Excellent Enlargements

I decided to get some 11x14 enlargements of some pictures I took in Japan. After doing some checking around, I ended up ordering them from Mpix. Their metallic paper is really nice.

Departure from Italy

Today, we got on a shuttle to the airport at around 10am for our flight to Detroit at 1:20pm.

BTW, Italian passport control is lazy. When you come into the country, instead of finding the first empty page to stamp your passport, they just pick one at random. And when you leave, instead of stamping the exit stamp right next to the entry stamp, they also pick a page at random. So now, you have a wasted page on your passport. This is really annoying since some countries (China, for example) want two consecutive blank pages.

At Detroit, U.S. immigration was stupid. The lines were long and when we finally got near the front, they closed are line (for U.S. citizens) and had us go to the back of the line on one of the visitor lines. My flight from Detroit to Nashville was delayed a bit since they had to wait until the plane had 3 flight attendants and only 2 were there.

Last full day in Rome

Today, most of the people on our tour left to go back home. But, my parents and I decided to stay an extra day.

Because the hotel was far from the city center, we had to take a hotel provided bus into the city. On the bus, we bumped into another couple on our tour and my seatmate, who was the only other traveler who was alone (or odd, in my case) besides me.

The bus dropped us off at Piazza Cavour. From there, we walked across the Tiber River and went to Piazza Navona and then on to the Trevi Fountain where we threw in some coins since this was our official last day. Next, we headed to Trajan's Market, the Roman Forum, and the Colosseum. The Colosseum was open, so we paid 10 Euros and went inside.

From the Colosseum, we walked to San Giovanni in Laterano (Basilica of St. John Lateran), which is Rome's official cathedral and was the papal residence until the 14th century. From here, we took a taxi to Castel Sant'Angelo and walked back to Piazza Cavour to take the bus back to the hotel.

Montecassino and back to Rome

We left Naples in the morning and headed to the Abbey of Montecassino. This abbey was destroyed in WWII, but rebuilt. It was founded by St. Benedict in 528 and is the mother church of the Benedictine Order.

On our way back to Rome, we made our last stop at an Autogrill.

We checked into our hotel, the Jolly Midas, upon our arrival into Rome. The rooms are badly in need of renovation. After resting a bit, we went on our final optional excursion, the Farewell Dinner.

The trip on the bus was fairly amusing. At the beginning of the tour, Igor told us that we should rotate seats each day so that no one gets stuck in a bad seat. But instead of a deterministic rotation, it was all quite random. One lady always seemed to be in the first couple of rows and was very annoying. As a result, on this final bus trip, some people got on the bus a little early and claimed the front rows (I got a seat on the very front row) so she had to go to the back of the bus. When Igor got on the bus, he seemed a little confused before realizing what we did.

Before going to the restaurant, we headed to the Trevi Fountain. According to legend, if you throw one coin into the Trevi Fountain on your last day in Rome, you will ensure a return to Rome. If you throw two, you'll fall in love. And if you throw three, according to Igor, you'll have a successful divorce.

Dinner consisted of an antipasto of cheese and tomatoes, a big ravioli, fettucini with white sauce, chicken with tomato sauce, and a raspberry gelato.

Some people had a bit too much to drink during dinner. On the way back, one lady borrowed the microphone and started emulating Igor.

Capri and Sorrento

We were supposed to take a boat from Naples to Capri, but the water was to rough. So instead, we took the motorcoach to Sorrento in order to get on a boat there. Because it was a Sunday, the main streets in Sorrento were closed for pedestrians. Luckily our driver, Giuseppe, lives in Sorrento, so he was able to get us to the docks in a very scenic, but round-about drive.

At Capri, the water was too choppy to go inside the Blue Grotto, so instead we visited the Villa San Michele. A little after 2pm, we got on the boat and headed back to Sorrento where we did some shopping and had an optional excursion dinner (an antipasto of ham of fresh mozzarella and other vegetables, 2 types of pasta, 3 types of pizza, and a lemon cake). Sorrento is famous for it's limoncello, a liqueur made from lemons. It is very strong, but I liked it so I bought a bottle. I also had two shots at dinner (it was an after dinner drink, and my mother didn't want hers).

After dinner, we drove back to Naples.

Pompeii and Naples

From Assisi, we drove to Pompeii. We ate lunch at a restaurant that Igor recommended whose service was absolutely horrible. It was 10 Euros for a pizza, drink, and gelato. On the way out of Pompeii, I noticed a place that had the same for 6, and whose service had to have been better.

At Pompeii, we spend about 2 hours on a tour of the ruins. We saw the Temple of Apollo, the Forum, casts of bodies, a bathhouse, a bakery, a brothel, and a market.

According to our itinerary, we were supposed to stay in Sorrento. But because all the hotels were evidently full, we instead stayed in Naples at the Jolly Hotel Naples. Because of this change, we got a free dinner at the hotel (originally, the dinner was supposed to be an optional excursion). It consisted of some pasta, beef and roasted vegetables, and baba. Baba is a apricot rum sponge cake. The liquid in the sponge cake isn't apparent while it's sitting on your plate, but once it's in your mouth it is readily apparent.

