Tidying up travel writing

Today I knocked off a couple of travel-related chores. Firstly, I wrote up my report on the ISO Photography Standards meeting that I attended in Tampere a couple of weeks ago. I need to summarise the entire meeting and any significant outcomes for Standards Australia, and submit the report to them, within 4 weeks of the meeting.

That took up until lunch time. The weather was a bit rainy and miserable again, so I couldn’t be bothered going for a run today.

In the afternoon I decided to tackle a less urgent travel issue. I still hadn’t finished processing photos and adding them to my travel diary for our trip to Germany and the Netherlands last year! I was partway through the last day in Amsterdam, so there wasn’t a lot to do, but I figured I better get it done, now that I have another whole trip backed up, along with the trip to Japan in June this year. I didn’t want to have three old trips that I hadn’t completed photo diaries for!

For dinner tonight, my wife and I went out for the first time since getting home from Italy. We didn’t want Italian food, so we went to a French crêpe place. Almost every time I go there I don’t have anything off the regular menu, because they always have a couple of specials, and they always look really good. Today was no exception – they had a chilli prawn galette and a butter chicken one! I would have liked to try both, but I decided on the chilli prawn. Normally I’d follow with a sweet crêpe for dessert, but I had that salted caramel tart I bought yesterday still, so I saved my dessert for later.

New content today:

Europe diary, day 6: technical topics and imaging demos

Thursday 9 November

I have terrible luck with shoes overseas. Yesterday the pair I brought here developed one sole in the process of peeling off from the heel. It’s been making a rubbery flapping noise every time I take a step, and was slowly getting worse as the sole progressively peels away from the rest of the shoe. This exact thing has happened at least twice on other overseas trips.

I woke up a bit early this morning, but not as bad as yesterday. M. got a better sleep. We got up just after 07:00 and had breakfast. At 08:30 we left, me heading for my meetings and M. for a cafe for her morning coffee.

Today’s meeting was packed with diverse technical sessions, after yesterday’s marathon on HDR images. Today we discussed image information capacity (using Shannon information theory to measure the signal to noise ratio across an image), depth metrology (characterising depth image cameras), angle-dependent image flare (measuring lens flare caused by light sources outside the field of view of the camera), removable memory (revising a current standard to deal with the fact that camera technology has moved on from removable memory), and vocabulary (revising the list of technical camera-related definitions to update old definitions and add new ones as technology changes).

For the lunch break, I went back to the same Turkish place as yesterday since it was so good. The woman remembered me from yesterday and welcomed me back with a hearty greeting. This time I had the falafel plate instead of the chicken, and it was just as good.

Despite the load of topics, the meeting wrapped up just before 15:00 today, because we had a special event planned for the afternoon. We had to make our way to the Finlayson neighbourhood, which is all old warehouses and industrial buildings, converted into restaurants and tech companies. One was hosting a mini imaging industry event, to which we were all invited.

But on the way back to the apartment to pick up M. I stopped off at a shoe repair place that I’d found by searching online. It was right next door to the restaurant where we’d picked up the key to the apartment, and so on the way. I had some stereotypical idea of an old Finnish cobbler who didn’t speak English, so I prepared by translating a few sentences explaining my predicament into Finnish using Google Translate. It was fortunate that I did, because the shop was indeed run by an old Finnish man who didn’t speak English. I showed him the translation on my phone, which explained that these were the only pair of shoes I had with me on this trip, so I needed either to buy some glue or to get a quick repair done while I waited. He examined my shoe and held up two fingers, saying “two minutes”. It ruined out to take maybe 10 minutes as I waited, thinking we were going to be late for the industry event. He did a bang-up job on the shoe though, for 10 euro.

I collected M. from the apartment and we headed to the event. We got a little lost in the building, climbing the stairs from the ground floor to what we thought was the first floor, but turned out to be the second. So we rode back down a floor in the lift. I think ended up on a kind of mezzanine level, half a floor above the ground level. From there we were confused as to where to go until we spotted signs pointing to an imaging event, which sounded right. Following these we entered a conference room area, where women at the door asked us to sign in on a list if invitees. I couldn’t find my name there, and we had to explain that we were ISO delegates invited by Ari to this event. This got an “ah!” of understanding and they handed us a blank sheet to write our names and affiliations on.

