·:[ Leefe rates the world… ]:·
• • • • •

Walking though Harajuku I was greeted by this visage staring down at me from a clothing store. Dark glasses, goatee, frilly shirt, bad jewellery… looks like a role player.

Actually, it reminds me of number role players I know in Sydney. And they probably just left a vampire freeform.

Is that a manga character I see before me?

Or a new movie super hero?

No, it is Symantec Man.

Just beside Shinjuku station, outside Lumine Est, last night I noticed a giant inflatable figure. Wondering what new manga, or perhaps a new super hero movie, this figure was here to advertise I walked closer.

With a little disappointment, and some mirth, I read the sign behind its feet. Seems Shinjuku. The giant figure here to protect, or possibly enslave, Tokyo was Symantec Man.

Looking closely at the sign behind the leg you will see that this is Norton for Symantec.

Saw a Nissen blimp moving round over Shinjuku the other night. It was was hovering over the station and had to rise quickly to get over the Takashimya building.

Interestingly I haven’t previously noticed any blimps over Tokyo. I have heard the occasional Chinook helicopter, but no blimps.

Maybe they are just too quiet to attract more notice, competing with the bustle of Tokyo life.

Been taking geotagged photos with a camera phone here is Japan. I though this would make it easier to add photos to Maps in flickr.

Well it doesn’t!

I spent a long time trying to workout where the ‘use geotag data in jpeg’s EXIF‘ command was when adding images to the map. It doesn’t exist. No where to be found.

It appears though, there is a setting hidden in flicker that tells flickr to use the geotag data in photos as you upload them. In flickr go to Your Account, click on the Privacy & Permissions tab, and you can find the Import EXIF location data setting.

But it only works for new or reloaded images, not existing ones.

Bit of a oversight don’t you think?

You would think that, if your jpg has EXIF geotag data, when you went to add it to a map flickr would think “hmm, this this photo has geotag data. I’ll ask the user ‘Would you like to use the geotag data to place your image on the map?’“. But no, it doesn’t work that way.

So you are stuck in an all or nothing situation. Either all your images with geotags are marked on maps, or you have to add them all manually. Come on flickr/Yahoo, it shouldn’t be that hard to implement it for individual images.

(I’d like to say thanks to Jannis Hermann for having a post about geotags in flickr. Everything else I found was about how to use flickr to geotag photos.)

The sun setting over Enmore Park

Walking to Marrickville Metro just after 8pm last night, Monday 3 March 2008, and all the street lights went out. Houses too. Well most of them as, interestingly, the odd house’s lights stayed on. Must have been on a different grid?

For around 45 minutes between 8 and 9 pm there was a blackout in parts of Enmore and Marrickville. I later found out from the local 7 Eleven that it affected their store in Petersham too.

So, not a small thing, but looking at online new papers and none of them seem to have picked it up as a story. Must not be very interesting. And the Energy Australia site is quite useless if you want to find out about blackouts or other faults.

Or, maybe it was just my imagination? It never actually happened?

I think Woolworths Marrickville Metro would have something to say about that. With main power out Woolworths was surviving on generators designed to power it for 20 minutes. Only important things had power, the registers and half the lights.

As you can see from the picture below, they were manually closing all the doors as they tried to speed all the customers through the checkouts and close the store.

It is disappointing that, while the blackout in the inner west last July got a reasonable amount of coverage, this one has received none at all (that I can find).

It is interesting to see some of the juxtaposition of architecture around inner city Sydney. Like this nice terrace of Federation houses just off King St in Newtown, with the big ugly Telstra building sitting in their backyards.

Man standing outside shop pondering flowers.

Took this shot last night and thought it was an appropriate one for Valentine’s day.

Camperdown Memorial park children’s playground is in disrepair. From the pile of empty bottles outside the playground it looks as if there was a party in the playground. And a rowdy one at that.

The lock on the gate is broken. So without an ever constant eye a child may escape. Or a dog may enter.

And both sand pits are full of cigarette buts. Not to mention the odd bottle cap and piece of glass. Not really the thing for a kids playground. I can see some kid slicing their foot open.

The sandpits need someone to run them through a sieve, like they do at the major beaches.

Now the broken swing I can’t definitely blame on the apparent party, but it is another sign of disrepair.

Considering inner city Sydney has a baby boom, it would be nice if facilities for children were kept in better repair.