Chapter 1: Osaka Castle

So on to the sightseeing! The first day I went to Osaka Castle (main site, Wikipedia link), a huge fortress originally constructed in 1583 and modified over the years with the changing political landscape. The entire park is impressive. The castle itself is built on raised land supported by massive stone walls which you can see in this picture.  Some of the walls extend as high as 20 meters (more than 60 feet).  When you get up close to the walls, you can see how big the stones are.  Many of them are several feet on a side – I can’t imagine how heavy they are.

The castle grounds are divided into an outer and inner area, and of course, there was a moat (a must for any decent, self-respecting castle) protecting the inner walls.  A beautifully textured wooden bridge crossed the moat to the inner sanctum.  From here visitors start to get a real idea of the size of the castle!

As big as it seemed from outside the castle walls or even just across the moat, it was much, much bigger in person.  It is fascinating to me that people built this castle without the modern conveniences of combustion engines or hydraulics!  If I remember correctly, there were 8 floors in the castle itself.  The inside has been completely modernized so that there is an elevator and stairs.  You can go the whole way to the upper pagoda where the view of the city is magnificent.

The museum inside the castle is very interesting and documents the history over the centuries as the castle changed hands and played a major role in the shaping of Japanese government.  Among the many artifacts were samurai outfits originally belonging to some of the rulers.  Their dress was intimidating!  Unfortunately we weren’t allowed to take pictures of the older pieces.

Ornate designs decorated much of the exterior of the castle, such as the gold tiger in the picture below.

In the same inner area there was also a beautiful Japanese garden.  I was running out of time but walked through quickly.  The view of the castle was shaped quite well by the pond and garden elements.

Chapter 2: Osaka Kaiyukan Aquarium

On Saturday morning, I went to the Osaka Kaiyukan Aquarium at Osakako (the port).  Their claim to fame is a whale shark exhibit, which was appreciably large!  The fin of the shark was probably on the order of 5 feet tall.  The length must have been 10-15 feet.  It was a massive creature.

The theme of the aquarium focused on the variety of life around the Pacific Ring of Fire.  They had dophins, huge sea turtles, large crabs, manta rays, otters, and many other species.  Two of the exhibits I enjoyed the most (alongside the whale shark) were the penguins and the jellyfish.  The penguins were quite playful and would come right up to the glass to see the “human exhibit”.  This one in particular would come up to stare and play with some of the children holding their hands out.  The jellyfish were fiery orange and red against the blue lighting of the tanks – an exhibit I always love no matter the aquarium.

One of the most interesting things I saw was a diver feeding the stingrays and other creatures in one of the really large central tanks.  The diver would take a small squid or octupus out of a tupperware container and literally put the food into the mouths of these stingrays.  Fish of all kinds swirled around him all through this process.  In the background you can see the whale shark, in another area of the tank separated by a net.

Chapter 3: Kyoto

The last major destination I visited for sightseeing was the city of Kyoto Sunday afternoon.  I went with the hosts of the conference and several other participants and had a great time.  The weather was quite dreary and very wet.  After spending some time trying to balance both the umbrella and the camera, I finally gave up with the umbrella and just got wet.

The gardens of the temple were incredible.  The preparation, design, and maintenance were clearly evident.  I could probably have spent much more time in Kyoto, and in fact if I return some day I will go to Kyoto to see more of the temples and gardens.  I saw only two of the twenty or so temples around the city.

Chapter 4: Odds and Ends

After the conference ended on Tuesday we all went to a traditional Japanese restaurant in downtown Osaka.  The food was marvelous there as it was everywhere I ate.  In these restaurants, patrons remove their shoes before going to a secluded eating area, often upstairs from the main entrance.  We would approach these restuarants from sometimes very narrow (but brightly decorated!) alleyways, and walk through bright cloth banners in the entrance.  Dishes were always beautifully prepared as well as very tasty.

Japan: A Wonderful Experience

I spent only a week in Japan but I found the people warm and accepting, the culture fascinating, and the scenery breathtaking.  I spent a lot of time on subway trains; every so often, the train would stop service in the middle of a line.  I assume this fact was announced over the loudspeaker but I could never be certain because it was only in Japanese, so I sat happily in my seat while everybody else on the whole train got off.  Every time that happened (kind of funny that it happened more than once right?  you’d think I’d start to notice a pattern), a grandmotherly woman would smile and gesture anxiously at me through the window from the platform, or elderly man would shake his hand on my shoulder and motion to get off.  This experience was typical of all my interactions with people.  The hosts of the conference were especially gracious.  The students I met were as eager to learn about my culture as I was to learn about theirs.

