Dark buds have been slowly making the cherry-tree branches bumpy, but today they suddenly erupted with color. No blossoms as of yet, but the color is clearly there where yesterday there was none.

The blossoms are quite late this year. Comparing to the my cherry-blossom timelapse from 2007, this year seems to be about five days late.

While I was down taking shots of the buds, an obvious grandpa/grandson pair strolled by, and they just looked so pleasant that I had to snap a shot...

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UPDATE: Sadly, the procedures reported on this post ended up not working. More info here.

I'll leave the whole post, including the inline updates, but be warned that it was all for nothing. )-:

As most folks guessed correctly in my golden bumpy "What am I?" quiz, the object is a lens CPU chip/contacts set. I'm surprised so many people knew what it was because I had no idea they existed until recently. It allows one to update an old lens with modern electronics that tells the camera body a few particulars about the lens.

By far my favorite [...]

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Well, this is surprising: iOS does not seem to be color managed. At all.

This is a long and technical article. Here's the table of contents:

Introduction Color Management Embedded Color-Profile Support Device-Specific Color Profiles The Curiously-Deficient "SpyderGallery" App What's Next One Last Caveat

Introduction

With all the talk these days about glorious color performance of the third-generation iPad screen, such as this article and this, I realized that my Lightroom-to-iPad workflow (presented in "Getting Photos from Lightroom to iPad: a Much Smoother Workflow") neglected to consider color profiles. This is a huge oversight for someone like me [...]

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I had a small but tasty get-together the other day with some friends, including recent graduates of the school I wrote about the other day in "Kyoto Butsugen College of Massage".

This was at Uroko (鱗), a restaurant near the corner of Shijo/Kawaramachi in Kyoto, that I really like for their 蛇の目焼き (janomeyaki) grilled chicken, which is utterly out-of-this-world tasty. The food and drink seemed to never stop all night, but the price was quite reasonable. Highly recommended. The restaurant is here.

I knew my crop-for-iPad plugin for Lightroom would come in handy sometime.

The recent grads were from a [...]

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I don't understand Apple's newly-announced dividend, nor the coverage I've seen so far, which seems to equate the dividend with "free money", manna from heaven, as if two fundamental facts didn't exist:

taking money from the company and giving to the stock holders reduces the value of the stock by exactly that amount, and for most stock holders, the dividend is a taxable event.

The end result is that most stock holders wind up with less because every quarter you must pay a tax on the mere act of owning the stock, a tax that you never had to pay [...]
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