Still on the Japan thing...
In the Motomachi shopping street in Kobe, there is a small stationary store. In there, I found and purchased a pad of paper of the sort I used to get when in college. It was smooth, high quality and with fine graduated graph lines.
I spent the rest of the week doing my job (which is why I was in Kobe in the first place), jotting down my thoughts and designs on this pad of paper.
What occurred to me was that the reason I stopped using paper in that fashion, is not because computers got so much better at taking notes but because the quality of the paper and the nature of the gridlines printed on them has gone dramatically downhill since the early 1990s. Bad paper is no fun to use.
If anyone has a line on a good supply of really nice linear graph, log-lin and log-log paper of the sort available in the Manchester University bookstore circa 1990, without having to fly to Japan, please leave a note here.
Showing posts with label Kobe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kobe. Show all posts
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Sorry, but Kyoto is not all it is cracked up to be.
In the past week I have spent 2 days in the air, 1 free day in Kobe, 1 free day in Kyoto, 1 free day in Osaka and 4 non-free days working in Kobe.
In the past I've also spent a couple of days in Yokohama, Kumagaya and Tokyo.
Kyoto is the one with the reputation for being the idyllic temple city. Yokohama, Osaka and Tokyo are the big noisy cities. All most people know about Kobe is that it had a really bad Earthquake a few years ago.
However on my trip to Kyoto, I found it to be louder, busier and less pleasant than any of the other cities. It did indeed have the shrines and temples and I visited some. Rather than being idyllic, they were plomped down in the middle of this noisy city with ugly buildings all around.
Yokohama, Osaka and Tokyo are indeed big, shiny cities with much shopping to be had. However Kobe, as a place to stay for a short trip, seemed to be the best of the lot. It's quieter, you can walk the city and for the tourist who doesn't want to try to hard, there is the Motomachi shopping street, the Sannomyia center gai shopping street, the Sannomyia hondori shopping street and few shrines and gardens of its own.
Kobe seems to be so horribly underrepresented on the internet and so if you Google for "Motomachi" you get things about Yokohama and if you Google for "Motomachi Kobe" you get no pictures of a wide convered shopping street with many good stores, which is what it is.
So if you Google for it and this page comes up instead, trust me, it's worth a visit. I got my daughter a Kimono there. Something I never managed to find in Yokohama.
Oasaka has a way better techy store, but techy stores don't make the family happy when you get home with a box of USB sticks for gifts.
In the past I've also spent a couple of days in Yokohama, Kumagaya and Tokyo.
Kyoto is the one with the reputation for being the idyllic temple city. Yokohama, Osaka and Tokyo are the big noisy cities. All most people know about Kobe is that it had a really bad Earthquake a few years ago.
However on my trip to Kyoto, I found it to be louder, busier and less pleasant than any of the other cities. It did indeed have the shrines and temples and I visited some. Rather than being idyllic, they were plomped down in the middle of this noisy city with ugly buildings all around.
Yokohama, Osaka and Tokyo are indeed big, shiny cities with much shopping to be had. However Kobe, as a place to stay for a short trip, seemed to be the best of the lot. It's quieter, you can walk the city and for the tourist who doesn't want to try to hard, there is the Motomachi shopping street, the Sannomyia center gai shopping street, the Sannomyia hondori shopping street and few shrines and gardens of its own.
Kobe seems to be so horribly underrepresented on the internet and so if you Google for "Motomachi" you get things about Yokohama and if you Google for "Motomachi Kobe" you get no pictures of a wide convered shopping street with many good stores, which is what it is.
So if you Google for it and this page comes up instead, trust me, it's worth a visit. I got my daughter a Kimono there. Something I never managed to find in Yokohama.
Oasaka has a way better techy store, but techy stores don't make the family happy when you get home with a box of USB sticks for gifts.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Isn't Photostitch Nice?
I just tried out photostitch, which is the photo stitching together utility that came with my camera.
The view from my hotel window when panned and stitched together, looks like this.
It is looking at Kobe up the coast North-East ish, with Mount Rokko in the background on the left and the Pacific Ocean on the Right. Zoom into the raise road bit and you can see the same truck twice, because I was panning the camera right to left as it drove right to left.
The view from my hotel window when panned and stitched together, looks like this.
It is looking at Kobe up the coast North-East ish, with Mount Rokko in the background on the left and the Pacific Ocean on the Right. Zoom into the raise road bit and you can see the same truck twice, because I was panning the camera right to left as it drove right to left.
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