Archive for December, 2006Looking Like the Cat that Just Ate the Bird Just two days ago I wrote about instilling a dislike of chocolate in kids by giving them unsweetened chocolate at first. If you'll recall, I lamented that we hadn't thought of this in time with Anthony, and so he likes chocolate. We limit it, at least, to special occasions. So yesterday's special occasion was that a slice of chocolate cake would go bad if someone didn't eat it soon. (So much for my credibility!) Kids can be much better about eating then adults: they stop when they're no longer hungry. He didn't finish the cake before [...] 
View full post » This post describes how I made the funky-color Kyoto fall leaves image from the other day. I'd wanted to check out the vine growing through a bamboo fence again, in afternoon light (as opposed to the morning shade I'd seen it in before), so I went back on Wednesday afternoon. It was a productive visit, with a few shots of the fence that will certainly find their way here in the future. However, the subject of today's post is what I saw when I looked up. Kyoto's impressive autumn colors are in full force now, but there are some trees that are slower in [...] 
View full post » I couldn't help but to laugh at the irony when I saw this Associated Press article on Yahoo! News: Considering how pejorative offensive the term “Xmas” is (it is, after all, “Christmas” with “Christ” X'ed out), you can't help but question the journalistic integrity of the writer (Tom Breen) and Associated Press. Take this headline in comparison: Ariz. cop had black men rap away ticket, which, like the first, is currently on Yahoo's “most popular news” list. I don't think anyone would put up with this headline rewritten as “Ariz. pig had black men rap away ticket” or “Ariz. cop had niggers rap away ticket,” so why do people [...] 
View full post » Anthony drew a picture of himself and Mommy: In it, he's holding hands with Mommy. They both have legs, but Mommy has no shoes. Mommy has sunglasses, and Anthony has “a police hat” and hair underneath. Thoughtfully, he also included the requisite biology to support pooping, peeing, and diarrhea. 
View full post » Home-Built Calendar We like to use a loose-leaf calendar to keep track of the family schedule. Yahoo! Calendars is still invaluable for things like remembering birthdays and when the property tax is due, but for what events are going on this week, we find it more convenient to use a loose-leaf calendar that we can write on and leave near the dinner table. Very occasionally, I end up with a nice picture that might look good on a calendar, so I thought I'd make my own. The one shown above was made while testing (it's my sister-in-law becoming my sister-in-law... and oh, yeah, my brother's in [...] 
View full post » Getting sort of sick of having to reboot my horribly flaky Windows system 10 times a day (I kid you not), I've finally succumbed to getting a new system. Despite being a geek for the better part of 40 years, I didn't buy my first computer until I was 30 (and I still have it below my desk — almost 10 years old, it's the machine with which I wrote my last two books). In the years since, I've bought two laptops, a system for Fumie while we were in America, and systems for both of us here. I built my current system from parts, [...] View full post » While on the short outing last week that yielded the surreal foliage image, I happened upon this scene. While sitting on my scooter, I whipped out my camera and took this picture. I have no idea what they were waiting for; I doubt it was their transportation, since it was a one-way street heading in the direction they're looking. The street was positively packed with people, so the few cars that were around were going very slowly. I was lucky to get a clear shot. On the temple grounds is a temple-run preschool (the sign on the gate above the kimono-clad lady with the cell [...] 
View full post » Daddy and Anthony “Daddy and Anthony in the rain, wearing shoes, amid the pooling water. Anthony is sad because he doesn't have an umbrella. Daddy is happy but a little bit sad.” I notice that this time, unlike his earlier drawing of himself with Mommy, we have fingers. Three fingers on each hand put us on the evolutionary stage just above the Tyrannosaurus rex (which had two). Stymied Daddy “Blue sky, grass, rocks, and Daddy with shoes. Daddy is sad because there are rocks in his way.” I notice that not only don't I have fingers this time, but no arms. And no hair. Sad, indeed! 
