Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 40mm — ¹/80 sec, f/9, ISO 640 — full exif & map

Portrait-Mode Desktop-Background Versions
1050×1680  ·  1200×1920  ·  1600×2559     

While on a short bike ride with Anthony today, we came upon this bamboo fence with a colorful vine sticking through. I thought it was pretty.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 55mm — ¹/2500 sec, f/2.8, ISO 100 — full exif
Coffee To Make You Feel Sad

“Deppresso,” one of Coca-Cola Japan's Georgia line of coffees, is named to evoke feelings of “Deep Espresso.”

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 44mm — ¹/60 sec, f/2.8, ISO 250 — map & image data
Walltop Tiles at the Konpukuji Temple, Kyoto Japan

There's got to be a name for the little roof that sits on top of a wall, but I don't know what it is. The wall here is next to the entrance to the Konpukuji Temple (金福寺). It's the first place that Nils and I went on our little trip the other day, and even the little garden just outside the enterance was really beautiful.

Here's a partial view of the garden, looking toward the enterance (with the subject of the first photo being just to the upper right of the enterance, obscured by some green leaves):

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 17mm — ¹/250 sec, f/2.8, ISO 100 — map & image data
Entry Garden to the Konpukuji Temple

When at the spot this photo was taken, looking directly left you find this gentleman:

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 45mm — ¹/60 sec, f/2.8, ISO 160 — map & image data
Caretaker at the Konpukuji Temple

He sits ready to accept your 400-yen (US $3.50) enterance fee, and provides a paper with a bit of history about the place. (I should note that Nils kindly took care of the enterance fee for me — thanks!)

The temple was founded circa 865, and is most noted for two famous poets who spent time there: Basho Matsuo in 1670, and Yosa Buson about a hundred years later.

Oh, and it's noted for being really pretty in the fall, as tomorrow's pictures will show....

Main Garden at the Enkouji Temple
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55/2.8 @ 17mm — ¹/180 sec, f/11, ISO 800 — map & image data
Standard: 1280 × 960   ·   1600 × 1200      Widescreen:   1280 × 800   ·   1680 × 1050   ·   1920 × 1200   ·   2560 × 1600

More pictures from my outing yesterday to Konpukuji Temple and Enkouji Temple, for their fall foliage.

This time I present a few desktop backgrounds, and as I did with the Cherry-Blossom Desktops, I'm providing both standard and widescreen versions. The two “standard” sizes are appropriate for common 4 × 3 displays, while the “widescreen” versions are appropriate for Apple MacBooks and Cinema Displays, up to an expansive 2,560 × 1,660.

Main Garden at the Enkouji Temple
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55/2.8 @ 17mm — ¹/500 sec, f/2.8, ISO 500 — map & image data
Standard: 1280 × 960   ·   1600 × 1200      Widescreen:   1280 × 800   ·   1680 × 1050   ·   1920 × 1200   ·   2560 × 1600

Those first two pictures are of the same garden, so they show how dynamic the view was: sometimes a lot of red & orange, and sometimes a lot of green. By the time the colors hit their peak, the floor of the garden will be blanketed in red, so despite the colors, it's really just the very beginning of the season. (This, despite how colorful the garden looks from above.)

In the next picture, we see a leaf alone in a gutter/stream, far away from its friends.

Alone
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55/2.8 @ 55mm — ¹/80 sec, f/5.6, ISO 320 — map & image data
Standard: 1280 × 960   ·   1600 × 1200      Widescreen:   1280 × 800   ·   1680 × 1050   ·   1920 × 1200   ·   2560 × 1600

Bamboo Canopy at the Enkouji Temple
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55/2.8 @ 17mm — ¹/10 sec, f/10, ISO 320 — map & image data
Standard: 1280 × 960   ·   1600 × 1200      Widescreen:   1280 × 800   ·   1680 × 1050   ·   1920 × 1200   ·   2560 × 1600

Bamboo is evergreen, so it provides a nice backdrop to the fall foliage, and in this case, a backdrop for my computer desktop.

If you look at the big version of the next picture, notice how the water glistens off the leaves in the left half of the picture. I think it's really pretty, although it loses much of its impact when shrunk down for display below.

Autumn Leaves at the Konpukuji Temple
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55/2.8 @ 55mm — ¹/160 sec, f/6.3, ISO 100 — map & image data
Standard: 1280 × 960   ·   1600 × 1200      Widescreen:   1280 × 800   ·   1680 × 1050   ·   1920 × 1200   ·   2560 × 1600

Changing Colors at the Enkouji Temple
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55/2.8 @ 34mm — ¹/200 sec, f/2.8, ISO 320 — full exif
Standard: 1280 × 960   ·   1600 × 1200      Widescreen:   1280 × 800   ·   1680 × 1050   ·   1920 × 1200   ·   2560 × 1600

I find this last picture a bit disconcerting because I don't really know what to focus on when I look at it. But perhaps for that same reason, it may make a nice desktop background, so I've included it here.

I've decided to take a gamble and Windows Update into SP2 and beyond again. I've done it a number of times in the past, to disastrous results (a system that's flaky even by Microsoft standards, crashing every few hours). I've been living at pre-SP2 for a long time, with a machine that crashes only every few days, but lately it's gotten worse. I made the mistake of using IE to see something that didn't seem to work in Firefox, and I wonder if I picked up something bad, because the machine seemed much more flaky after that.

So, I did a full Windows Update (having to reboot a miraculously-little three times), upgrade to IE7, and ran Microsoft's anti-spyware Windows Defender. It didn't find anything amiss, and I haven't crashed in the 8 hours since, so maybe things are okay this time? I won't hold my breath, though.

Anyway, so now I'm preparing a web post with more fall foliage pics from my trip yesterday, and in testing with IE7, I realize that if you don't have a <DOCTYPE> declaration, it doesn't understand some CSS, but oddly, does understand some. Specifically, I noticed that it doesn't understand padding ascribed to an image, but does understand margin. This seems..... odd.

Here's a test that should look fine on this page, because it has a DOCTYPE:

Three images with red borders, each within its own green-background div: the only difference among them is that the center image has a margin, and the right-most has padding (the left-most has neither).

In upper-left	——— Should be Centered ———
no margin/padding	margin:20px	padding:20px

However, if you view it on a standalone page without a DOCTYPE, it suddenly no longer recognizes the padding, so the right-most image is no longer centered within its div.

The solution is to include a DOCTYPE for all pages, such as:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
                      "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

But this just seems silly to me, and of course, Firefox and Safari don't have such a selective understanding of CSS.

Sigh.