Posts

There’s two types of blog posts in this world:

Every year at the end of March there’s a lot of important events in schools around Japan. Not only are the students finally coming to the end of the academic year and the hundreds of tests that they have had to endure but the teachers themselves find out if they will be staying or transfer to another school.

Before starting up this blog I’d had a break of about 3 years when I did no writing on the web. My previous blogs all went the way of the dodo and due to my move to Japan I had to stop writing for the various sites and publications I was working for back in South Africa.

One of the biggest shocks to my system when I first moved to Japan as just how cold the winters here can be. Now those of you who come from the US or Canada will be laughing at me and telling me that your winters get just as cold if not more so, but what you’ve got to realize is that South Africa has particularly mild winters paired with hot, dry summers.

This week was the graduation ceremony for the third years at my main high school. It’s the main event of the school year and all the staff and students try their best to make sure that everything goes off without a hitch.

So the first thing you might notice if you’ve been here before is that the site looks vastly different from before. Previously I was running it on an instance of Ghost 0.4.1. The second thing you might notice is that the site is no longer hosted on kibayanse.com, but rather a vanity URL - terrancebrown.me

One of the things I do most frequently on my laptop is to type out notes and documents. Whether it’s a draft blog post or a few paragraphs of fiction, I’ve ended up using a combination of Ulysses III, Byword and Marked for nearly all my documents.

With the release of Sony’s PS4 system in Japan on 22 February I decided to pick up a console for myself. Since moving to Japan I’ve moved to Sony’s platform for almost all of my gaming (The Xbox 360 is all but non-existent here and the Xbox One hasn’t even officially been given a release date yet.) and as I’ve never really bought a console at launch I thought I might as well give it a shot and see what all the fuss is about.

Recently I’ve been looking to move away from Google’s free services to solutions that, while paid, might be a better fit for me as well. There’s also the fact that Google has a tendency to shutter their services. Throw in privacy concerns and the slow influx of ads into their best services like Gmail and there has been no better time than now to look at moving on.

What a hectic past week it’s been! I’ve just returned from my trip to South Africa and it feels a little bit sad to be back actually. For all it’s crime and poverty, South Africa is still such a beautiful and amazing country that everyone should try to visit at least once in their lives.