An old friend from my days toiling in the bit mines at Yahoo! Finance in California was passing through Kyoto on a tour of Japan, and we met up last night for a few hours.

We took a walk over to the Eikando temple to see their evening lightup. I was astounded to find that it wasn't jammed packed... I guess it's still early in the season. I've written about it before (here) from having visited just the outside -- you can enjoy quite a bit of the lightup from near the entrance without having to pay -- but last [...]

Today started off cold and rainy, forcing me to actually get some development done on my plugins, but it cleared up in the afternoon. I'd been out on a photographic fall-color central-Japan adventure every day so far this week (Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu), and wanted to make it a full week-long marathon, so I headed out for a few hours in the afternoon.

These are two of the 426 photos I took today. The one above speaks for itself, but what's going on in the photo below?

Anyone who has taken Internet 101 or has the equivalent in real-life experience [...]

Two weeks ago, in "Around the Kyoto's Daitokuji Temple Complex”, I mentioned that Stéphane had introduced me to a temple I really liked (something he's done two more times since, the Kongourinji Temple a couple of days ago, and the Yoshiminedera Temple yesterday). The temple two weeks ago was the Koutou-in Temple, one of the many in the Daitokuji Temple complex.

The entrance from the road is simple but tasteful...

The short path turns to the left, under the roof you can see at the left side of the frame.

That's the main entrance gate, which is fairly small and [...]

This is turning into a spectacular week of exploration and discovery. On Monday I spent the day scootering in the mountains to the south-east of Kyoto, discovering an amazing temple and other photogenic delights I've yet to find time to post about. (I did post about some tiny bridges that were a bit geometric, but otherwise not too interesting.) Then yesterday I tag along with Stéphane Barbery to the amazing Kongourinji Temple (金剛輪寺) an hour away in Shiga, and I came back with 619 photos, mostly amazing and also now in the queue for posting. On the way home yesterday, [...]

I'm guessing the sparse white puffs in the foreground are cherry blossoms, the jyuugatsuzakura (十月桜, "October Cherry Blossoms") I first ran into at the Himukai Shrine a year ago. I'd not seen them since.

Today I accepted an invitation from Kyoto friend Stéphane Barbery to accompany him on a visit to the Kongourinji Temple (金剛輪寺) in Shiga Prefecture, an hour's drive away on the far side of Lake Biwa. As I mentioned yesterday, I wanted to continue to give the pain in my arms a rest from computer work, so I joined him and ended up having a deeply emotional [...]