Kirk here with something from my news feed.
2026-04-03 12:02 JST 2026 Kirk here with something from my news feed. Kumamoto Official Suspended for Watching Porn at WorkA male employee in his 50s from Kumamoto has been suspended for four months for watching 93 hours of porn at work. https://www.tokyoweekender.com/japan-life/news-and-opinion/k … ↗ View original post on Facebook For a link to the original post on Facebook, open this page on a computer. Reactions: 0 · Comments: 0 · Shares: 0 ← 2026-04-02 09:00 JST 2026-04-04 08:49 JST → Around this time … 2026-04-06 14:08 JSTPost 2026-04-06 12:13 JSTThis is an ideal time of year for hikes. A good day hike is to Hanaokayama 花岡山, the hill behind the train station. You can take JR or the city tram to a somewhat proximate location and walk up a whole lotta steps past cherry trees to the peak. Note along the route many old inns that were used as leprosy hospitals in the 1920s. It was also a site from which the Kagoshima army bombarded Kumamoto Castle, and there are graveyards dating from that era. Reading the tombstones is interesting. At the peak is a stupa gifted to Kumamoto by Prime Minster Nehru of India. If you go by car, the night view of Kumamoto is unsurpassed. - William 2026-04-06 11:02 JSTKirk here. The "follows" (likes + follows, actually) of the page recently passed the 6,000 mark. Thanks to everyone (editors and readers) for participating.I went for quite a long time without posting much. The reasons were that I had become rather disappointed in the Facebook platform (i.e. what Cory Doctorow has termed en***tification) and also found that I was spending too much time on the page and not able to do other things. Recently, I've been feeding news to the page in a way that I think will be more sustainable. What follows is for nerds like me. If you don't have any particular interest in how the sausage is made, so to speak, please feel free to stop reading here.I have two RSS feeds for Google news alerts: "Kumamoto" and "熊本 + 外国人". I use RSS for other things and so I check my feeds on my app (Vienna on my Mac) every day. A problem I have is that I get a lot of false positives. "Kumamoto" might snag flight reports, for example, and "熊本" + "外国人" often includes articles about Kumamoto where "gaikokujin" only appears in a side bar so the article isn't really about 外国人 in 熊本. Wading through all of these false positives took a lot of time and wasn't really sustainable in the long run.Fortunately, I've found a solution that I'm quite happy with. I've made a little app for myself that uses Python scripting and AI (via API) to sort through everything for me. I'm not able to program in Python but Claude helps me -- so-called "vibe coding." Now, I just double click on a little app and the script is invoked. It checks the unread items in my RSS app, uses Python to mechanically sort items into "include" and "exclude" categories, then uses AI (Claude API) to check stuff that can't be sorted mechanically. The result is data presented to me in the form of a web page with a small number of "included" items at the top and a much longer list of excluded items below it.It works remarkably well. I can now check in less than a minute what used to take me much longer to sort through. So, I should be able to keep feeding news to the page and also get other work done. ;) 2026-04-05 08:58 JSTKirk here. I saw something on TV about this local product but haven't had a chance to try it out yet.Crystal clear soy sauce from Japan's Kumamoto a global hit, tops 1.6 million bottles sold - The Mainichi 2026-04-04 08:49 JSTKirk here with an article about the 2016 quakes.How Kumamoto Survivors Are Keeping Earthquake Lessons Alive | JAPAN Forward 2026-04-03 12:02 JSTKirk here with something from my news feed.Kumamoto Official Suspended for Watching Porn at Work (this post) 2026-04-02 09:00 JSTKirk here with some TSMC news.TSMC wins approval to produce 3-nanometer chips in Kumamoto | NHK WORLD-JAPAN News 2026-04-01 15:38 JSTFrom 1 April, a new type of bin bag will become available.You can put both burnable waste and non-burnable waste in these bags.You can continue to use the existing bags as well.Although you can put both burnable and non-burnable waste in these bags, you must choose to put either burnable waste or non-burnable waste in them—not both.The message seems to be that whilst the bags can be used for both types, you must sort the contents and put them out separately.If I may offer my personal opinion, I would like them to produce small bags specifically for non-combustible waste if there is a demand for them.It’s a bit confusing, isn’t it, that you can put both combustible and non-combustible waste in the same bag, but you’re not allowed to mix them?Atsuko ( * ॑꒳ ॑*)Kumamoto city website https://share.google/s3PY4U7Mr0WyuqAz9 2026-04-01 06:00 JSTKirk here. Every April 1st, I've been publishing April Fools' posts on the page for many years now. This year, however, I'm afraid I just can't do it. You see, to be honest, I'm not well. I've been diagnosed with a degenerative cognitive disease: ICVS (Inane Cat Video Syndrome). My docs tell me that it's caused by the overexposure to infinitely scrolling videos of cute kittens, babies laughing at sneezes, goats screaming like humans, and hamsters eating tiny burritos. It has left me unable to focus on any single task for more than . . oh, look, raccoons stealing things . . . that's so cute! And those dogs in costumes are absolutely adorable . . . um . . . well . . bye! 2026-03-31 11:32 JSTKirk here. To be honest, I don't have a deep interest in the repair of this Shinkansen car, which was damaged in the 2016 earthquakes. It has been interesting, however, to see the numbers of people who care enough about it to show up to cheer it on.Repaired Tsubame Bullet Train Car Damaged in 2016 Kumamoto Earthquake Sets Off on Sea Voyage to Hakata 2026-03-30 22:22 JSTKirk here. No shortage of news about this guy -- though most of it doesn't mention his hometown.Homer in 3rd straight game! Murakami continues astonishing start to MLB career
