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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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% [...]
With the impending release of Microsoft’s Windows Vista and Office 2007, I thought it was only appropriate to give you a tour of my new little home office for 2007. (Sorry if you came here looking for news on Vista and Office 2007!)
So, having moved house, I now have a whole room for my stuff. [...]
As an update to my post The 15 year old toilet stains, I’m happy to tell you that I managed to get the toilet clean(ish). Believe it or not, sandpaper did the trick. Not just regular sandpaper, but some special stuff you can use on ceramic surfaces and in water (edit: Silicon Carbide waterproof paper [...]
Having just bought a house, we’ve been busy putting things where they belong and fixing things up. One of those things was the doorbell, which I finally got working today after the $100 doorphone adapter arrived. Crazy, I know, but the intercom needed to be connected to the telephone which required a special adapter. Seems [...]
Mami and I were waiting at City Hall today when I noticed this ‘Most Wanted’ poster. I thought the woman in the middle looked incredibly like Michael Jackson. What do you think?
It beats me how anyone who looks so similar to the so-called King of Pop would be able to avoid capture for long… unless [...]
I don’t ever expect to be rich, but I do intend to be financially free, and by that I mean having enough money not to worry about it. It’s not a pipe dream, but something I expect to happen in the not too distant future. I’ve been reading up on ‘intention manifestation’, and I intend [...]
There are a few things I want to mention today, but they’re quite random,ﾂhence the unimaginative title.ﾂ
Last week was ‘Halloween Week’ at my school so I donned myﾂmage hat (imagine a samurai’s hairstyle) and pulled out my sword. The sword retracts into the handle so I had fun stabbing my students and scaring many of [...]