Ravenna and Assisi

On the way to Assisi, we stopped by Ravenna. The Basilica of St. Apollinare in Classe was closed for restoration, so we had plenty of free time to wander around. I stopped by Dante's tomb and had Zuppa Ingelese gelato which is supposed to be a local specialty. It sort of tasted like eggnogg with cake.

Because of the narrow streets, our tour bus couldn't drive all the way to our hotel in Assisi, so we had to park in a lot and walk up the hill to our hotel, the San Francesco, which was located right next to the Basilica of St. Francis. My room at the hotel was extremely small.

After checking in to the hotel, we were free to visit the Basilica of St. Francis. It is divided into 3 parts: the crypt, the lower basilica, and the upper basilica. The lower basilica is more subdued in keeping with St. Francis's life, while the upper basilica is brighter to celebrate his sainthood. Pictures were not allowed inside.

Dinner consisted of spaghetti, turkey with fennel, and gelato.

After dinner, we went on an evening walk and saw the outside of the Santa Maria over Minerva (a church built inside a Temple of Minerva) and the Basilica of St. Claire. We also did a little shopping (I bought a small painted wood figure of John Paul II). For priests, Assisi must be like a candy store because there are a lot of neat shops selling chalices and other priestly paraphernalia.

BTW, Chinotto soda is nasty.

Venice

We took the motorcoach into Venice and then got on a boat to St. Mark's Square. Unfortunately, the boat didn't go on the Grand Canal, so we couldn't see what it was like during the daytime. At St. Mark's Square, we visited the Doge's Palace and the Basilica (no pictures allowed inside of either place). Afterwards, we went to the Vecchia Murano Glass Shop to see a glass blowing demonstration and do some shopping.

A little after noon, we met at the Bell Tower to go on the optional lunch excursion to Burano. Burano is a fishing village in the lagoon. Lunch consisted of shrimp cooked in olive oil, seafood pasta, St. Peter's fish, and a dessert and cookies.

We got back into Venice a little bit before 5pm and had some free time. So, we walked over to the Rialto Bridge and did a little shopping.

Dinner at the hotel was pasta and lasagna, veal, and tiramisu.

Lugano, Verona, and Venice

In the morning, we crossed the border and made a brief stop in Lugano, Switzerland. I bought a Swiss Army Knife (which is actually cheaper on Amazon), and my mother bought a Rolex (which was cheaper there than in the United States).

From Lugano, we crossed back into Italy and went to Verona where we were free to wander around. We saw the Roman Arena, the Tombs of the Scaligeri, and Juliet's House (Casa di Giulietta). Since Romeo and Juliet was a work of fiction, the house really wasn't Juliet's. While in Verona, I had a really good melon (cantaloupe) gelato at the gelati place which Igor recommended.

We left Verona at 4pm and continued on to Venice. When we arrived at Mestre (mainland from Venice), we checked into the Park Hotel Ai Pini before going on our optional dinner excursion, "Venetian Night Out".

We took the motorcoach into Venice and then a water taxi down the Grand Canal (since it was dark, the buildings were illuminated) and on to St. Mark's Square. From there, we walked to our dinner at the Restaurant All'Angelo. We had a prawn cocktail, a puree of dried cod over polenta, taglioli pasta and lasagna, veal, and tiramisu.

Lake Maggiore

In the morning, we took a boat to Isola Bella which is an island on Lake Maggiore containing a palace and terraced garden.

The afternoon was free time, so I took the ropeway up to Alpino and Mottarone. At the Motarrone stop, I had to hike up a very steep hill to reach the peak of Mount Mottarone. The view was excellent from the top.

Dinner consisted of an antipasto buffet, bowtie pasta with pesto, veal, and a creamed caramel dessert (reminded me of flan).

Milan and Stresa

Today, we traveled from Florence to the town of Stresa on the shore of Lake Maggiore. On the way we drove by Genoa, had lunch at an Autogrill, and stopped at Milan.

In Milan, we visited the Gothic cathedral and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II.

At Stresa, we checked into the Grand Hotel Bristol. Dinner consisted of penne pasta with tomato sauce, trout with fennel and hashbrowns, and tiramisu.

Florence

In the morning, we headed to Galleria dell'Accademia (Academy of the Fine Arts) to see Michelangelo's statue of David. Pictures were not permitted inside.

Afterwards, we walked over to see the Duomo of Santa Maria del Fiore and the Campanile (Giotto's Bell Tower). Next, we visited Piazza della Signoria (where there is a replica of David) and then on to Santa Croce where we stopped by a leather factory and had lunch on our own at the Finisterrae Ristorante Mediterraneo (we shared two pizzas: one with ham, mozzarella, and tomato sauce and another with buffalo mozzarella and cherry tomatoes). After lunch, we headed to Vivoli's Gelato, which is supposed to have the best gelato in Florence. During the rest of our free time, we went to Ponte Vecchio to see the shops on the bridge.

