michael's journal

Courtesy of "Grandma".

mari at a museum

My father used to whistle this song back in the '80s.

My wife walks down a country lane that is in truth surround

I passed by this rather cavernous entrance to an undergroun

seventeen burned kanji Long time readers will know that I us

sunrise over kokubunji in may

There are a lot of smart people out there. This is some int

 

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Pansies (I think) in an exquisite hue of blue.

It had poured with rain the day before, but these irises we

 

This turned out to be the kind of sci-fi/action flick you hope for: good enough to keep you watching, but largely free of over-the-top emotional indulgence or blockbuster CGI scenes that take you out of it.

This place next to our train station is only sporadically b

A black-and-white photo of afternoon clouds gathering over

I would go by here three days later and find all these peta

But whose portrait is it? Shot on the Chuo line as I was

The sky over western Tokyo looked like this today. Collec

I was on an escalator and saw this photo taking shape. I tu

eight more burned kanjiLast week, I mentioned that I use this tool called WaniKani to practice kanji and vocabulary.

This is a drama set on a Japanese bullet train (shinkansen) following the long route down from northern Japan to Tokyo.

Living in a place with tree & bush nurseries can have its u

I have this new, inexpensive wide-angle Chinese lens. It's

I've photographed this staircase before, but now I realize

This was the first hand-held high-res photo I attempted wit

What. A. Mess.

Today I had a genuinely interesting experience with AI.

a whole table full of OM Systems camera gearToday I wandered into the largest Kitamura Camera I've ever seen.

fourteen burned kanji and what do you get I use this tool ca

I couldn't hack it, I'm sure of it. Collections containin

Today I got up at 04:00, and was out the door at 05:30 to race downtown to meet a tour group and then take the bullet train to Nagano prefecture.

Perhaps the biggest QR code I've seen. Collections contai

A black-and-white image showing the basket from a bicycle a

A young woman uses her smartphone in a quiet corner of a bu

I have noticed some recent photography post and videos about the "xpan" photo layout.

Crow on a fence in Koganei, Tokyo. Japan's crows are downri

Winter is definitely over. Right? Riiiiight? The petals

A flowering fruit tree blossoms despite being heavily cut b

I went to Kichijouji to shop for a new camera, because my r

A narrow street between suburban houses disappears into the

Today's interesting Japanese word is �

 

I have two aquariums in the house, each with a canister filter from Tetra, as pictured below.

Another video, this time from someone with a camera/video-related Youtube channel.

Here's piece by a fellow whose work I got to know during the pandemic.

I was explaining to my son how The Pixies were so influential.

 

As part of my resisting the current US regime, which is threatening military takeover of my country, I have slowed my use of Amazon dramatically.

This seminal movie has a problem: you cannot now watch it without thinking of many, many other titles that have come along since then plotting the same course.

This is a sci-fi flick set in the 1960's.

 

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We went bike-shopping for The Girl.

Yes, it's movie night with Netflix.

old buildings have grit

This was all trees only a few weeks ago. Collections cont

I've been shaving with a single blade since the previous millennium, but there was a time more than thirty years ago when I used an electric shaver with rotating heads.

The strap broke on my beloved and possibly ten-to-twelve-year-old Blackburn headlight, pictured here.

They built a new street in our city. I've never seen such a

On my way to the office this morning, there was a light fog hanging over everything.

This is the whisky isle of the liquor store I've been going

I took this photo with a new (to me) OM Systems OM-5. It to

After a recent trip to Fukuoka, I realized I was missing to

Today, again, I calmed a screaming child.

This was one of a few photos that convinced me it was time

After all these years, I can't get over the flimsy locks on

I've been involved in a process by which we're leading 14-hour days for this thing everyday at work.

I just spent a week facilitating day-long seminars explaining the next era in the company's development.

A photo of the Tamagawa irrigation canal, which passes through Kokubunji about a third of the way from the river that feeds it to the city center.

 

So now Puppet-Sock Sauron says that the tariffs against my home and native land will continue until Canada is absorbed by the US.

Here's who "Perplexity" thought I was on December 20, 2024.

I've been playing this games called Civilization for more than thirty years.

This is an action flick (it's in the name!

One of the odd things about Japan is that you tend to hear interesting new English-language music in stores.

on the train trip a burger after a long day

I've just had some news that I believe shows something interesting about receiving bad news.

I am happy to report that winter's grip is already starting

I was reading my daughter Alice Through the Looking Glass at bedtime when I realized that I've been making a mistake with the opening stanza of the poem "Jabberwocky" this whole time.

I made level five on Wanikani for my kanji/vocabulary studies in April.

Much to my delight, we spotted this very late sequel to the 1993 movie Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers.

One of my colleagues posted this: Let’s make 2025 a fantas

Netflix was promoting this sci-fi flick this weekend.

I've managed to lose weight over X'mas.

On this morning, we arrived in Kobe on the over-night ferry

I've had the flu, probably since December 27th, despite having had the flu shot.

I went to tell the kids that being January 1, it was time to go for a walk to the local shrine to "pray".

Standing on a flood protection levy next to a stream in sou

Rock formations with lines and shape vaguely like turtle he

I find the combination of a humble 16MP Olympus mirrorless

Featuring a rare appearance by my kids. We were on our way

Earlier this month I had my annual health checkup.

It's a shame that Kokubunji is so flat, because I bet this

This is an animated prequel to The Lion King, a now-thirty-year-old Disney flick.

Our gift for The Girl this X'mas was a hot-shoe mounted microphone for her camera.

X'mas Day was fun.

I wish they wouldn't do this. Why leave this stump of a tre

2024 was a pale year, on the whole.

I like the rendering on this new manual-focus lens. Colle

As I've mentioned earlier this month, I'm using this tool called Wanikani to study Japanese kanji and vocabulary.

The word from "sky blue" in Japanese is "mizuiro".

I wanted to see what a new AI called Perplexity had to say about a project we did at work recently.

I finalized saw 'xitter' in print today.

While the Youtube algorithm takes all, in the end, along th

A friend shared a story about a new AI that is specifically trying to improve search results while cleaning up the hallucinations and other things that have made AI tools such a mess.

Looking west from Shibuya an hour before sunset, Dec 18 202

I shot this from the street one evening, heading for a year

One afternoon in December 2025 I shot this out the window o

I was walking down one of Shibuya's innumerable streets and

I'm using this tool called Wanikani to study Japanese kanji and vocabulary.

We bought a new washing machine, which was delivered last week.

This is a Netflix thriller about a TSA agent in the US who is coerced into helping some terrorists get a bomb aboard a commercial flight.

The first photo I usually take with a new lens is of the wa

Today I sold three of my old Pentax and Minolta manual focus lenses, plus a 30mm macro lens that I'd recently picked up in a trade-in.

Our son is in Nepal.

The Canadian government is moving to end a strike by Canada Post that has ruined the Christmas revenues of countless small businesses across the country.

I'm using this tool called Wanikani to study Japanese kanji and vocabulary.

The Girl and I went out to take some experimental photos. H

I don't know what was happening in the city's south-west, o

Fiery colors this afternoon as the sun set over Kokubunji.

Mari and I spotted this while on a walk in Tokyo, today. We

I took the distressing step of selling my "deep sea" fishing gear today.

I went for a quick spin to Tama Lake in western Tokyo.

I watched this for movie night with The Girl, now aged 12.

I'm a daily-carry hobbyist photographer.

OK yes, I used some hot-sauce for sushi at dinner tonight.

I love this site, such an interesting place. Compare below

I took this photo while on my way with some staff to an aft

This is a ramshackle old house on a property near me.

I couldn't sleep, so I hit the streets with my camera at 05

Leaves spinning as a man-made stream returns underground in

We received our copies of the photo books we make for the family every year.

When I wrote the content management system that powers this website, 'public' was either not a reserved word or its use was not enforced.

I'm shocked at all the Gen-X, Millennials, and Zoomers who

This is an animated flick about some aliens whose entire culture revolves around theft.

The kids suggested we watch this animated movie based on a TV series based on a series of toys from my son's early childhood.

Mari and I went for a walk on a Saturday morning.

An ant on the march!

Somewhere near the Asagawa in western Tokyo.

I like this photo. Makes my neighborhood seem somehow exoti

I'm trying to get used to this new lens but it seems in mac

This is a clever animated movie featuring two nerdy boys who discover that the 'haunted house on their street' is actually possessed by an angry spirit that is capable of controlling the house to do things like eat people.

Basketball moms after a resounding defeat. Collections co

I shot this little neighbor when on a wander around the blo

I think I'm going to like to have a lens with a macro funct

It rained all day Monday and Tuesday, then this morning as well.

I use this app "wanikani" to study kanji.

I'm quite pleased with how this came out. Interestingly, th

Youtube has been feeding me these things for years. And I k

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When I lived in Vancouver nearly 25 years ago, I learned to

Way out in Takao, I noticed this taxi with some distinctive

This is Takao station and surrounds, in western Tokyo. Co

We had several showers pass through while I was at work.

I think I was punched on the Chuo line tonight.

I'm trying some new Chinese medicine that's supposed to help prevent migraine.

At a high school where my son was playing in a tournament.

I watched this with the kids on Netflix because it was on a "bucket list" poster of 100 movies that I bought The Boy for X'mas last year.

I was looking at the map of my travels in Japan and realized that although I'd colored in Gifu as if I'd spent time there, I can't recall actually having done so.

where did thirty years go?

While attempting to reassign the drive letter for an NVME drive on Windows 10, "Disk Management" kept throwing up a warning: "The parameter is incorrect".

Today I added a second M.

Seeing this recent weirdness with the fake Tesla "robots" reminds me of a clip from the Simpsons.

For many years I have been snapping pics of passing trees.

As large as she is, this female hasn't yet fleshed out, the

I am keeping track of the various misspellings of my surname.

Out before the sun was properly up. It's gone from 30+ to h

These are the two goldfish we kept, out of the three hundre

I am so, so glad to see something other than summer skies o

The Boy and I watched this after it turned up in a Netflix search.

It was still definitely summer when I left, but it's autumn now in Tokyo.

Well, Nagasaki-ken, you had all of a week as my latest prefecture.

This is the end of the JR line on the northern coast of Kyu

I was walking on a river-side boardwalk and wondering what

Today I attended a barbecue with colleagues from several offices.

I took this image from the castle overlooking the Saga city

They'd added some brightly-colored streamers to this place

Just before the "nope" moment in a horror flick or game.

I shot this while walking past the walkway into a hotel.

For a third time in two weeks, I had Vietnamese food tonight.

My Japanese instructor informs me that we've been working together for four years, as of this week.

The white stuff was apparently the tissue beneath the mane.

American burger and spicy fries Tonight it was back to a bur

I was pleased with this shot of a boy on the city ferry tha

I was on a 5k walk from Shika island to a train station to

Bleached colors in the evening, and a lonely leaf to signif

I headed across the downtown area of Fukuoka to see if I could fins a collared t-shirt in my size, as one of the shirts I brought with me is disintegrating rapidly.

I hope everyone likes photos of my dinner, cos this is just going to keep happening!

Having visited Okinawa, Hokkaido, and now Nagasaki in the past 18 months, I realize I've now visited more than half the Japanese prefectures.

This is the 'gunkanjima' in Nagasaki. Five thousand people

One thing that drives me crazy about living in Kokubunji, i

As I made my way through the connective tissue between a shopping mall and the Hakata station, I glanced down a side corridor and saw what was for all purposes an 'android' in the sense of Star Wars.

I just had a very, very close call.

Today I visited the ruling queen of 'haikyo' in Japan: abandoned sites.

I thought this faux-digital-3D lettering in a Chinese-Japanese museum was pretty clever.

I decided last night that I would run off to Nagasaki.

I saw one of these security robots in a shopping mall today.

I ate at a place called Bangkok-Ya in Fukuoka last night.

