On my desk...

On my desk...
Originally uploaded by k.blueice

I noticed how reflective the iPhone really is the other day when I put it down on my desk... so I thought I'd take a photo of it. I really don't like taking still life photos that much, so I don't really do it that often. Usually I don't really like how they turn out, but am reasonably happy with this one. It also reminded quite a lot of one of my friend's photos which I really liked.

So how is the iPhone? I've had it for quite a while... its damn good. In fact, to not clutter the internet with more of the same, Thomo has already summed it up pretty damn well.

What else is going on? Not much, hanging out at home for a while (I'm on holiday!), playing with Mia, catching up on some sleep, trying to avoid reading Bloomberg, and going snowboarding this week, so it better start snowing tomorrow, because it's a bit lacking at the moment. The forcast is for a white Christmas which will be fun :)

Busy...

Has been rather busy of late... why?

1 - Mia !

http://yogobear.blogspot.com/2008/09/this-is-mia.html

http://yogobear.blogspot.com/2008/09/mia-day-5.html

http://yogobear.blogspot.com/2008/10/some-more-photos-of-mia.html

So cool ;)

2 - Work

There was this little bit of a problem... Caused all sorts of fun and games. Maybe "meltdown" would be a better description? Oh well, bad for some (Lehman's... ouch), but not too bad for us. Have heard rumors that lots of those $20k per month apartments in Roppongi Hills are sitting vacant now that all the Lehman's crowd can't afford them, and apparently can be rented really cheap... may have to investigate that.

Besides those two? That's enough to keep you busy, but...

Have managed to take a couple of photos. I had to go into work late one night and decided to walk. It only takes about 35 minutes, and have been wanting to take some night photos for a while. I've uploaded a few of them to flickr, start here and work backwards... all taken hand held.

And I am still uploading photos reasonably regularly from my phone to here.

What else is going on? It's getting colder... there is snow starting to fall in the mountains! Mt. Fuji has some already - can see it from work on a clear day. We're already planning and booking snowboarding trips. Looks like this year will be Christmas in the snow! Cool.

Oh! you can buy fireworks in Japan...

At Toys'R'us. And they are cheap. This monster bag is only $50. If only I had somewhere to let them off...

I think I might have to "find" somewhere to let them off...

Tokyo Bay Hanabi 2008

Last Sunday night was Tokyo Bay Hanabi. We had some friends over, we managed to get a dozen people into our apartment. Amazingly it wasn't to crowded. And we had pies.

Anyway this year I thought I would try something different for taking photos of the fireworks. Last year I was shooting with a wide angle lens and got some great pics of the whole scene. So this year I thought I would try shooting for some close up shots with my old 210mm zoom lens, things turned out pretty well...

I was pretty amazed at how well the old 210mm zoom worked out, it is around 15 years old after all. It doesn't have auto focus, but the *istDs could actually "talk" to it so I could control the aperture using the body, this amount of backwards compatibility really did amaze me.

Above is just a mosaic, but you can see the all the individual photos on flickr.

Welcome to the Dark Side...

I brought an iPhone. Damned Apple.

Anyway, I opened another flickr account to upload phone pics. I must admit it's very convenient to upload photos from the iPhone.

And in general it is a very damned cool toy, its just a shame you have to use iTunes, if only it had a decent piece of software on the computer side it would be so much better.

Now, time to post something else so this isn't the top post on my blog...

Stormy Weather...

On the NEX on Saturday afternoon, coming back from Narita we went through a really crazy little storm somewhere near Chiba. It was bright and sunny one moment... Then crazy amounts of thunder, you could hear it in the train, and lightning and rain... Then back to sunny again... All in the space of about twenty minutes.

 

Before...

During...

After...

 

Was quite an interesting train ride really, and I'm well impressed by how well these pictures came out, especially considering they are taken out the window of a moving train, using my mobile phone.

As a side note, it never ceases to amaze me how green and pretty Japan can be, this is just a random rice field out the window of the train, about 10 minutes from Narita airport.

