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I'm going to Madrid on Saturday, after 16 months in Seoul, South Korea. It's been a good time here in just about every way. I'll be home in Victoria around the end of March, after a bit of touring through Europe, India, and possibly Thailand. Wish me luck, and I'll be home soon! I'm packing the computer now, so the next post will likely be from Spain.

I saw Avatar. It was very good. Some may like the plot and characters, and some will not. I think it depends on whether you've already seen films like Dances with Wolves, and Pocahontas, because if you have, you've already seen the plot of Avatar. The script was thin and stretched a bit too far. The visuals however, are more than worth it. Once you're settled in and enjoying Pandora, you'll be willing to forgive and forget any script problems. That movie officially crosses the line in my mind of knowing how movies are made. Until Avatar, I could see how shots were constructed and how CG is used to suppliment the sets and characters. But Avatar just doesn't make sense anymore... the digital and physical realities are so blended that there's little way to intuitively separate the two. I think this is what people mean when they say Avatar is some sort of revolutionary film. Today was my last day of work. It was a bit sad, but only a bit. I think I'll genuinely...

And winding up! My time in Korea is down to a mere 12 days. Four of then will be spent working, three on a hiking trip, one is Christmas, and the remainder will be spent organizing and preparing and seeing various people and buffets off for the last time. I'm saving a large number of pictures to be made into an entry about life here, as well as some extra to be posted after I get home. But for your pleasure, here's a photo of delicious, delicious pig feet (in the middle): Do not be alarmed. In all fairness, you probably eat just as many pig feet as Koreans do, only in the form of hot dogs and luncheon meat.

Over the last few days I've spent several hours (and there are more to come) organizing, filing, and purging my email inbox. It's painstaking, because there are all kinds of attachments and photos and valuable letters worth keeping, so I need to look at most things before they are deleted. And here's the thing: I can see an entire relationship run its course simply through emails. In the start, they're kind, friendly, helpful, and generally written with a sense of reaching out one's hands out to the other. As time passes, the emails become more practical, simply setting plans and occasionally bickering. Soon, we started to pick little fights and respond passive-aggressively. Eventually, the writings are consumed by issues and problems and over-reactions to words and events that, at the beginning, would have been utterly forgettable. Finally, there are the post-breakup emails, where both parties try to make some sort of amends, in the "we were both wrong, s...

Imagine you're a tall man. You're 6'3, well built, and very handsome. You're in the prime of your life and career. You are obscenely rich, worth somewhere in the hundreds of millions of dollars. You are a professional sports athlete, among the most famous, recognizable and ground-breaking athlets on the planet. You're a married man, but you spend much of the year travelling around the world on the professional circuit, staying in classiest of hotels and getting sports massages, while amassing seven-figure paychecks for tournaments and product placements. There are literally millions upon millions of beautiful women who would have you for a night or a lifetime without one moment's hesitation. I'm not saying he should have done it, or that he couldn't have helped it, but I do understand.

Google's been under fire for "posting" unpleasant things at the top of it's search results. Last week it was anti-semitic websites at the top of the list for the search term "Jew," and just this week it was a doctored image of Michelle Obama (to make her look like a monkey) as the first result for an image search of her name. First, people may as well stop being offended by things on the internet. It's a free medium, and many of its users are accessing it while in a private setting. Unconventional content is a norm, and understandably so; the internet doesn't have the compelling behavioral pressures of a social community, and its content reflects that. Second, it's not google's fault. I don't know what their search algorithms are (and they would baffle me anyway if I did), but they're just giving you the results. Google, not unlike a binocular company, isn't promising that you'll like what you see, it's merely trying to gi...