I made another visit to the hard-to-reach Ushio Kannon Temple, which I wrote about a couple of months ago, but this time I went by car and took my nice camera. The beautiful, rich matte red of this dimly-lit statue caught my eye...

I don't know anything about Buddhism, but this statue is apparently of a Wisdom King named “Ragaraja”, a “dharmapala deity” that is “known to transform worldly lust into spiritual awakening”, according to Wikipedia.

Visually it's quite interesting, and was one of many in a small, dimly-lit hall.

To be continued...

Ah, the wide open road, one of the great benefits of cycling, getting away from the stress of the city and immersing oneself in nature, freeing oneself, at least temporarily, from the coffin of electronics that our modern lives have become.

Cycling lets you leave the electronic shackles behind, and connect with nature and friends.

Don't get me wrong.... hiking can be great, as can motorcycling. Both get you away from the rat race, but cycling seems to hit the sweet spot. You can see a larger variety of different scenery than you can on foot, yet you're still “raw” with nature, unlike when on a motorcycle.

But the biggest benefit may be in freeing your mind from all the modern hassles, leaving all the electronics behind.

Well, except a light... you should have an electronic light.

I'm pretty anal about safety, so I run with lights on the front and back at all times, even during the middle of the day. So, I do have to make sure that their internal batteries are charged before every ride.

Actually, in my case, my bike's shifters are electronics, so I need to make sure they're charged as well.

It's not fun when the derailleurs run out of battery, as I found out on a 225km ride last month. The entire Di2 system is charged via a control box under the handlebar stem:

The problem when the battery ran out, I realize now, was that the wireless unit takes a lot more battery than the unit itself. Without the wireless unit, the battery lasts for months, but with it, weeks. I'd added it just prior to that long ride, and hadn't yet realized just what an electronic toll it takes. So now I make sure to charge its battery much more often.

The wireless unit transmits the current status of the derailleurs to my cycling computer, which I guess is another bit of electronics I rely on...

Now that I think about it, I do need to bring my phone with me just in case...

... and going along with that, so I can be alerted to messages and such...

I need to write up a post on these sunglasses (CTRL One), which can instantly convert between tinted and mostly-clear, at the touch of a button. I find them very useful because I can maintain eye protection (from bugs, raindrops, etc.) even when plummeting down a mountain in dark forest shade.

And while we're on the subject of cameras, as both a kind of “insurance” and just to have the cool footage, I like to have cycling cameras on both the front and back...

These Cycliq products are poorly thought out, poorly designed, and poorly supported, but they more or less work and don't have any competition in this product space, so I guess it's the best I can do.

In the photo above the camera and cycling computer are attached to the bike with a K-Edge mount that I wrote about recently, about how it broke under stress and how K-Edge came through. Since writing that post, another copy of the same mount failed in the same way. I wrote back to the company, but haven't heard anything for more than a week. Sadly, I guess the trust the mount had regained is lost. I'm no longer using it. UPDATE: They did send me another round of replacements, and this time they've got it right. I've used the final version for thousands of kilometers without issue.

And to continue with speaking of disappointing products, I currently use two products by Wahoo, but they're both pretty bad.

The Wahoo “Blue SC” speed and cadence sensor seems like a great product at first. It's both ANT+ and Bluetooth, which is super convenient. It's the only one I know of that can talk to both my iPhone and my cycling computer at the same time. But it's got the most moronic design.

It attaches to the bike with a big rubber band. The band hooks to one side of the unit more or less permanently, is stretched around part of the bike (the non-drive-side chainstay), then hooks back onto the unit on the other side. This is a common way of attaching stuff to a bike, but the way Wahoo implemented it is fantastically bad because they put the “hook” side facing in, so you really can't get at it without taking the wheel off, and even then it helps to have small hands. Then, to make matters worse — much worse — the “more or less permanently” attach point is anything but... the band barely fits into the tiny shallow notch, and immediately pops out the moment you put any strain on the band (such as when trying to attach it to the bike), unless the planets are aligned just so.

If you are able to get it to stay as you stretch the band, you've then got to figure out how to get the band to the rear of the unit, something that would perhaps be easy in the best of conditions (inside a workshop with the bike mounted and the wheel off), but it's the mother of all frustration out on the road. I would never try to work with this unit within earshot of my parents or child.

Luckily my parents and child don't often ride with me, because one needs to deal with this piece of crap out on the road from time to time because the band has a habit of just popping off for no apparent reason. I ended up adding twist ties as backup attachment, just to keep it from getting lost, and this has saved it a number of times. But even with the band and the twist ties, it's still a hot mess... it has to be positioned within fairly tight tolerances, but the poor mount deign makes it easy for it to slip out of alignment. I even used some Dycem (amaaaazing stuff) to keep it from slipping, and it helps, but Wahoo's bad design trumps all.

I truly can't believe that they actually tested this design in the field, using real human cyclists. It's an unfathomably-bad design. It's a gratuitously-, wantonly-bad design.

