Snow Day

Yesterday it snowed in most of central Japan. Near my home, the snow settled into a very nice carpet -- thick enough to be fun, not thick enough to be a hazard. The park near my home was looking great, and many kids and families gathered around to make snowmen and enjoy the snow.

However, these pictures are a bit bittersweet to me. When I moved to Nagareyama, its Central Park was a mostly forested area. Over the years, it has been developed so that most of the trees were replaced with grass fields (as in the above pictures). They also removed a large stone sundial, and a set of weird, whimsical totem poles I was rather fond of.

I understand that the park needed some renovations: some of the playground toys were falling apart. But I think that the new look is a bit sterile and same-y. I miss all the trees and twisty paths in old Central Park.

Talking about missing old things...

On the New Years day, we ate osechi and I found this very nice old cassette player. It was still playing just fine, although I was told the fast foward and rewing functions were broken (meh, probably fixable), and the radio antena was missing (fixable).

Imagine someone 30 years from now, digging up a decades old smartphone. Between always-online requirements, dead servers, and batteries with limited shelf life by design, I bet most technology just wont be usable anymore.

The osechi was pretty good, though! It was a funny set with a "Grandparent" box (traditional osechi), a "Daughter" box (cold meats and salad) and a "Grandkid" box (sweets and "easy" meals like potato salad and nuggets).

To finish this post on a nerdy note, I ran into a problem when I tried to batch convert the pictures from my camera to web size: The camera naming convention uses a space between date and time, which messes up for i in $(ls) in bash. After a bit of searching, the solution was to add an environmental variable (IFS) telling bash to separate parameters at line breaks, as you can see below:

$ IFS=$'\n'; for i in $(ls); do convert $i -geometry 1000x1000 s-$i; done;