happylife

Zenzai

Zenzai is a typical Japanese sweet which is made of small red beans and sugar. We enjoy it both heated or cooled. A bunch of chestnuts or omochi a loaf of white sticky rice cake are added as the topping of zenzai. They have zenzai look more colorful and taste better. We can even get zenzai from a vending machine in a shape of canned drink, but it is rather curious. As you know, Japanese sweets are healthy because they don't contain any fat. In Japan there are few super-fat people. I think it owes much to this healthy sweet food. Sure we have sometimes chocolate, ice-cream, or butter cake, but we have them by far less than Western people. Old Japanese people rarely have them especially which causes Japan a country of longevity. So, zenzai must be a great food.

Tokyo maze

Tokyo is of course the central city of Japan, but it has no center itself. Someone say that Imperial Palace is the center of Tokyo, and the other say the Tokyo station is the center. There are so many places or building which can be the symbol of this city; Tokyo tower, Diet Building, Ginza, Shinjuku, and much more. Tokyo consists of so many symbolic and central things, and so it has no very central thing. Tokyo is a center-less city. This map, which draws only the small part of my neighborhood, shows the chaos of Tokyo. There are no straight roads or rectangular blocks. It is really a maze. Even I, who was living there for decades, sometimes get lost. But I don't think it is bad to be chaotic. Sure it is hard to drive a car from point A to point B through this large maze, it is a little bit amazing to walk around in Tokyo and happen to see something new. Tokyo is not only a maze but also an always changing maze. It is really an attractive city for a person who loves busy and brand-new things.

How to deal with books

I often go to bookstores without buying any books. I go there just to read books. I think I can keep the best concentration on reading in bookstores because I have to evaluate the book and decide whether to buy or not in a limited time. As soon as I pick up a book from the book shelf, I first glance at the cover page, then the index and then the introduction. It takes five to ten minutes per one book for me to do all these processes and I can eventually grab the outline of the book. In most case, it is enough for me and I rarely want to purchase to own it. I have once bought any books I was interested in, which caused a terrible situation. That is I was surrounded by a numerous books which interested me before and which I hadn't read yet. This was a very stressful situation both mentally and physically because such books threatened me in my brain and in my room. Now I am a bad customer for bookstores because I rarely purchase books. In this way, I can save money and keep my peace. In fact, there's no more space to hold books in my book shelf. The only problem is that I can't use this method in English books. It is too hard for me to grasp the outline in ten minutes in English. So my room is getting filled with English books now.

How to get money from the Internet

This is the summary of my now reading book "Multiple streams of Internet income." First of all, in order to get money you have to have your customers. To get your customers, you should have subscribers of your ezine who are going to be your prospects and then customers. There are various methods to get your subscribers of your ezine. The most effective one is to offer a particular valuable information or report free. Once you get enough subscribers, it's easy to increase them and get some money from them. All these processes might look taking a long time and effort, but it isn't so difficult as you think before actually doing it. With the power of the Internet, you can do them in a short time without any costs. -- Well, I know it. And all I have to do is just starting it.

Contact lenses

I've been nearsighted since I was a child. As I get older, my nearsightedness has got worse. I can't even see my own foot fingers clearly without glasses or contact lenses. I've used my eyes too much gazing at computer displays for a long time, or reading small characters on books too much. I believed that sailors live in a good conditions for their eyes because they are always seeing far away in a vast sea. But I found that it wasn't true after I learned sailing last year. Sailors have to watch small characters on charts in a shaking boat. Furthermore, their eyes are always exposed under the sunshine. The UV lights are known to affect eyes badly. Sure it is a sad thing to live with bad eyes, but I barely feel the sadness in my everyday life owing to contact lenses. I'm using soft contact lenses which can be used for one week (or more) with no care. After one week I only have to dispose them and put on the new ones. It's fantastic. As I have been wearing the same lenses for two weeks, they've got fogged. Now I have to change them and feel the sadness of being nearsighted.

