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Smoke Free for 365 Days

July 1st, 2008 by Nick Ramsay

July 1st marks one year since I put out my last cigarette, so on this fine occasion I thought I’d interview myself about life after smoking.

Were you a heavy smoker?

Not really. I smoked a pack a day for about ten years, but the later years were spent puffing on those incredibly light 1mg menthol things.

Why did you quit smoking?

Good question. It wasn’t for health or financial reasons. I decided to kick the habit because I was about to become a dad, and didn’t want to be smoking around a baby.

How did you quit?

10 weeks worth of nicotine patches did the trick. I had to get my Net Buddy 4 Life to bring them over from Canada because in Japan (until very recently), you had to see a doctor if you wanted patches.

Was it easy quitting?

The first few days were pretty tough, but after that, with the help of the patches it was easier than I thought. I should say that it was my third serious attempt at giving up, so I knew what to expect. Even a year later, I get the occasional urge for a cigarette, but have resisted so far.

Do you feel any healthier?

I was expecting to feel a lot healthier by now, but it hasn’t worked out that way. I’m not as short of breath as I used to be, and I don’t have much of a cough these days, but I don’t really feel all that different, which is kind of disappointing.

Was it worth it?

Although there’s the possibility of cigarettes tripling in price very soon, smoking in Japan is a very affordable habit, so I haven’t really benefited financially. However, saying that, being smoke free for a year did get me a discount on my life insurance payments.

As for my health, well it’s hard to judge how much I’ve extended my life. Smoking was a great pleasure, and I tend to think living a little less as a smoker would be more enjoyable than living a little longer as a non-smoker. For something as wonderful as smoking, I’m surprised companies aren’t falling over themselves to manufacture healthy cigarettes. They did it with coffee (decaf), chocolate (low fat) and cola (diet), but rather than people accepting low tar cigarettes, they ban smoking altogether! Go figure!

I would be very interested to see a peer reviewed study that proves secondhand smoke from a 1mg cigarette causes lung cancer. I just cannot believe it’s possible! Anyway…

Will you ever smoke again?

I really hope so. Either when I’m so old it won’t matter, or when the cost is so high that getting addicted again would be impossible. In the meantime, I’ll enjoy a wonderful side effect of not smoking… a belly! Yes, can you believe it? For the first time since puberty, I’ve actually gained some weight! I’ve tried in vein for nearly two decades to gain weight and at last, I have a whopping 62kgs hanging off my 6ft frame!

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My New Office 2008

June 22nd, 2008 by Nick Ramsay

I previously wrote a post titled, My New Office 2007, in which I showed you a photo of what my home office looked like in January 2007. Here’s quick reminder:

Although a bit messy, that layout served me quite well, but things got even more busy when I added an extra desk and a second monitor. Not only was I running out of space, but I couldn’t reach the dead cockroaches and centipedes that were falling behind the furniture after a quick blast of Gokki Jet Pro.

The time had come to apply the 80-20 rule.

What’s the 80-20 rule?

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, Haddad’s Theorem, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Business management thinker Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of income in Italy went to 20% of the population. It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., “80% of your sales comes from 20% of your clients.” Source: Wikipedia

In this case, I decided to throw out 80% of the things I use just 20% of the time, and keep the 20% of things I use 80% of the time. Here are the results:

Okay, so maybe I didn’t quite reach 80%, but I did a good job, particularly clearing out the closets. In the end, I hauled two car loads of stuff, mostly old books, CDs and shelving, to the massive Kakamigahara incinerator where I said goodbye to a huge chunk of my past.

Now that my office has been detoxified, I feel refreshed and more productive than ever! So how about it? Have I convinced you to do the same?

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8 Fabbertastic Facts About Nick Ramsay

June 20th, 2008 by Nick Ramsay

In an effort to introduce himself to his fellow Japan bloggers, Chris G has written eight random facts about himself, including one about a dangerous Jurassic goose.

Chris has tagged me to do the same, so here we go…

8 fabbertastic facts about me

I am incredibly forgetful.
I wake up at the sound of a pin dropping.
My favorite PC game of all-time is the Sim City series.
I am incredibly forgetful.
I once tried to sell brand new Japanese Pokemon cards on eBay for $100 each. I sold zero.
I hate eggs. I’m not allergic. I just can’t stand them. The shape, smell, and even the name makes me shiver!
When I was in primary school, I played Jesus in the musical “Godspell”. As I was hanging on the cross at the end, I wet myself, and my disciples got covered in wee as they carried me aloft, down the aisle between the audience.
I once made $100 at a Japanese university by clapping my hands for two minutes. It was part of an experiment to compare how clapping styles differed between Japanese and non-Japanese.
I once made $800 by giving blood, urine and stool samples at a Japanese medical clinic. It was part of an experiment to compare how blood-clotting differed between Japanese and non-Japanese.

