Japan 2025

 (Click on any image for a larger version)

Downside of the season: cold and rainy. Upside of the season: cherry blossoms!

Tokyo doesn't offer much in the way of antiquities but the Meiji shrine and its surrounding park are a green oasis of tranquility surrounded by city.

Tokyo has lots of tall buildings but I particularly appreciate the NTT Docomo building for its 1930 New York vibe. I converted the image to grayscale but on another cold rainy day there wasn't much hue in the picture anyway.

A group of young ladies in Asakusa. Before you get too excited, I'm pretty sure they're all tourists.

Asakusa at night.

Doesn't look very Japanese? Actually this is the interior of Magellan's restaurant in the Tokyo DisneySea park, themed to Portuguese exploration. This was my first visit to this park---Disneylands exist around the world but DisneySea exists only in Tokyo. I must say I was really impressed with the design and execution of the park. For example, most theme parks have fake mountains and fake caves with fake rocks but Tokyo DisneySea has the most realistic fake rocks and grandest fake caves I have ever seen. Most visitors probably won't notice it consciously but it really aids the suspension of disbelief. I also learned later from Google Maps that a road cuts straight across the middle of the park but it is camouflaged so smoothly that one never suspects it is there. 

Change of location---ocean scenery near Nagasaki.

View from our hotel window in Nagasaki.

Exterior shot of Haneda airport.

Japanese commuter train on the Sobu Line with cherry blossoms. Commuter trains never looked this good.

Creepy autonomous chair at Haneda airport. I, for one, welcome our new chair overlords and would like to point out I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground slipcover factories.

How to change the CD drive Windows Media Player uses to burn a disc

 This is outside my normal range of topics for this blog, but I just spent roughly an hour figuring this out and on-line resources were weirdly unhelpful. At the end of the post I'll say more about this, but first the how-to:

The assumption is that your computer has both a built-in CD drive and an external CD drive attached. Windows Media Player (WMP) wants to use the internal drive for burning CDs but for whatever reason you want to use the external drive. How do you make WMP do this?

(Note this discussion is for burning CDs, not ripping or something else. I'm using Windows 10 but maybe it will work in some other versions.)

1. Plug the external drive in and put in a blank CD.

2. If a window pops up saying "What do you want to do with this CD", click the little X in the corner to close it without responding.

3. Open Windows Explorer and right-click on the external CD drive. (If Windows Explorer fails to recognize the external drive, then you have yet another issue that I don't know about, sorry.)

4. Choose "Properties" from the drop-down list.

5. Choose the "Recording" tab.

6. If your computer is like mine, you will see "Disc burning" and then "Select the disc-burning drive that Windows will use by default." Under this select your external CD drive.

7. Close this little window.

8. Open Windows Media Player and select the "Burn" tab on the top right-hand side.

9. If your computer is like mine, it will still show the internal drive as the burning destination. However, under that the words "Next drive" have appeared. Click on that until your external CD drive is the one shown above (probably just one click).

10. Drag music files into the list below the tab as normally.

11. Click the "Start burn" button at the top of the list as normally.

I tried this and it worked for me. I'm listening to the disc now (Pat Metheny "Bright Size Life").

Good luck!

-oOo-

Okay now for the rant. I started this journey by searching "windows media player change burn drive" on Google, and the following results show up at the top of the list:

As you can see the first highlighted search result shows part of the response and it appears to be actually relevant although also rather intense. However when you click on the result the page that comes up is different:

So we see that the respondent has avoided answering the question asked and instead tried to change the subject. I don't get it. If that answer is "sorry can't do this" then just say so. But what really peeves me is the bait-and-switch on the part of Google. I spent maybe an hour following other search results and always the same result. Don't answer the question, change the subject.