At the beginning of October I visited Japan for the first time. I landed in Tokyo, travelled out to Mount Fuji and then west to Nagano Prefecture, finally heading back to Tokyo via Kyoto and Nara. It was a lot to try to pack in to two weeks but it worked out pretty well all things considered.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be documenting in words and pictures my trip, focusing mainly on the locations but with odd entry about the things that seemed constant throughout my time there.

• Pope merchandise – “The pope is visiting the UK soon, and the merchandise is already on sale, but it’s rubbish. This week’s challenge is to show the Vatican what they should be selling to mark the occasion. God will be delighted.” (via @bengoldacre)
• The Creativity Crisis – “The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded.” It’s always bugged me when people refer to ’the creatives’ when talking about designers or artists. This is why! But back to the article… it’s interesting that you can “teach” or at least encourage creativity.

• The November Plan – Post now updated with my recent trip to Austria.
• Apple’s Mistake – “How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that’s just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak.”
• The Daily Shoot – A great idea to help people (myself included!) to take more pictures. I think a lot of us have the will, just not the time or inspiration. Time is hard but inspiration just got a little easier.

• Senior City-zens: The World’s 10 Oldest Still-Inhabited Cities – “I grew up in Europe, where the history comes from.” Maybe Eddie Izzard should have gone with “I was born in the middle east, where the really old history comes from.”
• Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule – If you can’t actually avoid meetings, then at least try to schedule them so you can maximise your productivity. Rings true…
• There’s a pretty significant problem in the new… – I’m starting to expect Graham Chapman to burst in at any second and announce that this is getting far too silly. Apparently any iPhone app that allows “unfiltered internet access,” everything from web browsers to Twitter clients to, presumably, delicious.com clients, now requires a 17+ rating.

• Apple iPhone Developers Mostly Don’t Make Much Money – “Martin surveyed 100 development teams, received 85 usable responses, and found that 52% of the developers had earned less than $15,000 for their efforts and 33% earned less than $250.” Missed this one when it was first published. Bizarre to think that I’m doing better than a third of other iPhone developers!
• Trust, hostility, and the human side of Apple – “When the relationship’s power is so lopsided, the only sensible reason to stay in it is trust. If we can reasonably trust Apple to use its power reasonably and fairly, we can sustain the imbalance.”
• Don’t call what happened in Iran last week an election – Christopher Hitchens’ take on the recent events in Iran.

• Ravenous Clock Runs Backward, Scares Children – Neat.
• Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live – “The point is that making a master teacher into a sacred fetish misses the essence of his teaching. So let us now kill Darwin.”
• Zappos CEO Talks Culture Fit and the Importance of Creating a ‘Wow’ Experience – Interesting article about how Zappos have thrived.

• Market Yourself An iParadigm – “The part I love the most is that the people making the ‘just market your app!’ comment have no real idea how much effective marketing costs. Oh sure, you can go far on viral and word-of-mouth marketing, but it all pales in comparison to even a small banner graphic in the App Store.” Making your application visible is hard.
• Matthew Alexander on Torture – Nice examples of why torture doesn’t work. Worth reading the linked articles.
• Robbery suspect left his address – “Chicago police have arrested a man who allegedly robbed a bank using a threatening note written on the back of his own pay cheque.” Brilliant.
• Reliving Cuba’s revolution – Interesting to see this on “film.” They wouldn’t let us take cameras up there when I visited in 2004. (Plenty of other pictures of Cuba on ZX81.org.uk though!)
• What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting – “Once one understands that a text message travels wirelessly as a stowaway within a control channel, one sees the carriers’ pricing plans in an entirely new light.” I worked on text messaging software back in the late nineties and, at least for GSM, is absolutely true.
• Internet sites could be given ‘cinema-style age ratings’, Culture Secretary says – “Giving film-style ratings to individual websites is one of the options being considered, [Andy Burnham, British Culture Secretary confirms].” The government still seems not to understand how the internet works. If implemented, this will basically result in a system that’s easy to circumvent and is paid for with higher ISP connection fees. We all lose.
• Happy Birthday Earthrise – “Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there! Isn’t that something…” Still very much awe-inspiring even forty years later.
• Fearless: Apple’s Macworld Expo exit is part of its DNA – “In Apple’s estimation, the best time to kill off a successful product or brand is ‘as soon as possible.’ Dropping a winner means creating a new winner to replace it, and that’s exactly what Apple has decided it must do to be successful: create great new products again and again.”
• If programming languages were religions… – Apparently I’m into Voodoo and Taoism…

• The Dumbing Of America – “The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.” The article is about the US but it’s also increasingly true here. Depressing.
• New Indiana Jones movie is dreadful – Oh dear. Like many people I’ll probably still go see it anyway…
• SMS costs more than using Hubble Space Telescope – “Text messaging [is] anywhere from four to 42 times as expensive as talking to the Hubble.”

• Behind the Scenes at the Bay Bridge Construction Site – I saw the construction going on a few times last year, but from a distance while driving past. Interesting to see what they’re doing in more detail.
• Hand-wringing About American Culture – Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge? – “Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.” The article concentrates on the US but I don’t think it’s limited to North America.
• America – more hassle than it’s worth? – Next week they’ll announce that all travelers need to wear orange overalls, the next that all flights go straight to Guantanamo… and then they’ll announce that it’s all an elaborate joke and that they just wanted to see how far we’d go before complainin