Oh, let’s go crazy and do a blog post two days in a row…

I was on my way to the subway this morning to meet a friend for lunch, and I saw this - a Far Side just begging to be written:

It then reminded me that a few weeks ago I’d seen this - all the traditional Japanese Autumn symbols set up for some portraits at a local dog boutique (jugo-ya full moon, tsukimi dango, pampas grass or could be bush clover - both are traditional Autumn symbols and I can’t tell from the photo but would guess the former):

The former surprised me a lot less than the latter. I suppose it’s because when I first came to Japan, it was not very usual to see a dog that was not a “traditional” Japanese dog (Shiba or Akita, etc.); and the dogs you did see were usually chained up outside the family house on a chain or rope that always seemed just a little bit too short. Now, of course, only several years later, you can barely go for a walk without tripping over a pack of long-haired dachshunds or several chihuahuas and you are then at the other extreme with scenes like this (and, in case you are wondering, there is no baby):

I was just updating another blog I maintain and thought I’d pop over and take a look at my blog. I was a wee bit shocked to realize that I’ve had an iPhone for almost 3 months. Oh well, at least I like it more now than I did before (although it is still lacking a few features I think it needs: “Mark as Read” would be a good starting point) (but, just as I typed that, it occurred to me that the feature might exist but I’ve yet to discover it).

Anyway, it’s been a busy few months and it does leave me pondering, yet again, if I should just scrap this endeavour. A kind commenter in Montreal, Van Hus, seems to think I should (but he also has some perverse desire to defend CNN writers, so I’m not sure we can take him too seriously).

My sister was here for a visit and we did a bit of travel: went to see F1 (hence the photo above, which was taken with the GIANT lens I lugged to the track 3 days running), went to Kyoto, toured around Tokyo. In case you are interested (and don’t worry if you’re not because I am not really an F1 fan either and don’t know much about it beyond the usual), the photo is the winning driver at Fuji Speedway this year, Alonso.

Here’s a classic Kyoto photo - this is Kinkaku-ji (aside from the striking gold facade, it is famous for being burned down by a monk in 1950 and then the act itself was immortalized in Mishima’s novel The Temple of the Golden Pavillion):

I don’t really take too many classic touristy photos these days - I tend to be more interested in things like this if I go “temple tromping”:

I’m off on another tour of the countryside for a few days on Thursday and I’m hoping the leaves are in full colour (although they seem a bit muted in colour here in Tokyo this year; but, at the same time, they are not fully changed yet). We’ll see…

PS: In case you are wondering what I mean by a “GIANT” lens, this will help you visualize it:

My goal today is to push that Madonna apartment billboard off the front page of this blog (yes, of course I know there are other ways to do that, such as reducing the number of posts displayed on the page, but it’s really just a way to push myself to get back on track with this whole blogging thing). I don’t have anything against Madonna, and I certainly own as many (if not more) Madonna CDs as anyone who went to high school in the 80s (so I never really did understand the nasty comment a disgruntled fan left here a few months back - I guess said fan didn’t like my comments about celebs shilling all sorts of things in Japan they’d never push back home).

Anyway, what to write about? Well, how about the series of iEvents I was plagued with on Friday afternoon - a complete snowball of iChaos that now means my Big Mac is off to the iDoctor for some iService.

So, in a flurry of spontaneity (not catalyzed by me), I now have a 16GB iPhone. To be honest, I had been feeling rather ambivalent about the acquisition of an iPhone: Japanese mobile phones are pretty feature-rich compared to North American models prior to the iPhone and, despite the many Apple products I own, I wasn’t in a hurry to get one.

I’d had it for a few days and was being a bit lackadaisical about inputting my contacts, etc. (because unlike switching to other mobiles here, where the provider transfers all of your data from old phone to new, the iPhone requires you to start from scratch and, oddly enough, the CD that Softbank provides to help you transfer your data through your PC is for Windows only), but I decided to bite the bullet Friday and get it done.

As I was reaching to plug the USB connector from the phone to Big Mac, I pulled the monitor towards me slightly and inadvertently unplugged the computer while it was turned on and had a whack of programs open. Normally, when this happens with a Mac, you just turn it back on and you get a message saying “Your computer was not shut down properly, so now we are going to have to realign the solar system and make sure that you are still standing in the same spot on the same plane of reality” (okay, that’s not really the message, but it’s along those lines and you have to wait a bit as it takes your computer a few minutes to sort out the permissions, etc.).

Not this time…

After watching the sleep indicator (the little white light on the bottom right) flash intermittently and beep for a while (3 flashes in quick succession and a loud beep and then a lag and then 3 more, etc.), the screen went black and there were some sounds you definitely don’t want to hear coming from your computer: deep, high-pitched radio squelch and a lot of fuzz and static - it sounded like ET was indeed phoning home. This went on for quite some time (read: I let this go on for quite some time in the hopes that ET would actually connect to his home planet and bring up my desktop).

Now, for most people, because they never back up their data, this moment would be the moment of absolute fear and panic. Unlike most people, my problem is that I have too many backups (I experienced a hard disk failure a couple of years ago that left me extra cautious) and, in these backups, I have quite a bit of duplication of my data (which means a lot of hard disk space is eaten up by my cautious approach). So, for the most part, a computer meltdown doesn’t really phase me too much (and I have a laptop as well anyway, which is what I’m using to write this).

However, I did realize in that moment that I had not backed up approximately 5000 photos from the past 4 months because I shoot in RAW and each file is quite large and I didn’t have much room left on my 3 external hard drives. Oddly enough, on Thursday, the day before this happened, I went to Bic Camera and bought another 500GB hard drive, but hadn’t done the backup yet.

Anyway, what I realized in that moment was that I don’t really care all that much for all of that data - sure, it’s a lot of photos to lose, but in all of that mass I realized that there are really only about 20 photos within all of that ridiculous mass that I would really be sorry to lose - just 20 or so, including these few:

A kind of interesting realization…I’m much less attached to all of my photos than I thought I was.

Long story short, I did somehow manage to boot once from the startup CD and transfer all of the photos to the new backup drive. However, when I rebooted again from a cloned copy of my system on another drive, my hard disk was gone…poof…not visible and that’s that.

¥49,000 (about $500) and Apple will pick up my computer, pack it up and repair it in 4 to 10 days. I am glad I was able to retrieve my photos and am hoping I’ll have my big desktop back again sooner rather than later.