In 2011, I:
- took 8,198 photos, including 4,352 in Chicago, 881 in Japan, 588 in Portugal, and 337 in the U.K. (and only 71 of Parker). This is almost as many as I took in 2009 and 2010 combined (9,140), and more than I took in the first 8 years I owned a camera (1983-1991, 7,671).
- flew 115,845 km but drove less than 4,500 km
- visited 5 countries (the UK, Spain, Portugal, Canada, Japan) and 8 states (California, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Indiana, North Carolina, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin) in 35 trips. Sadly, this meant Parker boarded for more than 100 days
- spent more than 186 hours walking Parker, which partially made up for all those days being boarded
- wrote 539 blog entries, with the most consistency in the blog's 6-year history (averaging 1.48 per day with a standard deviation of only 0.11)
- got 2.3 million hits (object views) on the Daily Parker, and 1.7 million on Weather Now, including 47,956 and 181,285 page views, respectively. According to Google Analytics, the blog had 28,613 unique visitors, and Weather Now had 26,539.
- read only 34 books, but as these included the first four of the "Song of Ice and Fire" series, it should count as 46
- started and ended the year in the same place (Duke of Perth, Chicago)
- went to only 8 movies, 3 plays, 3 concerts, and 3 baseball games, which is terribly sad
Oh, and I also got a master's degree. (Almost forgot.)
First photo of the year, in fact:
Codey might want to play tug, but Roger couldn't care less:
Codey waits for me to put down the black flashy thing and start playing tug again:
Canon 7D at ISO-6400, 50mm, f/1.8 at 1/250, just a few minutes ago.
I forgot to post this photo from the Tsukiji fish market earlier:
Two of them, the first in Kyoto:
The other in Tokyo:
Tokyo at night, with a 6-second exposure:
(Here's the daytime view.)
Yesterday I took the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto and back. The 476 km trip takes two hours and twenty minutes, averaging 200 km/h including stops.
The best we have in the U.S. over the same distance, the Acela from Boston to Philadelphia (511 km), takes just over five hours on a good day and more if it snows. Chicago to St. Louis (457 km) is scheduled for five and a half hours, but I haven't ever made the trip in under six.
The U.S. made different choices than Japan (or Europe: London to Newcastle, 483 km, takes 2 hours and 50 minutes), because our vast depopulated spaces made an automobile-based infrastructure deceptively appealing. Wouldn't it be incredible if the U.S. experienced some kind of economic situation where it made a lot of sense to start correcting that monumental error? Oh, right.
In any event, I left the Tokyo train station a little past 10 in the morning and got to see this by 2, which is really the point:
Exhibit 1, a very fast train:
Exhibit 2, autumn at Tenryu-ji, one of 17 UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Kyoto:
Exhibit 3, a juxtaposition of transportation technologies:
Explanation, to the extent required, follows tomorrow morning.