Processing a few photos

Today I processed the photos from the other day. It managed to take me all day, even though I only did about 20 different photos, with about 5 different subjects (so only 5 different descriptions and keyword sets).

Here are some of a hoverfly I didn't get any ID shots of, and so won't upload to my photo website:

In the evening I watched 'The Bullet Train' with Mauser and Bo. It is part of a Sonny Chiba boxset, but Sonny Chiba is not in it a lot, and doesn't do any fighting or anything. It is very similar story-wise to Speed (or should that be Speed is very similar story-wise to this film). Although the film is two and half hours long, I thought it was very nicely paced, and with a good amount of twists and turns. The vegetable ocarina guy also appears to be one of the bad guys.

Annoying airline website booking

Most of today I was just writing an article for my photo tips website.

In the evening I played on Secret of Mana with Mauser and Bo and did some more work on my ebay wordpress plugin.

I also booked the flights for mine and Mauser's Ukraine holiday in October. It was quite annoying.

For getting there, we booked a flight with Wizz Air, but they don't seem to do any return flights in November. So I had to book the return flight with BA. But BA's website would only let you pay in US dollars. The BA website was set so that my location was the UK. The website address was britishairways.com, so we tried britishairways.co.uk, but that just redirected to the .com site.

It had a currency conversion thing, but this just showed you what the equivalent price was in GBP, it didn't let you choose GBP as the currency. You'd think British Airways would let you pay in British pounds.

With Wizzair, their website says that when flying with Wizzair Ukraine, you get one piece of hold luggage included for free, but must specify your luggage when booking. But then, when you add one piece of hold luggage when booking, it charges you £17. I checked the website for contact details, but they only have premium rate phone numbers (70p/minute + standard network charges). So rather than waste money phoning them, probably being on hold for ages, and then likely being told that you do need to pay for all hold luggage, I thought I'd just pay the £17 fee.

Wizzair also charge a £7 fee for paying by card, but £3.50 for paying by bank transfer. But their bank account is not UK based (I think it was in Hungary). And it didn't look like I could do an online bank transfer to a non-UK based bank account from my Santander account. So I had to pay by card and pay the £7 fee. At least you're protected if Wizzair go bust or something when you pay by credit card.

Photoing

This morning I went out in the garden to see if there were any insects to photograph, but there didn't seem to be any around. So I went on a walk down the old railway line to see what it was like down there. Unfortunately it was still just (boggy) grass down there, no insects other than a bee fly, a beetle, a couple of other flies, and a spider. The blackthorn was flowering in some areas though.

In the afternoon I wrote up yesterday's blog post and uploaded some more old insect pics to my photo website.

Another thing I have been doing the last few days, is continuing my search for similar services to Photoshelter (i.e. sell Rights Managed images and prints). Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be anyone else who offers this service. I do think there is a gap in the market here, but building a service like Photoshelter would be quite expensive and time consuming.

Here are some more of the alternatives I looked at:

• Pictage - doesn't offer image licensing, appears to only use their own (US based) print lab
• theimagefile - offers rights managed image licensing and prints (though possibly prints would need to be self-fulfilled - the website doesn't seem to give much info). As well as using them for a website, they also have a centralised image database like a stock agency. According to their website prices start at £5/month, quite reasonable. But as far as I can tell potential clients need to sign up before they can check the price of a rights managed license.
• ThirdLight - offer PhotoBox Prints (Worldwide shipping) , self fulfilled prints, and Rights-Managed E-commerce Downloads. No info on prices, and I couldn't find any links to example sites hosted using their service.
• Photo Cart Pro - self hosted gallery / cart solution. One time charge of $329. Can't see anything about Rights Managed Licensing, presumably you would have to create this yourself.
• IPN Stock - One-time setup fee: $595 (USD) for IPN to build and customize your site and $195 per month. Presumably stock sales only and no print ordering. Also requires 40 megabytes image files minimum.
• BlueMelon - Looks like they only offer prints from their own lab. Offers image licensing, but looks like you have to set your own pricing structure. Whenever I clicked on the 'products list' option under the buy option on any member's photo, it came up with a js pop-over with a loading icon, then went to a blank page.
• Sutterfly - Website and prints, but no licensing
• ExposureManager - Prints and downloads, but doesn't appear to support RM licensing downloads
• MorePhotos - Gallery and prints, don't appear to offer image licensing
• PhotoBiz - appears to just be shopping cart software, no licensing built in and everything self fulfilled

In the evening today I watched a James Stewart film with Mauser and Bo. It would be interesting to see a western film with Nick Cage, and see if he is any different to James Stewart.

