I haven’t shot much last year, especially not much I am actually proud. But last week I was in Yokohama, Sakuragicho and went to the Oosanbashi Pier. That place is a feast for anyone interested into Architecture.
Below are two of my most favorite shots, thought they do not show much of the architecture, they just show my style.
Shot with Canon 5D MkII and Canon EF 35/f1.4L
Vague Distance
Deep Colors
UPDATE, 2011/3/28: added two new links.
With all the troubles nothing is more fun than to follow all the various web sources for radiation measurement. It is like a new hobby, instead of reading hyped web pages, I check those pages in the morning.
A list of them below
http://park30.wakwak.com/~weather/geiger_index.html
This is a private one, part of a small weather station in the center of Tokyo. The values are a good comparison material to the official pages. I used this as source for the images in my previous post.
This are graphs from all over Japan from the official government sources and converted into nice graphs. The page can be translated to english. Gets updates everyday.
http://www.bousai.ne.jp/vis/jichitai/kanagawa/index.html
This page is also an official one from the Disaster Prevention and Nuclear Safety Network for Nuclear Environment. The link above is for the Tokyo/Kanagawa area. This page also has an english version. The source for the Kanagawa area comes from here.
http://housyasen.uh-oh.jp/kanagawa/
I actually don’t know what the sources are, but this might also be similar to the atmc.jp page. Link above again goes to the Tokyo/Kanagawa area. This page is only in japanese.
This one is an english page created for the Fukushima Power plant problem. Also has the radiation values from all over the country.
This is a collection of all the Official and Private Geiger counters all over Japan.
If I find more, I will update this page.
UPDATE, 2011/3/28
This one shows the radioactive amount in small flash animations that visually show how much radiation is there at the moment.
This page is a collection of various data sources and shows not only the radiation level for the important and affected prefectures, but also for the power plants itself, the water radiation levels and the current amount of earthquakes.
UPDATE 1: I added two a link to the official tepco radiation reading from Fukushima and a graph based on this reading.
UPDATE 2: IAEA moved the disaster from a Level 4 to a Level 5
UPDATE 3: They have been moved up to Level 6
UPDATE 4, 2011/3/16: I cannot confirm if the Level 6 is from IAEA or just from the France Atomic Group. The IAEA web page is a horrible mess. I also added the radiation readings until noon today (2011/3/16) and besides a small spike up to about 0.50µSv it is now back at around 0.20µSv.
Blood sells.
Horrible stories sell.
Catastrophes sell.
The bigger the better.
Horrible in all its gore, as long as it is on the other side of the world.
Until the big earthquake here in Japan on the 11th March, I very much though that some of the newspapers in my country would have a high standard of reporting. Not like really good newspapers, like Die Zeit, but not as bad as the german Bild, or similar tabloids.
Well, I was wrong, I was so wrong. All of them reported like the world has ended. And not about the Tsunami, not about the cities that were literally removed from their place. Not about the hundred thousands of people now homeless, and who lost all and everything. No, there was one topic. And one topic only.
Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant.
Yes, if you read the foreign media, then you would think there was no earthquake, there was just an enormous horrible accident at this power plant. One that surpasses Chernobyl, that would have already put more radioactive matter into the air than anything before and Tokyo is already doomed.
I am sorry to say, it is not so.
Yes, some of the titles are correct, but not correct in how they say it.
Yes, because of the huge earthquake, and following Tsunami the Fukushima Nr.1 Power Plant was hit hard. It’s four old reactors have huge troubles. But in no way it was like Chernobyl.
Why? Simple, because the whole thing is very different.
So where are we know? Is the situation hopeless? No, two of the reactors (1 & 3) are cooled with sea water, 2 is now the main problem. The fuel rods still seemed to be exposed, but they try to put back water inside. 4 has burned, but on the outside and the fire was put out.
Radioactive matter was released, but it was minimal. The radioactive matter that hit Tokyo today, was way below any dangerous levels, and still lower than the radiation you receive when you take a transatlantic flight. The normal background radiation is about 0.27µSv (Micro Sievert) and tope level today was 0.89 µSv. Levels at the plants door were much heigher, in Millisievert. 100 Millisievert (1000 times more that 1 Microsievert) can be dangerous to humans, if you are exposed for a long time to it.
Tokyo, Hino, at 101m readings of today (2011/3/15).
UPDATE: Readings from today
Tokyo, Hino, at 101m readings of today (2011/3/16).
UPDATE: Data from the Fukushima plant itself.
Readings at the main gate from the Fukushima powerplant as off 2011/3/15:
Radiations big problem is always the time and the amount. Long time small amount is as deadly as short time high amount.
When I look at the last days, I doubt this will happen in Tokyo, and in the coming days, I do not think that this will change or happen. With every day passing it gets less and less likely that more radiation will be exposed. Simply because the reaction has already stopped, it is only the heat left that needs to be cooled down. If water can be re-circulated back into the reactor the whole thing can be brought under control.
My basic message is, do not believe too much what the foreign media says about it. It seems their understanding of this topic is minimal and they are not willing to understand it more.
Additional information can be found here.
In the recent months I use Chrome a lot. It is my primary browser at home and I also use it quite a lot at work. But at work I also use Firefox 4 Beta (currently 11) for my non-work browsing. Just to check it.
The most annoying thing of Chrome, next that you cannot make it open links in new windows, is the missing title bar. I can understand the idea, space. As modern displays get wider and wider and have less and less height (rant: 16:9 displays are IDIOTIC for computers) you need to save some space.