I hope Noah kept his other job! (Hat tip to Grandma for th

I'm note really what this place is, but I like what they di

There is new guidance for US government agencies and anybody else who is beholden to the NIST regime regarding password rules.

Tonight I decided to finally go to a Mongolian restaurant that I spotted two visits ago.

The reflections in this river where disturbed by the countl

I came across this closed liquor shop at night.

My son, oddly enough, believes that Thai and Vietnamese foods are the same thing.

It's now possible to get NFC chips that can fit under your glued-on fake fingernails.

Friends on a bench in Ohori Park, Fukuoka. Collections co

Today I got out the door early(ish) and went to see the reclining Buddha that's just east of Fukuoka.

Today I had quite a walk across the city, probably another 10km jaunt including the walk to Hakata station in the morning.

The temperature was suddenly not thirty plus today.

When your Mac won't read your SD card, check that Mega and Dropbox are disabled.

This is a sci-f-adjacent movie about a young woman growing up in a world in which all adults undergo massive plastic surgery to achieve their ideal form.

This week and next, I am in Fukuoka.

I had a flight for work at 19:00 on a Friday.

This website is powered by FreeBSD Unlike just about anythin

I've finally added file uploads to the CMS for this website.

The average temperature in Tokyo for the 2024 month of July was fully two degrees hotter than the average for the thirty prior Julys.

This is an off-beat X'mas movie about a deeply revised Santa Claus who fell into the job at some point in the 12th Century after a mortal lifetime as a Scandinavian warrior-chieftan.

I built the kids a minecraft server on a FreeBSD virtual machine on my new server equipment.

If I ever get involved in another start-up, I am absolutely letting this guy know just for the incremental oblique humor.

You can see how this concrete was built. Collections cont

Remember: every time a haggis is caged, a bagpipe falls silent.

Mari had to meet Ken at his sports-physiotherapist this evening.

It's 34°C and 73% humidity, despite being the 9th of September.

This is a movie about a down-trodden wretch who agrees to forego saying "no" to anything.

I spent most of the day getting all of the data, code, and configuration across from the old system.

Today I started the long process of installing the hypervisor and then building the new server that will host this website.

This video does a great job of explaining why consumer cameras have kept getting larger in recent years.

I received an email today that started with "Hello, my perverted friend.

This is a movie about an aging loser who's still plying his hometown for women and holding down a job that feels beneath his abilities.

At work, we are dumping some old monitors due to an office restructuring, and I pulled rank by asking for one.

I have been using a kanji learning tool called "wanikani" for a year.

I've been doing a lot of writing, lately, largely on a novel I started in 1991 (yes, I'm one of those people).

This is a movie about an insomniac insurance adjuster who is locked in a consumerist distraction.

The Boy and I went trout fishing this morning with fly gear.

Photo courtesy of Mari.

I didn't know these things had wings.

The hotel is pretty strict about tattoos in their onsen and pool, so while Mari and the kids went to the pool, I hiked down to the lake.

After more than 9.

After a generally good first "Kingsman" movie, the second was a chaotic mess.

This is a noir film about a loser has the same name as a crook who is involved in a plot to steal a million dollars.

I watched this nineties movie with my kids, in part because it was on the "movie bucket list" we gave our son.

I spotted a few of these automated lawn mowers at the campu

This is a movie about a washed-up one-time semi-heroic character with a mutant healing ability that lets him bounce back all but immediately from almost any injury.

These are Cheeky and Sneaky, the two goldfish we kept from the three hundred eggs that hatched on April ten.

Last night there was a 5.

It really is bonkers how things have been in US politics for so long.

This is a story in which the mantle of Japan's Ultraman super-protector is passed on to a new generation.

This is a story about a family of horse-trainers who formerly had a good livelihood providing horses for Hollywood.

Last year, I noticed that Shakespeare's "The Tempest" was written four hundred years ago, so I thought I'd give it a whirl.

This is an animated movie about some conceptual figures that live in a girl's head.

I had an interesting day, today.

Today for my Japanese homework, I had the question, �

I'm going to try to take the last batch of fish to a different store than the one we've been taking them to.

This is the classic tale of the crew of a space tug hauling an ore refinery back to the human home solar system.

There's yet another lightning storm over western Tokyo tonight, and it's easily one of the most active storms I've ever witnessed.

We had a bit of an adventure this afternoon.

I went for a walk with my camera tonight and passed this pa

It's a holiday (that notes a time the Emperor rode on a steamboat) and we're holed up in the few rooms that have air condition, each of us doing his/her thing.

We watched this animated Netflix movie for movie night.

This is a partially-desaturated image of a grey building on

We took the large majority of the remaining baby goldfish to the fellow with the aquarium shop in Tachikawa.

I got home from work around 19:30 tonight and spent an insane amount of time getting a new tire on Mari's bicycle.

These fish were three months to the day from their hatching

I went to our local grocery store tonight and was shocked to see that it was closing for the next two weeks for extensive renovations.

It is so hot outside that no one wants to go out for any reason.

This is an unexpected feature of life in Japan. Tiny food t

A scene from the hottest summer of my life. So far. Colle

I watched this with The Boy for movie night.

Here's how the upstairs aquarium looks.

Featuring "art mode bracketing" on micro-four-thirds. Col

For movie night, The Girl and I watched this harmless action flick.

towering over the treesI ran into a family from Perth in Australia and walked them to their hotel in western Shinjuku.

These cuties were a lot of fun at this age. It's amazing to

Touched by his noodly appendage. Which is to say, life, uh,

The heater in Emma's aquarium went crazy and drove the temperature to nearly 40 degrees.

The premise of this movie is that a foundling turns up at a farm, and as he grows up he is found to have special powers.

It was time, once again, to take some baby goldfish to market.

These were the top 40 IP addresses trying to log into this server on SSH without an authentication key over a three week period this month.

grope grope grope?

The drum had a dedicated garage.

This weekend, two of our countless little fishbabies died.

This is an action flick about a young CIA operative who mans a "safe house" that goes disused week after week.

The Girl and I saw this in an IMAX cinema today.

And just like that it's suddenly summer, with thirty degrees and sticky.

This is a stylish and disturbing anime from France.

This is a story about two kids held captive by a witch in the towering apartment building where the boy lives/lived with his parents.

I discovered this bronze statue of a family of three, which

The upstairs aquarium is now set up for the nineteen babies that are the current residents.

At some point, perhaps around the time I became a parent, I developed a strong aversion to heights.

I got home yesterday to find that Mari has done an amazing job of raising the baby goldfish.

Today I took the shinkansen back to Tokyo.

I found myself in the office by 07:30 yesterday, and again today.

The first kanji in this name is 'chou', which means 1,000,0

I went out for drinks at a cheap izakaya a ten minute walk from our office.

Last time I was in the city, I found a pho place named the same as the town in southern Kyushu where Mari's parents live.

 

Fukuoka is known for its outstanding fresh fish (even by Japan's standards) but also for a form of ramen.

I've decided to take a break from constantly changing the water of tiny baby goldfish.

This is a worthy sequel to the surprisingly good "high concept" movie about the return of the prehistoric Otodus Megaladon to the seas.

Some of the flowers seem to concerned with their fallen fel

This is a Korean sci-fi flick about a near future that while not a crap-sack world is certainly a dystopian place.

In the office building where I work, we have some strange elevators.

The doll behind this aquarium is a "daruma". You typically

We put a bunch of our young goldfish into a new 90cm x 25cm

Got to have bypasses.

There seems to be a chap running for president in the US that's a bit divisive.

People won't believe that this title results in a valid sea

I thought the elevated storage was an interesting touch. I

The Girl and I went for a photography-walk. Collections c

I was shocked to learn of the death of Mary Ann Neary, someone I met with regularly for more than six years during my days in Toronto's cycling advocacy activism.

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These are baby goldfish eating algae, as seen from outside their tub.

This is the fellow who would take our baby goldfish. He was

Today we took about fifty of our baby goldfish to a store in Tachikawa where the proprietor (and only employee, it seems) agreed to take the off-spring of Emma's fish.

Beautiful little critter. The spots gradually gave way to s

We ran over a spike of some kind, and the car dealership fr

We lost two baby goldfish this morning.

Here's a clip I recorded showing the state of the fish after four and a half weeks.

This is a live-action Japanese cop buddy movie that dispenses with one of the buddies fairly early on, leaving us with a smug, womanizing annoyance who feels like he stepped out of a piece filmed in the early eighties.

This is a tense horror movie that lays it on so thick our twelve-year-old (who chose it!

My kidney stone.

We took nearly a hundred baby goldfish to a local aquarium store today.

My poor Mari had to take me to the hospital tonight.

I've been hatching brine shrimp to feed to baby goldfish. I

Very well executed, just not sure why. Collections contai

The babies, now three weeks old, no longer look like fry but rather like tiny goldfish.

This is the latest in the literally never-ending series of action movies about a fictional quasi-governmental spy agency that cleans up after the Pentagon.

This is yet another Marvel super-hero movie featuring Spider-Man.

This is what it's like, feeding baby brine shrimp to baby g

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It's not too uncommon to see young men wearing nail polish, these days.

The surviving author of the book that explained the 'generational theory of history' has put out another book, and the title really says it all.

This is a nicely-paced science fiction story about a solo astronaut from the Czech Republic who is on a mission to investigate a strange feature that has appeared somewhere in Earth-observable space.

made it to level five in my kanji studies

I'm closing in on 7,500 posts on this journal of mine and t

I shot this from my employer's office in Shibuya, looking t

I think this fry had been eating the hatched shells of the

This is a goldfish fry at nine days, surrounded by his favo

I discarded some of the many, many fry when they first hatched, but I believe we've got some two hundred to three hundred remaining.

This time from the fascinating people of Kurzgesagt.

This is an animated prequel to the movie Despicable Me from .

The aquarium was the right temperature for raising brine sh

The white particles are bits of chicken egg yolk. It is dam

I once stopped to take a photo of an abandoned building at

I noticed on Saturday that The Girl's goldfish were spawning again.

The Boy, drinking some water, exclaimed on how much he loves water.

After more than thirty years, I finally saw this mid-'80s classic about four boys who set off to find a body in the woods.

Because I live in a small city in the center of Tokyo prefecture, I've tried to identify the exact geographic center.

I love the 'art modes' on my camera.

We attended a conference for The Boy's basketball team at a small university in Hachioji.

&n

Cheery blossoms spread above the street outside the Kunitac

Two children run into a building with a sign advertising pi

This photo was tricky to get, as it required a lengthy expo

I used the "live composite" feature on my camera to generat

It looks like the contest winners have been announced for the annual photo contest here in Kokubunji.

Another movie night, and another selection by The Girl.

&n

Today I woke early with a strong migraine and scotched my plans do see the mangrove swamp and to do some shopping for Mari.

At the hotel where I'm staying, I had a chat with an Australian named Matt who lives in the small village of Uken here on Amami Oshima.

I waited in this place for some time to get a glimpse of th

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The weather forecast wasn't too conducive for fishing today, and the actual weather bore that out.

I visited Amami Oshima last week, and this is one of the fi

It's been some eight or nine months since I had any time off, so I decided to take this week away from work.

I told my daughter this was where they farm 'astroturf'. Sh

Over the course of a few nights my son and I managed to watch "Pulp Fiction" on Netflix.

On Reddit, someone posted a map of southern Kyushu and ask what life is like in the region.

my father's final photo My father was a regular photographer

I must be watching more science stuff these days on Youtube, because this was recommended for me.

Two of Emma's goldfish spawned today.

I went out for a stroll with my camera at night. I set up t

I watched the first release of this series a few years ago.

This young lady is as tall as I am: 195cm. Collections co

I shot this sparrow by our feeder. Yes, that's the laundry

I shot this after emerging from a volleyball game in Takasaki in Gunma prefecture.

Half-frame vertical frames?

