為了逃避碧潭每年過年二十四個小時習慣放川流不息的炮引起的的夜未

Despite all the rumors of a successor to Canon’s full-frame 5D DSLR, it appears that the new Rebel XSi/450D is all Canon’s going to give us before the next camera-foaling season this fall. The new Rebel packs 4 million more pixels onto a sensor a bit smaller than the one on my ancient 20D, ensuring larger prints and requiring more processing to make it work in low-light situations. It’s too bad that most camera companies are still promoting the myth that more megapixels=better images quality when in most situations the very opposite is true. But the Rebel’s ISO settings don’t even feature a 3200 setting, which I suppose is just as well, because it would most likely be too noisy to use.

After seeing Canon’s new crop of cameras, I’m still not seeing anything that tempts me to upgrade my current setup. The larger LCDs and live view options are nice, but not enough reason to spend the extra money on a 40D, which doesn’t seem to be that much of an improvement over the 20D. Frame rates don’t interest me in the slightest. Even the new point-and-shoots aren’t really much of an improvement over my little SD800IS, simply squeezing more megapixels onto the same, tiny sensor and trying to use processing to make up for horrible low-light performance. I can do that with software on my own, thanks; I’d rather have a decent image to start with and work from that.

The only way I’d want to upgrade would be if the price of the 5D continues to fall. At the moment it’s not much more expensive than the Nikon D300, which isn’t even a full frame camera, and it is virtually unmatched as far as low-light/high-ISO clarity goes, at least for something I consider to be a reasonable size and price. Canon makes most of its money on point-and-shoots and the Rebel line, I suspect, but I hope they continue to develop small full-frame DSLRs like the 5D in the future.

If I were to go full-frame, I’d have to give up my lovely Canon 10-22mm EF-S lens for wide shots, but I’ve been thinking that I rely overmuch on that lens anyway. I don’t know quite how to explain it, but sometimes I feel like my wide lens makes it too easy to get an interesting shot, that I’m somehow using it to replace rather than augment what I think of as “real” photography. By taking away that option, I’d be forcing myself to concentrate harder on composition at a certain focal range. I’m not really considering limiting myself to a single 35 or 50mm prime (though the idea has merit), but perhaps staying on this side of 16mm would actually help me learn to “see” better. I’ve already done this with telephoto lenses; maybe it’s time I did it with the superwides as well.

While we’re on the subject of photography, I’d like to know something: Why is it that so many photographers (i.e. photographers who are linked to around the net on places like Metafilter) use such horrible interfaces to display their work? Usually the quality of pictures themselves is unremarkable and no great loss as I figure I can find much better on flickr’s Explore, but occasionally I’ll come across a great photographer who chooses to punish viewers of his pictures in the most maddening fashion possible. It’s like drinking a succession of small glasses of vinegar laced with heroin.

Of course, flickr has its problems as well. Though having so many pictures and a good Interestingness algorithm works well most of the time, I’ve found that it’s quite pointless to join groups based on number of views, as the vast majority of pictures with thousands of views feature mostly blond women in bikinis, mostly blond women sitting at tables, and women of all hair colors lying on mostly white beds.

On a positive note, flickr does have an important lesson to teach anyone (like myself) who dwells excessively on different types of cameras: the camera finder. All you have to do is go to the list of cameras and pick any old model of crap camera, and flickr will show you a range of brilliant photography done with that very model. It’s a humbling experience, but hardly a surprise when you consider that most of the best photographers of the last century had very little to work with, equipment-wise.

There are even people who set out to “recreate” masterworks of great photographers, even making sure that the planet is in the right position when they make such attempts. I find it difficult, however, to recreate even my own photos, much less those of other people. I used to take my 20D back to the site of pictures I took with my SD800 and try to get “better” versions, but it never worked out. The emotional state of the photographer is just one of countless variables that go into making a picture, each next to impossible to replicate, so I don’t even try.

Besides, even if you did manage to get something interesting, how would you describe it in a way that doesn’t sound pathetic? “Look, here’s a picture I took that’s the same place, time, season and focal length as an Ansel Adams picture! Aren’t I creative?”

