Still at the hospital. Cant make phone calls or email until I go home tomorrow. only saw him for 2secs through glass! Kiko is fine. So spread the word…
Noa Kenichiro Bennett
3.634kg
51.5cm
Year: 2005
My Birthday Excitement & Soccer Death
The Kiko Report:
T minus -2 and counting. No baby. A very big and heavy Kiko (who seems to want the baby on the outside.) Stay tuned. 
- The Good News
My birthday!! 
Remember? November 9th… 26 years old… right!? (most people thought I was 25 this year for some reason. Anyways, Kiko and I celebrated together. We found a nice Itallian place in Utazu (a nearby city!) and went out. We also had cake. Kiko gave me a super wallet, and I also got some clothes and a Shogi set from my friends. Here, look at the pictures.
Look!! See?? That is a card I got from Goggy and pictures of my birthday cake. It has soccer balls on it… get it? … note how it also ties in to my next subject:
- The Bad News aka. Soccer Death
Now this may be a little bit hard to grasp…. but… I injured my hand playing soccer. It isn’t broken but it’s really swollen and quite painful. I also got a ball to the face which left swelling and a bruise…exciting? Here’s the background:
See that guy to my right, your left? Mark. He’s from England. Really nice guy and top-notch footballer. He also has a super hard shot. That hit me. From 2 feet away. When a volley would have sufficed. I thought I was going to die. Fortunately I did not.
This is a team picture we took last weekend. We played the Tadotsu Town Office team (again!). Instead of a 2-2 tie, we beat them 4-0 (or that was the score when I went to the hospital.) Nice.
Here is some photos of my pain. Empathize.
See that swelling??? I know you do. 
More soccer pictures here.
That is all.
A *BIG* Update
Not that big of an update. (baby wise anyways…) But it did take me a hell of a long time to get everything ready. So you best be reading this.
First of all, quite a few people have noted that this website has turned into a baby-watch. It’s true. Our visitors are up by about 8 times what they usually are. This will definitely be the first place pictures are posted (don’t get too excited!). I will be e-mailing in photos from the hospital and they should automatically get displayed online so you will know right around the same time I do.
Secondly, some of you may be seeing some weird crazy pages when you visit. Sorry! I’m trying to get 4.0 online so that when the baby comes it’s all ready to show you tons of pictures… ‘cuz that’s what you want to see… maybe. That’s what I want to see anyways. Besides, I figure that if you are actually visiting this site you have a vested interest in what Kiko and I are doing.. right? I suspect the baby will be a big part of what we are doing so you get to look at the billion pictures that I take (with our crappy camera. thanks everyone! 
)
At any rate, the reason this is a big update is because I am going to be sending up pictures that have been sitting here for ages. I have also updated some of the photo galleries. Expect all of this to be re-done in time for the baby … (lots of pictures, easy to read entries and other fun stuff!)
By the way, thanks for all of those who called/wrote to wish me a happy birthday. 
It meant a lot to me. (That’s the closest happy face I could find to a birthday hat…) to those who didn’t…. I’m not naming the baby after you.
So here goes…
Recenetly, in Takamatsu, at the Kagawa International Festa (weird, no homepage… but look here.) my Tug of War team took first place in all of Kagawa. Yes, I have a tug of war team. Yes, I was clearly the deciding factor in the win (laugh now, but I was the anchor and had some good skill. I beat other anchors who were three times my size.) We also destroyed the girl-scout team in the semi-finals. It was exciting…
Can’t get enough of all that Tug of War action? Getting excited by that Tug of War pose I have? Look here for more pictures.
Last (maybe) but not least, remember the Halloween Party? (Of course you do.) Well I also had a Halloween event in my town on November 6th (the greatest day to have a Halloween party.) With the help of my good friends Nikki and Jim (thanks Jim!) we took 25 elementary kids (only 10 signed up) and got them to cut tiny ass little green Japanese pumpkins into something resembling a jack’o’lantern. It also marked the first time in my life where I have ever made my own pumpkin (all by myself.) … Here are a few choice scenes. Go here for the entire album (my pumpkin is the one on the chair with the candles in it!)
Damn it! I knew I was forgetting something…. in one of my kindergarten classes I recently received a love note. It was really really cute. A little 4 year old girl (named Madoka) came up to me after class and handed it to me. I was going to read it but then she said I should put it in my pocket and read it when I was alone… 
crazy…
I will translate:
David-sensei (teacher): I love you. Let’s keep studying English together.
Please make note that she went to the extra special effort to write from left to right instead of right to left (so that my white brain could understand…)
That is all… maybe the next update will be baby news?
2005 Kagawa Soccer Team
Hmm, these are a little bit late.. (not to mention a bit embarassing!) but here goes.
Introducing the 2005 Kagawa Soccer Team. 
Studly bunch, us. If you want to see more soccer pictures, go here.
At any rate, we have a game coming up this weekend. (Followed by a tournament the week after which I cannot make because of the impending baby. Have a look at last years tournament.)
Here are a few pictures from a game we had a few weeks ago. We played Tadotsu Town office team. It was our first match together and we came back from 3 behind to tie it up at 3. That was the good part. We then proceeded to have our asses handed to us by Junior High School students who came up to Jim (the really tall guy)’s legs. I guess they practice and stuff everyday… but still ….
ps. my birthday is soon. excited?
