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Category: Miscellaneous

Learn About Your Name with Baby Namer

September 28th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

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 [...]

Posted in Miscellaneous | 3 Comments »

Motivate Yourself with FutureMe

September 26th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

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 [...]

Posted in Miscellaneous | 3 Comments »

Happy Birthday LongCountdown!

September 23rd, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

Today marks the first anniversary of starting this blog. Can you believe it’s been a year already? The first year saw Mami and I buy a house and have a baby, and while that will be hard to top, the next year should make for very interesting reading, particularly if you’re following the progress of [...]

Posted in Miscellaneous | 5 Comments »

September 11th - 6 Years On

September 9th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

Six years have passed since planes crashed into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center yet the images remain as vivid as ever. It was late in the evening in Japan when the attack took place. I was at home when a distraught American colleague phoned me, urging me to turn on the TV because [...]

Posted in Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »

Michael McKinlay on TV!

September 4th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

Regular LongCountdown reader, Michael McKinlay, was interviewed by CTV (Canadian TV) recently. I asked him why he was on TV and this was his response:
CTV News called me because my name was listed on the University of Calgary’s Student Union Housing Registry. They asked if they could come over and interview myself as well as my [...]

Posted in Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »

My Two Digital Cameras

August 29th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

It’s amazing how despite being in Japan for over ten years, I’ve never had a decent camera. This summer however, I bought two digital cameras in the space of two months!
If you remember, I upgraded my mobile phone to a WIN W52H by Hitachi. The built-in 2.0 Megapixel camera can take great photos, giving you [...]

Posted in Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »

The Sun Sets on Kakamigahara

August 29th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

I’m not much of a photographer, but Mike convinced me to get a new camera after writing about his Nikon Coolpix S200. I’ve been looking a lot at stock photos recently, and thought it would be great to submit my own photos for sale on the web, but I’m going to have to put in [...]

Posted in Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »

Watching Movies at Home

August 29th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

About four years ago, I took the plunge and bought a 37-inch wide screen plasma TV. At the time, it was awesome. I hooked it up to a surround sound home theater system and invited all my friends around to my place for video games and movie nights.
As the years passed, my TV looked smaller [...]

Posted in Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »

If I Had an Attic Lift…

August 27th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

When I was a kid, I had the best attic in the whole world. I used to share a room with my brother and to get into the attic, all we had to do was open the closet and climb up the ladder. My dad had built a huge toy room up in the loft, [...]

Posted in Miscellaneous | 3 Comments »

Give Me a Bed Already!

August 26th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

When you have a one-month old baby in the house, it’s hard to get much sleep. It also doesn’t help when you have to sleep on a futon. Trying to sleep on a hard mattress, no thicker than a paperback book, with the sound of a baby crying ringing in your ears makes you wish [...]

Posted in Miscellaneous | 3 Comments »

Do you use online coupons?

July 18th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

One thing I really look forward to when I become a dad (anyday now!) is buying my son all the cool toys that I still want for myself! Being in Japan, the cost of shipping rules out most purchases from overseas… unless you use a coupon!
CouponChief offers daily discounts for about a thousand online stores, [...]

Posted in Miscellaneous | 4 Comments »

My first videoblog

June 18th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

Back in October last year, I wrote about long distance friendships and how video conferencing is bringing people closer together despite huge geographical divides. In response to that post, I got an email from a company called SightSpeed who encouraged me to try their own free, video conferencing software.
What I didn’t realize until now was [...]

Posted in Miscellaneous | 8 Comments »

Add color to your child’s drawings

June 14th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

Apart from a few Action Man and Star Wars figures I had when I was a kid, I’m not really into dolls. However, there’s a website called The Doll Palace which has a new section that should appeal to parents. The new Coloring Pages section has a wonderful choice of ready-made, black and white drawings. [...]

Posted in Miscellaneous | 3 Comments »

Blogging, beer and bugs

April 5th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

I’m back in the classroom this week for a new school year, and my students are a year older than they were last month.
During my week off, I kept myself busy working on my new technology blog Nice4Rice.com, which sees me, as Spud Oregon, reviewing tech-related websites and giving blog owners a chance to get [...]

Posted in Miscellaneous | 2 Comments »

LC’s 100th post!

March 29th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

I started writing this blog on September 23rd, 2006, with a post describing my arrival in Japan. Now, one hundred posts later, I thought I’d take a look back through the archives and point out some of my favorite articles which you may have missed.
September 2006:

What is Yakudoshi? I wrote this when we were looking [...]

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Misleading Media

March 4th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

When I first started this blog back in September, I planned to write about Japanese news stories rarely seen abroad, and that’s exactly what I did. I wrote posts such as Woman hurls dog from sixth-floor apartment and Car ploughs into 33 nursery school children. However, as you would have seen from my recent posts, [...]

Posted in Miscellaneous | 4 Comments »

Shall we dance?

February 16th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

In my post Ballroom dancing in Japan I told you how I got into dancing, and it’s been a while since I’ve mentioned it again. So for the record, I haven’t given up and I still take lessons once a week. My wife Mami, on the other hand, stopped going when she learned she was [...]

Posted in Miscellaneous | 4 Comments »

10 things I miss from England

February 13th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

I got news this week that my parents have decided to sell the family home and move permanently to their holiday home in Eastbourne… finally giving my brother the motivation to find a place of his own! Anyway, this has got me thinking about some of the things I miss from home, and since I [...]

Posted in Miscellaneous | 6 Comments »

Technical problems with LC

February 10th, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

I’m not sure if I’m the only one experiencing it, but I’m having some problems viewing LongCountdown.com in both IE7 and Firefox. I can usually see the sidebars and header, but the post or comments section doesn’t always show. Refreshing the page sometimes brings up the post and sometimes not.
Anyway, maybe this is just a [...]

Posted in Miscellaneous | 3 Comments »

Ordering books from overseas

February 1st, 2007 by Nick Ramsay

I’ve just spent the last two hours browsing the books at http://teachershop.scholastic.co.uk/, and have come away empty-handed, but not without a fight! I registered, and went through the shopping cart procedure until the final step when I was finally able to see the shipping cost. For some inexplicable reason, the cost of shipping was 20% [...]

Posted in Miscellaneous | 3 Comments »

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