Cassandra and David Rolph's Website

We keep our music on our tiny server. It works really well because Cassandra and I can both access it from our computers. I believe I could network it to our living room if I was willing to run a cable, but thats another story for another day.

I should have read the summary of this book a bit more carefully. I was expecting to buy a book, written by a successful financier, about where the global economy is going. The plan was to get rich by moving our assets to where the future is. What I got was a book by philanthropist on how the global economy could be improved to the benefit of the disadvantaged on this planet. On second thoughts I'm glad I didn't carefully read the summary, because I wouldn't have bought the book if I had.

Well for the past 9 months I have been riding my bicycle to work, traveling less on weekends and driving illegally in Japan. The reason for this is after 1 year in Japan you must get a Japanese license. A mix of repeatedly failing the test, giving up and starting to try again and other excuses means that until now I have failed to get my Japanese license. I suppose I have always been one police pull over away from deportation.

We have never been big coffee drinkers. But lately we have been casual coffee shop visitors and then on a trip to Austria I got to really like espresso.

So I have barely played chess since leaving Colorado. Here is one of the last serious games that I played.

Winter Springs

We've closed down the blogger blog held at blog.fromoz.com

Now all our personal posts will be posted here. For now tochigi.fromoz.com will still be kept at Blogger.

All the old articles from blog.fromoz.com are now held here. We still need to work a bit to make them accessible.

cheers,
Cassandra and David

We thought some people might be a bit curious about where we live and what its like.

When most people think Japan, they probably think Tokyo. Tokyo is very densely populated and very busy. We don't live there. We live in Nasushiobara. Its in Tochigi prefecture a bit over an hour north of Tokyo. Its quite rural.

Over 30 years ago Bali was my first Asian trip. Some of my earliest exotic travel memories are from there. 20 years ago I went again for a much more off the beaten track trip around Bali. Another great trip. So I was pretty excited to be going back again. It was a short trip to the main tourist area in Bali. We found it much more developed, a little busy, but still possessing all the charm that I loved on those previous trips.

In 1990 I was ready to travel the world. Well, nearly ready, but I didn't have any money. So my girlfriend and I ate beans for a month, saved our money and bought one way tickets to Taiwan. We had heard that it was quite easy to get a job there teaching English and the pay was decent. Our plan was to backpack Asia with the money we made there.

Neuromancer is supposed to be a science fiction classic. It won all the awards and coined the term cyberspace long before it came into common usage.

For me it was a good, but not great read. Its a page turner and the action keeps up pretty much the whole way.