Greetings!
If you’re seeing this post then you must have been referred to here by me personally, clicked on a link from my social accounts, or got really lucky and came here from organic search engine results (just kidding, you are a good samaritan and it had nothing to do with luck, but it might have some to do with my SEO skills 🙂 ).
This post is an introduction to this site and outlines some of the goals and motivations of this site. Personally, this post serves as a guideline for me so that I don’t stray from the original plan for this blog. You can read my profile in a separate About page, though I will likely go into small tangents about my personal life in the posts I will write. If you went and came back from that page you would notice that I am, in fact, a Taiwanese who grew up in the States and now work in Tokyo. While I can speak, read, and write in three languages, English is my strongest point (and, consequently, a strong selling point as a talent here in Japan), and thus posts in this blog will be largely written in English. While there may be times in which I will post in Japanese or Mandarin Chinese, my grasp of these two languages are not strong enough to produce a prose in which readers will find interesting – and to be honest, I wasn’t necessarily the top of my class in the English department, neither, so I hope to become more poetic at English first before engaging in others.
At the time of this post, I live in a somewhat small city in Tokyo called Jiyuugaoka (自由が丘) of the Meguro ward district. It is a place relatively known for youngsters and lavish dessert shops, but is also an important place for train transfers along the Toyoko and Oimachi lines. While not cheap, it is a very convenient area to live in and therefore many expats choose to live in or around this area. The name of this blog, “JiyuuLife,” bears semblance to the area I call home now. “Jiyuu,” or “自由” in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese, translates to “freedom,” which to me symbolizes the beginning of my journey to financial and spiritual freedom – roughly a month before the inception of this site I had quit my previous job as a technical solutions consultant in the finance industry to move back to the internet services industry which I currently work in now. Since this company also has housing assistance, I also opted in to move to a bigger and more vibrant area. But while I only moved two stations south (I have been to Jiyuugaoka many times before in my life) the day I decided on the apartment I will move into I was overcome with a sense of liberation and the determination that I will better myself, for myself, by finally breaking free of the financial and mental chains holding me back from being my best. To me, this blog serves as both a tracker – so that I not deviate from my path to personal greatness – but also a memento of such journey, so that in the years or decades to come I can come back to this public diary and reminisce about the wonderful memories I made.
Night picture of rotary outside of Jiyuugaoka Station
Alright, now let’s get on with some administrative topics. Since I’m new to blogging, I will take this time to try out some formatting features. I promise, I’ll get better at deciding what to use for which situations in the future 🙂
Motivation
In addition to self-development and the vague goals I outlined above, the following are what I hope to explore and try out in this blog to gain a better understanding of how it works and become more professional at:
Advertising – Advertisement and marketing are major topics in the world today and it is said that no businesses can get by without some form of marketing. While I do apologize for displaying advertisements in this site, it is a necessary evil as I am hosting, publishing, and maintaining everything by myself. The main costs for maintaining this blog are the hosting fees (variable depending on site traffic) and well as domain hosting fees, and though it doesn’t amount to much in a year-on-year basis, I do hope to generate enough royalty for this site to be self-sustainable. In this way I can continue to provide more DIY and how-to guides for everyone to follow along in the future.
Web Design – I’ve never been great at web design as I’ve always handled the backend in all the salaried positions I engaged in. Fortunately, self-hosting WP comes with many unique templates for me to use as a base, and adding small things on top of it is much simpler than starting from scratch. Expect this blog to become more and more lifelike as time goes by, and I hope it becomes beautiful enough that other sources will refer to this place as an example of a great blog.
System Administration – Load balancing, seamlessly adding/subtracting virtual machines, error logging and monitoring… the list goes on. There are many ways to approach it and is utterly overwhelming as a result. While there are many tools which can be leveraged to assist in backend management, the orchestration and decisions ultimately come down to human intelligence. While not necessary now, it will be a delightful burden for me to have the opportunity to incorporate many of these concepts in the future.
Linguistics – As stated above, I’m not the best at expressing myself in any language. I hope to fix that.
Exploring New Concepts – This place serves as a log of sorts for me to remember what I have tried – what worked and what didn’t, how I could improve next time, et cetera. As engineers we tend to have do things in a methodical and scientific manner, and keeping track of our processes is a time-consuming but necessary part of organizing our achievements.
Below is a bullet point list, just because 🙂
Posts will be mainly centered around:
- Data aggregation
- DIY
- Shop/Item Reviews
- Other Know-Hows
Aaaand, that’s it! I assume if you made it this far then you must either be very bored or very infatuated with me. Regardless of which, while this blog is not specific nor niche in content, I hope that every viewer will be able to take something away from here and use for their own self-betterment. It is an exciting time for me to start my own blogging “service,” and I do hope I have the strength and persistence to nurture this site for the years and decades to come. Thank you, and thank you in advance for your continuing support.