weblog of roderick kar

waiting at the lounge for boarding in kansai international airport now. boarding time is 17:45 local time. i got lucky with an upgrade to business class just like when i came.

i was too tired at the end of each day to write anything. but i did manage to wrap up each day with a quick review and select of the photos taken each day. i have uploaded them to flickr. they are:

when i return, i hope i can refine my selection and attach more meaningful tags to them.

i have also shot quite a bit of video footage. it will be fun to create a 90 seconds video that summarize the trip.

in the airport now waiting to board. got a free upgrade to business class. a good start of a vacation. only managed to upload 2 sets of photos to flickr yesterday. they are on miho museum i took last april.

this set is getting to miho from kyoto via train and bus:

i don’t have time to get fancy with writing captions and organizing the rest of the photos, so the other set is just a whole bunch of photos i took at miho.

i ended up making a copy of the 120gb of photos i took in the last trips on a portable hard disk and bringing it with me to osaka to keep working on them …

in less than 24 hours, my dad and i will be on our way to osaka. yes, i know it has been many weeks, if not months, since i last wrote. of course, i have good reasons. i moved into a new apartment on 1st april (it is not a joke) and, for the first time in 2 years, i got super busy with work. so i am actually in very high spirits now and looking forward to the new challenges of new projects at work and living on my own for the the first time in my life when i return in 8 days.

meantime, i am still busy with unpacking. my living room (which also doubles as my study) is filled with opened boxes. not to mention the unopened boxes in the kitchen. and i haven’t started packing yet for the trip! because of the works and the moving, i also haven’t had time to plan for the trip either. lucky in a way, because i am traveling with my dad, i won’t get into adventurous mode for this trip. so i will be visiting places that i have already visited probably a few times. because my dad won’t have the patience to wait for me to getting around. so today is all about unpacking and packing. hopefully, i find time in between to take a quick look at my photos of my last two trips and organize them into attractions for storing on my iphone. in that case, i can let my dad to choose which places he would like to go visit. i have a hunch i will be updating this blog quite a few times in the next 12 hours or so.

i went to kansai end of april last year and just missed the cherry blossom season at its full blown. i did manage to catch a glimpse of what it is all about when i visited miho museum. i was completely taken away by the beauty of miho’s architecture and the tranquility of its surroundings. i spent at least half an hour to walk the 10-minute walk from the entrance to the museum which was covered with cherry blossoms. miho is definitely on the itinerary this time.

except for miho, i didn’t get to see any cherry blossoms. so i bought a blu-ray on cherry blossoms as consolation when i saw it on display in a shop in kyoto. i have kept the disc playing since early this morning so i can jog down the places worth seeing and match them against the cherry blossoms forecast website. the disc also serves great as background music while i pack.

i wrote a letter to the editor of south china morning post a couple of weeks ago but it didn’t get published – a first for me. maybe it is a sign that i should quit writing stuff for audience of the brick and mortar media. afterall, especially for this story, the internet is a much better medium because it is about a very inspiring talk which can be viewed on youtube or ted. if you like what you read, you can play the embedded player of the talk down at the bottom. the talk is almost 20 minutes long and i have tried my best to summarize it within the 400 words limit imposed by scmp on letter submission. below is the letter:

Barry Schwartz, an American psychologist, gave a talk on virtue and practical wisdom at the annual TED Conference in the US last month. He explained how excessive incentives had demoralized work and how excessive rules are impairing American health care and education. He gave several compelling examples. Though given entirely in the context of the US, I find two relevant to Hong Kong.

Practical wisdom, Schwartz quotes Aristotle, “is the combination of moral will and moral skill.” Schwartz notes the job description of a typical hospital janitor involves only odd jobs and lacks anything to deal with human beings. But by employing moral skills to improvise and make exceptions to their job descriptions, a few janitors have displayed moral wills of care and empathy towards the people that have come into their ways while they perform their odd jobs. It reminds me of the unfortunate Caritas Medical Centre incident. If only a few involving had possessed adequate moral skills, a tragedy might have been avoided. According to Schwartz, any work involving interaction with human beings is moral work. And moral work depends on practical wisdom, not job descriptions.

