I love my laptop. I’ve had her for five years now. She was a graduation gift from my parents after I finished university. She’s served me well, and I’ve adored her accordingly.

However, she is getting kind of old. Five years is a pretty long time for a laptop, especially one as oft-used as my own. But I cherish her and do my best to take care of her. Sometimes that endeavor can be cheap – a screwdriver to open her up and a can of air to blow dust out of her vents – and sometimes it can be expensive – like a new battery with international shipping by air during lockdown last year. 

In the past, when I was living at home with my parents, I relied on my dad a lot to do maintenance and troubleshooting on my much beloved computers. He’s a software engineer and total nerd, so he’s into that. However, since moving to Japan, I’ve had to learn how to do a lot of that stuff on my own – albeit while still constantly berating him with questions that he patiently answers – and it’s been interesting. Last year, when my battery degraded beyond all of hope redemption, we’d planned for him to bring a new battery with him to install when he and my mother came to visit me in April. Then corona happened… The trip was cancelled, I had to buy the battery again and pay an exorbitant amount of money for shipping, and then install it myself. It was more than a little intimidating, but I succeeded! It was a really rewarding feeling.

This year, as my computer continues to age, she’s developed new problems that I’ve done my best to resolve. Her power cord has been working less and less well, and she’s been charging very slowly. She’s also been complaining about voltage compatibility issues, and I grew increasingly worried about the welfare of the battery I’d so painstakingly installed at cost. She was also running slower and hotter. She very rarely crashes herself, but programs she was running were crashing more frequently. Her battery was draining at a faster rate, startup was taking longer, and programs just weren’t running as well as they used to. Compared to most people’s computers, she was still running above average, but my expectations for her are very high. I expect peak performance at all times, so I knew I needed to take action to resolve these inequities and improve her performance.

So I got her a new power cord, and that resolved many problems. And then, at cost once again due to the computer chip shortage, I got her a massive RAM upgrade. She was running on 12GB of RAM, and just booting up would suck up 10GB, let alone when I was running any really intensive programs like Photoshop, let alone Zoom or Steam. 12GB of RAM is higher than the standard 8GB laptops usually come with these days, but it was still clearly insufficient for my memory needs, so I ordered a massive upgrade of 32GB of RAM. Installing that RAM was another terrifying endeavor, but I succeeded once more!

She’s running like a dream. Her battery lasts longer, she charges faster, she runs cooler, programs have stopped crashing, she boots up almost instantly, and everything is just running quicker and smoother than ever. It’s like she’s a brand new computer!

I love my laptop. I have no interest in getting a new one anytime soon. Therefore, I will put a great amount of time, effort, and money into maintaining her, and I feel really good about those investments. If you’ve got an electronic you really care about, take care of it, and it’ll take care of you, too.

Hello Everyone!

I would like to formally introduce myself. My name is Nicholas Williams. Please call me Nick!

I am from America. I am from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I have being living in Japan for six years. I like to watch action movies, anime, and mysteries. I also like to watch sports such as basketball, American football, pro wrestling, boxing and MMA. Before I became an English teacher, I played NFL football as well as competed in bodybuilding. I also enjoy traveling around Japan with my family.

Thank you for reading my blog and I look forward to meeting you all. Let’s have fun together!!

たまごっちを知っていますか。

携帯型の育成ゲームです。

今年は２５しゅうねんにあたるらしくアニバーサリーセットが出ます。

子供に買うはずが、自分もはまってしまい、一生懸命このおもちゃの

おもりをしたのを覚えています。

まめっち、にょろっちなどいろいろなキャラがありとにかくかわいいです。

ペットのいない人や、このコロナ禍には楽しいおもちゃ、癒しとなりそうです。

It’s Father’s Day today, which is something that I look forward to a lot since I’ve been a dad.  My kids made me some great presents at their school, and I got to relax a bit.  Overall, it was a nice day, but it was still a bit sad.  Due to the coronavirus pandemic, it’s been over a year since I’ve been able to see my own parents.  Normally, my mother comes to Japan a few times a year and my father will join her for one of those trips (he really doesn’t like flying).  But since spring 2020, international travel has been impossible and I really miss my family.  I hope that everyone who was able to see their fathers had a great day with them.  Here’s a baby picture of me with my father taken some time around 1983-1984.

横山晃生君がゴールデンウィーク中に留学に旅立って１か月余りたちました。元気そうに、しかも楽しんでいる様子はＳＮＳ上でわかるのですが、留学生としての大変さはなかなかこちらからはわかりません。ただ、あれだけ話していたYouTubeの編集時間もないほど毎日追われているようです。日本の高校生はアメリカの高校生よりずっと長い時間勉強するように思います。塾にも通ってたいへんだと思います。日本の大学生はアメリカの大学生ほど勉強しないと思います。アメリカの大学生は、本を読んで翌日その内容について討論したりレポートを書いたりと、短い時間の中で多くのことをこなさなければいけないように思います。実際のところはどうなのか、晃生君に聞きたいくらいです。日本の高校→アメリカの大学に進学すると、勉強漬けになってしまう！でも晃生君なら大丈夫でしょう。日本では、日本一キャンプをしていた高校生だと思います。周りの友人といい関係を作って、有意義な２０代、３０代を過ごせるようにその関係を深めていってほしいと願っています。