Okok, so this is probably the last post of it’s kind! I’m going to introduce a new family member! yaaaay.

Internet meet Charlie.. Charlie.. this is the internet!

Baby brother Charlie.

Charlie was brought into the world at about 11am on the 30th of September.. Mum is doing fine I hear.. and so is the rest of the family.

Our family has grown to reach lucky number 7. Hurraaah!

This post is long overdue, I’m in Japan now so my life has taken a turn off towards something a little different to what the other 20 years of my life has become accustom to. I’m in Japan and already I’ve had my share of ups and downs. Ups being.. well I’m in Japan, all my new friends (especially Angie ^^) and general Japanese life and language learning. Downs being.. well, until this moment the 1.23 million yen bill I had hanging over my head.. and that’s that.

From the top then! Japan.. Japan is a very cool place. Beer comes out of vending machines, people speak Japanese and are actually really really nice at all times. There are trains going everywhere and the situation I have at my seminar house absolutely kicks mega super ass.

Friends? all these new friends are absolutely amazing, what’s more amazing is that they come from all different parts from around the world and that just makes everyday conversation super super cool. Like, the Americans say ‘leisure’ in a messed up way and some Canadians really do say ‘about’ funny. The English don’t know simple words like ‘stacked’ and the Australians are just super awesome 25/7. I love my friends.

Angie? ohh she’s a little stubborn gem whom I seem to really like.

Half of our family, we're too big to fit in one picture.

Japanese life and language? ohhh it kicks ass. I have a pink bike and I ride it on the road, I almost get hit by cars daily it’s such a chore but it’s Japanese life so I live with it. Language is improving tooo, as a side effect of living in Japan.. uhh  I’m out of sync now someone just dropped an egg onto a tatami mat.. it’s not my room but they’re making a fuss about it.

Oh the down! yeah so I signed up for a contract with Softbank because I was going to be here for a year and I wanted to use internet on my HTC Dream! the phone I absolutely adore and love. I made sure to get the unlimited packet fixed price plan, and the guy said I’d only have to pay 6000 yen at the end of the day if I downloaded a shit load.. annyway, I got an email from my bank back home and they told me when I called them that Softbank tried to push through a near 16 thousand dollar transaction.. twice! so yeah, turns out the Softbank guy put me on the wrong plan for my phone and I was using the internet heaps thinking I was okay and before I know it I’ve got somebody from Softbank calling me spewing shitty English trying to tell me to stop using my phone.

Thankfully one of the Residential Assistants (Akane) had my back and was able to explain the situation and whatnot.. it took some talking and even a discussion at some Softbank headquarters but we managed to work out that I’ll pay 13, 400 yen and I’ll get switched over to the plan I was supposed to be on in the first place. I’m happy because it’s not 1.23 million yen and I don’t have to worry about bad things like ninjas coming to get me cos I wouldn’t pay.

Annnd, I think that is that. I will try to keep most of my Kansai Gaidai posts on my Kansai Gaidai blog but this part of my blog looked like it was getting a bit dusty so here we are.

As Austin Powers may say, I’m in Japan and because of this I’ve taken the opportunity to make yet another blog focused on those Japanesey related adventures! and my 9 months as an exchange student here.

And this is where I study.

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So do go on and check it out at here.

It’s been a good couple of weeks, sorry for not checking in but I’ve been caught up in that little game we love to refer to as life. My meddlings with life have made me aware of one thing however, that.. bringing in the title of this post; I’m looking for more.

Life is complex. Life is crazy. Most of all, life is random. People have been pondering the meaning of life since it’s conception. Now, I don’t wanna brag.. but I’m pretty sure I’ve discovered the meaning to the game called life! the meaning of life, as people phrase it, is a loaded philosophical theory which aims to associate some sort of deep significance with everyday interactions that lead up to some kind of long term goal and/or that are powered by some sort of motive. This goal doesn’t have to be ambitious (by no means!), it could be as simple as living life, getting through the day, one step at a time.

Whatever you want.