The streets are filled with people carrying packages home these days, prizes they won at their companies’ year-end dinners. I hadn’t won anything for three years straight, so I didn’t expect much last night when I walked into the Formosa Regent Hotel ballroom, the same ballroom where my friend Azuma got married a while back, and now the site of our company’s year-end dinner. In order to spend as little time as possible sitting awkwardly at a table full of strangers who all knew each other listening to speeches about the company’s financial performance, I lingered outside watching co-workers play a Wii game featuring a cartoon character standing on one leg. When they were done, I took pictures of the silverware in the hallway.

Eventually I was corralled by a group of co-workers who saw me outside, and herded into a seat just as the speeches began. The food arrived, but as a consequence of my late arrival, I’d managed to obtain the seat next to where the server uses to serve the food, so most of the dinner was spent leaning to one side while various goopy substances were ladled out. At one point a small roach scurried across one of the plates; the server whisked it away quickly and acted as if nothing had happened. I did manage to win a small-ish prize, the second smallest on the list, which was heartening in that it was enough money to make a dent in my bills but not enough to arouse too much animosity amongst my co-workers.

After the ceremony I was talking to one of my bosses about the sad news concerning the demise of the company’s badminton club* when another guy walked up and addressed my boss: “Say, this guy doesn’t happen to have a flickr account, does he?” he asked excitedly. My boss pointed at me.

“You know, you could just ask him; he’s standing right here,” he said. My boss is cool.

The new guy then turned to me. “Are you….” he began, apparently nervous. “Are you….Poagao?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“THE Poagao? The photographer?”

“I’m pretty sure I am.” I was becoming a bit concerned about his reaction. But it turns out that he’s just naturally exuberant and has been following me on flickr.com for a while. He had no idea that we were actually co-workers and was more excited by the coincidence than anything I can take credit for.

He told me that the company actually has a photo club. I’d talked to the official dinner photographer, a young guy who had just purchased a new Canon 5D along with a 24-105L lens as his first DSLR to learn about taking pictures, as well as an older guy who also had a 5D with a battery grip, and they said I might try coming to a meeting some time. I just might, if only to drool over all the nice cameras they have.

So the evening ended on a good note, though I spent most of the dinner drawing cartoons on the back of my lottery tickets. Afterwards I walked past the old US embassy to the MRT station and took the train home.

This weekend is going to be another busy one; the Muddy Basin Ramblers are going to play at the 70’s Discotheque Sappho de Base, which is located on Anhe Road’s Lane 102 in the basement of #1, on Saturday night starting at about 10:30. After spending months playing the same songs over and over for the album, we’ve recently been practicing a few hot new numbers, and it should be interesting to see how they go in a public setting.

Otherwise, I will hopefully be doing looping/ADR sessions with some actors for the film. The rest of the time should be spent editing, among other things.

*The demise of the badminton club is bad news, because it was good to play with people who actually take it seriously. I say this because there’s been an addition to the pug-nosed women I play with on Monday nights. Yes, dear readers, it’s true: Whiny Woman is back.

It’s not the same woman, but it might as well be. She’s in her mid-to-late 40’s but seems to think that she’s really only 11, except it’s more of an I’m-on-Japanese-TV kind of 11. This includes talking in an excruciatingly cute approximation of a child’s voice and walking with her knees bent inwards and hands in the air. Her laugh, if it can be described thus, can cause birds within a 100-foot radius to relieve themselves in mid-air. I find myself missing the days when it was just me and the pug-nosed women.

From a 2005 report: “Despite reaping great profits from iPod sales, Apple is still hesitant to bring its iTunes Music Store to Taiwan, because local consumers are still downloading songs via peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing Web sites instead of using online music stores.”

I’m bringing this up because Apple has lately seen fit to include some very useful applications to the iPod Touch. The only problem is that, while the new apps are free for new purchases and free if you have an iPhone, they are charging a bit of money, US$20, to unlock these abilities for the iPod Touch. They might as well be charging a million dollars, because if you don’t happen to be in an iTunes-approved country, you won’t be able to get that or anything else from iTunes or Apple, even if the country you’re in actually makes the iPods you’re not allowed to upgrade.

But is it me, or is this logic backwards? Apple is “hesitant” to bring iTunes to Taiwan because local consumers are downloading music from P2P sources? Hello, McFly? If there’s no other viable alternative, of course people will download songs that way. Just like by keeping the iPhone out of Taiwan, you’re ensuring that people will have no choice except to Jailbreak phones bought abroad. I’m considering jailbreaking my iPod Touch, though I really, really don’t want to. I’d much rather keep it unjailbroken and use iTunes to update it with the latest apps. I don’t have that big a problem with paying 20 bucks for the extra features. But Apple won’t let me do any of that because I’m in the wrong country.

