“The streets are so clean!” “Such excellent service.” “Public Transportation is quiet, clean and efficient.” “Gift wrapping is included with any purchase?!” “Japanese students clean their own classrooms!” “The streets are safe.” These are the common refrains you hear everywhere about Japan, and I left out quite a few for brevity sake. All these statements […]
Well, I finally bit the bullet and bought a new vehicle. This one takes up much more road and can climb mountains more easily because of its six speed manual transmission. I also managed to find it in a succulent dark mint. All in all, a decent purchase for ¥25,000. It’s a significant upgrade over […]
Well, it’s been a while. A three week trip back to the US put a monkey wrench in my writing. But I have stayed clear of nearly all social media in that span, which has been a welcome addition to my lifestyle. Basically my Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts have been completely canceled after the […]
I am a snowshoe junkie. Love it. Go about 3 times a week. And the thing about snowshoeing in Japan, in my humble opinion, is that it is underrepresented as an outdoor activity. That’s sad. Skiing gets all the love. But skiing has it’s own issues. It’s prohibitively expensive, often crowded, and honestly a bit […]
Does Japan celebrate Christmas? No. Sure you will see Christmas trees in the shopping malls and illuminations throughout the winter, but those have little to do with the actual holiday. There are holiday sales galore, because who doesn’t love a good sale? But that warm, hearthy, childlike anticipation that reaches crescendo in the early hours […]
I’ve been experimenting with Zentangle, an artistic technique that is meditative, relaxing, and not dependent on skill. Some might call it advanced doodling. There might be more to it than that. But I think the results speak for themselves. Bare in mind that I can hardly draw a straight line. I have been very impressed […]
I’ve gone back in forth on my relationship with social media. I went cold turkey off all of it a few years back only to have that experiment fail spectacularly. That led me to my most recent period of social media addiction, where I made accounts with countless platforms and allowed several hours per day […]
Well, not quite. But it just got a lot closer. A few weeks ago I took some space from my ridiculously large Windows partition (200 Gb of 600 Gb free space) on my daily driver Toshiba Dynabook laptop and installed Peppermint OS, a semi-lightweight Ubuntu based Linux distro. It was a bit worrying. I had […]
I’d been struggling to put one of my old Raspberry Pis to good use. For the better part of the last several months it’s been just idle, waiting to be tinkered with. I have all kinds of components to build a variety of wicked projects. But in the past, most of my attempts to make […]
Well, that was interesting. 30 blog posts in 30 days. Some were better than usual. Some were just content for content’s sake. I learned a lot in the process. I became even more familiar with some of the nuances of WordPress. I mastered the use of the WordPress Mobile app. I was also able to […]