Standing Desk

I spend a lot of time in front of my computer. A lot of time — there are days when I go from bed directly to my laptop; spend my morning commute, my entire workday, and my evening ride home staring at the same screen; then spend the rest of my evening in front of the machine, with only brief breaks for eating, showers and bathroom.

This is not exactly good for my body, needless to say. Hunching over a laptop hurts my eyes, hurts my back and neck, and ultimately hurts my ability to focus. I often take quick breaks where I walk down the hall and back again to think, have a drink water water and just get out of my chair for a bit. That helps, but it is not quite enough.

This July my back was hurting more than usual so I decided I'd try standing up rather than sitting down. I'd tried to stand and work a few times before but never managed to get comfortable. This time I've figured out how to make it work. Here is my setup:

Improvised standing desk. Note my cool "Cup Noodle" coffee mug. I'm very proud of it.

I found a couple of cinder blocks in a storage room and added a thrown-away cardboard box on top (I don't have a Sony laptop myself). I now also have a cardboard wedge of sorts under the back of the laptop to tilt the keyboard forward. The mouse pad support is just a collection of suitably thick books from my bookshelf. A bit impractical when I want to look something up in one of them but otherwise nice and stable.

Both the laptop and the mouse are higher up than I first thought they should be. With my previous attempts I had the desktop at waist level, with my arms at a 90 degree angle when typing, but that quickly gave me worse back pain than sitting down. This desktop is much higher, about level with the bottom of my ribcage, and my arms angle upwards to reach the laptop. The mouse is midway between hip and chest.

It makes sense. When your lower arms stick straight out at 90 degrees it puts maximum load on the upper arm and shoulder muscles. Our muscles are much worse at keeping our joints in a midway position than close to either end. Imagine a heavy jar full of water in your hand. imagine holding it in your hand with the upper arm straight down and the lower arm sticking right out in front of you. Now imagine the same thing, but with the lower arm angling upwards, toward your chest. Which one would be easier to hold over time?

With a higher surface your wrists also find support on the front edge of the desk and mouse pad, while they're dangling unsupported in the air with a 90 degree angle. Also, the screen comes up to a comfortable viewing angle. It is important to get the height just right though; I really notice when I need a book in the mouse pad pile and replace it with another of a different thickness.


At first, I could perhaps stand one hour at a time. I'd stand up and work until my legs and knees started complaining, then sit down until my back started hurting again. But within a few days my body was adapting and after a week I was standing up most of the day. I do need to move about a bit as I stand, and I continue to take quick walks every now and again. And I do sit down when I read stuff, or write by hand.

Now, two months on, I probably stand about 80% of the time at work. My shoulders are still stiff but my back no longer hurts. My headaches have become much less frequent too; I think that may be because I keep varying the viewing distance to the screen as I move about, rather than due to standing itself.

On my wishlist is some kind of less improvised setup. Ideally some kind of small add-on desk I can put on a normal desk like this. It'd have fully adjustable height, a laptop surface with adjustable angle, a separate mouse pad shelf and a small surface to the left for a book or things like that. And it'd have to be decently inexpensive; my employer is not likely to pick up the bill for anything like this. I may have a go at building something myself at some point, for home use if nothing else.

About the Blog, By The Way…

You may have noticed that I'm posting more lately than I used to. Our paper has been submitted, so I guess it's not soaking up all my writing energy any more, leaving more writing time for the blog. If that is the reason — and I have no reason to believe otherwise — it means I have some fixed amount of writing I want to or need to do every day, one way or another.

I wonder if the writing time I spend on other websites, on email, on paper reviews, on long-form homework and so on also counts? If so, I probably spend more time writing — in three languages no less — than I spend doing anything else at all in my life. And here I thought I'd left the liberal arts behind when I chose a science career…

It's The O-bon Holidays- so what am I doing in this office?

It's O'bon, the yearly summer holiday where many people return to their hometowns to meet relatives, attend festivals and honour their ancestors. Many businesses are closed or working at reduced capacity. NAIST has most of the week off — not even the cafeteria is open — and plenty of people didn't show up last Friday either.

I have three days off too, but I've chosen not to use them now. Instead I'll take those three days toward the end of September. Together with a couple of national holidays it will give me over a week off, enough time that we can fly to Sweden to visit my parents and meet my new niece.

