Minimalism - Online Income - ESL - Japan
In this video, Rikuto shows his curiosity for everything and anything by attacking the camera. If I had let him have it, I’m sure he would have tried to eat it, too! If you can’t view the video, watch it here on YouTube. If you like, you can find me on Twitter at @nick_ramsay. I’d love to hear from you!
Since I started JapanSoc, I’ve been adding Japan-related blogs to my iGoogle page, and you can see in the screenshot that there are a whopping 80 of these blogs that I’m currently subscribed to. Subscribing… Blogs… Feeds… What does it all mean? Some of you are probably already confused. What is iGoogle? How do you subscribe to a blog? What does “subscribing” to a blog actually mean? Basically, when you subscribe […]
Here’s part five of my Google Speed-Search series. This post answers the question, is a Google search case sensitive? What difference does case make? Some search engines will return different results depending on whether you use upper or lower case characters. So, for example, if you type apple you’d get results for the fruit or technology giant. If you typed APPLE however, you’d get results for the Association to Promote and Protect […]
There are a few things I’d like to ramble about this morning (2:30am!). The word “Half” – to allow it or not Mami and I were talking about what to tell Rikuto about the word, “half”. If you missed my post, Half-Japanese or Half-Blood?, this English word is used by Japanese people to describe someone who is only part Japanese. Foreigners despise this word because the English implications are not complete, impure, or even […]
Here’s a lovely picture of Rikuto sat on the sofa, sporting a cute hat, mittens, and “I Luv My Mum” socks, courtesy of his Aunty Emma and Uncle Mark. The colorful clothes he’s wearing are part of Mami’s Yahoo Auctions haul. Mami’s online activities also won him a little Big-o-Ball to go with the larger version he got when we went shopping. Doesn’t he look like a couch potato? 😉 […]
It wasn’t so long ago I looked at the possibilities for teaching English online, but never considered using my webcam and mic to learn Japanese online. Actually, I’ve always thought study materials for learning Japanese were far behind those for learning English. I remember being frustrated at how most English textbooks came with CDs, whereas books for learning Japanese still came with cassette tapes, even though tape players had long disappeared […]
In this fourth part of my Google Speed-Search series, we’ll take a look at stop words – words that Google ignores. What words does Google ignore? There doesn’t seem to be a public list of Google stop words available (although I did find this), but words like the, is, are, that, on, in and with are very likely to be ignored. Numbers and question words, too, seem to be considered as stop words. […]
Like everyone else in Japan, I was completely oblivious to the war mongering coming from Australia. Yes, it seems that the new Labor Government have been urged to send warships, but thankfully “Australia won’t go to war with Japan” [link removed, Google it]. War? There’s been no talk of war! Australia’s Ambassador to Japan, Murray McLean, said starting a war with Japan was “absurd” and an option he “wouldn’t even contemplate”. “The reason that […]