Invasion of the Mushrooms

I must admit to not usually feeling that a vegetable (or fungi) is worth a comment on, but I was fairly impressed, bordering of blown away, when I saw that in the two flower pots near the front door had over ten huge mushrooms in them yesterday night, where only three days earlier there had been none.

I’ve removed them for fear they may be undesirable, and assume they got in there via spores from somewhere, perhaps in the soil. I have weighed LH’s opinion that they may have grown from the marrow of some massive insect which has been buried in the bowl, but the whole concept frightens me too much. I must have cut an odd figure, stood outside my house doing some gardening, in the dark, with a headlamp on, and effectively harvesting mushrooms.

Anyway, there we have it, I’ve managed to achieve a blog post about mushrooms, and not a single hallucinogen oriented comment.

Word of The Day: Eschatology

Eschatology |ˌeskəˈtäləjē|
noun
The part of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind.

ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from Greek eskhatos ‘last’ + -logy .

I got that from the Apple Dictionary (New Oxford American English). There’s other results from reference.com and so on.

I saw the word whilst reading Microserfs today and admit it’s one theological word I hadn’t heard before. Surely there’s a business plan positively dying for this word?

Posted from Windows Live Writer

After playing with Windows Live in Vista for a long while, and after four months of decent Windows 7 pre-releases, I’ve nuked my laptop and stuck Windows 7 RC in there as the main OS, and put the latest Windows Live Writer in, and now I’m just testing out how it works.

The setup was very simple – I just told it the URL and my login credentials and it figured the rest out – no corrections required. As I’ve known for a while, the Windows Live Writer GUI is very nice, and almost un-Microsoft-like in some ways, but I suppose with Windows 7 (and to be fair, Vista) MS is turning down a different road. Let’s see if it posts OK, or whether it just gunks up my databse the way Word used to destroy HTML.

I’m also playing around with Office live and a few other things. It nice to see MS come back with nice products, even if they don’t get the Google mind share in certain quarters, purely because I’m a big fan of competition in the market.

Anyway, more news most likely on brightblack if I get chance.

Bike Trip: Hakone and Ito

Yesterday, DG and myself got on the bikes for the first day trip of the year, clocking up 290Km (180miles) door to door, which was a fair distance given we barely hit an expressway - just small local roads.

We went from Fujisawa in Kanagawa-ken, down the coast road for a while, then up into the mountains of Hakone on some of the great special roads. Often when I’m up there I go to the Gyoza Centre near Gora for lunch, and then we headed down the spine of the Izu peninsula, before the long haul back up the 135 coastal road. We actually headed to a bar a friend of mine owns for a soft drink, but unfortunately he seemed to have shut it for the night.

I was pretty pleased with the day’s ride - I think my riding’s getting better especially on the corners and inclines which is good, staying on top of the throttle a bit more, and keeping the bike lower when i need to in corners.

As always, there were great moments and views you wish you had a helmet-cam for, but there were others - a parade of about 20 very expensive sports cars (Ferrari, Porsche, Lamborghini) and customs, a lot of very nice ‘bikes - which we did get some photos of. It was kind of ironic, as we sat in the tea lounge of the Toyo Tires Turnpike Cafe, we saw a woman posing (for want of a better phrase) who might have been a model of some kind being steadfastly ignored by all the men around as they gawped over the expensive car show. There’s no accounting for taste I suppose. Finally she gave up and got back in the Ferrari she arrived in.

Other interesting notes were route 102 which where we joined it had a very impressive incline for a few kilometres, and about half way up, a set of traffic lights, which mercifully stayed green, and a fully automated self service petrol station, which had us a bit confused for a couple of minutes.

I had to avoid a bat of all things on one road at about 70km/h, and avoid a moron stepping in the road just a kilometer from home, justifying again that the most dangerous part of a bike trip is in the last few miles. Fortunately, neither flying mammal nor walking mammal were hit (although why the guy was walking around in the road I have no idea).

As soon as I have the route plotted, I’ll put it up on brightblack, as much for my own benefit, but I hope someone finds a new, great road for them.

All Meshed Up

After an impressive two years of not getting round to it, I finally got myself a mesh riding jacket for the motorbike.

I’ve been happy to run around in my leather jacket, but Japan, to be fair, does get a bit hot in the summer down on plains, regularly hitting 35-40 degrees C plus pretty nasty humidity and on a few days, I’ve got back just plain hot.

Therefore it makes sense to get a mesh jacket to make the rides - or more specifically the stops - just that little bit cooler. I went looking around for one which was not only a good fit, but had some decent hard padding. After trawling the web for information, I finally decided to hit the local NAPS shop, which is deliciously close to the new house.

In the end, after trying on quite a few jackets, I went for the RS Taichi Exceed mesh which not only fitted well and had good hard protection, it also has the same system for the front chest protector, which I already have from my Honda leather, meaning I can keep using that.

