In the jungles of high stakes finance, employees of any big bank are used to dealing with a plethora of exotic alphabet soup creatures. For example there are such specimens as SEF, MIFID, CME, LME, QE,

Happy New Year my fellow Steemians! I'm back and ready to burn some rubber after a long & refreshing end-of-year break. But before putting the pedal to the metal, what better time to look back and

It's that time of year again, when the weather grows frosty, the days pass all too quickly, and my credit card bill shoots straight up. Ah, the signs of the holidays! Christmas is my favorite day of the

The first in a line of books attempting to bridge the gap between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, Star Wars: Aftermath answers the question: what happened after the second Death Star was destroyed

Every year my family likes to kick off the Christmas shopping season with a trip to the old-fashioned city of Kawagoe. Located less than an hour north of Tokyo by train, there's no better place to get

I work for a global investment bank, in the upper reaches of a vast office tower just like this one. It's one of those Wall Street companies that people love to target during election campaigns. And you

Choosing an online username is not easy. It requires some thought & creativity, and is one of the most important decisions you'll make when trying to get off the ground with social media. I always

Yes, I'm going to go there. Let's address the elephant in the room straight up: I use a voting bot, and I'm proud of it. What is a voting bot: any piece of computer software that votes automatically on

TL;DR: Part 1 was all about the steps required to do remittances via Bitcoin instead of relying on the traditional banking system. In this post I focus on how much money you can save by doing so, and present

My family & I spent last weekend in Kawasaki, a large city only an hour by train from western Tokyo, and the place to be for Halloween in Japan. Kawasaki hosts one of the nation's largest annual Halloween

TL;DR: In this 2 part series I explain how to use Bitcoin for international remittances, thereby avoiding the expensive fees charged by the traditional banking system. Part 1 covers the steps involved

TL;DR: In this post I offer an Excel spreadsheet that you can download and freely use for managing your personal finances. I start by covering the advantages of having such a planning aid, and then move

Seveneves is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi vision of our near and far future. Neal Stephenson has always had a way of taking big ideas and writing about them in a gritty, realistic fashion that's chock full

Today I took a day off from work and went with my wife to enjoy the warm weather at Showa Kinen Park in Tachikawa, western Tokyo. The seasonal cosmos flowers are in bloom, making this a perfect time to

TL;DR: In this post I discuss what Synereo is, how its ongoing crowdsale works, and whether you should buy into it. After some analysis & number crunching, I conclude now is a good time to buy directly

One problem with the Steemit web site is lack of tight integration with several useful services that have sprung up around the platform. Steemit Chat is arguably one of the best such services, but using

I like managing my cryptocurrency investments on the go, so in this post I'm going to share 10 of my favorite crypto related mobile apps, in no particular order. With these apps, whether it be commuting

I have a confession to make: I'm addicted to being awake. There are so many demands on my time, I like to make productive use of every minute and not leave unfinished business before I sleep. Yet going

As mentioned in my introductory post, I've been living in Tokyo for well over a decade. This will be the first in a series of posts chronicling my (mis)adventures and travels in the land of the rising

One of the most reliable tools in my cryptocurrency investing toolbox is lending on the Poloniex exchange. It's the old-faithful, slow-but-steady, go-to champion of my passive investment strategies. And