Arrived in Tokyo

Well, I'm here now, and I managed to take very few pictures. The flight over was great. Getting to the hotel was easy. Weather is nice (compared to Ireland). Biggest shock so far has to be the electronic toilet!

Tokyo

Location where I'm staying. Thanks to Yukiko Shima for her maps which helped me pin-point it!

Weather!

Andrea says the weather is Ireland's favorite topic of conversation. As if to prove the point, I'd just like to point out it is very cold here at the moment. OK, on paper it says it is above freezing, but tell it to my ears, they were numb for a hour this morning, and I only have a 200 metre walk to the office!

Actually it is a bit warmer in Tokyo at the moment, and positively toasty in Taiwan, so a reason to look forward to my trip tomorrow.

Yahoo Weather:

• Dun Laoghaire
• Tokyo
• Taipei

Going to Tokyo & Taipei

I'm travelling to Tokyo next Saturday for a week. Poor Andrea will be left behind as usual, but maybe I can get some Hello Kitty stuff for her. I'll be staying in Shiodome, not too far from Ginza (good for shopping I'm told). I'm also going to have a couple of nights in Taipei. As usual, very little time in either location for shopping or sight seeing.

Dun Laoghaire on Google Earth

Google have updated a lot of the maps on the Earth system recently. Fortunately, Dun Laoghaire (and much more of South Dublin) is now available in very high resolution.

The pictures appear to have been taken some day last winter around mid-day (long shadows pointing North).

I can make out my house and the SITA office very clearly, not to mention boats in the marina, the cars in Crofton Ford and on the roads, etc.

For some reason Maps is lagging behind.

Despair, Inc.

If you've ever worked in an office you must have seen those arty photographs with the black background and the little inspirational aphorism underneath, highlighting words such as "Success" and "Team Work". My former boss had a picture of a mist covered gold course with a wise word or two about success underneath. (In fairness it seems to have worked for him, but I think there were other factors involved.)

Anyway, here's a webpage that sells the counter measure for the down-trodden cynics among you. Despair, Inc.

My personal favorites:

Best of all, when you order something you get a very nice thank you note.

Lisbon Pictures, September 2005

At last, the pictures from our holidays are uploaded! After messing with loads of different gallery and album software packages we gave up and I just wrote html manually. I cheated a bit... windows picture resizer tool, multiedit macros, server side includes, CSS, etc. means I didn't have to actually type 380 image names (or more than 100 lines of html) but it was still way too much work. Also, I've no easy way to attach comments to the pictures. The really hard part was what we done tonight, we spent hours picking colours, only to end up with grey!