Job

The school year is over in Japan, but meetings remain. I work at a junior college and right now higher education in Nihon is between a rock and a hard place. The cause of this is a birthrate that has been falling like the Nasdaq; there are too many colleges and not enough students to go around. Japan used to pump out 2 million high school graduates a year. That figure is now down to 1.5 million and will dwindle to 1.2 million in the future. Now it's easy to get into a 4-year college. Other students choose what are called specialty schools that prepare students for specific jobs such as healthcare workers or computer programmers. Junior colleges bottomfeed and must have a high job placement rate to keep afloat. This school has had a job placement percentage in the high nineties, but the slumping economy could knock the stuffing out of it this year.

Well, a sure way to get your mind off problems at work is to think about building a new computer. I'm intrigued by the Shuttle SN41G2 . It's a small, quiet motherboard-in-a-cube that is about the size of a small toaster. Plus it has onboard sound and video and plenty of USB and 1394 ports. Now I have an overclocked Athlon in mammoth case I've crammed underneath a table. The fans raise a racket and are powerful enough to cool an Arizona subdivision. What I want is something doesn't impair the MP3 listening experience and that I can put on top of the table where my 2 year-old son can't get to it.