I’m very much hooked on Second Life at the moment. That means I’ve subscribed to a number of Second Life and virtual reality related blogs, and have been watching some videos on YouTube to find some places I haven’t visited yet.
One such place was Princeton University, which has been recreated in Second Life. Princeton has [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The new advertising medium is blogging. Companies and individuals alike are increasingly taking advantage of blogs to promote their products and websites to audiences in highly targeted niches. For example, somebody with their own blog about raising children in Japan, or a language school looking to recruit teachers, might want to get a special mention [...]
With the launch of The News Room, I can now get paid to embed news stories, including video, into this blog. So, the first thing I looked for was a story related to Japan. On my first search I found this fascinating video about “styrofoam homes of the future”. It seems that a Japanese company [...]
If you’ve never seen a Japanese keyboard, you might wonder how on earth the Japanese type into their computers. With a language containing over 10,000 characters, you’d think a Japanese keyboard would have more buttons than the Starship Enterprise. In this article, I’m going to give a brief overview of the basics, so if you’ve [...]
One thing that bugs me about living in Japan is when you surf the internet, some websites, particularly the big ones like Microsoft and Google automatically default to the local language, which in my case is Japanese. This isn’t too much of a hassle as it’s relatively easy to locate the language settings and switch [...]
Mr. H, my student and friend, has just left after coming to my house for coffee and dango on Easter Sunday. While he was here I showed him just what you can do with computers these days.
If you’re new to this blog you won’t know that Mr. H is in his seventies and started to [...]
Last month I got a new computer, a Windows Vista PC with enough power to run Google Earth! I’ve been playing with Google Maps a lot lately, particularly after I discovered you can manually alter the zoom level to go in further than you thought possible, like this section of Africa in which you can [...]
To celebrate Mami’s pregnancy, we went out for yakiniku with her mum, sister and her husband. Yakiniku restaurants are big business in Japan, and are often so crowded you have to wait ages to get a seat, as we did on Sunday. Once seated though, we got to experience the next step in restaurant technology [...]
In the autumn of 2005 I launched the ESL Writing Wizard and the following spring I added the ability for teachers and parents to ‘publish’ the worksheets they made. While they have the option to make their worksheets public, many of them have. Today, I’m proud to announce that the site has reached a landmark [...]
Continue reading about ESL Writing Wizard - 5000 worksheets!
The day Windows Vista was launched, I went on the internet and ordered my dream computer (well, as close to it as I could afford!) That was nearly two weeks ago and it finally arrived on my doorstep on Thursday morning.
There are few purchases in life that get me really excited. You could probably list [...]
I had the launch of Windows Vista marked on my calendar since before Christmas, and was counting down the days until its official release on January 30th. In the build up to the launch, Microsoft ran commercials on Japanese TV… 3 days to go! 2 days to go! So, when the 30th came around at [...]
Once in a while I post about my ambitions to earn a salary-sized income from my efforts on the internet. I have a few websites, mostly in education, which attract visitors from all over the world. The oldest of my current websites is the ESL Writing Wizard which I started in October 2005. Since then, [...]
For the month of November, 88% of visitors to my Writing Wizard website use Internet Explorer, while only 7% use Mozilla Firefox. How does this affect my approach to web design? Well, although I check my sites in Firefox, if they don’t work correctly, I honestly don’t care!
Tech-heads and Firefox fanboys will rave about tabbed [...]
Update: When I got Windows Vista, I switched again. Now I’m using Windows Mail (Dec. 2nd, 2007).
The last few weeks had seen my spam-count sky rocket. I think the extra exposure I gave my sites with some pretty heavy advertising campaigns must have pulled in as many spammers as honest visitors. I guess I’d been [...]
Continue reading about No more spam with Mozilla Thunderbird
Earlier this year I started on ESL-Kids.com, a website that offers printable flashcards and worksheets for teachers like me - ESL teachers on the front lines everyday, faced with an army of children and only a few ABC cards to defend ourselves with.
It was a slow start, but recently I’ve given ESL Kids a facelift, [...]
I’ve been using Google Adwords to advertise my websites for over a year now, but I’ve kept my advertising budget as low as possible. However, I’ve been experimenting this month with different sized advertising budgets to see what effect it has on the number of visitors to my sites, and how much I earn through [...]
I’ve been writing a lot of posts about Japan since I started this blog and not enough about English teaching or making money on the internet. Today, I’ll focus on the internet side of things.
The first thing I do every day is check my email (read ‘delete spam’) and then I log straight into my [...]
I woke up this morning to find an email from one of my best childhood friends - talk about a pleasant surprise! We last made contact about ten years ago, so it was great to hear from him. It got me thinking about how people maintain long-distance friendships.
When I first came to Japan on a [...]
