So after losing my old 60-gig 4th-generation iPod at a hotel in Malaysia )-: I got home and ordered a new one, a 60-gig 5th-generation iPod. The new one is thinner than the old one, can play videos, and is black.
I use it mostly at the gym, but also in the car and sometimes out and about or at home. I like it a lot. I'm not one of those rabid Apple fans, or, perhaps, even an Apple fan at all, but I must admit that Apple does a very good job of keeping things simple and clean, yet leaving more advanced features [...]
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I used to love garlic, but I think that all changed this morning when I woke up leaking concentrated garlic extract from every pore of my body.
Yesterday while relaxing with a beer, I enjoyed a snack best described as “corn-nut garlic”. Cloves of garlic deep fried and turned into big puffy crunchy snacks, very much like hyper-seasoned corn nuts. They were strong, of course, but no more than a good garlic potato chip or other well-seasoned snacks.

I didn't have too many of them, though -- maybe a third of a 120-gram bag (a total of about an ounce or so). But this [...]
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Here's a photo which I think captures a lot of Japan:
Cherry Blossoms, a Cemetery, and a Ramen Noodle Joint
I took this near Daigo Temple in Yamashina, Kyoto, Japan, after visiting the temple during cherry-blossom season last month.
The big yellow sign says “Ramen” (as in “noodles”), and is for a shop on a major street that you can't otherwise see in the picture. The thing that looks like a cemetery is a cemetery, although there are no bodies, just monuments and likely some ashes.
As a bonus quintessentially Japanese thing, in the very upper right, you can see some futons hanging over someone's [...]
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It was hot enough today to need the air conditioner for the first time this year. It was hitting 27C (80F) outside, and was all the hotter in my office due to the computers acting like space heaters.
It's a tenuous link to summertime, but here's a Reader's Digest “Word Power” from August 2003, featuring random words that begin with “can” or “dog”. Their rationale for this particular slice of randomness (and my tenuous link to summer) is that August is known as the “dog days of summer” because that's when the star Canis Major rises with the sun. Whatever.
Anyway, as always, I missed the “exceptional” [...]
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The sun rose at 4:49 this morning here in Kyoto. Ugh.
It was the first time so far this year that the sun rose before 5:00am. Unfortunately, it won't be the last -- the sunrise gets steadily earlier until it hits 4:42am and stays there for most of June. It won't rise during the 5:00 hour again until late July.
The picture to the right is from my GPS unit, which can compute the theoretical sunrise/sunset data for any point on earth. The point in question today is my apartment.
All this early sunrise stuff is unfortunate because Anthony tends to rise with the [...]
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This by far is the most funny email message I have ever received:
Date: Tue, 9 May 2006 13:48:22 -0700 From: hidden To: jfriedl@yahoo.com Subject: Saw your book. It's tripe. I learned more from man pages and googling. I feel bad for any schmuck who wasted their money on that garbage. I hear you are a real jackass. Not surprised. Your picture looks like a typical jackass. Fortunately your kids don't look like their dad, yikes. Your lame blog form doesn't even work right. Anyway, you suck and [...]
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So, I got email from my sister letting me know that my blog's comment-submit process was broken. This must be what my mystery fan referred to in his kind message to me this morning.
It turns out that I'd introduced a bug into my comment-processing mechanism the other day. It's fixed now, but I really can't apologize enough. The poor guy tried to submit his “you're a jackass” comment 11 times, and after it failing through no fault of his own, you certainly can't begrudge him the subsequent “you suck” he tacked on.
My sister tried to submit a comment a few times, after which she sent [...]
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The Japan Times (English-language daily in Japan) has an article today about a plan to photograph and fingerprint foreigners entering Japan. It had been in the works for some time, and has been a topic of some debate, but now it's law.
Here are some excerpts:
Diet passes bill to take foreigners' prints, pics
By Masami Ito
A bill requiring fingerprinting and photographing of foreigners upon entry to Japan was passed Wednesday as a way to prevent terrorism.
An estimated 6 million to 7 million foreigners entering Japan every year will be obliged to have their fingerprints and photographs taken, along with other personal identification [...]
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Monday saw the Aoi Matsuri festival here in Kyoto.

“Aoi Matsuri” is 葵祭 -- Aoi means “hollyhock” (a kind of flower), and matsuri means both “source of great traffic congestion” and “festival”.
This particular festival, held on May 15th ever year, dates back about 1,000 years, making it the oldest festival still held today. It's a “festival”, though, only in the sense of the hoopla surrounding it is festive -- it's really more of an “event”.
People dressed in period costumes leave the imperial palace and walk a path to some shrines a few kilometers away. People line the path to see the costumes and such.

Anthony had his first field trip with his preschool class on Thursday, to the Kyoto Prefectural Botanical Gardens. Fumie had come down with a cold, so I got to chaperone. I took 420 photos. Here are three of them...
Kids are meant to run
Friends
Kids are still meant to run
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I'm pretty good at creating software, but for me it's a very different story when it comes to electronics and mechanics, so it was with great awe that I read one man's attempt to photograph insects in flight.
His saga has 10 pages, starting out with a laser sensor he built to trigger the camera when a bug is in the right spot, and includes taking apart a 1950s mechanical shutter, finding a way to open and close the shutter with electromagnets 20x faster than his modern digital SLR camera's shutter lag, and, well, a lot of smarts. He even mills his own [...]
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Starting preschool is a big deal in Japan. It's a “big kid” step, and as such can be a mix of excitement and stress for the kid, Anthony included. It puts parents in a difficult situation, because while you want to play up the excitement, you do so at the risk of playing up the stress. He gets, for example, the excitement of a new backpack and thermos, but then has then has the stress of having to carry them. Of course, just going can be stressful in and of itself.
One big difference to Anthony between daycare and preschool is that he now gets [...]
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