Typhoon Approaching
4:05 PM — T minus-5 hours

I've never seen the precipitation radar look quite this colorful. This is from a few minutes ago. I live at the black dot to the lower-right of center. Typhoon #19 (“Vongfong”, though these kind of names are never used in Japan) is forecast to pass through Kyoto in five or six hours. A bit exciting.

Update: 70 minutes later, it's all the more impressive:

5:15 PM

Now at 7:25 it's a field of red, and it's raining here, but it really doesn't seem that bad. Also, the wind, which was quite strong a few hours ago, seems to have died down considerably.

7:25 PM

Update the next morning: it turned out to be not such a big deal here in Kyoto... it rained but not even close to the torrential rains we get in the summer. The Kamo river, for example, didn't even come close to flooding (as it sometimes does).

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 35mm — ¹/2000 sec, f/2.8, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Pulling Out From Kyoto Station
view from a south-bound bullet train — 71 kph

As I mentioned yesterday, with a typhoon expected to reach the main island of Japan on Monday, we make a quick Saturday/Sunday trip south to Hiroshima and Miyajima. The approaching typhoon made for an interesting sky, with a very high cloud ceiling, in different patterns.

Photos of the sky from the train window are pretty bland, but perhaps of interest to someone who has never been to Japan.

この間の土曜日、京都から宮島までの空景色。写真はつまらないですが、日本に来られてない方には面白いかも。

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — ¹/200 sec, f/8, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Rice and River
an extremely typical view — Akashi City — 273 kph (170 mph)

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — ¹/320 sec, f/8, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Clouds in Himeji
295 kph (183 mph)

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — ¹/50 sec, f/20, ISO 1100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Cruising Speed
300 kph (186 mph)

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — ¹/80 sec, f/16, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Wrong
300kph, not 312 kph

In the split second after we came out of a tunnel, the GPS unit was confused about the speed. It quickly returned to 300kph.

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — ¹/60 sec, f/16, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Rural Kurashiki, Okayama

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — ¹/100 sec, f/16, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Pulling Into Fukuyama Station
269 kph
when I see a super-high cloud ceiling like this, I get excited for the sunset possabilities

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — ¹/320 sec, f/6.3, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Pulling Into Hiroshima Station
yes, that's a Costco next to the baseball stadium — 103 kph

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 62mm — ¹/400 sec, f/6.3, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Outside Hiroshima Station
weird art thing shows the spotty clouds — 0 kph

After a lunch (that will eventually be its own blog post), we took a streetcar for 15 minutes...

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 36mm — ¹/100 sec, f/9, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Former Downtown Hiroshima
now a park

Then a taxi ride another 20 minutes south, and then...

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — ¹/320 sec, f/10, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
View from the Ferry
on the 10-minute ride between the mainland and Miyajima
a less-dramatic view than I posted seven years ago

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — ¹/160 sec, f/9, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
View from Our Hotel
Kinsuikan Hotel in Miyajima (宮島の錦水館)

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — ¹/100 sec, f/6.3, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Kids Playing at Low Tide
in a few hours, the water will be four times their height

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — ¹/125 sec, f/5, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Walkable (Sort Of)
Itsukushima Shrine (厳島神社)

One's got to be careful where one walks, because if there's vegetation, you can't tell at a glance whether it's just over hard-packed dirt, or over a mushy layer of water. In this case, a kid answered the question for me:

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 62mm — ¹/125 sec, f/11, ISO 1600 — map & image data — nearby photos

A few minutes before sunset, color started appearing to the west..

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — ¹/50 sec, f/5, ISO 180 — map & image data — nearby photos
First Colors

As I posted yesterday, it eventually got pretty nice.

Two days later, the typhoon is almost here.

Posts about the trip to Miyajima are continued here...

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 32mm — ¹/125 sec, f/5, ISO 2500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Shrine Gate at Low Tide
Itsukushima Shrine (厳島神社)

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We popped down to Hiroshima this weekend, and spent the night in Miyajima, near the Itsukushima Shrine. A typhoon is coming, so last night's sunset was not too shabby.

厳島神社の鳥居、昨日の夕方。台風19号の影響で奇麗な夕焼けでした。今日、雨が始まる前に京都に戻りました。

The shrine is notable for being in a tidal plane with a huge difference between high and low tides (the difference yesterday morning was 3.41m — more than 11 feet), so the look and feel of the area changes dramatically throughout the day. It's prettier when the water is up, but it's more interesting when the tide is out because you can walk around out past the gate.