Afternoon Tea With a View

This one is also from a couple of weeks ago. We went to Tokyo Dome, and ended up having afternoon tea in a bar / cafe thing on the top floor of the hotel there. Was a pretty impressive view, and some pretty tasty food.

Tokyo Dome is the big building on the left, the amusement park is part of the greater Tokyo Dome attractions, this shot is looking vaguely north towards the outlying parts of Tokyo, not that you can tell, a Tokyo seems to go on forever!

Somethings from Kawaguchiko

We went to Kawaguchiko a couple of weeks ago while a friend was visiting, was pretty cloudy the whole time, so only saw a few glimpses of Mt Fuji, but was still a good weekend away. And we saw a really stretched vehicle... and a lady on a fish... click to see full size.

A Mango, A Bridge and a Crane.

Like the title says...

A mango, an expensive mango. A $157 mango.

And on a completely different subject, a damn big crane. Have been wondering all week about what the thing was parked over the other side of the bay, it looked like a large piece of roadway on a barge. Turns out that's exactly what it is. It is part of a new bridge, and this huge crane is going to lift it into place. To give some scale, the little boat in the foreground is actually a ferry, not a small ferry either, if you look closely you can see quite a lot of people standing on it's roof.

Some random photos from the weekend...

Lately, at the end of a nice clear spring day, the view from our apartment has been pretty nice. The sun gets reflected back off the buildings on the other side of the bay. Finally managed to grab a photo, it isn't the best, had to push the ISO to 3200, so its pretty grainy...

This is 4 shots glued together, the end result isn't to bad.

And on a completely different subject...

For the last few weeks there has been fire boats in the bay doing strange, choreographed, well, something. Including using the funky water cannons. Interesting.

Anyway's, on Saturday it became obvious why. They were rehearsing for some demonstration of fire boat goodness.

Including shooting fluorescent colored water from their water cannons. Didn't quite grab the camera quickly enough, but managed to catch the tail end of the spray.

Mmm, technicolor... 

How do you take your coffee?

With "Creap"... obviously.

Yep, "creamy powder" goodness. And it's even on sale...

Send me enough money, and I'll be happy to send you some "Creap" to call your very own. A great way to win friends and influence people I'm sure, especially when combined with some cheap ass, freeze dried, instant, decaf.

Heh.

Golden Week

Golden week just finished (sort of, this post is a little late). This year two of the public holidays fell on a weekend, but we still had a four day weekend to enjoy. And enjoy we did, we went to Niigata, which is shortly to host the G8 Summit, preparations were well underway while we were there. Will post some more later.

You know things are not going well...

... when you have to fire up a packet sniffer.

Yep, long, tedious day.

But Ethereal, or WireShark as it is now known, has come quite a way since I last had to use it. At least that made the day somewhat less unpleasant.

Sunday afternoon at Zojoji temple

We went for a stroll around Zojoji temple this afternoon. It is only one train station away - but you could walk there if you wanted. Was a bit of a random encounter, because we were on our way back from a Hanami festival, and had to change trains at Daimon to get home. It was lunch time, so we decided that we may as well go get some food and explore around Daimon a little bit... we ended up following the crowd to Zojoji.

Anyway, lots of people, lots of Sakura, and lots of Jizo... very colorful and bright, but quite sad when you find out what they represent.

And on a completely different note, well somewhat related as it is also has cherry blossoms, we saw this last weekend. There really is a lot of rivers / canals / water in Tokyo... almost everywhere you go your only a short walk away from a river or canal. Pretty cool, especially at this time of year, because quite a lot look like this.

Its Cherry Blossom Time!

Air Tower Sakura - HDR
Originally uploaded by k.blueice

The cherry blossoms are out... they are everywhere, and very cool. More pictures on my flickr photo stream, go have a look.

Thought I would have another play with qtpfsgui, yeah, gotta love software with abstract names... sort of fitting probably though in this case. Anyway, this pic is HDR, and I like it. Would probably have helped if I:

1) Used a tripod

2) Didn't take photos while its windy... the branches moved a lot.

