The photo above is from a hike on Mt. Fuji a few days ago, which I'll write about soon (I hope), but today's post is about the WhatsApp messaging service, and something I discovered about it during my Fuji trip.

On a bicycle ride on Mt. Fuji, while in the middle of taking a photo with my iPhone, the iPhone just spazzed out and died, and I was left without a way to contact the others I was traveling with. Unfortunately, the ride went some hours longer than I had anticipated, and I'm sure my friends worried.

When I returned to the hotel, my friends had gone out and left a message for me expressing their worry, so I wanted to contact them using WhatsApp on my laptop. But it wouldn't connect.... it turns out that WhatsApp won't do anything if it can't contact your phone first. My phone was a useless brick, so I was stuck.

Other messaging services that I use both on my phone and my laptop — LINE and Facebook Messenger — worked fine, so I could contact others to report my mostly-unreachable-while-on-the-road state, but I was cut off from everyone for whom WhatsApp was my main method of communication. This was unfortunate.

I've a special spot in my heart for WhatsApp, because it was created by a couple of friends, and I gave them some minor help early on. I was one of its first users, before it was a messaging app, and was literally the first WhatsApp user in Japan. But these days I tend to use LINE more, both because it has more reach in Japan (WhatsApp has much more reach outside of Japan), and because I find that LINE has more features that are important to me.

If you use WhatsApp, just know that you're running a risk: if your phone dies, or is lost/stolen, or runs out of battery, you're cut off from all your contacts, even if you have WhatsApp running on your computer.

Six years after Google unveiled their “Google +” social network with photo hosting, with heavy emphasis on photographers, and a couple of years after Google shut down Picasa Web Albums, the sort-of-backdoor way to upload photos to Google, Google has finally released a photo-upload API, so that I can make a Google Photos plugin for Adobe Lightroom.

Sort of.

What Google allows at this point is extremely limited, and I don't hold much hope that it'll expand.

As of today's initial release, the plugin can:

1. create an album in Google Photos
2. upload photos and video to such albums.

That's it. Nothing more. The plugin can't upload to existing albums or any album not made by the plugin.

The plugin can't delete or update photos, even ones it uploaded in the first place, so we can't make a publish service.

From the employee-developer interaction I've seen so far, I don't hold much hope for this API.

More information, and updates as they happen, on the plugin's home page.

Over the years I've reported on informal tests with satellite-tracking location-logger units (“GPS trackers”), such as “More GPS Cycling Tests” from three years ago, and from six years ago, “Another Informal Location-Logger Test” (itself a followup to “iPhone 4s GPS is Shockingly Good”).

When cycling, I try to record my ride on at least three different units, because they tend to fail in the middle of a ride a lot more commonly than one should think, and the data geek in me doesn't want to risk losing data on the ride. I've recorded every one of the 23,827 kilometers I've ridden since getting into “real” cycling a few years ago, and I love every bit of it. (Hahah, “bit”... “data”.... see what I did there? 😀 )

Finally getting my bike fixed (after my frame bit the dust in March), I was able to do my first proper ride in ages the other day (at Strava):

Along on the ride I had three units to track my location:

Satellite reception tends to be pretty bad during that climb, so the minor drift seen above is pretty good for all three of them. The blue iPhone track is the most accurate by far, though.

Just after I got to the river at the left side of the screenshot, the Garmin's location lock started to drift, and for 3½ minutes it was merely “pretty bad”, but then suddenly it started marching off on a steady, mostly-straight line across the map, like a drunken member of a strolling group who suddenly sees a late-night pancake house and determinedly, though slightly wobbly, homes in on his target, much to the consternation of the others.

After 3½ minutes of that wildly-off-course single-minded deviation, it must have gotten its pancakes, because it stopped updating for two minutes, and then was suddenly back in the general vicinity of correct. After another minute or so of trying to stand without falling over — 10½ minutes after it went totally crazy — it's back in perfect step with reality.

I've seen a lot of bad tracking in the decades that I've been paying attention to this stuff, but nothing even remotely this bad for so long. Just crazy.