The only thing that is even more hilarious is the fact that only foreigners from iTunes-approved countries are able to use the new maps application on their iPod Touches. Most Chinese-speaking people won’t be allowed access to this application. The maps it displays, however, are in Chinese.

Thursday was the going-away party for Forumosa’s Stray Dog, aka Sean, so I decided to take the opportunity to check out the new Alleycat’s on Songren Road. It was quite a walk from the City Hall MRT Station, but I took some interesting shots over the wall of some construction nearby with Taipei 101 in the background. Thankfully nobody saw me sticking my camera over the metal enclosure.

The Songren Alleycat’s is nice. It was officially the Forumosa.com Happy Happy Dance Dance Hour, but I wasn’t really in the mood for socializing and spent most of my dinner eating alone and reading. Afterwards, I thought I’d make my way, aided by GPS, through the alleys to Liuzhangli Station instead of walking back the way I came. Guided by the Google Maps app on my phone, I found my way through the maze very easily, and got some more interesting shots in the process.

I’d gotten a call from Thumper late Wednesday night. He was in Da-an Park with a group of guys who were playing country music. “They need a washtub bass player to fill in for theirs on Friday,” he told me. He said he was going to play with them there at Bliss as well, and Slim was going to come, so I thought I’d go and check it out. After dinner on Friday in Gongguan at a hot-pocket stand and picking up a new backpack, I went back to Bitan to retrieve my tub and stick, and took the MRT to Da-an Station, where I got another call from Thumper, this time informing that their bass player had decided to show up anyway. But I was practically there, so I figured I’d go anyway.

The band consisted of three guys, all enthusiastic young foreigners, one on guitar, another on banjo, and one playing his bass, which was a metal soup pot with a steel wire attached to a plank. It wasn’t as deep or resonant as my plastic tub, and the action of the stick was a lot more sensitive to the slightest movement. I tried to play it a little and managed to get some notes out of it, but I prefer my tub.

The band said that it was their third public performance. They were nervous before taking the stage. As for the show…well, let me put it this way: the highlight of the evening, music-wise, was when we all stopped playing at the same time at the end of one song. I know it sounds strange for a member of a band highly lacking in the polish department to call another band “unpolished”, but there you have it: They need work. During the show the band members were supposed to tell jokes in between songs. The banjo player decided to make me the subject of his, which was a story that included me wishing to a talking frog for a beautiful princess. I didn’t know which part of that combination was less likely, but before I could think of something clever to say another guy yelled out, “Maybe he’d wish for a prince instead!”

“Nah, he’s a guy, he’d wish for a princess; come on, let me tell the joke!” the banjo player complained, and went on with the joke.

Afterwards, I was ready to go home and go to bed, for it had been a long, tiring day, but Thumper and Slim were going to hang out at a local park for a bit, so I nabbed some fried rice from a convenience store and joined them. As always, it turned out to be a lot of fun, and we stayed up until the wee hours and the not-so-wee hours talking. The sky was getting light when a group of old ladies swept across the park, picking through our trash for recyclables. The city was coming to life around us, and suddenly the park wasn’t the private enclave it had been during the night, so we bade Thumper farewell and grabbed a taxi back south.

Saturday was election day for the legislature. Our voting post was located in the old Bitan KTV Club. The voting went smoothly. As usual, nobody had a problem or even raised an eyebrow when I showed up with my voting notice, though I got scolded for taking pictures from the street. I skipped the referendums because I don’t agree with using them for election campaigning instead of on real, meaningful issues. Afterwards, it turned out that about 75% of voters agreed with me.

The DPP was completely routed, of course. Chen Shui-bian, as predicted, stepped down from the party chairmanship to let Frank Hsieh emerge from his cocoon and start campaigning with as little stigma from the election loss as possible. If there’s one thing the DPP knows, it’s how to run an election campaign, I’ll give them that. I see the results more as a vote against the DPP than for the KMT, and I hope the latter doesn’t let it go to their heads or take it to mean that everything they stand for is hunky dorey with everyone. I’m still waiting for the usual bizarre turn of events that precedes every election here. I’m thinking it will happen in March, but I could be wrong.

