Stefan Rohner

I came across Stefan's pictures on photo.net where he won picture of the week. It's now gracing my desktop. His pictures are absolutely amazing - capturing some very real emotions of his subjects. I wish I could take such pictures - it's quite intimidating to get up close and personal with your subjects while maintaining a non-posed feeling. I'm inspired now to keep trying to photograph on a bit more personal level. It's hard, but I'll keep working on it.

Craig and I went on a camera hunt yesterday, hoping to find a good deal on the Canon Digital Kiss (Rebel) EOS, but the prices here are outrageous. You'd think that the prices would be less where the cameras are actually produced, but I guess the Japanese are willing to pay the prices. In the States, I found the camera as low as 800 dollars, and the lowest price I saw here was on a USED camera for 1200. Ridiculous! SO..... I guess we'll be getting the camera off the internet!

ring 0 - birthday?

What does this picture seem like to you?

It's the cover to Ring 0, which seems as if the movie would be about the "birth" of the curse which is the plot of the movie. Ha! There's not even a baby involved in the movie, so how can they have one on the cover? Though it answered a couple questions, it managed to create many, many more. I don't understand how they can call this a masterpiece of Japanese horror. Well, I suppose if that's a masterpiece, I can't imagine the low-level that the other films barely rise to. Anyways, don't check it out unless you want to learn some weird Japanese....

In other news....just how cold is it here? Well, my shampoo is FROZEN!! Seriously, it clanks around inside the bottle as one big chunk of shampoo ice! geez.... it really makes me miss insulation and central heat!

day of reduction

I spent the entire afternoon attempting to reduce a massively large paper that I wrote for my Fulbright project into a much more sucinct paper for the upcoming Ethicomp 2004 conference in Greece. Yipes, what a day! It has gone from about 30 pages to a little over 15, but the limit is 12..... I don't know how on earth I can get it any smaller! I've been over the thing so many times I think my eyes are crossing, but I've still got 3 1/2 pages to get rid of. It's sad to throw out stuff I've worked so hard on! But, I have found a potential use for the scraps. Aside from the recycle bin on my computer, there is a conference coming up in 2005 (gee that's so far away!) with the Women Into Computing organization. It would be super cool to do another take on my project at this conference in London. My current approach is a more integrated, philosophical approach to problems of employment for women in Japan. It's quite interesting, but my head feels muddled from all the aspects I'm covering just to make one point. I don't know if I can post the actual paper that I'm using for the conference, otherwise I'd show it to everyone now. Once it's completed, I'll post it with reference to the conference. It's pretty boring unless you're into women's issues and Japanese society, but I'm having fun with it. It's very nice to finally be able to independently research issues that I have interest in and to pool together the knowledge I have attained to create some points of my own. It's like school but much freer. I'm setting the boundaries, and I'm deciding the content. And the plus side is that what write is not going to be judged by anyone who has control over my academic achievements. The worst that can happen is I get laughed at while presenting (but even if that happens, I get to go to Greece, so you can't hear any complaints coming from me!).

In other news, I'm off to watch the Ring Zero (for all of you out there who have seen the American version of the Japanese movie, The Ring). The Ring Zero is a sequel to The Ring II (yes there is a sequel to The Ring). Unfortunately the Japanese versions seem to lack any sort of coherent plot, and they mostly consist of cheesy visual effects that I think are supposed to scare me, but they mostly just make me laugh. If you haven't seen The Ring, you should if you like scary movies and you shouldn't if you don't like 'em. Check out my old post on here if you want to read more!

linkage

I've got a ton of cool links that I've been wanting to share....so here they are!

- after dinner for readers is a pretty cool site with a ton of interesting pieces of literature on everything you can imagine. I guess when you have such a conglomerate you have to take the good and the bad, but it's defintiely worth checking out.

- here is a cool picture of a chimney which is on antipixel. The hazy blue shade of the picture is really nice and the post got some fun comments too.

- kind of weird drawings/comments at toothpaste for dinner. It kind of takes a ironic sense of humor to appreciate the remarks, but I got a laugh out of some of them. This one's pretty cute.

- you can change the seasons here.

- a cool use of high speed clicking.

- Liz Wolfe has *amazing* appreciation (and talent) for colorful photos. If only I possessed such talent (I am sure the appreciation is there, but absolutely not the talent!). The pictures are surprisingly humorous too!

- I just like the fact that someone would name their site lala land. The pictures are fun though - I'm thinking of trying to submit some myself.

Okay that's all folks!

I'm still around

Sorry everyone for the lack of posts lately. It's been almost a month since my last one (but not quite, so that's good). I couldn't write about a lot of our Christmas plans, since we went to Michigan as a surprise for the family. It was really awesome, and I'll write more soon, but for now, I'm just doing a brief check-in. We just got back from MI and it feels like 7 AM but it's almost 10 PM and I have to work at 8 in the morning. toodles for now!