Here's a "What am I?" quiz for the new year. Leave your guess in the comments; as with my other quizzes, I'll keep comments hidden until I reveal the answer in a few days.

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Japanese culture has people sending New Year's cards en masse just before the end of the year, with Japan Post holding them until the morning of January First, at which point they then deliver them in accumulated bundles to households across Japan.

The card above is what we sent this year, with pictures we took in the middle of an (almost) deserted road near the ancient but far-removed Sokushouji Temple in rural Shiga Prefecture, on the same outing when we made a family visit to the temple in November.

Here's the English version we used for our Christmas cards [...]

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This past week has made quite an appropriate ending for the year.

I'm grateful for generally good health, in the grand scheme of things: I don't have Alzheimer's, cancer, or other big health issues. But in the less grand scheme of things, 2010 was a horrible year for my health, with multiple bouts of fairly extreme arm pain, and other stress-related ailments along with the random "getting old" issues that seem to beset me, like bouts of back pain and such.

So, how was this last week an appropriate ending? Let's look at the day-by-day playback...

Dec 25th   Christmas Day. Had [...]
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I realized recently that I'd yet to finish posting about my brother-in-law Shogo's wedding to Namiko. My flow had been interrupted by the sudden idea to make a photo book for them, and I neglected to pick it up even after posting the candid bride portrait last month. This post continues from "Reception, Part V: Entertainment", and completes the story.

And what comes after the entertainment? Dessert.

Of course, the main feature is the wedding cake.

The bride and groom stood by the table and handed out cake as the guests filed by, after which the guest could add additional [...]

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I've just pushed a major update to my Picasa Face-Data Import plugin for Adobe Lightroom so that it now uses new plugin features of Lightroom 3 to maintain real keywords for the names associated with images.

It's much less kludgy than the version for Lightroom 2, but using Picasa on images in your Lightroom catalog still comes with major caveats. See the plugin's page and last year's "Giving Up on Picasa Face Recognition" for more.

However, if you do use Picasa and Lightroom in tandem, this plugin makes for a reasonable way to import Picasa's face-recognition data to Lightroom.

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