Do you want our own, personalized email address? You’re going to need two things:

Once you have these then you can proceed to create your own email address (or addresses).

See after the break for all the details.

I live within walking distance to the Arakawa River in the northern border of Tokyo. The river acts as the border between the Tokyo metropolis and the Saitama prefecture. As in other parks and natural spaces in the city, there are always people jogging, cycling, praticing baseball, and even water skying! The well-known Sumida River branches from the Arakawa not far from where I live. It flows into Tokyo Bay near the Kasai-Rinkai Park next to Tokyo Disneyland.

I took these last year, during a walk a beautiful summer afternoon.

The photos are after the break.

Look at this video. This is how typical anti-nuclear protesters in Japan react when you try and talk to them.

So violent. How do you reason with someone like this? This is why you hear so much from anti-nuclear protesters, but you don’t hear from us pro-nuclear: anti-nuclear are many, irrational, violent and (most of them) don’t understand what they’re talking about. Because of this, pro-nuclear people feel threatened and prefer not to say anything.

Most of the song is insults, threats and yakuza-speak, but he also manages to drop a nice amount of lies (maybe just because he doesn’t understand what he’s talking about).

Let me clarify a few of them:

With technologies like solar power and other renewables, we can get all the electricity we need without nuclear power… and cheaply, too.

No. This has been discussed again and again in many places. Most of these aren’t economically viable, or just won’t work in a country like Japan that doesn’t have the resources. But hey, maybe I’m mistaken. Show me real data that proves that we can depend on the renewables, and I will happily agree with you.

More after the break.

Yesterday there was a blackout at home while I was at work. It lasted about two minutes, and I learnt about it because one of my monitoring systems at home sent me a notification saying that two of my servers had rebooted.

You know, I’m not used to blackouts because this is the first one in the 10 years I’ve been living in Japan. Usually I wouldn’t really care about the power going offline for a few moments, especially when I’m not home. However, I’m sharing my room with two little ferrets. They don’t stand the hot weather very well, so I keep the air conditioner on during the whole summer for them. Yes, 24×7. And yes, it’s expensive. When I came home yesterday I found the air conditioner turned off because of the blackout, and the room temperature was very high. Nothing happened to my ferrets this time, but it could have.

Read on for my opinions about all this anti-nuclear movement.

Hakone is a mountainous area about 100km south-west of Tokyo. It is a very popular touristic destination because of its many onsen, beautiful scenery and its proximity to Tokyo. You can get there easily by train (JR East or Odakyu).

Hakone is one of my favorite places around Tokyo. I visit there from time to time, but I like it especially in winter. One of the best experiences you can have is being at a rotenburo (an open-air hot spring bath) while it’s raining or even snowing

More after the break.

Yokohama – Japan’s First Port City

In 1859, the Edo period came to a close and Japan opened itself up for foreign trade.  It chose the tiny fishing village of Yokohama to be its main port city.  Yokohama grew from a population of 600 to become what it is today – Japan’s second largest city.  It’s a beautiful city with its mix of architectural styles, spacious feeling, and internationalism.

More after the break.

I just wanted to share a few photos of my two ferrets that were lurking inside my iPhone. Yuki (female, 2 years old) is the white one. Kuro (male, 3 years old) is the darker one.

Enjoy.

Kuro and Yuki sleeping together in their hammock. Notice Kuro’s “WTF?” face.

More photos after the pause.

I just realized now that ag0ny.com, the domain name that I had been using for over 12 years, has been stolen. It’s pointing to a site in Russia and is hosting what appears to be a web aggregator.

I’m not really going to pursue this because the domain was worthless. I just had an email address there that I barely used. I kept it because from time to time some old friend or another sent me an email there. Plus, another person had an @ag0ny.com address on my server (JPGrobler: if you read this, now you know why your email address isn’t working anymore, I’m sorry).

So remember, if you want to contact me via email, my current email address is javi@lavandeira.net, not the old ag0ny@ag0ny.com.

ag0ny.com at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, just for nostalgia.

Sorry, Facebook. This time you’ve crossed the line.

I read just a few moments ago in Slashdot that Facebook has replaced its users’ default email address with a facebook.com email address. I wasn’t very happy at all with Facebook before, and this, if true, would be the last straw, so I had to go and confirm it.

And yes, it is true. My profile now shows a @facebook.com email address (that I’ve never used and don’t intend to) instead of my real email address.

This is already too much. I’ve already deleted all my photo albums from my Facebook account, and over the next few days I’ll complete the process of removing as much content as possible and disabling the account. I have to write down the email address of people I want to keep in touch with, untag myself from my friends’ photos, and post a notice in my profile saying that I’m not there anymore.

I will still log in to Facebook during the next few days in order to remove all content from there, but from now on, if you want to get in touch with me, feel free to send me an email directly to my real email address: javi@lavandeira.net

There are several things going on in the world right now that I consider worrying enough to write about. These are (in no particular order):

• Religion
• WikiLeaks
• Animal abuse
• Nuclear power
• Political corruption in Europe
• Intellectual property

I’ve started writing about a couple of these (nuclear power and intellectual property), but I never seem to be able to finish because there’s always something new happening that changes my priorities: Julian Assange is denied the appeal for extradition, or a new anti-nuclear demonstration, or the political party that got Greece in all this trouble wins the national elections again.

Since I can’t decide what to write about first, I thought I’d just write this post summarizing what my opinions are, and then decide on a subject based on what gets me the most death threats. Please note that I’m not talking about posting a tweet or two, but writing multi-page posts containing real information about the subject.

So here we go.The following are my opinions.