March 16, 2011: While in Kobe I joined a NPO project and worked nearly all my waking hours for two days to setup a new web site, Help Japan 2011, to help raise aid for the earthquake victims. The next day I traveled back to my home in Niigata partly by train but mainly by hitchhiking. I started off at Kanda parking area on the Hokuriku expressway in Shiga prefecture. … Continue reading →
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1The left arrow points to my location and the right one is the location of one of the nuclear power plants in trouble. Two days ago I was finally able to contact a friend in Sendai, the largest city closest to the epicenter. He said that he and his family are OK and that their apartment building had only minor damage. Dishes have fallen off the shelf and many were … Continue reading →
The Tohoku or Northeast area of Japan is about the size of Lake Michigan. The earthquake moved this massive amount of land 2.4 m (8 ft) east into the Pacific! That’s what caused the tsunami that killed 19,759 people. It was an auspicious time for me to come to Osaka after the earthquake. I was contacted by a friend, Josh DeSantis, the chairman of Hiyaku28 NPO, to come to Kobe … Continue reading →
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7I’ve been calling all my friends, especially the ones that live close to the earthquake epicenter near Sendai, Japan. Nobody I know was hurt during the earthquake in the slightest. Everybody in Northern Japan experienced the shocks of the quake, but nobody was close enough to the coast to be affected by the tsunami. My family in Niigata reports that they all went outside during the earthquake, but then went … Continue reading →
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1Saturday, March 11, 2011: The morning after the major earthquake in the Pacific not far from Sendai, the largest city in the Tohoku area, I accessed the Internet news and saw more horrific photos of destruction by the tsunami. A friend with whom I stayed with said, “Over 10,000 people were killed!” I began to weep but learned later he got it wrong. So far the number of reported deaths … Continue reading →
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2The pointer on the left points to where I lived in Niigata City, and the pointer on the left is where the Fukushima nuclear reactors are that were damaged by the earthquake and tsunami. March 11, 2011: At 2:46 PM local Japan time I was sitting in a MacDonald’s in Sangenjaya, only two train stops from Shibuya, a major commercial center of Tokyo. An earthquake began shaking the building. There … Continue reading →
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6Following instructions from a couple web articles, I learned to set up my own home web server!
Continue reading →I advised a friend to use the Mozilla Thunderbird mail archive feature to move all his email from his Inbox so that I could move his WordPress web site to a different server. He did that, but to our dismay, only email from 2010 was archived; all email he received this year had disappeared! I immediately accessed the mail server via Cpanel and Horde webmail program, and saw all the … Continue reading →
The other day I discovered that Linux Mint recently came out with a Debian edition with features that are still lacking in Ubuntu. One of the main features that caught my interest is the ability to install Linux Mint Debian on a PC with multiple hard disk drives. It has been my practice for a few years now to have the /home partition on a second hard disk, and to … Continue reading →
Walls of snow along road in Japan February 1, 2011: I started out very well with the first ride on my trip to Noda city in Chiba prefecture, just east of Tokyo. The purpose of this trip was to attend a fellowship meeting at 7 PM. It was good weather and I left home at a very good time, just after 10 AM. Tokyo is 300 kilometers away but it … Continue reading →
My friend’s daughter has a lightweight Sotec notebook PC with Windows XP. As often with the case of browsing the Internet with Windows XP logged in with Administrator privileges, in spite of the antivirus program in use, some virus crept in and was causing poor performance. Moreover, it corrupted some Window system file so that no hardware devices displayed in the device manager! And, the Network device went missing so … Continue reading →
January 25: Today in 4 cars I hitchhiked back to Niigata. The third driver would have taken me to Nagaoka train station, but because it was not too late, still 4PM with a hour of sunlight left, and because I would have had to wait 50 minutes at the train station for the next train, I decided to try to try to hitchhike a bit further. It was now the beginning … Continue reading →
January 22: This morning it snowed constantly, not too hard but enough to make me want to take a train the first part of this 500 kilometer plus journey. My destination was a port town in beautiful warm and usually sunny Shizuoka Prefecture. I knew the enough though it continued to snow in Niigata, on the other side of the mountains separating Niigata and the Kanto Plain, it would be … Continue reading →
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2A working replica of Noah’s Ark opened In Schagen, Netherlands. Man Builds Noah’s Ark to the exact scale given in the Bible.
Continue reading →On January 9th I hoped to hitchhike from Misawa City in Aomori Prefecture back home to Niigata but I ended the day 130 kilometers short of my goal! The main reason was accepting a ride from Mr. Suzuki,(24) from Kushiro in Hokkaido, who I met at Iwatesan Service area. He asked me if I would mind a stopover in Morioka city so he could do some shopping. Because Mr. Suzuki … Continue reading →
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6Otoso, the traditional Japanese drink during new year celebration. Every year for three days from January 1st, the Japanese drink Otoso as part of their celebration of the new year. It is made of spiced Japanese rice wine. Most Japanese don’t know the root of the meaning of the word Otoso which literally means, “something that was slaughtered and resurrected.” Yes! This name literally has Christian roots! It has to … Continue reading →