Sanuki Fuji
Here in Kagawa they have this mountain called iinoyama. It goes by the nick-name of "Sanuki Fuji". Kagawa is famous for lots of little mountains in very nice mountain-shapes. Sanuki Fuji happens to be a tiny-little version of Mt. Fuji. It is actually quite nice and can be seen from anywhere in the prefecture.
Last week Ishikawa-sensei (my supervisor) and I climbed it and took pictures from the top. It was about an hour climb and, save for a few clouds, it was a fantastic view.
Wanna see more? Click here.
Linux – Netcat Command
Netcat: The TCP/IP Swiss army knife
Of all the networking tools I’m familiar with I use four more than any other; ping, traceroute, nmap, and netcat. The first two utilities are standard on many operating systems. nmap is a port scanner which makes it simple to identify the services running on a machine. Netcat? That’s a general purpose tool described by its author as a TCP/IP swiss army knife.
The utility of netcat comes from its extreme simplicity, it does one simple job very well. The main job of the package is to open up a network pipe, you connect to a host and it sends all input to it, and shows you the output.
It’s almost the same as a telnet client, but much more scriptable.
For example we can connect to a webserver using netcat and send a command to it – getting the result piped back to us.
skx@lappy:~$ echo -e "HEAD / HTTP/1.0\n" | nc www.foo.com 80
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 23:05:36 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.29 (Unix) PHP/4.3.8
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.8
X-Accelerated-By: PHPA/1.3.3r2
Location: http://0.0.0.0/
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
Here we used the echo command to send get input to the process, instead we could type it manually:
nc www.foo.com 80
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
[ret]
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 23:06:41 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.29 (Unix) PHP/4.3.8
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.8
X-Accelerated-By: PHPA/1.3.3r2
Location: http://0.0.0.0/
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
As well as setting up a pipe to a remote machine sending our input to it, and showing us the output from the far side we can use it in the reverse manner.
In this case we tell it to listen to a port – and send some text back to anybody who connects to us:
skx@lappy:~$ nc -l -p 2000 -e /usr/bin/uptime
The command line flags used here are -l for listen, -p 2000 for listening on port 2000, and -e /usr/bin/uptime to execute the uptime command when clients connect.
From a different machine you can test this, by connecting to port 2000 and seeing the output:
skx@lappy:~$ telnet localhost 2000
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
00:07:50 up 3:03, 4 users, load average: 0.08, 0.11, 0.20
Connection closed by foreign host.
There we see that we’ve been sent the output of the uptime command, after which the netcat process has exited.
We can write a very simple servers that do simple jobs, or forward traffic between machines using this principle.
For example if you wished to redirect traffic from port 24 on one machine to port 22 on another then you could insert a line like this inside your /etc/inetd.conf file:
24 stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/sbin/tcpd /bin/nc 192.168.1.1 22
(Don’t forget to restart inetd by executing /etc/init.d/inetd restart).
Now when you connect to your server on port 24 you’ll be seamlessly redirected to the SSH port (22) on the remote machine 192.168.1.1.
This is just one example of the kind of job netcat can be setup to handle, for more inspiration read the manpage by running "man netcat".
There’s also a good page online with a few samples of fun things to do with netcat here:
Kiko @ 10 months!
10 months!??! Those advanced Japanese people. Babies in Japan gestate (??) for 10 months.
Not really … I bet you believed me for a 2nd, right??! (I actually thought this was the case when I was first told about this 10 month deal.) No, actually they start counting from an earlier date and the baby is said to be in the womb for 10 months.
Backwards little yellow people? Advanced future overlords? I’ll leave it to you to decide.
At any rate, here is the beautiful Kiko at 10 months (or 2 weeks from the due date.) See how nice she looks? (I’m happy by the way.. that’s my picture face.) 
Kagawa Halloween Party
I was debating about putting Kiko’s picture up, or putting up pictures from Halloween. Halloween won.
Here are some pictures from the annual Kagawa AJET (JET Council, of which I am vice-president??) Halloween Party. Everyone looked pretty good. Especially Greg in his saran-wrap costume, and Jim as spiderman. In case you didn’t notice, I was dressed up as a disgruntled Canadian. Kiko was the wife of a disgruntled Canadian.
If you want to see bigger (more?) of these Halloween Pictures, look here.
Kiko and I are now off to watch "It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown!" for Halloween.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! 
My Amazing Sweet Potatoes
Coming hot off the heals of the potato party, take a look at my sweet potato excitement. Boo!! That’s right. 3 types, all transported from Kiko’s Island of Tanegashima to here in Kagawa. (I live in Chunan-cho, but you guys know that, right?) 
Now enjoy the view and look how cool I am picking my sweet potatoes. (and yes… I already know that no one likes to comment on my farming because you are all jealous.)
The Famous Potato Festival
This entry was actually entitled "Update on Kiko" but she didn’t like the photo I was going to upload. She promised I could post one tomorrow, so expect an update tomorrow. She looks… umm… big. But cute…
Anyways… yes, it’s the Potato Party. Remember how Kiko used to work at one of my schools? Well they invited us back for a Potato Party. The actual translation was "The Honourable Potato Party"… but well… umm… that’s stupid.
Now what do you do at a potato party you ask?
Well, first you take cut-up sweet potato, put them on Ritz crackers with whip cream, add some more whip cream and sprinkle liberally with chocolate chips and sprinkles
Then what do you do? (Do you really have to ask?) You have a potato quiz, sing the potato song and talk about potatoes. (He is pointing at a sign that says "Potato Quiz" by the way.
You’re jealous right? And why shouldn’t you be.