View full post » This post is not likely of interest to regular readers of my blog (“Hi Mom”); I'm putting it here mostly for the search engines. A Nikon D200 dSLR has two color-space settings: sRGB and Adobe RGB. People often ask which should be selected when shooting in RAW mode, with the oft-provided answer that “it doesn't matter” because RAW data has its own camera-specific raw-sensor-data color space, and sRGB vs. AdobeRGB comes in to play only when converting the raw sensor data to a different image format (e.g. JPEG). Indeed, the color-space setting doesn't matter for the main picture, which is what people are generally asking about, so “it [...] View full post » Anthony These shots are from about two weeks ago, when the leaves were starting to approach their peak. Out for a walk a few minutes from the house, I was surprised to come across this tall grass, and I thought it would make a nice background. It wasn't really that cold — maybe 15C (60F) — but being the first cold snap of the season, it felt cold. Lately it's gotten down to 6C (43F). It won't get much colder... the low during the winter in Kyoto is about freezing, with the mid-day average about 5C (41F). 
View full post » Last week I showed four-year-old Anthony with a messy face, and received comments like “that's not a messy face,” with commenters recklessly comparing my well-behaved four-year-old with their snotty-nosed incorrigibles as infants. Well, I used to have one of those, too 
( more pics ) ( more pics ) 11-Month-Old Anthony in Various Stages of Un-Eat Notice the rice in his nose in the left-hand picture. Anyway, here's a followup to the messy face post. When asked to smile for the camera, Anthony tries, but it's a very fake, plastic smile. So while taking [...] 
View full post » My sister keeps her photos on Yahoo! Photos. This is unfortunate, because it's a bad photos service. I don't know when Yahoo! lost its way (although my first guess would be when they got rid of me * :-), but they seem to spend their time now making things “flashy” instead of the “useful” and “intuitive” of the old days. Most recently, this manifested itself with a big screwup of their TV-listing sit. With the current version of Y! Photos that debuted during the summer, they have perhaps added useful features, but in the process, made the site really inconvenient for its most basic use: it's difficult [...] View full post » Fumie had a preschool-related event yesterday, as a member of the Mama's chorus. There were groups from all the various schools in the system, from our preschool up through the college. It was with this upcoming event in mind that I went ahead and bought the Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 zoom lens last month. I knew I'd get the lens eventually, but with the expected dark theater of this event, I decided not to wait. I ran into focus issues with it, and not knowing how long it might take Nikon to recalibrate it, I put off bringing it in. Yesterday, the theater didn't seem so dark, [...] 
View full post » Today started like most days, with Anthony waking me up because he wants some milk. (He normally gets up before us and plays until he gets thirsty enough to wake us up.) Walking into the livingroom/kitchen, I said “It smells a bit like poopy in here” and looked at him. I checked his butt to see whether he'd done a poor job of wiping, but that seemed fine. I asked whether he knew what the smell was, and he got quiet. Uh oh, this is not a good sign. After a bit, he said “I want you to go; I don't want milk now.” Uh [...] View full post » I've released Version 2 of my Photoshop CS2 Calendar-Template-Building script. Here's a summary of new features: Added the ability to populate the calendar with holiday/birthdays/etc data read from a file. Added an “auto save” feature, particularly useful when generating whole-year templates for distribution. Summary of bug fixes: Fixed the “weeks start on Monday” option, which had been broken when building all months in one shot. Fixed the pre-set margins and such for Portrait mode actually work properly (see an example above). It now references only fonts that come standard with CS2. I thought [...] 
View full post » This morning, Anthony's preschool had a Christmas service, which included the kids (aged 3-6) putting on a “pageant” depicting the Christmas story. The older kindergarten-aged kids did a lot of speaking roles and other complex things, while the younger kids like Anthony had less challenging tasks. Anthony was the star. Or, at least, a star, lighting the way for the three kings. He wore a star hat, and made “twinkling movements” with his fingers above his head. If you use your imagination, you can see Anthony on the far right in the picture above. (A crop [...] 
