Memories… is a random series of memories of my trips to Asia in the late 80s and early 90s. One of the very unexpected features of backpacking around China in the late eighties and early nineties was how frequent I would end up booking a passage on an ocean liner. Just these words alone feel [...]
Katano near Osaka is one of those very typical small towns that surround the major cities in Japan – big enough to retain their status as an independent city, but too close to a major megalopolis to ever attract any of the spotlight. We are here on a regular basis since we have family in [...]
We found this place several years ago, unlikely enough only a few miles away from where my parents-in-law live near Osaka, and we’ve been back this year since it had left such a great impression on our first visit. The Hoshigaoka Sewing School must have been closed many years ago but it was then reopened [...]
Yesterday morning I got up an hour early at 5am and after some breakfast I loaded up my bike and pedaled through the still-dark Sausalito. Going south, following the waterfront and then the steep climb up Alexander Avenue to Highway 101 and the Golden Gate Bridge. This was no ordinary morning and not my usual [...]
For the next four days – July 31st to August 3rd – my novel Shanghai Gold will be available as a free Kindle download. I hope this free promotion will lead to more reviews – so if you have a few days this summer to read a action-packed adventure novel, I’d love it if you [...]
Here’s my post for the 25th anniversary of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, which still covers most of my feelings about that machine. 30 years is a ridiculously long time in our fast-moving age. But I still remember the tactile experience of typing long Basic listings into the little rubber keyboard of my 16k Spectrum. I [...]
A while ago I bought this item on eBay – it was essentially a random find that intrigued me. It is the guest list of the 1936 round-the-world trip of the S.S. President Monroe out of San Francisco. (link to full scan of all pages on Flickr) The annotations on the actual guest list are [...]
I recently finished reading Rebecca Solnit’s excellent “Infinite City” (Amazon), and for somebody like me who likes maps, history and San Francisco it was a pleasure throughout. If you love San Francisco, buy it now. One of the main themes of the book is that every person has a very different mental map of the [...]
Memories… is a random series of memories of my trips to Asia in the late 80s and early 90s. In 1989, just weeks before the Chinese government breakdown on the Democracy movement, I bought passage on a Yangtze river boat from Shanghai to Chongqing – a distance of more than a thousand miles. For the [...]
This is my latest vintage camera – the Kodak Duex. The Kodak Duex is a very unusal 620-format camera with a helical telescoping lens cylinder made from bakelite, creating photos with a negative size of 6×4.5cm. It was only made for a very short time from 1940-42 at a cost of $6, approximately $167 in [...]