It makes it really hard to get good alignment when you stack the images. Oh well. Still turned out ok.

Nozawa Onsen

A couple of us from work went for a last minute weekend trip to Nozawa Onsen. A lot of people had recommended this resort, so definitely keen to try it out. After deciding on Friday afternoon that I would go, was a bit hectic getting home to pick up boards then get back to work to get picked up for the four hour drive up to Nagano. We stayed in a really budget lodge run by an Aussie (vegemite toast for breakfast!), so the accommodation wasn't flash, but it was cheap and close to the slopes.

 

Now this was a fun resort. We spent most of the weekend dropping off the right hand side of the mountain down through a selection of incredibly steep gullies and ridges. At the start of the weekend it was almost untracked, but by the end... well we chopped up a fairly vast amount of terrain. In the end we had to give up on it because the temperature warmed up and it was getting just a bit to sketchy... 50+ degree lines that were coming with you rather a lot... and there was some fairly large cookies rolling down as well. We certainly wiped all the gullies clear of tracks by the amount of snow that was slipping down them. Heh steep... Fun.

So after spending a day and a half in the resort and not going on one single "marked" trail, we decided to try out a run called skyline to finish off the afternoon. Wow, this is probably the best groomed run I have ever ridden. It is a relatively narrow trail that goes straight down a ridge line with steep drops off both sides. Really impressive views all the way, and not crowded at all, so you can really speed down all 3km+ of it. Impressive.

After staying till closing time (several laps of Skyline!) on the Sunday we had a quick onsen then headed back to Tokyo. Even caught a glimpse of Shiga in the distance on the way home. Definitely going to go there next season, and definitely going back to Nozawa Onsen as well.

We got a taste of the famous weekend freeway traffic on the way home, but a quick stop for some ramen and we missed the worst of it and ended up back in Tokyo by about 10pm.

Twitter...

Twitter... have been thinking about having a play with it for a while, so finally signed up and added an RSS feed from my account to the sidebar on this blog. See what happens.

Snow and Shopping?

Yes, in Japan you can combine snowboarding and shopping together into one weekend. In fact you can do the both of them together in the same resort. Karuizawa.

We stayed in a cabin at the Prince Hotel. Very cool, a cabin in the snow, complete with big icicles hanging off the roof.

From the front door it was about two minutes walk to get to the ski lifts in one direction, and about two minutes walk in the other direction to get to the huge outdoor outlet mall thing. The slopes definitely aren't the best in Japan, but they are certainly good enough for a weekend of fun, and the views from the top of the mountain are pretty nice. And there is some pretty cool rocky mountains off behind the resort.

The actual ski slopes are pretty small, and so they get pretty crowded, probably the most crowded slopes I've seen here in Japan. And the whole resort is very beginner friendly, so a lot of time is spent dodging out of control beginners. And no powder, but still it was fun to just cruise around, and when you've had enough, you can go to the mall!

All in all a fun weekend.

Snowboarding in Naeba

On the work ski trip...

A friend and I snuck under the ropes and got some sneaky turns in under Gondola 1 at Naeba. Really easy access, no hiking! And the traverse out along a creek wasn't to bad... and unlike Australia, the creek was actually covered, so you could ride over it without to much concern. In fact we took a run down one of the gullies and it was much fun, well fun for me, apparently not so much fun for the person following me because I wiped all the snow off of a waterfall as I was going over it, so getting down after me was a bit of an issue. Heh.

Anyway, haven't ridden in the trees for quite a while, so was nice to get back into it again, and the snow was sensational, almost waist deep in some places and really fluffy. Yay, Pow!

 

Really was amazing to get such great snow (with steep bits!), with pretty much no other tracks apart from our own, and did I mention no hiking? Just get off the Gondola, duck the rope, enjoy the pow, short traverse along a creek, and duck another rope back onto a groomed run. Easy. Fun.

Got to say though, it's quite a bit steeper than it looks in these clips, and was pretty hard work, especially as I was riding a 146 with the stance set tip and tail with the back foot at -15. But for such a short board, it really handled it nicely. Just need to square up the angle on the back foot before next time, then it will be even better.

