This composition, by Montreal photographer Josée Houle, combines my photo of a wall at Kyoto's Myouhouin Temple (妙法院), which I published on a post in 2012, with photos of a model being splashed with colored milk.

Josée described the process to me:

It sounds really messy, but fun, and the result is certainly interesting and fun.

She posted the photo, along with information about it, on Facebook, and also some behind-the-scenes photos here.

As I wrote in my previous post, I recently hiked on Mt. Fuji. Today's post is about the next day's bike ride, a 100+ mile odyssey that included two cycling climbs up Mt. Fuji as far as the paved roads would allow, a typhoon, and a dead iPhone. The dead iPhone explains why there are few photos on this post.

Here's the ride at Strava:

There are no roads to Mt. Fuji's peak at 3,776m (12,389'), of course, but three roads go fairly high up. My initial goal of the day was to ride one of them, the same road [...]

I moved to Japan in 1989, and the person who met me at the airport in Tokyo was Krish Kulkarni, a graduate student at Tokyo University, and the twin brother of Ram Kulkarni, my best friend at my own graduate school in America. I had most recently met both of them a year ago in Tokyo, and last week met Krish and his family as they vacationed in Japan.

Climbing Mt. Fuji was high on the list for Krish's 19-year-old son Vishnu, and they kindly invited me along.

Krish's back was bothering him, and despite a massage in Kyoto from [...]

The photo above is from a hike on Mt. Fuji a few days ago, which I'll write about soon (I hope), but today's post is about the WhatsApp messaging service, and something I discovered about it during my Fuji trip.

On a bicycle ride on Mt. Fuji, while in the middle of taking a photo with my iPhone, the iPhone just spazzed out and died, and I was left without a way to contact the others I was traveling with. Unfortunately, the ride went some hours longer than I had anticipated, and I'm sure my friends worried.

When I returned [...]

Over the years I've reported on informal tests with satellite-tracking location-logger units ("GPS trackers"), such as "More GPS Cycling Tests" from three years ago, and from six years ago, "Another Informal Location-Logger Test" (itself a followup to "iPhone 4s GPS is Shockingly Good").

When cycling, I try to record my ride on at least three different units, because they tend to fail in the middle of a ride a lot more commonly than one should think, and the data geek in me doesn't want to risk losing data on the ride. I've recorded every one of the 23,827 kilometers I've [...]