Year: 2016

My Ghostery plug-in found 33 trackers on The Economist website.

33!!!

Definitely a good reminder that there are so many companies who are hungry to collect information about me. What do I read, what are my interests, what do I buy.

And again, I am torn between the need for privacy and improving my experience.  It is annoying that 1 minutes after surfing at a leather bag website, I get on Facebook an ad for that shop.
I am sure Facebook is making a lot of money out of it, but it feels … bad.  I definitely Don’t want to reward these two companies by buying and always activating my “don’t buy that, you don’t really need this” mental plug-in.

 

Japanese call my nose “tall”, 鼻が高い, while in Israel it was referred to as big, huge.

It usually draws nice attention from Japanese, but in some cases it is a real nuisance.

Yesterday I went to an Eye Doctor to get my regular check and my nose was “in the way”.
As I put my chin on the machine, the nurse operating it pushed it to my face, crashing my nose. When she wanted to switch from right eye to left, she just moved the machine, crashing my nose again.

She obviously apologised for it, saying that my nose is “tall”, but I didn’t feel the apology was genuine.

Maybe I should warn nurses Before starting the examination

As it happens, I was on a business trip to Fukuoka and Kumamoto on the day before the first earthquake. Had lunch in a restaurant near Kumamoto Castle and enjoyed seeing the many tourists experimenting with local Kyushu delicacies.

 

Since then, Kumamoto suffered from two main Earthquakes and countless aftershocks, heavy rains and mud avalanches.

My heart goes out to the people of Kumamoto and I wish I could do something to help.

As I was walking with friends around Shinjuku and Kabukicho, saw two photographers taking photos of a girl. Obviously snapped a few photos of them taking photos and here is one of them:

 

Spent some time last week with a friend from the US and a group of his friends who visited Tokyo.

It was a lot of fun, but it also made me tired.

Thinking more about it and trying to (over)analyse it,  I reached the conclusion that my communication style has adjusted to Japanese and Korean style. Though there are no language barriers talking with Americans, conversation flow and subjects are slightly different than what I am used to.

When my American friends were talking about Podcasts/Audible and latest Tech hype, I was like “hmmm… have no idea what you are talking about” . I read books, more interested in latest “Line Taxi” features than what Uber is doing.

When my friends were puzzled with Japanese efficiency, I complained that it is difficult for me to travel to the US.

Cannot imagine what Japanese feel when they chat with American or when they travel the US, but I am sure it is more than what I do.

It feels great being able to chat in Japanese with Izakaya owner, in English with my American friends and gossiping in Hebrew with my friend.

 

At least 10 times I asked Groupon to STOP sending me emails, but I keep on getting them.

I find this is a very bad business practice to spam and to ignore my requests.

And again, I will ask to stop sending me emails, but this time I will also instruct gmail to direct those directly to the Trash.

 

 

Forbes.com tells me that I cannot access their content as I am using an Ad blocker.

I fully understand that Forbes needs the ads to finance their contents, but the fact is I am NOT using an Ad block; I am using a tracking blocker.  I don’t mind getting Ads but I do not want Marketing companies track my behaviour. I do not want surf a website and an hour later get an ad for services from the same website or similar.

As I am not planning to allow trackers, it seems I will not be able to access Forbes.com.

 

My 1Password extension was just disabled on Chrome which wasted about 20 minutes of my time trying to find the right updated extension and installed it correctly.

First I installed a newer version which required 1Password 4 which i do not own and only then I found the right version.

Is this really for security reasons or just trying to enforce Google webstore rules on the extensions ?

Anyway, it was a pain