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Latest Posts:

  • Stuff the App Store needs to do..

    The iOS App Store really is a brilliant thing. I first learned to program way before internet access was widely available, so the options for sharing my first creations (in STOS Basic, on the Atari ST), amounted to 3.5in floppy disks – today, if you can code something you can easily distribute it to a…

  • No, Jeremy Hunt has not saved Lewisham A&E

    I’m putting this online to preempt the inevitable Evening Standard headlines claiming that Jeremy Hunt has today spared Lewisham Hospital’s A&E department. From his statement today: On the emergency care proposals, Sir Bruce was concerned that the recommendation for a non-admitting Urgent Care Centre at Lewisham may not lead, in all cases, to improved patient…

  • Japan on a Budget: Fukushima-ken

    Aizuwakamatsu, Fukushima-ken Three years ago, most people probably hadn’t heard of Fukushima. Today everybody has heard of it, but very few people are visiting. This is a great shame, for many reasons. The name itself is something of a problem. Fukushima is the prefecture, a city within it, and also the namesake of the nuclear…

  • Japan on a Budget: Hirosaki and Aomori

    Inside the Hakkoda-Maru Aomori-ken sits at the very top of Honshu. Getting there on the train is as easy as you could hope: Shin-Aomori is the current terminus of the Tohoku Shinkansen, so you can leap on a Hayate service from Tokyo or, like me, catch it from Morioka, where the Akita mini-shinkansen line meets…

  • Japan on a Budget: Tazawako and Nyuto Onsen

    Tazawa is a beautiful, almost circular, lake in Akita-ken. Getting near the lake is easy: use the Akita mini-shinkansen, which if you’re coming from the south runs together with the main Tohoku line and forks off at Morioka (from the north, change there). Getting to the lake itself is harder. Having failed to find a…

  • Japan on a Budget: Sendai, Matsushima and nearby

    Dancers, Sendai Getting to Sendai is easy: grab a Shinkansen train from Tokyo Eki. The Hayate services are best: you’ll need a reserved seat, but these fly past all but the biggest stations. Step out of the huge Sendai JR station and you’re within walking distance of just about everything, although there’s also a subway…

  • Japan on a Budget: Tohoku by Train

    Matsushima, near Sendai, Miyagi-ken I came back from last year’s trip around southern Honshu determined to work on my kanji and head back the next year. One year, one hundred and twenty kanji and three more terms of general  study later, I was on a plane to Narita again. And this time, with something approaching…

  • Run for the hills – the Facebook Divorce Zombie returns

    I’ve written on a number of occasions about the fascinating-but-flawed ‘Facebook causes x% of Divorces’ story that pops up in the media every year or so.It first lurched around in 2011, and then crawled back out in January. I anxiously await the next outbreak in January 2013, summing up the results of a survey conducted…