The old Kyoto Theater Hall near my house reopened today after some years of renovation, emerging as "ROHM Theater Kyoto" (ロームシアター京都). ROHM is a semiconductor company based here in Kyoto, last mentioned on my blog more than 10 years ago, before I got into photography or even blogging that much, on this post about their annual Christmas lights at their company headquarters. They must have paid a boatload of money to someone to get branding rights for this renovated concert/theater complex.

I have a vague recollection of seeing some kind of performance at the original theater 25 years ago, when [...]

It's been a mostly-lazy New Year break for me, just hanging out at home with the family, working here and there on my Lightroom plugins, from time to time updating roads I cycle a lot at OpenStreeMap.org with much more accurate road data than they currently have, and some general vegetating.

I did get to bookmark the change of year with a last bicycle ride in 2015 up into the mountains north of Kyoto on the last day of the year. There was even a bit of snow. Brrrr. Then on January 2nd, I did a lazy ride to the [...]

The other day I went on a ride with Kentaro Kataoka ("Ken-chan"), who has been a friend for a long time. He's a sports-massage masseur with his own clinic.

He's been on my blog a number of times over the years, such as when he graduated from massage school four years ago, giving a friend an impromptu massage last year, or just seeing the sights with me (here and here).

He does a lot of running (street and mountain), but is new to cycling, having just bought his first "real" road bike. We went on our first ride together the [...]

On my recent trip to New Caledonia, I did a fair amount of driving. As someone with limited driving experience outside of North America and Japan, some of the street signs were not intuitive, such as this bicycle-related sign that I presented as A New Caledonia No-Bikes-Allowed “What am I?” Quiz:

To someone used to driving in North America or Japan, the sign above clearly and unambiguously means "No Bicycles Allowed", because anything with a diagonal red slash through it means "No  whatever  Allowed".

Along those lines, the sign at right would clearly mean "no cars allowed", but in New [...]

Just a quick writeup with some pictures of a nice group ride that I did two weeks ago with some of the stronger riders from Cycling Kyoto!. I was by far the newest, weakest, slowest, least experienced among them, but they're a nice fun group so they made me feel welcome.

今回の写真は二週間前のサイクリングの事です。

It was wet from a recent rain, so quite slippery. Discretion is the better part of valor, so Tomas aborted the attempt. I didn't even try. But as Rick H had suggested, I did measure the slope with the Compass Tool in my iPhone:

UPDATE: I originally wrote [...]