We're back in Kyoto now. The 12 hours on the plane from San Francisco to Osaka went pretty well; Anthony was a good boy. Fumie presented him with some new toys to play with, and with them time went by quickly.
A long-flight travel tip: I had ordered a special, low-cal meal for the flight. I need to watch my weight, but the real reason I did this is because (at least on United Airlines), ordering a special mean means that you get at the very start of meal service, well before others (up to half an hour before others, depending on where you're sitting). [...]
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A new semester of classes begins this month at the Doshisha University Center for Japanese Language. I can speak Japanese fairly well, but it's all self-taught so I could certainly benefit from some formal study. I thought I'd take Japanese classes at Doshisha, since it's part of the same system that Anthony's preschool is part of, and its location is convenient to Anthony's school. It also has a good reputation.
But I won't be attending classes because the paperwork to apply was just too daunting. It's not that it was bordering on the ridiculous, but way past ridiculous.
As one might expect, the application includes [...]
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I know it's not the season for cherry blossoms (except in the Southern Hemisphere?), but I'm finally getting around to processing photos from last spring and ran across two blossom photos that make fantastic desktop backgrounds. They perhaps don't look like much in the small versions shown here, but follow the links to the large sizes for gorgeous, delicious desktop-worthy images.
Here's the first one:
       Widescreen:    1280 × 800   ·  1440 × 900   ·  1680 × 1050   ·  1920 × 1200   ·  2560 × 1600
The 1,600×1,200 size is appropriate for any standard 4×3 desktop (e.g. 1,280 × 960, etc.). A first with this post, I've included widescreen versions in native sizes appropriate for Apple [...]
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Shopping for a particular kind of 50W lightbulb, I found what I needed in the package shown here. At first glance I see that it's a 50W type, and that it saves about 10% on energy. Cool.
Looking closer, I see that the big “50” is basically a lie. It says: power consumption 45 watt 50 WATT style
At least the “10%” part is true. It says: (comparing within our own company) about 10% energy-saving type
Well, of course, if you use a 45-watt bulb where you intend to use a 50-watt bulb, you'll be saving 10% on energy. The problem is that you'll have 10% less light! [...]
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(click to expand)
Having looked back to cherry-blossom time in a recent post, this time I'll look forward to the upcoming fall by revisiting some photos I took last fall.
The picture above is the backyard of someone's house, visible from a trail leading up Daimonji Mountain (see this post for more on Daimonji). The following picture shows the front gate of the same house:
(click to expand)
The path is on a slope leading up the mountain, which is why the wall shrinks to nothing on the far right. It's from there that the first picture looking into the backyard was taken.
(click to [...]
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A commenter on my previous post asked about how I make the borders on the images I post. I'll talk a bit about that here.
At first I thought that it was wasteful of screen real-estate to add a border. When printing a picture to hang on the wall, I don't add borders, but I do use colored matting to compliment the picture. That's what I've got in mind when adding borders to images that I post.
The real skill involved -- skill that I don't have much of -- is deciding what to do. How to do it is much easier.

A Japanese brokerage company mis-entered a stock sell order on their computerized trading system. They transposed the number of shares they wanted to sell with the price-per-share at which they wanted to sell, offering to sell 610,000 shares of such-and-such a stock for 1 yen each, rather than the intended offer to sell one share for 610,000 yen. In dollars and cents, that's an offer to sell over half a million shares of a stock worth over $5,000 for less than a cent each.
Ouch.
Doing the math (¥610,0002) one calculates that it could have been “ouch” to the tune of about 3.25 billion [...]
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Anthony's First Bento of the SemesterHand-made rice balls, octopus-shaped fried wieners, broccoli and carrots, and a cheese snack
Today was Anthony's first “bento day” of the new semester. His preschool started last week, but they were all short days. Finally today the kids could bring lunch (“bento” means “boxed lunch”) to eat at school.
As I wrote in the post “It's All About the Bento” when he has his first bento day last May, the bento is a big deal, and Fumie puts a lot of effort into making them fun, easy, and healthy. Today was no exception.
Tasty Left-Overs After Bento Preparation
As [...]
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There's a camera collector in Massachusetts who often finds undeveloped film in the cameras he acquires, so he develops it and posts the pictures. They're often from the 50s or 60s, but some are much older. In any case, I found his page of “found” photos to be interesting.
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Every so often I look at my server logs to see by what means people find their way to pages on my blog. One thing that's long bothered me is that people's Yahoo! and Google! searches often bring them to my blog's home page, rather than to the post-specific page containing the text that was matched by the their search.
For example, my previous post contains the text “There's a camera collector in Massachusetts....,” and because my blog home page contains my five most-recent posts, that post and its text will stay on the home page until I've written a few more posts. If [...]
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In my previous post I dug up messages someone wrote almost 10 years ago, and in some places challenged what they wrote. In writing the post, I mostly wanted to document the thread that created the somewhat-famous “now you have two problems” quote, and the challenges and rebuttals I included are a bit unfair of me (being 10 years later, with little chance that the author would care to engage now in a debate about writings and technology 10 years old).
So, with that in mind I'd like to refute a comment made yesterday on the Slashdot review of my book: On Sep 13, 2006, someone commented on [...]
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While I was in The States for the summer at our old house, I found out that my Reader's Digest subscription was still coming, so I have a recent “Word Power” to work with. This one comes from September 2006. (If anyone wants to send me a bunch of old Reader's Digests so that I can post more of these, I'd be appreciative!)
This one features words from Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. Apparently, this quiz is harder than most, because according to the scale, you can get two wrong and still be considered “exceptional.” I, of course, always miss ”exceptional“ by one or [...]
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Today was the undoukai (運動会 sports day) at Anthony's preschool. It was very fun for all.
I was impressed with the design and organization. It was all about fun for the kids. The preschool has three classes: first year (3&4 years old, like Anthony), second year (4&5 years old), and the big kids, third year (5&6 years old). There were age-appropriate “events” (more like activities) for all.
It started out with a march onto the field, and “Happy Body Movement”, more or less dance/exercise to music as the kids did simple, practiced routines while standing in lines. Then there were “races” for the youngest, where they [...]
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The Sports Day at Anthony's preschool had many events for the various ages. This was nice, but it also meant that the kids had to sometimes sit off to the side, when their age group wasn't having an event.
Overall, all the kids of all the age groups behaved themselves just wonderfully.
There was one time, though, when Anthony (exactly a month shy of turning four years old) got a bit, uh, boisterous while one of the older groups was doing a running event. I was standing across the field, watching his innocence and joy with great joy of my own, but as his antics escalated, I [...]
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One-year-old Anthony on floor duty in the kitchen of our old house, circa 2003
We sold our Cupertino house today.
I'm not sure whether our method is the best, but for what it's worth, here's how we sold it quickly, and for a profit:
Buy a crappy, run-down, termite-infested house at what turns out to be the start of one of the greatest housing booms of all time. (I recommend, however, that you know it's termite infested before buying it; we didn't.)
Over the course of the next few years, remodel, pouring more money into it than you paid for the whole property to [...]
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