So I'm at work. Not quite alone but nearly so. On the upside it's quiet and relaxing, and there's no seminars or meetings or anything to distrupt you. Even the closed cafeteria has a silver lining: I brought oatmeal, milk and a banana for lunch instead of the usual cafeteria fare. Japanese aren't much for porridge in general so I rarely eat this at home, but now I get to indulge for a couple of days.

Time off or not it's still O-bon, though, and like previous years we're sun-drying our umeboshi. It's a good time for it; the weather is hot and sunny and there is less traffic on the streets.

Twitter is a Conversation- That's Why I Gave Up on It

Cool people use twitter nowadays. I don't like to feel uncool more than anyone else¹, so I made myself a twitter account some time ago. After a brief trial I gave up and I no longer use it.

Tweet, tweet?

I'd mostly forgotten about the whole thing, but I stumbled onto a post about how people who give up on twitter have misunderstood the point. Now, the author is the kind of person who feels that a brief text of 300 words and no pictures is best shown as an embedded Flash applet² so you'd normally just shrug and ignore him, but he does have a point I want to bring up: Twitter is a conversation. And that, I realized, was the very reason I gave up on it.

What happens when you join is, you start following people. People you know, mostly, online or off. And they talk. And they talk. In brief sentences. All the time. Any one person isn't saying all that much, but follow a dozen people and you get a never-ending stream of brief, disjointed comments strobing across your screen.

You're in a large group of people at a party where everyone sits together but they're no longer all talking about the same thing. A couple of people are talking about work over there; another few discuss politics over here. Someone explains how to make the perfect Chicken Balti while another gets advice on stain removal. Many of them talk to people over the phone as well, so you only hear one side of the conversation.

Great at a party I guess. Not so great when it happens on my computer while at work. When I log in to twitter I invite that group to hang around right next to my desk and loudly chatter away. I lose my concentration and can't focus on my job. So I shut it down for most of my day. But this is real-time conversation; when I log back in I drop right into the middle of dozens of ongoing discussions (or monologues, more often than not), with no good way to catch up. I read "Just make sure it's covered with the oil", and I have no idea if it's a curry recipe, removing ketchup stains, car maintenance or sexual advice.

Tweet, tweet, twetwetweeeet!

Twitter is brief, free-form, informal, real-time and conversational, and that's exactly why I don't use it. "brief, free-form and informal" really is just saying that it lacks structure. Structure may be constricting and free-form liberating, but structure is actually important for readers to understand what you're saying.

A typical newspaper article follows a specific structure, and as a result we can skim a newspaper extremely effectively. We can read just the headline for the subject, then jump right to the specific details we're interested in. The article structure - and our experience with it - tells us exactly where to find it. Bloggy short-form essays like this one has a well-defined structure too, and scientific papers take structure to an extreme, all to make life easier for the reader³. Twitter streams lack this structure and become hard to follow, especially when you don't follow the thread from the beginning.

The real-time, conversational nature makes it worse. There's no recaps or summaries, no longer, coherent arguments and no background, so catching up becomes all the more difficult. And when you follow several people - and when they talk with several others in turn - a number of disjointed conversations get all jumbled together in a single stream⁴. You have to continuously follow the chatter to keep track or you'll start from zero all over again whenever you log in.

Twitter isn't the only "conversation tool" out there of course. Most of our communication tools are about conversation. Chat, SMS, twitter, email, online forums, IRC, blogs, multiplayer games, research publications - they're all about people talking to each other, and they all offer some unique combination of speed, reach and longevity.

Chat and SMS have a nearly real-time communication cycle - on the order of seconds - tailored for transient one-to-one conversation. Twitter is just as fast and ephemeral but good for mass communication. Research papers and books are also one-to-many, but very permanent and with a cycle measured in months and years. I guess the classical handwritten long-form letter would qualify as the quintessential one-to-one slow cycle medium. Email is the most long-lived and important electronic communications form we have, and for good reason. It's so very flexible: email supports a communication cycle from minutes up to days or weeks; supports both extremely short and and very long-form messages; it does one-to-one but also group communication; and it lends itself very well to long-term information storage.

Twitter isn't bad. It sits at a particular spot - a combination of speed, longevity and brevity - that proves to be very popular for a lot of people. But no medium is for everybody, and its combination of features just doesn't work well for me.

Not a Tweeter.

--

#1 You might argue that particular train left the station many years ago. I would not disagree.