There's a thing on Reddit where people are posting maps from a quiz where you have to name cities and towns in a given region.

Way back in 2009, I noticed that I'd written 2,500 entries in this journal.

I have been doing some camera gear downsizing.

Well, it's happened yet again.

I've had a stab at working out where the center of Tokyo prefecture is.

This is a Gojira movie from Toho, the originators of the genre.

For "movie night" we watched this old gem in honor of the passing of Carl Weathers.

This photo of a university campus at dusk took nearly a sec

Thanks to Martin for the link!

Long ago I learned the kanji 時

I've lost my Suica card.

Tonight we watched this kids' movie about a down-on-his-luck divorced father taking a night job so that he can remain a part of his son's life.

This is an antique* anti-war western with a stellar cast, sharp writing, and about forty minutes more run-time than it needs.

While cleaning the aquarium, something went wrong as I was reassembling the cannister filter and water began to pool on the wooden floor.

&n

Part of Mari's name in Japanese is the kanji 真 for "true".

I found this site quite interesting. Compare with the image

This is the way I found my bicycle at Nishi-Kokubunji station tonight.

For the past three+ years I've been studying Japanese with a teacher.

Today it is with a heavy heart that I mark the passing for a shirt from Eddie Bauer that my mother gave me circa the year 2011 -- or perhaps 2003.

 

I spotted a post on Reddit about having been to two places on the opposite sides of the planet.

The Boy and I watched this, perhaps to see it through as much as anything.

Here's an interesting video about the Ponzi scheme we're all living.

This is a Western about two men who hire themselves out as law enforcement muscle in the western territories of the US in the late 19th Century.

Perhaps diamond .. apartment house? Note the reflection of

I shot the sunset from Kokubunji in western Tokyo, with Mt

This is an animated movie from the lunatics at Aardman.

Sometimes, when I look at what a mess we've made of software development and delivery, if we haven't perhaps missed the peak of software and are in the decadent denouement.

The car has just a hint of new plastic smell.

This building is a key landmark in my cycle commute home on

It's a bit expensive but it was a fun. Note the poorly-done

I came across a new type of vending machine in Japan.

I recently bought a new smartphone after more than five years with an aging Nokia 6.

I came across this odd movie in one of our streaming services and despite its mediocre ratings on IMDB, gave it a chance.

We've had word we can pick up the car on Sunday.

I came across this interesting log splitter from New Zealan

This video suggests that a gigantic payday for a start-up founder early in the story of the start-up's life can kill the company and everything it might have accomplished.

 

This is the sequel to the gritty and seminal "Fistful of Dollars".

A few weeks ago, I introduced a photo rating tool on my website.

We spent the early morning on Kujukuri, the 60-kilometer-long beach in Chiba.

Today marks the 27th anniversary of this journal of mine.

Today after greeting the new year with a bit of a prayer and then a walk on the beach, we went to a place in Chiba where they have all sorts of survivalist games.

This is a movie made in Spain in the 1960s but set in the US-Mexico frontier in the 1890s.

To think that the day of open-source microchip architecture is here.

They can stop "Rick and Morty" now.

I watched this on a flight to Fukuoka today - the flight was barely long enough, and there were irritating pauses near the end, but I think I still pull off a review.

After many years, I've restored the capability of visitors to this site to rate photos.

On why the "Mad man" might not be bad news for Argentina.

This is a story about a cop who finds himself investigating something that seems to lead to shady stuff all over the district.

Today I learned that in the timeline of "The Jetsons", a TV show from the sixties, the titular lead character George Jetson is estimated to have been born in 2022.

There was a chestnut orchard near our home and I'm sad to report it's been pulled out and now it's like it was never there.

There's a thing you can do with your hands where you make an air-tight space and then blown past a gap between your thumbs to make a sound like an ocarina.

They say you no longer see the staff at train stations pushing people onto trains in Tokyo, but you do indeed.

Emma helped me with my homework today.

I do like a rotating model, and this news item prominently features one!

I put up the X'mas tree today.

After an extremely long work week, I managed to sit down with a movie for the first time in a while.

Today, I returned to Kamakura -- acting as tour guide for five Dutch visitors sent from my employer's headquarters.

We've "subscribed to a car".

There are some amazingly talented people out there.

So, it looks like a supernova could have stripped the Earth of its ozone layer 360 million years ago, at the end of the Devonian.

This house is a stone's throw from ours. Collections cont

We played "The Game of Life" with Yagu, today.

We came across these fruit. I'm slowly getting used to seei

These once-brightly-painted tires had been placed around a

I know I've shared photos of this model before, but mmm, Co

I needed a break after some very long weeks of late.

Sometimes, you do get what you pay for.

I hope you like lines and shapes that repeat! I snapped thi

The Boy's team had another game today, and again they won.

This summer, one of my fishing buddies told me about this John Prine song.

With an hour-long break to watch an animated flick with Emma, I spent the day today from 05:30 through 22:30 working on this year's photo book.

It was a national holiday, today, so naturally the school system booked part of their city-wide tournament on this day.

I don't know that I've ever seen an evening sky as clear as the one over Tokyo right now.

My wife and daughter walked into a bakery in our area today to find that no fewer than three staff were helping an extremely rude and demanding woman who insisted that she must be served immediately and to her satisfaction and that she didn't have time to wait.

This morning I adopted the color scheme of Tokyo's Musashino train line for this website.

We attended a tournament for The Boy's basketball team.

We did a five kilometer walk, mostly along the Tamagawa. Th

I've never dared park my 100kg+ one of these things but the

The Girl and I went to a ravine that a friend told me about a few years ago.

I discovered a one-liter thing of milk sitting on the counter.

five germaphobes enter an elevator cannot touch; won't go

Why conspiracy theories don't work.

I watch a fair number of movies, and I have definitely noticed a long degradation in quality and some really mystifying incidents where the CGI was clearly worse than it was twenty years ago.

My work-from-home chair has packed it in.

Here's an interesting idea.

We played The Game of Life today.

This is great advice.

There's a Kickstarter project that is promoting a digital back for 35mm film camera.

Today we attended a truck lunch festival in Tachikawa.

We looked at a house in Kunitachi, today.

I watched this, a favorite of mine, with my son tonight.

Youtube has recently started complaining about the "ad blocker" that is part of my browser.

Mari and I went to the local clinic today and got shot twice: for the flu and for COVID.

I'm slowly convincing The Boy that he should start writing movie reviews.

This is a "found footage" movie about a live streamer who decides to spend a night in a haunted home.

I've learned - thanks to my Mum - that I'm still paying for the prepaid phone I used for two weeks in BC this summer.

Tonight for "movie night", my daughter and I watched a Japanese movie inspired by Beauty and the Beast.

This is an interesting story about two neighbors in a small apartment building in Los Angeles who investigate some crazy phenomenon after one of them witnesses some unnatural light the unexplained levitation of household objects.

This is a movie about some dudes who break into the world's most secure vault, which is apparently in Spain.

I believe this is the third time I've been in the news in Japan.

I'm due to give a short speech at our office's Grand Opening.

Missed my son's event at school today because I had to leave town.

I don't recall having seen any of the Tremors movies except for the first, and I'm surprised to learn that this is the seventh.

This is a near-future Sci-Fi movie about a drone pilot who causes the deaths of some marines in a conflict in Ukraine through hitting a military target that was immediately adjacent to their position.

I don't know why Microsoft does this, but they periodically notify me that they're going to deactivate my credit on Skype.

My daughter and I seem to do everything together these days.

One complaint I have with these Spider-Man movies is that the titles are so similar that you can't tell which is which.

This is a fun if chronologically distant sequel to the '80s movie Predator.

I note that Canada's first World Cup showing (and first victory over an american team) comes on the 30th anniversary of our last win of a Stanley Cup.

Today Mari and I went to an unassuming grocery store that I'm sure we've passed on many occasions without entering.

Well, it's Friday.

I was wondering when these guys would get around to Canada.

Today I added a quote to my collection and noticed that it was my 250th.

I was out for an evening bike ride and the sky really came

My brother passed along this rather incredible account of typeset in the Star Trek movies and TV shows.

When we were in Hakone last weekend, a young couple was hanging around our car right after we arrived.

It's lens flare and no focus.

Once upon a time I watched "Mission Impossible II" and did not like it.

&n

This area was poisoned by whatever gas was coming out of th

El Nino and a hundred million Ford F-150's and here we are.

The other day I shared a link to the woes of the car manufacturing industry as they face unprecedented problems.

At a matsuri, people started a rhythmic dance of sorts with

I noticed this article title "the potential looming auto industry fiasco", and thought it got everything just about right.

We thought this flick looked interesting -- I had thought that Jackie Chan had retired.

Today was another ridiculously hot day, but I decided that rather than spend yet another weekend indoors, I'd hop on my bike and do a dry run for a longish ride I have planned.

I note that Canada has reformed its passport process.

Death, what a bummer.

I've recently flown to the Netherlands and to British Columbia and my brain and body seem to be in broad disagreement.

In a rather jarring change of pace, I found myself in a Kabuki theatre today.

My brother called to let me know that our father has set a date for his medically assisted death.

I know it's not the last time I'll travel by plane this year, but I am glad to be done with it for now.

I was slowly engrossed in this movie after a shaky start in which its clearly dated setting initially had me cringing.

This afternoon, I gave my father a final hug, a final kiss on the cheek, and told him I love him, and then I left.

We'd had a good day.

We were back on the water this evening, but it wasn't my on

This part of BC is so beautiful, I can barely believe it.

It was the season open and we were out on the water in Camp

At 05:30, we hit the water at high tide and headed to the s

While on a hike earlier in the week, I came across a tiny mouse so small that its entire torso and head were no larger than the last digit of my thumb.

This is where Buttle Lake and Upper Campbell Lake meet, in

I got in late and decided to burn off what remained of the evening with this movie on Netflix.

I love this kind of to-the-point explainer.

After a long day's errands, hiking, and fishing, I spotted this underappreciated classic on Netflix and watched it for what must have been the third or fourth time.

I suspect this a gorge cut for the hydro power generation p

This is a fun movie about a shlep whose fiance isn't close with her parents.

This morning I took Oma/Opa's PC in for repair and got it booting again.

I decided to try my hand at fly fishing while I'm in Campbell River.

I'm in Campbell River, BC, for the next two weeks!

I guess locals leave the boats around like this between use

I was en route from Tokyo to Campbell River, British Columb

Tonight I watched this 1979 sci-fi movie with my brother and sister-in-law.

It seems that a good third or more of the trees in Vancouver's Stanley Park are dead.

I arrived in BC this afternoon.

This morning I spotted a young woman whose skirt had gotten caught in the rear gear assembly of her bicycle.

Social distancing had more impact on mortality than lock-downs.

In May of this year, Ted Chiang wrote a piece in the New Yorker comparing AI to McKinsey, a consulting firm famous for "extracting shareholder value" by tactically tearing apart functioning companies.

This is a movie about a knight whos act of knighthood is sabotaged by a violent act of terrorism that causes him to unwittingly kill the city's monarch.

This movie is honestly an excellent action film.

Between jaunts to other continents, I managed to watch this with my kids.

Ever since I rebuilt my websites on this AliExpress Celeron server I have apparently been under the false impression that I had blocked password access on SSHd.

I'm in the midst of a busy travel time.

I watched this again with my daughter and I really enjoyed it.

This fellow's criticisms are sadly accurate.

While flying between Dubai and Tokyo I realized we were fly

It's all very cool that we actually have this technology at

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The only times in the past twenty years that I've said "win

I cycled to Hook of Holland after work.

One of the few things I knew I wanted to see when I was in

Despite the gathering gloom and the advanced hour, I did not get rained upon.

I landed in Amsterdam at 13:45 today, having left Tokyo at 18:00 on Saturday.

I'm having one of those 21st Century dislocation moments.

