Junsei is a traditional resturant chain in Kyoto, with three locations. The main one (near Nanzen-ji) is built around a traditional garden that is listed as a historical site. Translation: show up well before your reservation so you have time to look around. You’ll have a decent view from your private dining room, but it’s worth a closer look.

Gosh, I wonder if the power outage at my co-lo had anything to do with the guy who was wiring up a dozen new PDUs…

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.