I hadn’t quite known what this event was going to be, and was a little surprised at all this. We entered room with about a hundred people sitting watching a presentation, and hovered near the back until someone brought us a couple of high stool chairs to sit on. The presentation was a series of 5-10 minute presentations given by people from various local imaging tech companies and university institutes here in Tampere. Most had brought demos of their technology, which were set up in a series of small rooms off the main room, and where we could go play with the demos after the talks were over.

But when the talks were done they first had some entertainment! An improv comedy group named Okay 10 performed for about half an hour, doing a series of 6 or 7 different improv pieces. The group was two men and a woman, with one man playing guitar for a few of the skits. He did a whole improv song, using title and word prompts from the audience – the song was named “Nimble Swimming” and when they requested a musical style someone yelled out “jazz!”, so the guy said, ah yes, he’d do it “in the well-known jazz guitar style”. He started singing and the woman occasionally called out audience words that she’d collected while the singer wasn’t listening. He was really good and the song was hilarious. This was the highlight of several good sketches.

After the comedy, we had a stand up buffet dinner, with mixed vegetables, potato rösti, braised beef cheek, braised pork, and falafel patties with spicy tomato sauce, along with beers and wines. The food was pretty good, with the beef cheeks delicious and tender. We filled up, and also went and tried a Microsoft HoloLens at one of the demos, which was fun.

Full of free food, we departed to head back to the apartment. But M. suggested stopping at a cafe for cakes and hot chocolate. It was still very early, just after 18:00, as the buffet had started at 17:00. M. led us to the cafe Kaffila. We passed three or four other cafes on the way which I pointed out, but M. said they didn’t “look cozy”. I saw what she meant when we arrived at Kaffila, which definitely had that “cozy” vibe. I ordered M. a large hot chocolate and asked the woman behind the counter about the cakes. I had my eye on what looked like a lemon cheesecake, but the adjacent cake with layers of cream looked intriguing too. She said the first was a pear cheesecake, which sounded good and I wanted to try it, right up until she said the other was a carrot cake and “that’s my favourite”. Well, the staff favourite had to be tried, so that’s what I had. It was indeed a very good carrot cake, with layers of cream filling.

Now truly stuffed, we headed back to the apartment for the night. The only issue outstanding is that when in the shoe repair place the man asked about my other shoe and I assured him it was fine. But… as I was leaving with my newly fixed left shoe, I noticed the heel on my right shoe starting to peel off… M. cracked up laughing when I told her this and said I’d have to go back and get the guy to fix the other shoe tomorrow.

Europe diary, day 5: ISO meeting begins

Wednesday 8 November

Again we had a bit of trouble sleeping fully through the night and were awake around 05:00. We got up just after 06:00 and had breakfast – the muesli we bought last night.

With time to spare, we decided to take a walk together over to the Tampere Market Hall, a covered market with various food stalls. M. was planning to visit later, perhaps for lunch, and wanted to get her bearings and figure out where it was relative to our apartment. We rugged up heavily for the cold outside, with our newly purchased thermal underclothes, then regular clothes, a heavy coat, scarves, beanie, and thick gloves. We ventured out at 07:45, still almost half an hour before sunrise, though the sky was lightening with twilight behind thick overcast. There were several other people walking around, also rugged up against the cold.

We crossed the swift-flowing and extremely cold-looking river, walking across a bridge that looks like it extends into a main street of the city, with many shops lining the sides. The Market Hall was just a couple of blocks past the bridge. Having found it, we backtracked the same way so M. could remember the route.

After stopping back at the apartment, I grabbed my backpack with laptop and headed off to the Tampere Technopolis conference centre for the first day of my ISO Photography meetings. It’s just a few blocks away, and I passed a nice old church that I paused to take photos of along the way. The Technopolis is right next to the huge Nokia Arena ice hockey stadium. And we actually have a great view of the stadium right out the window of our meeting room, which is up on the top (8th) floor of the conference centre.

