Being a Dad in Japan

I find it odd how every stage of life throws a different set of social pressures at you. There is no avoiding them and the most recent one to come my way is the pressure of having a child. Within the past 6 months friends around me have given birth to four children and the…

Last weekend I went to Akihabara to purchase a computer. Most places you can go and pick up a computer that is prebuilt and preconfigured, but Akihabara lets you customize and outfit your computer in any way you want. For example, buy computer parts and get a free English lesson as one sign touted. This…

It’s about time LeBron made for some kind of controversy. I read in the ESPN forums about how LeBron should grow up and be more mature and shake hands at the end of the game. I think it was exactly that, immature and selfish, not to congratulate the other team on a great performance on…

I read about a mother finding her lost child on Facebook after 20 odd years of separation and reminded me of friends that I had been out of touch with since high school or earlier. Conveniently and, admittedly, frighteningly I was able to traverse the deep roots that run deep into the society of America…

In honor of the Cavs historic collapse so far in the playoffs I thought I would try and counteract the negative forces in the universe by helping my bowling team look a little less lowly by winning 4 of 4 tonight. A strong performance in the first and third games pushed us over the edge…

Watched Tron for the first time today (in its entirety). 1982 release date and computer graphics above and beyond anything else that came out in the late 70’s or early 80’s. The dialog sucked, although the infusion of numerous geeky phrases and puns made up for it a bit. Come on, you scuzzy data, be…

The Cavaliers lost today to the Orlando Magic, second loss in three games now and they have yet to dominate a game like they did all regular season. James continues to put up impressive numbers, but I get this sinking feeling that he’s trying to put the whole team on his back. One man can…

B Pump is a climbing gym two stops from Koenji. Located in Ogikubo it is a bouldering mecca for the Tokyo elite climbers. Not including your truly. For the third time in 1 week, I went to the gym. This marks my official return to rock climbing. Between games of tennis and going to the…

Two songs that bring tears to my eyes, but I love em. Johnny Cash – Hurthttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmVAWKfJ4Go Harry Chapin – Cat’s in the Cradlehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH46SmVv8SU

So you are moving to Tokyo? You want a cool place to live or at least a low down on what your options might be? First let’s start off with the geography of Tokyo. The #1 distinguishing “landmark” is the Yamanote (山手線 – drop the の) line. Either you live inside the Yamanote line or…

Saying sorry to someone is a fine line. First, you want to be wrong. Second, you want the other person to be right. Then, I believe, you can feel like you are in a position to say that you are sorry. If you are just guessing that the other person is right then that, of…

Tennis with my coworker today out in Chofu. The weather is starting to warm and although I thought it was going to be chilly out there, a few minutes of running around proved that the temperature was just right. My serve was very rusty, but the ground strokes came back to me quite quickly. Playing…

Today was the quarterly party for the bowling league. The night was spent drinking and eating nabe amongst the wisps of tobacco fumes while we gossiped and slung stories of bowling and life back and forth. I had the pleasure of sitting next to one of my old team mates. I had either forgotten to…

It was fun while it lasted, but having a blog feed on your page that is dynamically inserted with jQuery doesn’t do squat for SEO, so I removed it. I’ve now gone over to using the SimplePie library to parse the XML feed in PHP and that’s working wonderfully. A bit surprised that the download…

An ad for the Hammacher Schlemmer web site was haunting the banner space of a site I recently visited and they are, for sure, the source of all that useless gadgetry and nick knacks that you find in airplane magazines. Just a few of the gems on the site include: An upside-down tomato garden thingy….…

I picked up “Walden”, “Into the Wild” and “Slaughter House 5” at the book store today. On the train I began Walden. Something about nearing 30 and trying to decide what to do with my life, I was obviously drawn to a group of books that were tackling similar issues. Only this time, I left…

Here is how I created my blog feed on boujin.net. 1) Loaded in jQuery2) Used the built in .getJSON function First, I ran into problems getting jQuery working correctly with the feed. I was confused over which function I should use, “load”, “getJSON”, etc. I finally decided on getJSON as I learned that you cannot…

Must be that time of year again when I feel inspired to write in the blog. My new year’s resolution is to be more environmentally friendly and report on the types of environmental activities that are going on in Tokyo. For those interested in environmental issues within Japan I hope I can provide bridge between…

Longitude is a great topic for a book and, better yet, the title for a book.  While the book “Longitude” certainly tackles the issue of finding out who first (John Harrison) could measure longitude correctly with great enthusiasm, it lets itself become too biased to what amounts to the hero of the story. It seems…