As I mentioned Yesterday, New Year's Day brought Kyoto's biggest snow in 60ish years. I went out for a bit in the evening to snap some pics and play with Anthony.

It was really coming down...

Compare that shot to the lead shot on this post.

The snow just stuck to whatever it first touched, and accumulated in improbable amounts on the most insubstantial of surfaces....

The moment I walked outside I knew that the expressway (whose nearest entrance is more than 6km away) was closed, because when it closes, traffic ends up bogged down on my street...

Earlier in [...]

While setting up in my living room for the silly photoshoot today, I noticed a few flakes of snow starting to fall a bit after 1pm. According to the news later in the evening, by 6pm it was already the biggest snowfall in Kyoto City in the last 58 years.

By 6pm the accumulation was only 16cm (6¼ inches), which is nothing for Ohio where I grew up, or New Hampshire where I went to grad school, but for Kyoto City it's a big deal.

Just to show how quickly it came down, here are two photos taken at the [...]

We did a silly family photoshoot today. We had planned to do it a month or so ago for our Christmas cards, but to my shame I was just too lazy to do cards this year. So to sort of make up for not having sent Christmas or New Year's cards, we did this shoot and are posting these photos.

今年は喪中で年賀状を送らないので、そのかわりに面白い家族写真を撮りました。 文枝はまだ 12才の息子より背が高いけれども、そろそろ息子に負けそうです。

Fumie is still taller than 12-year-old Anthony, but that won't last long, and Anthony will be taller by the time next year's photoshoot rolls around.

At 5′ 3½″, Fumie still has two inches on Anthony (he's 5′ [...]

An old friend from my days at Yahoo! swung by Kyoto the other day, and we made a quick walking tour of a few sightseeing spots.

I first met Andrei Zmievski at an Open Source Conference circa 2002, and we worked together a bit on things related to PHP's regular-expression support (of which a chapter of my book on regular expressions is dedicated). As an expert in PHP, he later joined Yahoo! a couple of years later when Yahoo! made heavier use of PHP.

These "selfie stick" (my word) things seem to have suddenly exploded in popularity. I've seen them [...]

When I mention "Shogunzuka", it can refer to an overlook with nice views of Kyoto that I often visit for sunsets, or its nearby temple. The latter has long had a dilapidated observation deck, but for the last year they were working on a remodel, and this past October they finally unveiled a new temple building and spiffy observation deck.

This past October 8th they finally had the grand opening, so I popped up for a visit.

The new building is actually an old building moved here and repurposed for use as a temple, but that'll be the subject of [...]