Two months ago I posted about a visit to Suntory's Yamazaki whisky distillery a ways south of Kyoto. After that tour was done, we (Paul Barr and I) hopped into a taxi for the 10 minute ride to hit the tour at Suntory's beer brewery, in Nagaokakyo city, an area where I happened to have lived in the mid 90s.

Unlike the old distillery, which is full of sweet aroma and deep, rich photogenic character at every turn, the beer brewery is a bastion of modern sterile industrial design, featuring all the warmth and character of the inside of a [...]

This is sort of a followup to January's "Informal GPS Logger Test: iPhone 4s GPS is Shockingly Good" post about GPS and GLONASS loggers. We took a drive today in the mountains, and I took the opportunity for another informal test of location-logging technologies

Garmin eTrex 20 GPS + GLONASS dedicated logger.

Dual® XGPS150 GPS-only bluetooth logger, recorded on an iPad with the Guru Maps app.

Apple iPhone 4s (GPS + GLONASS) recorded via the GeoTagr app, which for some reason the company sent me for free out of the blue the other day (probably hoping for a [...]

I don't normally have two photos on one of my "What am I?" quizzes, but then, I don't normally have two quizzes going at once. This one is even more obvious than the currently-outstanding "An Oh-So-Obvious "What am I?" Quiz" from a few days ago, at least if, like that one, you look at the image metadata, but these two snaps are perhaps good for a few moments of perplexity.

I also don't normally put industrial grunge for a desktop background, but I'm giving it a try with that top image, for a different vibe.

Anyway, what are these images [...]

Here are a few shots from the Koumyou-in Temple in Kyoto (光明寺, 京都) taken on the same outing as the photos accompanying my Lightroom 4.1 post the other day.

One of the verandas consisted of a single plank of pine more than a yard wide (94cm by my foot-measuring estimation). I'd never seen anything like it; I assume that all the trees big enough to allow this big a plank were harvested long ago.

I talked to a lady that I took to be the owner of the place, who said that the temple building itself was not all that [...]

(The photos on this post, from my first visit earlier today to the small but elegant Koumyou-in Temple (光明院) in eastern Kyoto, have nothing to do with the prose of the post. They're just pretty pictures.)

The Problem

Historically in Lightroom, when uploading one's photos to an online service such as Facebook, Flickr, etc., one sees a little progress bar in the upper left that chunks along with each picture, such as the one shown at right. With my plugins, the progress bar makes two steps for each image, one after Lightroom has rendered the copy to be uploaded, [...]