The red line shows my trip. From November 30th to December 5th, I circled central Japan and reached my year-end goal of 90,000 kilometers distance hitchhiked from August 2003. In 16 vehicles I covered 1420 kilometers passing through Tokyo, Nagoya, Kyoto and Osaka. This trip also broke my previous record of 2005 of kilometers traveled in one year. An interesting person I met on the way to Tokyo was a … Continue reading →
University professor Dr. A. Kusumi who took me to Niigata from Hirosaki city in Aomori Prefecture Again I went to Aomori city and back, 1060 kilometers, this time in 12 vehicles which includes two trucks. The highlight of the trip was to meet A. Kusumi, a professor who teaches environmental research at a university in Nagoya. I met him at the entrance of the Tohoku Expressway near Hirosaki. His car … Continue reading →
November 29, 2009: While hitchhiking to town I noticed a lady walking toward me from a distance with what appeared to be her car parked by the side of the road behind her. I correctly assumed she was going to offer me a ride. She had another lady friend with her who was the driver. They seemed a bit overly impressed to meet me which caused me to become suspicious. … Continue reading →
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1A man who took me to Murakami City in Niigata Prefecture October 30, 2009: I needed to be in Odate City in Akita Prefecture on November 1st for an appointment at 9:00 AM. Odate is the birthplace of Hachiko, the faithful dog that would come to meet his master at Shibuya Station in Tokyo when he arrived returning from work. Hachiko continued to do this every evening — even after … Continue reading →
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2November 2: Fedora Linux version 12 is due to come out on November 18, but I couldn’t wait to try it out and installed the yet beta version. Improvements from Fedora 11 that I’ve noticed: The default video driver recognized my dual monitor setup and automatically gave me the correct screen resolution and spanning monitors. Gnome seems to run faster. Terminal now comes up instantaneously. Many of the applications appear … Continue reading →
My friend Daniel sent me this photo of him with Gary Sinise, the actor who played Lt. Dan in the film “Forest Gump”! He seems to be a really nice guy to pose for a photo with one of his fans. I learned that Gary was born in Blue Island Illinois which is only 9 kilometers (5.6 miles) from where I was raised in Hegewisch, a neighborhood of Chicago. Download … Continue reading →
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1Asari Toru who drove me a distance of 200 kilometers October 25: I’m in Aomori city and on the way back home to Niigata. Rather than go back the way I came along National Route #7, I decided to try the Tohoku expressway that runs through Sendai. The first driver was on his way back home to Akita City after attending a Rugby match in Aomori. He offered to take … Continue reading →
The good Lord blessed my efforts and a man driving a truck, Mr. Kawamoto, picked me up after only a few minutes and took me all the way to the door of my destination! At first Mr. Kawamoto said he would take me to Hirosaki, about 3/4 of the way to Aomori City, but then he said if I wasn’t in a hurry, he would take me to Aomori city … Continue reading →
Route 49 by Lake Inawashiro, Fukushima Prefecture October 14, 2009: Today I went to Sendai via the same route I took on my adventure to Aomori via Fukushima on Sept. 17, 2009. I thought it would be a piece of cake considering that Sendai is only 290 kilometers or a bit less than half the distance to Aomori. This time, however, I got stuck at Aizuwakamatsu City in Fukushima for … Continue reading →
Northern Honshu, Japan October 11, 2009: I was in Mutsu City in the Shimokita peninsula in Aomori prefecture of northern Japan. As you can see on the map, the top of the red line was my starting point and the end of the line is Noheji city which was my destination. I started out 11:30AM and had to be at Noheji city by 2PM in order to catch a train … Continue reading →
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2A mother and daughter who went out of the way to take me to my destination. Oct. 3, 2009: It rained hard during the evening and early morning, but by 9 AM the rain subsided. I needed to go to Kanazawa city in Ishikawa Prefecture for business the next day and opted to hitchhike rather than taking the bus in spite of the possibility of more rain later. I’m sure … Continue reading →
Yoko Kosaka Sept. 22, 2009: This is a continuation of my previous post. The return to Niigata from Aomori took me via Misawa city, the location of a large USAF base close to where I visited a friend to help him with his Windows Vista PC problems. Yoko Kosaka took me on the first leg of my journey. The next day it only took 4 cars to take me the … Continue reading →
The Tohoku area of Northern Honshu, Japan. The red light shows my usual route to Aomori City, and the blue line shows the route I took on this trip. The good Lord blessed my vision and faith by providing a sweet couple who took me all the way to Aizuwakamatsu in Fukushima the very first ride! They didn’t want to take the Ban’etsu Expressway but rather took route 49 instead. … Continue reading →
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2Somebody sent this to me long ago. I think it’s too good to forget. 🙂 If you can start the day without caffeine or pep pills, If you can be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains, If you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles, If you can eat the same food everyday and be grateful for it, If you can understand when loved ones are too busy to … Continue reading →
I clicked on a link to access a certain article when all of a sudden a window popped up saying that my hard disk was undergoing an online scan for viruses and trojans. It reported that my private data is under attack and my PC is infected with security threats. I was advised to download and install “Total Security” to remove the threats. Notice the interface of the PC screen … Continue reading →
An 85 year old man who picked me up. Sept. 4, 2009: After waiting about 15 minutes for a ride to get to a friend’s house on the other side of town, an elderly gentleman offered me a ride. I didn’t want to ask him his age for he looked quite up in years. Instead, I asked what he does. The man said he has been retired for 30 years … Continue reading →
This is my collection of quotes from the movers and shakers of this world that I believe shed light on why the world is what it is today. If you have a quote that you would like to add to this list, please write it in the comments section of this post! 2009 is also the first year of global governance, with the establishment of the G-20 in the middle … Continue reading →
I moved this site from blog.jamesjpn.com to jamesjpn.net. A problem I faced was there were 678 lines of code that pointed to photos on the blog.jamesjpn.com server and I needed to edit the posts to point the links to the new server on jamesjpn.net. Thanks to http://www.barrywise.com/2009/02/global-find-and-replace-in-wordpress-using-mysql/ I learned how to do a global search and replace in the Sql section of phpMyAdmin! UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, ‘blog.jamesjpn.com’, … Continue reading →
Natsuki (22) who took me to Echigo Kawaguchi August 18: On a hot summer day I traveled in four vehicles 330 kilometers to Chiba city located east of Tokyo. The last driver went out of his way to take me right to the very door of my destination! The first vehicle was a truck carrying long steel bars. The driver, a young man, said he needed to drop the bars … Continue reading →
