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Kodachrome and Velvia San Francisco No. 5 — missing the view

View from my apartment, corner of Haight and Fillmore, San Francisco, October 31, 1994: click for larger image (42K)

I don’t miss San Francisco much, despite what you may think seeing as I’ve been publishing photos of it here for the last week. But I do miss the view I had from my last apartment, seen here in its nighttime version. (I will say this, I did luck out when it came to the views from my last two San Francisco apartments). And I miss the apartment itself. No great shakes (except for the view), but it was the first place in San Francisco I lived in by myself, without roommates. And it was the San Francisco apartment I lived in the longest, having spent nearly 8 of my 14 years here. Oh well, life goes on.

This photo was taken on Halloween, 1994. The light that can be seen emanating from the center of this image is that of the Castro District, center of San Francisco’s gay and lesbian community, and the scene every year of a huge look-at-my-costume fest on Halloween. On a clear night like this, the sounds of the massive block party would waft into my apartment, tugging at me to come out and join the revelry.

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Kodachrome and Velvia San Francisco No. 4 — one foggy night out of many

St. Ignatius Church, San Francisco, September 14, 1994: click for larger image (33K)

Another night-time shot, and another featuring St. Ignatius Church, which I previously posted a photo of to kick off this San Francisco series of slide photos from the mid-90’s. Personally I really like this shot, partly for its warm yellow hue, and partly because I think it’s really the only image I have that begins to capture the essence of that predominant feature of the San Francisco landscape: fog.

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Japanese listening practice

Perhaps this will be of help to some of my fellow Japanese language learners out there. I’ve been looking for some Japanese radio stations to listen to via Real Audio, in an effort to bolster up my at-the-moment flagging Japanese, and especially my listening skills. There are plenty of news programs out there, usually coupled with video (TBS maintains several linked here), but I just wanted something to listen to in the background while I’m scanning photos and what-not, and without a visual accompaniment, news programs are just too difficult. Certainly there are a slew of music programs available out there, but these are naturally heavy on music and light on talk. What I wanted was talk radio, conversations and interviews conducted in futsuu-kei (everyday Japanese using plain forms), on topics I already have some knowledge about so I’m not totally lost at sea.

I finally found something I was looking for, raji@, run by a company called Advanced Internet Integration (AII) (even more digital media content at their site). Every weeknight from 11:30pm – 2:00am, which also happens to be my prime computer usage time slot, there are 4 or 5 programs on topics like computers, gaming, music, movies, etc. Tonight, the program from Mikaka featured a discussion on blogging, and online community, which then morphed into a discussion of jisatsu buumu (“suicide boom”) and web sites that offer advice to folks contemplating suicide, which have been in the news a lot recently.

If others out there know of other resources out there like this one with which to improve my Japanese listening skills, well, I’m all ears.