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We’re back in Kyoto for about a week. We arrived yesterday evening (local time) and got up early today for a whirlwind trip to Tokyo to see our friend Rafael. I’m about to crash from jet-lag so I’ll just cut it short here and preset this photo of Fuji-san, shot from the window of the shinkansen on the way to Tokyo.

(Getting a photo like this is mostly a matter of luck, because the view is frequently obscured by buildings, power lines, etc. All you can do is use an auto-winder mode and hope that at least one exposure works.)

Here’s a photo of my most-recently completed modular origami project:

It’s from Tomoko Fuse’s Unit Polyhedron Origami. It’s 120 units folded from rectangles. I don’t really time how long it takes to make things like this, but figure about three minutes for each unit and about two to three hours for the assembly. Assembling it was somewhat tricky because the units were a little springy and wanted to be inside-out until I joined enough of them to form more than half of the spheroid. No, I didn’t do this all in one sitting.

Because the web can never have too many photos of cats, I’ve just uploaded a bunch of photos of our numerous cats to my Flickr site here. They’re not in any particular order and there isn’t any particular theme or whatever–just snapshots of the clouder taken over the last few months.

The first signs of autumn may have arrived. We just had two straight days of overcast, rainy weather (which is unusual for here), and it’s still cool-ish today. I noticed on the first day that some of the trees nearby are starting to change color. Personally I’m ready for a change in season. It’s been a hot summer and I have no objection to cooler weather.

In other news… Um… Well, there isn’t much other news, I guess. I’ve been toiling away on Audio Damage’s latest creation. It’s not a terribly complex plug-in but we decided to switch to Steinberg’s VST3 format as the basis of our products. We think that this is the most future-proof approach to building plug-ins currently, since Steinberg provides code to turn VST3s into Audio Units and VST2s, and also covers the 64-bit versions. We hope that Steinberg’s backing of this system will help isolate us from whatever surprises Apple throws at us next. We’re also building our own platform-independent preset system, something which Chris has been trying to talk me into for years. So, we’re doing new and interesting things, but this means learning a new plug-in framework, which–as is par for the plug-in development course–is not particularly well documented. It is kind of fun to be doing something different, however.

The other news that might be worth relating is that we’re going to Kyoto in two weeks, to take the half of the vacation we forfeited this spring in the wake of the tsunami/earthquake/nuclear disaster/rampant uncertainty/etc. It’ll be nice to get away for a bit, and it will be interesting to see Japan at a different time of year.

Finally, I’ve been putting together a set of photos of the resident felines (all six of them). I’ll try to get that put up on Flickr this weekend.

There’s a nice article here at our travel agency’s website about ramen in Japan, including a mention of the ramen museum which we’ve visited. It makes me want some ramen right now–not the usual instant Top Ramen, but the hot, thick, flavorful stuff found in Japan.

…it’s apparently because of network issues on the East Coast. If you have geek curiosity, the incident report for my web host is here: http://status.mediatemple.net/incidents/2258-east-coast-latency/

UPDATE: apparently it’s the server itself and not the network. “We’re working on it,” they say.

I’ve been remiss in posting photos of flowers this year; actually I’ve been somewhat remiss in even taking photos of flowers this year. Our burgundy day lillies came into their own this season but it seems that they went entirely unphotographed. Oh well; they’ll be back next year. The star this year may be the hibiscus, which apparently benefitted from–or was at least undaunted by–its first pruning, which I did last fall. The younger pale-purple clematis also put on quite a show.

In any case, I just put a batch of flower photos on Flickr here, arranged in chronological order.

Here’s a blog of photos of a young Japanese woman levitating: http://yowayowacamera.com/

I ran across this by accident on YouTube this morning. I first saw it several years ago but it’s still mind-blowing:

UPDATE: Sold!

Anybody need a 303 clone? As described here, here, and here, I built a x0xb0x about a year ago. It turns out that it hasn’t been getting much use so I think it’s time for it to go to a more appreciative home. It was built from a x0xsh0p.de kit with no modifications except that I used green LEDs for some indicators, and substituted longer standoffs so that the LEDs protrude from the panel. (IMHO it looks stupid to mount the LEDs so that they don’t come through the panel, which is how most kits seem to be built.) It’s in basically unused condition and works fine.
Asking price is $400; that includes an AC adapter and UPS Ground shipping within the lower 48 states. If you want a faster shipping method, or if you live in one of the two far-flung states, you cover the difference.

I vastly prefer PayPal. Sorry, no non-USA orders; shipping stuff out of this country has become too much of a hassle to be worth it.

Email me if you’re interested. Thanks for looking.