Japan’s Earthquake Warning System

Japan is prone to earthquakes and although most of them are small, they are quite common with announcements popping up on the TV screen alerting us to the most recent quakes. From time to time, a big one will come such as the Great Hanshin earthquake in 1995 or this year’s Noto earthquake. As frightening as these earthquakes were, neither compared to the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 which killed […]

Crazy for Ballroom Dancing

I promise one of these days I’ll post a video of me dancing the Rumba or the Waltz. Yes, if you haven’t read about my ballroom dancing antics before on this blog, let me tell you that every Friday night I take dancing lessons. I started learning with Mami, but since she became pregnant, I’ve been taking private lessons with my teacher, Mr. M. That’s right, two guys arm in […]

All My Sites Hacked!

Just as I was getting ready for work on Monday afternoon (as is the schedule of an English teacher in Japan), a friend called me to say my blog had been hacked. Sure enough, this blog and all of my websites were displaying this rather unfriendly welcome page: Fortunately, the nature of the attack wasn’t particularly malicious, and I was able to restore things within an hour. I’ve since changed […]

When One Life Just Isn’t Enough…

For a while there I managed to avoid the virtual world of Second Life, knowing full well that if I gave it a try I’d be sucked into the world’s greatest timesink. Anyway, curiosity got the better of me and I ended up registering and created the character Nikorasu Revnik. It’s difficult to understand what Second Life is until you jump in and try it for yourself. Basically, it’s a […]

Rikuto Gets Vocal

Rikuto is still a long way off speaking yet, but that doesn’t stop him trying to communicate. In this video, he gets quite vocal on a number of important issues. I don’t know what he’s trying to say, but it’s fun imagining. Maybe he’s giving his thoughts on Japan’s new prime minister, or perhaps he’s surprised at the fall of the U.S dollar! At the end of the video, I’m […]

Learn About Your Name with Baby Namer

Choosing a name for a baby can be a difficult task. I wrote about how we decided to call our son Rikuto before, but I was surfing the web and found BabyNamer.com, an interesting look into the background of names you might be considering. There are currently 23,000 names, mostly English, in their database, and the front page lists some of the more popular ones. Naturally, I typed in my […]

Motivate Yourself with FutureMe

A year ago, I used a free service at FutureMe.org to send an email to myself in the future. I had completely forgotten about it until it came through the other day. Here it is, with obscenities and personal info removed. Dear Nick, It’s Sept. 24th, 2006. Hopefully when you read this you will have achieved the goals that I’m setting today! 1) Be earning (deleted) 2) Have saved (deleted) […]

Rikuto – Is That My Hand?

The other day Rikuto turned 2-months old, and I posted about some of the things we can expect from him this month. One of those things is the realization that he has his own hands. With that in mind, and considering how these videos of the baby seem to be pretty popular with my family in England, here’s another one of little Ricky called “Is That My Hand?” If you […]