At 6pm, we left to go on an optional Tuscan Dinner excursion. On the way to the restaurant, we stopped by the Piazzale Michelangelo which has a very scenic view of the city. The restaurant is located a little outside of Florence in the Tuscan countryside. Dinner was good (antipasto buffet, goulash and cheese ravioli, prime rib, and berry tort). What was really good was this blue drink that supposedly consisted of spumanti, blue curacao, and peach schnapps.

Pisa and Florence

After a 6:15 wakeup call, we departed the hotel at 7:30 and headed to Pisa and Florence. On the way, we stopped at an Autogrill for lunch. Autogrills are found throughout Italy (we stopped at them multiple times for lunch or restroom breaks) and consist of a cafeteria style restaurant, sandwich/expresso counter, and grocery/wine store. When ordering from the counter, you pay for your sandwich first (and had better be able to pronounce it properly), then take the receipt and pass it over the counter to get your sandwich (which they'll heat, if you want).

At around 1:20pm, we arrived in Pisa to see the Leaning Tower, Duomo, and Baptistry at the Field of Miracles (Campo dei Miracoli). At 3:30, we left and continued on to Florence where we checked in to the Grand Hotel Mediterraneo.

First full day in Rome

After a 5:45am wakeup call, the tour group departed the hotel at 7am to head to the Vatican Museums. We left this early so that our group would be near the front of the line before it opened. After we arrived outside the museum's entrance and got in line, our local guide in Rome, Francesco, gave us radio receivers with an earpiece called Whispers so that we could hear what he said. These Whisper devices were used throughout the tour and were much better than the alternative (the guide yelling).

Although you can take pictures in the rest of the Vatican Museums, you can't in the Sistine Chapel. Supposedly, this is because the Japanese company that did the restoration of the frescoes currently have sole rights to the images. Despite the prohibition, I stealthily took some pictures with my SLR anyways (aimed from the belt level). I noticed someone else in the tour group had his camcorder in a bag with it opened and pointed upward.

From the museum, we entered St. Peter's Basilica and then had some free time to look around St. Peter's Square. We then boarded the motorcoach and headed to the Roman Forum to see the ruins. Unfortunately, we couldn't go inside the Colosseum because of electrical problems.

In the late afternoon, we skipped the optional "Roman Highlights" excursion and dinner, and instead took a taxi to the Spanish Steps. After we arrived, it started raining very heavily. From the Spanish Steps, we walked down Via Condotti and then headed to the Pantheon (which looks like a Roman temple on the outside, but is now a church in the inside). Next, we walked to Piazza Navona and had dinner at Tre Scalini. This restaurant is known for it's tartufo (chocolate coated chocolate ice cream, cherries, and whipped cream). I had pasta (lasagna and tortellini), veal, and the tartufo.

Arrived in Italy

Note: These posts about Italy were made after I came back to the United States.

My Northwest flight arrived in Rome's Leonardo da Vinci Airport (Fiumicino) at around 10:30am. The food wasn't as good as Japan Airlines, but each seat did have video on demand (whereas on JAL, there each movie was on a separate channel and continually replayed). There was also a networked trivia game, but only a handful of people played.

At around 1pm, we left the airport to go to the Starhotel Michelangelo which is located a couple blocks from the Vatican. There, we met our tour director, Igor Spinelli, and checked into our rooms. Since we had a little free time before having to meet back at 5pm, my father and I walked over to St. Peter's Square to look around.

After the meeting at 5pm where we met the rest of the group (46 people total on the tour) and Igor went over some things, we took a bus into the city for our welcome dinner. Just about all the dinners on the tour had four courses. Normally this consisted of a antipasto (cheese, cold cuts such as prosciutto ham, etc), a pasta dish (occasionally containing different types), a meat dish (which was often veal or pork and sometimes fish), and a dessert. Tonight, dinner consisted of an antipasto of cold cuts (ham, salami, etc.), tomato bean pasta soup, some sort of cheesy pasta, thin cuts of pork and pan fried potatoes, and peach and strawberry gelato.

A continental buffer breakfast was included for free each day, but all lunches were on our own.

Italy

I'm leaving for Italy this afternoon to go on Globus's 14 day Italian Mosaic Tour with my parents. We're both taking the same flight to Rome from Detroit (they've got a longer lay over as their flight from San Diego arrives earlier). It's actually 13 days if you don't include the day you leave the U.S., but we're staying an extra day in Rome. We'll be going to Rome, Florence, Lake Maggiore (Stressa), Venice, Assisi, and Sorrento/Capri (hotel is in Naples, unfortunately, so we probably won't see much of Sorrento).

Undeleting on ext3fs

Someone accidentally deleted a bunch of files on their Linux box at work. None of our machines (machines which the group that I'm in deal with) are backed up in any official manner, although some are either replicated or rsynced. This machine was not. The filesystem was formatted ext3fs, which meant that I couldn't use Midnight Commander's undelete function. Normally, at this point I would say there's nothing I can do and all your work for the past 2 months has been lost forever. But, since I was feeling nice, the files were plain text, and all had the same header, I decided to see what I could do.