Soo.. in short? what’s the meaning of life? there isn’t one, that’s bullshit. There is your meaning of life and that’s all. Life is what you make of it, and my meaning of life tells me I’m looking for more.

In other news; I’m driving my car again and completely appreciative of it and I bought a new netbook to replace my laptop which died last weekend. I also literally scaled a fooking mountain on Saturday! I’m kinda proud of that for some reason. Ohh and Kansai Gaidai is only 33 days away now. ^^

But will I find what I’m looking for? I think so.

So not long now right? we’re shooting towards the 50 DAY MARK!! and then I’ll be jetting out of here to the land of the rising sun. As weird as it seems to say this.. I don’t wanna go. >.< I’ll miss people here too much! my mum is preggos and I when I return I’ll have another bro/sis whom will be almost 1 year old. That’s saad, right? I think so.

Plus my friends!! I can’t imagine not going to uni with them this semester and doing our thing. Arguing about what we’ve learnt at the guild bar and bouncing our fantastic start up ideas at each other, you know, the ones Google will buy off us for 50 million each. I don’t want to NOT be apart of that anymore, I can’t bear to miss it. But it seems, I have to and again, it’s another thing that seems to be tearing at me.

Google Images is fun to mess with.

But don’t get me wrong, I really really want to go to Japan. I’m super excited, can’t wait. But I don’t want to leave everyone behind. If I could leave Australia and put everyone here in a time freeze I would; and then to come back after my adventures and have everything resume as it would have if I didn’t leave would be more than ideal for me. Unfortunately, this isn’t possible. I’m going to miss out on alot of things! friends will discuss random stuff without me, family will get to hold this new critter before me and life in general will move along without me. It almost feels like I’m dieing and soon I’ll disappear completely from Australia.

Suuure, I guess you could say I’m exaggerating a bit here, but I feel pretty strongly about it. I’ll still be in contact with family and friends but it won’t be the same! as I kinda touched on in my other post — it’s different when you can see someone in the flesh and can converse with them, when that’s taken away from me.. the people whom I’ve selectively chosen to be with. I don’t know what I’ll do.

But I guess I’ll tackle that bridge when I come to it though! right now I can only focus on the here and now and not the ugly bits of the future. I don’t know what else to add here, so I guess I’ll just plainly say that I will miss alot of my Aussie brethren, friends and family alike. You had BETTER miss me too. =P

Alright so all was going well this week, I had exams done, I was feeling super duper.. then last night while on my to way a party at Mundy’s house that I didn’t really want to go to! I slipped off the road and crashed my car! Yeah, so THAT sucks.. airbag did it’s thing and it was pretty cool but I was in a ditch and all the smoke made me think the car was going to blow up like in Grand Theft Auto or something (cos that game is full of realism) anyway, got out of there pretty quick after I saw a bunch of smoke but it turns out that was just the airbag’s smoke for after it had been deployed. Uhm yeah, so I had to change a tire with the help of a random passerby named Glenn that saw me crash which was pretty cool. With the 500 – 1000 dollars excess I’ll have to pay the insurance company? Was it worth it? I dunno yet.

Concrete slab vs. my car.

Yeah so basically, the road was wet and a little foggy, I approached a corner too fast for the weather conditions, couldn’t put the steering wheel in full lock and spin out on the road because of an on coming car so I had to run it into a ditch. Thankfully, the ditch was mostly grass and a few concrete slabs but the car isn’t in such a bad way. I’ll get some pictures up here later today.. but I was able to drive it home and now all is well.. cept for the part where I’m stuck at home in the middle of no where for the weekend and won’t be able to use my own car to get to work etc.

Ahh such is the luck in my life! anywho, in other news; exams! all done, super happy about that. I didn’t want to do a blog post until they were all done then I crashed my car and now I’m sitting at home so here I am blogging.. yeah, you might have noticed that I’m not the most devout blogger but hey man gimme a break I do try here and there. I forecast with my exams, at the very least I will get 7, 6, 6, 6 with a possibility of still getting all 7′s which is the perfect semester, yet to be done by anyone in our little group at uni. So maybe I can be the first, plus it would be a nice finish to the little saga that is my Bachelor of Arts degree at Queensland University of Technology, even though they were IT units lol.

