Flat3D

Teeing up a goat

They laughed at PC when he tried it.
They loved it when Mark-boy Little showed up with one.
No-one even notices when Lyle changes his.
Now its my turn… I am growing me a beard! A goatee to be precise.

My dad used to tell me the only reason to grow a beard was to avoid shaving and any facial short of a big bushy was pointless. But the carefully trimmed moustache says otherwise.

I must admit though, this whim was born from not shaving for a week and then deciding that a full blown beard is just too much for a 23 year old…

Anyways, I am sure photos will appear at some stage!

Speed demon…

Today we all went to Aomori to a prayer meeting. While we were there Angela mentioned she wanted to get YahooBB. Not for the fast internet so much as the free phone calls to all other YahooBB users in Japan (which most OMF missionaries are).

So on the way home we stopped by Yamada Denki in Goshogawara. Right inside the door I saw the YahooBB sign covered in bright colours, complicated kanji and plenty of katakana. I looked for a moment and it wasn’t too hard to figure out what the speeds were by the titles of the packages.
Here is a pricing list in English
Notice how the slowest broadband speed is 8Mbps. Notice how the provider we use at home, F2S has a top speed of 8Mbps.

The prices aren’t that different though.

BUT the big thing comes when your eyes drift leftward and you see speeds increasing through 12Mbps and 26Mbps right up to 50Mbps.

Fifty megabits per second.

If we had that speed in our house at home the 11mbps wifi network would slow our data transfer. No longer would the modem be the bottleneck! Huge files would appear in seconds. You could watch streamed television at better-than-normal digital TV quality! And here that is exactly what they do! BBテレビ (BBterebi) is Japanese for BBTV…

And it doesn’t stop there. This is inaka… This is countryside… The sticks… The boonies… The back end of nowhere…

In Tokyo I have heard of 100Mbps access at not much higher a price using optical fibre cables right into your home… Crazy speeds…