Japan 2008: Day 3

Our third day in Japan had us waking up in Tokyo, and checking out of the very lavish Prince Sakura hotel to start our walking tour of Tokyo with my friend Andrew Shuttleworth. We saw a variety of places around the city of Tokyo, and by the end of the day we had the blisters to show for it! Warning: many of these pictures are of technology, which some of you may find boring – but I was in geek heaven. Check out the photo gallery…(comments have been enabled on the day three gallery, as an experiment, so if you’d like to comment on the photos, please feel free).

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Japan 2008: Day 2

Our day two Japan photos are up, this time chronicling our journeys from Kyoto to Yokohama to Tokyo. We spent the afternoon in Yokohama – initially we were going to head for a place called Sea Paradise, but when we got to the station the cab driver told us it would cost 10,000 yen to get there – $100 CAD and an hour’s worth of our time. Both factors were steep, so we decided we’d skip that and spend the afternoon around Landmark Tower, the tallest building in Japan.

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We’re keeping so busy that I haven’t had much time to edit photos…and my Dell XPS M1330 is starting to make louder and louder whining noises – in a quiet room, it’s really noticeable and really irritating. <sigh> Time to call Dell when I return to Canada…

Who Coded This Stuff? Outlook [Part 1]

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On so many levels, Outlook 2007 is a superb product – I spent more time in Outlook than any other piece of software, including the Web browse, and for the most part it’s an excellent product. But in other ways, it’s just plain stupid. Take the “Search Address Book” feature. I use it all the time, but sometimes I only know a bit about the contact I’m looking for. Maybe his first name, or, more likely, the company he works for. Take the above screen shot: I’m searching for someone I know who’s in my contact list who works for Epson – so I type in Epson and hit enter. No contacts found. Yet look at the contact for Andrew – it says Epson in the business field. Why shouldn’t it find the contact? No good reason I can think of. Who coded this stuff? They can do better.

Japan 2008: Day 1

Our first full day in Japan was focused on one thing: SUMO! We had tickets (thanks James!) to the second-last day of the sumo tournament being held in Osaka. Off we went! I took a great deal of photos, and heavily culled them all, but it was difficult to not have a rather sizable collection of sumo photos (no pun intended) remain. I only kept the best though, so hopefully they capture some of the action that we saw!

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Japan 2008: Day 0

These are our “day zero” photos, which was our travel and arrival day…although technically we lost a day and a half with the 15 hour time zone change and the 14 hours of travelling (including the layover in Vancouver) so this is more like day zero/one. Not a lot here in the way of interesting photos, but I share them with you nonetheless. 🙂

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The Question of Point and Shoot Cameras

My friend Ed Hansberry made a post to the Mobius mailing list, where we were discussing digital SLR cameras, asking whether or not he was the only one that liked point and shoot (P&S) cameras. This was my reply.

Ed,

I think everyone that has a DSLR also has a P&S – the two technologies are not mutually exclusive in any way. I never leave my P&S behind, even if I’m bringing my DSLR, but I will sometimes leave my DSLR behind and only use my P&S. P&S cameras are great, but there are some things they’re not so good at:

  • fast shutter release (for getting that picture right away – even the worst DSLR is faster than the fastest P&S)
  • flexible lens choices (though there are some P&S cameras with amazing zoom)
  • low-light photography (noise free, focusing without much light)
  • super-sharp images (I love my Canon SD 870, but the image quality it has pales in comparison to any DSLR)

On the other hand, P&S cameras have video while “real” DSLRs do not. The best camera you have is the one you have on you – so there have been many instances where my P&S camera got great pictures that my DSLR did not simply because I have my P&S on me. Continue reading The Question of Point and Shoot Cameras

Japan, Sumo-Style

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That’s what we spent several hours watching yesterday – it was quite the spectacle! I have several hundred photos to process from yesterday (that’s culled down from over 900 photos), but I wanted to share a bit of what we’ve experienced thus far…

What’s the First Thing a Geek Does When He Gets to Japan?

He tests the bandwidth at the place where he’s staying of course! Check this out…

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17 mbps downstream? Wow – that’s fast. At home in Calgary I’m on a 10 mbps connection and it’s really more like 9 mbps. The upstream speed isn’t that impressive though – I have a solid 1 mbps at home – so this is probably DSL. Unfortunately, as fast as it is, the router seems to not like my laptop, I keep having to unplug it to get an IP address.

[OK, this post is mostly a joke, this is certainly not the first thing I did when we got here, but I haven’t had time to write about our adventures thus far…hopefully today on the train I’ll have a good two hours to process my photos and write.]

Off to the Land of the Rising Sun for a Vacation…Geek Style!

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Tomorrow, I’m off to Japan for two weeks for a real, business-free vacation with Ashley. It’s going to be awesome! I tend not to get excited about vacations until right before they happen, so I’m just starting to get excited. I’m all geeked up, bringing:

  • …the XPS M1330 laptop for photo and video processing (gotta’ have some grunt for processing those raw files)
  • …the Fujitsu P7010D for watching movies on
  • …my Proporta battery for keeping the Fujitsu lasting that 11 hour flight
  • …the Nikon D300 + four lenses (including my new ultra-sharp 24-70 f/2.8) + 32 GB CF card + 3 x 8 GB CF cards
  • …the Canon SD 850 IS (with 8 GB microSD) for snapping casual pics and for videos (damn I wish it did HD videos – I don’t want to bring my Canon HV20)
  • …two Zunes 8’s (one for the wife, one for me)
  • …one pair of Ultimate Ears super.fi 5 EB’s
  • …a TomTom GPS (without maps, just for finding our way back to our starting point GPS coordinates – was going to bring the HP iPAQ GPS, but it crashed and that didn’t make me feel very confident)
  • …iGo Juice with several adaptors, PPC Techs Lil Sync Cable, Lil Sync Mobile USB Power Pack for charging everything
  • My T-Mobile Dash, not to use as a phone, but to look up our travel schedule
  • …a few assorted adaptors and cables

Quick, I don’t leave until tomorrow AM – did I miss anything? 😀

Remember the “CD-ROM Business Card”?

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Just when you thought no one could come up with a worse idea than having a business card that you need to put into your computer…now someone has come up with the idea of giving our small portable media players as a business communications tool. Really? Seriously? Who’s going to want to accept a media player as a pitch device – even if it’s a cheap device, there’s a perception there that you’d want to give it back to the person, and you’d probably just refuse it to begin with because most people wouldn’t want the responsibility of having to give it back when they were done with it. I don’t know how much these costs, but even if they’re “only” $99 each, you’re still not going to give them out like you would a business card or brochure…