On the Japan front, under 70 days left now til I depart. It’s getting pretty exciting because I’m starting to meet some exchange students like me who are going to Kansai Gaidai at the same time on Facebook. It was actually because of them me and Jace come up with the collaborative idea that is The Kansai Gaidai Hub. Hoping it’ll take off, but we’ll see. Basically offering blogs to a wide array of exchange students from different backgrounds while also giving them a place to talk about anything really. Really happy with the forum and chat scripts I got up and running, just waiting on some DNS related issues to iron out the last few things then we need to build the main website, which really.. shouldn’t be that hard.

Anyway, I don’t blog often — buuut, I’m on holidays now so maybe I can muster up the motivation to do so.

Ta ta!

Such a typical thing of me, to have a blog post that has absolutely no relevance to the title.. well I guess there is a reason I would entitle this post ‘Home Improvement’ but it seems I’ve already forgotten, but if a reason existed, it still makes this post title meaningful.. I hope. Despite opening up with random babble, I do have some things I’d like to get out on his post so I guess I’ll start with site improvements, or just little things I’ve been messing around with that involve the site.. this could be the reason for the title too.

Umm, so I had a read through a few articles that basically said Facebook, like any other one of several other social networking websites, were setting theirs sights on implementing and rolling out vanity URL’s for their users, it’s a bit late for Facebook to be catching up in this regard, but at least they are going to get around to it even if it does mean they are idiots for not doing it to start out with. If you’re not quite with me atm, an example of a Facebook vanity URL would be: www.facebook.com/mark — but yeah, it’s something you’ll see with a dozen of other social networking websites, but not with Facebook, why?

Facebook is late to the game, once again.

The reason is a combination of a bad choice by Facebook and the all too common notion that is, “we’ve come too far to turn back now” but yes, it seems that Facebook has to go towards vanity URL to promote themselves as a more accessible service, identifying users by a long random ID number just isn’t practical. Okay so we, or rather Facebook, have identified the problem so why don’t they just go round and fix it? the problem is pretty simple. They have 200+ million users, if each user has the option to claim a vanity URL for their Facebook account all at once, it isn’t going to work too well with Facebook’s servers.. so the sheer scale of their userbase is preventing them from rolling out a ‘must’ to their users.

Improvements?

Annyway, so where am I going with this? improvements to the site, I thought to myself.. if I can’t get myself a vanity URL how can I let anybody I know an easy way to find my Facebook account? the solution was found after trawling through the comments on a few of these articles. It really is quite genius, I have to admit: www.mpears.com/facebook — yeah! by setting up a 301 redirect, I’m able to easily tell friends and family an address that will instantly get them to my Facebook account. Yeah so I’ve applied this method to all of my social networking links on the site and I realized something interesting! in a way, it protects me to a certain degree. Whilst the actual location to where my 301′s redirect to exist on the Internet, if I make only the 301′s public on my website then someone cannot tell where the actual link is without clicking it, so any cached pages or recorded links will all be www.mpears.com/twitter instead of twitter.com/mitchellpearson — this essentially gives me control, because I can turn off the 301′s at any time, rendering the cached information stored on the Internet useless.

You'll have time to do this now that you don't need to type another 20 keystrokes.

Um so yeah, in addition to a Facebook and all the other social networking websites I use on the right, I made a few redirects for sheer convenience.. these include /email /contact /lifestream /kansai-gaidai /about /google /live

Ahh.. I also added a few no follow’s to most of those social networking websites, and I’ll see how that goes for me, currently I figure I don’t need more people to become aware of the individual pages but instead I’d prefer to people to come to this site, particularly my Mitchell Pearson page if they want to visit an external website.

Oh and in addition to that, in related news.. my page rank dropped to 0.  

Annd on a Japan related note! less than 3 months now til I leave the shores of Australia and start a 9 month tour of duty as a exchange student at Kansai Gaidai University on the Asian Study Abroad Programme.

Can.. Not.. Wait.

If the excitement doesn’t kill me, the experience will send my head into overdrive.