Passing on the meme…

Let me pass on the baton to Shane, Deas, and Billy West.

Here are the rules:

People who are tagged need to write a post containing 8 random facts about themselves.
At the end of the post you should name several other bloggers to be tagged.
Leave a comment for the bloggers and link to your own post.

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I Love Commercials Commercial!

June 17th, 2008 by Nick Ramsay

Last year a I wrote a series about Japanese manners, each with a video of an AC commercial that broadcast nationwide, teaching Japan’s public to be a little more considerate to each other. I thought those commercials were brilliant, kind of like drink driving commercials back home, but these were about topics as frightening as eating hamburgers on a train.

I Love CM

I’m all for encouraging people to talk to their neighbors, as was done in one of those AC commercials, but this latest “CM” is going a bit too far. Now they are actually encouraging you to watch TV commercials! Watch this video to see what I mean (or jump directly to YouTube).

I have to admit it’s one of my favorite commercials, not least because of its very catchy tune. The question is, though, will an advertising campaign like this work? Will people start to watch the commercials more, and then actually buy the products being advertised?

Of course! When you repeat something enough times, it becomes true, so singing “I love commercials” to yourself all day will subconsciously make you believe you really love commercials. It must work because I’ve been glued to the TV for the last few days. I might have to change the lyrics to “I love changing diapers” or “I love Akihiro Miwa” if I’m going overcome the things I fear most.

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Launching WritingWorkbooks.com

June 13th, 2008 by Nick Ramsay

Since I wrote about my Dot Com Lifestyle, I’ve had people me asking exactly what I do for a living, and I even found my name mentioned along with mega-bloggers Darren Rowse, Steve Pavlina and John Chow, in author A. Dawn’s Personal Finance Journal!

The latest project
I promised to keep you all informed about my latest website, Writing Workbooks, which I’ve been building with my mum. It’s full of handwriting practice workbooks which cover popular elementary school topics such as dinosaurs, the Titanic, hot air balloons and bears to name just a few. My mum was a primary school teacher for years so it made sense to lean on her for the content, and she’s very excited about signing up for Adsense and earning her first online income. Apparently though, she’s not in it for the money, she’s in it for the fame and groupies!

My thought processes

This isn’t a tutorial, so not everything I do can be applied to you own projects, but let me explain some of the things I try to aim for when making a new site.

Stick with the same niche

First, I usually choose a topic similar to one I’ve done before. That gives you an instant stream of visitors because you can direct your current traffic to your new site. I now have seven websites in the children’s education niche which attracted around 140,000 visitors last month. If those people aren’t interested in the content, they have three main choices: click the back button, click through to one of my other sites, or leave through an ad. I try carefully to keep visitors within my circle of sites as that increases the chances of them either bookmarking one of them, or earning me a few cents.

Squeeze the niche

Once I’ve got my topic, I “squeeze the niche”. That’s my term for targeting every page to your desired audience. The visitors I want are searching for “writing workbooks” or a variation on that, so I need to rank highly for that search term in Google and co. I registered the domain name writingworkbooks.com because most people who link to the site will use the title as their anchor text. The words used in incoming links are really important, and that’s why it’s common for people to rank highly for the name of their site. I’ve also used related keywords in the titles of every page on the site. This should show that the whole site is based on the same topic, which should give it more weight in search engine results.

Build it and leave it

Next, and this was mentioned before, I rarely build a website that requires ongoing work. This blog and JapanSoc always need some kind of contribution (especially spam busting!), but my other sites are finished. I think it defeats the purpose of running an internet business if you actually have to work. That’s not what the Dot Com Lifestyle is about! Ideally, you’ll make sites that take a few weeks to make and promote, but then you can leave them online to earn a passive income. That gives you time to spend with your family, or work on new projects to build up your online workforce.

Launch day

Finally, it’s time to launch. I actually had the site online over a month ago to give it time to get indexed by the search engines, and I made a sitemap and submitted it to Google through Webmaster Tools. Today, I linked all my other educational sites to this one, and put the word out on a number of education-related social bookmarking sites as well as Digg, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us. That should spark a flurry of interest, and with a bit of luck the teachers and parents who will benefit most from WritingWorkbooks.com will bookmark it, link to it and discuss it in forums.

Where do we go from here?

I’ve nearly finished my contribution to the site, so I’m going to leave it up to my mum to promote it in her signature on teacher forums. Quite honestly, after typing up 800 handwriting worksheets, we are both suffering from Repetitive Strain Injury and could use a break… until the next project begins.

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« Previous Entries

Smoke Free for 365 Days

My New Office 2008

8 Fabbertastic Facts About Nick Ramsay

I Love Commercials Commercial!

Launching WritingWorkbooks.com

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