I hate to have any negative articles on my blog, much less two in a row, but wow, it's difficult to count how many ways Garmin's products are so much worse than they need to be, from devices designed for the pocket but without a way to lock the buttons from being bumped in pocket, to worse-than-nothing "features" you can't turn off, to memory-card slots buried behind batteries (really? How does one screw up something as simple as a memory card slot? Ask Garmin.), to any number of additional "what on earth are they thinking?" observations.

From hardware to software [...]

The user-interface (UI) design of iOS 7 seems to be of the radical variety. Not quite as radical as the initial iPhone was to the cell-phone world at the time, but also not as universally lauded. A lot of people really hate iOS 7.

(Except the first, the photos on this page have nothing to do with the text; they're just random photos I've taken recently.)

Until recently I'd never actually used iOS 7, but from seeing it in news and advertisements over the last few months, I knew I didn't like the new look. The same aesthetic that [...]

I've discovered a new way to travel out of Kyoto/Osaka: a morning flight out of Osaka Itami combined with a previous-night's stay at the Osaka Airterminal Hotel.

Note: the airport is Osaka Itami (ITM), not the larger and more popular (and farther away) Kansai International (KIX).

It's less than 45 minutes to my fligh,t but I'm just getting out of a long, hot bath and now sitting down to write this. No rush. The entrance to the gate security area is a two-minute stroll from the hotel front desk, with a Starbucks in between any time I want to avail [...]

I've been feeling remarkably lazy about writing lately, sorry.

My wife and I were in a travel agency the other day (here in Kyoto, Japan) to purchase some pricey tickets for some upcoming family travel, and since it was a lot to put on the credit card at once, I had called ahead to my US-based credit card to let them know the charge was coming so that it would go through smoothly.

Of course, while standing there at the travel agency office, the transaction was denied. Sigh.

I couldn't call The States with the travel agent's phone, so we [...]

I've spent the weekend since having posted "Visiting the Miho Museum" trying (and failing) to fight off a cold, but I seem to be slowly recovering today, so today we have a simple post, of a bunch of geometric-ish images from my visit to the museum, presented in the order I took them (with the exception of the first two images being swapped).

These first two from the tunnel leading to the museum have been processed with differing white-balance settings for dramatic effect. The one above is processed so that the sunlight streaming in is white, turning the incandescent lights [...]