Wednesday, January 11, 2006


Junko and Arata were very disappointed with the picture of them that we have in the kitchen. They said they looked stupid. So, we took a new picture. Now this is the one that's in our kitchen.


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Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Tort Reform (stopping crazy lawsuits)

This web site (click here) tackles some common urban legends. It's an interesting read. It's also worth clicking through to the details on the well-known McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit.


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Typing Speed Test

To test your typing speed click on Power Typing.


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No More Blue Screens of Death! Norton's vs. Trend Micro

I'm happy to report that I found the source of the instability that my poor desktop was suffering from. It was Norton's Anti-Virus. My system routinely crashed if I let it idle long enough. I tried a number of tricks advised by some of the generous tech people who can be located in various forums on the net. Nothing worked.

Then my subscription to NAV ran out. Nice nice! I uninstalled Norton's, and voila! No more blue screens!

I'm now running Trend Micro's PC-cillin. No complaints so far. One of the big bonuses, aside from system stability, is that it doesn't use up nearly as many resources when doing a scan as NAV did. Norton's was slow!


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White Christmas


The view from our hotel room at the Harvest Club Kougen (Karuizawa). Technically the Kougen is in Gunma Prefecture. We were less than a couple of kilometers from Nagano.


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Christmas in Nagano Photos


Garrett and I getting ready to tuck into a rather large bottle of sake.

Chris: Hey, Garrett. Do you have tickets?
Garrett: Huh? Tickets to what?
Chris: To the 'gun show'!
Garrett: You're dumb.
Chris: Fine, then get your hand off my teat.


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We did a lot of shopping even though it was damn cold. About half of the people in Karuizawa at any one time are likely to be crammed into this Starbucks. Garrett was so delighted we found a table that he touched my nose.


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Karuizawa (Nagano Prefecture) is famous for jam.


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