Erin Hughes.com

I am popular, for the next 14 minutes and 32 seconds.I posted a couple of quick articles that people liked and I have been getting a steady flow of hits and comments mostly by mail from friends. I could not wait till Sunday so I ran my little webalizer script and got my numbers. They were good a couple of hundred hits apiece between both the article about Dr. Ron Paul's campaign selling my e-mail address and Nigel my former co-worker. Cool as it was I was suprised to see this in my country stats;

I knew you Amazon guys were good. I did not know you were that good. DAMM!

Dr.Paul Please stop reselling my mail address. Dr. Ron Paul came to me like a gleaming star of hope for politics. I was so energized by his strict constitutional views that I told friends family and even enemy's how YOU, Dr. Paul could change the way we as Americans not only are looked at by others, but look at ourselves. I gave money twice, TWICE, once I gave you $100, at a time when I really should have saved it. I believed in the Campaign for Liberty and signed up for its mailing list. I read your updates and hoped that it would become a reality, knowing it was a uphill battle. Then something funny started to happen. More and more mail started coming in Help Stop Obama, Hillary lies to the... somebody. They were the kinda thing that gets political allies all up in a fuss over some thing or other. As the election drew closer the mail flow intensified. Now it is just down to a trickle, 2 or 3 Republican mails a week against Obama and what ever he is doing at the time. But it occured to me. "How did these people get my name?" Well the unfortunate and simple answer is Dr. Paul sold them my mail address. Well probably not Dr. Paul himself, a campaign manager or some one in the IT management department. Heck. It might even be in your FAQ "When you sign up you will receive 3rd party messages". It was almost a year ago and a lot has happened since then. Did I miss something? I use my personal mail, that I only give out to close friends. Anyways today I got 2 of the same mail about how Obama is going to take my guns.

A LOT of people do not like me. Nigel is a guy I use to work with who really hates me. I am not sure why. One day things were fine, the next he just wouldn't talk to me. I think the boss liked me more than him, or he did not like the fact that I was hanging out with other guys in on our team. What ever the reason, he quit to move back to England citing his frustration with Japan as the reason. Now about every couple of months I get a mail from my blog system that says, someone new has signed up for a account and I need to approve them. Lots of times it is someone who actually wants a account or just someone trying to get a account to make some blog link spam. But every once and a while it is Nigel. I mean the evidence is always so obvious. He always uses my name or someone else who we both know or some rude word in Japanese along with my work email address. This blog is not so popular, so I personally approve every account, and catch him every time. One time I even went as far to tracking down the IP, which lead me to a school. sagamihara-kng.ed.jp I called the school and asked for him and the person on the phone said he was not available. I asked if he worked there and they said yes.

Japanese efficiency When you live in a big city things are typically done in a different manner than they are done in the countryside. Getting your drivers license renewed is no exception. I woke up a little later than I had planned and tried to help with Anna then took off. I got on the train and could not remember the stop. Was it Higashi or Musashi-Sakai? I chose Musashi-Sakai, got off and found the bus to take me the rest of the way pretty easily. I was not sure when to get off but spotted another guy with a card like mine telling him to go to the Drivers License Center and wisely got off when he did. When I got out of the bus there was a woman herding people towards a rather unofficial looking tent. She told me if I paid 600 yen she would get me the paper I needed to get started and I could skip the first queue. I was skeptical since all the people ran straight for the Drivers License Center (DLC). Then I remembered how cheap most Japanese people are when it comes to something like this. They would rather stand in line another hour than pay 6 bucks. My time is worth allot more than 6 dollars so I paid up and when I got into the DLC I saw she was right. The first queue was the longest, must have been at least 1 hour wait. I stepped right into the payment line where I bought some stamps and put them on my paper. The wait was about 10 minutes but I think you might be able to skip this part if you knew exactly what stamps to buy, they are common forms of payment at city halls and ward offices. A savvy Japanese native could circumvent this step as well I would guess. After this the experience pretty much turned into follow the herd as I went from station to station noting the people around me and making sure they where in the line for the next station as well. It was simple and efficient every section was broken down into a series of short questions and that I answered with a yes.

There was a eye test.