The Garmin's tracking was just dandy for the next seven minutes, but then it went bat-shit crazy for the next hour and a half....

And so after almost two hours of this craziness, it fixed itself and was fine for the rest of the trip.

Really weird.

In any case, I was able to use the tracklog from my phone, recorded with Galileo Offline Maps (Name changed Feb 2019 to Guru Maps), and so my ride data was saved.

The ride itself was lovely.

For the first two climbs, I consulted with Jason Eisenmenger (seen here) on a kind of power training, where I pick a power level, and try to stick to it for the whole duration, watching the readout from my power-meter pedals, adjusting my effort to try to keep it consistent.

For the first short climb (about 4 minutes at 10%), I thought I'd try to keep an average of 300w, but it turned out to be too steep to use that little power, and I ended up averaging 385w.

My time of 4:03 was much slower than my all-time best of 3:14. In order to equal that best time again, I'd have to average 482w, which I doubt I could do, but if I were to shed 10kg of fat, I'd have to average only about 440w, which would be plausible.

The second climb was much longer, 7.6km @ 5%. For this I aimed to keep a 280w average, and ended up at 287w for the 32:14 it took.

To equal my best-ever time of 27:38, I'd need to maintain 335w, but if I dropped that 10kg, I'd need only 300w, which again is plausible.

So, hopefully getting back into a habit of rides will both increase my fitness and decrease my weight.

After those climbs, I put the power meter away, and just enjoyed the mountains. My goal for the day was to investigate some of the minor roads around Hiyoshi Dam.

There's a long, lovely descent just before arriving here. I first did it two years ago (mentioned on this post), and have now done it many times.

That first time I'd taken it carefully, averaging 65kph (40mph) for the 2:05 it took to find the bottom. Over the next few attempts, I really gave it my all and tried to finish as quickly as possible, and every time I ended up with exactly the same time. It was frustrating.... I just couldn't break that two-minute-five-seconds barrier.

This time, though, I had no intention to try to hard, being so out of shape and out of practice. It's been a long time since I've had my downhill mojo, so I didn't push hard and just had fun. And, of course, I beat my record by one second. 🙂

I didn't have a real camera — only my iPhone — but I've posted photos from this area many times over the years. (Also see my map of blog photos centered on the lake.)

One of the roads I explored ended up at a possibly-abandoned dirt race track:

One road I explored ended up diving into the lake, as an apparently-little-used slipway:

Most of the roads I checked out had been marked on OpenStreetMap as paved residential roads, which seemed highly unlikely, but before fixing that data I thought that I should check to be sure, so I did. The one above was gravel, but fine on a road bike.

It's a bit difficult to see in the photo above, because I took it right from the edge of the road that remained, but much of the “road” that had been there had fallen into the ravine. I put “road” in quotes because it was very rough, overgrown gravel. Even if the road hadn't disappeared, I probably would have turned around soon.

There was a parallel road on the other side of the steep ravine, and that was in much better shape...

But it, too, became more and more rough as I got deeper into the mountains...

I then took the tunnel, which descends steeply toward the city of Kameoka. After exiting the tunnel is this lovely, steep descent. The fastest time averages 70kph over the whole 1.75km distance, which is too fast for me to take some of the curves it has.

My final surprise for the ride was that I made a new personal record (PR) for the climb up the mountain that separates Kameoka from Kyoto. This shocks me even more than the aforementioned descent PR did, as I wasn't even trying to have fun, or anything, with this one... just plodding along, trying to get my fat gut back home. But, as I found out when I got home, I beat my previous best by 23 seconds.

Anyway, it was lovely to be back on the road. I hope my Garmin Edge 820 has its sanity back for good. We'll see.

I'm very surprised to find that I prepared this article last year but didn't actually post it. It's the final followup to “Minh and Nghia Photoshoot Preview”, its Part 2, and wigglegram.

We'd left off while at the Murin'an gardens, so we'll continue with a few more shots from there...