But as I have a lot of tabs open, you often do not know which one is which. When you can see just one or half of a word, it is often difficult to know where you are. Especially when you read posts from one and the same page, eg Slashdot. With Firefox I can see the full title and therefore know where I am, with chrome, I have no idea.
This is how firefox looks:
And this is how Chrome looks:
The Chrome top needs just a view pixels more, and is way less usefull. One more thing, if you disable the bookmarks bar in Firefox, you can still quickly access all the bookmarks through an icon in the URL bar, not so in Chrome. Actually, if you disable the Bookmark bar in Chrome, you can only access the bookmarks via the Menu item.
Of course Firefox itself is not the pinnacle of usefulness, just the removal of the status bar is a quadruple face-palm. But thanks to the 4-ever-bar, you can have that back. It is just very confusing when you are used to look at the bottom of the window for the URL info, and there is nothing there anymore. This breaks usability in more ways than you can image. No other browser shows this information the URL bar. Not only makes it no sense there, most of the important information has to be cut of, because half of it is used by the current URL anyway. They should have done it like Chrome and have the mouse over URL info at the bottom. Still Chrome doesn’t do it perfect too, because it also cuts off most of the URL …
Browsers, they all sucks. Suck memory. Meh …
雪降った！昨日夜すごい降った、帰るとはすごく大変。道は滑りやすかった。。。とめっちゃ寒かった。
Yeah, I did nothing in 2010, really nothing. And so nothing will happen in 2011, really nothing. Well, one year less to wait for death. The only final solution to this whole shit.
I am using this little square box now for some time and I like it, even thought there is no album shuffle.
For example, the iPod Nano tells you when the battery is low. Some really nice feature. Thought it doesn’t help you when you forget to charge it in the evening.
But what sometimes makes me crazy is the fickleness of the interface. I just make a slight swipe and it is a swipe. Or sometimes he sees the touch, but doesn’t really interact with it. At the end it is not really a big problem, because I really do not use the interface that often.
Exploring the lists of your music is actually really cool, you can quickly jump to a letter and quickly scrolling through a long list is really awesome quick. Nothing of the endless clickwheel scrolling on my old one.
Last but not least, the external volume buttons are more useful than I ever thought. I use them all the time. Never thought I would.
All in all I am still very happy with it, and still recommend it.
Most the of the time I don’t care if stuff disappears in Tokyo. This is Japan. Today the building is there and tomorrow there is a new building.
But this time I was really shocked. Look at this google link, and now imagine it with all trees gone. Yes, all of the big trees have been cut down. And not only that, parts of those awesome old statues have been moved to make space for graves. I can understand that, there is no money to maintain them and Japan is 99% old people, and they are willing to pay shit loads of money for their grave. Still, it is shocking that this happened.
I was standing there, in the middle, surrounded by thousends of small flies and no trees. It looked like after a bomb raid …
So here are some pictures from before, lucky I have no pictures from afterwards, else it would make your heart cry.
Fisheye is fun. Mr. Uchujin had one with him, but this lens is actually from Mr. Eichiscart.
Expensive, but it is real fun.
The man himself. You can actually take the whole room from corner to corner.
Or you can do like taking something else.
Or some close up porn.
So everybody on the intertubez has already twittered, blogged, reviewed and what not else about the new iPods. Especially the new Nano, that is sort of not a “Nano” anymore.
There was only one Nano that had a slight different style but in general they had all a display and the click wheel. This new Nano has only a display, in a iOS style way, no click wherel, square form.
Square is the new hip.
After I owned my iPod Nano for ages and although it still worked the battery started to get on my nerves. Two to three hours maximum music is kind of annoying when you are not charging your iPod every day.
So when the new Nano came out I decided to get one. Finally 16GB (or almost 16GB) of memory of music, not anymore squeezing everything I want on 4GB. But how will the new interface work compare the old one?
My normal iPod usage is very simple: Play music in album by shuffle. Normally I do not interface with the device at all.
What I never really liked about the old iPod was the not very easy way to change the volume because with the click wheel I never got it right, on the other hand the click wheel was a very good interface to go through the list.
The new list interface, exactly like on the iPod Touch or iPhone.
Now the list is one thing that has changed, it got much bigger, because it now has to be able to be selected by a finger, not really a problem for me, because normally I do not much go through the list.
The volume control on the new iPod is much better, there are now two buttons on top and therefore give an easy interface to it. Often important if some music is very quiet and other is very loud.
Now my most negative point, there is no shuffle by album anymore. I was very shocked and asked myself. WHY? Why would they remove it? Is the hipster Starbucks Frappuchino Mocca Latte drinking iPod welding crowded only hooked on one day hits? For me, a kind of more older person, that still likes those older LP/CDs that were more or less one big track I really cannot get this. I hope this function comes back in an iPod Software updated.
Besides this I really liked the new iPod Nano. It has a radio (will never us it), the interface to the Nike shoes (never use that), a pedo meter (might use it just for fun). It still has an interface to photos (never used that). But it does not have any of the games anymore, or the world clock (none I ever used). It still has a big clock, which can be set to be the first seen.
The play interface.
Now if you do not set this, the first screen is where you can start playing the music, so the first step interface is as easy as with the old iPod. But, because there are no physical buttons for play, you need to take the iPod our of your pocket if you want to pause the music. Something you have to think about, if you are in the group of unseen-iPod-interface users.
So my final remark is. I like the new iPod Nano, except that it is missing the shuffle by Album feature, besides that I see no issue. And if anyone complains that the iPod does not have good sound, I just think you either don’t have good quality mp3 files or shitty headphones.