This is a sequel to the interesting Netflix movie "Extraction", which was a straight-up assassin story with enough intelligence and vulnerability to set it apart from the usual fare that I think most of us have been ignoring for decades.

It's one of the reasons I shoot color! Collections contai

Once in a while Netflix will recommend an older movie you've never heard of.

This is about a teenager who is struggling with life following the death of her father -- an event that's weakened the family to the point of disintegration.

This is a movie about the cast of a series of blockbuster action movies.

Somehow a story line from the Douglas Adams "Hitch-hikers" books popped into my mind this morning.

For some reason my daughter and I decided to watch this second modern sequel to the '80s original "Ghostbusters".

This is irritatingly close to a good movie.

At some point, I started keeping track of how long I've been on certain jobs, or lived in certain homes.

This was, clearly, the dairy section of a Japanese grocery

I probably shouldn't be writing a review of this.

What a mess!

The "photo of the day" feature has been reinstated.

This is an animated flick about a scrawny young dog who dreams of being a samurai.

I described my symptoms from Wednesday's hell day to a colleague and he told me that it sounded like COVID.

I went to the office despite being quite sick yesterday.

It seems that everyone's waking up to the fact that useful AI is here now, and is incredibly easy to build.

This morning we left our hotel and made our way back to Naha.

last day on the beach It was time for us to return to (comp

let's check this out Fatal swimming! Sounds like my kind of

Today we had a later start, hitting the road at around 10:00.

Our day b

This is a Daihatsu Hijet Jumbo kei-truck. Because men in Ja

Today, we headed north to the famous aquarium on the north

We arrived in Okinawa today for a four-day visit; our firs

It's been strangely cool the past few days.

I'm delighted to add yet another mis-spelling of our last name to the pile.

This past week, I added a new feature to this website.

I learned this morning that The Boy ran all the way to his school at one point this week.

From time to time, since I had COVID officially in August, I've had "flu like" days where I feel mildly feverish, exhausted, and headachy.

This is a sequel to 2019's surprisingly good Adam Sandler movie.

It's painful to watch Florida turn into a miserable fundamentalist state.

Why it suddenly matters how we roll out artificial intelli

Today I cycled from Kokubunji to Kichijoji on my way to work.

pen care booth at Itoya This is the room where you can br

just after a rainstorm in Ginza

end of a rainy day in Tokyo The Girl and I had returned to

But it was a warm rain.

pets wait in boxes I don't know if this was a pet store o

After work today, I walked from Shibuya to Shinjuku, to catch my commuter train.

The spring colors around here are astonishing.

I got very lucky this morning.

It was a rainy day in the inner west side of Tokyo.

welcome sign of spring Things are sprouting, everywhere.

These lovely little flowers had come up all over a driveway in our neighborhood.

We were in Tonogayato garden (yes again!

Where's the food at?

I work on the 42nd floor of this building.

A bike courier waiting on his next destination.

I don't know what's more interesting, the content or the fellows discussing this development.

It was so damp today that I had to go to five street-side vending machines before I found one that worked.

I find it amazing that it works and we don't know why but

We paid ¥58,000 for electricity in February.

all praise be the pajero mini I like Japan's many functio

Maybe it was the staff in a restaurant or something like t

I think it was hunting small fish.

This is a stitched-together panorama.

The 45 kilometer tamagawa irrigation canal passes through K

I had to endure a two hour drivers lecture in Japanese, tod

It was a glorious scene on a gorgeous day.

Today I managed to renew my driver's license on my own.

Tomorrow, incredibly, the family will be heading in three different directions by 08:00.

I've just noticed that I have continuous recordings of edits to this website's page dating back to this time in 2008.

Nothing seems to be in focus, but I love it.

This has to be the clearest stream I've ever seen.

It's been a very short trip.

The sun was heading down behind the Northern Japanese Alps.

It is simply amazing what someone can do with the right software.

It's the end of the first week of March, and I just brought out the fan to cool myself through the afternoon.

Later this month, I'm turning 52.

I never used to get bags under my eyes. Now they never leav

I'll be sitting a two-hour driver's ed instruction video in Japanese.

I got a ring to reverse-mount an old manual focus lens on Emma's camera.

Seems enticing, somehow.

This is a story about a family that moves into a grand old house to discover that it's haunted by the sad ghost of a man with a middle-aged paunch and a combover.

This is the aquarium I set up for The Girl.

I went out for some "shutter therapy" after another long day.

Today we went to a place I'd visited last year to see about getting a new ring fashioned for Mari out of her engagement ring (which she hasn't worn since she noticed it was scratching baby #1) and her late grandmother's ring.

If history had played its cards better, my last name wouldn't be Werneburg, it would be Ƿerneburg.

I'm not even sure what color this is.

I found this on the back side of a house, perched above a narrow laneway full of passing cyclists.

Today I went for a three hour photography walk around Kokubunji.

s

Looks promising!

Today I took The Girl into Tachikawa, the nearest large (sub)urban center to our home.

On the way home tonight, I stopped and shot this view down an out-doors hallway.

I have written nearly eight hundred movie reviews and the person who posted this may be one of the few who sees the concept the same way.

streets of to

I last saw this movie about twenty years ago.

The Girl is the proud fish mama of three sprightly little goldfish.

I wonder what he did to pull garbage duty.

For the past eight years I have been using an Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mk II.

I can hardly call a movie that cost a billion dollars a "lazy cash grab" but this thing had some fundamental story-telling problems and was a confusing mess to watch.

Ever since the New Year's, when I went fishing on six separate days, I've had what I thought was a minor infection on my finger from briefly hooking myself while out on the water.

trees & tr

To date, the worst applications I have used were: SAP, the

Whoever laid these out, did so with love.

This is a film about a real Troll waking up and terrorizing Scandinavia.

I liked the way this young lady's skirt was catching the wi

And I thought Canada was lousy with signs. Collections co

I watch the Youtube videos of a former hedge fund manager who explains who things like financial scams and Elon Musk work.

The Boy has a semi-portable basketball net that sits in our driveway.

There's a new Dungeons and Dragons movie coming out, and it looks pretty good.

I've written 1,077,939 words on this website.

a lifetime

Some spaces in Kokubunji that were productive farms become

So fast she can't be photographed.

For movie night, we watched this sequel to the "Puss in Boots" spinoff of "Shrek 2", which came out way back in 2004.

Last year I made a comment on a Youtube video about the problems of hydrogen vehicles.

Not a pretty town, but I can dig it.

I had the strange experience today of discovering that the ball point had fallen out of my ballpoint pen.

We had some friends visiting from Toronto this weekend.

Today we went to a 120-year-old circus.

I wonder why they need the brick when the have the fancy do

Today I had to go to the clinic to get repeats on my migraine meds and the sleeping pills I some to need to get through the night.

This is my neighborhood garbage depot on "plastics" day.

This is a movie about a young woman who becomes trapped in a "Groundhog Day" daily time loop.

My brother made me a leather watch strap.

The Boy caught a Bonito!

The kids were playing hide-and-seek today, and it all went too far.

I spotted this car outfit with decals that I thought were m

I've now used feedback from ChatGPT to brush up the story I ludicrously submitted to a Toronto Star short-story contest twenty years ago*.

This movie's had quite a rave reception and I have to say that I'm not entirely sure why.

This is a charmless sequel to a very different and original murder mystery.

My son and I tried to recreate a walk from three years prio

The Boy and I went for quite a hike, today.

It looks like the steep declines in email over the past few years are no longer possible.

 

Welcome to Kagoshima, a city on a drowned "graben"

a lifetime

Happy Yuletide!

What can you say about movies you see on airplane equipment?

You can take the boy out of the city but you can't take the

I watched this seminal flick from the '90s with The Boy, today.

...sailor's delight!

My son wanted to a see a Denzel Washington movie so you know this was my first thought.

Somewhere out there is a chef named Melissa Werneburg.

Say, do you remember COVID-19?

This morning while taking the garbage to the pick-up site I saw and electric tuk-tuk called a "Fun vehicle".

Oh wait, that's the sun. We don't always see it a lot in To

I think I shot this with my Nokia 6.1. Collections contai

We went to a performance/art exhibit thing in Yokohama call

I've driven in Japan before but never Tokyo.

We've packed up the used heater that wasn't working properly and have bought a new one in its place.

This little eatery had been built in a semi-open space conn

I took The Girl downtown today.

This morning a Reddit user with a female name and icon posted a photo of a new aquarium that had just been set up on Thursday.

Who doesn't love blasting the planet with asteroids!

Sadly, all of Emma's three street-festival goldfish fingerlings are gone.

I've been watching "Star Trek Deep Space Nine", lately.

We bought a new (used) heater and it only works on certain wall sockets and only if you let it heat very gradually.

This is a Sci-Fi thing about some genetically-modified humans living in a world that has censured them and placed them under rigid restrictions.

This action-comedy is so much over-the-top fun that I watched it a second time with my kids within days of my first, solo viewing.

Thanks to being the parent of a teenager, I now get to learn how much the replacement of a school window costs.

My daughter and I watched the original story about a young girl whose father disappears at sea.

I honestly have no idea what the fuss is all about with this movie.

The Girl and I took some time to re-organize the aquarium.

I had three emails from my daughter this morning.

We went more than two years in this house without an aquarium, ending a run of about fifteen years of continuous aquarium-keeping.

walking around

This is a fun story about a kid who moves to a small town with her parents.

I thought I had a handle on how bad the Aral sea ecological catastrophe really was.

What a mess! It's hard to imagine that the leadership didn'

This is how badly the old derailleur failed on my bike. The

This is my humble photo of the lunar eclipse.

I left work early tonight (just past 17:00!

This is an animated story I watched with my ten-year-old daughter for "movie night".

greenery col

This is a movie in which Kevin Hart plays the diminutive comic relief and someone capable of maintaining a scowl plays the heavy.

color simple

I hadn't realized that China's population figures were questioned.

I was reviewing some old photos and was reminded of an even older event in my life.

I recently uncovered these old pics from my time at NikkoCiti.

I've been a fairly regular user of the social media site Twitter for the past several years.

This is an infectiously chaotic story about a famous but fading movie star who is invited to the home of a Spanish billionaire for a $1 million project of unknown purpose.

I mean, for small businesses apparently yes.

skies No contex

streets of tok

This is a film with a star-studded cast and an overly ambitious plot that more than fills out its 2+ plus run-time.

I've noticed that the thumbnail images on this site have started to become inexplicably uneven in size.

I watched a Youtube video relating the recent performance

Every year I make a book of photos from the kids' past year.

This is a curiously unappealing prequel to "The Kingsman", a modestly original take on the spy genre.

I follow a Reddit thread on Gen-X.

I put these b

I spent the first twenty percent of this movie thinking that I was seeing a cartoon prelude to a live action movie.

The Germans seem to have really made a mess of their energy security.

It was one of those days.

It seems that the new King in the UK (my liege, since I'm Canadian) wanted to go to the next big climate conference.

I watched a run-down of several theories around who blew up the Nordstream natural gas pipelines.

Mari and I found a Thai restaurant in Tachikawa and went for dinner without the kids for the first time in so long I don't honestly remember.

This morning I was out the door at 07:15 determined to ride to Kichijoji, half of my 25km commute and something I used to do routinely.

The Boy was pushing his bike pretty hard and had the chain "fall" (he can't describe it better than that, I think it skipped).

This is, like other Guy Ritchie movies, about a gangster in a pinch.

This fellow says that the Russians are calling up 300,000 - 1,000,000 men but they might not be able to equip them with .

We met Yagu and went to The Boy's school for an open house today.

Today's a holiday in Japan but we're completing a cloud migration and I had to follow the team's progress for about five hours.

I wasn't really able to tackle my homework this past weekend but when I noticed a message from my instructor commending me on always doing my homework I redoubled my effort and got it done with around a minute to spare before our call.

architecture

This is a sci-fi flick about a man surviving quite alone after some apocalyptic disaster.