Beepa-bah-poo

Yesterday and today I have done basically the same thing.

In the morning and first part of the afternoon write an article for my photo tips website.

In the afternoon sort and upload to my photo website a few old insect pics. Then go in the garden and try to get some insect photo. Unfortunately I have not been very successful with this. These are the best pics I got. They are either not good enough for my photo website, or I didn't get enough shots of the insect to facilitate an id.

After dinner play on Secret of Mana with Mauser and Bo. Then work on my wordpress ebay plugin.

Various

This morning I updated my pog website then went to Church.

In the afternoon I uploaded a few old insect photos to my photo website and played on Secret of Mana with L and Bo. We also watched the latest Yoshi Electron video.

In the evening I worked on my google profile pic and also did sculpey painting.

Trying to record a video

I spent most of this morning trying to get Camstudio to work so I could record a tutorial video. At first the video quality was rubbish and jerky. Various info suggested installing the K Lite codec pack to add the Xvid (and other codecs), but I installed both x32 and x64 versions, and reinstalled Camstudio (trying different versions) multiple times with no difference.

Eventually I found a recommendation for a codec called Lagarith, and once installed, this did show up as an encoding option from Camstudio. But then I had more problems with the cursor just being recorded as a pointer, and also the filesize quickly reaching 4GB and then the video becoming corrupted. (My C: where the video was being recorded to is NTFS, so I don't think there is actually a max 4GB filesize).

I couldn't work out to fix those problems, so I downloaded a demo of Camtasia, which worked perfectly. Thankfully, the trial version doesn't seem to have any limitations, and lets you save your video with no annoying watermarks or anything. While the trial version was good for doing this video, I don't really want to pay £200 for some software I will only use very occasionally.

If they offered a basic version that just records the screen, but doesn't offer adding captions or editing the final video, and sold it for about £30, I would probably purchase a copy right away. It would be like Camstudio, except that it works.

In the afternoon I recorded, edited, exported, and uploaded my video using Camtasia. Then most of the afternoon I spent in the garden. I pruned back some hedge style plants near where the blackbirds are currently building a nest. There was a nice frog that jumped in L's burning tin, and got a rusty nose. He jumped out of the tin, but later he jumped back in it, so I took the tin over to the pond. I had to give him a bit of encouragement to jump in the pond though.

In the pond there was also a tadpole with legs and feet. It must have overwintered as a tadpole. We have some frogspawn laid a few days ago in the pond as well.

In the evening I had a look at using the Photoshelter API. After doing a bit of this, I wondered if anyone else had already made a Photoshelter PHP class. When I searched for this, I came across a blog post mentioning a similar service to Photoshelter I'd not heard of before - Photo Deck. Checking their website, they seem to be very similar to Photoshelter except that they don't offer prints, and they don't take payments either. But they do manage the shopping cart, licensing, and code side - you give them your paypal details, and the actual payments would be processed directly by paypal. So Photo Deck makes no commission on any transactions (unlike Photoshelter).

The main benefit (for me) of Photo Deck would be that you can link directly from your website to the image licensing page on Photo Deck. They also offer an API, which appears to be slightly better than Photoshelters (looks like you can update image descriptions etc, which I don't think you can do with the Photoshelter API).

But Photo Deck only does one thing I can't easily do myself - extensive rights managed licensing pricing. Whereas Photoshelter does this, plus provides payment processing and prints from labs in the US and EU. Pricing appears to be pretty similar ($30/m for Photoshelter standard a/c, £20/m for Photo Deck).

After this I looked for more Photoshelter alternatives. Fotomoto offers prints and licensing, but only 3 levels of RF licensing, not RM licensing. LicenseStream only offers a licensing solution, no prints, and costs the same as Photoshelter ($30/m). I also found this software you can install on your own site - gallery and licensing only though, and $600 - PhotoBox.

Websiting

This morning I changed the CTH website KML (again). I decided that actually I was displaying too much info in the info bubbles in google maps, and this made the long thin info bubble windows either go off the top of the viewing area, or make the marker go off the bottom of the viewing are. It looked nice in Google earth though!