View full post » I've had a cold (and still do... ugh!), which is why I'm not writing much, but something just happened that makes me really wonder why people can't keep their word. I ordered a new computer two weeks ago, and Dell said that I'd get it to me near Christmas, but it actually arrived a week ago (and is wonderful and zippy). And now, two minutes ago, a deliveryman shows up with my camera, back from service at Nikon. Nikon had promised it on Dec 23rd, but here I am with it three days early. I'm so glad people can't keep their word! (I [...] View full post » A cute thing going around the Internet these days is Elf Yourself, a site where you can upload a picture of your face and then see yourself doing a silly dance dressed as an elf. It's fun and silly. When you go to the site and click the “Start the Elfamorphosis” button and choose to upload your own photo, you're first presented with this page: Blah blah blah, yeah, whatever, click ACCEPT and move along. If you actually glanced at the text shown before clicking ACCEPT, you'd see that you can't post porn and you have to have the right to use [...] 
View full post » I've had this cold for a week that's just left me feeling totally blah, with a mild headache and without an ounce of energy. Luckily, it doesn't take much energy or brain to sit in front of a computer, and so I thought I'd try to mix in some other colors with the blue this cold has left me feeling. Here are some colorful shots from one outing a month ago. The contrast and shadows in the last one grow on me as time goes. The second-to-last, looking up at a tall tree, is interesting in that you [...] 
View full post » My Christmas present this year seems to be my health. Finally, yesterday (Christmas Eve), the cold I've had for the last two weeks or so started to abate. Perhaps it was the drugs that the doc gave me, or maybe it was just time, but I finally felt good enough to at least do some shopping. Our Christmas Eve began, just like last year and the year before, with the mini free concert at the Kyoto Hotel Okura. This time it was a Mr. Wakata playing Christmas favorites on the pan flute. Anthony had been hoping for horns like last year, so at times [...] 
View full post » The new Dell computer I ordered a while ago actually arrived ahead of schedule, two weeks ago, but I came down with a cold the evening it arrived, and am only just feeling good enough to write about it. In short: it rocks. Its processor actually has a slower GHz rating than my old computer, but it's a Core 2 Duo, and each of its dual processors is much faster than a similarly-rated Pentium. It's fast. My old computer's name was “WINFOO”. This one is “ZIPPY”. It showed up one Wednesday at about noon. I pulled it out of the box, and while wondering what [...] 
View full post » Standard Japanese Police Car This evening while driving in Kyoto, I looked in my rear-view mirror and noticed a police car coming up behind me with its lights a'flashing. It pulled up right behind me. I then did something that would probably freak out most Americans: I ignored it. I didn't pull over to let it get around (or to stop and talk to me). I didn't speed up, but I didn't stop, either. I just ignored it. When traffic caused me to stop at an intersection, he just stopped behind me. I listened to music on my iPod (I think it was Céline [...] 
View full post » The pure, wide-eyed, innocent joy of an excited child. It's something all children have, and all adults wish they still had. In the case of this adult, it's also something I wish I could capture.... with my camera. These were the best I could do on Christmas morning... Sometimes, the excitement is just a little too much for him. Opening one present (a bubble-maker from Grandma and Grandpa, thanks!), he exclaimed “Yeah! This is just what I need!” This alone is funny enough, coming from a four-year-old, but it was soon followed by “What's this?” I have it on video... I should upload [...] 
View full post » We're back from our mini trip to near Ise, in Mie prefecture, about three to four hours away by car. It was a wonderful little trip. We stayed at a large but traditional ryokan at the water's edge (map). The picture above is Anthony, wearing a yukata, sitting on the tatami floor of our room, looking at a book. Sometimes I can't get over how cute he is. Hmmm, perhaps I'm biased.... 
View full post » Part of a Nutritious Breakfast, Ryokan Style As I mentioned in the previous post, we spent two nights at a traditional ryokan. Ryokan prices are generally quoted per person, not per room, because food is such a major part of the stay. In the two dinners and two breakfasts we had there, we feasted like kings. In the picture below, the lady who ended up serving all our meals is describing something about our first evening's dinner to Fumie, as Anthony dances in his yukata. He was very tired and a bit punchy, but it was his first time to wear a robe or yukata, and he [...] 
View full post » | 
Jeffrey Friedl You are currently browsing the archives for December, 2006. Blog Basics Index of Photos Post Categories Currently Popular(Not counting recent posts)
(Popular six months ago)
(Most popular posts, ever)
|