Typhoon Manmadol, which is currently making landfall in Kyushu, may be the largest (geographically) in the history of Japan.

Now I'm not dumb but I can't understand how this story played like fantasy but we're expected to believe that it's real.

It's so, so nice to ride a bike where the chain isn't making noise and skipping all over the place.

Recently, Mari's old 650b*-based bike has been having some difficulty.

It's been a month since I got over the initial bout of COVID and I'm still having days where I feel just like I did: sore throat, headache, wheezing, stuffed up sinuses, can't sleep.

On the surface, this is a sci-fi movie about a woman in her fifties that is asked by an other-dimension version of her husband to join an epic struggle to save the multiverse.

It's scarcely been 18 months since I last migrated this website to a new server, but I've done it again; with a twist.

Air Canada still hasn't refunded the money from the ticket they cancelled.

I've heard of three more people getting COVID in the past few days.

It looks like I'm finally kicking the after-effects of my bout of COVID.

Today I took (most of) the systems case to the local community center to dump in an all-metal recycling box.

I do like to have a spiderplant around. Collections conta

The Girl made her own game of Twister.

I've recovered my "lost" photos from 2006.

About 18 months ago I wrote a piece about building an old PC into a modern workstation.

On our recent trip to Canada, I tracked down a lot of old backups because I'd discovered at some point in 2021 that I'd deleted the original images from a visit to a bamboo forest in Kyoto.

I bought a new systems case that arrived last night.

When we landed at Narita we finally got to the baggage gate some two hours after touching down.

This is a spy thriller in which the government aims one of its off-the-books killers at another of their killers.

So it turns out there are actually seven stars in the Pleiades constellation, and that various human cultures have been referring to the constellation that way for a very long time because 100,000 years ago we could see all seven stars.

We're back in Japan.

I brought many of my old photo backups and some old hard drives.

I took our dear Maebh, the Kia Rondo, to the dealership to hand her over today.

This is a movie about a vampire hunter in Los Angeles.

I had another COVID PCR test today and yup, I'm still positive.

I started working remotely, today.

vehicles

Today I had a positive COVID PCR test.

Mari and I went for a walk tonight, from mum's place on Linwell out to the beach at Port Dalhousie, then back over the pedestrian bridge at Royal Henley Park (odd name, I thought).

This is an unassuming animated movie about a mer-boy/reptile who becomes interested in the humans in a nearby village - which is in sunny rural Italy.

We've chosen our movers.

The Girl and I went for a walk today, first to the water and then back; and then to a nearby shopping mall.

When we went to the storage unit to day I picked up my "old" home-built PC from 2018 or 2019, which contains a bunch of parts I want to take home (to Tokyo).

The three of us went out early this morning and found a bakery that was open in the neighborhood where we're staying.

Today we went to the storage unit in farthest-flung Scarborough.

We're in Toronto.

We've retrieved our luggage.

This is the latest Bond flick and it is not good.

We're at "Grandma's" after quite a trek.

Movie night comes to Netflix once again.

Celebrating 22/7 (or ~3.

Recently I've been rebuilding a study tool for kanji that I accidentally nuked several months ago.

It was pushing 30°C at ground level, but clearly it was cold enough for snow at ten kilometers or so.

Condensation trails, or "contrails" are one of the first things I can remember learning as a child of a glider pilot.

In this sequel to "Venom", a sloppy sci-fi/super-hero movie featuring a human and his alien "parasite".

The premise of this movie is that a wastrel winds up with guns surgically grafted to his hands.

On the weekend our family had a water-balloon fight on our street.

This is a sequel to the imaginative and fun, "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle".

So it turns out that if you were born in North America between 1966 and 1975, there is a hundred percent certainty that you were exposed to harmful amounts of lead as a child.

It's 5º in Tokyo right now with humidity of 43%.

This is a movie in which Kevin Hart plays the diminutive comic relief and someone capable of maintaining a scowl plays the heavy.

This is an unpleasant little Sci-Fi number that features a number of inmates at a facility who are serving lengthy sentences.

This is an off-beat movie about a former star chef who now lives in a shack in the hills with his truffle pig.

A few years ago, my daughter was playing with my shaver.

This movie is what they call "fan service", designed foremost to please people who are really into the material.

On the downside my Japanese reading this weekend is on Yoko Ono.

It's remarkable to me that we can't even find the DNA that could tell us what these are.

Apocalypse now!

This movie is a near miss.

I watched a Youtube video about the textiles industry.

I went hunting in my journal and found what I was looking for: record of when I started working on the database-driven photo manager I use.

Today we watched one of The Boy's basketball tournaments.

I have this growing conviction that electric cars are not the solution to our car problem.

I marked this auspicious day by buying books, but not Douglas Adams.

This is a Marvel super-hero movie with enough of a re-skin that it is more watchable than many.

Today there was a persistent rumbling that waxed and waned in volume.

This was a "movie night" movie and despite myself I found it growing on me.

I can barely keep up with these things. I mean, I don't th

My friend Kevin Atwood died five years ago.

I hope the author's right that all this suffering and dest

Emma is studying the prefectures of Japan, so I've decided to learn them as well.

This is an animated remake of the old Addams Family series, movies, and comic strips.

This is the tale of a young Texan who falls in with a bunch of vampires.

For Movie Night, The Boy and I watched this now thirty-year-old Hollywood flick about a mentally and emotionally disturbed individual who - get this - attempts to walk across Los Angeles.

It's happened for the first time in nearly three years - hit with shit yet again.

I bought some Japanese whisky that turned out to be a form of Scotch.

You see some interesting architecture in this city, where t

This is an interesting work of Science Fiction that starts with its main character falling off a sky hook and then follows him to every miserable corner of a future that's at once dystopian but also somewhat grounded and optimistic but not in a Star Trek way.

The household is now down to just two cameras.

This is a tense tale set in a near future Crapsack World where war has broken out between .

Today I did some work on my watches.

This is a family-friendly animated movie about a girl in Toronto's Chinatown community (the one on Spadina) who discovers that she is heir to a family secret - puberty-onset shape-shifting superpowers.

The average home in Toronto is now $1.

The power generation company has announced that due to damage sustained in the large earthquake last week, the power plants in the north-east part of Japan are at maximum capacity, with zero spare.

Mari arranged a fishing trip for The Boy and me, as it's a holiday.

There was a large quake tonight, easily the largest I've ever experienced.

This is a particularly good animated kids' movie.

For years, while earning barely enough to pay the bills in Toronto, I'd occasionally write about this or that "watch crush".

This is a movie about a guilty survivor of a horrific incident at a university in which a fellow female student is filmed while being raped to death.

I live halfway around the world but I thought I'd create this token of my well-wishes for the people of Ukraine.

This is a comic book movie based on real comic books that I have actually read*.

This is a Fantasy story about the seventh son of a seventh son - a supposed marker of great ability as a wizard.

I've realized that the house is so cold I've developed frost-bite on my little fingers.

I went to work today, downtown.

The Boy has been accepted to a STEM program at a high school in Toronto.

This is a movie set in a near/alternate future in which GMO's were necessitated by an ecological collapse - humanity was starving.

This is a frustrating Sci-Fi/thriller flick that doesn't realize it's promise.

On the weekend, I received an email from Google that they were cutting my legacy account on Google Workspace.

This is a somewhat weird and off-putting animated story about a species of cuddly mammals that have bodies shaped like donuts - replete with the center hole.

Every day I tackle a couple of items from my to-do list, sit down to work, race through lunch, site down to work again until 19:00 or 20:00, and then face the too-brief evening exhausted.

This is the third in the "How to Train Your Dragon" series of animated movies.

My son had to sit an English-language exam today, so I packed him up and we went to Kichijoji.

This is an animated story of a human girl who wakes up to discover she's become a troll.

I bought some Japanese whisky in the grocery/drug store and it's .

It's not cold in Tokyo, but the houses sure are.

This is a sequel to a sci-fi thriller in which massive comets have fallen to Earth, spawning alien killing machines as they go.

I find that any time there's any small shift or movement, I'm waiting to see if it's an Earthquake.

I've only been back to work for 2-3 days and already it's like I never took two weeks off.

Today some Christmas cards arrived in the mail.

For "movie night" we watched a film about a kid who likes to write scary movies.

Today my son and I watched the first of the Bond movies to feature Daniel Craig.

It will surprise no-one that we went fishing today.

I watched this Bond flick with my son as part of our ongoing series.

We traveled to Miyakonojo in the interior of Miyazaki, today, to visit with family.

Today Mari drove me and the two Akios down to Kushima, to meet her uncle and board his boat.

Not having had a response from the second literary agency I reached out to in early December, I've now written to a third about my novel manuscript.

We took to the water again today, and I tried to catch larger fish rather than loading up on smaller ones as we had last time.

Today we went to a shrine first thing, leaving at 08:00 to beat the rush.

Today we headed out for a bit of a trip around the coast, just Mari and I and the kids.

Today my son and I watched our fourth James Bond movie, for the fourth actor to take on the role.

Well, I can honestly say that 2021 was one of the hardest of my life.

The collapse of email as a communications medium proceeds at a furious pace.

I can't believe how exhausted I became this year.

This is a satire of the handling (or lack there-of) for a dire situation in which two American scientists discover a killer asteroid that's on a collision course with Earth.

This is the third Bond movie that my son and I watched together.

I went fishing with my father-in-law today.

This is the second Bond film that I watched with my son.

I watched this with my almost-thirteen-year-old this morning.

I showed the kids this '80s classic movie tonight.

I built a TV stand this morning.

Not having heard from the first literary agent I reached out to six weeks ago, I've sent a second query to a different agency.

This is a Chinese-produced movie on Netflix that my daughter and I watched for "Movie Night".

A good friend has produced a card game called Nihonjin Mitai.

Our TV comes from Hi-Sense, a Chinese manufacturer that's been around for a number of years.

Burned out after another brutal week at work, I sat in front of Netflix and took a chance on this movie about a beautiful young Russian woman who winds up working for the KGB in the waning days of the USSR.

Yesterday I was woken at 02:00 by a modest earthquake.

It's 2021.

I was woken at 02:00 by an earthquake.

I've been reading a book called "The Whispering Wars" to my daughter.

This movie is four hours long.

Sometimes, Hollywood will make a movie simply by assembling a leading cast and letting them do their usual shtick.

We watched this one for "movie night", and I realized that I'd somehow never seen this movie.

It's been quite some time since I watched this Sci-Fi/thriller.

Every year, I make photo books detailing the kids' lives.

My mum sent this tool, which shows how different cities will look once flooded by the expected rise in sea level over the coming decades.

I had an unusually good e-commerce experience with a company called Number Barn that lets you park phone numbers.

I bought an all-silver watch to offset my entirely dark-dial watch collection.

The space adventurism of billionaires gives me solace that humanity is never going to colonize space.

After receiving a generous watch gift from my brother I'm suddenly a watch collector.

This is the story of a vampire who is locked up in a coffin for centuries and then released in our time.

Following hot on the heals of "Army of the Dead" comes a prequel about the German safe-cracker.

I had dinner with a friend tonight for the first time in so long I don't remember.

There, I said it.

So .

This is an awkward semi-comedy featuring a guy who loses control of his life to an app.

I've submitted a query letter to a literary agent in the UK regarding my latest novel manuscript.

I got my first query letter out the door with a synopsis and the first three chapters.

I'm trying to find some reliable numbers of my new Mac's power draw, because I seem to be getting far more use out of a battery charge then I was expected.

It was a beautiful day today, and the only one in the forecast for my week off that wasn�

This is by far the best of the Men in Black movies about human cops chasing a bunch of alies around Earth.

In this story, a girl finds a yeti cowering on the roof-top of her building.

I've bought a new laptop for the first time in well over a decade.

We had a great earthquake today, a 6.

This morning as with most Mondays I got an early start at work at around 07:00.

