Author Archives: Jay

About Jay

My name is Jay Melton, and I have been adding to El Viajero since early 2005. Readers are encouraged to comment, but they must first fill out the simple registration. No information will ever be made public; it is only used for comment identification.

Goodbye, Steve Jobs

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This is the look of (I’m guessing) all of Apple Inc.’s web pages today; at least the U.S. and Japan Apple sites have this look. We learned this morning that Steve Jobs, founder and leader of Apple Computer and now Apple Inc. passed away from his fight with pancreatic cancer and its aftermath.

I have been a long-time Mac user, since the first Macintosh in 1984. That machine had 128KHz (that’s a k, as in kilobytes) and a one-sided floppy (but not so floppy) disk drive with 400k of storage. I later upgraded it to a Fat Mac with a double-sided drive and 512k of memory. I’m looking at the numbers on the MacBook Pro I’m using now and it has 2.8 GHz; that’s 7,000 times more processing speed, and I’m not even sure those numbers can be compared. I carry an iPhone, I use an iPad, and, based on Apple’s cool presentation of the new iPod Nano watch faces yesterday, I have one of those on the way to strap onto my wrist.

Virtually 1/2 of my life has Steve Jobs’ imprint on it. He truly was a genius. I am in shock, and I am sad about his death. Thank you for all your hard work, Steve. You are going to be sorely missed. Rest in peace…

The Kyushu Shinkansen

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After a looooong wait, we finally have a shinkansen line here in Kyushu. Service started the day after the Tohoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami and aftershocks. Those events put a big damper on the festivities, but the trains are running, and boy, are they nice. The above photo is at Kurume station where there are both smoking and non-smoking rooms while you wait for your train.

You’ll need to know if your train is a 6- or 8-car train, so you line up at the correct gate. It makes a difference because the trains will have a different place to stop depending on their length.

I had a reserved seat, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but, as you can see, the train I was on was not crowded. In fact I was the only one on my car. I could have saved some money by buying a non-reserved seat. You really need to know how busy a train will be at any particular time.

The seats are comfortable, and there is at least one 100V, 60Hz electrical power outlet for every two seats. The front seats at the bulkhead each have their own outlets.

I haven’t ridden the shinkansen in years, so I’m not sure about the power outlets in the other lines of the JR systems. I have to assume they also have power outlets available. I’m hoping to have more chances to ride the trains a write about those experiences.

[Editor's note: The above photos were shot with the best camera (is the one you have with you): my iPhone 4. I thought it did pretty well in both bright and dark conditions.]

The jklmeltons are okay

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I have received lots of inquiries about our situation here in Japan and can say there are no problems in Kumamoto. We are far from the devastation  in northern areas of Honshu. If you can help financially, the Red Cross is taking donations on their website. You can send a small amount as well with a text message to 90999 in the U.S.

Thanks to everyone for your concern. Please keep the Japanese in your thoughts. We hope for a speedy recovery.

Happy 2011!

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Just a note to say Happy New Year to all of my readers (both of you ;-) )! Here’s hoping that the new year will bring you and yours everything you are hoping for. Here in Kumamoto, we are enjoying our second day in a row of snow (I’m not sure I’ve seen two in a row here, but then I’m getting old…) Sorry, global warming, we need to crank up the heat today!

Christmas Dinner 2010

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Here is this year’s Christmas dinner, featuring a chicken spiced up with some Mexican seasonings. There were mashed potatoes, Asian-style broccoli, and garlic bread to go with it. I used Mark Bittman’s book How to Cook Everything for this year’s menu.

I squeezed some lime juice, added some peanut oil to hold it together, minced some cilantro (coriander leaves) and a jalepeño chile, and added salt and pepper.

I spooned that mixture all over the chicken, top and bottom, added some whole garlic cloves around it, and put it in the preheated oven. One nice difference from the Bittman and previous recipes is that I used my iron skillet in the oven. The trick is to put the leg/thigh side down (that side needs to cook more/faster), and the heat from the iron skillet is enough to cook the bird evenly. The thighs got cooked and the breast meat came out nice and juicy.

The chicken was not spicy at all, but it had all the flavor of the chiles and cilantro. I drained off some of the juices from cooking, and we used that to flavor the meat and potatoes. The juices were definitely spicy and delicious! 8-O I’ll play with that recipe some more; this year’s chicken may have been the best yet. :-D

New Foreign Food Store in Hikarinomori!

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I went to the ‘big’ mall at Hikarinomori and found a new store selling all kinds of foreign food there. It’s called Kaldi Coffee Farms, and, for someone who lives far from a big city, I thought it had an amazing amount of food we cannot find otherwise. They had coffee, tea, sweets, cheese, beer, wine, spreads (sweet and savory), snacks, sauces, spices, and many others. If you like to try new things or need an ingredient for something you like to cook, you should check it out.

The shop is on the first floor, next to the grocery store. I think the space used to be a cell phone store and the information counter. You really should go. ;-)

Excursion in Kumamoto

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The Department of Environmental Resources heads out each year to clear out some local areas in Kumamoto. This year we went to the mountains near Nagomi Town and cleared out a lower area of some tree growth. There were lots of weeds and much brush to cut and move. The area you see here was pretty grown-over and needed some work. After doing the cutting, we took a break and had a bento. The weather was cold in the morning, but was perfect around lunch time. Students brought the cut material down and divided it into wood and brush piles. The plan was to have a barbecue after, but was postponed. Thank you all for a great job! :-D