Summer on the Road

Well, it looks like I’ll be on the road a bit this summer, though the following are all still in development:

Late May: just a small one day motorbike trip up and around Hakone and Izu to run some kilometres up on the bike.

June: it looks like we’ll finally do our 5 day road trip around Hokkaido. So far the only 2 things we’ve really decided on is some hot air ballooning and a visit to the Ainu village. We’ve talked about doing this for a few years, but now it really looks like it’s on.

Late July: I’ll be going up to Motegi to watch and help out my friend Bobby whose team will be racing their Mini Cooper, so I’m taking my tent up on the motorbike and camping a little. More news on this as it helps.

Finished: Phoenix Wright - Ace Attorney

Finally, after an embarrassingly long time, I have finished the first of the Phoenix Wright games on the DS. The shame is really because I borrowed the cart from my friend about two and a half years ago, and finished the first stories within a week or two. After that I played half of the last level and for some reason just put it down.

I spent the next two years saying I would finish it, but not doing it. Anyway, now I have a longer commute I stepped up again and whisked through the remainding content quite quickly.

I think the whole game and the style is very good, and makes a pleasant change. There are a few rather pedantic sessions where you can’t figure out exactly what item you should present when, but generally the logic flows, once you tune into the game’s logic, which isn’t difficult, unless like me you put the game down for months at a time, you can whip through the trials without too many issues.

Anyway, I think the bottom line is that it’s a good game, and generally worth picking up if you see it, but be warned that the last trial is drawn out beyond belief.

Gun Rats

I was just walking between the Shin Maru and Maru building and saw they have a new set of art installations. An interesting piece to me was this one - it really is quite detailed. I didn’t have time to peruse it too Lin or check out the other exhibits; I might do tomorrow. Interesting really.

Whole Site Software Updates

If you don’t have any real content, do some site news, that’s what I always say. What with moving house and all, I’d fallen a bit behind with updates and such, so I though I better get on it smartish.

Firstly, I bumped Drupal from 6.9 to 6.11 - not good, I don’t like skipping core updates on that if only because they tend to be security based. Anyway, fixed.

Next up was the old warhorse WordPress, and a minor bump from 2.7 to 2.7.1, but done anyway - again, it never hurts to apply these and take a few minutes to make sure the site is secure.

I was about to update the forums from BBPress 0.9.0.2 to 0.9.0.4, but honestly, apart from the interesting side of setting it up and playing with it, I haven’t really pushed the usage much, so I’ve just gone ahead and deleted the whole thing. If something isn’t being used, it’s best just to prune it to save admin and maintenance time.

So, all up to date again. Honestly, I do have some content coming for Brightblack, or whatever I end up renaming it. It’s coming. To paraphrase British Rail, I’m getting there.

Night Tokyo

This is chronologically out of sequence with the last couple of posts because I forgot about it! I took this on my iPhone on our last night in the old apartment from the viewing floor (43f). I wish I’d took a real camera, but you get the idea.

What to do with my websites?

Sigh. With the sheer fun of family and life in general, my posts to this blog and the brightblack.net have dropped over the last 18 months, so as I ease into a new phase as a house owner (pending the loan obviously) I’m looking at less web writing time generally, so I’m thinking of what to do with my we presences.

Recently I’ve had about enough time and opportunity to update Twitter (@nanikore) and Facebook, though the latter I barely used anyway.

I’m also thinking about whether I really need the Flickr! Pro account or whether I can go back to the free version.

What I’m currently considering is stopping this as a blog, folding the old content away as nanikore.net/blog and renaming the brightblack.net as nanikore.net main page and post whatever content I have as that.

Or just stop it all. In the small writing time I have, I’d like to either start my creative writing attempt, or write something longer which is informative - historically these longer things would be on brightblack and so I suppose the blog for me has been squeezed out between a ‘website’ like brightblack and a system like Twitter.

Obviously I should just have 1 URL, but I think I’ve become attached to both ‘nanikore’ and ‘brightblack’ but the time has come to just use ‘nanikore’ and rename/repoint brightblack.

Anyway, this is my goal for May - will keep the page updated.

View from the end of the Street

We recently moved out from Tokyo to the Fujisawa area. I snapped this photo on my phone from the end of the street on the way home from the supermarket. Sometimes I forget how nice old man Fuji can look.

Comic Touch for iPhone

This app - adding mindless commentary to photos on my iPhone is actually something I could actually get into.

It’s by the same people who did Comic Life on Mac and PC which I remember I got bundled with my MacBook a few years back. Nice app.

Misty and Rainy in Tokyo

With all the lights and such in Tokyo whenever the amount of water in the air builds it almost becomes a light. A poor photo, but a nice effect.