Since about a year ago, it's been
forbidden to smoke in
the street in Akihabara (we have to protect the poor little lungs of the
geeks, so the species can survive ;-)).
However, I haven't been there for so long that I didn't actually notice this law in practise, until last Sunday when I noticed that interesting room.
I didn't really know what it was first: not a store, not a restaurant, however, the awful smell, the yellow walls and the fog inside the room quickly gave it away: just a smoking room. Actually, about the only place where you can smoke in Akihabara without being in a restaurant.
I wish this disgusting place could help those smokers to realize how awful smoke can be, but I have little hope about it...
Anyway, as far as I understand, even if you get a fine for smoking in Akihabara, I think I remember you don't actually have to pay it...
Japan is indeed an interesting place...
I went to Harajuku and to Meiji Jingu
on Sunday with Ratana to show him around some most interesting places, like
those gothic
girls who gather on Sunday afternoon in front of Yoyogi Koen, the rockers
dancing all day long and more seriously, Meiji Jingu shrine.
Although it was not "taian" (大安,
the best days to get married in Japan - note that since my own wedding, I
became especially aware of that kind of things, as well as so many other
wedding-related things that have absolutely no interest in an everyday's
conversation!), there were about three weddings going on at the same
time.
I didn't have all my lenses with me, just the old good 50mm but I tried a few shots, practising for Fred's wedding next month.
I will have the honour to be one of the photographers and
I wish to give Fred and Mari a nice gift under the form of a nice series of
wedding pictures.
For that, I've been studying the pictures of our own wedding and I will try a
few artistic shots.
In the meantime, this 5-minutes session was a good indicator for me and shows me how fast and mobile you have to be during the wedding. We'll see how well I will have learnt by June 26th!
It all started when someone posted a picture of a cat contemplating a flower in a forum. Then someone else posted another picture of his own cat looking at the first cat.
Say no more, it was enough to start a chain reaction of cats looking at the previous cats looking at the previous cats!
The whole series can be found on a website called Private Hand, featuring a bit less than 100 cats as of today.
Will Pitou ever make it on that page?
Pictures of our wedding keep coming, we've
just received the ones from the studio photographer, that one who made us pose
forever, correcting each and every single detail ("tilt your head to the
left, no, it's too much, back, yeah, oh you moved your left hand, etc.")
before taking the picture!
However, I must admit that the pictures actually matched our expectations, although you can tell on some of them how tense we were, keeping that pose forever ;-).
It's finally thanks to Fred's recently acquired scanner that I was able to upload the pictures on my website (don't even dare asking me how much the photographer would charge for new prints!).
One regret though: since the paper used for the photographs was not
completely flat, the scanning process shows the reflection of the scanner's
light, revealing the granularity of the papera and making it look like the
picture is covered with dust.
I applied a quick photoshop filter to remove most of it, at the cost of some
added blur, but the results are still not perfect.
Maybe I'll just get my own scanner and spend more time on that. It'd be really nice to send prints to our relatives and friends.
Finally! Following recommendations of
the W3C, I found an interesting website explaining
a fix for the problem of transparent PNG showing a grey background in IE or
Frontpage on Windows (IE on Mac supports PNG transparency!).
There are several options, this one uses conditional comments in IE to run a javascript, which will enable the alpha channel in IE
The solution is quite light and will allow me not to have different PNG files for IE and for other compliant browsers.
When Microsoft finally decides to patch their browser, hopefully they will also think about supporting CSS properly!
The picture above was found on the libPNG website and was created by Stefan Schneider.
Ever since I switched to Apple instead of my crappy PC
running Windows, I've never regretted my decision, except when I was feeling
like using a few applications that were only available on PC.
For most of them, I was able to find workarounds, replacements (sometimes better than what I was using on Windows), but one that was awfully missing to my library was VNC, which allows you to remotely control a machine's mouse and keyboard.
Looking at the VNC's website, where no binary file was available for Mac, I started to compile the source code for Mac, when I realized some X11 libraries were missing in my environment.
Laziness finally got me and I never actually tried to go any further since then.
That is until I found out about VNCThing, which is a native VNC viewer for Mac OS X, which seems to work quite well and is rather fast, compared to my Windows' version of the VNC viewer (or maybe my opinion on Windows related applications is biased...).
Unfortunately, the official site Webthings.net does not make the application available for download anymore (the domainname is actually for sale), but there are several other mirror sites on the Internet, which still provide the application for download.
The safest way to keep yourself updated and to be sure you get the latest
versions is to follow sites like MacUpdate or VersionTracker.
Both sites provide email notification for software updates, but MacUpdate
requires a one-year membership for $20
Of course, VNCThing is under the GNU General Public License, meaning that is free to download, to use and to distribute.
That being said, I can put the binary files of the version 2.2 on my website too :)
We are just back from a 8-day trip to Bora Bora, where Eiko and I
spent our honey moon.
The colours of the lagoon were just amazing, the water was so clear, no wonder that Bora Bora is one of the most popular destinations for young couples.
We stayed at two different
hotels: the InterContinental
Hotel Beachcomber, an amazing hotel for the clarity of the water, and the
Hotel Bora Bora, a
luxurious hotel, where you can see some manta rays, if you are lucky at
night.
Both hotels offer a wide range of services and activities, but my preference goes to the Hotel Bora Bora, for the atmosphere and the wonderful restaurant!
Either case, Eiko and I had a wonderful time, snorkelling, relaxing, swimming with sharks or rays, or experiencing a jeep safari in the mountains of Bora Bora.
That was really an unforgettable time... and that's all we wanted for our honeymoon!