Posts from earlier years from the same area include one about low tide (twice), one about the area at dusk, the gate at night, among others.

On the way home this afternoon, the first drops of Typhoon #19 (“Vongfong”) started hitting as we pulled into Hiroshima Station to switch to a bullet train. The typhoon will hit there in earnest tomorrow, with it forecast to reach Kyoto by the evening.

It's the middle of a three-day weekend, so I thought travel would be relatively calm and uncrowded, but normal reserved seats on every bullet train for hours were sold out. The thought of having to stand for the two-hour trip to Kyoto was unappealing, so we opted for “Green Car” seats, where we could indeed get a reservation to Kyoto. “Green Car” seats are four to a row, instead of six, so it was nicer. It was also much more expensive, of course, but we were lucky to get them; by the time we got to Osaka, the entire train was sold out, and the moment we arrived in Kyoto, a conductor arrived to make sure our seats were empty, presumably for the few lucky folks with confirmed reservations from Kyoto.

Continued here...

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 135mm — ¹/320 sec, f/10, ISO 3600 — map & image data — nearby photos
What am I?
besides, of course, very black
クイズ：何でしょうこれ

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It never ceases to amaze what one can find while putzing around the mountain fringes of Kyoto. I came across this today, and thought it might have potential as one of my “What am I?” quizzes. What is it?

This one is probably pretty easy, especially if you look at the image metadata.

It brings to mind this quiz from a couple of years ago. I still use this related photo from that quiz's answer post as the login-screen background for my Synology DS1511+ NAS unit; the ultra-industrial feel seems to work nicely as a login screen.

As always, I'll keep comments hidden until I post the answer in a day or three.

Nikon D4 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/500 sec, f/2.5, ISO 140 — map & image data — nearby photos
As Peaceful As...
... backup storage that doesn't crash

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(Recent posts have been filled with fall colors, so for some balance, I'm dipping into my cherry-blossom archives)

For the last few years I've had a Synology DS1511+ NAS unit... an always-on “network drive” that sits in a closet at home that I can access on my home network from all my computers at home. I use it for local Time Machine backup, as well as a local CrashPlan repository for various backups. (I also use CrashPlan to keep backups offsite.)

The Synology unit has five drive bays, which I initially populated with 3TB Seagate Barracuda drives.

That was a mistake.

Five drives at 3TB each ostensibly adds up to 15TB of storage, but I set it up in a fail-fail-safe RAID configuration, meaning that even if two drives crash at the same time, the data remains available. That left me with 9TB of usable, relatively safe local storage.

That was a good idea.

Nikon D4 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/1000 sec, f/2.5, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Toji Temple (東寺)
Kyoto, Japan

With disk drives, it's never “if” it will crash, but “when”. When the first drive crashed after about a year, I yanked it out of the drive bay (while the Synology DS1511+ was still running... it allows for “hot swap”) and put in a spare that I had ordered along with the initial five, for just such an occasion. The Synology then used the new drive to rebuild the redundancy in the background, and all was well.

The Seagate drive was under warranty, so I packed it up and shipped it off to a Seagate processing facility near Tokyo, at my own expense. It was a hassle, but they sent me a new (refurbished) drive.

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 @ 14mm — ¹/500 sec, f/11, ISO 360 — map & image data — nearby photos
Ryouanji Temple (龍安寺)
Kyoto, Japan

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Anyway, to cut to the chase, in the three years since I bought those 6 Seagate Barracuda drives, I've had 7 or 8 of them bad. They get replaced, and the replacement goes bad. The most recent, last week, was a drive that had been replaced by Seagate just six weeks earlier.

One time, two drives crashed within hours of each other. I was very happy I'd opted for the fail-fail-safe configuration. I replaced one of the failed drives right away, but didn't have a second spare, so I courted danger by running in just fail-safe mode for a week or so until the replacement came.

Nikon D4 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/500 sec, f/2.5, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Looking
for a disk that doesn't crash

I think the problem is that these Seagate drives are “Desktop” drives, which means they're intended for a PC.... perhaps a PC that's shut down every night? (I rarely shut down my computers, FWIW.)

Having gotten so sick of the hassle of sending these back to Seagate, I decided to buy some new drives. I went with Western Digital “Red” 4TB NAS drives.. They're specifically built for (or, at least, marketed for) use in NAS units, so hopefully I'll have better luck going forward.

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 — ¹/100 sec, f/11, ISO 720 — map & image data — nearby photos
Rocks
as useful as dead disk drives

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