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Driving on the wrong side of the road…
When coming to Sydney I knew I was going to face a new challenge. It isn’t that I had never visited a country that drives on the left side of the road, but I had always taken public transport in those places. In Hong Kong, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Bahamas, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Grand…
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Tie me Kangaroo Down, Sport!
When I found out I was coming to Sydney, Australia I made a mental list of things I wanted to do and to see. So far I have checked off seeing the Sydney Opera House, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Bondi Beach and Manly Beach. While walking around Circular Quay I heard an Aboriginal busker playing…
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Gone for Walkabout…
One of my very good friends, Erdal Ozkaya, picked me up Sunday morning for an incredible day in and around Sydney. He and his family took me to two very famous beaches – Manly Beach (where Erdal’s son and I practiced our Taekwondo) and Bondi Beach. They took me to a place called Woolloomooroo (which…
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AC03: Flying with Phaedra!
As I walked down the gangplank toward my ‘home in the air’ for the next eleven hours I heard even before I could see her the head Flight Attendant on Air Canada flight 003 from Vancouver to Tokyo. She was on the PA system almost cheerleading her staff, and as I appeared she put on…
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SQ11: The Flight of a lifetime!
If I have been delinquent in my blogging over the past few weeks I apologize – I have been preoccupied with work. Overloaded may be a more accurate term, but that is no reason to neglect you, and I apologize for it. In my defense, I have a great article that was ‘in the can’…
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Server Core Address Woes
From the files of “What the F@rk?!” Here’s a little gotcha that I’ve been wrestling with all afternoon. I hope this post can save some of you the frustration (exacerbated by jetlag) that I have been experiencing. I am configuring a bunch of virtual machines as domain controllers for the company I am consulting for…
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Warning!
Wednesday morning I was sitting at my desk when a pop-up appeared on my screen. It was actually an Internet Explorer window, and although it was written entirely in Japanese, I suspected immediately that it was a scam, a fraud, malware, or something. Why? It had a very old Microsoft logo on it (from the…
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Mayor Ford: It’s time to go.
Over the past eighteen months I have written a couple of articles about Toronto Mayor (and News Talk 1010 radio host) Rob Ford. In the first one (Leave Mayor Ford Alone!) I came to his defense when people took a video of him leaving a fast food restaurant and made fun of him (he was…
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The Urinating Boy, and the weirdest volunteers ever…
At the north end of Platform 2 of the Hamamatsucho Station on the Yamanote line there is a statue/fountain that may be the strangest I have seen since I got to Japan. I actually have no business at this station and never would have seen it, except for that another gaijin that I met recently…
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Thank you readers and Happy Halloween!!
The calendar has turned in Tokyo. Although there are a few hours left in North America, here it is now Friday, and more importantly it is November. I got in late from a Halloween party in Shibuya… the whole city was a crazy place tonight, and I have the pictures to prove it (they come…
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American Express: Leave home without them, because they don’t care.
I have been a customer of American Express for six years. Because it is not my primary credit card (I know, they are a charge card) they have TERRIBLE customer service. I have paid down my balance every month, but because my average spending on their card is lower, they refuse to let me buy…
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Respect the Belt… Respect the Art.
I mentioned in conversation a couple of days ago that I was going to be starting to learn Kyokushin Karate in Japan and that I was very excited. One of the people involved in the discussion mentioned that the first few months of any martial art is going to be less interesting, but if I…
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A Real Trip… Happy Halloween from Japan!
Saturday night was Halloween. Okay, no it wasn’t, but obviously all of the great parties for that occasion are on the week-end. If you can imagine that in Tokyo people seem to dress up in costumes on a regular basis for no good reason, they you will believe that Halloween in Tokyo (and especially in…
The World According to Mitch
The day to day ramblings of an IT Professional (and so much more…)