#2 You would have thought an "information professional" working for libraries would have the minimal sense not to exclude disabled visitors or visitors using devices without flash, especially when there's nothing to gain. Could he be one of those people who write all their emails as embedded Word-files, just so they can choose their own typeface?

#3 Research papers aren't exactly known to be easy to read, but they are - if you're in the target audience. They are written for a very specific reader: busy scientists that work in the same field and get inundated with new papers every week. They need to quickly and accurately see what the paper is about and determine if the information is useful and relevant for them.

Reading a research paper is a skill; a skill you need to learn and to practice. Once you do know how, you can skim dozens of papers in very little time, and be confident you didn't miss anything relevant. If you don't know how, and you have no background in the field, they can be incomprehensible. Which is OK - you don't learn about a scientific field by reading research papers, any more than you learn how to drive a car by reading manufacturer-issued vehicle maintenance manuals.

#4 "Aha, but IRC and chat rooms are just the same!" Yep - and I've never really taken to IRC either, for much the same reason. And at least with IRC and chat rooms you do see both sides of all conversations.

(Belated) Happy Birthday!

We celebrated Ritsukos birthday last week. And as usual for our birthdays, we went for dinner somewhere we would not normally go.

This year we went to Kobe. A quick lunch at a German hot-dog place (Kobe is good for non-Japanese food), a walk around town for a few hours, then a beer at Ebisu Bar right by Sannomiya station. It's a European-style pub where you can sit for an hour or two over a beer and talk. It's exactly the kind of place I often used to visit when in Sweden, and that I sort of miss here. They have some good dark beers on tap too, which is not something we're spoiled with here.

Dinner was at Ito Grill, by Nankinmachi in Kobe. As the name implies it's a steak and grill restaurant, vaguely French or western European in style. We had a terrine; soup; an excellent fried flatfish with mashed potatoes, vegetables and balsamico sauce; their signature beef stew; and dessert. It was all very good, if somewhat light on seasoning in my view (I'm a little too fond of salt for my own good). We had a good view of the charcoal roast oven, and while the stew was really, really good the steaks in that oven made our mouths water just looking at them. Perhaps we'll go again some day, just to try the steak.

Ritsuko got a new camera as her old one died late last year, a Panasonic GF2. I'm pretty impressed by it; a major step up from a small-sensor camera in quality, while remaining small and compact. Anyway, it meant we only had that camera with us, so I don't have any shots of my own from the dinner.

Missing My Mug

I broke my coffee mug at work the other day. I'd just washed it, and the wet mug slipped out of my hands and shattered on the floor.

It wasn't expensive or special. Just a plain white ceramic cup with a wide mouth tapering off to a narrow base that made it easy to use, if a touch unstable; I've toppled it more than a few times, with coffee all over my desk as a result. To my surprise I really miss it.

I've had the mug for five years now, at three different labs, and used it every day at work. Never really thought about it - I don't even have a picture - but I guess I just got used to the mug, and now it's gone.

I brought another mug from home, one I got at the Cup Noodle museum a few years back; it's nice, but it's not the same. It'll take a while. We really do get attached to things, don't we?

Ella

My wayward brother and his girlfriend announced the birth of my niece Ella yesterday. Everybody seems to be fine and my brother seems almost silly happy from the emails I've got. Big congratulations everyone!

Merry Christmas

Akasaka Prince Hotel

It's Christmas Eve, and I'm taking a break from my end-of year panic together with Ritsuko. We've had a non-traditional cross-cultural Christmas dinner (meaning fried chicken, apple salad, cake, cheese and wine) and I'm mellowing out with the last of the wine while writing this post.

To the left is Akasaka Prince Hotel in Tokyo. It's a distinctive building in a pretty well-done 1970's style, and they apparently do some large-scale decorations for Christmas every year. This is the last Christmas though; it's slated to close and get torn down next year. Just to the right, beyond the edge of the picture, is restaurant Stockholm, where we had Swedish Smörgåsbord last week.

Oh, and we've had presents too, of course. Here's mine:

 

Otonona No Kagaku, Twin-lens reflex camera kit.

