On Saturday 12 August 2023, I did a ~4hr ~6.7km solo hike in Hakone on a humid day, ascending about 570m to Mt. Myojogatake (明星ヶ岳 みょうじょうがたけ 923m) from the Miyaginobashi bus stop, heading towards Mt. Myojingatake then down toward the Miyagino Annaijo bus stop. Mt Myojogatake is one of the stops on the gairin "outer rim" (外輪 がいりん) of Hakone, and you might meet trail runners attempting to complete that brutal course. If you’re a "normal" person with decent fitness, you'll find this hike up to Myo...

On Sunday 30 July 2023, I did a ~10 km solo hike in Hakone on a hot summer's day, ascending the Yusaka trail from Hakone Yumoto station, ascending 850m over about 7km to Mt Sengen 802m (浅間山 せんげんさん) and Mt Takanosu 834m (鷹巣山 たかのすやま) with the (nonexistent) Takanosu Castle ruins, then descending 400m to Chisuji Falls (千条の滝 ちすじのたき) at the 8.5km mark, and proceeding another couple of km over roads to Gora. Mts Sengen and Takanosu are related, in that Sengen used to be known as "Lower Takanosu" unti...

On Saturday 22 July 2023, I did a solo hike up Mt Kintoki (金時山 きんときさん) in Hakone, on a perfect day for hiking, and was rewarded with incredible views from the summit. This mountain has maybe the best view of Mt Fuji, too. It was a good physical challenge for this 57 yr old who mostly jogs and walks the dog. My legs held up better this time compared to my first adventure up Mt Kurobi in Gunma, probably because I've tried to be more active since then, doing several less-challenging hikes in the me...

On Saturday 15th July 2023, I did this solo hike from JR Zushi to JR Kita-Kamakura, via the "Nagoe Kiridoshi" (名越 "Nagoe" place name 切 "Kiri" cut 通 "Doushi" route or way), one of the seven ancient passes cut into the mountains surrounding Kamakura to make it easier for people and horses to pass. The news said the heat was going to be brutal, so, wanting to be out early, I packed the evening before buying some energy and protein bars at the local supermarket, and was up at 4:30am to get a quick...

On Sunday 2nd July 2023, I did this solo hike from JR Kounandai to JR Kamakura, via the Kamakura Ten'en Hiking Trail in the "Kamakura Alps". After delivering the pamphets and papers from the chonai meeting the night before to our group's mailboxes, I set out at about 6:30 am on the scooter, and parked at a 24 hour lot at JR Ofuna. From there, I took the train two stops up the Negishi line to Kounandai, bought a couple of protein bars at the combini, and exited. Outside the station, I turned on...

On Saturday 3rd June 2023, I had my first real mountain trekking experience, and I got to discover how out of shape I really am. We went up Mt. Akagi, aka Mt. Kurobi, in Gunma Prefecture; one of the 100 famous mountains of Japan (English) or 百名山 "hyakumeisan". During the trek, I asked our guide why Akagi's considered a "beginner mountain", and she said it's because there are not many areas where you'd risk death. Right. 😰 I have done some trail hiking in Kamakura and the Miura Alps, but our dau...

We at my firm eSolia decided to migrate everything to MS365, for better or worse, because literally all our clients use it and it's just more efficient if it's our daily driver. Besides the tenantname.onmicrosoft.com domain that comes with the service, you can assign a custom domain that you purchase via a registrar in the usual way. You add the domain you want in either Exchange or Azure AD admin, add a TXT record in your DNS host (like AWS Route53) to prove that you own the domain, and once ...

My wife told me about an awful thing happening in Japan. Some hunters who use "gun dogs" or "scent hounds" to flush out prey, will abandon them in the forest, chained up at the end of the hunting season in early spring, or let them stray, after which they get picked up and taken to a shelter. These people are really scum to be treating an innocent dog so cruelly like that. Rie Kaneko from Chiba set up Gundog Rescue CACI (Japanese) in 1993 to provide shelter and retrain gun dogs, even working w...

I can't believe it's been 30 years since we got married. To celebrate, we booked a tour of Shimane and Tottori prefectures, and had a fantastic time. We did a tour so we could not have to plan, and drink without worrying about someone having to drive. We took the bullet train from Shin Yokohama to Okayama, then went on the tour bus to Adachi Museum, then to Tamazukuri Onsen for the first night. The second day was on to the Shimane Winery, Izumo Taisha shrine, then Misasa Onsen. The final day was...

I finally got my proper Japan driver's license, and what an ordeal it's been. Fasten your seatbelts for this one. The incident I've been in Japan since 1987 and did not drive for the first 4 or 5 years. I always have kept my US license current, and after getting married, got and started using an international license. Never had a problem buying cars, mopeds, or insurance using the international license. They expire yearly, and recently had always bought them online via AAA, and they'd come in...

If you're trying to learn *nix command line, whether you're on a Mac, Linux, the Linux subsystem in Windows or something else, here's a few points you might find useful: In my opinion, don't try to learn every command deeply, but rather learn the basics, take a while to get used to it, then circle back for more detail. Use man to learn what you need, when you need it. Idan Kamara created a really useful site called « ExplainShell » that graphically shows what linux commands do. For example...

Our dog "Maru", a male Shiba, is going through a rebellious phase now at 11 months old. Our trainer told us Shibas especially go through a phase between 6 and 18 months where they seem to forget every bit of their training, won't listen to commands, won't eat, won't crate, forget there they're supposed to pee; all manner of fun stuff. Yep, it's happening. He's being extra difficult now, but there are still flashes of that obedient, cute little guy from, um, two weeks ago! When it happens you j...

