With a name like 二の丸, it deserves two pictures. Sadly, neither of them really show off the actual palace. I’m still sorting through the shots to find one I like. Meanwhile:

[Note: the carving is completely different when viewed from the other side, but photography was forbidden inside, so I can’t show you.]

Scott informed me that I’d managed to get this song stuck in his head, and it seemed unfair to make him the only one. This is the entire Hello!Project army, circa New Years 2007. The big girls come on stage about 2 minutes in.

This is one of the doors leading into Meiji Jingu.

When praying at a shrine, you throw a coin into the offering box and clap, to get the attention of the kami. On New Years Day, half of Tokyo comes to Meiji Shrine to pray, and the crowd is so thick that most people can’t reach the offering boxes. So they throw their coins towards the shrine.

Some throw with more enthusiasm than skill, so the surfaces facing the courtyard are pockmarked as high as you can see.

This is the entrance to the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka.

The false entrance, that is. The real one's over here:

Sadly, not only can’t you buy a ticket from Totoro, you can’t get one at the real entrance, either. Domestically, they’re only available at Lawsons convenience stores, and they sell out weeks or even months in advance. There’s a block reserved for foreign tourists, fortunately, but you have to order them through specific travel agencies.

I didn’t geotag my vacation photos before importing them into Aperture, and it turns out that it treats those fields as read-only, so that the only way to add that data after the fact is by hacking the underlying SQLite database. What I’ll do is export a bunch of small thumbnail images, tag them with HoudahGeo, and then knock together a small script to insert the tags into Aperture’s database.

Meanwhile, here’s a sample (8MB KMZ file) containing most of the images I’ve posted so far, along with some new ones, exported for Google Earth. You can load KMZ files into Google Maps, but the built-in image links don’t work.

After the MacBook Air, what next?

MacBook Water: splashproof to survive your eXtreme lifestyle, or at least a spilled latté when you show it off at Starbucks.

MacBook Earth: the natural organic sustainable recycled biodegradable cruelty-free dolphin-safe fair-trade computer. 10% of all proceeds are divided equally between Greenpeace, PETA, and BDS.

MacBook Fire: oh, wait, they already make those.

Pretty much every review I’ve seen by someone who has read all of the specs can be summed up as: “this would be a fantastic machine for someone else”. The deal-breaker for me (and I was already lukewarm on the concept) was the lack of ethernet, which means that the spiffy-keen “use the DVD drive on any networked Mac or PC when you need one” feature is crippled by the performance of your wireless network or Apple’s optional USB 10/100 dongle. Suddenly it doesn’t seem so spiffy. Also, if you spring for the outboard optical drive, it ties up your only USB port, and they don’t mention it including a hub.

I can’t see very many people adopting it as a primary machine, which means syncing configurations and data to another Mac. .Mac sync sucked horribly for the entire lifetime of Tiger, and I still see occasional outages for .Mac mail. They claim to have put a lot of work into it for Leopard, but if the Air is really a secondary machine, then they need to add direct sync between Macs as a solid OS feature.

I think the real accomplishment of the Air will turn out to be improving the quality of lightweight PC laptops and tablets running Windows Vista. I expect to see the first round of them in about three months.

…of Minimoni. Sort of. If they start turning into mini-skirted mini-hamsters, though, they’re going too far. Meanwhile, here’s Athena & Robikerottsu:

Their new video replaces the first one as the opening theme of the kid’s anime series Robby & Kerobby. Fear for the future.