April 19, 2010: I had intended to hitchhike back home on Sunday morning but stayed in Aomori city in northern Honshu an extra day to deal with a friend’s PC problem. Hitchhiking on a weekend or a holiday is always easier. There are more cars on the road with families traveling longer distances. Weekdays, and especially a Monday mean people traveling for business reasons, and they are usually not in … Continue reading →
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1The food additive MSG (Mono-Sodium Glutamate) is a slow poison. MSG hides behind 25 or more names, such as Natural Flavoring.” MSG is even in your favorite coffee from Tim Horton’s and Starbucks coffee shops!
Continue reading →April 6, 2010: Today is the 11th and last day of my trip. The highlight was to meet Tsutomu and Keiko who took me from Gunma prefecture to the Miyoko parking area in Niigata. They are a married couple in their mid 40s who live in Chiba and work as hair stylists. The interchange Tsutomu and Keiko intended to exit the expressway was a convenient one for me to continue … Continue reading →
Muslims praying just after sunset at Fujikawa Service area on the Tomei expressway in Shizuoka prefecture. The cherry blossoms over their heads are in full bloom. April 3, 2010: Osaka was still cold but sunny when I arrived at the Suita Service area on the Meishin expressway at 10:30 AM. The Meishin expressway runs from Nagoya to Kobe. The first driver took me to Gozaisho on the Shin (new) meishin … Continue reading →
March 27, 2010: Today is the first day of an extended hitchhiking adventure to southern Japan. I left home at 7:30AM. The weather was unusually fair for normally-cloudy Niigata. The first stop was Kariwa, a village next to Kashiwazaki city and home to the largest nuclear power plant in the world. Since a major earthquake just off shore Kariwa in the Sea of Japan, two of the 9 nuclear reactors … Continue reading →
Mr. and Mrs. Ii who went out of their way to take me to Niigata City March 22, 2010: It was unusually windy with a few snow flurries, and the temperature was just one degree above freezing when I left my friend’s house in Aomori city at 7:30 AM to walk to the National Highway route 7. I’ve hitchhiked on this highway before, but this morning people seemed unusually hard … Continue reading →
A couple soon to be married who took me from Murakami city toward Yamagata Princess, the Shih Tsu dog that I have been caring for since December is now with new owners. I’m now free to continue to travel Japan, meet people, share my faith, and visit Family International Homes throughout the country. On February 19th I left home and arrived in Aomori city the next day. It was beautiful … Continue reading →
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2I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu Linux, version 10.4, and installed it as a virtual machine with VMWare on my Fedora 12 pc. I also ran it as a live CD from boot. I’m still not convinced that Ubuntu is better than Fedora for me. Ubuntu is missing two GUIs (software with a graphic user interface) I use all the time in Fedora. There is no firewall GUI no … Continue reading →
Last night a young lady asked me to look at her Windows XP laptop. It was running much slower than it did when she first got it. Usually, I first consider that the system is probably infected with malware or spyware, and I installed and ran SuperAntiSpyware to scan the C drive of her PC. But later I realized that she, being the type of girl she is, would not … Continue reading →
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2I installed a beta version of the new Gnome Shell desktop environment on my Fedora Linux PC, and it seems to be very cool indeed! And it’s free, not only free in in the meaning of “freedom” but even free as in “free lunch.” Gnome is the standard desktop graphical environment for many Linux distributions, including Fedora, the Linux distribution I’ve been using on my PC since February 2005. Another … Continue reading →
Recently I’ve been eating a traditional Japanese food called nattou nearly every day for lunch. Nattou is also known as “sticky beans. ” Click the photo to see why! Normally people eat it on top of rice, but I often eat it right out of the package with chopsticks after sprinkling on the soy sauce that comes with it. Nattou is very nutritious and good for health. When I first … Continue reading →
Hitomi (27) who took me back home Princess the little Shih Tsu dog I am temporally taking care of was taken to be shampooed, and this set me free from caring for her to do other things. It’s a beautiful sunny day in normally cloudy Niigata and so I just had to grab the opportunity to get out again, hitchhike and meet people. The first driver was a man who … Continue reading →
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2The photos below shows bamboo trees bent over with the tops stuck in the snow! The snow causes the trees to bend over till the top of the tree touches the snow on the ground. Further snow buries the top branches tying the top of the tree to the ground, and it will stay like that until enough snow on the ground melts, even though the original snow that bent … Continue reading →
I realized today it’s been a little more than a year since I started to use WordPress blogging software. My first post was on January 7, 2009. I’ve grown used to it and think it’s probably better overall and easier for me than the HTML / CSS hand coding coding method I used to use. Not that it’s not good to learn HTML and CSS. Because I know these technologies, … Continue reading →
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1Kevin and Yuriko Jan. 10: I had to make an emergency trip to Oyama city in Tochigi prefecture to fix a PC. Oyama city is a good 270 kilometers from home. It was snowing this morning, not a particularly good day to hitchhike! In order to save time and avoid hitchhiking during the snowfall, I took a train to a station about 30 kilometers away from where I hoped to … Continue reading →
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