I usually do not publish personal information on her but the post I am going to reference is worth making some correlations. I have been married going on 9 years, my wife is from Okinawa Japan. I had to laugh tonight when I found a site that talks about Japanese customs. I have been traveling to Japan for 20 years and have many business/personal contacts thus I have learned some of these strict customs the hard-way. My father-in-law owns a large company and is the company president. He is picked up by a driver I have had the opportunity to hang out with him numerous times and have observed formal meetings and have participated in the business courtship in bars and restaurants. As a foreigner there is always the opportunity to sing Karaoke and have business people practice English on me. For many years I was amazed at there work ethic and wondered how they worked all day partied all night and still made it to work the next day. The experience for the non initiated can be gruesome especially when the sake is still flowing at 3am and you have to be back in the office at 7. The average American Business man would collapse after a couple of weeks of this but you learn to pace yourself. The culture and traditions are very in-depth and one would have to study for many years to fully appreciate the Japanese culture. [<A href=”http://www.nora-krug.com/bowl/”>How to Bow, Drink and Visit a Home in Japan</A>]

Here in Hawaii a pyscho killed his 8 year old daughter for no apparent reason. What would drive a person to do this is beyond me. Simply terrible.

Not much news here just work work work..

<P>Wow what a trip, I do not recomend 3 cities in 4 days. Getting into the hotels/motels in the middle of the night for most of the stops if I had not needed a shower I could have just slept in the car. Anyway lot’s of fun. I did try to find WiFi hotspots as I was on the move. Pretty sad results all hotels and airports I went through did not have hotspots. Makes you wonder why some company doesnt get off there butts and rollout WiFi in this high traffic areas.</P>

<P>Well here&nbsp;I am again at 35,000 feet headed towards LAX for a 5 day trip with 3 cities in as many days. It was supposed to be a 2 city trip but something came up aand now a easy 5 days turned into pure hell. </P>
<P>If all goes well I will be back in Honolulu saturday afternoon meanwhile I rack up another 6-7 thousand frequent flyer miles. But the way the trip is setup I will be on&nbsp;3 different carriers. Shoko cashed in some free miles recently and we were ablt to get 2 round trip tickets to Okinawa while having to pay for one which was about $800.00 so not bad considering the damages could have been around $2400.00</P>
<P>I spent some free time this week re-designing the <A href=”http://www.cochranefamily.net/”>Cochrane Family Website</A> and thus far it looks damn good. We incorporated a Movable Type weblog into the news section so it will be much easier for me to update as needed. </P>
<P>I have been working on drumming up some new editors for the Geek News Central website as my schedule is going to be very crazy over the next several months and I do not want content to suffer. We have built up quite a following and if I don’t drive them away&nbsp;because of &nbsp;my slap shot the site should continue to grow.</P>
<P>I am originally from Michigan and even though I live in Hawaii and travel a great deal it seems my travels either have me on the west coast or overseas, I havent been back home in 3-4 years and I feel the need to go home and stretch my legs out for a couple of weeks. Hopefully I will be able to squeeze this in sometime this summer. </P>
<P>Shoko and the kids are headed to Okinawa at the end of May and will not be back for 2 months so hopefully as soon as they get home we will be able to sneak out and take a vacation. I would like to take 3 weeks but we will see what the schedule allows for.</P>
<P>Hopefully United doesn’t lose my luggage as I am really going to be a moving target for the next couple of days.</P>

<P>First Project rolled out and I am now cleaning up. The <A href=”http://www.cochranefamily.net/”>CochraneFamily</A> website has been cleaned up and I am currently re-adding all the pictures but the site looks pretty damn good.</P>

<P>CNN owes every dead Iraqi that was killed by the Regime and every dead military person a profuse apology. They should crawl on there knee’s head bowed and ask forgivness from each and every family. Their revealed actions makes me sick. I hope the people involved loose a lot of sleep. If there ever was a reason to wonder why people do not trust ordinary news sources. [<A href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/opinion/11JORD.html”>New York Times</A>]</P>
<P>If they had reported things as they really where maybe the President would not have had such a hard time raising support. Shows you the almighty dollar drives everything even if people get killed. I watch Fox the majority of the time but I have just locked out CNN on my cable box. Good riddance.</P>
<P>I apologize for breaking our geek thread but I had to rant.</P>

