It sounds like such a cliche, but it’s amazing how seriously some Japanese take cooking the perfect bowl of rice. A top-of-the-line rice cooker like the one shown below can be ￥118,000 - currently about AUD$1300!!!
Photos were taken December 2007.
Living in Tokyo has made me realise how many nice parks there are in Melbourne. There are definitely fewer in Tokyo, so we are quite lucky to live very close to one of the biggest - 新宿御苑 (Shinjuku Gyoen). The park has a few different styles, and is very popular on the weekends, especially during spring (cherry blossom season) and autumn (when the leaves change colour).
Here are some pictures taken in December 2007, when the leaves were changing colours. The rest of the photos are in this album (or click the photos).
My hard drive on my macbook failed a few weeks ago. I’ve resurrected the original hard drive (not the failed one) till I get around to buying a new one. Luckily I had backed up my photos the night before (yay for rsync!), so I didn’t lose anything really important.
I’m seriously considering getting a Time Capsule, since I need a wireless router anyway, and automatic wireless backups would be awesome.
I ran into the following dialog when trying to “Empty Trash” in OS X (10.4)
The problem was caused by a couple of hundred locked files on the USB drive, which OS X happily sent to the trash but would not let me delete. Normally you can just restore a file from the Trash to a normal file, and then alter the properties (File -> Get Info in the Finder). But since the files were on a USB drive I couldn’t see them in the Trash.
So the files were effectively stuck, and I couldn’t empty the Trash without hitting “continue” a couple of hundred times (and the locked files would still be there, so that would happen every time).
After a quick google, and a look at man chflags, I found a solution. Open terminal, and run the following commands (replacing DRIVE with the volume name of your USB drive)
NOTE: run the following command at your own risk!
find /Volumes/DRIVE/.Trashes -type f -exec chflags nouchg {} \; -print
After than, “Empty Trash” worked as normal.
Bron and I went to 高尾山 (Mount Takao) during autumn.
高尾山 is about 45 minutes west of Tokyo by train, so it’s really easy to get to. There were lots of people there, but most of them took the cable-car to near the top so at least the trail wasn’t too crowded. We took the side trail up and the main path down, which was a good move as the side path had some nice spots to rest and enjoy the view, and also has some variation in incline (the main path is uphill all the way).
The rest of the photos are in this album (or click the photo).