This was another "movie night" viewing on Netflix.

I got a reading of 99.

We tried to fix our TV today.

Lemme just grab a handful of bees real quick.

This is the telling of a team of US soldiers that went into the Taliban's stronghold in Afghanistan following the 9/11 terrorist strike.

Another semi-lockdown quarantine movie review with the kids.

We watched this with the kids.

This is the story of a detective who is sent to his former precinct in Los Angeles to complete some paperwork.

This is an action pic about an assassin who's been tasked with hitting a yakuza target.

We're going through a bit of a cool spell, so my wrist has become a bit thinner.

Once in a while my daughter and I try to watch something for "Movie Night" that turns out to be unwatchable.

My son and I watched this flick for a school assignment.

This is a story about a man and daughter who lose their wife/mother and the father can't shake that his wife was allowed to die due to some mix of medical and pharmacological incompetence and/or conspiracy.

By finding an hour or so per day I've managed to rewrite a novel from scratch in the course of six weeks or so.

This is an animated movie based on the excellent TV series "The Witcher".

This is a spy farce starring the penguins from the Madagascar movie which I want to say was fifteen years ago or more.

I've completed the plot for the first draft of my rewrite of a novel I first wrote from 1990 - 1994.

This is a whodunnit set in a mansion.

In this film, a girl in Miami finds a kinkajou (a rare monkey thing) while on a trip in Cuba.

This is an over-the-top cop-in-trouble movie in the vein of "Bad Boys II".

Last year I don't think Tokyo was hit or skirted by any typhoons.

I use scripts to support the content management system that I wrote to create and serve this website.

I bought a new fishing watch for 2200 yen.

A couple of weeks ago I was having trouble sleeping and decided to count all the times I'd flown.

Sometimes there are movies that seem to be grown up around the personas of the lead actors.

Someone planted a single grape vine in our yard.

Had my second vaccine shot yesterday.

I've had my second vaccination, in a small clinic in the neighborhood (Kokubunji).

I saw a bat on our street tonight.

I've taken my journal live again.

Just under two months ago, Mari and I switched to a low-carb diet.

We've been having problems with the sound-bar for our television dropping out all the time.

It's about a young fellow who is being raised by a single mother.

The rainy season has abruptly ended, and the temperature is north of 30°C every day.

This is a sci-fi action film about a pair of agents for a galaxy-spanning government military force of some kind.

I got my first vaccination shot today.

This is an animated flick that re-purposes twenty-something Hansel and Gretel as investigators for the society of magicians that maintains order by tracking down missing peoples of all types.

I've finally finished a story I started in 2003 about how multi-cellular life got started on Earth, and added it to my little collection of sci-fi.

I've restored some of my fiction to my website.

Today I discovered that something had gone wrong with the software I wrote to manage my book reviews.

Today I cycled up to a town called Ome in Tokyo's far north-west.

Having this kind of day.

This is a movie about a pissed-off semi-sentient car tire that discovers it has psionic abilities.

Today we set out at 08:30 for the pension office.

Well I made it all of six days with this new drug in my system before taking a cafergot for a migraine.

My Japanese is getting to the point where I can string together actual (spoken) paragraphs now.

Today I had two shots at a hospital of a drug supposed to prevent migraine for up to a month.

This is a movie about a trio of siblings that move into a rambling and decrepit home of a deceased relative after the separation of their parents.

I'd noticed recently that the little pot into which I'd transplanted my spider-plant seemed oddly full, like the soil was about to overflow the thing.

This is an Adam Sandler movie.

I made a watch from parts I ordered on Ebay, AliExpress, and Amazon.

This is a style-over-substance heist movie set in a fictional Las Vegas that's been over-run with zombies.

Set during the Spanish civil war, this is a zombie movie.

This is a very uneven telling of the assembly of a "B" team of agents to track down a missing nuclear bomb.

This is the tale of a novelist who writes spy thrillers.

I managed to nick myself twice with a new razor blade.

I have a feeling that this movie came together due to someone owing someone a favor because I don't think it was built on an idea per se - or at least not a solid one.

When I moved from Tokyo to Toronto I bought a phone number in Toronto in advance through a small Canadian company.

Over the past couple of mornings I've been going through some of my pics from the past few months.

Kokubunji at dusk

This is a strange version of Spider Man that has no origin story but is basically a kid in the by-now Iron Man's wake.

I slept with the window open last night for the first time this year.

This is an animated flick we watched on "movie night".

We had an early morning quake again today.

laying down plastic for rows of produce Collections contai

I gave The Girl a Casio watch for her birthday.

In what is surely a sign of a stable economy, my seven year old SARB watch from Seiko is now selling for twice its original retail price - used.

I'm going to build a watch from parts that I ordered from Ebay in the US and Aliexpress in China.

And now it seems I have to mow the lawn every week.

This is a short based on the Star Wars universe, replete wi

Today I was contacted by a former employer about the possibility of training their firm on a renewed push on the work we were doing 2-3 years ago.

So I mowed the lawn in about ten minutes.

For the first time in 30+ years, I'll be mowing the lawn this weekend.

This is a movie about an elderly woman whose life is turned upside down when she's forcibly confined in a nursing home by a crooked self-employed agent who has the legal authority to make self-serving financial decisions.

like books a-flight in the Golden Hour Collections contain

the black heart door

teaching the girl about lines

This is a story of a girl who's drawn into a ghost story.

a park in cherry blossom season

We had another earthquake on Sunday.

a Tokyo front yard in the Golden Hour Collections containi

Until just yesterday we were using our space heaters on a daily basis.

I'm celebrating with a nasal/chest cold, which The Girl brought home early in the week.

Hmm, I guess I've burned off two thirds of my life expectancy.

I went to see my neurologist again today.

mt fuji across water

mt fuji across water

Today we went to a small city in southern Chiba prefecture called Tateyama.

Mari's bought me a birthday gift of fishing.

This is a sequel.

For last Tuesday, I had to write something about an interesting experience.

The camera market is imploding fast.

It's been a year in Japan as of today.

I hope this unverified article is right, because it means I qualify for Japanese Permanent Residency.

I've been using a password plugin in my browser called LastPass since who knows when.

My beloved old camera bag has become faded, worn, stained, and shapeless.

I've discovered that I've managed to delete some ~150 or so photos from a 2006 trip to Kyoto with Mari and mum.

It's been many years since I was happily surprised by this gritty Angles-and-Demons flick featuring a human who has learned many occult secrets and now spends his unhappy days fighting "Lu"cifer and his minions.

This movie has a promising cast and certainly appears visually stunning, but is let down by an unengaging story in which characters behave without clear motive and no one is really very sympathetic.

After we'd had our bentou, we dragged The Girl into see some open houses that were freshly built in a quiet corner of our neighborhood.

When my brother and I were small my mum would occasionally ask what kind of gift to get for our dad.

My boss is going back to Europe for failing to deliver on a major risk project.

On October 9 I bought a video card for The Boy's PC for ¥28,000.

This is a spy spoof in which Rowan Atkinson plays a dimwitted secret agent of mostly good nature.

Today's word in Japanese is 動物, or doubutsu, or animal.

I just learned the word for grey in Japanese; haiiro.

We've had several quakes in the near year I've been here.

This is a luke-warm reboot of a TV show from the '60s that lacks a good deal of the charm of the original.

I decided, around 15:30 to head west to the Tamagawa to see the river by bike.

Two weeks ago I was surprised to see plum blossoms in the neighborhood.

This is a Korean piece of Sci-Fi that I quite enjoyed.

Kokubunji isn't exactly a beautiful place but it's lively enough for a tiny city in the middle of 40 million people.

Today Mari and I went for a walk to do some errands.

"Take me out into the black, tell 'em I ain't coming back.

I've long since lost count of the many, many VM's and physical servers upon which I've had emuu.

It's 3° outside this morning, which means it's scantly warmer indoors.

This is an entertaining film that's basically "The Goonies" in Hawaii plus girls.

And we think *we* have it rough.

Some of the cheap Chinese lego-like bricks I ordered before X'mas arrived.

A few blocks from our place is a laneway that's been abandoned.

This new residence of ours is about thirty years old.

The main weakness of Heist movies is being too clever.

As much as I like the stars of this film, I couldn't sit through it to the end.

Late this summer, we went to a "recycle shop" that Mari had found online.

This is a spooky family flick about a boy who goes to stay with his uncle, who is something of a witch.

This is a gritty telling of true events in mid-Century France.

We went out to see the sunset.

I was thinking back across the year and realized that I may have gotten through the year without a day lost to a migraine.

This time last year I recorded a count of the emails I'd received through the year.

I tweeted to Ravensberger, who made this marble run toy, be

I really wanted to enjoy this movie about a scientist struggling to resolve a global climate crisis while a space mission is returning to the ruined planet.

Of late, Robert Rodriguez has been making kids movies.

This is a musical number about a genius inventor who is ripped off by his apprentice.

crowded tree Mari's done a stellar job of X'mas as with eve

We were treated to an amazing image of the moon, Saturn, and Jupiter all crowded into a single corner of a cloudless sky at dusk, tonight.

This is a Batman spin-off, or perhaps a spin-off of "Suicide Squad", which is a spin-off of Batman.

Today I bought three heaters.

The Girl has been playing with Lego a fair bit, but sadly we had to leave most of it in Canada so she's got way more windows than wall pieces and some of her creations have been a bit rickety.

I tried showing my kids this flick for "movie night".

This film was a recommendation from a friend, and I was completely blown away.

I had to go to a dentist today because of a persistent problem in my jaw.

Well I've got three of my migraine capsules left.

The sun had just come up, and I was out with my camera. You

This is the site of the main temple complex from which 'Kok

This is a story about a man stuck on Mars, who must who must survive on science alone.

For "Movie Night" my daughter and I watched this one.

It looks like we have no option to get the photo books to people on time.

We went to Tachikawa today to get me onto a mobile phone service.

This is the '80s classic featuring a bunch of kids who decide to explore a house where they think some evil-doing is afoot.

Proving once again that there can't be a good movie without a sequel, this is the unnecessary follow-up to the endearing Netflix Christmas Special featuring Kurt Russell as Santa Claus.

I needed a new bank account, because the Japanese banking system is .

I didn't get as much done today as I wanted.

Today I joined the headhunter who placed me at my current gig in a fishing trip.

Today we set off right away for Fuchu, a city adjacent to Kokubunji.

One odd wrinkle has come up in our plans to switch to a low-cost phone provider.

This is a classic science fiction movie from twenty years ago, before financial crises, calamitous presidencies, and terrorist strikes at the heart of the global financial industry.

I've discovered that I've been completely exhausted.

This is a kids' movie from a Chinese studio that features an ancient tale from that same country of a goddess who winds up stranded on the moon / living in association with the moon.

I used some white corrective tape to patch up three mistakes in this year's photo books, which arrived last Sunday.

This is a fun Sci-Fi flick about a cop whose son is becoming a petty crook.

 

We headed off at 10:30 this morning hoping to reach a place where there's a ravine full of autumn colors, this finally being the season.

I caught the edge of the glass on my beater watch on a surface while taking The Girl out to the park today.

 

Today we watched a movie the kids only know from memes.

Today I hooked up a small Linux device between the new TV and our even newer Internet connection*.

We've been diligently watering the grass and watching for some sign of life but we were beginning to think it hadn't worked when Mari spotted tiny shoots all over the tiny yard.

This morning I carried on with the work on volume thirteen of the kids' photo books.

Today was a sunny day (queue the day-long migraine) so we decided by around nine in the morning to seed the yard in hopes of growing a lawn.

This morning I set off to find a kickstand.

 

Buying a TV has become insanely difficult.

This past week the landlord sent some gardeners, who aggressively cut back the cedars and made pollards out of the deciduous trees.

I had my second Japanese lesson tonight.

 

For the first time in four days, it was not raining incessantly.