I was also amazed at the volume of people!  At the Osaka/Umeda station in downtown Osaka, there is an underground shopping area that must extend for miles (not an exaggeration), all lined with department stores and vendors of all kinds.  This shopping center connects hotels, subway stations, and train stations, so at times there was a veritable sea of people moving in both directions (walking on the left, not the right!) and you could really only go with the swell.  Times like these it was easy to feel somewhat lost in the cadence of footsteps and blur of faces, although being tall and red-haired I probably was anything but an invisible face in the crowd.

Today, with the effects of travel beginning to wear off and sleep returning to a more normal schedule, I downloaded all 1000+ photos and started poring over them, revisiting all the places I saw and people I met.  It was a wonderful experience!  I think I will have many warm memories of Japan.

I flew out Friday morning at about 10am from SLC and arrived in Floripa the next day, Saturday, at about 5pm with stops in JFK and São Paulo.  According to Delta’s Skymiles program, I traveled 6,734 miles in approximately 31 hours, or about 217 miles per hour average!

We stayed at the Jurere Beach Village, which is literally right on the beach as you can see.  If you zoom in on the map, you’ll find Jurere at the north end of the island which is more the tourist area.  My room was on the top floor looking out into the center court.  I fell asleep at nights to a cool ocean breeze ruffling the curtains and the rhythm of the incoming waves.  I woke up in the morning to sunlight streaming through the same curtains with the same breeze and waves.  Breakfast every morning was a buffet with fresh fruits, juices, breads, pastries, eggs, sausage… you name it.

I didn’t do much Saturday evening or Sunday.  Monday night I took off with some friends to downtown Floripa.  We walked along the avenue toward the bridge to the mainland for a while at sunset (pictures below) before hitting up the Churrascaria Ataliba for dinner.

Dinner was amazing. We were the first ones in the door and the Maître d’ let us go back to see the furnace and the chef. They had cards illustrating where the meat was from on the cow, and there must have been 30 different cuts of meat from beef alone, plus chicken, pork, and lamb. If you’ve ever been to a Rodizio’s or a Tucano’s, this was that same idea. They just keep bringing the meat until you say no. I got a limeade that was tart and sweet to the point of turning my mouth inside out.

After dinner we took a taxi to the nightlife area of the island called Lagoa da Conceição (a lagoon around the center-west of the island). Caught some live music from a local band for an hour or two then started to head back home. On the way home we decided to find a local taxi cause the hotel’s taxi service was ripping us off. Amlan, one of my labmates from India, decided we wouldn’t pay more than R$50 to get back to the hotel (it would have cost more like R$75-100 from the other taxi).  We flagged a guy in a little 5-seat hatchback and Amlan talked him down like a pro till he finally gave in.  I think there are some aspects of the world cultural experience I may have missed in middle-class America!

I’m particularly glad to be enjoying my continued existence post-Brazilian-taxi.  That guy drove his little hatchback like it was a Formula 1 match.  I held out hope that he was at least marginally sane.  In the end, he got us back home in little enough time that it was indeed only R$50.

R.I.P. spencerkellis.net

Update: If you’re interested in viewing an internet relic, check out old.spencerkellis.net (no guarantees that everything works!)

You’ve probably noticed by now a bit of strange behaviour on the part of me and my websites.  (BTW, thanks to the English for the elegant ‘iour’ in behaviour, and while we’re at it also for the optional long ‘i’ in missile).  Strange blog posts with perl and linux and TinyMCE and syntax highlighting that don’t matter to WordPress and have no relevance to my current Adobe-based digital workflow.  You may also notice a change at www.spencerkellis.net.  What can be happening?

Well, it’s the end of an era.  I’ve officially retired the original spencerkellis.net and in its place I’ve copied over what has been masquerading as photography.spencerkellis.net.  I copied over a few of the articles that got hits regularly on Google (hence the spate of blog postings this evening).  I just want to document a few of the features of my old website before it disappears forever into the warm southerly beaches of internet retirement.

• Designed from scratch using PHP/MySQL/CSS/JavaScript and related technologies
• Database driven; each page in the site was made up of “snippets” and each page’s configuration was stored in a database table (also included backend management interface, see below)
• Close to 50,000 lines of PHP code, more than 2,000 lines of JavaScript, and nearly 2,000 lines of CSS (estimates calculated with linux wc -l command)
• User-based AJAX commenting system with TinyMCE integrated and custom security (never hacked or spammed once completed, and of course that’s not because of low traffice
• Flexible tagging system that spanned articles and photographs
• Search designed from scratch to return results from all site elements including tags, articles, and photographs
• AJAX- and jQuery-based photo browsing in sidebars
• Fully custom admin section:
  • Comment management system designed from scratch
  • TinyMCE article adding and editing with integrated Google Syntax Highlighter
  • Automatic image uploads with Adobe keyword extraction, automatic thumbnail generation, and tracking of ratings and views
  • Fully customizable site organization: user interface to manage what GET variables corresponding to what page(s)
  • AJAX-based interface to completely specify site pages as collections of site “snippets”
  • “snippet” management engine
  • Selection of Photoblog images and “favorite” images

In the end, feature creep doomed the site.  There were a lot of really cool and somewhat novel ideas (note similarities between my snippets and WordPress Widgets), but they required too much for one person with actual life responsibility to fully address.  It was too complex to maintain, and it was too complex to navigate.

