Just realised, it’s been a while since my last post. So, what’s going on.
Well, here in the UK, it’s very much autumn now. The swallows disappeared from the field in front of the house last week, obviously on there way back to Africa for the winter. The last of our peas and beans have been picked, and we won’t get much more growth from our chilli and tomato plants in the greenhouse.
At then end of October, and first week of November. As well as getting the chance to see the in-laws (which I enjoy, we’ll have no jokes about in-laws from hell please), friends etc, we are going to explore the country a bit. We are spending an evening up in Akita at Nyuto onsen, which should be great. After that, we are exploring the Fukushima area. As well as just taking an opportunity to explore a bit of the country neither of us have been too, to be honest we are scoping out the area as we consider a potential move back to Japan! At the moment, we are both considering our career and life options and are making a decision whether to return and settle in Japan or attempt to settle in the UK.
Anyway, other news.
Missing oldies
What a complete fecking mess. It turns out 234,354 Japanese centenarians are ‘missing’. What’s more bonkers is that 884 would be at least 150 years old if they were still alive.
Part of the problem, as far as I can see, is that the systems involved for storing and monitoring this kind of information seems to be heavily manual work, with paper work rather than computerised systems. I always remember going to the local government offices to register various things (marriage, alien registration cards etc etc), and would hardly ever see any computers being used. If these records were computerised, how easy would it be for the local authorities to run simple, regular reports on the data to flag any suspicious activity.
Of the course, another thing that has been pointed out in much online discussion, is if the over-100 records were this out out of date, what about the records for the 70-99 year olds. It’s surely possible that a large number of them have died, and their families have not reported their deaths (out of laziness, attempting to avoid taxes, or attempting to continue pension claims in the name of the dead person).
Net problems
Bloody hell, there’s one thing annoying about living in an area a fair old distance away from the main telephone exchange… we get crappy broadband. As the weather gets more wet and cold, we find our broadband (and telephone line itself) gets more and more unreliable.
This week, our connection completely died on us with some fault about 330m away from the house (according to the engineer I was speaking to today when he popped out to fix it all). So, in complete frustration with BT I brought a PAYG Three mobile dongle. Bloody hell, it’s quick compared to the land line. Of course, the downside is that mobile broadband is bloody expensive (cost per Gb download).
Mind you, been speaking with the engineer and he mentioned the fibre rollout in the area. Whilst, we would still be quite far away from the exchange a switch to FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) would reduce the length of copper wire. Time for me to investigate, but I suspect that BT won’t be offering one month contracts (which is what I enjoy with Zen Internet). Given that we may end up moving, tying ourselves into a long contract could prove to be expensive if we decide to get out.