On Sunday I rang my Dad for the first time since I got here. Among other things he mentioned that he had read my blog but described it as being a bit “wacky” and that he could not make head or tail of it.

Now I could take this to mean 1 of 2 things: Either he finds my style of writing down whatever rubbish that comes into my head at the time and publishing it for all to see on the net silly or he does not really know how a blog works and got confused by the random titles and jabberings littering his web browser. If the second reason is the case read this Dad! If it’s the first reason then I will cry inside.

Still the fact that he said that reminded me how I still haven’t bothered to write the About page for this blog, maybe that will help visitors to this site work out what on earth is going on. I will write it soon, I promise.

After I have written this, I am going to try to use my complicated looking washing machine for the first time, wish me luck……

1. Get on a plane.

2. Go to Japan.

For a blog supposedly about going to Japan I have mentioned it very few times, well only 6 odd months after I started this blog I am finally there.

And I can’t read anything.

Sure I can read the odd character but even then I have to work out what the word means having done that, it is most frustrating. I really have to crack open my Japanese textbooks again and do something about it but my jet lag is so bad that by the time I get back home I just want to lay about doing nothing. Hopefully by the time I’ve been here a week it will have gone away, it is really starting to annoy me.

The other day I bought Valve’s Orange Box over Steam. I mainly got it to play through the Half Life 2 episodes, having played Half Life 2 to the end a couple of years back and really loving the game despite not really liking FPS games that much. However the Orange Box isn’t just about Half Life 2, it contains Team Fortress 2 and a odd little game called Portal.

I didn’t really expect much from Portal, I fired it up expecting to play for 5 minutes and then to turn it off, only to find myself engrossed in mind bending logic for about 2 hours. I finished that first play on level 17 of 19 (according to the in-game signage) and I thought to myself “Well that was fun and all, but is this it?”

That wasn’t it.

The last part of this game was one of the most enjoyable gaming experiences I’ve had in ages. I laughed, I cogitated and (somewhat worryingly) I found that I was talking out loud to no one but myself about what was going on in the game. I implore anyone reading this to seek out a copy of this game as soon as possible, you won’t regret it. The main game can be finished in less than about 4 hours too so it is perfect for those of you without much time on your hands.

Any game that has “the cake is a lie” in graffiti on the wall has to be worth anybodies time, doesn’t it?

As some of you reading this site may have noticed, quite often this site seems to be down. I’m not sure if it was 123-reg‘s fault or not but all my emails to them about the problem were met with shrug of the shoulders from their tech department. So I finally lost patience with them and bought a new domain name and hosting from idleserv instead. Screw you 123 reg!

I suppose it was about time I got my own hosting anyway rather than just scabbing it off a friend for nothing. So now I own 2 domains both nipponthebus.co.uk and nipponthebus.com, the co.uk one will probably expire after a year but I plan to keep the .com one. It has a more international ring to it, which is better I guess.