So instead I changed the KML to just include the address, and a link to the relevant webpage on the CTH website for more info for each marker.

I did a bit of work on my ebay wordpress plugin. Then I started working on adding a button to my photo website to allow ordering prints and licensing images via Photoshelter. I haven't actually signed up to Photoshelter yet, but I want to get everything ready to go so I don't waste my trial.

I started off with quite a large button with a shopping cart icon on the left, some text and the Photoshelter logo on the right. I want to include the Photoshelter name so that a user isn't surprised when they click on the button and are then redirected to the Photoshelter website.

I did some research on buy button placement. The general consensus seems to be that it works best in the top right corner as this is where most sites put it (and so users have come to expect it to be placed there). The opinions I read also strongly suggested that you should do split testing to see what works best. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done, particularly as would only be able to track click rates, not sales.

After this I realised that actually using a shopping cart icon on the button could be confusing. The button does not 'add to cart', but just redirects the user to the Photoshelter website. So I changed the button to remove the cart icon.

I decided to upload a few more pics to my photo website, and spent quite a while researching descriptions for some beetle photos. Then I checked the photos, and I'd already written descriptions. Doh!

I spent the rest of the afternoon and part of the evening cutting out some pogs in Photoshop, and preparing my pog website update for Sunday.

After dinner I also watched the final episode of Frozen Planet and two Popeye cartoons. The Popeye cartoons are really funny. They are totally random and un-PC. For example, Popeye punches a big Native American chief, who flies out of his clothes and lands on a rock, and is actually Gandhi.

Various

I spent most of this morning still trying to fix a map problem with the CTH website.

In the afternoon I wrote a blog post for my photo website, and then spent quite a while checking my emails.

In the evening I watched Frozen Planet and a couple of Popeye videos with Mauser and Bo.

Doing stuff but not actually getting much done

This morning I processed a pano from Monday, and then spent most of the rest of the morning and afternoon preparing it (and the pano I processed yesterday) for upload. (And actually uploading it).

This is what I had for lunch - half Stilton and half mature cheddar cheese on toast. Yummy!

In the late afternoon and early evening I also made a cake, but I forgot to add the Baking powder, doh!

For the rest of the evening I was trying to sort out some KML for the CTH website.

I randomly received this issue of Popular Photography magazine in the post today. I do subscribe to Pop Photo digitally via Zinio, but the cover of this photo is different to the Zinio version. Judging by the contents listed on the front cover, it is the same contents though. I would guess it is a UK edition, while my Zinio copy is the US edition. Bit strange to just to receive a free copy in the post.

Trying to fix a website

This morning I added a couple of recipes to my recipe website, sorted some pog images, and started checking some stats for my websites.

After lunch I carried on checking the site stats, and found a problem with one of my sites. The site had a pop-up div with a transparent grey overlay behind it. But the grey overlay wasn't showing up. I spent most of the rest of the afternoon trying to figure out what the problem was, and how to fix it.

I never did figure out what the problem was though, my local dev copy of the site worked fine, but the live site didn't, and I couldn't see any differences in the code. The overlay was created using jquery tools, so I tried the latest version of that, but that didn't work at all and just threw a javascript error.

Then I tried to post about the problem on the jquery tools forum, but I just kept getting an 'authorisation required' message when I tried to post a question. (Yes, I did sign up and was logged in). After doing some more research it seems that jquery tools has not quite been abandoned, but is not really being actively developed any more either.

Searching for jquery tools alternatives, it seemed most people suggested jqueryUI. So I tried that, but in the end I actually just re-used some other code I had written elsewhere that does the same overlay job.

In the evening I watched an episode of David Roberts (NHK Let's learn Japanese), and processed one of the panos that I took yesterday.

Article writing

This morning I marked up (with HTML) 3 articles, and wrote one article for my photography tips website. After that I went down the park to take a pano of the daffodils by the river.

It had been sunny all morning, but when I came out of the house I could see there were some clouds blowing towards the sun. So I walked to the spot where I wanted to do the pano as quickly as I could, in order to try and beat the clouds. But that meant that I got there just as the clouds covered up the sun. Then I had to spend quite a while just waiting there until the sun cleared the cloud again. Typical!

I had lunch when I got home, then copied across the photos and geo-coded them. I checked my email, then spent the rest of the afternoon finishing off the photo tips articles. Most of the time was spent finding relevant CC licensed images on Flickr, but adding them to the blog also takes a bit of time.

