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 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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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... 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.