Otona No Kagaku is a great series of sciency kits for adults, with a new issue every few months. I've been eyeing this twin-lens camera kit ever since it was released early this year, and now Ritsuko gave it to me for Christmas. She knows me only too well I think.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Back Home

We've just arrived home from our Tokyo weekend. I'll write a picture-post thing later, when I'm done with the images. Until then, a few random observations:


* I didn't have real internet access all weekend, and it was wonderful. Well, I did have my smartphone of course, but it doesn't invite you to random surfing for hours on end. I'm bone tired, but I feel way more relaxed than I ever do after a normal weekend.


* We passed a Sony store and I took a quick look at their new e-book reader, the Touch 650. It was, well ... amazing, really. I mean, I almost bought it right there and then, and had Ritsuko - always a voice of reason - not been along I really would have plonked down the money right in the store.

It's an e-ink based reader, like the Kindle from Amazon. Which means it really looks like paper rather than a screen. It's nicely bright and contrasty (black and white photographs look pretty good), and there's a typical "flash" when you change pages. So far, so good.

But it's light. Really light; the weight feels like a thin pocket book, and you could easily hold it for hours on end without getting tired. Could have it in a pocket or in your bag and never know it's there. And it has a touch-screen, so you can navigate by swiping your finger, you can click on icons and type notes right on screen. It even has a simple drawing program that is surprisingly useful; the e-ink screen only has to update a small bit at a time so it doesn't lag. Surprisingly (for Sony), it supports plenty of open formats, so it's easy to get texts on it. No net connection but USB and SD cards are supported. The battery is good for weeks.

I've tried the Kindle 3 too - it has the same screen - and the Sony is just plain better. It's lighter, smaller and the touch screen makes using it much more natural. For reading it handily beats tablets like the Samsung Tab and the iPad; they're heavier (much heavier for the iPad) and don't have the battery life or the paper-like screen.

Why didn't I get it then (apart from Ritsuko reminding me I don't actually need it)? Research papers. A major reason for me to get it would be to read research papers in PDF format. They are notoriously difficult to read well on-screen; I usually resort to printing them. An e-ink screen should render them much better. But I suspect the screen size (15cm - 6 inches) and the PDF reader application just aren't up to the task of showing them properly. I didn't have any example PDF-files with me, and I'm not going to buy a reader until I can test this properly.


* Most places in Japan sell a range of local specialities as travel gifts. "白い恋人" (shiroi koibito) is an extremely popular soft white chocolate cookie from Hokkaido. The name means "white sweetheart" and alludes to the white chocolate and to the wintery climate of the area. Coming back to Osaka tonight we spotted a gift store at the station selling a cookie called "面白い恋人" (omoshiroi koibito). Which means, roughly, "interesting sweetheart" or "amusing sweetheart". That, to me, sums up Osaka pretty well. I'm happy to be back.

That Was Fast

Remember that I'd reached 77kg about a month ago? I've lost another kilo since then, without even trying. There's nothing like pervasive stress and lack of sleep to make you lose weight, I guess. Not that I lack appetite, mind you - I'm plenty hungry at dinner time - but I feel full as soon as I start eating.

Anyway, this is just a temporary problem. Tomorrow is my second vacation day of the year. Ritsuko is going to Tokyo even as I write, and after work tonight I will take the train and join her for a long weekend in the capital. We'll go see a big outdoor temple market in Asakusa, spend an afternoon in Jimbocho (home to hundreds of specialist used book sellers), have Smörgåsbord at a Swedish restaurant and probably spend Sunday in nearby Yokohama and its large, lively Chinatown.

I strongly suspect I'll gain back the weight I've lost, and then some, by the time we come back.

Cold

It really, really sucks to sort-of have a cold. I mean, at least a real, proper cold or an influenza is unambiguous: you have it or you don't. If you have it you're sick and you're not going to do anything but feel sorry for yourself until you get better.

But a sort-of cold isn't a proper disease. You feel sluggish and tired, and your throat is just painful enough to be annoying. But you're not really sick; you can still go about your day, you can still get things done. Of course, just because you can do stuff it doesn't mean it gets done quickly or well.

I've been under the weather for a couple of days now, and today it's evolved into this dreaded sort-of cold. I've dragged my sorry behind around work all day with my head feeling like its filled with cotton wool. With my luck this'll probably linger on into next week, never really erupting into a proper illness, but not going away either.

Seems it's going to be one of those winters.

Seven. Seventyseven.