A photoshoot at the Nanzen Temple must include a visit to the old (but still functioning) aquaduct.

After this shot, I bade them farewell, and they continued on with their Kyoto sightseeing.

I recently went to an amazing art exhibition at the Takashimaya department store in Kyoto. It's now moved on from Kyoto, currently showing in Yokohama for a couple of weeks. Highly recommended for kids and adults alike. Fumie had brought Anthony earlier in the week, and loved it so much that they'd recommended it to me.

It's a selection of the prolific art by Tatsuya Tanaka, the guy behind the 2,500 works at Miniature Calendar, works which are amazing both for their simplicity (we all could have thought of that), and for their level of wit, which (in my case) are better than I could have thought of.

At the exhibition I attended, some works were there live, and some only as photos....

Photography and social-media sharing were both encouraged, but it was not a situation where one could make good photos... I had no tripod, and it was crowded, so anything more than a few-seconds pause to take a photo would have been unsociable.

Also, the lighting for the displays was not well thought out (or, were perhaps the best that could be done with what was available). The lighting for the physical display of the large “Calm Broccoli World” seen above consisted of harsh spotlights directly above each broccoli tree, meaning that the actual points of interest (the people) were all in dark shadow making photography of them by exhibit visitors fairly meaningless.

Time and time again I was struck by the wit of his creations, all just a little better than I could have come up with, yet, as a photographer, I couldn't help but lament at some of his photos.

For example, consider this work that combines a motherboard and rice planters:

His photo of this work looks very much like the one above, and the first thought that comes to my mind when I see it is “he didn't use a polarizing filter”. (I've written about polarizers many times, such as “The Effect of a Polarization Filter on Wet Rocks, Etc.”.)

So, I put on a polarizer for a few shots, to get more of the deep blue of the motherboard...

These pictures are still no good, but in a controlled environment I thought they could have been very nice.

Here's one that has an aspect that was totally lost on me until Damien pointed it out.

As presented, my eye first went to the right half, which I now realize is a “making of” kind of photo, with the left half being the final product. But because I didn't see it in the correct order, I didn't really pay attention that the edges of the books were meant to impart a sense of speed.... I just saw books being used as a road. I hope my presentation here lets you get the full effect.

The “Victory” figurine is in the lower-left of the frame.

This work demonstrates another thing about his art: they have English titles, but all the wit is in the Japanese titles. The English title for this work is simply “Spurt”, which like most of the English titles are a simple factual word or two, devoid of wit or pun.

The Japanese title, as you can see in the phtoo, is “本”気の走り, which might be translated as the boring “earnest riding”. The pun is that the first character of the word for “earnest” also happens to be the character used for “book”, so with the quotes around that character it might give the sense of “feels like riding on a book”.

This was probably not the best example because this pun is so corny. Let's try another:

Here's the title card for it:

The Japanese title is a multi-lingual pun. It's nonsensical on the face of it, but it combines the word for “dish/tableware” with some seemingly-nonsensical sounds to make something that sounds like the English word “Shocking”, all followed by “Accident”. Perhaps the wit is lost in the need for an explanation, but it's a fun title to look at and figure it out.

The title for this one, 新パン線 (shinpansen, “new bread line”) is a play off the word for bullet train, 新幹線 (shinkansen, “new trunk line”).

There was often a difference between the live instillation and the photo of record for the work, with many differences likely because of how the parts are arranged during setup. In the case above, though, the long distance between the bride/father and the groom/priest makes it all the more funny, but such a distance can't easily be accommodated in a close-up photo, so they're much closer for the photo of record.

Anyone in Japan recognizes this as a rice harvest, complete with post-harvest field stubble, and rice plants hanging to dry like this.

There must have been 100 different works on display. It was thoroughly enjoyable.

The exhibit exits to a gift-shop kind of area where you can buy all kinds of miniature things, and the artist's three books.

I was disappointed to find that two of the three books had only English titles (they're both available on Amazon US, here and here). Since the Japanese titles add so much, I bought the only one that actually had them.