There were about 30 delegates at the meeting, from Japan, USA, Germany, Finland, China, and me from Australia. We kicked off with the usual administrative session, going over previous meeting minutes and action items, then future meeting planning. I gave a report on the planning for the October 2024 meeting which I’ll be hosting in Sydney. Then we had liaison reports from associated standards and industry bodies. This led us up to lunch, which we took early to provide additional time for the afternoon technical sessions, which would potentially run long with a lot of discussion.

For lunch I took a short walk outside, a couple of blocks to a nearby shopping centre. Inside was a Turkish street food place named Baba’s, where I got a chicken kebab plate, sitting on tall table with stools outside the small shop, inside the mall with a view over the central atrium. The food was good! Also inside this mall was a climbing facility, with dozens of climbing walls with different themes and challenges. It looked cool, but was closed and nobody was climbing there.

Back at the meeting, the afternoon sessions were devoted to discussions of the two HDR standards the group is working on. The HDR format which was developed quickly into a Technical Specification is going to be upgraded to an International Standard. But the bulk of the discussion was on the new proposal for HDR gain map definitions, to allow mapping to SDR and other displays. This is a topic with a lot of technical details, and input from multiple people. The session went a bit long, past the scheduled 18:00 closing time, which itself was later than our usual 17:00 close, to try to squeeze in an extra hour for this topic.

I walked back to the apartment to collect M. and then we went out for dinner to a place we’d passed this morning, a brewpub called Pyynikin Brewhouse by the river that looked good. I’d checked it out online and booked a table for 18:45. We ordered some garlic bread, which turned out to be fingers of dark rye bread, served with a spicy tomato dipping sauce. What a great idea, making garlic bread out of rye bread! Why haven’t I seen that anywhere else? It was delicious. For mains M. had the vegetable burger, while I had to try the sautéed reindeer, served with mashed potatoes and beer-marinaded cranberries. The reindeer was sliced thin and was tender and tasty, with a slightly gamey flavour unlike any other meat. I also tried the Pyynikin stout beer to wash it down, and that was good too.

M. filled me on on what she’d been doing during the day while I was at the meeting. She checked out the Market Hall, grabbing some snacks from various stalls. Then she spent the day wandering around the shopping area, staying indoors a lot to avoid the cold. She found an artisan market called Stable Yards, consisting of a collection of small wooden buildings that she said was very interesting.

As we finished dinner, I overheard some familiar voices at a table across the room, behind a partition. Sure enough, five of the ISO delegates were there having dinner. We figured we must have made a good choice as one of them was the local Tampere meeting host and would have known where to take the others for a good meal.

We headed back to the apartment for the night, had showers, and rested up a bit before bed. Hopefully we’ll have a better night’s sleep tonight, as we’re both getting very tired by dinner time as our bodies slowly adjust to the time zone.

Late night Zoom meeting for photography standards

I’m up late tonight because I have a Zoom meeting for ISO Photography Standards, beginning at 11pm. I’m on a special ad-hoc committee to consider the issue of skin tone colours on photographic test charts. We specify various International Standard printed test charts that people can use to test camera colour reproduction. And of course skin tones are of crucial importance because of how sensitive we are to when they don’t look quite right, so many of the charts include patches of colours meant to represent skin tones. But the issue is that many of these were designed decades ago, and the representation is mostly based on European, light skin tones, with few or no darker tones.

So we’ve assembled a group of experts from around the world to consider how we specify these going forward, in a more inclusive way. We need to think about and discuss what range of colours to specify, how they should be reproduced and displayed, and how their reproduction should be quantified and measured. It’s complicated by the fact that our visual system is very finely attuned to skin tones, not just as flat colours that might be printed on a chart, but also by spectral reflectance, lighting and metamerism effects, subsurface scattering, angular effects, and salience effects caused by our brain’s innate ability to recognise the difference between an actual person and a patch of colour.

Some of the group members have been discussing in email the potential need to specify test charts with fully three-dimensional models of human faces with synthetic skin that includes translucent layers, which is a far cry from the traditional methods of testing camera colour reproduction with a printed flat chart with square patches of solid colour. So… I expect this Zoom meeting is going to be concentrating on what exactly the scope of our problem is, and how complicated we should go in addressing the fundamental problem of expanding the range of skin tones in our standards.

