To think he started racing virtual cars in a computer game... reality is definitely more impressive than fiction.

Wonderful images. I've heard good things about Adam's cooking/cook book. How often did you break out the speedlite, just curious.

Do they have the Porsche SuperCup series where you are? They just ran at the 'Ring. Awesome.

His story is real but what isn't said is that he did go to a performing arts school before he hit this particular stage, so it's not as if he walked off the street and did this performance.

still here

Very glad that all came out healthy in the end. Please rest well and we look forward to meeting the new family member in the future.

I hate hate hate hate this too. A company in Japan (nice folks but...) has the license for Giz and Lifehacker in Japan. They got Nick to redirect Japanese IPs to the Japanese site even when we dont want to go to the Japanese site. Complain to Gawker Media I guess. I basically dont go to those sites anymore.

Hato's bar is about 1.5 years old, btw.

Just had the pulled pork sandwich at Hato's Bar today. Highly recommended. No one but me for lunch but dinner is busy and you need a reservation if going with a group.

Sarah, big fan of the book. Bought it on Kindle and am making my way through it. Great idea, and great stories = great book.

Haven't listened to much Winwood since Traffic but loved what they did then. 80's Winwood was pretty painful iirc.

Dave, would love your take on the Lumix LX-3 or the newest LX-5 if you've had a chance to use either. A bit more flexible (optical zoom) still fast glass and 720p HD.

Mari-san, please double-check the links on this post. Many of them do not work.

One more vote for the B&W.

"these days I'm lucky if I sleep past 5:30" Once you have your baby, you'll be lucky if you sleep past 5:30 ...

Thanks for this nice trip report. We're looking for some beaches to visit before the end of summer and we may go out this way (although the sand fleas don't sound fun.)

"a terrible, terrible commercial steward of what remains an extremely innovative culture." Absolutely powerful and accurate. Look at all of the fawning over the iPhone 4's new FacePhone (video phone) technology. Japan AND Korea have had video phone technology since the dawn of 3G networks here in East Asia. They haven't been successful as features. It'll be interesting to see if it is a software thing (of which Apple is the best implementation) or a network thing (Apple's only works on WiFi which makes for a much faster connection than 3G.)

It's something of a cliche but I really do think that time away from your own country really does allow one to _see_ things that you otherwise would have taken for granted. The US is no different than anywhere else in that there's a lot of strange stuff going on. But that the credit card companies have so much control over the behavior of people such that no one uses cash anymore is crazy when there's no 'e-money' in the US (like Edy or Suica/Pasmo.) Lots of other stuff, like health care, food portion size, etc. etc. the list goes on and on, but the "cashless" society of the US is one of those things that really should be legislated properly. If the credit card companies didn't have so much power, there's no way they could replace cash, which is the most efficient payment mechanism.

Replace "game" development with "software" development and you have the same issues writ much larger.

So damn awesome!

Gotcha! Thank you for sharing that. I'm just starting to experiment with off-camera flash (Nikon CLS in my case) and while the learning curve is steep, I'm looking forward to the results.

David, love your images. It doesnt look like you use much in the way of external lighting or strobes. Are you mainly available light? Can I ask what your main setup (camera, most often used lenses) looks like?

Its cool that they let you film the blessing. Normally that sort of thing is not allowed.

Cool episode. Regular users can only post 10 minute segments. You have to have a "director" account to post longer videos.