<P>Many of you Ladies hate Cigars. Every man needs a vice and my alloted 1 or 2 cigars a month is I suppose my vice. My Patio at home is the best place. My dad and I built it&nbsp;2 years ago and I don’t get to use it as often as I do. But&nbsp;oh boy is it nice to sit on that Patio and smoke a Cigar.</P>
<P>I had been doing major battel with over that patio with the housing association. It took a year but I did not roll over to the libeal pinkos. But now all of my neghibors are using our floor plans and building there own patio. The housing authority was not used to someone fighting them but we won thats the major thing. So the next time I smoke a cigar in my bug/pest freePatio I will be effectively throwing the bird at those assholes. Now where the dart board I need to get that mounted up. I have a TV out there the Wifi reaches and all I need is a keg keeper and I will be in heaven. I may not have a garage but by god I have a patio. Hmm I wonder if we can mount some tools to the wall 😉 nah need to keep it civil so the wife can entertain.</P>

War is War people see the images on TV and get the idea that it is a big game out there. After 20 years of service I have seen my share of interesting things. But one thing for sure those men over there that are getting killed are dead. Dead is Dead and when you think about that for a little while. You realize it is not a game. God Bless there familes, the price of freedom and helping repressed people is not cheap.

<P>Have you ever been so frickin tired that you could hardly navigate. I swear I have been running on reserve power for the last&nbsp;20 months and I need a vacation like it’s going out of style With 70 some vacation days on the books I need to burn some vacation time. I guess when I’m dead I will get caught up on sleep as there is no time to sleep now. I have vowed that if I do get some vacation time I am going to leave my Cell, Laptop and PDA at home.</P>
<P>I am unsure why I do this to myself but besides my regular&nbsp;<A href=”http://www.navy.com/”>Job</A> and keeping&nbsp;<A href=”http://www.geeknewscentral.com/”>Geek News Central</A> updated,&nbsp;I have had 3 huge projects in work for about a week now.</P>
<P>#1 Is the FaceLift of BBS Networks <A href=”http://www.bbsnets.com/public/beta.htm”>here is a beta</A> of what it is going to look like. It has been running the same basic design for about 5 years and I’m sick of it.</P>
<P>#2 I am scraping the curren&nbsp;<A href=”http://www.cochranefamily.net/”>Cochrane Family</A> site and have done a hell of a job with the re-modeling&nbsp;here is a <A href=”http://www.cochranefamily.net/beta/index.htm”>sneak&nbsp;peak</A>&nbsp;it is&nbsp;just a shell at this point but will get it populated&nbsp;over the next few dayd and when it is ready we will roll it out.</P>
<P>#3 I am not sure I will get it done this year but I have went looking for some help. My <A href=”http://www.bbsnets.com/”>BBS</A> still has several 1000 visitors each day but most miss our biggest feature. We have nearly 1/2 million shareware files on-line. Three or four years ago I purchased the domain <A href=”http://www.filearchive.net/”>filearchive.net</A> and have not really developed it. As it&nbsp;is just pointed at the&nbsp;bbsnets.com domain.</P>
<P>&nbsp;But a certain fellow in California rolled out a site today he has been sitting on for awhile and I think we may do the same but it is going to be a huge undertaking as I need to find a net aware software package that will work with my current storage structure. It was a daunting challenge 5 years ago but it’s not so bad now as technolgy and out of the box software packages are much more diverse. My main man down in Floridia could solve our dilema with a week’s worth of work on a current package I am currently running but he can’t stop development to change the package at this time.</P>
<P>Meanwhile considering the world situation I am keeping real busy. Since my promorion last year I have had about twice the workload and I thought I had a lot going on before.</P>