I have compiled a list of every movie I’ve ever seen!

I’d often thought about creating this list, but dismissed the idea as too difficult, too time consuming and ultimately impossible.

That all changed when I joined Netflix last month.  After poking about the Netflix website I realized that their user movie-rating system was perfect for compiling my list.

The first 500 movies were easy.  I started by sorting through lists of popular movies, then movies by genre, checking off every movie that I’d seen.  After that I started pulling up filmographies of actors.  I’d check off every Robert DeNiro movie that I’d seen.  Then I’d pick an actor that had been in a movie with DeNiro (say James Caan in the Godfather) and I’d check off every James Caan movie that I’d seen.  This could go on for hours.

After 500 it got tough.  At 750 I thought I was done.  I scoured my memory and somehow came up with more.  Benji the Hunted, Suburban Commando, Monkey Shines, all the Ernest Movies – movies like these kept popping up out of the dark recesses of my memory.

The list is over 850 movies long now and it is done.  I just can’t think of any more.

My eBay auction ended last night and my camera received 16 bids and sold for $81!  That’s 81 x .62 = ~$50 in my pocket.  Yay!

For about three years now I’ve been telling people about my three year plan.

The details aren’t important; suffice to say that the three years are set to expire soon. I’ve accomplished what I’d hoped and I’ve arrived at the juncture where it’s time to formulate a new plan that will guide me forward from here.

The thing is, their wont be another plan.

So long as I can remember, my life has been defined by someone’s plan. Whether it was one of my own creation or one that had been laid out for me, there have always been goalposts marking out the road ahead of me, measuring my progress and defining my next heading. From my first steps to my first paycheck, the road to today was clearly defined and ready for the taking.

Now, as the clock strikes 28, I prepare for a whole new kind of challenge — a goal-free life.

It occurs to me that a plan can only take me so far. That I’m running out of things to plan for, and that those things that can be planned and measured are becoming less and less important to me. That, as I am dragged kicking and screaming towards adulthood, what really matters to me are those things that can’t be planned.

So as my three year plan passes gently into the night, I commit myself to the following goals: I will laugh more, I will listen to good music, I will spend as much time outdoors as possible, I will drink more wine, I will check my fears and insecurities at the door, I will do my best to surrender myself to life and embrace its current as it pushes and pulls me, to and fro.

Ironically, this won’t be easy. But it sounds like a good plan to me.

Last week I took a bold step towards the future by purchasing my first flip-phone. As I’ve noted before, I usually have a two-year delay in picking up on the latest trends, so waiting until 2006 to ditch my old candybar phone with the monocromatic display and original-nes style ringtones is no big suprise.

I’m totally enamoured with my new phone. Their is the obvious attraction — as a kid who grew up watching Captain Kirk request a beam-up by flipping open his communicator I secretly not so secretly desire to do the same. But aside from playing out my childhood fantasies, this phone totally rocks! My signal strength is better, I can hear people more clearly, voice dialing is totally awesome and yesterday I used the speakerphone to have a friend navigate me to my destination as I drove. I haven’t even begun to use the phone’s bluetooth features yet! This thing’s so hot, even James T. would be jealous.

Last week I decided it was time to do something with my old film camera.  Since the day I bought my Digital Rebel last year my old Rebel 2000, once my pride and joy, has laid untouched in a fit of dust collecting.  After considering my options I decided to take my camera to Snappy Auctions, a business that sells your stuff on eBay.

Now my camera is listed on eBay!  Snappy Auctions created a nice listing for the camera (though they claim that it was “used very little by its previous owner” which isn’t true at all) and now I just sit back and watch the bidding!  As of this writing the camera has received two bids and is going for about $20.

Snappy Auctions keeps 35% of whatever the camera sells for and then they mail me a check for the rest.  It’s a small price to pay when you consider how easy they make the process, and even more so when I admit that I never would have sold the camera on my own.  Now I get to experience the thrill of selling on eBay without any of the work!

What is a photograph if not a moment frozen in time?

Of all the art forms, photography is unique.  It is not an extension of the artists imagination, but rather a real moment captured.  The photographer can not change the reality he captures to suit his own creative expression, he can only hope to show reality through the prism of his own eye.  And so the photographer captures moment after moment in time, forever frozen just the way he saw it.

I say this in consideration of my own motivation for taking pictures.  I recently read a fascinating article on the psychology of photography.

“What drives us,” theorized psychologist Greg Feist, “is the need to capture that fleeting but eternal moment.”

“Or a wish to capture and control the things we see, to hold the beauty of the moment forever,” added psychiatrist William Reid.

Indeed, as man continues on his journey toward becoming master of the universe, we all still remain hapless victims of time.  Time marches on regardless of our own interests and we can do nothing to control it.  Like sand through our fingers, the tighter we grasp at time, the more easily it slips away.

Time is a particularly cruel tormentor to someone like me.  Constantly residing in my own thoughts, my perception of reality keeps me recalling the past or gazing towards the future, painfully unable to process the present as it rushes past me.

And so I find solace in photographs.  With the click of a shutter I come as close as I ever will to exerting control over time.  It’s why I do all of this, really.  This website is a shrine to frozen moments in time.  Images, thoughts and happenings that would otherwise be lost to the past are memorialized here.  Amongst these ghosts, somehow, I find meaning and peace.

“When pictures are being taken,” says Dimitrios Deliz, a leading photo industry analyst, ”it’s a prolonging of the moment, a justification for our being.”

This weekend I visited the Schiffer clan and took this picture of Todd’s oldest with Todd’s youngest.

My company sent me to the 3-city ”Research Triangle” in North Carolina this fall to attend a class on high-speed digital design.  Aside from the class, the trip was an opportunity for me to visit a state I’d never seen before!  Although I didn’t get much time away from the southern comfort of the Hilton hotel that I stayed in and attended the class in, I did manage to get out for at least one night; I visited Gennette and her boyfriend Pepe for dinner (featuring half-price bottles of wine!) and a tour of the Chapel Hill campus.

This photo was taken at the Hilton I stayed at.  The hotel had a large open-air porch with rocking chairs for guests to sit and relax in – a really nice touch of southern charm!