Archive for the 'General' Category

General posts

My Short Trip to America

I went to America the other day, but I'm already back in Japan.

Actually, it was my shortest trip to America, having been there for less than an hour. In fact, I was back in Osaka eating lunch 15 minutes later.

As part of the paperwork for selling my house, a few of the thick stack of associated documents needed to be notarized, so I had to visit the US consulate in Osaka (officially, the Consulate General of the United States of America, Osaka Japan).

I knew that I was getting close to the building when [...]
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Creative Street-Sweeper Design

I awoke the other day to find Anthony playing with a street sweeper he'd built. Perhaps every three-year-old does this, but I was really impressed with both the imagination and the ingenuity of the design.

As far as I know, he's hasn't seen a street sweeper like this, so the design is all from his imagination. He did see a street sweeper during the summer, but it had the vacuum/sweeper hidden within the center of the vehicle, and more or less looked like a brick with wheels. I have no idea where he got the [...]


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How to Sell A House Quickly, and At a Profit

We sold our Cupertino house today.

I'm not sure whether our method is the best, but for what it's worth, here's how we sold it quickly, and for a profit:

Buy a crappy, run-down, termite-infested house at what turns out to be the start of one of the greatest housing booms of all time. (I recommend, however, that you know it's termite infested before buying it; we didn't.)

Over the course of the next few years, remodel, pouring more money into it than you paid for the whole property to begin with. Include ample amounts of blood, sweat, and tears. [...]


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Protected: Anthony Getting Out of Line
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Better Search-Engine Indexing of My Blog

Every so often I look at my server logs to see by what means people find their way to pages on my blog. One thing that's long bothered me is that people's Yahoo! and Google! searches often bring them to my blog's home page, rather than to the post-specific page containing the text that was matched by the their search.

For example, my previous post contains the text "There's a camera collector in Massachusetts....," and because my blog home page contains my five most-recent posts, that post and its text will stay on the home page until [...]
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