Seven years in Japan this month. And 77 kilos. Which is right at the upper end of normal weight for somebody my height. And it's 14 kilos less than I weighed when I first came here. I've lost 2 kilos per year since I came to Japan; faster the first couple of years but I'm still losing about 1-1.5 kilos per year. Without any kind of dieting or restrictions; without, in fact, thinking of my weight at all.

The latest picture of myself. We ran into this discarded couch in Kobe a few weeks ago, and Ritsuko took this with my Pentax 67. This scene would make a pretty good band promotion picture I think.

Why have I lost weight? I eat balanced meals - meat and fish and fatty fried stuff, but mostly vegetables, pickles and fruit. It's easier and cheaper to eat local food so I no longer eat pizza, sandwiches or kebabs, and we usually make Japanese food at home. I normally eat set meals, at set times, with no snacks in between. My photography hobby and my daily commute have me walking 10k steps or more every day.

A typical weekday set meal for us - salmon, miso soup, a couple of vegetable side dishes and rice. The "set" bit is important, I suspect; we all tend to eat not until we're full but until we have no food left. There's more rice and stuff in the kitchen if I want it, but I rarely take more since it's not right in front of me. Had the extra food been on the table I would probably finish it all.

I was able to break with a lot of old habits and set up new ones because I moved. It's much easier to break old habits when your life is changing, and moving to a different continent where you know nobody and don't speak the language would probably qualify as change. I was able to quit Swedish chewing tobacco ("snus") - a highly addictive form of tobacco not available in Japan - with minimal pain at the same time.

77kg is nice, but ideally I'd like to drop another couple of kilos; my ideal weight is around 75kg. At this rate I'll probably get there in another couple of years. Good enough for me.

Tsuyu

Tsuyu, the rainy season, is declared for the Kansai area. It's about one week late - spring and summer has all been later than usual this year. We can look forward to a month of damp, rainy weather. Everything has an upside of course; photography is often more interesting in bad weather than in bright sunshine.

We've set the first batch of umeboshi and have another two to make over the next few days. We also set a jar of dark rum-based umeshu; we'll see how that goes. Maybe we'll try whisky umeshu next year.

And finally congratulations to my little brother and his girlfriend, as they are pregnant (well, just the girlfriend obviously) and expect to become parents in January. I really have to start working seriously on my "disreputable old uncle" persona.

Packed Week

We have distinguished visitors, in the form of my parents, here in Osaka. They spent last week in Tokyo, and visit us here this week - we had dinner last night, we'll show them Kobe and our favourite Indian restaurant there tomorrow; that sort of thing. At work I have a very looming, very definite deadline for a paper revision, and a submission deadline for another conference is approaching fast as well (how I'll make both conferences - separated by 18 hours and one continent - is a question for later). I need to get started on some administrative stuff for this summer and there's a pile of recent papers on my desk begging to be read. I believe I'm supposed to get a bit of actual modeling work done as well.

Which is all a roundabout way of saying that I'll not be posting a whole lot here for the next week or two. Or I end up posting more than usual instead, in order to vent a bit. I write here as a fun diversion from my usual worklife after all, so it's not impossible.

Disorganizer

Not my desk.
But it could be.

I'm not an organized person. I mean, I'm really not organized. I have "could be useful" emails by the thousands in my inboxes. Most of my documents are completely unsorted, with helpful names like "brain5.txt". There'd be no point in me getting a nice desk as I'd never see it under piles of books, papers, unwashed coffee cups and long-forgotten forms anyway.

It's not just general messiness either. I tend to forget about seminars and meetings unless I get reminded, and I neglect administrative deadlines as a matter of course. I can never remember passwords, so I write them down - but then I forget where. Worse, I recently completely missed a submission deadline (not the one I've been working on), which is not just inconvenient, but fairly serious.

Last week I got the idea that I should try some kind of computer scheduling program. I looked around a bit and found one that's gotten a lot of good word of mouth. Simple and straightforward to use, and integrates nicely with my other desktop tools.

So I try to install it, but get a message to the effect that GTG can't be updated because it's already running. It turns out I already had this idea in January. I'd downloaded an earlier version, started it - and forgotten all about it. I found it open behind some ongoing blog entries, a forgotten instance of Octave and a couple of open PDF files.

 
So much for that bright idea.

Merry Christmas!