I ended up grepping /dev/hdb1 for a string which was near the top of each file. After that I used dd to read 20k from the byte offset which grep returned and dumped this to a file. From these dumps, the user will have to tease out the actual file contents from portions of other files in the dump as well as figure out which files actually contain the newest version of the content.

Final Cut Pro 5 audio bug

Last night I noticed that the audio that I had exported out of Final Cut Pro wasn't matching the levels from within the application. After spending a good deal of time dinking around (deleting audio level keyframes, re-nesting sequences into the main clip, etc), I decided to check Apple's FCP discussion groups. Evidently, this bug has been around for a while. I guess I got lucky and never stumbled upon it.

The solution is to force an audio mixdown of the sequences that are being nested.

Last Day in San Francisco

Yesterday (6/22), after the CPOE conference finished up at around noon, someone from Vanderbilt, someone from McKesson, and I went to Yank Sing for dim sum. It was quite expensive. I don't remember how many dishes we had, but the total bill was $75. There were a lot of dishes that I hadn't seen before including a dim sum version of Peking Duck.

After lunch, I went to Alamo Square to see the Victorian houses around there, Golden Gate Park to see the Japanese Tea Garden, and then to the Golden Gate Bridge.

For dinner, I had a duck dish, a corn bread side dish, and crepes with cajeta and vanilla ice cream for dessert at the Colibri Mexican Bistro.

This morning I took the BART to Oakland and had an uneventful flight back to Nashville.

Day One at the CPOE Conference

The talks at the conference so far have been moderately interesting. For me, the most interesting was a short talk during lunch about Human Factors Engineering by the product manager for Soarian (Siemen's CPOE system). From what I saw of Soarian it looked pretty interesting. It's web based, but I'm not sure if it works in anything but Internet Explorer. It also seemed a bit slower. I think this may be due to the complexity of it's web based UI. They should have tried just keep things simple.

After the conference had adjourned for the day, I went with two other people from Vanderbilt to Fisherman's Wharf for dinner at Bubba Gump's Shrimp Co. Restaurant.

SBC Park

My seat at SBC Park was in the View Level on the third base side such that I could see right down the first base foul line. Overall, the stadium was nice, although I like Petco Park better since I like the fact that the concourses are larger and less cramped. The Giants beat the Diamondbacks 8 to 3, so the Padres gain another game in the standings.

First Full Day in San Francisco

I took a bus the the Palace of Fine Arts this morning. This is where Sean Connery's character meets his daughter in the movie "The Rock". From there I walked toward the beach next to the bay to see if I could get a glimpse of the Golden Gate Bridge. Unfortunately, it was foggy. After that, I took the bus to Ghirardelli Square and took some pictures of Alcatraz. I then walked through Fisherman's Wharf and then down to the Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill. By this time, the fog cleared up a bit, so I got some pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge (although by this time, I was much farther away than I was earlier). From Telegraph Hill, I walked through China Town, had lunch (Dim Sum), and then continued on to SBC Park to buy a ticket for tonight's Giants game versus the Diamondbacks.

In San Francisco

I arrived in Oakland International Airport this afternoon and took the AirBART shuttle to the Oakland Coliseum station in order to take the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train to the Powell Street Station. The train was definitely not as user friendly as the trains in Japan. For example, there are no screens in the cars to tell you what the next stop will be and the announcements are said too quickly with poor enunciation. Maybe it was because I got use to them, but the announcements on the trains and busses in Japan were much easier to understand.

The hotel I'm staying at is the Grand Hyatt San Francisco which is next to Union Square. It's a couple of blocks from the Powell Street BART station whose Stockton Street exit is right next to the Apple Store. It's also a couple of blocks from Chinatown.

After checking into the hotel, I walked about 1.25 miles to Nihonmachi (also known as Japantown). I found a Japanese sweets store which sold the exact same box of sweets which I brought back from Japan. It was a bit more expensive here ($14 vs 1000 yen). I ended up buying one box of green tea flavored assorted sweets (Ocha no Tsudoi) and another box of a single type of green tea flavored sweet (Maccha Komichi) which looked interesting since the outer shell is transparent. I also bought a DVD (Battle Royale 2). Since it was around dinner time, I decided to eat at one of the restaurants in the main mall. Just like in Japan, most of the restaurants had wax models in the windows. Upon entering you are greeted with the standard Japanese greeting (Irasshaimase!). Unlike in Japan, the waitresses obviously speak English as well. I ended up ordering some shabu-shabu since I did not get a chance to eat that in Japan.

On the way back to the hotel, I made a detour and walked around the financial district and a small bit of Chinatown.

BTW, internet in the room is $9.95 for 24 hours. Hopefully Vanderbilt will reimburse me for it.

CPOE conference in San Francisco

I'm going to be attending a conference ("Decision Support for CPOE") in San Francisco on June 21 and 22. I'll be arriving in Oakland on 6/19/2005 and flying out on 6/23/2005. From the program it sounds like the target audience is actually higher level hospital administrators, but the person I used to report to at Vanderbilt is one of the speakers and encouraged some of us to go.

Unfortunately, the Napa and Sonoma Wine Country Tour got cancelled due to lack of interest.

