Greetings from the Philippines

My name is Richard, I'm from Canada, the west coast.  I've been living here in the Philippines since 2012.  Prior to beginning life here I had spent about 15 years living in Japan from 1995 up until I made the move to the Philippines.  I did make some trips back to Canada, one of which was from 1999 to 2004 where I spent that time living on Vancouver Island.  

I'm an IT Consultant, Computer Technician and entrepreneur.  Most of the the past 20+ years I've been self-employed, running my computer business in Canada, Japan and now the Philippines.  

Work wasn't always abundant, so I have taken on numerous types of other work, from working in restaurants, bars, volunteer work and hard labor jobs at factories in Japan.  I actually did teach English too while I had stayed in Japan.

I've stayed in numerous locations during my time in Japan.  Worked in Nagoya, lived in that general area for probably the longest period of time.  Cities I've lived in included Ichinomiya (formerly Bisai City), Toyota, Kameyama and Suzuka.  I spent some time not in Tokyo, but nearby, known as Asakusa.   I spent half a year living on Okinawa which is where I had done volunteer work looking after abandoned and rescued cats and dogs.  The first place there was only just under 20 dogs.  The next location, now that was a lot of work, around 50 dogs, and over 300 cats.  

When I moved here back in 2012, that's when I married as well.  But also that's when I moved my business here, and as many at the time had recommended, opened an Internet cafe.  Times have changed though, especially in the residential area's.  More and more people have computers and Internet at home.  Another factor was the limited budget, so the computers purchased at the time were not very good.  

So after we decided to close up shop, other than repairs, and secretary type work I looked into two area's, one of which was Forex.  The training was a few months, but later required an investment which I wasn't in such a position to move forward.  That was last year, beginning of the year in fact.  

About this time last year I began teaching online to Chinese students.  It's a Philippine/China co-operation, but the company began hiring non-Filipino teachers to attract more students.  Foreigners were paid higher than Filipino teachers, of course that also mean the students paid higher rates for those lessons.   The company made a poor change at the beginning of this year by increasing the student fee's, and that led to students quitting and looking for cheaper alternatives.  So I haven't been teaching for the last several months now, well except for one Japanese student, which actually is my client which I do technical proofreading for.   I actually did teach with a Japanese company, also online, but the company was not as well established as the Chinese company, from lesson material to the web based interface which was not very reliable.

So at the time I began learning more about Forex, actually working on a live but demo account, I also began researching in to Bitcoin.  I've earned some, but nothing to brag about, the amount of time you spent on faucets doesn't make it worthwhile really.  There have also been a number of companies, websites, fly-by-nights that have taken our bitcoin and ran!  Risky to say the least eh!  Now I'm working on another system, which is pretty much Forex, but you can monitor bitcoin/chinese yuan pair and take your educated guess as to which direction the pair is going to go.  In fact, I'll even mention it here, I'm using BitPlutos.com and they have a sweet deal, install their app on your Android or iOS, take a screenshot and email it to support at bitplutos . com and you'll get 0.25 BTC which has a current value of $163USD.  You will be able to withdraw after a turnover of 7.5BTC, that's all your wins and losses added together.  They did this promo last month and again the promo is back but only until 7/31/16 (not sure which time zone that is though)

I mentioned Android and iOS, actually for over a year now, I've also been testing apps for the devices, the desktop computer and via a web browser.  The testing I've done is just simply usage and reporting of any bugs, crashes etc.... Usability Testing would probably be the right title for that.  Haven't made any huge amounts at that, but it's neat to get early access to some of these apps (some of which require removal after the testing has completed).

Well I've rambled on here and still can write  a bit more here.  In addition to having an interest in nearly anything tech related, I do enjoy movies a lot, I suppose I could also be called an animal lover.   Labradors are great, but smaller dogs are less involved, well at least they eat less and in most cases make less of a mess.  I had a french bulldog before I left Japan, and if I ever have a chance to have another, I probably will.

I haven't been back to Canada since 2007 and until I can reach some financial goals, I don't know when I will take a trip back.  

I was just going to upload a pic, not of myself but of the city I was living in before moving to the Philippines.  Sadly, we can't just upload pics from our computer, but from a URL.   At any rate, Suzuka City is where I had lived for about 5 years, it's also infamous for the Suzuka Racing Circuit.  Lastly, my handle/nickname here is SuzukaPC, the shortform of what I named my business Suzuka PC Services.  Branding is important, and I haven't always done that right, with name changes occurring numerous times over the years.  So despite not running the business in Japan now that I'm here in the Philippines, I decided to just keep the name as is.

Thanks for taking the time to read up on my lengthy introduction LOL