Versaille

OK, I’m finally getting around to posting the rest of my European vacation photos. I know, I know it’s been way too long, but hey better late than never…..right?  This time it’s the palace of Versailles. It’s easily the most decadent place I’ve ever been. It was also packed with people, so it was really hard to take good photos.

I promise the rest of the European photos will be up over the course of the next few days. So stay tuned!

Happiness

Wow these kids really like the toys they get with their Happy Meals at McDonald’s!

New Camera

While I was in Tokyo a week ago I decided to go down to Akihabara , and pick up new camera. I had become unhappy with the quality of the photos my Canon g10 was taking. It was great in the daylight, but in low light situations it usually fell short. Putting out very noisy photos. So I did lots of research about all kinds of models and finally I decided on a Sony Nex 3.

The Nex kind of combines the best of the SLR and compact camera worlds. It gives you the same image quality of an SLR in a compact camera size. The cameras body is super slim and light! In fact the heaviest part is the lenses, which you can change just like an SLR. I got the kit with both of the starter lenses. The big one is a 18 – 55 mm zoom and the  more compact one is a 16 mm wide-angle.

It can do all kinds of cool things like sweep panoramas, twilight modes, HDR, and even take video in 720p. You can see how thin the body is. Even with the heavier zoom lens attached, it’s still lighter than my G10.

With the 16 mm attached it actually fits really easily into a jacket pocket. It also feels pretty light too. Below you can see a macro photo I took of one of the flowers in our garden (yes they are still blooming even though it’s almost February!). Click on it for a larger view.

Now here’s a direct comparison of my two cameras, shooting almost the same scene at 1600 ISO You can really see the difference in colors. Plus the Nex photo has barely any noise. The G10 shot is a noise fest!

Sony Nex 3

Canon G10

The Nex has a sensor on it over three times the size or the G10 (Nex 23.4mm x 15.6 mm, G10 7.6mm x 5.32mm). It definitely helps in low light situations.If you want to see more photos taken with my Nex, just scroll down a bit. All of the pictures I took in Shibamata were taken with the Nex.

Shibamata

This past weekend the wife and I headed down to Tokyo for a visit. I was mostly to go to the Canadian embassy, since my passport is expiring in a few months. While we were there we went all the way to Shibamata, to check it out. It’s an older part of Tokyo where they filmed the Tora-san movies. In fact the first thing you see when you get off the train is a statue of Tora-san.

This area still has older feeling to it. The shopping street probably hasn’t changed since the 40’s.

In front of this old style candy store there was a vending machine made to look like a robot. How cool is that!

There’s also a nice temple at the end of the shopping street, which featured heavily in the first Tora-san movie.

You can also go to the Tora-san museum. It has this really cute statue out in front of it.

You can see a trailer from the first Tora-san movie below. This series had 48 movies! That’s a hell of a lot!

2010 in review

WordPress has a new thing where they send you kind of a report card for your blog at the end of the year. I figured I would share it with everyone. I was surprised that I got over 68,000 hits last year (I actually got 70,071). I was also surprised that the post I wrote about that old live action Ninja Hatori show got the most hits (so far it’s had over 9,032 hits. Huh?). So check out the info below.

 

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

Madison Square Garden can seat 20,000 people for a concert. This blog was viewed about 68,000 times in 2010. If it were a concert at Madison Square Garden, it would have performed about 3 times.

 

In 2010, there were 44 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 508 posts. There were 105 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 63mb. That’s about 2 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was July 5th with 451 views. The most popular post that day was Ninja Hattori-Kun.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, hakitarun.livejournal.com, team-bhp.com, ifreestores.com, and bartman905.wordpress.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for ninja hattori, coeur de pirate, wagon r, pringles, and dhalsim.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Ninja Hattori-Kun January 2009
15 comments

2

The Cat Bus November 2008
2 comments

3

Music I’m Listening To November 2009
15 comments

4

Ninja April 2009
10 comments

5

The New Wagon R October 2009
13 comments

Giga Pudding

Who say Japan is so healthy?

Yes the pudding is actually that big! And yes this a real promo video.

It’s Back Baby!

One of my favourite burger in the whole wide world is coming back to McDonald’s tomorrow. The Texas burger is back! It’ll probably be for a limited time so get it while you can, if you live in Japan that is. I know I’m going to get one tomorrow for sure. You can check out my earlier post if you want more info on the burger itself.

Busy Busy

Now you might be wondering why there haven’t been any posts in almost a month. ‘What the hell happened to him?’ you’re thinking. Well the lack of any work on my blog can be answered with two reasons. No, it’s not because work is so busy, or some sort of crisis. The simple answer is “Rock Band 3” and “Gran Turismo 5”! At the beginning of the month Rock Band 3 came out, and thus began my total obsession with playing it every waking moment.

I had previously written about my love of the older incarnations of Rock Band, so this was no surprise at all. The addition of a new instrument to play didn’t help either.

Yes, they added keyboards! Opening the world of Rock Band to various piano, synth, or organ based music. Hell I can play songs by New Order and other great 80’s bands now. Considering New Order is one of my favourite bands, that’s pretty awesome.

Later this month I was starting to cool down on Rock Band, but what decided to rear its head after almost six years of development? Gran Turismo 5!

My favourite race game of all time. Needless to say this month was properly gone to games. I’m still quite rabidly addicted to GT5, and even considering getting a racing wheel for my PS3. This can’t turn out well….

Euro Chicken

McDonald’s Japan recently has had a new series of chicken sandwiches based on various European cuisines. The series is strangely called “I-con Chicken”. The first release was “Cheese Fondue”.

It was good, but the sauce was more like a cheese flavoured pasta sauce, and not a real cheese fondue. Number two is the delectable “German Sausage”.

I really liked this one with a nice German sausage patty and mustard. I think there might have been some sauerkraut on it too. The last two haven’t even come out yet. They are “Diavolo”.

and “Carbonara”.

I’m really looking forward to “Diavolo”, since it’s supposed to be spicy. I do love me some spicy stuff!

UPDATE! I had the “Diavolo” sandwich today, and it was really good. So far it’s my favorite of the bunch.

Real

Here’s another manga recommendation. It’s by the same artist as Vagabond (which I previously wrote about here), Takehiko Inoue. It’s about wheel chair basketball. Which is a rare topic in any sort of media. The story focuses on three young men whose lives have been affected in different ways by debilitating injury. The first losing a leg to cancer. The second causing a motorcycle accident that led to someone being paralyzed. The third being paralyzed in a traffic accident. All three are struggling to come to terms with their own lots in life. It all comes together around the sport of wheel chair basketball. The series is quite touching, inspiring, and quite heartbreaking. It’s extremely well written. I think it could be one of Inoue’s best series. It’s a very well-developed character piece, and the characters feel real. Don’t expect any over the top manga action here though. Just serious (but sometimes a little funny) drama. You can find the series around the internet translated into English. Currently the series is up to nine volumes.