HDR is interesting. I've been playing a little with it over the last few days. Lots of possibilities, some of the abstract stuff you can do is cool. Ive got a few more pics here.
For more info about HDR start looking here.
I've also been out taking some more photos recently, wanted to get some Autumn pics before all the leaves fall down... got lucky and actually got some pics of the leaves falling. Some are posted on flickr in my photostream.
i certainly did savour that elaborated chocolate taste ;)
<edit>: w00t, I can post from my mobile phone! heh. just need to sort out that strange image rotation...
So, like I said in my last post, we went for a quick holiday to Thailand. We stayed in Phuket, right on Patong beach... here in fact. Got to say, Thailand is pretty cool. Phuket is a bit too crowded with Aussies and "Eurotrash" (not being mean about it, but that's just the description that comes first to mind) though. So many Westerners, was unbelievable, you could almost imagine you were in an Australian beach resort! Probably seemed more so because we live in Japan.
It was nice, and we had a great time, but I think it might have been nicer ten years ago. There is too much development there at the moment, so you end up with these really strange contrasts, like a huge, brand new, shopping mall right next door to outdoor markets which get flooded to ankle depth in water when it rains! Another example was on the eastern side of the island, there is a big marina development which is probably nicer than most in Australia, and not more than 30 seconds away by boat along the channel to get to the open water there is what can only be described as a shanty town, which really becomes obvious at low tide.
It was a bit wet while we were there, but it didn't really stop you from getting out and doing things. It would be overcast and warm and really humid all day, with a really heavy tropical rainstorm at around lunch time, then another one during the evening. It was actually good, because it kept it from being too hot. And hey, its fun wandering around the markets when its rainy, it keeps most of the rest of the tourists in their hotels, and wandering around in ankle deep water inside a market is pretty funny.
Fake stuff is everywhere... in the markets its incredibly cheap, and in the upmarket mall it costs more, but what your getting might actually be the real thing. Oh and you might seriously consider buying the "No, I don't want a f*cking suit, massage, or tuk-tuk" shirt after a while... my advice, just smile and have a laugh with the mobs of vendors trying to sell you whatever it is you really don't need. I think they do it for a laugh themselves most of the time, just to see how hard some of the tourists bite. Haha, its funny to watch.
Oh, and Thai airways... got to say, the food was pretty decent, in fact pretty damn tasty, but the planes are old and crappy. You don't get a personal entertainment unit thing, you just have to watch the one tv screen at the front of the cabin. And on the way back the air conditioning was set to like 30 degrees Celsius, it was really hot and stuffy, I don't ever get air sick, luckily, but this was starting to make me feel a bit dodgy, glad it was only 90 minutes from Phuket to Bangkok. Very unpleasant, in fact one of the worst plane trips I can remember... oh and then, on the flight from Bangkok to Narita (Tokyo) no movie! lucky I had a book with me. I don't think we will be flying with them again if we can possibly avoid it.
There is a few more pics on flickr.
Ok, I've been lazy. No posts in a while. Why? (excuses time...) Its been busy at work, those databases in my last post have been a pain. Apart from that? Ive been in Thailand as well for a holiday ;)
First off, we went and visited the National Science Museum. Really cool, heaps of interesting stuff, and really cheap (not like museums in .au), is good to see this stuff being made available to all for next to nothing. They've got all sorts of stuff, from dinosaurs, through to some of the earliest computers, and even a section on space flight. Oh and they have a real missile launcher in their back yard! And the roof terrace with umbrellas that sense you coming and automagically open is worth seeing.
We had a visitor come to stay with us, so we got to do the tourist thing (hah, as if we still aren't tourists ourselves!). So we took her all around the place, including Tokyo Tower. I hadn't been there before either, so it was pretty interesting.... in these databases are some tables, database A contains table A..a and database B contains table B..b, the schemas for A..a and B..b are identical. The data stored in them is sequential, that is, table A..a contains the first half of the data and table B..b contains the second half of the data. Sound familiar? Probably does, this is a fairly common archive arrangement, you put all that data from each month / year / decade / whatever into a new db to keep the size manageable... yeah yeah, not ideal, but hey, these things are everywhere.
