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 Printable Lesson Plans Genki English CDs:  Volume 1  Volume 2  Volume 3  Volume 4  Volume 5  Volume 6   New CD Vol. 7   MP3 Songs |
Take any problem in the World and it's invariably caused ( or made worse)
by a lack of education. Too many kids hate school because it's too boring.
The aim of Genki Learning is to have all subjects in all countries taught
in a fun, engaging and effective way. There are already a few million kids
benefiting from this, and even a whole country where the government has
put it in all their schools. But there's still a long way to go!
While I'm on the road you'll hear about my travels & workshops, and
when I'm doing studio work I'll keep you up to date with ideas, updates
to the site and some of my favourite teaching resources. So if you want
to find out what's it's like behind the scenes or how & why I do what
I do or even if you're just nosey or a bit bored, have a read.
I'll update the diary as often as I can, so keep coming back. And of course
whilst I'm away, the office staff are always ready to send off your CD orders just as soon as you send them in!
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Previous Entries are here
Went out to work at Seattle’s Best again today. Except that I couldn’t use the electric socket, so only got 3 hours work done before my battery died. But I had a plan! I brought my music computer along to do some music work. But when I switched that on the batteries also died. Hmmm.
But anyway I had to go and buy a DVD burner and on the way I found a new music shop! Yeah! And best of all they had a brand new Korg Electribe valve synth that had just arrived today. Fantastic. I had a play around for a bit and it was great, oh I miss doing being a music producer. I guess that’s the thing between music gear and video editing gear, the music stuff is just a joy to use, whereas video editing is like trying to wade through concrete, it is just soooo slow and unresponsive! Now if only I had somewhere to live that I could fill up with new synths and stuff…
Oh I’m fed up with problems with the web servers!! I’ve spent just about all of this week faffing around with the new web host, rather than getting work done on the DVD, which is now well behind schedule. The new web servers just have so many little problems, it’s ridiculous! I was thinking of moving back to Yahoo, but that means having the website down for whole periods of time and having my mail being stopped by spam attacks every so often!! Argh!! I should have stayed with the host that I used until August, but that account was just killed with all the spam mails! All this spam and stuff is making it so expensive to run a website, in 4 years it’s never been this much hassle! Everything used to be all plain sailing, but not any longer. So I’m sort of stuck in a trap of what to spend my time on, making new stuff or trying to keep the website up and running.
Today I had a meeting and the food was a little interesting to say the least, basically because everything was alive. They set up a BBQ on the table and brought out a massive platter of crawling, moving live shell fish!! I had never seen anything like it. The jumbo prawns were fighting each other to jump off the plate onto the floor (seriously!). And you had to hold them on the BBQ so that they didn’t run off the grill. But it was very nice, and obviously very fresh! Then after lots of talking, the boss of the restaurant came up with a refrigerated box. I had had a few sakes by now so didn’t quite realise what was going on. But he put his hand in the box and pulled out a LIVE OCTOPUS! Which he then plonked on the grill and had to hold it there to stop it running off down the table. Oh my goodness. But it tasted really nice! Well, that’s Japan for you, even after all this time everyday I still find something very weird and wonderful! Actually before I came here I thought octopus only lived in the movies, I didn’t think I’d end up BBQing a live one! People always ask me if I’m always genki. The answer is, no. Basically to give good presentations to adults or kids you have to be genki to get good results, so then I become very genki and outgoing and it works. But normally I’m just, well, normal. These last few weeks I’ve spent all my time doing the DVD and haven’t had any meetings or presentations. But today I was asked out to dinner by a publisher who’s job is to “make Genki English famous”! Thing is I’m still full of cold! But I got wrapped up in all my winter clothes and on the subway just kept saying to myself “Think Genki, Be Genki”. It didn’t work. My eyes were just streaming on the the train! But eventually I started getting a bit better, and by the time I met everyone I had a big smile and was trying to be as genki as I could. And it worked, because in half an hour I’d forgotten all about having a cold. Mind over matter, eh? Of course the strange food helped! Anyway the meeting went really well, talking about the new DVD (it’s crazy that I can show demos of it on my phone!), and lots of new products. There were people from the bookstores there as well and it was great to get their feedback.
Well I think I got precisely zero productive work done today! First off I spent hours and hours trying to install the discussion board on the new server. It just refused to work!! But there are a load of really good posts on there so in the end I just bit the bullet and updated all the posts by hand! My mail is also in limbo at the moment, with the mail going to my account on the new server, but I can’t actually get to it until my net connection here decides it’s going to look at the new server as well. All hassles. But at least everything should be seamless for the people viewing the site! I also backed up my video work onto the hard disk I bought yesterday, it took 6 hours just to move all the data! Crazy. But luckily I have the use of two computers at the moment, so although I couldn’t do any email or DVD work I did spend a bit of time cleaning up bits and pieces on the website. And actually sprucing up the website is quite fun!
Did some quick reshoots today and spent a lot of time recording the voice parts for the animations I did last night (recording at 4 AM probably isn’t the best thing with neighbours living as close as they do in Japan!). I also found out a really cool new shopping cart system, which could be useful in getting more ideas out to people quicker. Then tonight after buying yet more hard disk space I went to the pictures. Mind you it was funny seeing all the special effects and thinking “oh, I can do that!”
Got hit again by a ton of spam emails, and as usual Yahoo responded by closing down my mail account. This is silly. Last week I did set up another hosting system with another company but I haven’t been able to get the discussion board moved across yet nor the ordering system, and with the DVD work I just decided to leave it for now. But I guess I do have to get on with sorting out the website! So I initiated the transfer progress. And as that takes 24-48 hours I had time to work more on the DVD and some really cool animations!
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