Tag: Apple

Today, we hit 3 temples over in the Kamakura region. And since I’m feeling lazy, I’m just going to post some bullet points about them for now:

    Hasudera: MASSIVE Buddha

  • Great pictures thanks to cooperative sky
  • HOT, HOT walk to Buddha
    Temple 2: Japanese shrine (maybe Tsurugaoka Hachiman Shrine?)

  • BLOODY MISERABLE HEAT and stairs on walk up to temple
  • Gorgeous scenary
  • Rest area near top with excellent apple juice
  • Rest area overlooks the city area and the ocean
  • saw some hawks/falcons/eagles flying from rest area, very cool
  • Got a picture of a couple of ladies wearing kimonos outside temple, really like the design of the white one with blue flowers
    Temple 3: Japanese shrine 2 (maybe Hasedera?)

  • Massive and beautiful
  • heat started to go down a bit
  • saw shrine maidens wearing traditional grab, but didn’t get a chance to ask them for a picture
  • had a small museum area with various things of interest: sword, arrows, bows, scrolls, vases, kimonos
    Shopping on way back to hotel

  • bought small something for Mom, K and Grandma D.
  • helped pick out omiyage for K-san.
  • ate dinner with AWelkin and Bryon again, this time also with Y, an old friend of AWelkin’s
  • nice itlian place, had salomn cream penne, very nice
  • got back to hotel late, tried calling Ariesna but got no answer
    UPDATE

  • This morning had e-mail from Ariesna that she’s been having a rough time (smashed her hand) but other than that she’s ok.
  • Also, I had some bizarre dream last night. Don’t remember much, but it seemed like I’d had it before and it seems there was some odd ball drug use going on in the dream. As I said, it was bizarre.

Homestay Day 2
We slept fairly late and then R & M made us brunch. A massive salad with tomatoes and onion, eggs, sausage, fatty ham patties and fresh fruit. After we lazily ate breakfast, they took us to a nearby beach. M-san warned us first that the water was very dirty but we had no better ideas on where we would have liked to go, so it was off to the beach. The whole area was filthy; actually, it was the first time I’d seen so much litter laying on the ground. And water level was really low, so there was something like a 100 yards of mud between the normal beach and the water line. Still, there was a strong breeze coming off the water and the smell of the sea was much like I remember from visiting the ocean back when I lived in North Carolina. So it was very pleasant. Then as we were leaving, R-san bought us some Japanese style ice-cream. Basically it like a slushie, shaved ice topped with flavored syrup but they also added in some cream. It was delicious!
(more…)

I started trying to backup all my music from my iPod to DVD-Rs last night and K3B said it successfully burned all the files straight from the iPod to disc, but upon looking at the disc; it was obviously a bad burn (only the center of the disc had “grooves”). I was busy with other things and didn’t get a chance to work on this any further than that last night.

Today while I was home for lunch, I tried playing around with iTunes & the iPod under Windows some more; it’s free single Tuesday, after all! Initially I didn’t have much luck but I did some more searching online and found more suggestions. Most of them didn’t look very helpful or promising, but one said to drop the iPod into the dock, disconnect the dock from the computer and reconnect it.

For whatever reason, that worked! Yeah baby! I got the new free single and a bunch of MP3s I downloaded the other day; so now I’m good to go with additional music. *joy* 🙂

Over the weekend, I started visiting some MP3 blogs and downloading some of the free tracks out there for extra listening material on my iPod. Today over lunch, I booted my home computer into Windows; so I could transfer those tracks to the iPod1. However it seems I’ve been biten by a bug in the iTunes/iPod software.

See, iTunes wouldn’t launch with the iPod connected; it would start in the background but wouldn’t display the GUI (at least it wouldn’t do it quick enough to satisfy me). If I disconnected the iPod, launched iTunes, reconnected the iPod then iTunes would continue to run but would fail to see the iPod. I tried dinking around with this for a while (rebooting, disconnecting, reconnecting, checking for updates and whatnot) but didn’t get any closer to having iTunes recognize the iPod. Though at one point an error message did pop-up telling me I needed to reformat the iPod.

I started searching Apple’s website, as I remembered hearing that there was an issue like this back in April when the last update for iTunes/iPod was released. The most info I could find basically told me to backup, reformat the iPod and try again. *sigh*

That’s not something I really wanted to hear. I guess tonight I’ll be booting back into Linux; backing up the data from the iPod to DVD-Rs and then trying some more drastic measures to get the iPod working right again.

Oh and the other reason I’m upset with iTunes; is that I forgot to go buy some songs from them over the weekend and hence had zero chance to win a free Powerbook. *double sigh*

1 For the record, I am familiar with gtkPod but it gives me errors everytime I try and get it just to read from my iPod which makes me disinclined to use it to write to the iPod.

As you know, the iTunes music store gives away a free single every week. Well, I was just over poking through their iMixes section and found this list which has a listing for all the free songs. Unfortunately, the songs are only free for a limited time; so you should check out the list right away to get the latest new, free song.