Flat3D

Summer holidays! Week one – Ibaraki

Here are some pics from the first week of my holidays with Emiri, we went to Ibaraki and stayed with her parents there.  It was a good week and below is a link to some photos with lots of captions!

I just realised that although Emiri’s littlest (although final year in highschool) sister, Seika, was there too, but she was studying everyday (in summer holidays!) from early morning to late at night so she could do well in university entrance exams!  So there aren’t many pics of her, but I am not sure it will necessarily be a summer she wants to remember!!

Anyways, here are some pics:

Summer ‘09 in Ibaraki

Tags: blueberries, duck, emiri, family, holiday, ibaraki, japan, lucky, raspberries, soba, summer

Summertime!

It’s summertime and that means holidays! Tomorrow I am heading off with Emiri on holiday to Ibaraki to visit her parents and then to Aomori to visit friends there. It will be great to get away from classes etc and have a bit of time to relax and recharge! We are going by ferry from Hokkaido (Tomakomai port) to Ibaraki (Oarai port), a journey of 19 hours by ferry! You can see from this map that it would only take 5 by plane and train, but where is the fun in that? Besides, there is a sento on the ferry, and a cinema, and a big room to sleep in, so hopefully we can arrive without so much of that manky been travelling feeling. And it works out a bit cheaper too…

Summer also means it is my birthday! Well it was my birthday… Thanks to everyone who sent birthday emails or cards or wishes or anything!
I have had a lot of fun thanks to getting a year older, last week Emiri came and made me dinner, and students from school invited me over to make gyoza (dumplings) and eat them, we had a special birthday english class too as my birthday was on a Tuesday. But to top it all, last Saturday Emiri had told me too ensure I was free for a special secret birthday surprise… I have been able to borrow a car for a few weeks while another missionary isn’t in Japan, and we drove to near the airport, where we met a guy in a car and strapped to the top of his car was, lo and behold, an Old Town canoe! The last time I had seen one was last September when PC, Andy L and I climbed in and risked life and limb just to get an all you can eat chinese and a chance to sleep on the cold ground in an over croweded tent!
So off we went canoeing down the Bibigawa river. It was beautiful, quiet, peaceful and the weather wasn’t too bad either. We took about an hour to paddle down to the get off point that the rental guys had set up. Short and uneventful, but a lovely chance to get out on some water and to introduce Emiri to the joys of paddling!

Anyways, I might get to post some photos etc from travelling, but we will see!

Tags: aomori, bibigawa, canoe, canoeing, classes, holiday, holidays, ibaraki, map, river, summer, summertime, tomakomai, trip, vacation, water

Quick update to prove I’m not dead yet…

With all the fake online reports of celebrities deaths following the series of famous bucket-kickers recently (too insensitive?) I thought I better pop up here and dispel any rumours that might have started that I am dead! I’m not dead! I’m not even famous!

Anyways… I just have been quite busy with study, church, life in Japan, and so my blog here has fell into a little bit of a lag!

Something at the more geeky end of things, I have recently reformatted my computer. Since coming to Japan I have done a fair bit of installing and uninstalling to try things and test things that might have proven useful but maybe didn’t etc and that ended up clogging my system up a little bit, not a great deal, but a little bit. So I thought I’d clean up and start fresh!
Now Sony put Windows, drivers, etc on a seperate partition then you make the discs from that and can recover the space if you like, which I did, well rather installed Win 7 beta, then the release candidate, on it.
So self-made recovery discs in hand, backups safely made and verified and mentally prepared for a few hours of offline life as my computer is rebuilt I set about reinstalling. So I went ahead and booted on the recovery discs, formatted the drive and began the Vista install sequence. Everything was going well until I got to disc 2 of the 3 recovery discs and after a lot of whirring it stopped reading and the install was aborted! The disc came out of the drive and under close inspection it had a bit of a scratch on the surface that was causing the problem!
What to do? Clean hard disk, no recovery partition, dud recovery dvds and no second computer to fiddle with things through… I did the only thing I could, I installed Windows 7 Release Candidate as my main operating system! (for those who don’t know, Win7 RC is the pre-release, final check over of Windows 7 before it is officially released in October, just to make sure it works and catch any major last minute bugs).
So thats the end of it really, I’m running Windows 7 Ultimate on my Sony effectively… Its running exceptionally well, certainly as well as Vista had become after legions of patches and updates, and much leaner. The interface changes are welcome, making the taskbar a bit more docky (but in a good way, leaving out the irritating bits of OSX’s dock and keeping the useful bits of the Windows taskbar…)
So yeah, Sony said I’d have to pay 50-odd Euro to get some new UK recovery discs sent to me (well sent to NI, then more to ship here…) So with the offer on Windows 7 for $50 in the US, £50 seems likely in the UK, I might just go on ahead and go for Win 7 instead of worrying about Vista… I still have my Vista key and can easily get my hands on a DVD to get the upgrade. Failing that I might just get my hands on the DVD and use my vista key to go back to vista. I mean really Sony can’t get away with charging me for software I already own can they?!

So there it is, I’m still alive and running Windows 7…

Tags: alive, dead, microsoft, RC, recovery, sony, vista, Win 7, win7, win7 RC, windows, windows 7