I took a long bicycle ride into the mountains north of Kyoto on Saturday. It was my first long outing since recovering from what I thought was a mild but persistent cold, but turned out to be a respiratory-tract infection. Once I got antibiotics, I felt better almost right away.

Since I was mostly out of commission for three weeks, I knew I was out of shape and wouldn't be particularly fast, but at the same time, I was on my new bike, which seems to let me go faster for the same effort, so in the end I didn't [...]

This post picks up from "Last Month’s Particularly Epic Cycling Adventure, Part 1", about a ride that I took with Nigel Randell and Andy Clark a month ago. Part 1 ended with us having reached Minetoko Pass (elevation 888m / 2,900') on a long gravel road.

The descent down the other side was often very rough, and the rain continued, but it was worth it because the views and general scenery were often gorgeous.

One thing that set this descent apart is that the forest it traversed seemed to be mostly original virgin wood, and not farmed ceder seen almost [...]

The mountains around Kyoto are such fertile ground for cycling adventures, I consider many of the rides I go on to be "epic adventures", but the ride a month ago hinted at in "Preview of an Epic Cycling Adventure with Andy and Nigel" stands out.

It was supposed to be a short, vanilla outing on well-known roads, but ended up being a fantastic adventure. Finally, a month later, I'm getting around to posting the longer version of the story.

Andy Clark and I met up with Nigel Randell at a convenience store at the foot of the mountains in northern [...]

I had the pleasure to have lunch today with Rick and Lily Hancock, visiting from Seattle. Rick has been reading my blog for years, and often comments, so we finally met "IRL" (In Real Life).

We spent all our time talking over ramen at Gogyo (五行) so didn't have much time for an outing afterwards, but walked over to the Rokkaku-do Temple for a few pictures.

As I described on this post six years ago, it's common at temples and shrines to pay a small fee for a random "fortune paper". If you get a good one, you take it [...]

Just an FYI announcement to Lightroom folks, as of version 20151010.134, my Metadata Wrangler plugin now allows you to add/overwrite certain metadata fields like Title and Caption. Previously, it could merely remove metadata that was already there.

My publish/export plugins generally give a lot of control in how those fields are populated during export, but most other plugins do not, nor do Lightroom's built-in export methods, so those users may appreciate being able to craft their metadata. Through the template tokens that my plugins support, you have access to the breadth of data about the image from your Lightroom catalog, [...]