Kyoto has a new tram system. Well, it did... just for a few hours yesterday.

I wouldn't have believed it if I'd not seen it myself, but for three hours, they shut down half the lanes along a crowded 4km stretch of road, intending the claimed space to be considered as a trolley track. They then had city busses pretend to be trains, and they plied the route for those three hours.

Apparently, the city is considering to add a new light rail system, to connect a rather affluent but disconnected area with the subway and railway system. The plan, [...]

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As best I can tell, he started off by drawing Mommy, Daddy, and himself.

Then, sitting with him,Fumie drew the babysitter that we had for a while yesterday, and a cat, after which Anthony mimicked the cat.

At some point along here, Anthony doodled some random other stuff as well.

The sitter apparently wrote some text, to which Anthony tried to add some as well.

That was all yesterday. This morning, we woke up to see that he'd added another cat, and some arrows whose meaning we don't know. (I discovered this paper after he was [...]

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Anthony sometimes really surprises us in the morning with what he's done before we awake.

Sometimes it involves something bad, like pee-pee on the floor or poop under a table or the entire contents of a tissue box spread out over the floor.

But more often, it's with something that amazes us because it represents a huge leap in his creativity or in some skill, such as when he built a most excellent street sweeper almost completely from his imagination, or a new level of artwork.

Today was one of those "huge leap" days. The level of what he drew [...]

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During the three-month ordeal of autofocus problems with my Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 zoom, between suspecting a problem and finally having it fixed by Nikon, I learned a lot about SLR autofocus -- how it works, and how best to test it.

There are plenty of autofocus test charts available on the web, but all of them were severely deficient in one way or another, so I ended up making my own. Its development progressed over time as I tried different approaches, discarding what didn't work and refining what did. (The chart I used in November shows elements of [...]

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