There's no turning back now. . . at least not without a $200 cancellation fee.

For some, this first bit will be old news. I've purchased my plane ticket and will be off to Japan on the ninth of July! I'll be heading down to Vancouver early that week to make sure that everything has gone well with the visa, as well as to visit family before my departure.

Naturally, I'll be updating this blog with tales of great adventure in the land of the rising sun*. For such an undertaking, mere text will not do. So, yesterday, I bought a camera, and decided to test it out last night. I'm pretty pleased with it so far. Below is a picture of the view from the deck of our house. It looks much better if you click on it, but be warned, it is huge (4000x3000 pixels-- I forgot to set the camera to lower resolution before taking this photo).



But what I really wanted to try was video uploading-- yes, my camera takes video. It's capable of HD quality, but for my purposes, I'll be filming at lower quality. Below is a video of my cat, Cedric. At midrange quality (640x480), this two minute video takes up ~150 Mb of data and took over twenty minutes to upload to YouTube. Unfortunately, the quality of the YouTube video is not quite up to par with the original file, but I guess that's to be expected.

Anyway, here's Cedric!



Am I getting sentimental about home already? Yeah, maybe. . .

*I even considered starting a new blog, "Doin' the Nihon Go Go!", just for that purpose, but then I realized it's hard enough maintaining one blog, and ultimately decided against it.