Christmas was pretty good fun!  I went to the Christmas Eve service at Sapporo International Church, then on Christmas Day had dinner with friends at the Pain’s apartment and headed out with Alex to meet some students and watched About a Boy on DVD, had chocolate fondue and just about caught the last train home!

One disappointment on Christmas morning was the lack of snow, it had snowed on and off for a couple of weeks, but had rained just before Christmas Day.  The day went through in relative dampness.  I called home and talked to family lamenting the lack of snow for Christmas, no sooner had I put the phone down, got my coat and headed out to meet Alex and the students from the university than I was met by thick heavy snow falling.  The snow kept going all night and Boxing day morning was spent knee deep clearing my pathway and car space!  The winter truely began on boxing day, the tarmac has barely been seen since!

So on the 27th I packed up and headed south!  I caught the train to Aomori where I met with Emiri and stayed a few nights in Itayanagi Church, enjoyed fellowship on Sunday and some snowboarding on Monday.  Then Emiri and I caught the overnight bus to further south, escaping the snow and entering the (slightly) warmer climes of Kanto!  Eventually arriving at Emiri’s parent’s house in Ibaraki prefecture.  Where I got to have a traditional(ish) Japanese 正月 (New Year).

The really interesting thing is that Emiri’s family own and run a soba noodle restaurant.  At New Years it is tradition in Japan to eat soba noodles if you want to have a long life (cos noodles are long y’see!  simple really…) and so for soba noodle restaurants everywhere it is a busy day!  So everyone helped in the restaurant, including me!  I didn’t go near the vital parts of the kitchen, opting instead to dish out the sliced leeks and sauce etc that you eat with your soba, wiping trays and other more mundane, but safe, tasks.  The night was great fun though and was followed by staying up til midnight to see the New Year in!

Other hightlights of the trip were the Oarai Aquarium, a huge dinner on New Years day, a barbecue in January (it wasn’t much colder than normal Northern Irish barbecue season weather!!), making tako-yaki and a lot of relaxing and taking it easy in between times!

Here are some photos from the trip!

Photos from Aomori and Ibaraki

On another note, I have put an interesting picture in the “recent pics” section on the right.  In Japan when you go to the loo, you remove your normal slippers (shoes are left at the door of the house, slippers may be worn thenceforth) and slip into a sleek pair of special toilet slippers.  If you ever happen to require the facitilies in my flat here in Sapporo, these are the very slippers you’ll find waiting for you just inside the door.

In other news, I am reenabling Re-Captcha on this here doolally to help those poor bookscanners out with recognising their words!

Check out this BBC News Story…

Since the last entry I have finished my exam (only had one…the LAST one!) and have literally just checked the result online to find I passed! But it ain’t over yet. Gone are the days when you’d be free after your exams, but not me, oh no. Now I have to complete and hand in a 20,000 word dissertation by mid-September… Yikes…
My subject of choice is “Paul’s Church planting in Acts”. I chose it because the majority of the work that goes on in Japan is Church planting work, and I want to do something linked to what I will be involved in (both directly and indirectly) out there (it’s hard to find Japanese topics to study in Belfast!). So far I think it is going ok, I have been working through Paul’s work in Acts, I’ve scrutinised it in a fair bit of detail and am now working through more specifically… I have chosen to look at the major points Luke makes about Paul’s work (he tends to pull out a major point at most of the stops Paul makes, often something done regularly, but studied at that juncture in detail…)
Anyways I’m probably boring you and you’ll stop reading if you haven’t already…

Recently I have bought a new camera! Well, new to me! It’s been a few years since the digital revolution really took off and the result is that there are a bunch of decent DSLR cameras out there second hand at pretty reasonable prices. I haven’t done much fun photography (ie photographing for photographing’s sake rather than recording events etc) and would quite like to start into it a bit again… So I was on ebay and snapped up a Canon EOS 300D, not the most up to date camera, but a great camera of it’s time, and still a quality camera! I got a great price and can’t wait til it arrives!!

I haven’t heard much, but hopefully some of us will be doing a bit of paddling soon too. I haven’t been out in my boat since YC stopped! Jake has also given me lend of his Mega Maverick, a plastic surf kayak, as he has got himself a beautiful carbon fibre boat (along with Lyle and Tommy…) and I am really looking for an excuse to get out.
Some of us also have (sketchy) plans to paddle from Antrim to the North Coast along the Lower Bann one of these days… Hopefully pretty soon!

Still at work at GCD… NICarfinder.co.uk is getting underway and keeping us pretty busy, along with the usual raft of other work…

My OMF applications are still working along, I pretty much have my medical forms filled in and just need to find out and tidy up some bits and get them sent off, candidate’s Course is at the start of July and I am travelling around various places speaking and sharing about Japan and future plans for me.

