One of Steve’s Photos from my birthday

I’ve just been mailed my Iaido Ikkyu certificate
Unfortunately I haven’t had enough time to train in any martial arts for a month or two (health problems here and there, travel, new housemates downstairs etc).
I just took a photo of it, but I’ve forgotten to enable my SD card reader in the bios on my computer, which’ll mean a restart of vista, which’ll mean a cut in our live cricket coverage (not possible). During the past two days we’ve had people visiting to watch the ashes, and have always had at least two people sitting down watching it. So… you’ll have to wait for a photo

Edit: here it is (A3 size):

After a bit of confusion after the BBC pulled their radio coverage from the internet, the ABC only allowing Australian IPs to access the radio stream, no free P2Ptv coverage and most paid online video being pulled because of Cricket Australia’s crazy restrictions, we finally found a paid site to watch all five tests of the Ashes. Yay!!! Five people in the house watching and drinking
Apparently there are now free P2Ptv channels showing it, but anyway

For those browsing the site with no idea about this post, I’m talking about Cricket

I’m posting from Windows Vista RC2 (b5744) which I just installed. So far it looks really really nice. My comp scored 3.7 experience points - pretty good for a two year old notebook!
The actual system seems more complicated than XP. Connecting to the internet didn’t even require the NTT Flets CD installation (which is required for XP). Super!

I’ve submitted a few of my photos to the photography competition in the Japanzine English Magazine.
Vote for them!

Courtesy of my sister Jasmin, here are some photos of newborn Max!

Well I’m sitting in an internet cafe in Kyoto overnight, in a private room with big reclining chair, because all the hotels in Kyoto are fully booked out tonight (apparently it’s a public holiday). I’ll update this post later… gotta sleep now

Edit (Sat evening in Nagoya): I was in Kyoto for autumn sightseeing. Unfortunately I think I might have gone two weeks early as I only saw about 5 plants with orange leaves and one with red leaves - the rest were green and you wouldn’t have known it was nearly winter. I took around 350 photos in total during the two days, with most of them coming out rather well. I went to see temples and Japanese gardens mostly. Really nice zen/wabisabi minimalistic design; both of miniture and massive scale. Photos soon. For the moment is perhaps 12 hours rest for my aching legs/blister (walked nearly everywhere I went). Gotta work tomorrow…