Succumbing to a mixture of curiosity, peer pressure, and pragmatism, I have created a Twitter account. Twitter in its original conception of “answering the question, ‘what are you doing right now?'”(or however they put it) never interested me much. If I need to know what someone is doing, I’ll ask, and I assume the same is true of other people. (Yes, I’m squarely in the I half of the Myers-Briggs personality map.) However, Twitter seems to have evolved into a sort of successor to email as a means of rapid communication, as well as a means of disseminating news (some of it useful, even). I’ll also admit that following the feeds of famous musicians amuses me a little. I’ve been following a few feeds manually and finally decided to set up my own account if, for nothing else, the convenience of having those feeds aggregated.
Announcing Panstation
Don’t ask me why it’s taken me several days to mention that we’ve released Audio Damage’s latest product. It’s called Panstation; it’s destined to be the last word in auto-panner plug-ins. It does a fine job on tremolo effects also. We modeled the entire panning portion of the Drawmer M500 dynamics processor, gave it some extra modulation waveforms and a couple other nifty tricks, added the trigger-counting feature of the Audio & Design PanScan, and put in the stuff to make it at home in a contemporary DAW such as MIDI control and tempo sync.
Random Useless Bits
[insert usual apology for lack of posting activity]
It’s National Doughut Day!
How to shoot a site’s credibility with just one entry.EDIT: see the comments.
Chris’s wife is a tad jealous of his new acquisition, and so am I.
“What’s it like now?”
After our trip, when I’ve mentioned to people that I’ve been in Japan recently, they often express surprise and curiosity. Since Americans tend to think of Japan as a very small country (which is true, speaking in relative terms of geography) and since the media was flooded with images of the destruction caused by the earthquake and tsunami, perhaps it is easy to assume that the entire country is dealing with the catastrophe. This is untrue in some ways–in the ways that people are probably thinking–but true in other ways.
Photos of Gardens at Heian Jingu Shrine Posted
Yes, I’m still working my way through the photos I took in Kyoto. Real Life has been getting in the way of such things, but I just posted over 50 of the best photos I took during our stroll through the gardens at Heian Jingu Shrine. The shrine has a good deal of historical, cultural and spiritual significance, and it also happens to have spectacular gardens. We had visited them several years ago and were completely dazzled by the cascades of cherry blossoms. We returned this year and were not disappointed. Click here to see the set of photos on flickr.
Dinner with the Makinos
It’s a bit startling to notice that we’ve been back from Japan for over a week now. I’ve been busy with getting back into the swing of the businesses, catching up with yard work, herding the cats, etc. (Speaking of the cats: if you’re in Boulder and need a cat or dog sitter, ask me for the name of ours. She does an excellent job; our cats adore her.) I’ve been meaning to jot down a few retrospective notes about our trip.
On this trip to Japan we were honored to be invited to the home of our friends, Sid and Takako Makino. They live in Nishinomiya which is not far from Kobe (and, if you happen to be a baseball fan, the home city of the Hanshin Tigers). We took a shinkansen from Kyoto to Kobe; Sid met us there and we took a local train to Nishinomiya. Takako met us near the train station with their car and gave us a brief tour around the town, stopping at a couple of highlights, before driving to their house. Their home is mostly furnished in Western style although the sofa, nearby chairs and coffee table were lower than you’d likely find in a house in the US.
Second Set of Photos from Japan: Sanjusangendo
I’ve posted ten photos taken outside of Sanjusangendo here . You might want to read my previous post about this place if you don’t know of it already.
First Set of Photos from Japan Posted
I posted a dozen or so photos from our first full day in Kyoto on my flickr page here. These were taken during a walk from the Yasaka Shrine up to the large statue of Kannon and across to Kiyomizudera. It’s a long walk and it involves hills, steep stairs, and throngs of tourists and school children, but it’s a beautiful area. Since we’ve been through it before I was trying to take pictures of things I hadn’t photographed previously, and/or things of interest other than the main attractions.
Heading Home
We’re packing up and checking out of the hotel shortly, beginning the long haul back to home. I haven’t been blogging much not because we haven’t been having a good time; on the contrary, I suppose I haven’t been blogging much because we have been having a good time. Yesterday we took a local train to the Arashiyama area in Kyoto, a part of town we haven’t visited previously. We went to a large temple there (whose name currently escapes me–I’ll post it later) whose gardens currently have a dazzling array of blooming azaleas. Tracie was photographed by no less than six Japanese tourists while perched on the veranda of the temple overlooking the koi pond. They asked for permission first, of course.
East Versus West
Everything you need to know about Japanese and Western toilets, explained in one handy sign found in a restroom in Heian-Jingu shrine:
Oddly enough, this particular restroom didn’t even have a Western-style toilet. I guess it was a general-purpose public-service sort of sign.
Heian-Jingu was one of the places we visited on our first trip to Japan but haven’t been back until yesterday. The sakura were spectacular. I think we caught them just past their peak because the pink color was somewhat less saturated than when we saw them in 2007, but that’s just an observation, not a quibble. I took a bunch of photos but may not get around to posting many until after the trip.