Cherry Blossom season again

Today was a gorgeous spring day and the cherry blossoms are out so the local park was completely packed with people.

Canoeing on Biwako

After climbing Akasakayama we stayed at a small family  pension next at the north end of Lake Biwa. The owners organise canoe trips on the lake in the summer and snow shoe tours in the winter. When we booked online through Rakuten it appeared that the canoe trip was included in the price. I could not understand how they could manage this. It seemed too good to be true; and it was. The canoe hire was extra and not particularly cheap. But when we booked the pension we had no particular intention of going canoeing, and we booked at the last minute in probably the busiest season of the year in Japan. In the end we had a great time, so it worked out extremely well.

The pension "Rudder" was a log cabin at the back of a boat yard with just 4 rooms.

The owner said that they had only had one boat turn over in 11 years but even so I left my dSLR in the car we went canoeing and took a point-and-shoot instead. I only took a few photos on the lake and after using the dSLR they seem a bit noisy.

Climbing Akasakayama near lake Biwa

At the end of the Golden Week holiday we spent a night near the top of Lake Biwa in Shiga prefecture, the largest lake in Japan. The weather was like a perfect summer, warm but without the humidity and mosquitos which blight the summer in Japan.

Akasakayama is an 800m mountain close to Biwako in an area popular for skiing in the winter.Even thought the campsite at the bottom of the trail was crowded very few people were actually climbing up the steep path. It is only 3.7km from the car park to the top but there is 600m of climbing so it is fairly steep. The initial parts have steps as shown in the picture. Further up the path follows a small stream.

I miss climbing in England where the hills rarely have trees so you have a good view as you climb. Most Japanese mountains are covered in trees so you only occasionaly get glimpses of the view from the mountain. Such as this back towards the lake with the campsite just visible at the bottom of the picture.

The other thing in Japan is that it seems impossible to escape from transmission towers. Almost every hill seems to have a line of them marching across it.

Finally the summit;

Then back down to have a hot bath in the Onsen at the bottom.

100m Kite

At the start of the Golden Week holiday we went to the Heijo palace site in Nara  where they are holding festivities to celebrate the 1300 year aniversary of Nara. There was a kite flying competition and one of the kites was this 100m long kite with lots of small kites spaced about 1m apart along the line.

Akashi-Kaikyō Bridge

The day after visiting Ako we headed back towards Kobe, staying at the Kobe end of the Akashi-Kaikyō Bridge (明石海峡大橋) which joins Kobe to Awajishima and which, according to Wkipedia, is the world's longest suspension bridge. The following day we took the ferry over to Awajisima and spent the day in a large park there.

In the morning the weather was rather grey and most of the photos I took of the bridge were grey on grey and rather boring. On the way back we took the ferry again, so that we could stop in Akashi for some of the famous local takoyaki, and the weather had brightened up so I had a second chance of photographing the bridge. The one I liked best seems to work well in black and white. The small boat in the forground adds a nice detail and was lucky timing since the photo was taken from the ferry so there was no possiblity of waiting for a suitable shot.

Sunset in Ako

We stayed in a ryokan in Ako which was right on the coast. Before dinner we went down to the sea and while the boys played in the rockpools I took some pictures of the sunset.

Ako salt farm

During the spring break we had a long weekend in Hyogo, starting off in Ako. At the Ako Seaside park they have a reconstruction of an old salt farm, where salt was extracted from seawater. Ako used to be famous for salt as well as being home to the 47 ronin.

The picture above is of construction used to concentrate seawater. The water is pumped up to the top and sprayed onto the twigs. As it filters down, some of the water evaporates. Visitors can "make" their own salt by boiling the brine until all the water evaporates.

Reinstalling Windows 7

I have finally finished setting up the PC again after installing Windows 7. I had been using the pre-release version for some time but when that expired I could not face going back to XP so bought the Windows 7 upgrade. The re-install was fairly painless but it has taken me some time to set up all the applications again. Lightroom was one of the last to get set up. I was expecting it to be a pain to re-create all the settings and install the plugins but in fact I found that just copying the contents of the Application Data folder from the previous installation kept all of the settings and plugins so it actually only took a few minutes.

