A couple of weeks ago during a scooter ride around western Kyoto, I came across a temple that I recalled having visited a couple of years ago. Its entrance path is quite nice.

Here's how it looked two weeks ago:

I'll have to visit again in a month when the colors are hitting their peak, but until then, here are some more views from Dec 1, 2012:

The smudge of red reveals who joined me on that visit. It was the same trip two years ago with the intense rainbow over Arashiyama a pretty path, a bunch of whimsical carvings, [...]

Fumie's folks took us out for lunch the other day, after a morning event to mark the 100th day of Fumie's dad's mom passing during the summer (she was 99½). The meal was teppanyaki at The Garden Okazaki, similar to the exquisite meal at another local hotel that I wrote about in the spring.

So, the big question is whether this one was better than the one before, and we were split, so it's probably that they're quite comparable.

A security weakness dubbed "POODLE" has recently been discovered in how internet-connected applications make secure connections, and this is having an increasingly-detrimental impact on Lightroom. Thankfully, it's easy enough to fix for most folks, and this post tells you how.

POODLE manifests itself in that certain kinds of secure connections are no longer quite as secure as they're supposed to be, so until you fix this for your Internet-connected applications, your data may be at risk. But the secondary problem is that, until fixed on your system, your Internet-connected applications like Lightroom may experience seemingly random network errors as more [...]

The other day while scootering around western Kyoto, I paid a visit to something that looked odd in Google Maps, to see what it actually was.

It seemed to be a building of cube rooms...

It turns out to be an assisted-living nursing home named "Life in Kyoto" (ライフ・イン京都) with 226 units ranging from 350 ft² to 920 ft². It seems a bit pricey to move in... of the four units currently available, the largest is a scant 445 ft², but costs $350,000 for a single person to move in, or $470,000 for a couple. As far as I can [...]

During past weekend's trip to Miyajima Island, the impending typhoon brought back memories of my first trip to the island, in 1989 after having been in Japan for only a month. A friend at work (Andy Krantz) had a nice trip planned for the week-long Obon holidays the country takes every August, and kindly invited me along. On this trip we stopped by Miyajima Island, which I knew nothing about (at the time I knew nothing about Japan except Perl Harbor and Sony).

On that visit I certainly would have seen the famous shrine gate, but I don't remember it [...]