In the evening I watched Rise of The Planet of the Apes with Mauser and Bo. It was okay, but it seemed more like it was setting the scene for a story rather than having a proper story.

Websiting and looking at Zenfolio, Smugmug, and Photoshelter

The past week I had some food photos to take and process, so that took a bit of time. But most of the week was spent working on the CTH website, which I took over administration duties of on monday.

I thought it was going to be a simple job of just updating it when people email me something to add on it. But actually it turns out I may have to be a bit more pro-active and request any info for updating it myself. The main problem was that it hadn't been updated since 2010, and all the pages were static HTML pages that must've been created using a visual editor.

This meant that the pages were full of loads of span tags, inline style declarations, font tags, etc. They even had quite a lot of layer tags. I'm not exactly sure what they are, but have a faint memory that they might have been Netscape's version of divs. Anyway, this mess of tags meant that the pages were practically impossible to update with hand coding as there were just too many tags interspersed throughout the content.

So I had to rewrite the entire site from scratch. I used PHP on my end, so that I had one file containing the header and nav, and then one file for each page that contained the content, header, and title for that page. To rewrite each page I copied the text from the existing page on the website (when viewed in a browser), and then marked up the text in HTML.

On Friday I had finished this, and then wrote a PHP script to loop through all the re-written pages and save as .html files. There were a few problems I'd missed (mostly CSS issues in IE). After fixing these, I could then upload the .html files to the website so it was up to date.

The main CSS issue I had in IE was that I had a dl where the dt had clear: left and float: left, and the dd had float: left. In 'normal' browsers, this meant that each dt would start on a new line, and would be followed inline by the dd. But in IE, each dt started on a new line (correctly), while the dds were all floated next to each other at the top of the dl. The solution was in IE not to float the dds (so add *float: none to target IE6-7).

Another issue I found after uploading the files was that urls with an & in them (url encoded as %26) didn't work. I think they generated a 400 Bad Request error. I couldn't be bothered trying to find out why, so I just changed those urls to remove the ampersands. I think the problem is just that it is a windows server (which is probably buggy).

For today, I watched 'How Green Is My Valley', and made some Choux Pastry. I thought it would be difficult, but actually it was really easy.

I have also been looking (the last couple of days) at different options for handling image licensing and prints for my photo website. I looked at Smugmug, Zenfolio, and Photoshelter. Smugmug only has very limited licensing options, just based on the size of the image the user wants to purchase. Zenfolio lets you create your own licenses, so you can have as many as you want, and set your own prices for each license.

But what I didn't like about Zenfolio is that the 'products' are just all listed together. So if you have 100 different licenses, the user would have to scroll through them all, looking for the one they wanted. I also thought the products part wasn't highlighted particularly well. Zenfolio seems to make use of AJAX, but with javascript turned off, images don't even load. There is no way to link to the products page for a particular image either.

Photoshelter meanwhile has a drill-down system for licensing, so it is easy for a user to get exactly the license they want for an image. Unfortunately, they also make use of AJAX/js, and there seems to be no way to link to the licensing or print ordering page for an image. Photoshelter is also extremely expensive ($30/month).

Smugmug, Zenfolio, and Photoshelter all seem to offer a range of printed options from printers in both the US and Europe.

It's annoying, because all three services have a considerable cost, but none do what I need. But I can't really code the functionality needed myself, as it would mean setting up a merchant account with a bank to take credit card payments. And I would also need to set up some system with the different printers (which would likely be very difficult for an individual with no known demand for print products to negotiate).

I think that I may well try Photoshelter for a couple of months as they come closest to what I need. But if I don't get any sales, then it won't be worth the $30/month cost. I am guessing that it will be money down the drain since I have only had two requests for licensing so far (over 2 years) via email, and neither of the requests ended in a purchase. But I won't know if I don't try.

I still need to look at it a bit further to see how I link my existing images to Photoshelter so that I can link through to Photoshelter from each image on my website to allow purchasing a print or license.

Pingle Pangle

When I switched my PC on this morning it said the filesystem may have become corrupted and it needed to do a chkdsk. The chkdsk did modify some files, but unfortunately doesn't give the file names of the files it modifies. So after the chkdsk had completed and the PC was up and running, I opened the Photoshop files of all the panos I added descriptions to yesterday to make sure they were still okay.