This morning Mari and I went to Kunitachi, a city in our 'hood with a name that seems to be comprised of bits of the larger cities.

Today after a grueling day and the end of a grueling week*, I was told that Ken had left his umbrella at school and that I'd had to meet him.

We've finally bought a sofa and some bed frames.

This is a sci-fi/super-hero movie about a disgraced photographer and the alien symbiote that he meets while breaking into a lab owned by a billionaire.

Ken's writing a piece for school on the Bering land bridge.

Our place is (literally) crawling with what appear to flying ants.

A friend posted to slack: "Andreas Liris, the CIO of Ma

Mari's old Tokyobike now has a new set of tires and tubes, and a new front axle to replace the one I broke when attempting repairs in Toronto last year.

Mari's dad had a near total aquarium kill incident.

This is an imaginative new story about the young sister of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes, who defies her older brothers by striking out to find their mother, who seems quite fixed on not being found, for reasons unknown.

In an exchange with a friend in Canada who's a lawyer and fo

 

Today we went out while Ken was at school.

Every time I sit in front of a Spike Lee movie, I'm hoping for "Do the Right Thing" or "Malcolm X", and not, say, "She's Gotta Have It" or "School Daze" (which was the first of his works I saw).

Mari spoke to the landlord about a nest of paper wasps that she'd spotted hanging from our bedroom balcony.

I spotted the "badge" from the baseball hat I bought as a memento when on a week-long science trip on the west coast in 1986.

We're discussing giving up beef.

My passport went missing for a week during the move, which was a problem because I'd have to register my new address with the government.

I've mentioned that I bought an old Dell PC for about 15,000 yen (maybe $CA180).

On Sunday, we went about introducing ourselves to the immediate neighbors.

We're sleeping in the tatami room until we have beds.

I imagine I'll be laughing at this post some day, but I'm pleased with the high speed of our Internet connection.

Today we had plans to rent a car and do a bunch of housewares shopping.

This morning presented some challenges.

Mari and I have been remarking to each other what a difference this place is already making.

Mari's parents are evacuating in advance of typhoon X.

Needless to say, as I cycled from home to home this morning, the weather was 32°.

As I write this, I'm looking at a pile of 33 boxes from our home in Toronto.

Yesterday we signed our lease and forked over a fortune in fees and rent and illegal key money.

We have to buy The Boy an iPad for his school.

If you buy one of these antique PC's you usually get a vali

We watched this for "movie night".

Mari had the movers come in to do an estimate today.

Tonight we went to a "recycle shop", which is the Japanese name for a store carrying used stuff.

Our real estate says we're almost certainly going to get the place in Kokubunji.

All of us went to the dentist this week.

Last night we picked up a car share vehicle* and went to a destination in Shibuya to pick up a used IKEA table and chair.

I woke around 04:00 this morning.

Mari's found a set of tables and chairs for the new house, at 1/4 the new price.

Mari told me last night that after thirty years, a law prohibiting the consumption of farmland for housing will expire.

Today it was 39.

 

After a thread on Reddit, someone sent me this query: Hello

Reminds me of the Japanese kanji for "ear": 耳 Collec

We've been looking at what it means to have to pay two months' rent in deposit plus one month's rent to the (illegal!

Today was possibly the hottest day of the year.

We were at a large outdoor playground and spotted .. this.

This film is a .

This is the tale of a young man who learns how to set up a wind-driven pump to bring up ground-water and save his family's farm in a time of drought and conflict in rural Malawi.

I saw another gushing article today about "Toronto's booming tech sector" and how its job growth is now greater than that of Silicon Valley.

I found Suica card with a recent date on the street.

Mari and The Boy went to the school today for a tour.

Mari and Ken took off at 09:00 or so to do some banking and to buy some mobile phones.

For "Movie Night" my daughter and I watched this flick about a robot that's escaped the Evil Clutches of a boy genius who's been driven somewhat mad and then loses control of the AI he's created.

I was talking with my "dotted line" boss in Europe in our regular biweekly call on Monday.

We've now lost a couple of homes we'd wanted to rent.

There's a joke in (seemingly endless) circulation on the Internet about how the virus and associated changes have led to more efficiency at the office.

Maybe as a global society we shouldn't have elevated "value extraction" into a religion, so we'd a) have some sense of shared outcomes and b) could be prepared for this.

On Sunday my colleagues and I at work were alerted by email that there had been two cases of COVID-19 in our office building.

The Girl has taught me something about teaching photography, as she learns.

I've been crapped on by ~twenty birds in my life, but this

 

I sat (and passed) a test on the cloud platform technology we're using at work.

During the chat with my direct boss this past week about my "promotion" some interesting things emerged.

 

This is a story of a band of mercenaries and former soldiers who come together to rob a drug lord.

Today we waited out the (morning) rain and went to Shibuya.

I read this poem today.

I'd just showed the kids the statue of Hachiko, the faithfu

This weekend we looked at six apartments.

It's summer, in the city.

The Girl was at home today with me as The Boy and Mari were off for his entrance interview and exam for a private school.

Another outstanding short made not-for-profit by the Star W

This weekend we're working through more prep for Ken's school exam.

I took The Boy out this morning on a pre-work walk.

One of the pleasures of moving out of Canada is dumping your Canadian banks.

Grandma's been getting weird texts from some unknown party about "E06" needing a credit card for bill payment.

Nearly four months after I landed on March 6, the family is here!

In preparation for the family's arrival, I've been shopping and cleaning.

A friend of mine lost his job in Toronto in early October, just a couple of weeks before I did.

Mari and the kids are out of our apartment on The Boyilworth.

I'm moving my mail hosting for werneburg.

Because I unloaded all of my old Minolta and Pentax gear, I only currently own two cameras.

Grandma was on a 1,000-person Zoom call today about social and environmental issues.

This past Sunday I finally took possession of my pulse oximeter.

One of the first things you forget about when moving to a new country (or even one where you've lived before) is the holiday schedule.

As part of the eternal hiring process for my current job, I had to enumerate all the places I'd lived in my life.

I splurged on some peanut butter last night.

&n

I woke up to some really bad news this morning (a death).

It's 31°C and 68% humidity right now.

I share my son's interest in learning the language of the country in which we'll be living.

When I was heading to Canada nearly ten years ago, I realized that I'd need a Canadian phone number to support my job search.

The old 32spokes.

Looking at the situation, we've decided that we'd be walking away from too much value in light of the likely difficulty in selling the car for anything like its "normal market value" [sic].

We're hoping to get The Boy into a certain school in the city center, a part of the city where rents are a bit much.

Well, as rough as the job is, and as rough as it is to migrate back here rushed and unplanned, it looks like the numbers validate my impression of Canada's fortunes.

Tiny, even.

It's official, I'm not flying home to help pack, move, or bring the kids here.

I've found an interesting storage company in Scarborough.

I'm winding down my activities with "32 Spokes", the cycling safety advocacy group I belonged to for six and a half years.

Just in time, the R0 value in Japan is going up again.

Today I picked up my new screen-reading glasses an I'm shocked to learn how much better my monitor is than I knew.

Today I set off fairly early on a shopping mission.

This is a movie in which a man returns to the house of his parents following an eight month stay in an institution.

Mari found some temporary accommodation options for when they arrive in early July.

Near my place in Kawasaki, a river is driven below ground before continuing a short distance later.

These are monthly transit passes issued by the TTC in the late '90s.

After writing about the VPN thing the other day, it's occurred to me that we could keep our Toronto phone number simply by bringing the tiny VOIP device and the old handset with us to Tokyo.

I've re-connected with a number of former colleagues from my last run at the life insurance firm where I am today.

Several private schools in Japan are barring kids from other countries to enter their intake exams, or simply not having those intake exams.

One of the irritants about being mid-way between two countries is the way that national boundaries still play a part in some services like telephones and media.

I woke with a migraine coming on at 04:00, so I moved my bed down to the main floor in order to get some cooler air.

I've finally figured out where there are so many delivery motorcycles racing back and forth outside my building all night.

There is a place in Kawasaki where they moved the Hirase ri

Tonight I went out for a bit of a walk to burn off some stress and to finally mail a letter that I've been trying to send for some time.

This strangely-named movie is one of the best thriller/action films I've ever seen.

I'm thinking of writing some laws of synthetic intelligence into my story.

This weekend I concluded a major edit of the middle third of my old novel project.

Another evening spent walking in Kawasaki while alone durin

This is a set of condos built into the slope of a hill. It'

Tonight I was out taking some photos and I ran across a masked palm civet, and introduced species that humans brought with them for some reason during prehistoric times.

I've been reading about SARS2 mutations.

One night I realized that a full moon had come up over the

So far, I've given three tours of my part of Kawasaki by "zoom.

As I have previously noted, when I first came to this country and started becoming exposed to the writing system, I couldn't help but note that some looked a lot like one thing, but meant another.

We're selling our stuff in advance of the big move to Tokyo.

I've made a new photo collection.

I went for a fair bike ride on a friend's son's ride one fi

This was a surprisingly good action film about a mercenary who's sent into Bangladesh to extract a kidnapped child.

I can hear the sounds of someone playing a tune by gunning the engine of some kind of high-performance motorbike.

I hopped on my bike at 13:15 and got off again 32km later.

It's been five weeks since I last cut my hair, so after The Girl's cake singing, I had a shower and put the hair attachment on my beard trimmer.

I've been changing my mind about my local grocery store.

Today a number of deliveries happened.

It's funny that you could be pleased to do something as trivial as activating and charging a prepaid credit card with funds but given that I had to use Google Translate every step of the way it was something.

This was the "bathroom sink" in the one-room hovel I rented

This is a science fiction movie about a future that feels a lot more realistic than Star Trek ever did.

When this charming millennium was still young there was in Canada a show on TV called "Corner Gas".

Yesterday I received a package of fifty disposable face masks.

I've filled five of the 100GB disks with media and other stuff from my Dropbox account.

In the interests of staying alive, I've been staying indoors every other day (at a minimum).

I'm giving up my account on "Dropbox", a cloud storage service that's been around for years but has been getting progressively more expensive and in some ways frustrating.

Well I just got paid today, got me a pocket full of change.

I woke up from a mid-day nap by happily announcing, "I'm awake!

When I spoke with Jon this morning he told me that he's been seeing people living in tents in green spaces about Toronto.

Out for another stroll, I found this place. I could see a c

Ken sent me a text early on Sunday morning (their time).

I was going for evening strolls and on this occasion I foun

Tonight I hit the road because I realized I'm gaining a lot of weight.

Out for a stress walk just now, I noticed the wacky name of the neighborhood on a pole.

Years ago when I lived in Sydney it was frequent that you'd see apartment listings featuring the term "harbor views".

The other day I posted a video by Bonnie Riatt.

This morning (my time) I joined the Masterson clan in an Easter video chat on "zoom.

There has been a noise complaint about my apartment.

On the whole, it feels like a somewhat atmospheric place to

It's now been two weeks since I had a face-to-face conversation with anyone.

Today I went for a bit of a walk.

At the end of the week I can report than both of the jobs I thought I'd saved have slipped through our fingers.

Today I ate leftover rice and lentils with the last of my prefab fish.

I've surprised myself by diffusing the situation at work with my staffer who was on Monday evening was talking about going to a lawyer.

In Ontario right now only one person may leave the house for shopping.

Last night I went out to get some things prior to the impending lock-down of Tokyo.

Well, time to start the long terrible grind on kanji once more.

One of the websites where I "published" the dissertation for my master's degree reports that that svelte 40,000 words has now been read 700 times.

We had planned to sell our car this summer.

"Badges?

This is a movie about a tough who works as a door man in the early 1960s.

I played an online board game with one of my colleagues, today.

I spent eight hours working on my old 2000-2008 era novel project.

Air travel between Japan and Canada is no more.

Tonight I did the loop through the great big cemetery near my home*.

