It's been a year since I bought an Apple MacBook to replace my older Apple iBook. It has a trackpad that you can move a finger around to control a mouse, but I found out by accident this morning that by dragging two fingers on it, you can scroll.

It's amazing. You can scroll quickly with a flick of your fingers (or a flick of one finger while another rests elsewhere on the pad), or slowly move the page around as if you were shoving a paper around on a desk. The up/down scroll is really useful for [...]
View full post »

Still looking to cool off, so this time I'm going back to the fall when the leaves had just started to turn color, to when Anthony and I went on a hike up to the top of Mt. Daimonji (大文字山) one of the short mountains overlooking eastern Kyoto, Japan. We did it with his school friend Kana, her two brothers, and her dad.

I'd done the same hike the previous year, but without a four year old, much less two.

Kana and Anthony have a wonderful chemistry, as has been seen on my blog before (as they get caught getting [...]

It's hot and humid in Kyoto now, so I'd like to try to cool off by returning to the quintessential pleasantness of Kyoto's spring.

The image above was made by applying the same Photoshop "Darken" blend-mode technique that I used to create the Color of Kyoto foliage desktop background last fall, but this time to a pair of pictures I took during a cherry-blossom outing in April.

Links below the picture are to desktop-sized images in both widescreen and standard versions.

Unlike the previous time where I used three pictures, I used only two this time. Also, instead of [...]