We're in Hokkaido for Christmas, where we're relaxing far away from the stresses of city life. We had a sleep in, had a long walk in the snow-covered countryside, I've just returned from a long soak in the hostel's hot spring bath, and with any luck we'll be stuffed to the gills with sushi and beer by tonight. And just so you see what we're leaving behind:

Crowds gather along Shinsaibashi shopping street to celebrate the true meaning of Christmas. Go ahead, click on the image; it looks much better large.

Huge Friendly Duck says Merry Christmas!

Sunday

Yay, a completely free Sunday! It's been hectic lately, with work, the JLPT test and all, so I decided I'd take this Sunday off. I would not read any research papers, not study Japanese, not even check my email (well, not a lot). I could develop some film, I could read a book, I could snuggle with my wife, I could ...

"The building fire inspection is next week so we need to tidy up the balcony. And it's New Year in just a few weeks so we might as well give the balcony a thorough cleaning while we're at it."

... I could spend the day scrubbing a year worth of grime off the air conditioners, the bay doors and the walls, I guess.

Now it's Monday morning. My shoulders and arms ache whenever I move. My hands are still red and swollen from the cleaning liquids, and they hurt from scrapes, cuts and abrasions - plaster looks good, but it's like cleaning rough sandpaper. I'm happy to be back at work again, where the most physical thing required of me is to occasionally lift my coffee cup.

I did get to develop a roll in the morning, though. We had a wonderful mushroom pasta for dinner. And the balcony looks great.

Taisho - prelude and warning

Ritsuko is traveling while I'm staying behind to work. But yesterday was Sunday so I went to Taisho ward in Osaka - that's part of the harbour area - to take pictures. Lots of cool industrial facilities and harbour installations. I've yet to process the pictures so a full post will come later.

However, a timely warning about something I've forgotten: Clouds are not a good sun blocker. The sun will burn you even if it's overcast. My face, underarms and backs of my hands were crayfish red when I came back yesterday and I still look vaguely ridiculous today. Oh, and it hurts. At least I did use a hat part of the time so my face isn't as bad as the arms.

Takeaway message: Use long sleeves. Use a hat. Use sunblock. Even if it's cloudy and looking to rain.

Not going to Sweden

I'm not going to Sweden. Not exactly news, true; I'm not going to Shanghai, Shizuoka, Swaziland, Switzerland, Svalbard or the Seyshelles either. The point is that, while I'm not going to Sweden, Ritsuko is.

She's going for a week to see my parents (and my sister, who's also visiting) in Borlänge and do a bit of sightseeing. Also, she's studying Swedish here in Osaka, but there isn't much opportunity to use the language here. A trip to Sweden gives her a good opportunity to practice. I would join her - we have a lot of fun on our trips together - but I'm just too busy at work to take any time off right now. That's good for her Swedish of course; without me there to translate she'll have to use it for real.

I'll join her the next time instead. And we'll make sure to take a short trip together later in the year. Meanwhile I'm staying alone in Osaka, stressing about the project, melting away in the sweltering summer heat and missing Ritsuko very much.

Summer.

Tsurumi

I'm in Yokohama - actually, in Tsurumi, north of Yokohama proper - and preparing for a research meeting tomorrow and Friday; don't expect any substantial posts for another few days in other words.

This meeting is oriented around poster sessions rather than talks. This is good: posters mean you get to talk one-on-one with people doing research you're interested in. But every poster submitted - our included - has a 1 (one) minute talk telling everybody why they should come by and check it out.

This is hard. This is really hard. I've done this kind of poster presentation before, and it's really difficult. I can talk about our research of the cuff for ten or twenty minutes, no problem. I can do a one-hour seminar with some preparation. But condensing it all into 60-90 seconds - including title and contributor names - is really tough.

And then you have to actually deliver it in that brief time, with a hundred people looking at you (well, they're mostly surfing the web, but still). You can't "iummm" or "ahh", or "well" or "maa" no matter how much you may want to. I'm a champion "umm"-er, but one good "ummm" - delivered with confidence and gusto - could eat up half the time you have. If I would try an unscripted delivery I wouldn't get as far as the names of my collaborators before people start forcibly pulling me off the stage with a hook.

So yes, I'm going to sound stilted and wooden when I rattle through my presentation tomorrow. Not a major problem; anybody with an interest in our work will get as much detailed, unscripted explanation as they can stand.

Statue at the soccer stadium in Nagai park, Osaka. Yashica Mat with Kodak Ektar film (Fuji has some real catching up to do here). No connection to the above; I just like this shot.