hiidenkonttibeta

Some pseudoartphotography:

Using a scientific method (Opening A Dictonary On A Random Page And Pointing A Random Word With Finger) I named them “Colleague”, “Potential” and “Minor”.

I watched American Ninja. Better check what other films the same director has done, to avoid them.. Well, it shouldn’t be too difficult. His best movie has imdb score of 4.4/10.

Not that all movies with low scores ain’t worth watching: Beowulf has 3.7 points, but it’s still fun, with all the PA systems in the medieval times and other pure silliness. Not a keeper, but worth seeing once.

Year 2003 indexes scanned! うれしい! I also picked “good” shots for hi-res scanning, and there’s quite a lot of them.. But this includes not only shots I consider worth sharing, but also those I have only personal interest in (places I’ve been, technically interesting, and so on).

And the last note: whoever categorized Lake of Tears album Forever Autumn as symphonic black metal in All Music Guide obviously has a ちょっと different description for SBM than I do.. Not that it’s a bad album (it’s sad and beautiful), but black metal it isn’t.

Here’s the second set of kanji I’m learning:

vuori, alku, iso, pieni, keskellä, riisipelto, nyt, keskiviikko/vesi, viikonpäivä, lauantai/maa, tiistai/tuli, torstai/puu, vuosi, puoli
ymmärtää, mennä, vapaa-aika, tulla, jokainen, kuukausi, perjantai/kulta, edessä, takana, keskipäivä, viikko, väli, aamu

These might take a bit longer. There are some pretty good pieces of software available for Palm Pilot for learning kanji. I made KingKanji lessons for these kanji, if I use it daily there might be some hope..

Karate Kid was on TV today (or yesterday, actually). I’ve only seen it once before, and that was in elementary school. Not a great movie, but could be considered a required viewing since quite many references to waxing practise sequence exist.. It would be nice to know if the crane kick actually exists in some karate style.

Korean romantic comedy My Sassy Girl (엽기적인 그녀), on the other hand, is a good movie. The girl (whose name never comes up) is just a wonderful character, and Jeon Ji-hyun is simply awesome playing her! It also doesn’t totally rely on someone being incredibly stupid and/or clumsy, as too many comedies do. Highly recommended!

This is how my camera phone renders bright white snow (on an overcast but still bright day):

Not very bright and あまりしろくない, but could be worse. Most cameras probably result in images like this by default, of course, but every useful camera would have some controls for exposure (or is it the white balance setting which does the trick in digital cameras?). Poking the picture with “auto levels” makes it almost white, but nobody has released Symbian Gimp so far :-)

Getting a postal packet from Hong Kong is nice. They still believe in postage stamps – companies elsewhere in the world seem to have forsaken them, using some sort of mailing deals indicated with stickers or printed codes. Their packages are utterly boring, all alike.

Stamps add personality to packets (and letters, of course). Coming from some faraway country, they bring a little piece of art made by some different culture.

I’m no philatelist but I saved the big green “Year of the monkey” stamp. I also don’t admire stamps for long – just a glance – before throwing them away with the package, but it’s still nice seeing them there, for some reason. Sad is the day when all stamps are replaced with bar codes.