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 [...]

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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:

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.

If you step [...]

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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 [...]

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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:

Standard: 1600 × 1200        Widescreen:    1280 × 800    -   1440 × 900    -   1680 × 1050    -   1920 × 1200    -   2560 × 1600

The 1,600×1,200 size is appropriate [...]

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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 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 basics such as:

Name, address, place and date of birth.

If currently [...]
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