The Wayfarer Blog

Update: I will not be moving to wordpress.com. Please continue to visit this site.

Please update your bookmarks. Effective immediately, I am moving this site, and all its contents, to its new home at http://thewayfarerblog.wordpress.com/.

As you may recall, I originally began The Wayfarer Blog on blogger.com. (Unfortunately, the first few posts I put up there were lost.) I decided to host my own domain so I could learn more about website maintenance, and so I could have complete freedom to design and develop my site. Although I have enjoyed the challenge of building and maintaining my own website, I would rather spend time on other areas of my life now. (I will sacrifice a little creative control over the way my site looks, but I will not lose sleep trying to find the errors in my rather shaky CSS skills!)

Also, although it is rather cheap to host my own site, free platforms like blogger.com and wordpress.com have improved tremendously. For someone like me, whose main purpose is to share pictures and ideas with family and friends (as well as anyone who stumbles onto this site), free is nice.

For those of you who have subscribed to this site’s feed and/or email updates, you should continue receiving posts in your feedreader/email inbox, as always.

If you need to contact me, please use the “Contact” button, in the header above, or leave a comment.

See you at http://thewayfarerblog.wordpress.com!

I’ve gone almost four months without posting. That is a lifetime for a blog!

I have a lot to say, and many pictures to post, but when I got back online, I discovered that my Flickr Pro account had expired. The free version is still up, but that only allows access to about 200 photos. I have around 2,000 photos, but until I renew my account, they will not be accessible. If you have tried to access my photos, and had trouble, I am sorry for that.

I will get it renewed and open again as soon as I can.

I’m back.

Sorry for the long absence. Getting my internet hooked up took a lot longer than expected.

Generally, it should only take a couple weeks, but I had many problems. The biggest one was scheduling–I had to be home when the people could come and install the new high-speed wires. Unfortunately, my schedule is very erratic, so the only day I could commit to was Sunday, and they had a backlog of over two months.

I did sometimes go to internet cafes, but I never had my password with me, or I had too many pressing emails to deal with…It just didn’t work out. I also have to admit that it was nice to take a bit of a break from the internet.

At any rate, I am back online.

Well, I made it back to Tokyo, but I need to change my internet provider. The good news is that it will be much faster, and for less money. But the bad news is that it might take about three weeks to get it installed. So I will obviously not be able to post as much as I would like.

Right now, I am at an internet cafe. I will try to post at least a couple times a week, but things will probably continue to be slow for the next couple weeks.

I have tons of Chinese pics to post, as soon as I can. I need to run for now.

Sorry for the lack of updates. I got busy, then had some internet issues before I left, so I didn’t have time to update the blog and let you know I would be in China. Right now, I am in Beijing. (More on that later.)

I have taken a lot of pictures, so check back for that. I’ll be back in Japan in a couple days.

Today, I went to a school I had never been to before, but I didn’t have to. To make a long story short, I was supposed to go to the school yesterday and today, but the schedule was changed. The person at my company who handles scheduling said he had emailed me yesterday, but I didn’t get the email. That has happened before, so I’m not sure what happened. But I wasn’t upset. It was such a nice day, I enjoyed taking some pictures on the way back.

On the way to the school, I took a cab. I had checked the school’s website the night before, and seen a map, but I wasn’t too confident. I didn’t know how long the bus would take, so I just took a cab. When I got to the school, they were surprised to see me. So, I just laughed it off. I took the scenic route home. I got to see an area of Tokyo I never go to. i don’t know if I had ever been there before. Who knows if I will ever go there again.

And the best part is, I had my camera with me.

Continue reading →

Wow. A week’s gone by, and I haven’t really had anything exciting to report. Well, “no news is good news,” I guess. I have been busy with a lot of (boring) stuff; final exams at my high school, preparing the syllabus for next year’s classes at my college, etc. I haven’t really been out taking pictures, either.

The truth is, I have been a bit introspective, and I haven’t really had any inspiration to write. But I am doing fine and all that…I just haven’t really had anything to say. And when you don’t have anything to say, you should just be quiet, right?

But I did come across something interesting when I was looking at my bookmarks in del.icio.us this morning.

100 Photographs that Change the World by LIFE

The pictures are great, and each one has a bit of a story, so go ahead. Check it out. These pictures are classic. Unforgettable. We grew up with them. Take a trip down memory lane, and enjoy, while you are waiting for me to get my act together and do something worth writing about.

Interesting BusinessWeek article about how Google is racing to catch up to the mobile phone market in Japan.

Japan: Google’s Real-Life Lab:

Japan’s handset-toting masses, it seems, have a lot to teach the Net giant. The country has become a vast lab for Google as it tries to refine mobile search technology. That’s because Japan’s 100 million cell-phone users represent the most diverse—and discriminating—pool of mobile subscribers on the planet. While Google also does plenty of testing elsewhere, the Japanese are often more critical because they are as likely to tap into the Net with a high-tech phone as a PC and can do so at speeds rivaling fixed-line broadband. And because Japanese carriers have offered such services for years, plenty of Web sites are formatted for cell phones.

Cell phones in the US are getting better all the time, but Japan is still years ahead. Fingerprint and face recognition systems, video talk, and the ubiquitous barcodes that you can scan on advertisements and posters to go directly to the appropriate website…Japanese cell phones are pretty amazing. Then again, most people don’t seem to really use all those advanced features. In fact, cell phones here seem less like phones, and more like mobile email tools. On trains, it is considered rude to talk on the phone, so very few people do. Most people just use their phones to mail each other, while they swim through the throngs of people at the station, trying to locate each other.

Or just to pass the time on the train.

There seems to be a lot of buzz about Obama in Japan. I have heard that a lot of people in China like him, too. I don’t know who I’m voting for yet. I haven’t been good about following election news recently, to be honest. I need to spend more time looking at the candidates…

I am off to bed, but I thought I would post a few pictures I took at Kourakuen Station and Tokyo Dome today. I will finish giving them descriptions and rename them later. The first few are from Kourakuen Station, after I got off the train. They have beautiful murals along the walls. Here is a small sample. Enjoy!

Continue reading →