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A fellow named Brian Chan has a nice gallery of his original origami works here. It’s quite impressive stuff, and way, way over my head in both design and execution.

We’ve posted a bunch of photos from our trip in this site’s photo gallery; click here to reach them. I took over 2000 photos during the excursion. Tracie waded through them and discarded the duplicates, blurred shots, mistakes, etc. We uploaded the rest to the gallery, organized by city or pairs of cities (e.g. the [...]

There’s a website called Sonic State which covers music-tech news, product releases, stuff like that. They have discussion forums also. I’ve never paid much attention to it but sometimes I watch their videos from trade shows. They tend to do strange things like run press releases for completely insignificant events, particularly things having to do [...]

I ran across the Kami-Robo site while googling for paper models. Some fellow makes paper robots and then stages make-believe pro-wrestling-style fights with them. He videotapes the bouts and writes elaborate commentary and back-stories. Quoting from the English version of the site: “At some point in childhood, all of us must have been swept [...]

Kamiya Satoshi is one of the top origami artists in the world. Until recently I’d seen only one or two photos of his work; he’s known for folding a nearly unbelievable dragon. It turns out that he has a webpage here and here’s a rather amazing video of him folding a phoenix:

A few miscellaneous observations and recollections:
Cleanliness
Urban Japan is startlingly clean. The airports and train stations, including the tracks themselves, are basically spotless. The cities themselves are also devoid of litter, cigarette butts, fast-food wrappers, etc. I saw exactly one example of graffiti. One could speculate that they pay particular attention to keeping the tourist-heavy areas [...]

As you may have already surmised, the vacation is over and demands of our usual lives and my two businesses have taken my attention away from this blog. There are many more things I could write about and many more photos I could post here (I took over 2000 of them, although I did at [...]

I haven’t yet posted photos from our day of touring Tokyo (or rather a tiny fraction of Tokyo) because of lack of time and energy. It was actually one of the most photo-heavy days in Japan; I took over 270 pictures that day. Here are a few of them. You may want to refer back [...]

I meant to include the following photo in my previous post, as an amusing example of the old and the new one sees in Japan:

Many of you may be faintly puzzled by this post. I admit that I’m faintly puzzled by my own fascination with beverage vending machines in Japan. I don’t think twice about vending machines in the USA, and I don’t drink many soft drinks. However, I was quite taken with the vending machines in Japan. Dan [...]