Japan or Bust

I have the pictures from May 29 up. It was our first day in Kyoto. Went to the Fushimi Inari Shrine and Kiyomizu-dora.

direct link

Here are pictures from our last day in Tokyo.  Stopped in harajuku to look at all the cosplayers that came out and then got on the shinkansen to Kyoto.  Direct Link.

Firefox 2.0 was released today.  One of the new features is something called microsummaries.  This allows you to create a bookmark where the text of the bookmark automatically updates.  I found a plugin for wordpress (available here if you have a wordpress blog) and have added it to this site.  Although now I’m just adding pictures, and I said I wasn’t going to create a post every time I add more pictures, I lied.  I’ll create a new post, mention that I’ve added pictures in the title so if you have a microsummary bookmark, you can tell when I’ve added new pictures.  For something like this, that’s more efficient then subscribing to an RSS feed.  If you have the new version of Firefox, you just go to Bookmarks and Bookmark this page.  For the name you should have a drop down list that you can choose the microsummary.

So, aside from this title, I will try to make them as short as possible, like “Pictures from May 23rd added” or something along those lines.  I know it would make more sense to add something like this to the image gallery itself, but couldn’t find a plugin to do it and didn’t have time to play around in the source to add it myself.

Sorry about the long delay, but I’ve finally got the next couple days worth of images up. I’m going to really try and get these pictures up more often then once every 3 months :). Next couple days are of Harajuku, Shibuya, Ginza, and Akihabara (again) areas.

Also, since last time I’ve posted stuff, I’ve updated my video codecs.  I’m still using xvid, but a new version, so you may have to update yours to view them, although it should still play fine.

http://japan.vrillusions.com/gallery/

Sorry for the long delay, was trying to figure out the best way to add videos. Unfortunately the videos do not want to show up in Firefox on Windows, so you will have to download the movie. All movies are going to be encoded with XviD. The easiest way to view the videos, if they don’t show up, is to use an application called VLC. It is availiable for Windows, Linux, and Mac and will work “out of the box.” You can also download the XviD codec here. If you still can’t get the video to work, don’t feel too bad as the video quality from a digital camera isn’t all that good. Cousin was using a video camera, unsure when those will be posted. Also got my first panoramic picture. On wide images there is a Panorama view option availiable.  You’ll also notice most of the pictures aren’t commented.  Unless I see something of interest or it jogs my memory, I’m going to leave the description blank.  So don’t look puzzled if you see a bunch of pictures without any comments on it.

Yes, after constantly getting bugged by people I’ve finally started to go through the 2300 or so pictures. I’m just going to do them by day. I have the first couple days up right now and I’ll try to get one or two done a day, depending on how motivated I am. One thing of note about my picture taking, if not aparent already, is I take a LOT of pictures. I pretty much post all of them as well. This is differant than professional photographers that take a ton of of pictures but only upload a few dozen. So there will probably be a few good ones spread through a lot of mediocre ones. I’ll probably make a ‘best of’ album at some point. I’m going to allow comments by guests for now, but if I start getting a lot of spam or vulgar comments I’ll have to switch it to user registration. So be nice.

http://japan.vrillusions.com/gallery/

So Saturday we just slept in a little late and headed straight to the airport and just waste time there for like 4 hours. Then after an 11 hour plane flight, a 3 hour layover, and then 2 gate changes and a late departure time later (Chicago O’Hare is terrible at handling traffic, a woman we were talking to also mentioned this), I’m back home. So at least for the plane travel, I’ll spend the little extra and go continental (they had better food service on the plane) and do not transfer at O’Hare as we had problems both times.

I have no idea what the total count of pictures is. I’m going to start downloading all the pictures off the backup server tonight and start the task of going through all of them. Thanks to all the comments I got. I’ll post information about pictures once I get them somewhere.

FYI I’ve changed the post times and such back to EST. The older posts will still have the Japan date and new ones will be in EST.

[of course, this is if we actually get on American Airlines for the fly home]

Now it’s time for the return flight details. Again I’m only going to mention the flight from Japan to Chicago since the other flights are just little ‘hops’ from Chicago. It’s going to be American Airlines flight 154. Flight Aware’s tracking looks decent (and I can direct link to the flight) but the image may not work since it’s an international flight, but will still show where we’re at. You can also try tracking it on FlyteComm. Or any site should show it with the flight identifier AAL154. Flight leaves at 6:20pm local time, or 5:20am EST. I will then arrive to Chicago at 4:00pm Chicago time (Yes, I’m going to get to Chicago before I left Japan) or 5:00pm EST.