So thats about it I think! Life is extremely busy at the moment and so forgive me if I don’t get much chance to update this in the near future!

But before anyone gets too excited, it turns out the flux capacitor isn’t what we all thought it was…
This is what it really is

The boffins at Hewlett Packard have developed what seems to be a “memristor”, a passive, fundemental component that can remember it’s set resistance… It sounds a lot more boring than Marty McFly’s gear, but it could have a big effect on industry…

We headed north to Aomori to stay in Itayangi Church, visiting Emily and other friends I met while here. Also giving my mum a chance to see where I had been and experience life in Japan a little!

So far I have been snowboarding, Emily’s parents came to visit with (soba noodles!), I’ve taken mum to see a few sights around the town, went with some of the english class “students” and the Ghent’s current short termer to an onsen and then for a tour of the local airport (one of the “students”, Mr Fujimoto, used to have his own plane and still flies from time to time from the airport)… and eaten all kinds of things that I have missed while in NI!

I might post some photos later, or maybe when I get home…

“Those foreigners going home and leaving us with all the work to do!!!”

I wonder if that’s what we are going to start hearing on the Steven Nolan show as we find our factories and other undesirable jobs devoid of workers and our unemployed feeling the pressure to get off their backsides!

The first chronologically that comes to mind (there have been loads I’m sure) is when someone mentioned about Nescafe being a bad idea because their owner Nestle is notoriously unfair when it comes to trading with coffee producers in third world countries. Now I don’t know if it is true any more, or if they have evened things up with pressure from campaigners, but this lead someone to comment how they didn’t see why fair trade was a good idea… After all, we pay more for fair trade products, and the producer gets more, so the trading from the company isn’t any different is it? They still make profit, we are the ones bearing the brunt!
But that’s the point! Very few corporations are going to give up profits to make people feel better, the genius of the Fair Trade initiative is that companies don’t have to lose profit, in fact they stand to gain profit in most cases. What the Fairtrade foundation has done is to provide an extra marketing boost to companies products, this allows them to inrease their sale price, while still remaining competitive (a lot of people will pay the little bit extra to make themselves feel better and be charitable). The company doesn’t lose out, in fact can make more money. But to get the Fairtrade status, they have to live up to certain criteria, criteria which help out the producers of the raw materials; giving them a fairer amount for their produce rather than ripping them off because they have no other choice. All the while the company gets a nice bit of PR and a healthy profit. Ultimately the only loser is the end buyer, and even then its only a small amount lost for the gain of a cleaner conscience.

So the point isn’t to make companies nicer or make them pay out more, it’s to give the producers a fairer amount of money in a way that the companies will be happy to comply with.

Number two was at a billboard I saw in Belfast last week. It was campaigning for disabled people’s rights, which is a good thing, but it was done badly… Let me explain. The billboard was expounding in short and snappy form the fact that the percentage of unemployed people who are disabled is disproportionately high. Sounds simple and unfair right?
But if we are living in an equal opportunity society (in terms of disabled/able-bodied opportunity (sorry if you are offended because I don’t know the PC terms…although feel free to enlighten me)) then for each opportunity for employment you should have an equal chance of getting the job regardless of your disability. Still the billboard seems right!
BUT when you consider that a disabled person will not, for reasons of practicality and safety, not be able to do certiain jobs, the statistics will change. For example, a blind man cannot become a taxi-driver, no matter how good his dog is. Thus the number of jobs that a disabled person can go for is immediately and unavoidably lowered.
And, if society was equal, in the jobs disabled people can do, their chances of employment would be no higher than anyone elses. So the pool of jobs is smaller and the chances are the same. The outcome of this will be a disproportionate number of disabled people being unemployed. Simply because society is both safe, practical and fair. And this is ignoring all of the other factors…
Important!
Don’t get me wrong, I am all for equality. I know that the billboard is making a valid point, the numbers of disabled people, even with this factored in, in employment is disproportionately low and it is unfair and whats more I’m ashamed to be part of a society that is this way. But for some reason it bugged me that the billboard would put up something that, if thought about, is really not saying anything at all.

The third one was seeing a sign outside a Gospel Hall near Carrickfergus. The sign, an obvious attempt at reaching out, said “He died for our sins!”. Nothing wrong with that, perfectly valid sign. Except that the makers obviously didn’t stop to ask “How will passers by read this?”
If you are passing by without any link to the church, you are going to read the sign and think “How nice that he died for their sins” and carry on.
Perhaps a better sign would say:
“He died for your sins”

As I said there are plenty more, but mostly IT related and pretty geeky!

In other news I found out that LG, the company who make TVs, phones, computing stuff, other electronic goodies began life being known as the “Happy Happy Good Times Company”.