My blog and everything else hosted on my server may be inaccessible on and off for a while, until I can get some hardware replaced. A CPU fan has failed, so the thing is turning into a space heater until it hits thermal shutdown.

Wish me luck...

We moved to Japan in early April 2004, staying at Fumie's folks' place in Hirakata-city, an hour south of Kyoto. Fumie had arranged an apartment prior to arriving, so once we were over jet lag sufficiently to move, we started the process of building a new life.

This was prior to my having started a blog, but for the first couple of weeks I kept an "on-line diary", half for my family in The States to read, and half for my own memory. It apparently didn't work well for the latter goal, because I forgot about it until I ran [...]

Yesterday's events were more than just throwing beans.

Continued here...

While heading to the airport at the end of our trip to Amami (more Amami posts), I noticed this amazing "bridge ramp thingy" (I'm not really sure what to call it) while driving through the city of Naze, off in a direction we weren't heading.

This detailed map (courtesy of Google) shows that it makes two complete revolutions:

I've never quite seen anything like it. It's definitely on my list to check out next time we go to Amami.

This is the bird's-eye view of the scene shown in the Extremely Blue Light Display post from two weeks ago. The light display is on a hillside in Roppongi Hills (an area of Tokyo, Japan); the photo was taken from a pedestrian walkway that goes over a road fronting the display.

The two side sections were static, while the display in the center section flashed and undulated from time to time.

Fumie and I were in Tokyo two weeks ago for another concert by Kousuke Atari, having won in a drawing one of the 150 pairs of tickets for the [...]