Today we did a simple little "Hanase Support" ride, where a few of us with experience making the climb to Hanase Pass helped out those who have never done it. Lianca and Stephanie made the climb for the first time, being encouraged by Manseki, Antti, and me.

The southern climb to Hanase Pass is Kyoto's premier climb, averaging 8.6% for 5.8 km (3.6 miles) of unrelenting grade. Through sheer ignorance I happened to choose it for my first-ever real bike outing, in the snow and ice of early February last year, when it took 48 minutes to finish. I've climbed [...]

Continued here...

This post is a longer version of Friday's "Checking On the Carpet of Yellow at the Ochiba Shrine", in which I posted two quick photos from a ride that day to check out the colors at the Iwato Ochiba Shrine (岩戸落葉神社) in the mountains northwest of Kyoto. I started writing this followup post the next day, but have been so busy since I'm only finishing it today.

I normally like long rides, I guess to amortize the once-per-ride overhead of dealing with everything (the before and after of clothes, bike, electronics, data, and self), but I didn't get started [...]

I took a short ride out to check out the status of Ochiba Shrine. It's still a few days... maybe three, maybe five... from peak. It seems early this year. When I first posted about it five years ago, it was from a Dec 2 visit.

Yet, the next year I visited on Nov 14, and it was about the same as it was today (Nov 18). Maybe it takes time, because the same year I posted one of my first wigglegrams from the shrine, with full-carpet photos taken on Nov 25.

Even more surprising to me is that last [...]

Today is the nine-year anniversary of my plugins for Adobe Lightroom. It was on November 16, 2007 that I released my first ones, export plugins for Zenfolio and for SmugMug.

Now, nine years later, after many having been added and a few having been retired, I have about 45 plugins available.

Today I released a few minor updates, including a new "Publish At..." feature of my Bag-o-Goodies plugin. It lets you schedule a publish operation for later in the evening.

I lost track of the count of updates I made prior to Lightroom 2, but since then, considering only the [...]