Staticfree Blog

A while ago at Grendels, I happened to discover an odd characteristic about US currency in infrared: it has special markings! So I decided to do a proper photo shoot using as many interesting sources of light that I had around my home.

These are only a few bits of the spectrum. I wonder what surprises await in other, less accessible parts!

After disabling bitmap fonts in Debian, the default alternative to Helvetica is Nimbus Sans. As you can see below, its on-screen rendering is ugly. Thankfully, Debian makes it pretty easy to disable Nimbus Sans and make fonts look nicer.

I went to Japan last week with my brother Cole, my dad, his significant other, Marie and her daughter, Minna where we met with my youngest brother, David. We traveled to Tokyo and stayed to explore for a couple days. Then took the bullet train to Kyoto where we stayed in a machiya-like hotel and ate bowls upon plates upon bowls of odd things that once lived in the ocean.

After we explored all variety of pagodas and temples over the course of a couple days, we headed over to Okinawa to stay on a military base.

The contrast between a ritzy traditional Japanese hotel and an American military hotel is astounding. The most notable differences were:

1. a poorly-designed ventilation system that was so noisy one had to talk loudly over it
2. general aesthetics and pleasantness; one place encouraged rest whereas the other seemed to find resting in one's hotel to be an afterthought
3. the toilet (of course)

Okinawa is famous for a few native fruits, notably: the Goya - a green, bitter melon that looks somewhat like a pickle, the pineapple, and the Shiisa which isn't a fruit. Shiisa are guardian lions that come in pairs: one with its mouth open to let out bad spirits and one with its mouth closed to hold the good ones in.

We just so happened to plan this trip around the same time that David was getting his promotion, so we got to see him become promoted to Corporal - the first big promotion in the Marines.

We snorkeled in the coral reefs on the north-western side of the island. As I wasn't able to put my glasses on under the goggles, I got to see coral, water and swimming schools of blurs. The water was warm in our wetsuits and the waves weren't too obnoxious. We later went to the aquarium and saw many of the things that lived in said coral. Okinawa is largely made of coral, so many things that are usually rock are instead coral, such as castles.

There are a few notable quirks about Japanese streets:

1. There are numerous vending machines. I only encountered a few of the wide variety of vending machines available.
2. Overly-friendly construction notice signs, complete with inspirational pictures.
3. The crosswalk man has a hat

I made it! I've finally gotten off the North American continent. My lack of Italian skills isn't as scary I thought, due to a common language of money, food and occasional English. I already knew how to read the wine bottles and many of the names of food. With a bit of French, Spanish and metric knowledge, I'm able to get by reading general signage.

I love the metric system: it makes so much sense compared to the highly deprecated and confusing English system. I've been using metric measurements everywhere I go for the past few years and have one place that I still need to convert: the kitchen. Metric measuring in the kitchen is done more by weight than by volume. It's looking like I need to get a nice digital scale.

The only thing I am not down with here is the exchanging of "." and "," in numbers. To me, "." is more important than "," and is something more important to leave in a thing. Dropping a "," in a sentence is less critical than dropping a ".". So when I see that "." is used for thousands separators (which can be left out) and "," for decimal separators, that does not make me happy.

I have some photos online and will be adding more. Check out my ongoing collection of photos from my trip to Firenze.