So now I want to run queries across the full depth of A..a and B..b in one go - don't ask why, I just want to ok? (hint: no clean logical way to decided which db will contain the data you want) Create a view you say, a union all kind of arrangement? Take advantage of the fact that both tables are nicely indexed? Nice idea, but no. Might work on small tables with a few gb in each one... but what if they have a few hundred gb? You better have a monstrous tempdb even to do something simple like:
set rowcount 100;
select * from AB_view;
So, what do you do? Surely there has to be some better way than freeing up a mega amount of space and bcp'ing the data out of one table, putting it into the other one, then re-indexing, that will take a considerable amount of time. I want to be able to just grab hold of the table objects in the db and tell them to join together "vertically". I'm sure there's many reasons why doing that isn't practical, but I don't care... at all.
Databases suck sometimes... And don't even bother asking me about DBArtisan... Surely there must be a good DB query tool out there somewhere that is light weight and, well, works? Someone could make a crap load of money if they built one...
A few weeks ago my funky 256mb graphics card stopped working. Not pleased. Luckily I still had an old 128mb one lying around, so a quick swap and computer was back to life... several weeks pass by... and few days ago my trusty 17 inch LCD monitor stopped working too. Bugger, I don't have a spare monitor lying around. Luckily the computer in the lounge room is hooked up the the huge wide screen TV... hmm wide screen...
So, feeling in need of new toys anyway (especially after phone call to a certain sneakygeek, yes, you know you are to blame), its off to Akihabara. And a short time later after browsing though a couple of department store sized computer shops I now have a nice new 22 inch wide screen monitor. Oh and a funky new 512mb graphics card to add to the fun.
Oblivion looks good at 1680x1050. Next up? I think its time to replace the ten year old IBM, home brew improved, LED encrusted keyboard...
I saw Asimo today!
It (he? she?) lives in Miraikan which is the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo (Odaiba to be exact). He came out for a ten minute demonstration. I don't know why, but I expected him to be bigger, and to be sort of "clompy" when he walks. But he's actually silent when he's walking. After walking around a little bit and doing some funky arm waving and such, he decided to go for a little jog... well more like a full on sprint. Now that was amazing. While he's running both his feet actually leave the ground at the same time, just like a real person. Considering he's now 7 years old, its pretty damn impressive.
The rest of Miraikan is also really cool. It is just like the Power House Museum in Sydney, not as big but it is much more interactive, and a whole heap cheaper (only $5 for an adult). Apart from robots they also have a lot of other interesting science stuff ranging from info about KEK and other particle accelerators, through to biology, chemistry, deep sea exploration and general technology. And the huge globe made out of LCD panels with a rotating image of the earth is awesome. All in all a very cool place. We will be going back.
It should be a word if it isn't, because that's what it is outside.
That big swirly thing, i.e. Typhoon Fitow is going over the top of us right now.
Getting home was interesting... a rather exciting taxi ride. People walking down the street we fairing much worse though, some were getting dragged away by their umbrellas, and some people are almost wrapped up in their umbrellas as the wind folds them around them.
Schools and such all closed at midday today, and are closed again tomorrow... unfortunately I don't get a day off work, I have heard that we would have a great view of the "flying futons" from our house. Oh well, maybe it will still be windy on Saturday.
Oh and we cant open the doors to our balcony, the wind is pushing them so hard. Lucky the glass is like an inch thick.
We just spent the weekend in Nikko, a really popular mountain area famous for National Parks and temples. We stayed in a nice little Ryokan that had private indoor and outdoor bath, and our room was looking out over a little creek with some waterfalls, just the ticket for a nice relaxing weekend out of Tokyo.
We spent Saturday out and about up in the mountains enjoying the nice cool weather - it was rainy and really foggy so the views weren't as spectacular as if it was clear, but the cool temperature (only 17 degrees!) was damn good after how hot it has been in Tokyo lately (over 30 degrees every day!).
One of the waterfalls Ryuzu-no-taki had a little tea house right in front, being overcast it was great for getting longer exposure photos like this one.
We also went to Kegon falls, this place is cool, there is an elevator which takes you 100m down the cliff so you can see the waterfall from the bottom. Cool.
Heaps of other cool stuff over the weekend as well, including Edo Wonderland, which is like an Edo themed cross between an amusement park and a museum.
All up, a really cool place, will definitely have to go back there some time.
Hanabi is very popular summer activity in Japan and tonight was Tokyo Bay Hanabi. What a show! And really really loud. In fact so loud you could feel the explosions shaking the glass of our apartment. I've put quite a few photos on flickr, in this photo stream. But had to post two favourites here... I love the shapes in this first one, with the cool little white stars above the red circle one.
