Merhaba everyone!
my apologies for not getting in touch sooner...man this place is crazy! i tried writing an email earlýer but ýt was erased and ý was gettýng frustrated wýth thýs freakýn turkýsh keyboard. 

I'm confused by how there are intermittent "i"s throughout the e-mail, though they have mostly been replaced by "ý"s (I would imagine because of the keyboard layout).

I tried looking up the Turkish keyboard layout and couldn't really find much - there's this on the Microsoft website - must use IE to view - looked at both the Turkish F and Turkish Q layouts. Still confused as to why the "ý"s kept showing up.

The rest of the e-mail is funny to read, just because it's like going through someone's poorly typed message and your eyes are coping with the massive bludgeoning of the language. (You know it's hard to read something that has tiepose evvry uther werd or was typed in l337-ShOrThAnD-TeEn-ChAt-SpEakzZz? Sorta like that.)

Love ya, E. :)

2 projects this time. One full-on slideshow, and one mini slideshow in karaoke "MV" style (in Taiwan, they call music videos "MVs"). (Well, they didn't ask for it, but I thought it would be SO cool to do it that way. Besides, both the bride and groom and karaoke fanatics.)

Here are a few excerpts from the wedding slideshow:

Splash screen for the karaoke MV:

Snippet of the karaoke MV:

The groom's mods to the lyrics were actually pretty sweet. The original song is called "Man Slave". If you watch the original MV, it looks as though Nokia perhaps played a big part in financing the video. Ah, blatant product placement. [ original MV @ YouTube ]

Some stats regarding the slideshow and beyond

Programs used: Adobe Premiere 6.5, Windows Movie Maker, Sonic MyDVD 4.5 (authoring)

Songs used:
1. Bride's section: 一起開始的旅程 (Our Journey Together) by S.H.E [ YouTube ]
2. Groom's section: custom mix of Good Times by Chic and Rapper's Delight by Sugarhill Gang [ mp3 download ] (they have the same bassline - never noticed / knew until I watched this)
3. Friends' section: Everything by Michael Bublé [ YouTube ]
4. Couple's section: When God Made You by Newsong [ sing along @ YouTube ]

Karaoke-making tutorial was provided here. I used Premiere 6.5 but only used Premiere's native titler, as mine did not seem to come with TitleDeko. It's simple enough but tedious. I wonder how the professional [English] karaoke bars get their karaoke songs ... ?

Challenges: working with Chinese input in Premiere and MyDVD; understanding the meaning of the Chinese song for the bride's section to better match photos with lyrics; audio editing / mixing right within Premiere to make songs shorter / longer.

All-nighters pulled: one

Warm Fuzzies:

Have you had a moment in your life where every single time you think back to it, you just can't help but bust out laughing? Here's one of mine:

Instead of explaining what's going on here, I thought I'd open up the comments for possible captions. Keep it clean, please! (I didn't have to mention that, did I?)

With a few kiddie patients under my belt, it's fun to reward them with stickers. Walmart has a pretty good selection - they've got your regular stickers, then stickers on clear backing, fuzzy stickers, and even 3D stickers. I try to stay away from the super heroes since that implies some violence, and pick stuff like cars, kittens, and Baby Pooh. Not sure if Toy Story stickers imply violence at all. Oh well. The shiny foilness was too cool to resist.

Adobe Premiere, I hate you. You too, Photoshop.

Please take a look and sign if you can. The petition's intro is quite thorough and describes how I feel pretty accurately:

In recent decades, China's effort in trying to make Chinese easier for both her youth and foreigners resulted in this push of Simplified Chinese.

Simplified Chinese, although convenient, fails to incorporate meaning into its characters. Many words of same phonetic sounds are replaced by a single character that possesses the same sound but lacks in meaning.

UN's action to "unify" the Chinese characters and recognize ONLY Simplified Chinese will have devastating impact upon the Chinese language, culture, history.

The world is already getting stupider and stupider. Can we try to slow things down a little bit here?

Quote of the day:

"He's in-in-incompetent ... I mean, impotent."

Sometimes, the best course of action to take is none at all.