They all seemed okay so I started doing a backup, which showed that a few .xmp files and one .pts file had a size of 0 on my hard drive. These must have been the files modified by the chkdsk. So I copied back over the versions from the backup, and then did a backup.

I carried on preparing the panos I'd been working on for the last few days for upload, then had a meeting about doing the CTH website. After that I finished uploading the panos.

When that was done I tried to see what stock library / libraries Bjørn Rørslett uses, so I could try and sign up to them too. I thought I had made a note of them before, but couldn't find them. When checking his site, I came across a technique he uses, which he calls the Multitemporal Technique. It is quite simple - take 3 B&W photos of a subject, then use each photo as a colour channel. But it is not something I have ever thought of, or probably would ever think of myself. A very interesting and creative idea.

On Bjørn's site he says that his images are handled internationally by the Science Photo Library. However, looking at their submission guidelines, they require photos that are 36MB when open with 8 bits/channel as a minimum. The 12MP images from my 450D are 34.8MB, so just under their limit, and the guidelines say not to resize files to meet the minimum. So I can't sign up with them unless I got a higher MP camera. The other thing their guidelines say is that they have the worldwide exclusive right to license any images you submit to them. So you can't also upload any images you have with them to other agencies, or license the images yourself as well.

Next I checked Corbis, they require 50MB TIFFs, but do allow interpolation. They recommend a minimum native image size of 11MP. However, they have a rather strange policy of requiring a minimum black level of 5 and max white level of 250. I can understand wanting images with the maximum tonal range (no blown highlights and no solid black shadows), but having a policy like this does not ensure that. All it means is that would you loose 10 tone levels. If a buyer then expands the tonal range back, information will be lost and the tones will become interpolated.

I also looked at Getty, but looking at their submission categories, they only seem to accept News, Creative, and archive (old) images.

In the evening I set up a copy of the CTH website in my dev environment so I can work on it, and then did some work on it.

bliddle bloddle

This morning I updated my pog website, then went to Church.

After dinner I had to go to a safeguarding thing at Church. I didn't really have to go, but they said last week that everyone should go. I thought it was going to be a health and safety thing, but actually it was about abuse. Although the thing was just over 2hrs long, I think the important points could have been covered in 5 minutes really.

If you think someone may be being abused / abusive you should report it. That was the main point really.

When I got back home Mauser said I had to play on Secret of Mana for a bit. So that was good, but also annoying at the same time since it meant I wasn't getting work on descripting my panos. After that I started work on doing the descriptions for the panos, but Adobe Bridge was showing Japanese / Korean / Chinese characters as empty blocks.

I spent quite a while trying to figure out what was wrong, thinking the XML file where Bridge stores it's keywords must have got corrupted somehow. Eventually I just tried restarting the PC, and that fixed it. I am pretty sure it was a Windows problem as the characters were also showing messed up in Scite and Wordpad as well as Adobe Bridge. Now they are displaying as the correct characters. I've never had such a problem with Ubuntu, Windows is so annoying, especially considering the cost compared to the free Ubuntu.

With that fixed I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening writing descriptions for some panos. In between waiting for the metadata writes to save, I looked to see how well the Tokina 10-17mm fisheye works on the Canon 5D Mk II. Hans Nyberg has a nice comparison vs. the Canon 15mm fisheye here: Canon 15mm Fisheye - Tokina 10-17mm fisheye at 15mm. It shows the Canon lens to be quite a bit better than the Tokina near the edge. Then I found a comparison between the Canon 15mm fisheye and Canon 8-15mm fisheye lenses. That shows the new Canon 8-15mm to be a bit better than the 15mm. So the Canon 8-15mm should be quite a bit better than the Tokina 10-17mm fisheye (as you would hope given the price difference).

The reason I was looking at that is that I was thinking of buying a Canon 5D MkII as my new camera, with a Nikon adapter so I could use my existing Tokina 10-17mm fisheye lens on it. Although the camera body is quite expensive, being able to use it with my existing zoom fisheye and my macro lenses would make be quite helpful. But if the Tokina fisheye doesn't perform that great on it, then I am even less sure than I was before.

Pano processing

Most of today I was processing a couple of Scotland panos. In the evening I also played on Secret of Mana with L and Mauser and tried making some plasticine Pikmin.