When I designed the first revision of the site in 2004,

• I was 24 years old working at Intel as a summer intern
• I had never heard of AJAX or jQuery
• I had very sparse knowledge of CSS and Javascript
• I had never used PHP before
• My first digital SLR was just “a twinkle in my eye”
• I had never used Photoshop
• The world was somehow more innocent

Adieu, mon website.  We grew up together in so many ways.  You will be remembered.

Is this narcissism at its finest or what?

I like and plan to keep the blog and the photography site (photograpy.spencerkellis.net). What do you all think about the gallery and the www.spencerkellis.net? And don’t worry about my feelings, fragile though they may be. It’s not like I spent 5 years of my life working on www.spencerkellis.net.

BTW, I’ve been making an attempt to post photos more regularly to the photography website.  The last 6 are from our vacation to Oregon if you want to check them out.

And I beat a challenge or two in Peggle on my iPod.

I have uploaded a few teasers, some of my favorites so far, to give you a taste of what we’re enjoying.  The pictures below are from Lakeside (first two), Newport (next two), and Cape Blanco (last one).  Lots more to come!

Classic Car Detail

Night Lights on the Lake (4th of July)

Monsieur Jellyfish

Newport Harbor

Cape Blanco Lighthouse

Your source for fashion

To wit, garnish your pajama bottoms with jeans, and add Crocs to taste.  Don’t forget the white socks.

I can neither confirm nor deny the presence of my wife’s feet in this photo.

P.S.  It’s as if fate has taunted me a second time.  Since I posted last week about my Windows Home Server setup, two hard drives have failed.  One was at school and therefore not backed up, but luckily it was mirrored.  The other, however, was one of the drives in the RAID 1 volume dedicated to photo storage!  Madness though it may be, there’s a method and a reason to my backup and reliability efforts.

Emily and I went camping last night.  It was a true adventure, right from when we decided to go to Wendy’s instead of making tin-foil dinners.  So embarrassing, it’s beyond shame.  But we did camp through a rainstorm so that may restore a measure of our self-respect.  With time.

It was a bit of an adventure because this was a dry run for our upcoming vacation, during which we’ll be spending some get-to-know-you time with our tent, air mattress (another indication of our hard-core-ness), and sleeping bags.  Emily’s had some extra back problems lately but she’s slacking on the blog front so you don’t know about them yet.  Anywho, it was a good time to test the waters.

The waters were a little chilly, but we’re alive and kicking.

I broke out the camera and irreverently took pictures of the campfire while people were trying to have thoughtful conversation.  I was especially enjoying the sparks that flew off every so often as you can see in this photo.  A little twist to make the standard campfire photo a tad more interesting.

I dragged Emily back through the mud to the tent for one last picture before we left.  In typical fashion, Emily got to be the stand-in test subject.  This is a job with which she is very familiar, and which she does passionately and whole-heartedly, as you can see.

In spite of the wet and muddy end to our camping experience, we both enjoyed some time out of the apartment and the opportunity to exchange cinder-block for a light canvas material.  Plus, since I made us sit through so many pictures of us in front of our tent, we have a great memory just waiting in the halls of our friendly forgetful futures.

So here’s my proposition: standardize the black sock, just like the IEEE standardized the format of floating point representation.

Emily has been nagging me for quite some time to get rid of my hole-y black socks, so, for the first time in our recorded marital history, I authorized Emily to purchase for me new black socks as replacements. I have been hedging, dodging, bristling, avoiding, refusing, and generally unwilling to allow my hard-earned money to be spent on something so meaningless as a black sock. A new leaf has been turned. I am a new man.

I may actually be able to dress myself properly in the dark.

Below, an F-16 in the middle of a high-G turn.  My friend (a Physics PhD student) says the white-streaked “clouds” on the wings is condensation being lifted off.  Neither of us can figure out why the engine flame (or exhaust or whatever it is) comes out in pulses.  Why not just a solid flame or smoke?

Finally, and almost as exciting, I cooked up a tasty breaktfast-for-dinner course the other day.  I call it Eggs Spencir.  The principal ingredients were eggs, red pepper flakes, diced onion, cut-up sausage, and quartered cherry tomatos.  Everything combined as a scrambled-egg kind of an omelette.  Very tasty!  Too moist for Emily, though–she likes her eggs more like cardboard or drywall than like eggs.  Bless her heart.