Apple on Intel

From what I saw on the streaming keynote address, it appears that the Jobs and the presenters where very careful not mention what sort of Intel chip is going to be used. Apple would be very stupid not to be going with 64bit chip from the get go. Their Universal Binary Programming Guidelines currently only speaks about IA-32.

Looking at the guidelines, it appears that even if an application is properly written and is just a recompile away from becoming a universal binary, there are some very subtle issues which might not be readily apparent until some heavy testing is done. For example, on the PowerPC, when a float is cast into an int, but the value is too large to be represented, the int gets assigned INTMAX, while on an x86, it gets assigned INTMIN. Also, an integer divide by zero is fatal on the x86, while on the PowerPC, zero is returned.

Hopefully, Rosetta (the dynamic PowerPC to Intel translator) will work well since I'm sure it's going to be a long time before a lot of applications are rebuilt as universal binaries. I almost think that come 2007, it might still be smarter to buy a G5 rather than an Apple Intel box due to software availability.

I'll probably buy a G5 within the next year or two, but I'm definitely not going to make any big software purchases (especially multimedia type apps) in the near future unless absolutely necessary since I'm not going to want to upgrade again once the software gets recompiled as universal binaries.

Apple Store at the Mall at Green Hills

The Apple Store at the Mall at Green Hills had it's Grand Opening today. The line to get in was very long. The first 1000 people got free T-shirts. The packaging was typical Apple (meaning nicely designed). The T-shirts were neatly rolled into a plain white box with a glossy silver colored interior and sealed with a silver Apple sticker.

Falling ceiling tiles at work

I'm not sure what happened, but a ceiling tile collapsed in the tunnel between the building where I work and another. Lots of gravel and dust spewed out.

Revenge of the Sith

I went to see Episode 3 yesterday. Except for the first 30 minutes or so, the movie was very good. The beginning was too comedic.

Google Maps

This must have been added while I was in Japan, but in Google Maps, you can now toggle from normal maps to satellite imagery.

Mac OS X multi user startup items

For a while, I've been wondering how "Nikon View Monitor Carbon" was starting automatically on my Macs independent of any particular user. This is installed with the software that came with my Nikon film scanner. After some investigating, it appears that besides the usual places (Login Items in System Preferences and the various Startup Items folders), there is a /Library/Preferences/loginwindow.plist file which contains items to startup automatically. There doesn't appear to be any application to view or edit this file outside of the generic Property List Editor or a text editor. It does appear to be in the same format as the ~/Library/Preferences/loginwindow.plist file which is what the Login Items tab in System Preferences saves it's information..

Xcode 2.0 installer bug

Supposedly, some files that were in the previous Xcode package are now part of the BSD package on 10.4. As a result, when upgrading to the Tiger development tools, certain files are deleted. To get them back, BSD.pkg must be reinstalled from the Tiger DVD. Better yet, uninstall-devtools.pl should be run before installing the new development tools.

Show Movie Properties in QuickTime 7

The found one other problem with Tiger on my desktop Mac that involves QuickTime. For some reason, selecting "Show Movie Properties" in QuickTime Player would cause it to crash. Going in to System Preferences and adding and then removing a language fixed the problem.

Another oddity which I noticed (probably not Tiger related) is that the sound coming from my iMic would sound staticy after running Audacity. Moving the iMic to a different USB port would fix the problem until using Audacity again. Once a port sounded staticy, it would remain staticy. Fix: delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.audio.DeviceSettings.plist. The settings for USB audio devices must be stored based on some combination of USB device ID (or whatever) and USB port and Audacity must be hosing these settings in certain situations.

Source of iSync problems

After trashing the DivX 5 QuickTime Component, iSync stopped crashing. Very strange. I guess that DivX component is not compatible with 10.4. I wonder if this might have also caused some of the flakiness in iPhoto.

X11 on Mac OS X 10.4

I tried running some Java apps from a Linux box via an X11 forward in ssh (-X switch), but the program wouldn't display properly. I thought the problem might be due to something that changed with X11 on Tiger, but it appears that the problem is actually ssh. Connecting with the -Y switch (trusted X11 forwarding) allows things to display properly.

iSync on Tiger

I tried starting iSync to see if anything was new, and it would crash immediately. According to Apple's support site, deleting "/Library/Application Support/SyncService/501/*" (where 501 is your uid) would fix it, and it did. Unfortunately, iSync still crashes if I try and go into it's preferences or add a device. I tried it on another user account, and it appeared to work fine, so there must be something odd with my account. Looking at Apple's discussion groups, it appears that some other people have encountered this as well, but no solution as of yet.

While playing around with iSync, I tried plugging in my old 1st generation iPod to see if I could add it as an iSync device. I thought this iPod was pretty much dead due to bad harddrive sectors, but on a whim, I tried running Disk Utility on it, and it was able to correct an error (leaf record count in the catalog file). Then, I tried moving my MP3s over from iTunes and it didn't get hung up or anything like it used to. So, it appears that my old iPod is back from the grave. What's strange is that I had tried reformatting it's harddrive before, and that didn't work, which is why I was (and still am) sure it's hardware related and wasn't file system corruption.