 The combination of rainy weekends, updating the PC and being generally busy has meant that I have not got around to updating the blog for some time. Now that spring is here and the weather is improving hopefully I will be getting out a bit more with the camera so will have something to post.

Plum Blossoms

Spring time in Japan means cherry blossoms. But before the cheery trees turn pink the plum trees come in to flower and last month we went off to Tsukigase, north east of Nara, to the plum festival. It was one of the first fine days of spring and the area was crowded with people out to see the plum blossoms.

Stalls in the along the path were selling locally produced pickles and, since this was a plum festival, umeboshi - the salty picked plums. There was even plum flavoured ice-cream.

Keihanna Memorial Park

It was a nice winters day today and we went to Keihanna park where they were having a free concert by some Taiko drummers. The concert was in the building above - a strange construction hidden by a a large amount of girders. Below is another view.

After harvesting the rice in Japan, the straw is often tied up in conical stands, I assume to dry. I have been meaning to photograph some of these but have not got around to it before. They had a few in the park for reasons not entirely clear.

New Year visit to Nara

December was rather hectic with business trips to Tokyo and Taiwan but the new year was more relaxed. Today we went out to join the crowds in Nara  for Hatsumōde, the custom of visiting a shrine at new year. Around the largest shrine, Kasuga-taisha was very busy as expected, but the other temples nearby were not nearly so busy. Along the path are many stalls or yatai selling food and snacks.

At the shrine people often get a slip of paper on with their fortune on it. If it is bad it is tied to a tree or other structure at the shrine so that the bad luck can be left behind.

Kasuga is apparently famous for its bronze lanterns. This row of hanging lanterns caught my eye as we were leaving.

The temples are also decorated for the new year, The round white things on the table are mochi or rice cakes which are a traditional food at new year.

By the time we got to Nigatsu-dō the sun was starting to set. It was a bit too hazy for a good sunset shot but the light behind the trees produced a nice silhouette.

A trip in to Kyoto

In a couple of weeks I will probably have to play tour guide for a day in Kyoto. I am still deciding where to go, but since Kinkakuji, the golden temple, is one of the must see tourist spots I thought I had better go and refresh my memory of it. I have been to Kinkakuji before, probably in 1993 when I first came to Kyoto but have not been back since. It was also a good excuse to visit Kyoto to catch the end of the autumn colours.

I actually prefer the east side of Kyoto, walking from Kiyomizudera up through maruyama park then on to Nanzenji. But that can be quite a hike and the golden temple is the famous sightseeing spot in Kyoto.

I took the train to Kitaoji and walked west towards Kinkakuji beause I wanted to stop off at Daitokui on the way. This is a large complex of temples and was very pleasant to walk around, not nearly as crowded as Kinkakuji.

From Daitokuji I went to the Imamiya shrine, which had several bright red maples in the compound.

Then finally on to the crowds at Kinkakuji. The approach to the temple had some nice trees in their autumn colours, as did some inside the temple itself.

 

Then finally, the standard tourist shot of the temple itself . I think this is almost identical to the one I took 16 years ago,

Mozy: Backup that does not work.

I just gave up on using Mozy as a backup solution because it simply does not work.  Now that I am using a DSLR I needed a better way to back up the photographs. Previously I had just been uploading all the jpegs to Flickr as a form of offsite backup, as well as keeping local backups on DVDS.  With the DSLR I now have lots of raw files and the modifications that I have made in Lightroom so I needed a real backup solution.

I have been using JungleDisk for some time for sharing files between computers and for backing up a small volume of important files.  JungleDisk uses Amazon’s S3 service for storing the data which charges per GByte of data stored. I thought this would start to get expensive if I had many GBytes of raw files plus other data so I looked around for an alternative.

Several of the photography podcasts I listen to mentioned Mozy as simple to use backup service which is reasonably priced and offers unlimited storage. The uploads are slow, but I decided it was probably adequate for the amount of stuff that I have.  I tried out the free version, which has a 2GByte limit and it seemed to work so paid for a subscription and started backing up my data.

