Going

Well, after a lot of thinking and debating I've decided to go back to Canada in July. I'll leave the job at GABA and look for work in Calgary. Summer's the only time I'll be able to find a job in Canada. Since there is so little time, I am now running to get everything done before then, airplane tickets, selling furniture, packing things quickly, canceling water, gas and electricity... I'm sad to leave Japan so quickly but there are some things which we must sometimes do. I still have many articles to write and pictures to post, so I'll still be updating this blog for a while.

Alone

WELL Jen is back in Canada now. I'm going to be working 7 days a week from now on. So I won't be posting much anymore but I'll try to keep adding a few updates.

Why you should keep your old printer

WHEN I arrived in Japan I needed to buy a printer to be able to print resumes and lessons for my private students. I ended up getting a slightly used 2009 model at HardOff for 5000yen. It's an EPSON PM900 (North American model RX700) it's a super fancy printer with multiple memory card slots, 6 separate colours and a powerful scanner. It's also big and bulky. However in Japan all printers are very large and bulky. They also seem to cost on average about 20000 to 40000 yen! I was happy with it but recently it started giving me warnings then one day stopped working. I checked online and found out that I would have to take it to Epson to get it fixed and that it was simply a matter of resetting some kind of counter. Epson's new printers have a counter which automatically locks the printer when a certain number of prints have been made, regardless of if it's still able to print it will force a user to go pay money to Epson to have their printer "fixed". So I downloaded the software and did it myself. It worked fine until finally the ink pads were full and I had to clean them. I found the service manual online and set to taking it apart. It took me 4 hours of painstaking work to get to the ink pads. The printer was built on top of them from the bottom up! Then I cleaned the pads, dried them and put it back together. To my satisfaction it worked again! Then a week later it stopped gain... Taking it apart again was not something I wanted to do. Jen found an old Epson P 760C (North American model photo 720) printer at her dorm. It's a 2001 model, very old and seems to have been bought and used last in 2003. It's been sitting in a box for 6 years... So I dusted it off and powered it up in the off hope it might work. I then hacked the drivers for a Japanese windows XP to make it work on the English Windows Vista. To my surprise it seemed a bit squeaky but functional. I gave it a bit of oil and then ran it through a 10 minute head cleaning. And... It works! Amazing! I'm flabbergasted, even the ink is still half full! Thanks to the dry ink clogging the heads, I don't even need to buy ink. The moral of the story is: new stuff is made to break, old stuff is solid.