In other happenings, I basically spent all day today writing my lesson plans for this week’s new Outschool ethics classes, on the topics of Candy for the younger kids, and Fossil Fuels for the older ones. I also made quiche for dinner, using cauliflower leaves as the vegetable in the filling, which turned out pretty good. I’m pretty stoked to discover that the leaves on cauliflowers are not only edible, but yummy.

New content today:

Some family revelations

Friday was a very busy day. I had a two-hour Zoom meeting with the Standards Australia committee for photography, which I chair. This was the follow-up for the ISO meeting I attended in Japan last month, for which I wrote the summary report recently. It was a well-attended meeting, and we had a new committee member to welcome, which was good. I went through all of the technical and administrative discussions from Japan, filling everyone in on developments. And then we had some Australian admin stuff to attend to, like updating adoption of international standards that have been revised, and organising preparations for hosting an ISO meeting here in Sydney in October 2024. I also said I was planning to travel to the next meeting in Finland in November this year, for which I can most likely get travel funding.

After that meeting I went out to pick up Scully from my wife’s work, and then return home in time for three ethics classes in a row.

And then after a quick dinner I went over to a friend’s place for board games night. We ended up with five people attending, and played games of Jump Drive, Gin Crafters, Fujiyama, and then four of them set up for Codenames while I went home a bit early, since I needed to be up a little early today.

Because this morning my wife started a new hobby! She left early to go to a local community garden and do some gardening work there. She came home with a bag of vegetables, mostly various leafy greens but also some potatoes, radishes, and Jerusalem artichokes. I had some of the salad greens on my lunch sandwiches.

After lunch we drove up to Gosford to visit my mother. We haven’t seen her for several months, because of various cancellations due to COVID and other illnesses. We took the souvenirs from Japan for her: a box of matcha chocolates, and a jar of spicy Japanese seasoning to use on her cooking.

While we were chatting, conversation turned to travel, about our recent trip to Japan, and then when we went to Germany last year and saw my aunt (my mother’s sister). And my mother said she was so thankful that we arranged a Zoom call with her sister before she died last year. And then she said, “You know we weren’t really sisters, right?”

I said, “What??”

My mother proceeded to explain that her and her older sister had different fathers, and both were different to the father of their three younger siblings (my other two aunts and uncle). Basically, the man who I’d thought was my grandfather for my whole life until today, wasn’t my mother’s biological father. (Nor the father of my mother’s older sister.) She said that her older sister’s father was an American soldier, based in Germany at the end of World War II. And her own father… she had no idea who he was. My “grandfather” had formally adopted my grandmother’s two children when they got married, and then gone on to have three more children together.

I had no idea about any of this before today. So, the gist of it from my point of view is that… I don’t have any idea who my grandfather is. The man who I thought was my grandfather wasn’t. And both he and my grandmother are now dead, so there’s nothing to be learnt there. My mother says that her mother told her this at some point (roughly when she was middle-aged), and her mother had urged her to go find her real father in Germany, but my mother had stated that the man who raised her was her father as far as she was concerned, and she had no desire to seek out anyone else. So I think the window has closed to learning any more.

It’s not a life-shattering revelation, but it does feel a bit odd to learn this so late in my own life. I don’t think it makes any practical difference, but now there’ll always be a bit of wondering about the truth.

On the drive home we stopped off at a suburb on the northern end of Sydney for dinner. We found a place called Burger Hounds and had burgers. I tried the “Honey Badger”, a fried chicken burger with spiced honey and coleslaw. It was a bit sweet, spicy, and really delicious. This was a really good burger place and was doing a cracking business in people eating in and also take-away orders.

A couple of hours later and I’m still full from that burger…

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Caramel slice photos

Here are some photos of that caramel slice I made last night.

First, the base has been baked in the left, and I’m making the caramel filling.

