Archive for February, 2006The main gate of the Heian Shrine, Kyoto Japan thirty seconds from my front door ( larger version ) It seems it's been months without a sunny day, so when we finally had one last week, Anthony and I took a walk to a nearby playground, and on the way I gave the wide end of my new 18-200mm zoom a go. I was on my back on the ground for this shot. Anthony didn't know what was going on, but after a bit of reflection, he got on his back and joined me. 
View full post » It's been quite a while since I put up a Reader's Digest “Word Power”. Here's one from December 2004, featuring words from the culinary world of food. The words are taken from William Grimes' Eating Your Words: 2000 Words to Tease Your Taste Buds. As always, I missed the “exceptional” level, this time by a wide margin. I'm quite disappointed; considering how good I am at eating, I thought I'd ace it! :-) How will you do? Choose which of the four possible selections best represents the meaning of the word 1.sugarplum n. [...] View full post » Oh, what a fun day. Too many toys! But not for Anthony.... for me! I try to be prudent with our funds, so I don't buy a lot of “toys” for myself. Last year I got an iPod. The previous year I got Photoshop and other Adobe “Creative Suite” software (although at a nice discount, thanks to the kindness of some friends). I probably have a number of other things on which spending money I've conveniently forgotten, but in general, my idea of pampering myself usually centers more around Orville Redenbacher's Smart Pop Microwave Popcorn and a beer than trendy electronic gadgets. However, last [...] 
View full post » Two weeks ago I complained that I was sick of being sick, and the very next day I felt great. Well I'm sick again, so maybe complaining will help again? I started to have a mild cold on Thursday, and just this morning I was thinking that I'm finally better when boom, this afternoon it takes a nosedive and now I feel more miserable than before. Yuck. So here goes again: I'm sick of being sick!!!!!! View full post » This is a followup to my previous post on testing a Transcend 4GB 120x Compact Flash card. In that post, I found that its write speed was actually slower than the 80x version of the same card (tested in a separate post). I contacted Transcend Japan about the slow card, and to their credit they replied very quickly at each step along the way. However, their initial reply was full of wishy-washy ways to avoid the issue, saying that there could indeed be situations where tests shows the 80x is faster than the 120x and that the speed rating they give is only for relative comparison only, [...] View full post » My horribly flaky hardware had a resurgence of horribleness yesterday with my ill-conceived idea to windowsupdate the thing. After installing 52 security updates, rebooting, installing Service Pack 2, rebooting, then installing the cumulative SP2 security updates (Lord knows how many in there), and rebooting again, my machine is now just as flaky as it was last September. Sigh. “WindowsUpdate™ -- keep up to date on all the latest bugs and inconveniences.” Despite the clear connection between WindowsUpdate and the problems, I believe it's somehow also related to my hardware, and that if I replace it I might extract myself from this mess. My brother has had good luck with Dell, [...] 
View full post » This is starting to sound like a broken record, but this time it's shame on Volvo for not having LATCH car-seat mount points (called “ISOFIX” outside America). I posted earlier about Audi not having LATCH points on some of their models offered in Japan. Today we were at a Volvo dealership, and while browsing one of the catalogs noticed a quote from the founder along the lines of “because cars are driven by people, safety must always be our primary concern.” Very nice, but why does it seem that none of their cars offered in Japan have this most very basic safety feature? [...] View full post » So, I call up PG&E to make a payment on the gas/electricity for the Cupertino house. They have one of those voice-navigation phone systems (“say 'card' to pay by card; say 'check' to pay by check”) that for some reason I find really annoying. (Most of what I find I want to say to such systems are words they would likely not recognize, and which are not printable in a refined forum such as my blog ) Anyway, I navigate through entering my account number and credit card number, but it keeps reporting that there's an error of some sort with my card number [...] View full post » My posts seem to have a negative tint lately, so I thought I'd try to counter that with a post on the somewhat of a success story that are my recent workouts at the gym. Fitness History In the very old days I was quite skinny (more gangly, really, considering that I'm a geek), and weighed in at about 180 pounds [82kg]. I'm 6'4" [192cm], so 180 pounds is pretty lean. Then I started working out and I built up a fairly nice build; at my peak, I had Popeye arms (okay, not really, but at least I had some muscle on my bones) and was [...] 
View full post » I seem to be way behind on my photo processing, and today it got worse when a FFF (friend of a friend of Fumie) got married at the Heian Shrine, which is conveniently quite near where I live. A traditional Japanese wedding is attended by only the very closest of family; it's the reception that's the big celebration attended by throngs of guests, so it's for that the FF (friend-of-Fumie) came to Kyoto. We could, however, visit the public grounds of the shrine and witness the newly-married couple leaving the area by rickshaw for the reception venue (in this case, at the [...] 
View full post » Since I'm getting more interested in photography and understanding cameras and techniques, I find myself wanting to know the details under which a photo was taken. Modern digital cameras encode a lot of such data -- shutter speed, lens focal length, etc. -- into the image file, generally called “Exif Data” (“Exif” stands for “exchangeable image file format”). So, I wrote a little online Exif viewer to view whatever data might be encoded. Here's a screenshot using the viewer on a picture from a recent post: That's just the summary -- you can see the full data using the tool itself. The amount of data [...] 
View full post » There are a lot of wires strung across the sky in Japan. A lot of wires. Here's a picture of the utility pole closest to our place: (IMAGE: Utility Pole Closest to Our Place (West Side)) As you might imagine, it's quite pleasant to see every day. (NOT!) Looking straight up from where I took the first shot, you can see in the photo below the utility pole closest to the other side of the entrance. All the wires strung between the two go right across the face of the building. (IMAGE: Utility Pole Closest to Our Place (East Side)) Double [...] 
View full post » | 
Jeffrey Friedl You are currently browsing the archives for February, 2006. Blog Basics Index of Photos Post Categories Currently Popular(Not counting recent posts)
(Popular six months ago)
(Most popular posts, ever)
|