Article writing and stats checking

This morning I wrote an article for my photo tips website. I would guess about 1/3 of the time was spent trying to find something to write about, 1/3 finding suitable CC licensed photos to illustrate it, and 1/3 actually writing the article.

In the afternoon I was checking stats for my websites. I found that for my photo website I didn't have any stats. Looking into it, I found that I had the wrong log file name in the server config for the website. For updating the site config on the server, I have local copies of the site configs that I update and upload. But the local copy had the correct log name in it. So how on earth I managed to upload a config file with the wrong log name in it, I don't know.

I uploaded the correct config file and also renamed the wrongly named logs to the correct names. So hopefully next time the log processing script is run it will update the stats with all the missing data.

I didn't notice any other big problems when checking the server stats, so next I moved on to checking the stats in Google Webmaster Tools. For one of my sites, it gave some sitemap errors, to do with my geo sitemap:

Status: Invalid XML tag This tag was not recognized. Please fix it and resubmit. Parent tag: url Tag: geo

I thought maybe I'd made some mistake in my geo sitemap, but according to this thread here: Why does Webmaster Tools warns about the geo tag in Sitemaps? and this thread: Discussions > Sitemap Protocol > Geo Sitemap produces warning this is a bug with Google Webmaster Tools. Unfortunately, the bug has been around for several years, and Google have not fixed it. It would be nice if companies would fix bugs in their existing software / products before they start working on new (buggy) software / products.

Everything else looked okay, except that the rich snippets tool wasn't detecting the microdata on my recipe website. When I checked the page, it didn't actually have any microdata!

It seems that Wordpress strips all microdata from posts when you save them. I found a post that said if you don't use the visual editor / disable the visual editor, then it won't strip the microdata. However, I don't use the visual editor. I disabled the visual editor as well, and tried again, but wordpress would still strip the schema.org microdata.

The post also suggested using a wordpress microdata plugin, so I tried that. Unfortunately I couldn't get it working. Next I tried just editing the post directly in the database (via phpMyAdmin), and that worked okay.

After that I tried deactivating all plugins and using the default Wordpress 2010 theme, to see if that would stop Wordpress stripping the microdata properties. Unfortunately it didn't work, and wordpress still stripped the data. So I updated the posts via the database. Some of the older posts used the hRecipe microformat (rather than the schema.org recipe microdata), and they had saved okay. I checked the Rich Snippets tool, and both the hRecipe microformat and the schema.org recipe microdata posts were now showing up correctly.

As far as I understand, using schema.org microdata to mark up content is what Google currently recommends. Of course, there are also microformats and RDFa to do the same job as well.

When I was done with that I started checking my site stats on Bing Webmaster tools.

In the evening I watched Comanche Station, another Randolph Scott western, and the same plot as all his other films. Still quite good. After that I finished checking my sites stats on Bing Webmaster tools.

Making business cards

This morning I uploaded the panos I was preparing for upload yesterday. I also did a draft of a recipe.

In the afternoon I worked on making a business card design. First I went through my photos and found 25 photos for one side of the business card (so for 50 cards, I get two of each photo). I wasn't sure if I should put any other info or branding on the photo side of the card, so did a google and found this thread: What do your business cards look like? - Canon Digital Photography Forums. The start of the thread is old and all the pictures have been removed, so I went to the end of the thread (thankfully it's still active) and worked backwards.

I was kind of surprised that the large majority of photographers did not use any photos at all in their business cards. They just used a minimalist design with either some shapes or text only. I didn't see any reasoning given for not using photos though. I would hope that using a photo helps your business card stand out from from other typography / vector based cards.

For adding a QR code, I used qurify.com. I ordered the business cards from Moo.com, and it said they should be delivered by Wednesday next week.

Panoing

This morning I updated my pog website, then went to Church. It was raining and on the way back from Church there was a cold wind that gave you brain freeze.

In the afternoon and evening I processed a pano, wrote a couple of descriptions, and prepared a couple of panos for uploading to my pano website. It took a long time because with one of the panos I kept finding something wrong with it, fixing it and saving it, then finding something else wrong.

In the afternoon I also watched an episode of NHK Let's Learn Japanese. David Roberts is tasked with a nice bit of US Imperialism - trying to promote American food and culture in Japan.

In the evening I also played on Secret of Mana with Belly and Mauser for a bit.