Mac OS X 10.4

I installed Tiger on both of machines last night doing the upgrade install (since I'm lazy). No problems on my laptop, but iPhoto started acting very flaky on my desktop. Zero length jpegs were being created in the wrong directories in the iPhoto library directory structure and iPhoto was trying to read from them instead of the originals (which were still around). Also, iPhoto would display the wrong image when launched from a Spotlight search result. It also seemed to be crashing frequently. Rebuilding the library didn't fix the flakiness. Since I think the problem was due to the scans I imported (and doing a batch operation to change their dates), I exported the originals, used EXIFutils to add an image creation time EXIF attribute so that I wouldn't have to correct the date in iPhoto, and then re-imported. It seems better now.

Back in the United States

After checking out and having the hotel temporarily store my stuff until it was time to get on the Airport Limousine Bus, I wandered around Akihabara for a while looking for anime stuff. I didn't find anything that I was interested in purchasing and headed back to the hotel to catch the bus to the airport.

From the Narita, I flew to LAX and then on to San Diego.

Last full day in Tokyo

Today, I went to the Meiji-Jingu Shrine and wandered around Harajuku and Shinjuku for a little bit.

I also got over my mental dislike for sushi and went to a kaiten sushi place and had 4 dishes (for about 500 yen). For dinner, I also went to a sushi place and had a set meal of about 10 nigiri pieces and a scoop of green tea ice cream.

Although I'm sure most people probably think green tea flavoring is strange, I've found that anything that has a sweet green tea flavor to be oddly refreshing.

Tomorrow, I have to check out before 11am and will take the Airport Limousine shuttle to Narita at around 1pm (flight leaves at around 5pm). I'm assuming that the hotel will let me store my bags somewhere between checkout and when I leave so I can do some last minute souvenir shopping (and hopefully use up most up my coins).

Yokohama and more of Tokyo

In the morning I went to Yokohama and saw the Marine Tower and Chinatown.

A little before noon, I headed back to Tokyo and when to see the Imperial Palace, stopped by Ueno Park to capture a little more video of something I missed but might need for the video, and then went to the kitchen district in Asakusa.

After that, I spent a couple hours wandering Ginza. The Apple Store was very crowded and it looked like tourists were all using the computers to do email and stuff (which was my plan, as well). The elevator was very "Apple". As far as I can tell, utside of a button to open the door, there were no other buttons inside. Instead, the elevator just went up and down by itself.

I'm not exactly sure what I had for dinner. I think I had flavorful spicy pork (buta umakara) and succulent boneless shortribs served with special sauce (karubi). But, it's possible that one of these meat dishes was actually tender charcoal grilled beef tongue (tan). I got this from their chopstick wrapper as there was no English on the menu. Also included was rice (of course) and ox-tail soup.

Nikko

It was raining really badly in Nikko (was nice in Tokyo, though). The temples were very ornate, but unfortunately, I had to take pictures while trying to balance my umbrella on my shoulder.

When I left, there was an interesting looking festival that was about to start that involved people and their kids dressed up and lots of floats. But because it was pouring, I decided to leave.

After I got back, I wandered Akihabara for about 2 hours.

For dinner, I had tempura and soba noodles in a restaurant area in the Sunshine complex.

Also, I discovered CalorieMate does exist and is not something made up for Metal Gear Solid.

Kamakura and meeting up with Lili

Went to Kamakura today and saw the Kencho-ji, Tsuugako Hachimanga Shrine, Hasedera Temple, and Diabatsu.

I then headed back to Tokyo and went to Ueno to wait for Lili. Since we couldn't find a locker that would fit her luggage, we lugged them around. First we went to see the museum in Ueno Park, and then went to Asakusa to see the Sensoji Shrine (it was dark). After that we headed to Ikebukuro to eat at Namjatown (Gyoza Stadium and the Cream Puff Town or whatever) next to my hotel. At around 10pm, we headed to Shinjuku so that she could catch her train back to Kanazawa. Unfortunately, we had a tough time locating the proper bus terminal,　so we had to literally run through the streets (actually only a couple blocks) towing her luggage. If only we had some cameramen like on the Amazing Race to get some footage! Luckily, we made it with about a minute to spare, so she was able to get back to Kanazawa instead of being stuck in Tokyo.

Japanese Language Notes

Despite listening to over 30 lessons of Pimsleur's Japanese, I think the only phrases I've used are "arigato" ("thank you"), "do itashimashite" ("you're welcome"), "sumimasen" ("excuse me" or "sorry"), "wakarimasen" ("I don't understand") and "kyo wa" ("today": used when trying to get Hashin Tiger tickets). Overall, I've just been trying to get by on English since even if I am able to come up with something to say in Japanese, I won't be able to understand what they say.

Hakone

I got a late start and headed to Hakone today. The weather in Tokyo was clear, so I was hoping it would also be true in Hakone. Unfortunately, it was not the case, so I didn't get to see Mount Fuji. I was able to get some good sniffs of sulfurous fumes at Owakudani, so the trip wasn't a total loss.