And another one.
That is a big firework to blow up at ground level, pretty glad I wasn't on the barge they were setting them off from when that happened!
We went on another day tour, this time to Yokohama. On the way we stopped off at the man made island / parking lot / attraction, called Umi-hotaru, that forms the intersection of the tunnel and bridge sections of the Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line.
This thing is an engineering marvel. 10km long tunnel, and 4.5km long bridge (I guess they couldn't decide which to build, so they did both).
If you've got google earth check it out ( 35°27'45.93"N, 139°52'36.55"E).
We can actually see it from our house, on a clear day, and there is a ventilation shaft / tower half way along the tunnel section. This vent thing is actually another man made island that is very strange looking, from our balcony it looks like a huge disk shaped thing out in the middle of the bay. You can see it in a photo here.
We also went to a place called SeaParadise just south of Yokohama. The pic in the previous post was taken there in an area called Dolphin Fantasy. Really cool place, we only had a couple of hours there so we will have to go back again to see it all. And I wouldn't mind seeing the Aqua Stadium show again, dolphins and seals doing cool stuff.
Ive also just posted a couple of new photos on flickr. This one of the moon over Daiba, and this one of the Hanabi (fireworks) in Asakusa on the weekend.
Seeing Japanese people posing for photos always makes me laugh.
For example:
Why the "V"? Didn't it go out of fashion long long ago (in a galaxy far far away...)?
Ive seen plenty of weird network problems. But this one is just to stupid:
Sometimes my network connection stops working, it shows up as "media disconnected" in windows. Try all sorts of things, eventually give up and reboot, problem still there. Eventually grab another blue cable out of the pile and plug one end into the computer and the other into the wall, and "voila!" everything is working.
So now I just think, OK, dodgy cable, no problem, move along. But wait...
a week or so later, same problem again! Now this time I went and got a brand new, still in the wrapper cable from the cupboard (you know, one that came with some piece of previously purchased hardware), plug it in, and away we go again. Nice, two dodgy cables, bit of bad luck there.
So fast forward another week, and after pulling nonfunctional computer apart (yes, my graphics card toasted itself, lucky there was an old one in aforementioned cupboard), network problem again! WTF!
This time I don't bother getting another cable, just grab one of the previous two, both still hiding conveniently under the desk, and plug it it... it works.
Why do my network cables just stop and start working like this? It does not make much sense...
I need a new "WTF" tag.
So after our funky day tour, today was some lazy Sunday afternoon shopping. A quick monorail ride from home and over the bridge to Daiba and into Venus Fort (there's an English link near the top).
Ive been wanting to try the camera on my phone for a while now, its not too bad, but the quality isn't brilliant... good enough for blogging though ;) And Ive got to say, damn its hard to hold steady.
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So after a really nice lunch at the place below, which had some really cool ambiance, we spent the afternoon wandering around in the mall, pictures above. All I can say is, wow, what a cool place. Oh and hey, its full of shops, and its all on sale at the moment. Nice. |  |
So we went on a day tour. Its hot and its summer, so lets go somewhere with a pool. In fact lets go to a place that specialises in water. So we went to Spa Resort Hawaiians.
A day trip, a day trip bus tour, everyone else does them, so why not us? So off we went, on the bus at 8:30 am, a quick pit stop at a huge roadside "facility" (way more fancy than the ones in Australia!) and then at about 11am arrive for our 5 hours of fun in the pools. Check out the link above, it's a pretty cool place. It feels a little run down, and it was pretty crowded, but damn it was still cool.
This poster is in the front window of the entrance hall thing. I'm still not sure what "Doctor Fish" are, or what they do for you, and for 1500 yen I wasn't really that interested in finding out... especially when there were water slides, dozens of pools, hot tubs, onsens etc etc to play in.
This is something I've been keeping an eye on for quite a long time now... one of the coolest imaging projects going at the moment (in my opinion anyway, but hey, your reading my blog).
So if you feel the need to heat up your graphics card a bit, then...
Main page is:
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/
Something worth looking at while your there:
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/bbc/
I cant wait until we can start creating our own scenes.
Q: How do you know you need to upgrade your camera?
A: When a full resolution pic still isn't wide enough to go across the desktop without "stretching".
Damn 3840 x 1024 desktop resolution, I knew there had to be a drawback to having three monitors on my desk.
heh.