Octopus wiring

I am surrounded by a lot of electronic gadgets such as a PC, cell phone, music player, IC dictionary, portable game, and so forth. Most of them are using a rechargeable battery and they need to be charged from the power line. I have four outlets in my room which are far from enough. In order to compensate for these insufficient outlets, I'm using a lot of power taps and there are several taps like this picture. We call in Japan this kind of wiring "octopus wiring" because it looks like legs of an octopus. This octopus wiring is said to be dangerous because it might cause fire. But It is so convenient and necessary for me that I can't stop using it. As you know in most gadgets, how to supply the power is the last remained problem. The Li-on battery is surely a great answer, but it needs annoying charging process which is even dangerous. So I'm urgently desiring that the fuel battery comes into practical use as soon as possible.

Being ubiquitous

A week ago, I changed my cell phone. I had been using a disposal cell phone which can be used for pre-limited hours by purchasing a pre-paid card at convenient stores. The card costs 3,000 yen and I can use the phone for one to two hours with the card. It looks expensive, but as I rarely use cell phone, I can save the money most effectively. When the phone was expired a week ago, I happened to see a guide book of a special cell phone which won the most favorite prize last year in Japan. The book tells much about the advantage of this cell phone and I got enticed into the fascinating power of it. After ten minutes I found myself at a cell phone shop ordering this phone. I made a contraction and paid 3,980 yen to get it. The name of the phone is Kyocera AH-K3001V and it also has a nickname "Kyo Pon".

The largest advantage of Kyo Pon is that I can connect to the Internet without any PC or PDA. It has a brand new, full browser named Opera. And with the combination of the constant rate plan, I can use it as long as I like, which means that I can connect to the Internet any where and any when just with Kyo Pon and without minding the cost. The constant fee is 5,000 yen a month which is a little bit more expensive than before, but I'm now totally satisfied with this Kyo Pon.

I have been using Kyo Pon for one week and I got almost hooked on it, always connecting to the Internet except while taking meals and bath. Of course I have a notebook PC and I was able to connect to the Internet. I know it is more comfortable because it has by far a bigger display and high-speed broad band connection. But I'm now using Kyo Pon for longer time than PC. The ubiquitous advantage of Kyo Pon is so great. Suppose you're in bed and have a question about something. If you have only a PC and it takes one or half minutes just to start it, you might keep sleeping in your bed and forget in the morning what you wanted to know last night. With Kyo Pon, all I have to do when I had a question is just taking up Kyo Pon and pressing some ten keys to get the answer from the Internet. It's really wonderful and I'm warring about the fact that I can't use Kyo Pon in Vancouver.

Always under construction

This is not a landslide picture, but a picture of a road construction site. This street which has three lanes and runs near my house is one of the main streets in Tokyo and is always jammed. The construction plan of widening this road was proposed when I was a student, it was almost twenty years ago. And the construction has not finished yet. I think it would take ten more years. The construction lets the traffic jam worse and the scenery along this street is terrible. A lot of people hope that it finishes as early as possible, but in vain. Of course I understand that the purchasing of the site for the road is a difficult problem, but the progress is too slow. I think that the government should have more leadership and the residents squatting in the site should give up the idea of selling their land too expensive.

Mr. Incredible

Yesterday, I saw "Mr. Incredible" at Shinjuku. I had been looking forward to watching this movie since I was in Vancouver last month. It was released in North America soon after I left Vancouver and was also released in Japan soon after I got a slipped disk. So I couldn't see it for a long time until yesterday. Anyway, the work was incredibly great. I can't find even a slight fault in this picture. I really love this kind of movie which has its own, wonderful, happy and dreamy world of view. Pixer's technology has perfectly established the all 3D graphics movie. It is so natural and super-natural that I didn't even mind that this film is all made of CG. This film is of course my most favorite one in this year and maybe in this decade.

Wars in a pocket

To tell the truth, I'm now addicted to a simulation game named "Gameboy Wars" running on Nintendo's pocket game machine. You may think of me as childish, but this game is well designed and fascinates a lot of adults such as me. It is one of table games just like chess or shogi. It contains hundreds of stage including special field like a city, factory, bridge, road, river, sea, plain, and mountain. The players up to four people (and any players can be replaced with the computer) fight together moving their weapons on the stage. There are more than ten weapons including, soldiers, tanks, rocket launchers, helicopters, bombers, dog fighters, battle ships, and even submarines. It takes five minutes to six hours to play each one stage, and there are about two hundred stages included in this small game machine. When I cleared all of the stages, I was surprised to find hundreds of hidden stages appeared. I'm very tired of wars.