When leaving Japan, I sold off my monitor. This was a bit of a gamble, but I knew that it would be expensive to ship, and hoped to be able to get something new and better. It turns out to have paid off; I sold the old one for a good price, and bought a [...]
Body Cooler FX: sour soda done well. I’ll miss it on my return to the US…
I hadn’t realized when I saw Mei and the Kittenbus at the Ghibli Museum that it was a limited time release. For a 20 minute short film in Japanese without subtitles, it was pretty enjoyable. A nice side effect of a cast composed almost entirely of small children and animals is that I could understand [...]
Aside from assembling a fairly complete and easy to use webcomic scraper, my thoughts recently have been on such issues as: Is it possible for a mathematical point, a singularity, to rotate? My opinion: no. Reasoning: Rotation requires an axis to rotate about, and a distance from that axis. A point on the axis of [...]
Once you get past May in Japan, the humidity index climbs to about 90% and remains at no less than that level for the next three months. Thus, it’s only ever worth riding a bicycle for pleasure at night; it’s just as humid, but at least it’s cool. I was riding about earlier tonight, exploring [...]
I’ve mentioned in the past that I live, quite literally, on the edge of a fairly large expanse of rice paddies. The nearest building across those paddies, perhaps a kilometer away, is a junior high school. As it happens, the wind often blows more or less directly from the high school to me, so it’s [...]
It’s interesting for me to see the reactions of my different students to the news that the school is closing in two months. I had a few, including some new students who had just joined, who quit immediately. Others seem to be staying for a longer haul, but it’s hard to tell. I heard yesterday [...]
Back when I first heard that the owner of my franchise had died, I thought of three major scenarios which might occur in its wake. Ordered in order of estimated probability, they were: the business continues with no major changes, the business shuts down immediately, the business continues for several months but is then shut [...]
I just learned why the company hadn’t yet contacted me to determine whether they needed to find a replacement teacher: somehow, their records got skewed, and they thought I arrived and started teaching six weeks after I actually did. With luck, they’ll recheck, discover their records were wrong, and the issue will blow over. Still, [...]
It’s Between Day and I have nothing to do. Golden Week isn’t a proper holiday in and of itself; it’s a set of four holidays which happen to all occur within the space of a week. Companies figure that at most, they’d get two days’ work out of their employees if they made them come [...]