After about 2 months of continual backup leaving the computer on during the day I had about  150GBytes of files backed up and the initial backup was complete. Then the trouble started.  Backups stated failing with a “Server Error 12” so I emailed Mozy support and did some Googling about the cause. The support, outsourced to India, replied with a “reboot and try again” message even though from reports on the web it is clear that “Server Error 12” is a problem on the Mozy side not on the client. When that did not work, support replied again that they could not fix it so had “escalated it” to someone at Mozy. They replied after 3 days that the error should be gone because they had fixed the account on the server. However, backups still did not work.

Then the Mozy emails started being blocked by GMails spam filter and some emails seemed to have been blocked before then. So far these are the only false positives that GMail has ever  found in my email. This caused some delay, but the advice was then to uninstall and then re-install the client which I did. After re-installing files started being uploaded again but the program wanted to re-upload all the files.  Since that took 2 months the first time I don’t think that is reasonable. But, to see what would happen I left it running only for it to stop with “Server Error 12” again.  So I emailed support again, and waited.  4 days later I gave up and deleted the account and have applied for a refund.

The backups stopped working on November  6th, by November 24th they were still not working and it is clear that something in the Mozy system is broken. A backup system needs to be reliable and Mozy, in my experience, is not.

Googling for possible solutions I found many others who had also had problems with Mozy and had given up as well. Not only are there reliability problems there seem to be serious issues if you want to restore files or transfer data from one computer to another or reinstall the OS or, well do anything that you might expect a backup system to support. The comments on the review: "Mozy Review: Is Mozy Online Backup Worth it? My Experience…" seem both typical and agree with what I encountered.

Reading other’s experiences it seems that Mozy may be fine if you have 1 or 2 GBytes of data so can do a full backup/restore in a few hours. Then if there is any trouble you can simply back up everything again.  If you have more data than that then Mozy does not appear to be reliable enough.

For the moment I have gone back to using JungleDisk. The upload speeds are much better than Mozy and I have been using it for several years without any reliability problems.  I can use it on multiple computers and browse the backed up files on a virtual drive. With lots of data it is more expensive than some of the other online backup providers. So I will probably investigate one of the alternatives.  But next time I will be more careful about checking for bad reviews first!

Maples at Mt. Kasagi

 Drab, misty weather this morning cleared up around lunchtime, so after spending all weekend in the house we decided to go out and visit Mt. Kasagi where they were having a momiji matsuri (Maple Festival.) Mt Kasagi is just a short drive from us in southern Kyoto prefecture along the side of the Kizugawa river. There is steep path up the side of the mountain to a temple on the top. We visited a couple of years ago and I have been meaning to go back.

Although they were having a maple festival there was only one small area with maple trees, but  there was somewhere for the children to play while I took pictures.

At the entrance to the temple there was a small tree which seemed to need photographing, with a large gate in the background.

On the way back down the mountain we took the road, which went past another large maple, lit be the sun which had almost dissapeared below the horizon. This maple was a glorious red.

Some autumnal colours at Joruriji

After some busy weekends I had some spare time this week so went back to Joruriji to see if the trees had got their autumn colors yet. A few trees are starting to turn red but the maples are still green. After a shot cold spell the weather had warmed up again with clear blue skies.

There are still some flowers in bloom so I tried a shot of the backlit flowers with the autumn trees in the background.

I think it will be a few more weeks before the trees really turn in this part of Japan.

Mikangari

Every year we visit a fruit orchard in Ide-cho to eat mikan. In Japanese it is "mikangari" or hunting for mikan. We take a packed lunch and eat it under the trees and eat far too many mikan. This year the weather was overcast, not like the hot sun of previous years. Just a few photos of the mikan.

A rainy saturday

It was raining for most of the day  and so we stayed home. Around 4pm it cleared up and with the sun low in the sky and some mist around from all the day's rain it the light looked good for taking some photographs. Unfortunately I had almost no time available, so I just managed a quick trip with my son to a local park. Despite some nice colours on the trees it was hard to find a good subject and the sun soon dissapeared behind the nearby apartment blocks.The best shot was from a foot bridge over the highway next to the park.