So I continue to catalog all my digital and film photos and at the same time resurrect some old photo galleries to SmugMug when I notice that under Vacation I have gone somewhere out of the United States since 1996.

I was in China in 1996. I spent the New Year of 1997 in Manila. In 1998 and 1999 I returned to China for the better part of both years (and in that time I was also in Helsinki). In 2000 I was in Japan (Tokyo, Kyoto and Nagano) and in 2001 I was in Manila and Tokyo. I didn’t go anywhere in 2002, unless you count a deep, dark place of sadness. I recovered such that in 2003 I was in London and Helsinki. Then I met Sun and bam! Cancun in 2004, Paris and Amsterdam in 2005, Barcelona in 2006, the Philippines and Seoul last year and this year, 2008, we went to Sydney.

Wow. I’m actually impressed. I’m actually surprised. I only remember making an effort to go abroad when Sun and I got together, so the eight years prior to that… well… I’m surprised.

That’s actually kinda sorta cool.

Anyway, all my vacation from 2003 through 2008 are up in the Vacation photo gallery. I have digital photos all the way back to 2000 so those will go up quickly. After that, we enter the world of film (I did have that Olympus C-900 but didn’t take that many photos with it), and I’m still scanning the year 1994.

Since March of this year, I’ve had to update the PS3 with new firmware every month. Actually, there were two in March and, wheeeee, THREE this month alone. That’s just a bad coding if you have to keep shoving “features” every month (frankly, all I’m noticing are new pointless icons on the dashboard; just about the only useful update had the PSN Store working).

It’s also annoying because for some reason these updates take almost half an hour to download and install. What the hell?!

So, in case you’re wondering.  Things are fine.  Fox News spent my lunch hour showing a calm and peaceful city with the tag BREAKING NEWS.  THE event of the Chino Hills earthquake was a broken water pipe on a street intersection somewhere.  Who knows how long they kept that chopper hovering over that non-scene.

I was going to wait to see this in IMAX but I can’t say no to Sun when she’s so keen on something, so she and I along with her brother Sang and my brother Alan (who’d already seen it) caught a 4pm screening at Pacific Culver 12.  Unfortunately, the theater was trying to push the film on more screens than they had prints, playing relay with the reels to keep those screens going.  And they fucked up.  They didn’t darken the theater until 4:30pm, and they STILL showed us commercials and trailers so the movie proper didn’t get going to ten before five.  Lame move, management.

Anyway, about the movie.

Fantastic.  This is more a thriller with a superhero in it more than it is a superhero flick.  The action scenes are actually not very momentous; there are some fine action-packed moments, yes, but they were secondary to the plot.  Yes, the plot!  It weaved its winding way through for over two hours and jammed into those minutes a really, really good story.  You want brainless action?  Go see Wanted.  You want a thriller with a sophisticated plot that somehow involves a guy in tights (all right, kevlar tights), go see this.  Go see it now.

Great cinematography, cool score.  The plot was fairly linear, however, and included three moments of divine intervention in order for it to continue.  Not too keen on that if the rest of the movie appears to be set in a realistic world (no kung fu, no magic swords, so why fade out on a predicament and fade in on a solution with no apparent connection beyond praying or dreams?) so yeah, those are “wha?” low-points.  Otherwise, enjoyed it.

I’m just finished cataloging all my old photographs from digital images I took prior to acquiring my Olympus E-330 and will slowly create collections to put into the Photos section.  The next major phase, which by my estimation will take, oh, a year or two to complete, is to scan in all the old negatives I have sitting in a box in the closet of photos I took between the years 1990 and 2000, when I was extremely prolific in snapping pics with disposables, crap 35mm point and shoots, and finally, neat photography devices like the Olympus Stylus-II, Canon AE-1 Program and Nikon FM-10.

I’d always intended to scan my negative.  In fact, I just discovered yesterday that I had conveniently catalogued and dated all my photos from China in 1996 with Sharpee text on the plastic negative sleeves. I don’t even remember doing that, but thank you, me, for having done so who knows when (at least ten years ago, by the looks of the handwriting).  Then a few years back I even bought an Epson 3170 to begin the process, only now that Epson is outdated and after some tests this weekend woefully unacceptable (2 minutes an image with just Unsharp Mask and another 15-20 minutes in post-processing). So I’m getting the newer Epson V500 with Digital ICE to get rid of a lot of that post-processing (color correction and scratch/dust removal is the majority of the work, so having ICE do the work, even if it takes just as long, means I can do something else in the meantime).  I nearly went for a pricier solution with a Nikon Coolscan or something, but honestly, I’m only planning on scanning at 2400 DPI and it’s not as if these negatives are premium film or the cameras I used had fancy glass on them.  The Epson will be enough.  I can’t justify spending more on a scanner whose film scanning purpose will expire once I scan all those negatives.

But yeah, let the adventure begin.

I’m glad I saw this.  I was annoyed that the title of a classic Jules Verne novel was taken and the trailer looked nothing like the story from that novel, but it turns out that the novel is used as a plot device and is very relevant to this new story… a new story in 3D.  It’s good old-fashioned rollicking fun and might even give kids the idea of checking out Jules Verne’s book.  I enjoyed it.  It’s not very complex and in fact, it’s pretty corny.  But in a good way.

Pretty much like Hellboy except more effects and less character interaction.  Unfortunately, that means the problems in Hellboy are also in Hellboy II; specifically, it’s all over the map.  The feel of the movie is hard to peg down because it swings too wildly across the spectrum.  The best parts are still the ones where you just see the gang hanging out.  There’s less of that here because a bigger budget let them do more CGI fighting, so you might say as a story, it’s worse than the first, but for action — well yeah, I guess it looks cool.

I actually was fine with the mythology.  I just didn’t like how there wasn’t much investment in caring.  You don’t really see Hancock’s lowest low as all that low, and you don’t get an antagonist worth anything to make you cheer for the hero.  It’s not as bad as the critics say, but it’s not great, either.

Lunatic action scenes that are fun to watch surrounded by a predictable and often-times idiotic plot.  Eh.  See it or not, your call.