I've had the most surreal PayPal experience over the last week or so.

I've long had a US PayPal account, but last week needed to create a Japanese PayPal account because I wanted to have a purchase shipped to my house (in Kyoto) from a vender that ships only to the verified "home address" of the paying PayPal account. So, I created a Japan PayPal account, and registered my credit card with it. The credit card's Kyoto billing address provided the requisite PayPal address verification.

After the credit-card registration was successful (which entailed them placing a small charge on the [...]

(The white line on the left side of the blue "exposure" band, below the big "@", is when the camera's flash fired for the exposure.)

Marianne Oelund recently posted a sequence of images of a Nikon D3 shutter in action, over on the Digital Photography Review Nikon D3 forum. With her permission, I have turned that sequence into a mini web movie application, such that you can animate the frames by sliding your mouse back and forth across the image.

I thought she had created the images with a high-speed camera, but it turns out that, lacking a high-speed camera, [...]

The first day of our trip to Whistler (in British Columbia, Canada) a couple of weeks ago was beautifully sunny, but arriving sort of late, we didn't do much but appreciate our great room at the hotel. The second day was mostly overcast, but we got in a nice bike ride, some kid play for Anthony, and a walk around Whistler Village.

It rained all day on our final day. We had some time to kill between checking out of the hotel and the train ride home, so we took the 25-minute gondola ride to the top of Whistler Mountain.

When we arrived at our room at the Four Seasons Hotel on our recent trip to Vancouver, we were greeted almost immediately with a tray of tea for the adults, and a tray of personalized cookie and milk for Anthony.

As I wrote once years ago, it can be dangerous to offer kids unsolicited sweets, but in this case, the cookie was well received by all. A sure fire way to delight an adult is to do something nice for their kid (and as I noted the other day, in the words of Seth Godin, good marketing is all about [...]

My folks have a small farm (here in Rootstown, Ohio, where I'm visiting for the summer) that they've rented out since before I could remember. I do remember, perhaps 35 years ago, the last time we fixed it up. 35 years of hard labor later, and it's looking a bit rough for wear.

A renter just moved out after having been there 15 or so years, so I took the opportunity to walk around, and snapped some pictures of the decaying barn and even-worse-shape henhouse....

The "haunted tree" appears to have been quite a large tree at one point, but [...]