Paul Barr is in Kyoto again, and we made a trip to the back gardens of Nishimura Stone Lanterns, behind their stone-carving workshop, as we did last year. Even after all the posts last year (enough to merit a "Nishimura Stonecarvers" category on my blog), including a 51-photo "overview" post, there was much left to explore at the gardens.

Unfortunately, despite our visit being 10 days earlier than last year's, the fall colors were mostly gone and the trees bare, and to make it worse, someone had just cleaned up all the photogenically-endearing leaves from the paths. But on the [...]

The other day I posted the first photo above as one of my "What am I?" quizzes. The second photo shows the same view, but with a smaller aperture and the focus on the foreground.

Here's the view from the front:

I posed the quiz as being a simple one to anyone familiar with the Internet because all one had to do was click on the "nearby photos" link under the photo (as I have under almost all photos I post) to find out that I had previously blogged a post titled "A Bazillion Offering Statuettes at the Sanzen-in Temple", [...]

I'd gone out to the mountains with Paul Barr today, intending to retrace the steps of last week's temple hopping in the mountains of south-western Kyoto, but we were so consumed by the beauty at the first stop, the Yoshiminedera Temple (about which I still have 500+ photos from last week to sift through) that we didn't do much else.

But still, in the late afternoon on the way home, between episodes of getting soaked in the rain, we did happen upon a small temple that we took a few minutes to explore.

I've got such a backlog of photos [...]

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 [...]