Schwartz argues excessive regulations diminish moral skill and smarter incentives still demoralize moral will. As such, they are not ideal solutions to the current financial crisis. He suggests remoralize work by celebrating moral exemplars and acknowledging moral heroes. He mentioned Aaron Feuerstein of Malden Mills as a moral hero. Malden Mills received US$300 million from insurance in the 90s because its factory had burned down. Instead of retiring or re-locating to a low-cost manufacturing country, Feuerstein decided to rebuild the factory in order to keep his 3,000 employees. He even kept paying them in full during construction just because it was the right thing to do. I first came across this story from 60 Minutes on ATV World. Ironically, the show has been cancelled by ATV recently. Who knows? Maybe a re-run of the story might have had inspired a few executives (including those from ATV) to think twice about their downsizing decisions.

Schwartz says if teachers and organizations strive to encourage and nurture moral skill and moral will, individuals will strive to become ordinary heroes by doing what is right. He believes practical wisdom is the most important virtue because it allows other virtues “to be displayed at the right time and in the right way”.

I just learned from engadget that Kindle for iPhone has been released. I installed it on my iPhone immediately and my first book was downloaded to my iPhone in less than 2 minutes. I have captured all its glory and posted on Flickr:

I have 28 books on my Kindle Library and I am trying to download them all to my iPhone.

Magazines are not synchrnozied though.

I was pleasantly surprised when greeted by a pair of non-disposable chopsticks during my first visit in 2009 to my favourite kaiten sushi restaurant in Causeway Bay. I have been bringing my own chopsticks since, ashamedly, only a few months ago when I finally heeded the warnings about how demands for disposable chopsticks are accelerating deforestation which in turn worsens global warming.

A few days later I visited for the first time a newly opened salad place in Central. While at checkout, the cashier explained to me how they encourage customers to purchase and re-use their own bowls by offering 2 free toppings to returning customers with their own bowls. They all sounded “green” enough to me, especially when my bowl was actually given to me for free under their opening promotion, until my order for a soup was handed to me in a disposable plastic container. Then, as if the container wasn’t counterintutive enough, she offered me disposable utensils and a plastic bag to carry my food upstairs as I had chosen to dine in. I kindly declined both because I happened to have brought my own of both. This shop touts its root from New York. Since its Hong Kong website has only contact information, I visited the chain’s New York website and found the concept of “re-usable” bowls is indeed a very big deal to them because it is about “making environmentally conscious decisions”. Whilst I have never visited any of their New York establishments, my own experience at their Central shop is more like helping them to save costs in cleaning bowls than helping the environment.

Eating with my own utensils

But we don’t have to look far to see socially responsible companies making “true” environmentally conscious decisions. The same company in Hong Kong that operates the sushi restaurant above also operates a chain of coffee shop, also imported from the US, in Hong Kong. A shop near my office has been storing a tumbler I bought from them for almost 2 years. Every time I fill up my tumbler, they take HK$3 off my bill. Did I mention they also wash my tumbler for free?

My tumbler

To quote Nobel laureate Al Gore, “The climate crisis presents us with an inconvenient truth. It means we are going to have to change the way we live our lives.” I don’t mind the inconvenience of carrying my own bag and eating utensils but I do mind carrying a bowl for a company that does not truly practise “making environmentally conscious decisions”.

An edited version of the above appeared as “Environmentally conscious’ claims sometimes miss the mark” in the “Letters to the Editor” section of South China Morning Post today.

The salad bar in Central is Just Salad.

The coffee chain is Starbucks.

The kaiten sushi chain is sen-ryo 千両.

Both Starbucks and sen-ryo in Hong Kong are operated by Maxim’s.

The following video was shot using the “latest” Canon Full HD consumer camcorder my wife gave me as Christmas present last year, which is only 2 weeks ago. It was the first video I shot using the camcorder’s built-in flash memory because I was testing it right out of the box in the shop. After spending 2 weeks with it, I must say it is an amazing camcorder. It is light and compact in size. I carry it with me everyday. Compared with my other HD camcorders, it beats them in both performance and video quality. It starts up quickly and performs exceptionally well under low-light conditions. But, sadly, I just learned today Canon has announced a new model – SF10, at 2009 CES, which is due to release in February. It spots a bigger and faster lens, which generally translates into even better video quality under low-light situations. I might as well get my wife’s money worth by embarking on a shooting spree in the coming weeks. Anyway, as the old saying goes in gadgetjunkie land, never trust an upgrade with your money that only has a minor upgrade in versioning. In this case, from HF10 to HF11.

I have always wanted to write a daily journal while I travelled. Ideally, at the end of each day, I would seat in front of my laptop in the hotel room to tag and organize photos I had taken on that day and write about interesting stuff I had encountered. Of course, my “good” intentions never amounted to anything. Otherwise, I would not be left with tens of thousands of photos grouped only by dates taken.