So we got the double whammy for the long weekend just gone. Saturday and Sunday was typhoon warning, it cleaned up Okinawa, but was a non event here in Tokyo, well we got some rain but that was about it. Then at just after 10am on Monday we had an earthquake. It was only about 3 on the Richter scale here in Tokyo, but it was over 6 in Niigata.
It seems that the nuclear power plant over there didn't fare quite as well as one would hope...
Even though it was only small here in Tokyo our building got up quite a rock and roll, up here on the 36th floor we were swaying around for a good minute!
Coming from Sydney, and having been a cityrail commuter in the past (and as a result ended up being the first owner of such distinguished domains as www.f*ckcityrail.com etc) I was really worried about having to commute to work on a train. Even more worried when I found out I have to catch two trains to get to work. Even more worried having heard stories of how crowded the trains are in Tokyo...
What a pleasant surprise! Ok the trains are crowded sometimes, but they come every few minutes! Ive never had to wait more than about 3 minutes for a train. I don't even have to worry about timetables and such, because they just run like clockwork every couple of minutes. Pretty stoked at how quick it is to get to work, I spend more time walking to the station than I do on the trains - first train for one stop, then change platforms, second train for 2 stops, then into the lift (without leaving underground) up one flight of steps, then I'm at my desk. All done in about 30 minutes, 10 to 15 of which is spent strolling through the crowd to get to the station!
Also, Tamachi station, I have to walk through it in the morning to get to my station (Mita). Wow, to say it is incredibly crowded in the mornings is the biggest understatement ever. It is a non stop stream of people packed in shoulder to should all going different directions! And I have to get from one side to the other... so glad I don't have to go into that station, my station is nowhere near that crowded. Will try to post a pic of it soon...
I'm confused. I keep hearing that it is rainy season at the moment. People are complaining that its hot and humid and rains all the time...
The only thing is that to me it doesn't really seem that bad, I don't really think its rained all that much (it rains for a day every few days, but not really pouring rain, just damp). Ok it is pretty hot and humid outside sometimes, but I've pretty much managed to avoid that. The only time I really have to be outside at all is the ten minutes walk to the station in the morning, then ten minute walk home at night (the building I work in has a train station inside it, so only need to go outside at the "home" end of the trip).
I suspect its going to get wetter and hotter yet, will have to wait and see...
So we've found our house, as mentioned before, but I thought I should explain how we found it. It was a very different experience to looking for somewhere to rent in Sydney.
We had two agents that worked with us (they both spoke really good English aswell), we told them how many bedrooms etc and price range then they send through a heap of floor plans. You pick some and say "hey, I'd like to see these ones", then they come and pick you up and drive you around all afternoon and show you the apartments! Not like Sydney where you have to do it all yourself, here you have the same person who comes to you each time and takes you out to see everything. It makes house hunting very easy! and there is so much to choose from aswell!
Ok, so I may have a slightly easier experience than some (being an expat on relocation arrangement), but still, damn, what amazing service. But when you do decide on a place you do have to pay "agent fee" (like a months rent) but still, pretty damn good value if you ask me.
It actually made finding a place to live fun.
So like i said in an earlier post, we've finally moved into our new place.
This is our funky new lounge room... Complete with strange swirly rug and funky couches. Oh and living in Japan would be complete without a nice TV!
The view out the window's not bad huh?
And it gets even better at night!
So after a week of being offline, I have now got an internet connection again. w00t!
Being that I work in IT, and rely on my internet connection a lot, ive always had good fast connections. Before I left .au I was using iinet's supposed 22mb connection, shame it only had connection speeds of about 1.5mb, but hey, I thought it was still pretty snappy... until now that is!
Now I'm in Tokyo ive got a 100mb (up and down!) connection! with no download limits, how nice.
So, sitting here at my desk, with a sensational view out over the bay (more on this later...), with a blindingly fast internet connection, life is pretty sweet!
heh.
This is one of the pics from our holiday to Japan earlier this year. Just what everybody needs... a golden house, as in real gold!
I wonder how often you would have to polish something like this?
The place is called Kinkakuji, its in Kyoto. There's heaps of other cool stuff to see there aswell, but to me this was definately a highlight.
The rest of the photo's from the holiday will be in this set.
Well as promised when i left .au i've now opened up a public blog, and a photostream on flickr. So with a bit of luck, you should be able to keep up with where we are and what we're doing.
Stay tuned for photos and ramblings from Japan.
