trains in Tokyo are clean and friendly

The characters of Tokyo and Taipei can be summarized by the musical qualities of their respective subway systems.

In Tokyo, each station has its own happy or calming melody. For example, at Ginza on the Yamanote Line, the little dance that comes out over the speakers makes you involuntarily bop up and down and back and forth — that is, if you are my strange sister, Wendy. A gentle minor third reminds you politely that the doors are closing.

In contrast, Taipei’s MRT is an angry cidada. It chirps sharply and repeatedly, reminding you that you are probably going to miss the train. An aggressive major sixth announces the impending doom of door closure from inside the train.

Maybe I’m projecting.

My father, Wendy and I went to Taipei’s Museum of Contemporary Art today to see the Naked Life exhibit, which was really good. (read more »)

The streets of Kamakura, Japan

I’ve posted some photos from a Kamakura adventure on Dec 13, 2006 with Ken Haig, Robin Orlansky, Wendy Cheng, and Hitomi Nakao. With his superhuman sense of direction, Ken guided us along the coast, streets, and temples of Kamakura, and as always, Hitomi helped us stuff ourselves with food.

I almost never have days of random wandering anymore, and I miss them a lot. I’m going to go out of my way to have more experiences like this in the future. Wendy posted some photos, too.

I haven’t seen any episodes of Survivor since the first season, but I hear that Yul Kwon won Survivor this year. He’s my ex-girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend and also the freshman roommate of Dan Peters, a good friend of mine. Pretty damn cool. We’ve never met in person, but we seem to have many friends in common.

Most of my friends are afraid to order Patagonian toothfish (commercially known as Chilean sea bass) when I’m sitting at the table, and ordering shark fin soup could lead to some serious drama.

A few days ago, the SF Chronicle reported that Whole Foods has started selling Chilean sea bass again because they have found a sustainable fishery around South Georgia Island. So go ahead and order Chilean sea bass, but be sure to ask where it comes from and whether it is MSC-certified, first. :)

i love food in japan With Hitomi as our guide, Wendy and I have been eating very well. After a couple hours of walking around in Kamakura yesterday, we ate lunch at a place called Unaji, which had the most wonderful dessert (a soy creme brulee of sorts). Two nights ago we had a big udon feast, and last night, Hitomi and her father treated us to sushi and sashimi at a small place they’ve been going to their entire lives. The chef even made Wendy a special vegetarian meal. :) I’m not usually a fatty fish person, but the toro last night was really good.

The problem with eating in Japan is that sometimes you can’t find anyone to translate the name of the fish you’re eating. :) (read more »)

For the past few days, I have been impressed with how courteous and quiet everyone is here in Tokyo. That peace has just been shattered by an American member of the Five Arrows basketball team here in the lobby of my hotel in Tokyo. I assume he’s part of the team because he’s really tall and is wearing the jacket. The guy is blabbing away on Skype very loudly (complete with cursing), and the hotel staff are all too polite to tell him to shut up. The difference between him and everyone around us couldn’t be more striking.

I’ve finally put up an easy way to order prints of the screaming turtle image.

The “screaming” or “laughing” turtle image is a close-up shot of a juvenile loggerhead turtle (Caretta caretta) and has graced the covers of magazines both in the USA and in Europe. A large print has been hanging in the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum for over a year now (as of December, 2006)… [see ordering information]

For the holiday season, my buddy Andy Biggs is selling a fantastic Namibia portfolio (25 of his best prints) for USD $495. The per-print value on this is really good, and it would make a perfect gift for an Africa enthusiast.

Andy also leads workshops and African photo safaris.

Baby Jack Nuttall, 10 days old Vienna and I went over to Geoff and Livia’s place tonight to see their new baby, Jack, and to take some photos of him. He is so cute.

If you’re friends with them, you should ask them to add you as a Flickr “friend” so that you can see more pictures of the little guy!

Women have become abstract yet again.

My friend Adam Nash told me today that I’m a “high-maintenance” computer user. I replied that I just want my computers to work. Here’s an example:

I have a Mac Pro outfitted with an ATI Radeon X1900 XT. When I run certain apps, I get moving pixel artifacts on the screen which can only be described as “sparklies”. Individual pixels light up and dance around, always in the same windows and in the same places. Frustrated, I called Apple support, escalated to a Product Specialist, and got a replacement card shipped out. (I also have the NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT; when I plug in the same monitor with the same cable to that card, no such artifacts appear. This led me to believe that it was a video card issue, since that was the only thing that changed.) Unfortunately, I installed the replacement card today, and the artifacts are still there.

Even more bizarre, when I took a screenshot of Aperture (one of the problem apps) and then opened the screenshot image in Photoshop, the artifacts appeared — in the same place! That’s right: artifacts appear both in Aperture and in screenshots of Aperture. (read more »)

A giant manta rays (Manta birostris) and videographer at Roca Partida I’m back from an 8-day trip with Norb to the Revillagigedos Islands (usually called the “Socorro Islands” by dive trip organizers) aboard the M/V Solmar V, and it was one of the best trips I’ve ever taken. El Boiler at San Benedicto may be the only place left in the world where you chuck a bunch of divers into the water to attract giant manta rays, which come to the rocks to play in our bubbles and to be cleaned by Clarion angelfish. Actually, I only ever saw the Clarions cleaning the remoras attached to the mantas (they’re disgusting and are covered with parasites), but people say that they clean the mantas themselves as well.

I’ve posted a few images (unprocessed thumbnails pulled from RAW files) for now, but will surely have a trip journal up within a few months. I’m sort of backlogged. :)