A few more blocks of photos:

• Autumn colours at Ginkakuji
• Various places in Kyoto
• Miyajima

The last of those includes possibly my favourite photo of the trip, bright yellow leaves reflected in a polished wooden floor.
Still to be sorted through: night views of Matsumoto castle, more colourful foliage, several panoramas, a fake statue of liberty ( Read more... )

I just got back from a great three week holiday, in Japan (again ;-)). I didn't take my laptop this time round, which was great from a "forget entirely about work" perspective but has left me with hundreds of photos on the camera to sort through and upload.
Here's a first slice:

• Himeji and Fushimi-Inari
• Mount Hiei
• Kinkakuji and Ryouanji
• Nara

A ( Read more... )

I took level N1 (the highest) of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test last month (mostly as part of setting myself a goal to get back into putting more effort into my studying over the last year or so). The results came out today, and I passed!

• Vocabulary/grammar: 45/60
• Reading: 60/60
• Listening: 56/60
• Total: 161/180 (which is a solid pass, given ( Read more... )

I've just had a builder in to partially board my loft and fit a loft ladder so I can get into it. This is something I've been meaning to do for ages, since it's irritating to have a part of my house which I can't access (even if only to check whether the roof is leaking). So now I have boarding on most of the usable part of the loft, and a nice ( Read more... )

I decided recently that I ought to start properly studying Japanese again (for some years I've not really made much active effort, though I have continued reading novels). So far I have:

• Set a goal -- I'm going to take level N1 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test next summer. I think this should be doable with some effort to shore up and de- ( Read more... )

Sigh. This evening I discovered that the bottle of mould spray that had been sat in a carrier bag in a corner of the bathroom had apparently suffered some kind of overpressure event, cracked the lid of the bottle, leaked over that area of the floor and left behind a white crystalline residue of who-knows-what... (photo hereI wonder how much of the ( Read more... )

This weekend's project was putting up bookshelves, something I'd been procrastinating on for the last couple of years. These are modular shelving units which you can put together in a variety of heights, depths and widths, though in this case I'm not really using the flexibility except to have them be shallower than usual so as not to take up too ( Read more... )

I don't go to Japan very often, but when I do I like to make the stay as long as I can get ( Read more... )

So it turns out that the computer conference I'm at overlaps with YaoiCon, and when I arrived to check in the lobby was full of cosplayers ^_^

So I switched current accounts recently; supposedly this is now a fully automatic process where they transfer all your direct debits and payments across, and for 13 months any payments to the old closed account are forwarded to the new one. Luckily I was cautious enough not to trust this entirely, because it didn't work for my mortgage payment ( Read more... )