Caramel slice: 1

I think the base is meant to be a bit more uniform in colour. I could have mixed the flour, coconut, brown sugar, and butter more thoroughly. But it didn’t affect the texture. Second, here’s the caramel filling after baking:

Caramel slice: 2

And then here are the final cut pieces of the slice, with the chocolate top layer:

Caramel slice: 3

And it tastes delicious! Overall I’m really happy with how it went.

Today I spent much of the day writing up my report on the ISO Photography Standards meeting that I attended in Japan, for Standards Australia. I have a meeting next week to fill in the Australian experts committee on all of the events from that Japan meeting.

And finally today, I know that much of the northern hemisphere is currently in the middle of record-breaking heatwaves. The stories have been shown here about heat in southern Europe, east Asia, and North America. But here in the south it’s winter at the moment, so we’re not especially hot, but we are also experiencing highly unusual warmth for this time of the year. It actually really feels like spring already, and it’s confusing many of the plants, with potentially devastating consequences for our crops. There was a story about it in the news today.

New content today:

Okayama: Photography meeting day 3

This morning after getting up and having the breakfast things we’d bought last night from a 7-Eleven, my wife and I walked over to the same coffee shop where she’d had a coffee yesterday morning. This time the staff pointed out that I needed to order something if I wanted to sit there with her (which they hadn’t done yesterday!), so I had to get up and go straight to my meetings.

This morning we had technical discussion on: photographic vocabulary and definitions (updating the existing standard), an additional presentation on HDR held over from yesterday, and the ISO DNG format. Following this we moved into the closing administrative session, which was broken in two by lunch.

We broke for lunch by 12:15 and I met up with my wife at our usual spot. I’d searched and found a couple of bakeries that we could walk to and try for lunch: Hattori Bagel, and Espresso Bar – The MARKET. We walked past the bagel place first and went on to check The MARKET. My wife liked the look of the bagel place, but liked The MARKET better. It looked like a boutique bakery with small loaves of interesting grainy bread, biscuits, scones, and things, They had a lunch menu with a few choices of vegetarian dish plus the soup of the day, and also some sandwiches and focaccia, mostly vegetarian but with a couple of tuna/salmon options.

I chose the brown rice quiche and soup, while she grabbed a fig scone and a lemon/tea scone to have with a caffe latte. We sat at a table outside on a small wooden patio, so we could enjoy the quiet street ambience. The soup turned out to be what I think was green split pea. The quiche had chunks of sweet potato and onion in it and was pretty good.

As we were eating it began raining, out of today’s overcast sky. At least the weather is cooler today. We walked back to the Convention Centre in the sparse but heavy drops, where we parted ways again until later in the afternoon.

Back in the meeting, I assisted with drafting of the WG18 resolutions, and then we had the final administrative session for the working group. But that’s not the end of the whole meeting! There were still TC42 sessions later today, and tomorrow.

The WG18 meeting wrapped up by 14:00 and I returned to the hotel to meet my wife again. After a bit of a rest we went out to the giant Aeon shopping mall across the street so I could have a look around, and also to buy a cheap umbrella which may be needed in the next few days as rainy weather is forecast. I also checked out a couple of game and hobby shops to see if they had any interesting things. I found some Japanese Magic: the Gathering cards, but not for the Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty expansion, for which I might have considered buying a few. So I saved money but not buying any!

We came back to the hotel and soon after I went back to the Convention Centre for the second administrative working group session. After this I went over to the adjacent Crowne Plaza Hotel to meet my wife there in the lobby before we went to the meeting reception up on the level 19 Sky Lounge. It was a standing buffet with a wide range of food: little fried crumbed things, prawns in a spicy sauce, pieces of steamed fish, chicken pieces in another sauce. There were several vegetarian options including roast vegetables, mini quiches, mini sushi rolls with three different fillings, salads, and some other things. They also had chefs preparing fresh sushi, served six pieces to a small wooden box, and plates of freshly fried tempura with vegetables, prawns, and fish pieces. There were also dainty pieces of three different types of cakes, and cut pieces of various fruits for desserts.