I also wasted some time by getting off at Hakonemachi instead of continuing on to Moto-Hakone on the ship on Lake Ashi. I went to see the Hakone Checkpoint, but wasn't impressed. It was probably a waste of money (only 250 yen) and time.

Also, I found a better place to use the internet than the hotel (which is 525 yen for 30 minutes). There's this internet cafe (Gran Cyber Cafe B@gus) that's 400 yen for 1 hour (not that I need that much time). According to one of the guide books I have, there's supposed to be a Virgin Megastore in Ikebukuro that has a few machines with free internet, but I haven't been able to locate it yet. I just googled, and it's over on the west side of the station, which explains why I haven't seen it.

I'm probably going to be going to Kamukura and maybe Yokohama tommorrow morning.

Japanese Baseball

While waiting until the Seibu Lions game, I went to Shibuya and near the Tokyo Tower to take some pictures.

The baseball game was between the Seibu Lions and Nippon Ham Fighters at the Seibu Dome. Even though it's technically a domed stadium, it's not enclosed along the edges so it got quite cold. The hotel had a coupon for discount tickets for 2400 yen. The seat that I got was on the second row along the first base side (Lion's side). Although the stadium was probably have empty, the cheering sections in the outfield were quite loud (drums and noise makers). The Fighters ending up beating the Lions 8 to 4.

For dinner, I had octopus balls at the stadium.

Arrived in Tokyo

Before, I forget, I had tempura and udon noodles (in soup) for dinner at Kanazawa Station.

I just arrived at my hotel (Sunshine City Prince) in Ikebukuro. I'm on the 28th floor. Since this place seems to have a lot of Seibu Lion stuff, I might try and get a ticket here for tonights game rather than risk any more sell outs.

Afternoon in Kanazawa

I went to see the Nagamachi Samurai Houses and the Oyama Shrine.

For dinner, I had tempura at a restaurant in the station mall.

First day in Kanazawa

This morning, I went to the Sakada Gold and Silver Leaf Shop and saw a brief demonstration on how gold leaf is made. They also served tea that contained gold leaves.

From there I went to the Higashi Chaya District and saw exteriors of old giesha houses. After that, I went to Kenrokuen Garden. Admission happened to be free. Near the garden, I also visited the Seisonkaka Villa.

From Kenrokuen, I headed down to the Nishi Chaya district to the Kutani Kosen Pottery Studio. It was pretty hard to find. I actually walked right past it. After walking for a little bit longer, I figured I must have missed it and paid closer attention to the kanji signs.

Right now, I'm sitting in an internet cafe ("Cyber Cafe Freaks") which costs money since my hotel in Kanazawa doesn't have internet access and all the computers at the Ishikawa Pref International Exchange Association library were occupied. After this, I'm going to head the Nagamachi Samurai District.

Last day in Kyoto

This is backdated post.

After checking out of my hotel, I went to Kyoto Station to find a locker to store my luggage. Unforunately, they didn't have any lockers that weren't in use so I had to store them in luggage storage which probably was a little bit more expensive than a locker.

I then went to the Kyoto Handicraft Center and ended up buying a woodprint which I had shipped back to Nashville since I was afraid I would get in wrinkled in my luggage.

Afterwards, I headed to the Imaniya-Jinga Shrine to see a matsuri (festival) there. I was late, so missed most of it.

A little before 6pm, I took a train to Kanazawa. For dinner, I had some pastries which I bought at the station.

Stalking Gieshas

I spent about an hour standing on one corner in Gion watching and waiting for geishas to pass by. I think I got a few good shots on film with my SLR and also got a couple on video. While I was leaving, one nearly ran into me stepping into a restaurant. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera ready and I reflexively jumped out of the way.

For dinner, I had pork cutlets and croquettes of potato. I'm not sure what it's called in Japanese.

Last full day in Kyoto

This morning I went to the Imperial Palace (which was open to the public, so it was very crowded). Afterwards, I headed to Gion and went to see a showing of the Miyako Odori. This is a Cherry Blossom Dance show performed by the geisha and maiko of Gion.

Traveling around Kyoto

Today I went to Kiyomizudera, Nazen-ji, Ginkakuji, the Heian Jingu Shrine, and Sanjusangendo Hall. I did more walking then expected since a lot of the busses I had planned to take were completely full.

In the late afternoon, I took a train to Osaka and then to Koshien (on the Hashin Railway) in order to try and see a Hashin Tigers baseball game. Unfortunately, the game was sold out (as well as the other games through the weekend). So, I guess I will have to try and see a game in Tokyo.

For dinner I ate at an Okonomiyaki restaurant at Kyoto Station and had an Okonomiyaki with beef (tasted like jerky) and shrimp.

So far, I'm well under my food budget (even considering the number of drinks I've bought from vending machines).

Japan Day Two

Today (technically yesterday since I am writing this on the 8th), I took at Shinkasen (bullet train) to Himeji to see the castle there. Originally, I was planning to stopping buy Osaka on the way back to see the castle there, but I spent too much time at Himeji-jo and misstimed the train, so I decided to head back to Kyoto. After arriving in Kyoto, I headed to Nijo-jo and then back to my hotel where my luggage was waiting for me.