Yet, reviewers like DC Rainmaker sing its praises. It's overly-chummy reviews like that that have eroded my trust in DC Rainmaker, as this is not the only product I've been disappointed with after a cheery review from him. The guy is my data-geek soul mate, but in product reviews I just can't trust him anymore.

Anyway, this angst about this pathetically-designed poorly-built sensor is okay because I won't be using it much longer. The speed sensor has recently stopped working for no apparent reason. I can hear the leaf switch close when I bring the magnet near, but the data never makes it out of the unit. It's a piece of crap.

And along the same lines, the Wahoo heart-rate sensor is also poorly designed.

Plastic has broken off both ends of the strap, in a way that seems to be inevitable given its stupid design. So far it's still working as a heart-rate sensor, but given that Wahoo apparently has no problem selling stuff whose basic design is so very bad, I don't think I'll ever buy one of their products again.

At least I don't have to recharge these two Wahoo products before each ride... they work off small batteries that last about a year.

I'm an ultra data geek, so I don't want to lose the data for my ride if my cycling computer has “issues”. So, I also record my rides on my phone using the most-excellent Galileo Offline Maps (Name changed Feb 2019 to Guru Maps) app. (The app is great, though Apple dorks activity tracking on their phones.)

As a further backup, I also record my rides with a separate stand-alone GPS/GLONASS unit:

And finally, with all these things with batteries that can run down, on long rides they can need a boost, so I often bring along a spare battery:

I used to have a power meter, which also needed to be recharged, but it was so inaccurate that I returned it (another DC Rainmaker review disappointment), so at least I have that going for me.

Okay, so other than all that stuff, cycling frees you.

Of course, you have to be able to recharge it all, so you also need a basket full of chargers and cables. Here's the floor of my hotel room during my Norikura trip earlier in the year...

Continuing on from “The Back Entrance to Shiga’s Eigenji Temple” the other day, about a trip last week to the Eigenji Temple (永源寺) about an hour's drive from Kyoto, after entering via the rear gate, you find a closed-off courtyard to one side...

You're not allowed inside, but it's still pretty from the gate.

To give a better sense of the space, here's a wigglegram:

To be continued...

This picture is from the same snowy outing almost two years ago that produced the three-part “Kyoto At Night During a Heavy Snow” posts (part 1 · part 2 · part 3). This shot mimics the one that leads Part 2, but this one was taken five hours later (at 4:42am) after the snow had long stopped falling.

Anyway, it's just a random photo to accompany a recommendation for users of Adobe Lightroom to read Victoria Bampton's “Lightroom Catalogs – Top 10 Misunderstandings” article. New users may find some misconceptions cleared up, while veterans will find a good resource to point to when helping others.

Victoria (“The Lightroom Queen”) has a thorough, non-technical writing style that's easily digested by the non-geek photographer. Her “Lightroom Missing FAQ” is well worth it if you're struggling with Lightroom, especially workflow-related issues. As a professional courtesy she gave me a copy of it back in the Lightroom 5 era (the current version of course covers Lightroom 6/CC), and that version is a ridiculous 624 pages long. I tend to prefer printed books to ebooks, but this really benefits from being a searchable PDF. Highly recommended.

Last week I took a drive out to a new temple that Manseki had recommended as being pretty in autumn. It did not disappoint. (The “Anatomy of a Selfie” that I posted the other day was taken here.)

It turns out that I rode right by this temple during my summer bicycle ride to Nagoya. At that time, it took about 2h 40m to get here from home. This time by car, it took about an hour. I made the drive with Paul, Damien, and a newly-met friend, Adrian Tischler from Australia.

We didn't realize it at the time, but the directions we followed to get there brought us to a little-used back entrance. There was little traffic as we approached in the morning, but we passed a gauntlet of parking-lot folks trying to get us to patronize their business. The sheer number of them waiting for the crowds to arrive didn't bode well for a quiet visit, but it was still early.

Our route left that behind, and eventually we came across a bridge that offered a nice view.

Soon we found a parking area at what looked like the end of the road, so we parked and walked up a pretty service road toward the temple...

At the crest of the hill you pay your entrance fee (about 500 yen), then descend into the temple area proper...

Halfway down, there's a picturesque alcove, a place called a chasenzuka (茶筅塚／ちゃせんづか), with a huge stone carved with that word (茶筅塚)...

It's apparently a place where practitioners of the Japanese Tea Ceremony can ceremoniously burn their used tea whisks, which are made from bamboo and don't last all that long. I guess if you've spent $100 on a whisk, you want to say goodbye.

I knew that a normal photo wouldn't capture the feeling of the space, so I tried making a wigglegram for the first time in ages...

It's a bit wonky because I didn't keep my distance from Paul constant. I'm out of practice.

Besides the huge stone with the name carved in it, they also had a little wooden calf-high sign with the name, so I tried incorporating it into a shot:

I can't quite decide whether it's interesting, or I should just delete it.

Turning again to continue on toward the temple grounds proper, it's only a short distance down a path until you arrive...

Continued here...