After voting, I went to Darrell’s for some looping with Graham, who was back in town on vacation before returning to Singapore. Dow Jones is moving him to Tokyo in late February, and a long chain of foreigners sitting in the various musical chairs related to the job are all moving around correspondingly; it seems I know quite a few of them.

Sunday morning I had just awakened to the sound of jackhammers pounding away at the Bitan riverfront steps when I got a call from Harry, who was on his way to the Dimu temple in Wantan with his religious friends. I dressed and walked across the bridge and down the “niaoley” (the piss-covered alley) between the buildings to the ferry dock. On the way over I chatted with the ferryman, who told me some unsettling news. According to him, some legal knot has been resolved, and they’re planning to develop the lovely rural fields of Wantan with ugly high-rises. He told me they were even planning to build a 12-meter-wide bridge from Bitan over to Wantan. I had thought that there was no development on Wantan because it was a water preservation site, but it seems that even that’s not enough to stand in the way of developers with their eyes on the money they could make from such developments. It would be a great loss, as I love to walk through that area.

At the Dimu temple, Harry and his group, some of whom were dressed all in Temple Yellow sweat suits, did their thing while I sat by quietly, listening to the things going on around me. I like going there to just sit. It’s not really meditation, as I’m not disciplined enough for that. It’s just sitting and being quiet. Spacing out.

That afternoon Slim and I took a cab up to Conor’s lofty Muzha mountaintop pad for some MBR practice, including some dangerously racy songs about Jesus. Conor’s pad has the usual foreigner-pad style from the rugs hanging on the walls to the various instruments from a plethora of cultures. Outside, rainclouds hung over a great view of the city; the weather had become typical winter fare, cold and wet with just enough rain to make you miserable without actually raining hard enough to make an umbrella worth the trouble.

Yang Qing-feng was practicing his sword form without his sword, which I found interesting to watch. I might try doing that sometime, to see if I can project my energy without the blade actually being there. It gave me some ideas, anyway.

Teacher Xu had to grab some people and tell them to practice with me. First up was Weeble, who is still resorting to the quick shove strategy. I really need to figure out a way to react better to that. He also tried some quick pulls, but I nearly balled him almost every time, so he gave that up. “Step away from me when you do that!” he told me. After that I tried pushing with a rather new guy, and got to practice my backstance for a long time, which became rather tiring.

I missed practice on Saturday due to a late gig on Friday night combined with the fact that I had to go vote in the legislative elections.

“I got beat up a couple of nights ago,” I told The Taipei Kid at JB’s last Friday night during Jacques and Olwen’s farewell party, sh0wing him a large bruise on my neck.

He looked shocked. “Really?”

“No, it was just a really mean massage,” I said. You see, my hosts at the New Year’s Eve party, Bret and Alan, both insisted that their masseuse was wonderful, describing how great they felt afterwards, though the techniques used were forceful, to say the least.

“He’ll break you in half,” Bret said. Still, that oft-fatal mixture of curiosity and stupidity that has gotten me into trouble so many times before caused me to ask for a name card with the place’s address, and when cold weather nixed plans for tai-qi practice on Wednesday night, I decided to take the MRT up to Shilin and give it a go.

The massage place is located in an alley off of Meilun Street, a few minutes’ walk from the Shilin MRT station. I knocked and entered, then was told to exit and take off my shoes and enter again. Inside was a nicely decorated lobby. I gave my name and references, and was told to soak my feet in a pot of medicine for a few minutes before the masseuse, a short, stocky middle-aged man named Blue, was ready. Apparently Blue was busy eating dinner, and he invited me to share the hotpot they had bubbling in the back of the house before we began.

Then, the massage. Now, I’ve had some massages before, and some were fairly uncomfortable. I’d told Blue to go easy on me, as well as about my old knee injury, but I swear, if that was “going easy,” then I wouldn’t wish the full treatment on anyone unless I really, really didn’t care for them.

It was excruciating. “Wow, you sure can yell pretty loudly,” Blue observed at one point. He pressed and pulled and twisted, sometimes getting an assistant to hold my feet while he wrapped a towel under my neck to stretch me out, medieval-style. He counted to three and then did his best to yank my arms out of their sockets, so hard my hands felt pins and needles, beat my calves mercilessly. Every time he said, “Take a breath, now breathe out…” I knew I was in for some serious pain. Blue said he was putting my spine back in alignment, bringing out a little toy spine to illustrate which bones he was forcing back into position. I wondered if his kids played with it in between sessions.

