This week, Anthony had shown a sudden (but still slight) interest in writing. The other day he wrote his name in Japanese all by himself, so yesterday, I thought I'd see whether he was interested in learning to write it in English. I wrote a sample, and he copied it a few times (the left of the image above), and then we covered all the examples and he gave it a try by himself.

Then we got out a much larger piece of paper, and tried a few more, adding his last name to the mix...

Finally, a bit of [...]

I've been meaning to write about and recommend the 16" FotoSharp Camera Rain Cover I picked up last summer. It's a remarkably simple little cover that scrunches up into a tiny ball in my camera bag when not in use, yet provides rain protection even with my big Nikkor 70-200 VR zoom on my D200.

The pictures on its web site pretty much show what it is, especially the 3rd one that shows it laid out flat (on top of a book, to show its transparency). It's a tube with a smallish opening on one end that goes over the [...]
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Adding to my stable of export plugins for Lightroom (Zenfolio, Smugmug and Flickr), I've just released my "Export to Picasa Web" Plugin for Lightroom.

I just hacked it out and it's received minimal testing by me (and no testing by anyone else), so version churn is likely at first as bugs are reported and shaken out. It comes with a French translation for all the parts that are the same as the other plugins, but the texts unique to this plugin remain in English until the French translator is able to send an update.

(If you're one of the [...]
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Anthony drew the picture above as a present for one of the girls in his class, Mizuki-chan. She came over for a visit on Friday and forgot one of her toys, so he's including the drawing along with the toy when he returns it to her tomorrow.

He drew the picture below last week, at my request for a drawing that we could include on our Christmas / New Year's cards. I didn't request any specific content, but he naturally knew to draw a family picture...

It was nice that he even included Curious George, a constant companion he received [...]

Fumie and I made an overnight trip to the city of Takamatsu, in Kagawa Prefecture, on the large island of Shikoku, Japan, to see pop singer Kousuke Atari (中孝介) in concert. Just as I did the last time we made an overnight trip (which was also to see Kousuke Atari in concert, at a shrine in Miyajima), I awoke early to see what photo opportunities there might be in the early of morning.

Unlike Miyajima and our extended time there, which produced so many nice (or story-telling) pictures that I had to make a Miyajima category on my blog, we [...]