forgive them for suspending my account every time I write a script with an accidental infinite loop. Anyway, for complicated reasons, I had to […]
Right across the street from our house is a mental hospital, and since we are its closest neighbors, we decided to pop across the street to their summer festival. There were more people than we expected. Half the neighborhood came along to join the families of the patients. I had to switch into genki teacher-mode when a bunch of my kindergarten children spotted me. Fortunately, with Rikuto squirming in my […]