Oni wa soto. Fuku wa uchi!

It's been a while since I've been to Akihabara and Ochanomizu. It's my day off, so guess where I'm going?

The weather has been absolutely freezing. On Monday it snowed, and on Wednesday day night it was 1 degree! I'm not used that chill at all. Back home it used to rarely get below ten. Anyway, today I made sure I was rugged up enough to endure any cold that might set in and made my way there.

In Ochanomizu I found a nice used Sony microphone stand for only 980 yen. It was quite heavy so I asked them to hold it for me and I'd pick it up later.

In Akihabara I looked around for a USB hub for my Air, and since they gave me those rechargeable batteries, I figured I should get a charger so I can use them with my stereo recorder. I tried out an old secondhand 50mm 1.8s lens that was pretty cheap, but I didn't buy it. I took a few maid pictures while I was there too.

When I got home I tested out the hub. Unpowered, it JUST managed to sync and charge my iPhone. My external hard drive didn't show signs of life until I powered up the hub externally.

The big mistake I made was pulling the power plug off while my SD card was connected and it corrupted my card bad. Damn.

I looked for a few (free) utilities to recover a whole lot of my photos and videos.

If you're on a Mac you should use Photorec. It's an easy to use Terminal based program that not only rescues photos, it grabs other files as well including AVCHD videos I made from the Panasonic, and even mp3s.

On a PC, PCinspector worked great and showed a familiar file tree structure of my memory card to get my files back.

Yesterday was Setsubun. Instead of throwing the beans, we just ate them for good luck. Seems these days I'm getting the bad with the good, so any reason to rid myself of my demons is worth doing. Quite tasty 'dem beans..