TC 42 meeting reception

The Japanese organising hosts and the TC 42 chair gave brief welcoming speeches and then we started eating and chatting with various delegates. There was entertainment: firstly singing by the main woman on the local organising committee, then a musical performance by delegates on recorder, trumpet, and clarinet, with same woman and a man I didn’t recognise doing some brief vocals towards the end of an original composition written by the guy playing the recorder. And finally after these there was a pantomime performance with a narrating drummer announcing various things in Japanese, while a dancer dressed as a samurai performed, then two dragons appeared (performed as large puppets by men inside the dragons), leading to a fight in which the samurai cut the dragons’ heads off.

TC 42 meeting reception

We chatted with various people, and it was good to hear that many are excited to come to Australia again next year when hopefully I will be hosting the WG18 meeting in October 2024. It was a good event, and the view from the Sky Lounge was wonderful, with panoramic windows to the north and south showing off the city of Okayama and the mountains to the north, as the sun went down. The reception was scheduled until 20:00, and in true Japanese fashion the hotel staff announced it was over and ushered everyone out right on time.

We’d had plenty to eat for dinner and so just headed back to the hotel via a 7-Eleven to get some breakfast supplies. Then it was showers and bed time.

Okayama: Photography meeting day 2

I slept a bit better but not fully through the night. We got up at 07:00 and had breakfast in the hotel room with the things we’d bought last night. I had a salmon onigiri and a small set of sushi rolls. My wife had a red bean paste bun, and then tried what she thought was simply some plain type of mini bread rolls, but which turned out to be a “3 flavours” thing with chocolate, custard, and red bean paste in the middle of the mini rolls!

After this we prepared for the day and left around 08:00. My wife walked with me to the coffee shop I found yesterday near the Convention Centre and got a latte there. We parted and I went to the meetings, while she was planning to visit the Okayama Prefectural Museum and Okayamajinja shrine.

The ISO meeting today started with a session on a proposal for measuring the information capacity of camera systems, using Shannon information theory. Then we discussed angle-dependent image flare measurement, followed by depth camera characterisation for accuracy and resolution.

We broke for lunch a little early. I met my wife and we walked north of the Convention Centre to find one of the lunch places recommended by the meeting organisers. We found the place called Sanuki Otoko Udon Nose and were looking at the picture menu board outside, which looked like it had some suitable vegetarian options for her. Then one of the Japanese delegates from my meeting came out and said hello, and asked if we needed any assistance with the Japanese. I asked if there were vegetarian options and he pointed out a few on the menu board outside, so we went in. We all had to wait a few minutes for a table, and my meeting colleague was with two other Japanese delegates, so I reintroduced them to my wife (they probably met briefly last year in Cologne at the beer garden dinner).

A couple of minutes later we were seated at the central bar-like area. The waitress gave us an English menu, and my wife picked a dish of cold udon noodles with kelp and some other vegetables, plus a quail egg. I chose a bowl of hot noodles with tempura prawns and vegetables, which came with a smaller bowl of dipping sauce and a plate of chopped spring onions, sesame seeds, and ginger. My Japanese colleague helped us interpret the waitress, who was asking a couple of questions. He said that the dishes came in three sizes, which he described as 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0. We both asked for the 1.0 versions. She also wanted to know if she should bring the cold noodles first, or wait until the other dish was cooked so we could eat together, and we chose the latter.

The meals came and they were both substantial. The quail eggs were raw. My wife mixed hers through the cold noodles with the sauce, while I put mine into my dipping sauce and swirled it around. We filled up quickly and were very glad we’d chosen the 1.0 size! After paying (cash only) the cheap ¥1700 for the meals, I left my wife at the nearby Hokancho shopping street so she could look around there, while I headed back to the meeting.

The next session was about camera autofocus repeatability. And then there was a long session on high dynamic range photo display and gain maps for dynamic range conversion. This included a couple of interesting demos of HDR image conversion and display, using an Apple HDR monitor to show off the images. This was pretty impressive, and hopefully a preview of a near future with easy access to HDR images and good ways of displaying them for people on all sorts of display hardware.

The digital photography working group session ended by 17:00, but I had an extra two hour meeting until 19:00 with the TC 42 Administrative Working Group, which deals with business matters at the higher technical committee level.