For the purpose of this blog, I have decided to write about the photos and videos that I will be working on instead of writing in the style of a journal to retell my past trips in chronological order. Now that I have started to write, I might have better luck during my next Kansai trip (which has been confirmed for eight days beginning 8th April, 2009, assuming my Kansai bug had not bitten me again before that) to really get into writing a journal.

Now, get back to the subject of this entry, the photo below depicts my first encounter with momiji:

The photo was taken on Saturday, 22nd November 2008 while I was trying to squeeze my way out of the platform of JR Saga Arashiyama Station (嵯峨嵐山駅). Arashiyama (嵐山) is one of the most popular momiji attractions in Kyoto (京都). In fact, as you can tell from the photo, the first thing that greeted me when I stepped out of the arriving train was a mountain blanketed in momiji. The second phenomenon that had awed me was the sea of people that had literally flooded Arashiyama, like below (click below to visit my “Arashiyama: Sea of People” album on Flickr):

I have visited Kansai in autumn before but I missed the momiji season every time. So, until my most recent trip in November, I had only seen either yellow or fallen leaves. But, don’t let my experience scares you. It is actually very easy to find the right timing and the right places to visit during the momiji season. If you google 紅葉, you will find many websites that feature interactive maps providing frequently updated information on the colouring stage of momiji throughout Japan. They also list momiji attractions together with information like getting there and rankings of popularity by readers. Because they provide forecast on the upcoming momiji season, they make very good planning tools for momiji trips. I have planned my last itinerary almost entirely based on information provided at http://kouyou.nihon-kankou.or.jp/ . The beauty of these sites is one doesn’t even have to know Japanese to comprehend because there are plenty of self-explanatory maps and pictures.

Next up is more momiji from Arashiyama.

The idea of building and maintaining a dedicated website to share my experiences, mainly in the form of photos, in the Kansai region of Japan only dawned on me while I was returning to Hong Kong from Osaka two weeks ago. Apart from serving as a cyber memento of my visits to Kansai during the last three years, such a site would also give me a much needed incentive to start tagging the tens of thousands of photos that I have taken there with meaningful descriptions rather than just organizing them into dates taken.

I also believe that I will be somehow being “forced” (not in an entirely bad way) to research more in-depth on the region by maintaining a site that is actually about the region. Which can only help enriching my future journeys exploring Kansai.

Although it wasn’t really a blog that I originally had in mind but nowadays setting up a blog is the quickest and easiest way to establish a presence in the Internet. As the blog entries build up, I might have a better feel on how to tweak the site to make it more interesting. Now that the first entry is posted, I can start working on the second entry to show some momiji pictures I took during the most recent trip.

In less than 15 minutes (10 a.m., San Francisco time), Apple Inc. will begin hosting a special media event that has “Let’s Rock” as its tagline. The “Let’s Rock” event has been heavily hyped since its announcement exactly one week ago. The tagline and the familiar silhouette that accompanies the invitation suggest an iPod related event. A refresh of the current lines of Shuffle, Nano, Classic and Touch had been expected and is inevitable since they have already shown their age. Except for Shuffle, I have had owned either previous or current models of all the other iPod lines. I currently own the following iPods:

I never saw the need of a Shuffle because even cell phones made couple of years ago could do a much better job than any Shuffles had been able to do. So I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple drops the Shuffle line completely.

I have owned 2 previous generations of the iPod Classic when they were still known as just the iPods.

I still own a 5th generation iPod Classic that I take advantage of its 60GB capacity to store most of my iTunes music library. Its capacity is not big enough to backup my iTunes library of both videos and music though. It is attached to my car stereo most of the time. Until price of flash memory comes down significantly coupled with significant increase in capacity, I think there will still be demand for the iPod Classic. So I hope a new Classic with at least 250GB capacity will be released today.

Pictures purported to be that of a real Nano 4G started popping up all over the Internet last week. Those pictures conveniently confirm the drawings of the unconfirmed Nano 4G that had surfaced since July. The Nano line is the only iPod line that I have owned all the generations.

If those rumours of a vertical Nano with 16GB hold true, the Nano 4G will be the first of the Nano family that I won’t be interested to own. I want a Nano iPhone!

It has also been rumoured that the iPod Touch family will undergo some minor cosmetic changes that come without increased capacity beyond its present 32GB limit. With iPhone 3G availably widely at contract prices that are way below that of the iPod Touch, I doubt if a minor facelift and price cut would be enough to attract buyers.