After a period of time, possibly half an hour, he was done and left me lying listlessly on the massage table. I hurt all over. After a while I got up, had a bite of hotpot though I’d lost my appetite completely. Out in the lobby, the assistant was busy picking a splinter of something out of Blue’s hand, digging around with tweezers under a magnifying glass. I wondered how he’d managed to give me a massage with a splinter in his hand, but then it occurred to me that perhaps that was one reason he was so forceful. Another possibly reason was that he thought a big hairy foreigner could take it. I have to admit, once you’ve started a massage it’s hard to quit halfway through. After all, you agreed to it.

I sat for a while, watching Blue work on another customer’s feet. The customer said that the more he did it, the more comfortable the massages became. But I felt like I’d been severely beaten, and just wanted to go home. “You’ll sleep well tonight,” Blue said as I left.

He was right about that; I did sleep well. Except when the pain woke me up. Over the next few days my arms and legs pulsed with a deep, annoying hurt that wouldn’t go away. My friends and co-workers were duly impressed with the large black bruise on the back of my neck (which is still there, almost a week later). Finding that I’m a little too hairy to use those salonpas-brand sticky patches, I used muscle-ache creams to help relieve the pain. when I called Blue to ask about it, he said the pain would only last 2-3 days. Bret said that maybe the pain was a sign that I needed the massage, that it meant I was helped more by it. The discomfort was pretty much gone by today. My hands have stopped tingling, for the most part.

I doubt I’ll be going back there any time soon. I might try going to another masseuse at some point, though, as I still like a good massage, but I’d also like to avoid Pain World as much as possible. Hopefully that’s not too much to ask.

I must apologize for not writing in such a long time. I’ve been editing, or trying to, for the past six months, and couldn’t bring myself to write because I felt ashamed. During that time, if I wasn’t editing, I was feeling guilty about not editing, not enjoying much else because I thought I should be editing instead, and every long editing session seemed to bring me no closer to finishing. No sign of progress, really, nothing to show except for a slightly tighter scene here and there. I can’t just do a bit of editing every day. It takes a solid block of many hours. You can’t just edit for a few minutes a day. I can’t, anyway. I’ve spent the last several months hating myself for not being able to just get it done. The rest of my life has been backing up against this project for several years now, forming a thick dam of scattered, inferior goals.

I went through and made all the changes we talked about when Dean was last in town. I took out entire scenes, drastically cut down dialog in others. Switched things around. People ask me how much I’ve done, how much longer it will take, when will it be done, etc. I have no idea at this point. Dean’s been working at the special effects, and doing great work, but it’s slow for him as well. Darrell can’t really even start his job until I get him a final cut.

My 3.2ghz duel-processor computer with its 2gb of RAM and almost 1tb of hd space is struggling to handle the project. Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 is unstable, crashing occasionally and forgetting the last few saves, sometimes an afternoon’s worth of work will disappear. Even when it doesn’t crash, each little cut or change takes several minutes to churn out, and I find myself staring at the message “Rendering Required Files” for a considerably longer time than indicated in the unhelpful Help section in which Adobe says I shouldn’t be seeing this message at all because Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 features smooth, seamless previews. My entire system is bogged down, though I find it hard to believe that nobody ever edited a 2+ hour project in Premiere before. Even the normally helpful folks at dvinfo.net don’t seem to know what the problem is. Maybe my computer is just worn out. Maybe it’s not just my computer.

But it’s 2008. Deep down, I had really hoped not to be still working on this by now, to have moved on to other things, but here I am, seemingly no closer than months ago. I’ve stopped guessing when it will be done, or trying to tell people when it will be done. “Eventually,” is about all I can muster at this point.

It’s been a long time between posts. I’ve been missing some classes due to various reasons lately, but I’ve still been trying to attend. I’ll try to sum up:

On the 19th, Teacher Xu was emphasizing how a connected opponent, meaning all of his components linked to each other, was easy to push, while someone who knew how to isolate the components of his body and energy, is generally harder to push. While watching him move, I wonder, as always, how he manages to keep potential energy so long before unleashing it on his opponent. It almost seems to defy the laws of motion. He’ll take a step and hold his inertia somehow for a moment and then all of the sudden it’s there again. Either that or I’m missing something. One thing you won’t see with Teacher Xu is him extending his arms; all of his energy seems to come from all of him, not his arms. That day I practiced with Not From China Guy, but it was mostly quick shoves.

