It's hot and humid in Kyoto now, so I'd like to try to cool off by returning to the quintessential pleasantness of Kyoto's spring.

The image above was made by applying the same Photoshop "Darken" blend-mode technique that I used to create the Color of Kyoto foliage desktop background last fall, but this time to a pair of pictures I took during a cherry-blossom outing in April.

Links below the picture are to desktop-sized images in both widescreen and standard versions.

Unlike the previous time where I used three pictures, I used only two this time. Also, instead of [...]

As mentioned in my previous post, Adobe has just released Lightroom 1.1, a free upgrade to their wonderful photo-workflow application. Correspondingly, I have upgraded my Custom Metadata Viewer Preset Builder, a web application that allows you to create custom metadata display configuration templates for use within Lightroom.

This description is presented with Lightroom 1.1 as an example, although the config files should work in any version of Lightroom 1.x, including 1.3.1.

This post is the introduction and documentation for my template-builder application. If you have used the previous version, you'll find lots of new things here, including new [...]

We awoke this morning to find Anthony was playing with his cars, which, as normal, means lining them up in some neat arrangement. I'm not quite sure what little imaginary world he'd built for himself, but understood that it had something to do with an airport.

He's been lining things up since before he could walk, and for the last four years, he's loved lining up cars, either caravan style or parked neatly. The scene above was one he made today, but he could have made it just as well three years ago or any time in between. I feature [...]

Fumie and I had a ningen dokku (人間ドック) medical checkup today. It's like an elaborate physical, including X-rays, electrocardiographs, etc. The low point for me was a camera down the throat to check the lining of the stomach (high-resolution video coming soon! :-)). Fumie had an MRI as well, which she also didn't care for.

The "ningen" in the title means "human," but I couldn't find anyone who knew the stand-alone meaning or origin of "dokku." Looking it up now, I see that it's from the English "dock," and thus the imagery of a full checkup like this is comparable [...]
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We spent another day with Aunt Jeannette, this time partially at home. She brought a Thomas lunch box and puzzle for Anthony, and helped him do it. It was slow going at first, but they built up steam as he got hooked.

We also took the time to push my scooter out front and pose for a few pictures....

The best part of the day was a lunch in Kibune, which I'll write about another time. It was a really fantastic experience.

Aunt Jeannette is here on a tour run by Alumni Holidays, with others from all around The States. [...]