I use eye drops on a fairly regular basis for a couple reasons.

Almost every morning I get to see the kids.

One of the irritants about this little apartment has been the Internet connectivity.

Meanwhile in Toronto, the school board has (finally!

I reached out to a friend who just moved to Vancouver with her husband in the Autumn.

Well that's the end of a month I'm sure I'll never forget.

I reached out to a lawyer friend in the Toronto area today.

Well, late March anyway.

Today it snowed a lot.

I mentioned to Mari that I noticed when getting money at an ATM that the ATM had a currency button.

Today Tokyo is on a lock-down lite, as the governor dips our collective toe into the concept of a locked-down Tokyo but without all the pesky stuff about businesses closing.

My health insurance card arrived!

Let the pandemic drag on, I've got my basic protein element

Tonight after a grueling day I attended a "virtual drinks party" with a bunch of colleagues on our shared text/videoconferencing app, which was nice.

This is a movie about the state of the "war on drugs", as told from the point of view of an officer from a local law enforcement agency who is drafted following a significant drug bust.

I've got food coming at me from all angles.

Grandma reports this experience shopping for groceries in St.

Once upon a time while visiting my dad's office (at which I would later hold some summer jobs) I saw a many-times photocopied sign titled "The Middle Manager's Prayer".

Mari had ordered a small desk and a ball chair so that I would have somewhere to sit while living in this little apartment.

I did some laundry this morning but it was far too windy to keep the stuff on the railing outside so I had to crowd myself in with drying racks all over the ~20 square meters of my apartment.

After a bit of a slow start, I went back to Kawasaki's city center and returned my keyboard.

No sign of the fever today, so I presume that my self-diagnosis of strep throat couldn't have been too far off the mark.

I woke soon after having eventually fallen asleep; maybe at 1:30 or so.

I would live in this tiny place until the end of June. Co

I worked from home today.

This is the story of what becomes of little Danny from The Shining.

Today I walked for about 4.

Early this morning I ran over to the dry cleaner's and picked up my suit.

If you're wondering, yes there's information on the developing outbreak in Japan.

I spent the first part of the day puzzling through the ongoing destruction of the global economy.

There are a few of these about my temporary neighborhood. I

I might have used this one.

Today Mari and I started the day by reviewing our priorities and deciding that there was no rush in finding an apartment.

Aha, I've figured out how to use the neutered phone that came with this studio apartment as a WiFi hot-spot.

My day started with a trek to "mouth of the gully" to drop off my suit at a dry cleaners.

10/10 for style baby, but maybe minus a hundred for parking

This is an unpleasant movie about a reclusive genius and tech billionaire who has been dabbling in artificial intelligence androids - to make women to keep under his thumb.

Bright and early this morning.

I wrote about all my running around in the city but I left out one exhausting piece.

I woke at three this morning, unable to shake the jetlag.

I need inserts for new shoes or I get plantar fasciatis tears.

Today we looked at a house in the city of Setagaya within Tokyo's long border with Kanagawa prefecture.

My day was pretty full.

In my absence, Mari suggested that the kids start tending to the aquarium fish on a daily basis.

I'm preparing for tomorrow's trip.

I woke up today to find that I have my job offer.

When I came back to Canada I used a service offered by a fellow in Manitoba to acquire a number in Toronto's then newish 647 area code.

One of the final purchases to get me back in corporate form was a set of shirts for the office.

When I was a baby, someone bought a chime ball for my distraction.

Today I gave away a good chunk of my old film and early digital camera gear.

Someone must have stepped very close to us in this one. C

We're leaving for Tokyo next week.

OK, I've sat through two of these with the kids.

This is a telling of Alan Turing's contributions to the British war effort in the Second World War.

As of this morning, the government of the province of Ontario has now paid us $250 in compensation for the strike days that saw our kids at home.

I cycled downtown to pick up a prescription, today.

We took the kids to the aquarium today because The Girl had an annual pass that was about to expire.

This is a gangster film from the United Kingdom, cleverly told as recounting of a movie plot being pitched by somebody knee-deep in the story himself.

Last night at bedtime I showed the boy how to shave, since he needed it.

Last night I reached out to a number of the headhunters that I'd spoken to during my time in Tokyo over the new year's, mentioning that I was still "working with" NN Life for this gig.

Just telling myself, "You so old, you still use df -lk /volume".

This is a live-action kids' movie about a fellow who is trying to hang on to his family's circus.

This morning we all headed out to get some greeting cards, because in the afternoon we were to pile into poor old salt-stained Méabh and toodled up to Oakville for a surprise birthday party for uncle Scott.

We're in St.

Today The Boy's best friend came over and we carried on the long-running Dungeons and Dragons campaign with the two boys and The Girl playing.

With tomorrow being a PA day, meaning the kids would be home, Mari and I headed out together for a Valentine's day lunch at a Lebanese restaurant in Leslieghville.

Today I took the kids outside so that they could take their bikes for spin up and down the street.

While I wait for things to happen in Tokyo, I've been applying for roles in Toronto and the region.

The Boy and I went downtown to pick up my spiffy new spousal visa at the Japanese consulate.

Tonight I got together with a small group from "32 Spokes", the cycling advocacy crowd in our part of town.

I've had a fairly strong bug this weekend.

One of the kids took a walk away from our ice fishing renta

The TDSB teachers are on strike today, so I wound up with four 11-12 year olds playing D&D at our place.

In preparation for my departure I did our taxes today, though I can't submit them yet.

After my team and I got sacked from a job, I received this

I just noticed this in our councilor's latest email blast (from the 31st).

Today one of my preparations for my likely departure was taking my ancient leather jacket and two very old blazers to the Value Village.

Every now and then I re-order my website or some part of it.

Today I learned that my daughter has somehow not watched Star Wars at nearly eight years old.

In preparation for an expected move to Tokyo, I've just taken the "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons" books that we used in the 80's down to the end of our driveway for someone to pick up.

I've closed the bank account for my consulting business.

Today I went downtown to meet an old colleague for a coffee.

I have to use the TTC tomorrow, and realized that I would have to sort out my payment card.

Today I met an old colleague downtown for lunch.

This is a downer of a story about a much of mutually antagonistic members of a drug cartel that's imploding over internal strife.

This the final strap I'd get for my Casio Duro. It was stil

When I was young I always marveled at my father's ability to get things done by refusing to make someone else's problem his own.

Do you suppose we all mis-read this statement by Luke Skywalker?

Touched down in Toronto today.

I'd like to think that I'd enjoy commercial fishing but I s

Every new year, the locals have some days off. They decorat

I bought this bike around 2006, but couldn't bear to have i

The way this movie was advertised didn't appeal to me.

Every new year, the locals in Miyazaki-ken run this wooden

Some damn delicious meat on the cleaning rack. Collection

These are a pair of isopod parasites that I found in a fish

I went fishing with my father-in-law on the Philippine Sea today.

interior of an ancient tomb, Miyazaki Collections containi

relief map of two burial mounds

the tree abides

Today we did archeology.

at a fine ryokan in Nichinan

a meeting room in the former home of a samurai Collections

Today we picked strawberries.

This is the bike I had made to my measurements when we live

Today we went to a shrine to pray, as it's a new year.

a tacked on doorbell

bamboo path in the hills

a valley seen from a clear-cut

A small shrine in the hills of Miyazaki Collections contai

My multi-annual plan to reduce emails has continued.

two boys and a rocket stove

sampling the rice

rice stock for making mochi

no climbing to the roof

my wife's elementary school

my wife's old elementary school

fishing at sunrise

a forestry lane on a hill

nichinan is a mill town

wet weather on broken hills

a fish restaurant in aitsu, in Nichinan Collections contai

something in the ground

a complex coastline, Nichinan

Two interesting articles on the Fermi paradox state: one, that civilization burns itself out via industrialization-fueled climate change; and two, that ignoring the discussion isn't helping us mature to the point that we can even contemplate moving into the stars.

on a laneway in Tokyo's east side

Today I traveled from Tokyo to Miyazaki, where I met Mari and the kids.

Today was another with two good things.

chiibas

Well, in for a dime, in for a dollar.

plan of a bike parking garage

Two good things today.

Today I met with an old classmate from Japanese courses way back when I was at NikkoCiti.

This is a choppy heist movie by a director who absolutely nails the stunts and visual wizardry and often struggles to capture natural human interaction.

a canal on Tokyo's east side

Today I decided I'd had enough of the cell-like "hotel room" in which I've been hold up at the surprisingly cheap cost of ¥5000 a night and went on a long walk.

Today I made the trek out to the south-eastern reaches of the Tokyo "ku", to visit an old friend: Satoi-san.

I had no meetings arranged today, but did some banking.

Today I met with a fellow Canadian in the lobby of a life insurance firm where I worked when Mari and I were first living together.

This afternoon I met with an old acquaintance - a headhunter I'd met with in the frantic days before I ultimately left Japan in late 2010.

Today I visited Tokyo sky tree, doing the tourist thing after a day of meetings yesterday.

For a second time in as many decades, the Spider-Man movies have now been rebooted; they've started all over again.

First thing I crossed the city center from Kameido to Shinjuku to go to a book store that I knew had English-language map books.

I flew to Tokyo today to find work here.

Ontario's cancelled another wind-turbine project.

An interesting article in The Verge about how greed drove a "recycling" company to falsify documents in order to conceal that monitors containing mercury were being sent to Hong Kong for dismantling.

You know how you're so good about sorting plastic bottles from non-recyclable trash?

OK, I had to watch this one twice.

For my math nerd friends out there.

Today I rode up to the Bermondsey neighborhood to meet a friend and fellow unemployee.

Today I had a meeting downtown with an entrepreneur who's built a thriving software business; within a couple of years of their start they now have four products in production with different clients.

In this fascinating video, we learn that solid-state, eco-friendly, stable, and inexpensive batteries are just around the corner--prototypes already exist!

This is a retelling of the classic Agatha Christie movie.

My eleven-year-old son and I watched this in the run-up to Christmas.

A friend in Australia passed on an article in which a corporate board member spilled the beans about the mis-allocation of millions of dollars towards management consultants who provided little value.

Today I received a letter from the CEO of Gitlab about the retraction of a planned service that had worried the user community.

explosion of red, toronto at autumn

tree reflected in ashbridge's bay

the changing season, toronto's waterfront Collections cont

chatting on a misty morning on Toronto's waterfront Collec

changing colors along toronto's waterfront Collections con

people strolling on a misty morning, toronto Collections c

misty morning on Toronto's waterfront Collections containi

three hearses parked in a bikelane, toronto Collections co

This is, at first glance, a murder investigation.

Today The Boy brought home math homework that was in our opinion way above the grade six level - to provide a formula that can explain the sequence 8, 13, 19, 26.

tall grass blowing in autumn

autumn sunlight through tall grass seeds Collections conta

What a load of shit.

This is an interesting story that feels like an adaptation from a stage production.

This is a story of a young man who goes out in search of his estranged father.

I just noticed that today is the twentieth anniversary of my web journal as a daily events record, not just movie reviews and the odd news.

This is where my cycling advocacy stuff is taking me these days.

On the weekend, I ate some wheat.

This past few years sure has produced a lot of prequels and spinoffs.

My summer went by in a blur of long start-up weeks.

Early in the summer, I heard Ken playing early in the mo

I wasn't sure the title of this one is actually a word, but it is!

Over the weekend I repatriated the last of my websites.

I read a story from Calgary in which a resident has been getting endless death-threats because he pointed out that the city's bus drivers are refusing transit tickets printed in French.

It seems that the people trying to solve the Fermi paradox are increasingly coming to the conclusion that we're utterly alone in the Universe.

I've just realized that it was thirty years ago this month that I returned to Ontario to start my university studies.

So it turns out that rats can play hide and seek.

This is a splashy fun flick set in a future where cities are now mobile affairs, roaming the countryside and taking what they need directly.