Afterwards, I walked around Gion. I saw a couple of geishas, but I don't think I got any very good pictures. I'll probably have to head back another day and just wait until one passes by. I also went to a show at Gion Corner. It was sort of interesting but, I'm not sure if it was worth the price.

For dinner, I at a little gyoza place.

First full day in Japan

My hotel (Karasuma Kyoto Hotel) has free internet.

I arrived in Japan yesterday without my luggage. Somehow it didn't get transfered from the American Eagle flight. It should arrive tommorrow, though. The food on the JAL flight was very good. For lunch I had tendon (the alternative was beef stew: probably japanized). Dinner was tortellini.

Today, I went to Nara in the morning at Northwestern Kyoto in the afternoon: Kinkakuji (Golden Pavillion) and Ryoanji. I was going to go to Daitokuji but sort of got lost.

Tonight, I had a dinner of eel over rice, a little tempura (two prawns and some vegetables), and a little soup. Cost: 1365 yen.

A couple of random observations:

- Pocari Sweat tastes like Gatorade. I had two bottles because I was really thirsty. The bottles were aluminum.

- There exists blueberry cream Pocky like snacks. The brand is Fran.

- Netscape 7 is aweful compared to the latest Mozilla/Firefox browsers. GMail only works in the standard HTML mode and blogger's composer doesn't work.

Garbage

I thought I was going get a trash cart from Metro this week, but it appears that this is not the case (unless they're planning on delivering on Saturday). So hopefully my neighbors don't get too annoyed if they deliver it while I'm on vacation and it gets left on the street.

Even though I really don't need a big 96 gallon trash cart, I'm assuming trash pickup will get better once the new system is in place. For the second time in the past few months, the garbage men didn't completely empty the garbage can. To make matters worse, it rained a lot and they left the lid open.

Clone Wars Volume 2

The Cartoon Network showed all 5 episodes from Clone Wars: Volume 2 on Saturday. The episodes were much more plot driven than Volume 1. Supposedly, what happens will be summarized in Revenge of the Sith's opening scroll.

iPod shuffle

Since my first generation iPod is pretty much dead due to bad sectors on the harddrive, I bought a 512 MB iPod shuffle. The main reason I got this instead of a larger iPod is because I wanted something super small to take with me on my trip to Japan and didn't want to worry about having to baby a more delicate harddrive based player.

Due to it's relatively small amount of space and lack of direct access to individual tracks, I decided not to load it up with my usual collection of soundtracks (Star Wars, Lord of the Ring, Braveheart, etc.). Instead, my iPod playlist mainly consists of more rock oriented music and select tracks from various soundtracks which would lend itself better toward randomized track playback.

The only problem with the shuffle which I have noticed so far is that sometimes it forgets what track you were last on when you turn it on after it's been off for a while.

Dream of a Talking Cat

I had the strangest dream amongst a bunch of vaguely interconnected ones last night. I was walking around a residential neighborhood and came to a dead end. All of a sudden a cat (kind of large cat: maybe a large bobcat) appears and says something about not to go in that direction. My memory is kind of fuzzy, but then a man appears and the cat says something and turns the man into a very small monkey. Later, some FBI guy or someone similar keeps me from leaving the place I'm in and going to the airport. After a while, he let's me go. On a TV screen, I see something about a fight at the airport involving a cat and a monkey. Normally, I have dreams that are pretty grounded in reality. Exceptions are the occasional vampires, zombies, and super powers. Occasionally (pretty rare nowadays), I'll be in a cartoon or some television show or movie. But from what I can recall, I have never, ever, had a realistic dream that involved a talking animal. The only thing that was a little different about last night is that I was paged at around 4:30am. I think this dream occurred after I went back to sleep.

Dawn of the Dead

Last night, I watched the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead on DVD. There is an interesting extra called "Special Report: Zombie Invasion". The news anchor is Richard Biggs (Dr. Stephen Franklin from Babylon 5) in probably his has last screen role before he died. Also, the voice of the president is none other than Bruce Boxlightner (President/Captain John Sheridan from Babylon 5).

JibJab's Second Term

There is a new animation out from JibJab called "Second Term!". This follows "This Land", "Good to be in D.C.", and "Santa Claus!" (aka "Grumpy Santa").

House of Flying Daggers

I went to see House of Flying Daggers. I think it's better paced than Hero, but the ending seemed too open ended.

Mac mini

The Mac mini looks really interesting. A bunch of them would probably make a nice little server farm. I see a couple negative things about it:

• It has an external power brick which appears to be about 1/3 the size of the mini.

• There is only one memory slot. It appears that Apple does not recommend users upgrade memory themselves (it could be that it's difficult to get the case opened up). From the picture on the design page of the Mac mini site, it doesn't appear that upgrading the memory would be difficult once the case is opened.
  

Chattanooga and Atlanta

I went to Chattanooga and Atlanta yesterday and today with my parents. The World of Coca-Cola was quite interesting. There were unlimited free samples of various Coca-Cola drinks from around the world (including lychee and a very strong ginger ale) that are not sold in the United States.