What's Been Rocking My World

This Sunday, at 9.42am, I awoke, with Jake and Warren who happened to be staying over at my apartment, to the somewhat violent shaking of my house.

Earthquake.

Less than 80km away, in a prefecture next to Toyama, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake had occur ed. My house shook, picture frames fell over and the walls rocked. It was quite exciting really.

Nearer the epicentre nearly 200 were reported injured and 1 dead. We got off lucky:

In October 2004, an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.8 struck the Niigata region
in northern Japan, killing 65 people and injuring more than 3,000. In 1995 a
magnitude 7.2 tremor killed more than 6,400 people in the city of Kobe.

The aftershocks continued for a couple of days, but I haven't felt any yet today. (Edit: Strike that.. I just felt one!) Check out this BBC Website link for more info if you're interested.

So after surviving a major earthquake here on Sunday morning, I thought I should give a little up date on life. This week my fantasy stocks and shares aren't doing so well. Down about 1000 pounds. I don't really know how to pick winners yet. Max's stocks are up 11000 dollars! I'll keep going until I get the hang of it.

Also I have been spending a good portion of time on Japanese study, but I'm starting to think Japanese might not be so useful. Unless I can incorporate Japanese usage into my future life, then there seems little point investing all this time in it. It might look good on a CV but what's the use in a good CV when I start my own business. Unless of course it's a Japanese business, but then business Japanese would take even longer to master!

Speaking of which, I'm going to have to clean up my digital footprint before I start my first business. RE: How to Clean Up Your Digital Dirt Before It Trashes Your Job Search. (Thanks to Mr Red Face for this link). I also heard an article about this same thing on BBC Radio 5 this morning.

It affects me because I had the amazing lack of forethought to register this blog as http://www.brownsdon.blogspot.com/. Now any prospective employer or investor can find details of my personal life simply by typing my name into Google. I come up top! Mind you, it is an opportunity to produce an altogether more professional looking persona, if one was so inclined.

In the not to distance future I will be deleting, re-registering and re-starting with a new more anonymous blog. I'll try to save my old posts, at least to my PC if not on the new blog, as they're quite a good record of things in general and I'm glad a made them ('If your life's worth living, it's worth recording!' to quote success coach Anthony Robbins).

Right that's enough life recording for the moment, and possibly the end of the current Rich Man's World. Don't be surprised if next time you try this blog it's completely gone, completely changed or as may be the case for a couple of weeks, completely the same.

Road Trip Osaka

It's been a fun couple of weeks. Last weekend I had sushi so fresh, the chef was scooping it out of a tank and carving it up in front of me. Then last Tuesday a graduating student (graduation day was March 1st) came to school with his new motor bike and practically forced me to drive it round the car park. My first motor bike driving experience, and it was easier than I thought. On Wednesday and Thursday I took yoga, and set up a Fantasy Share trading account. On my first day trading, I made 20,000 GBP with a lucky spread bet. It would be nice to make that every day. I have been less lucky with my share choices and my fantasy total is down 2524 GBP.

On Friday, I bought the world's thinnest, and coolest 3G Mobile phone. It's about as thick as an eyelid. Pretty nice. Finally Japan is giving me some kick ass technology. I could fit my camera, mp3 player and phone inside a tea bag. Also the phone has the new headphoneless bluebrain handsfree technology, allowing direct signal transfer to the bones of your inner ear. Works really well, much clearer than using it the old way.

Saturday was the start of a fun road trip to Osaka. 5 hours in the car, a couple of wrong turns, but over all pretty easy. Since it was St Patrick's day, we donned our greensleeves and headed to Murphy's, the Pig and Whistle and finally Club Pure. Club Pure is 3500Yen (about 15quid) for men to get in and 2500 Yen (10quid) for women. Sound expensive? It's not. It's all you can drink. Open bar. For 6 hours. Amazing.

Sunday was spent wondering round the really cool Shinsaibashi and Amerikamura areas. Well the day time was. Osakas gay district was recommended for sunday night life and we headed over to see what we could see. We had a great dinner in a not gay at all American style restaurant, then headed off to find a bar. Apparently, Osaka's gay community is pretty quiet on a sunday, and out of the 9 patrons in the bar, 7 were in our group, with only one in our group actually being what in polite circles is called "a gay".

On Monday an interesting Salivador Dali exhibition was visited (with great picture narration and commentation by Jake Groves), followed by a viewing of "Deep Sea" at the world's largest Imax screen, narrated in the world's most patronising way by Jonny Depp and Kate Winselt. "Nearly 5 feet long!" "the word we use is Sym-bi-osis"

After that it was time to head home to the not so bright lights of Toyama Prefecture. I can't wait to see what the next couple of weeks have in store!