After this I left and met up with my wife again. We dropped my bag off at our room and then walked over to Omame-dokoro Masu, a place described by Google as a tofu restaurant. It had good reviews and many people saying it was great for vegetarians. We found what I thought was the place, but it was difficult to tell as there were three doors close to each other, and no English anywhere in sight. We poked our noses in one and I asked the staff inside simply “tofu?” and they nodded, so we entered and took seats at the bar counter. The place was tiny and there were just seven seats, but there was also apparently an upstairs room with other customers up there.

One staff member typed on his phone and then showed us a translation which said, “Sorry the menu is only in Japanese.” We said that was okay, and I used Google’s photo translate on my phone to get an idea of what was on the menu. We ordered the “peanut tofu” appetiser, “special tofu dumplings”, and “assortment of 6 types of fried tofu – sweet and spicy sauce, spicy miso, plum meat, dengaku, grated radish, fried garlic”. I assumed “plum meat” meant the flesh of a plum. I got a beer to drink and M. tried a “Calpis”, which turned out to be a milky yoghurt drink, which she liked. The last dish arrived first, being six blocks of fried tofu topped with the various things. But one looked suspiciously like tiny fish and tasted to me a bit like it, so I asked after looking up the Japanese word for fish, and the guy confirmed it was indeed fish. So I ate that one, but my wife had the dengaku (miso) one and half of each of the others.

Then the dumplings arrived, looking like fried gyoza. I tried one, and the filling was very suspiciously meaty. I asked the guy, who asked another staff member, who said they had chicken in them. So this was a bit surprising! I ate them, and they were good, but my wife was left not having any. We ordered a couple of other things, this time asking to confirm they were fully vegetarian before ordering. So it was a bit of a mixed bag, with unexpected items and surprise meat in dishes. I wonder how many vegetarians have gone to this place and assumed the entire menu was vegetarian, and came away thinking some of the dishes had surprisingly good “imitation meat” in them!

We were full, and walked home along another different route for variety. We stopped in at 7-Eleven for more breakfast supplies and then went back to the hotel for the night. I grabbed a random ice cream which had zebras on the wrapper, and it turned out to be vanilla ice cream with ripply stripes of chocolate through it, and was quite good. So it was really a day of surprising food!

Okayama: Photography meeting, day 1

Today was the opening day of the ISO Photography Standards meeting that I’m here in Okayama for. It’s being held at the Okayama Convention Centre, which is just a few minutes walk from our hotel, on the opposite side of the main train station.

For breakfast we went to a nearby 7-Eleven and picked up some packaged onigiri and a couple of random sweet things and headed back to the hotel room to eat them. After that, I walked the short distance to the Convention Centre, and found the meeting room, where I was early, but the Japanese admin staff had already set up. There were coffee and tea and some simple snacks, including some specialities local to Okayama:

  • Kibi-dango – small type of mochi
  • Ote-manju – very thin flour based shell filled with adzuki paste
  • Yumesen – “waffle” wafers filled with cream, vanilla or matcha

This meeting is a Plenary meeting for all of ISO Technical Committee 42 Photography, which is the umbrella committee for our technical activities in Working Group 18 on digital photography. The whole committee also includes other working groups dealing with photo printing, image stability, storage, and other issues related to physical photography. We only have a plenary meeting once every two years, and in between the separate working groups have their own technical meetings (WG18 meets three times a year). The first part of the meeting this morning was a plenary session, which was essentially administrative business for TC42 as a whole. It was also the first chance for the new chair of TC42 to lead a face-to-face plenary meeting after the 2021 meeting was replaced by a fully virtual meeting due to COVID.

After that plenary session we had the opening session of the WG18 meeting, again more administrative stuff. The main thing for me was discussion and planning of the meeting scheduled for Sydney in October 2024. We needed to decide on the dates, bearing in mind things like technical conferences that some members may be attending around the same time of the year, so there are no travel clashes. We decided on the week of 14-18 October, 2024.

During the lunch break I went by myself to a curry house not far away and had a Japanese curry with vegetables and a fried pork cutlet.

