Since starting first grade, Anthony has been collecting an allowance. He gets 50 yen a day (about US$3.60/week), which is substantially more than the five-cents-a-week that I got 40 years ago, but still much less than many of my own peers got at the time. In any case, 50 yen a day seems to be the right amount to help instill a sense of value and a respect for saving.

He's still not really grasping the concept of money – value to him is in the physical number of coins, not in their amount – but it's coming along. He'd [...]

Sorry for the lack of interesting posts lately... I've been going all out working on my Lightroom plugins lately, and seem to have no time for blogging. The plugins are like black holes.... I've got a new one in the works, and the nearer I get toward being able to release it, the more energy I devote toward reaching that goal, sucking energy away from, well, pretty much everything else.

Anyway, today's (uninteresting) post is about a tree I noticed on the grounds of the Kyoto Imperial Palace park, during a family bike ride two weeks ago. It was a [...]

This post follows from Secluded Beach on Ishigaki Island, Part I, about our trip to the beach on our second day of a short trip to Ishigaki Island in the far south of Japan. Part I included this picture looking north from our spot on the beach....

We saw only a few people the whole time we were there, including one guy who walked up the beach toward the outcropping seen above, and just disappeared. I wondered what was over there, so I took a stroll.

When we'd first arrived, I'd seen someone way down the beach playing with some [...]

Anthony noticed a crown-shaped image on a carton of milk (seen at right), and asked what it was. I explained that it was what happens when a drop of milk splashes, and he was quite interested, though somewhat skeptical.

I promised to show him, explaining that it was too fast for the eye to notice, but that we could use a camera to stop the action. His interest was piqued.

I set the camera up on a tripod, got a black dish and put some milk in it, set my SB-800 flash as a slave on 1/64 manual power and [...]

It was a supremely wonderful day today, with perfect sun and temperatures. The hysteria from the swine-flu plague is mostly past, so we went out for a family bike ride, our first in ages... perhaps the first since last summer in Whistler, Canada.

Just prior to taking the picture above, I discovered that it's possible – though not particularly easy, and certainly not becoming – to change the focus selector switch on a Nikon D700 body with your teeth. (I was riding a standard mamachari Japanese bicycle, which is inherently unstable, and so unlike the bikes I rode growing up, [...]