The Shrine on the Roof

Perhaps the small shrine originally stood on the site of what is now valuable "real estate" in central Tokyo? An interesting solution. Completely invisible from the ground of course, but no doubt tended to.

Two worlds

From the Financial Times, Saturday 8th October 2005.
p4. Estate agents hope for City bonus windfall.
"Bonuses are expected to be largest among bankers working on debt-related products such as credit derivatives rather than those on mergers and acquisitions"
p10. UN struggles to feed Africa's hungry people
picture caption "a woman carries water-lily roots gathered from crocodile-infested waters in Malawi. The tubers are barely edible and cause diarrhoea"

Drip Coffee

Drip Coffee: from the packaging to the way the pre-cut framework unfolded, precisely, no tears (in both senses), everything worked! And the coffee was good, especially waking up at some odd hour jet-lagged!

Fuji-san from the train

Fuji-san from the Shinkansen, December 2002, on my way to Kyoto.

Kūya Shōnin 空也上人

The 13th Century small statue of the priest Kūya is at Rokuharamitsuji [六波羅密寺] in Kyoto. The small Buddha figures (kebutsu) coming from the priest's mouth represent the sacred syllables of the nenbutsu [念仏], the recitation of the Amida Buddha's name. More details are available at Jaanus (Japanese Architecture and Art Net Users System).

Angel sculpture by Imre Makovecz

Imre Makovecz’s Roman Catholic Church Paks, Hungary

"Angel sculpture outside Imre Makovecz's Roman Catholic Church, Paks, Hungary". The cover of this magazine in a newsagent on Tottenham Court Road spoke to me directly.

test display

日英故事ことわざ辞典
UTF-8?

Ubuntu Linux on a Sony Picturebook C1VFK

The Ubuntu distribution of Linux continues to amaze me. The latest version (5.04) installed directly on my old Sony Picturebook laptop. This can be a difficult installation as being a very small laptop, there is no room for an in-built CD-drive, and the screen is effectively half-size (1024 x 480). I have a plugin-in PCMCIA CD-drive for loading software, but almost all Linux distributions on CD start to boot, then discover that the PCMCIA driver they need resides on the CD which they can no longer recognise. Catch-22. Anticipating prolonged trial-and-error, I was stunned to see it boot directly, and even more remarkably, recognise the unusual display. This is amazing. Combined with the synaptic package manager for security and other updates, and hardware recognition as good as Knoppix I can thoroughly recommend this distribution. Having run a dual boot IBM Thinkpad for a year (Windows and Linux), I am now moving over completely to Linux with the lightweight Sony ideal for travelling. Even my wireless card was recognised. Running gVim and Lyx for text, Sylpheed 2.0 as mail client and Opera and Firefox as browsers. Wordpress runs locally using XAMPP to provide MySQL, Apache and PHP. LifeRea is the feed reader. There is some satisfaction in keeping an old friend going!

A Korean Monastery

The image does little justice to the immense calm that filled the room. (I will locate it more accurately in a future post).

A Korean Monastery

The monastery was for female monks, if I may so describe them, only. It was about 5:00 in the evening, and the huge drum was beaten in a very vigorous manner for about 10 minutes, as the trainees and monks came from all parts of the temple complex.