Taking some test photos… found an outbreak of Godzilla Plague

On Friday afternoon went out and took some test photos with a colleague who has the same camera, he’s been having some trouble with sharpness so we thought we would do some comparison shots. Anyway, one of the things we took some test photos of was this telegraph pole. It’s pretty amazing how many cables there are, and this is pretty normal for streets in Japan.

Here’s another one, just a bit further down the same road. This is looking towards Roppongi Mid Town from just near Izumi Garden Tower. I actually ended up quite liking this photo, the afternoon sun on the cables and the huge red billboard in that background with Godzilla advertising Kirin Fire – canned coffee.

 

I didn’t really think any more about the billboard, advertising is everywhere here, but then today, we were at Roppongi Hills with some visiting relatives and we went up to the City View on the 52nd floor. It was a really foggy day so not to good for taking photos of the view, I was just going to throw this photo away, but something red caught my eye…

 

It’s a plauge of the huge red and black Godzilla billboards.

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.

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.

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.

Japanese people in photos

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...)?

Pretty (annoying) blue cables

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.