A while back, the morning news in Japan did a piece on "how much is too much reclining" in trains and planes. The result was, most people in Japan felt that 40.4 cm (15.90551 in) was the max they wanted someone in front of them to recline. In typical Japan News fashion, they measured distances and angles, and got a cute little girl to say when she felt uncomfortable when the man in front reclined. (What burns my cookies is when the person in front of you reclines violently and suddenly.) Anyway...

Of course there are people who live by creating trouble as their raison d'être, like Baron Munchausen. In my thinking, life dishes out trouble anyway and automatically, so why make it more difficult? People who are constantly negative are as impractical in thought, as people who are constantly positive. People who make even more mistakes to compound the problem as the pressure mounts, then bail, are another good example. As are people who fail to plan at all, or people who blurt out problems ...

Thinking about motivation and how to motivate, I came to a conclusion that works for me. Praising someone for what they are already good at, is a waste of an interaction. The person being praised learns nothing, especially if you or others have said it before. The praiser misses a chance to make any sort of difference, and can fall into a rut of doing nothing to improve or better themselves. I think it's better to guide someone in the direction of things they don't like to do or are not good...

I like comedy because laughter makes me feel better, and the heavy stuff comes for free. What about in Japan? Japan has some interesting comedy or "owarai" styles that are good to know for learners of Japanese. It might be really, really esoteric to those who don't speak any Japanese, but if you're trying to get from intermediate to advanced any language, you could do worse than to listen to and learn some comedy in that language. Japan has some types of humor such as the performed styles m...

Are you a project manager or, a manager of MS Project. That is, is your selected tool impeding you rather than helping you? The more time spent fiddling with your tool (an apt metaphor here), the less time you're spending thinking and communicating about how people, things and money fit with your schedule and the goals you're aiming to meet. There may be projects that require a 5000-line Gantt chart, but even large projects I've managed have never needed one. Steering committees made up of sen...

Before COVID I used to walk to JR Totsuka station here in Yokohama, every day for my commute to Tokyo. It was a good opportunity to listen to a podcast, and I have several favorites I'll share here. Although there's English news in Japan (I've paid so much in newspaper subscription fees for the last 34 years I'm practically an investor), I like radio, and Podcasts are a great radio-like way to keep up with what is going on outside our little archipelago. I can't stand queuing, but we do a lot ...

The other day I had to do three bank transfers for my company, since my business partner who usually takes care of this, couldn't. The bank tellers are really very polite, but I can't get away from the idea that they are also completely incompetent, albeit really politely. The thing is, I had only the bank book and the hanko (stamp). If you have the cash card and PIN, it's easy to do a bank transfer. You deal with an ATM only. But if you don't, it's forms, and forms mean mistakes, especially f...

Robert on Strava says he "just takes the stings and calls it free Vespa", which is funny, but Asian Giant Hornets (Vespa mandarinia) in Japan are no joke. Read on to find out why. Sept and Oct is breeding season for the Japanese Hornet, which is when they get aggressive. In Japanese, these are called "oo-suzumebachi (オオスズメバチ)" meaning "great sparrow bee" because of their large size. You know you're in trouble when they start clacking their mandibles. You'll hear their buzzing anyway, but whe...

A question on the Hugo support forum prompted me to try deploying the Hugo quickstart site on Vercel. It was super simple. Here's what I did. Hugo Quickstart First, just run through the quickstart steps in a local folder to get it basically working. I put my projects in $HOME/dev. Connect to Vercel using their CLI command Assuming you have installed the vercel CLI command locally and have authenticated, you can connect your new Hugo project to your Vercel account by running vercel in the p...

The other day I wrote about using Postmark for sending out HTML emails. We wanted to have a way to backup our Postmark email templates automatically, so we coded a simple Github Actions workflow. There is about 10 minutes of setup for you to do, and it works well enough to backup your Postmark templates and server information on a schedule. Basically, you need to: Visit our postmark-backup repo on Github. Click "Use this template" to copy the repo to your own account where you can set you...

Roman Perepelitsa has coded a fantastic, featureful zsh configuration that works right out of the box. "Zsh for Humans" (aka "z4h") and its companion prompt "Powerlevel10k" are easy to install, and come configured with the most useful features you might need in an interactive prompt. You can see what my configuration of the prompt looks like here: I love the ssh wrapper feature, which lets you auto-push your zsh environment up to a remote server. You use the wrapper like this: % z4h ssh myu...

If you are hosting your app on a service like the recently-closed Webfaction, you might be getting shared space for your web pages or app, databases and email addresses that can be used for sending or receiving. However, many modern hosting environments such as Vercel , Netlify or others, don't come with email capability and assume you'll setup some service to handle the emails that are issued from your app, such as welcome messages, password resets and the like, or, inbound emails. There are...

After updating to Apple's iOS 15, amongst several privacy initiatives in iCloud+, you can enable "MPP" or Mail Privacy Protection, that has email marketers up in arms because it blocks those 1px "beacon" images used to track your opens. It's easy to turn on: Settings, Mail, Privacy Protection, Protect Mail Activity ON What it does it pre-fetch your email contents to a proxy, blocking the trackers email marketers typically use. When macOS Monterey is released, it should be available in Mail....

Japan Rail's IC rail pass "Suica" is so named because it helps daily commuters pass through gates easily, i.e. in a "Sui-Sui" manner, since 2001. Penguins are skillful swimmers, passing in and around obstacles with ease, so that’s why the "Suica Penguin" was born. Its designer is the lovely Chiharu Sakazaki 坂崎千春, who modeled it after an Adélie penguin. Ironically, people shuffling towards escalators during rush hour, walk a lot like penguins. 🐧🚅 ...