When I made my trip to Japan last year, I took a friend. He took a lot of pictures, too, but hasn’t gotten around to posting any of them. We backed everything up onto my laptop, though, and I have his permission to pick through them and post them here.

Obviously we were pretty much always at the same place at the same time, and we even used the exact same model of camera a lot of the time, but we were frequently looking at different things, and sometimes at the same thing in different ways. Today, I went through his pictures and tried to select a representative sample of what he saw in Japan.

I’m posting them in batches, generally without commentary, and for more fun, I’ve randomly shuffled them. Actually, I hadn’t planned on that part, but Aperture does a terrible job of renaming on import, and not only scrambled the file names, but also created a number of duplicates. Since they were already out of order, and I didn’t feel like starting over, I embraced this flaw and randomized the order completely. There are a few cases where pictures really do belong together, but that’s a job for another day.

So, over the next week or two, expect 16 batches of 12 pictures, with one above the fold and the rest below, to keep the page load times reasonable. They’ll all be filed under category DNA.

From Instapundit at the Republican convention:

His bus was attacked by protesters who dropped sandbags from an overpass, but he was unscathed.

[Update: Really winning the hearts and minds out there, gang. And I do mean “gang”:

Protesters smashed windows, punctured car tires and threw bottles Monday during an anti-war march to the site of the Republican National Convention.

I hope you brought plenty of bail money. Excuse me, I hope your parents brought plenty of bail money. Or not, preferably. Rot in jail for a while.]

The advantage of learning to read a language is that you find out when they’ve been cheating on the translations.

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Asami Konno is all grown up, but still baby-faced. Enough so that despite knowing her age, I always feel like a dirty old man when I see her in a bikini. I still look, because I am a dirty old man, but that pouty little-girl face really brings out those “she’s half your age!” feelings.

Ogling Konno is less disturbing than, say Risako Sugaya, whose grown-up face and figure can lead to thoughts of consensual felonies, but there’s a good chance both are heavily enhanced by her stylists.

With Konno, though, I look at that body, and I really, really want to believe that it’s all OEM.

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Thank you for feeding Yossie. In the latest Ongaku Gatas video, she no longer looks a little too much like the other person in this picture:

[and if anyone is wondering about the group name, Ongaku Gatas (“musical pussycats”) is the singing spin-off of the H!P futsal team, Gatas Brilhantes (“shining pussycats”)]

“We are not responsible for any mutations that cause your virus-infected laptop to wipe out human civilization after your return to Earth. Unless you land in Berkeley, in which case we’re totally claiming the credit.”

from the BBC: "Nasa has confirmed that laptops carried to the ISS in July were infected with a virus known as Gammima.AG.

"The worm was first detected on Earth in August 2007 and lurks on infected machines waiting to steal login names for popular online games."

I am only interested in women’s dresses as gift wrap. I don’t want to buy any, thanks.

…four points define a wobble. Some months back, I left myself a note to buy the Manfrotto Modo Pocket camera stand when it finally reached the US. I had taken their tabletop tripod with me to Japan, but hadn’t used it much because of the overhead: pull it out of the bag, find a dinner-plate-sized surface to set it up on, take the shot.

I didn’t bother buying any of the other “quickie” mini-tripods that are out there, because most of them struck me as gimmicks first, stabilizers second. The Modo Pocket, though, looked eminently practical:

Small enough to be left on the camera while it’s in your pocket, with a passthrough socket to mount on a larger tripod or monopod. Usable open or closed. Solidly constructed, like most Manfrotto products. A design that derives its cool looks directly from its functionality. It’s even a nice little fidget toy.

What it isn’t is a tripod. If you put a three-legged camera stand down on a surface, it might end up at an odd angle, or even fall over if there’s too much height variation between the legs, but it’s not going to wobble. A four-legged stand is going to wobble on any surface that’s not perfectly flat, and is also going to be subject to variations in manufacture.

The legs on my shiny new Modo Pocket are about two sheets of paper off from being perfectly aligned, which means that it can wobble a bit during long exposures. Adjusting it to perfection is trivial, but even once it’s perfectly aligned on perfectly flat surfaces, it won’t be that way out in the real world.

It can’t be, because it has four fixed-length legs. This is a limitation, not a flaw. Just like it’s not designed to work with an SLR and a superzoom (it would fall over in a heartbeat), it’s not designed to replace a tripod. It’s designed to help the camera in your pocket grab a sharp picture quickly, before you lose the chance. I expect to get some very nice, sharp pictures with this gadget, and I don’t regret the $30 in the least.