Still snowing...

 

Its still snowing.

This is the front of our apartment building, the grass is all completely covered and there is snow piling up against the little walls. There is a couple of inches of slush on the roads as well. The news is saying that some trains and highways are closed, and even the Shinkansen's are running late (that never happens!).

Might be interesting walking to work tomorrow morning if it freezes tonight...

It's snowing in Tokyo!

It's been snowing here in Tokyo all day. Very cool! Have to go out later, could be interesting...

Has been a while since I posted, but have some more to post later today...

Snowboarding in Iwa-ppara

So, like I said in the previous post, after getting back from our Christmas long weekend in Naeba, we booked ourselves in for the new year's long weekend in Iwa-ppara. I've got to say, this place is convenient. Under two hours from walking out our front door in Tokyo, to being on the mountain. This resort isn't as high up as Naeba, so the snow wasn't as good, but it snowed all weekend, so everything was just fine. This place is perfect for beginners, it has amazingly wide open runs that are nice and long, from where this picture was taken (again with the poor quality phone photos!) it is over a kilometer straight line to the bottom. Nice. The place we stayed in wasn't anywhere near as fancy as the Naeba Prince Hotel, but it was good enough, and it had a nice outdoor onsen bath. And its right in the middle of the ski run, so you can ski right to the front door. You did have to take your boots off to go to your room though, but still, can't complain.

Also took my camera with me, so here is some more photos:

It snowed while we were there, about 50cm over the three days...

And then just on dusk on the Sunday night, there was a brief break in the clouds...

Finally got to use my new ND filter that I got before we went to Thailand, pretty happy with the results actually! The lift in this picture is a gondola, but unfortunately its closed this season. I think that the resort will be much better next year when they have it open again, without it, half the bottom section of the resort is unusable. Still plenty of room to ride elsewhere, but it would be much nicer if this section was available. Anyway, was still a good weekend, despite that and the weather, we will be going back!

It's snowing... time to go snowboarding!

Should have posted this a week ago... didn't get around to it.

Our hotel room. Night skiing.

It's winter. It's Christmas, so there's plenty of long weekends and days off work. So we've been snowboarding. First up, Naeba. Home to the "Dragondola". Living in Tokyo has its advantages, it's under two hours to get from home to Echigo Yuzawa, which is surrounded by numerous ski fields, then about 30 minutes by road to get to Naeba from there. I've got to say, Naeba has ruined my whole snowboarding experience. How? Ha, look here or in the pic of night skiing on the left. See that twenty something storey high tower? Well we stayed in that. Oh, and is that a gondola and a quad lift right outside the door? Yes, yes it is. I like being able to put my boots on in my room, and at lunch time, not have to fight for a table, just get takeaway and eat in your room. Nice. From now on, all snowboarding accommodation must be located less than 20 steps from room to lift. The quality of the pic's isn't too good, but its not too bad for a mobile phone. One is obviously our room, nice and big, great view of the mountain, and even better view of the fireworks each night... did I forget to mention there is fireworks? Well there is, and they were pretty damn good. The other pic is taken from the top of the quad lift which leaves fight from the door of the hotel. "Nighta" (Night skiing) until 10pm every night. Oh, it snowed too, mmm powder, deep windblown pockets in the out of the way sections of the black runs. Very nice.

On the way back to Echigo Yuzawa from Naeba, I spotted another resort right near the train station, looked like it had really nice long, wide, open beginner slopes, just what Yoko needs to practice linking turns. So two hours later, back at home, a quick Google finds that the resort we were looking at is called Iwa-ppara. Another few minutes and we've found a hotel right in the middle of one of the runs. A quick phone call, and we're sorted for the long weekend leading into new years.

Rainbow Bridge - with rainbow colors

Rainbow Bridge - with rainbow colors
Originally uploaded by k.blueice

Rainbow Bridge has a new colour scheme... its now all "rainbowy". I've got to say, the view from our apartment was pretty colourful already, but now its getting rather psychadelic!