On the 22nd, Little Qin was complaining about Tuishou competitions and the judges there when I arrived at CKS Hall. Teacher Xu reminded me to keep my head in line with my torso when doing forms, and expounded his “yuan kong wei” premise, i.e. “original position” vs. “relative position” in movement. He says this is something the other schools don’t really teach so much. I find it quite helpful, personally.

This last Saturday we all took Teacher Xu for dinner at the fancy restaurant under the National Opera House. Pretty much everyone was there, and it was a good time. Afterwards we took group pictures in the square, and then after everyone else had left a few of us went back up to the balcony of the concert hall to get some practice in. I went through the forms, not doing too much as I was still sore from an overly aggressive massage last Wednesday night, while the others filmed each other doing moving-step tuishou. Little Qin set up a little ring, not unlike a sumo ring, for them to see if they could push each other out of bounds.

Here we are in the much-anticipated year of 2008. In a way it seems too soon, but 2007 was wearing on me, and the new year seems to bring with it a sense of motion I’ve been missing as of late. Last night I met Harry at the Kunyang MRT station after work. We then cabbed it over to Bret and Alan’s Nangang apartment, where they had set up not only a delicious banquet featuring ham, but also a Dance Dance Revolution game on the big rear projection TV. It wasn’t as big a group as in years past. I’d hoped to talk to my Dominican friend Lorenzo about possibly spending Chinese New Year in Kyoto this year, but he wasn’t able to come this time. We toasted the new year with champagne and watched Taipei 101 consumed by fireworks on TV. It looked quite impressive, but I was glad I wasn’t out in the cold.

One of Bret’s friends drove us back downtown, through amazingly dense crowds to the intersection of Zhongxiao East and Dunhua South Roads. The streets were filled with cars, scooters and mostly young people, more than even rush-hour traffic before a holiday. Harry and I took one look at the long lines waiting to board the MRT and set off walking west along Zhongxiao. It was after 2am, and the streets were filled with people, and though most of the shops were closed, the few that were open were doing brisk business.

We walked to the Zhongxia0-Xinsheng MRT station and joined the long lines on the platform. Train after train, all filled with passengers, came and left with hardly any time between them. Eventually we managed to squeeze onto one and took it to the West Gate Station, where we planned to check out the activities at the Red House Theater Square. Many other people got off there as well; apparently it was a happening place to be on New Year’s Eve.

The atmosphere in the square behind the Red House Theater, however, was unnerving. There seemed to be a lot of “tourists” instead of the usual crowd, and there was a strange tension in the air. A group of loud foreigners walked past, one of them hitting me with his shoulder. Trash littered the ground, and trucks hauling things away shined their headlines across the scattered tables. I didn’t feel like staying; it wasn’t the same place. Harry picked up on it as well, and said he was going home.

Back at the subway station, I got a message from Eric that he was at The Source, so I stopped by there. When I sat down at the bar, I noticed a guy with his head in his hands. It was my neighbor Greg, who had apparently drunken himself into a stupor. Eric and I chatted, mostly about movies, and drank tequila until 5am.

The MRT was running 24 hours that night, so I walked down to the Kuting Station, buying some fruit on the way. McDonald’s was crowded with people, and traffic was still heavy in the pre-dawn chill. Back to Bitan, where I finally made it to bed sometime after 7am. It had been a long time since I’d stayed up to see the sunrise, but there wasn’t much of one this first day of the new year. Instead, it was cloudy and grey.

Still, I’m glad it’s 2008; it feels like this year has a great capacity for change, not just for me, but for the world in general. Presidential election in both Taiwan and the US are pivotal for both countries. Add to that the Beijing Olympics and several other global concerns. On a more personal level, it is my hope that I will be able to see the finished movie in a theater at some point this year, as well as the English-language version of my book in bookstores. While I’m at it, I’d like to spend some time traipsing the streets of cities like Paris and Prague, taking pictures to my heart’s content.

Upon a glance at new years past, however, it seems that all of the above goals are at least several years old. Each year I say I want to get the movie done, get my book published in English, and take a trip to Europe. It’s been so long. Should I even bother listing them any more? Still, I do feel that this year is going to be different. It has to be, for some reason I can’t put my finger on. Just a feeling.

We’ll see. I guess that’s the point.