After lunch we had the first technical session. This discussed work on standards related to low light camera performance with simulation of human hand shake (i.e. not using a tripod), the memory model used for storage of digital images by cameras, and definitions of camera pixel-related specifications (like exactly what a megapixel is and how to count them for camera sensors). These sessions took us through to the close for the day, which finished a half hour early, at 16:30.

After the meeting I returned to the hotel and met my wife (who actually came out to meet me halfway) and then a little later we went out for dinner. I wanted to try an okonomiyaki place that I’d found with reviews saying they did a good vegetarian version. It was just around the corner from CBD Green where we had dinner last night, and in fact we’d walked around to have a look at it then. It was a little hard to tell which place it was, as there was no English signage at all, but it looked popular with a queue of people waiting for tables. So we went a bit early tonight to hopefully beat the queues.

When we got there, the place only had two tables occupied out of about ten, so we were seated and they turned the hotplate in the middle of our table on to heat up. The waitress apologised that they didn’t have menus in English. I said we wanted okonomiyaki and my wife was vegetarian, and she said that was okay. She went down a list of options, pointing at the lines on the Japanese menu: beef, pork, prawns, squid, mix, and also the same again with noodles. We opted for the noodle-free versions, I got the mix and my wife the vegetarian. We were looking forward to cooking them ourselves on the hotplate, but we noticed a guy cooking things on a bigger hotplate at the kitchen/bar area. One set of cooked noodles came out for one of the other tables and they put it on their hotplate and turned it down to just keep it hot. Then soon after they brought our already cooked okonomiyaki over and did the same.

Oh well. We still got to add our own sauce and mayonnaise and kelp flakes, and bonito shavings on mine. And it was really good. Although they were a little on the small side compared to other places where I’ve had okonomiyaki before. But they were very inexpensive. The whole meal, plus a glass of beer for me came to only ¥21,000, or about A$21.

We explored a little further down the street where the restaurant was, as it looked interesting, with dozens of other small restaurants lining the sides. Then we walked back to the station, where earlier we’d seen a take-away crepe place, with a queue of people waiting to order. I fancied one of those for dessert to make the total dinner more substantial. When we got there, there was still a long queue, and I realised why when I saw a sign that indicated that the place was having a one-day sale, and all crepes were only ¥390. In fact, the queue was even longer than it looked, because we saw a young couple try to join on the end, only to be escorted by a staff member outside the food hall area, to an additional roped off queuing area out in the main station concourse, where more customers were already waiting! So… we decided not to bother queuing up for crepes, and I got a Belgian waffle from another place nearby, a peach and strawberry one. It was very good – crisp crust, chewy interior, and good strawberry flavour in the waffle itself, topped with a peach cream.

Back in the hotel we showered and prepared for another earlyish night, with hopefully a solid sleep for myself this time.

Day full of Zoom meetings

I had outschool ethics classes at 8am and 9am, followed immediately by a Zoom meeting from 10-12 for planning the agenda for the ISO Photography standards meeting in Japan in two weeks.

Then at 1pm I had another Zoom meeting, this time with the professor of the university courses I’m tutoring. We’re gearing up for running the Image Processing and Pattern Recognition course again in semester two (beginning in August), and he wanted to go over some suggestions that I ad at the end of last year’s course for improving the course material and presentation. I’d written a list of things, and we went over those so he understood everything. I would be happy to help produce some of the extra diagrams I suggested, but I’m very busy the next few weeks preparing and then travelling to Japan, and also he didn’t want me working on course material without getting paid and he doesn’t have budget for that.

Tonight I have another ISO Zoom meeting, scheduled for 11pm-midnight my time. This is an ad-hoc group meeting for the depth camera performance topic. I missed the last one two weeks ago because I was sick. I may skip this one too, because honestly I don’t contribute much to the discussion, as it’s the others who are doing experiments with the equipment in their labs.

In between I took Scully for a couple of walks, avoiding the large band of rain that crossed Sydney in mid-afternoon. For dinner I made spätzle with split pea soup. My mother used to make spätzle a lot when I was growing up, and I made it a bit too when I first moved out, but haven’t done it much for many years now. I should do it more often.

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