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This site has been officially running for two years now. The first year was quite interesting and though the second year followed a relatively consistent theme, modelling, the second year was also quite interesting.
This time last year I was dabbling with gymnastics while working part time at my mother agency, Mode Models. I managed to learn a front tuck and front flip. I was working on back tuck and back flip when I was placed with the agency Joy in Milan. In April, I dashed off to Italy where I reached an all-time low before landing my first job, an editorial for the Dutch magazine Avantgarde.
I managed a trip to Bologna and a trip to Switzerland amidst some interesting parties before I abandoned Milan for London.
I spent some time in England getting to know my granny whose company, while growing up in Calgary, I missed during childhood. I also visited with my aunt and uncle at their lovely cottage in Haywards Heath. Using England as a base, I went to Holland then to Denmark and Sweden where I did my first fashion show during Stockholm Fashion Week.
I was about to return to Canada when instead I dashed off to Singapore. I had an amazing couple of months with the agency UpFront. I did lots of work including my first cover and a trip to Kuala Lumpur for an overnight shoot.
I went home for Christmas and spent a few weeks in Canada before it was once again off to Milan. And here I am.
As for the site, I announced some major plans last time for the "unfinished" parts such as the links under my psychedelic face. Well, those updates never happened. In fact, the gallery was even taken offline. I have done some tweaking of the site, but it is generally the same as when introduced last year. So I will take this occassion to rescind the announced development. I am currently working on some top secret projects which may or may not receive some involvement in the site. Aside from that, any changes will happen as they happen.
If you want to help, you can link to my site. I am trying to beat a certain Reverend and his auspicious vegetarianism in my google ranking.
Here is to a fun and fabulous year three.
Good Bye Electric Gasoline
My cousin's company is looking for an application developer. Bonus: the job is in Tortola (think white sand beaches and offshore banking) in the British Virgin Islands!
Click here (pdf) for the full details.
I have resurrected the Mainichi Shinbun news feed and returned it to its rightful place in the right-hand column. I disabled it a while ago when the script generated errors, but did not bother looking into it until now. Apparently the "Evil Empire" has assimilated at least the Enlgish part of the site into its collective MSN juggernaut.
I also added a feed from the Globe and Mail business section. Globeinvestor is one of my favourite sites and when I originally added RSS news feeds (approximately one year ago), it did not offer any. There are none directly from globeinvestor so the Globe and Mail business feed is the closest alternative.
In case you are wondering how the setup is arranged, I have the unix crontab facility pull the xml files to a local directory every half hour using wget. From there a php rss parser function (that I found online) generates the html links for the article headlines.
On February 8th 2006, a male model going by the name "Christophe Bernard" took advantage of his hosts by helping himself to new bar of Swiss chocolate from the fridge and finishing all the milk without asking. After claiming to have nowhere to sleep for the night, two other models sharing an apartment took pity on him and agreed to his request that he might stay over. He then proceeded to blatantly mooch from them while repeatedly violating the no-shoes policy of the apartment.
Height: 187 cm
Hair: Blonde
Eyes: Blue
Nationality: Belgian
Considered forward, presumptuous, and a mooch risk. Last seen in Milan. He may approach you looking for accommodation. Caution is advised.
So I have made my second trip to Switzerland within the span of a year. This time I went with my roommate Questions. Being it his first time in Europe, this was a must-see destination. Fortunately Janos and Aniko and their two cats were able to kindly host us in their flat in Aarau.
Let's start with this year's Christmas illustration by Janos Escher-Gáspár. I posted his previous drawing belatedly last year so this year, late again, wonderful as usual, here it is (click to enlarge):
The rest are from the trip. Enjoy!
(An exchange point for ebay in Zurich station. Cool.)
The foreign perception of Italy is very romantic. People imagine delicious pasta, architectural charm, and a common, passionate joi de vivre. I find the delicious pasta unaffordable, the charm buried under graffiti and garbage, and the joi de vivre simply a euphemism for indolence. There is, however, one thing I perpetually anticipate when returning to Italy.
"A Persian flaw" is one of my favourite expressions. I cannot recall precisely where I first encountered the phrase but I believe it was either while reading Nietzsche or watching "The English Patient". Since so few people seem to have heard this expression, I am inclined to believe it was the former. It refers to the historic practice by Persian rug makers of incorporating a deliberate flaw into each work so as not to presume perfection, the domain of Allah.
Italian yoghurt is fantastic. Compared with the artificially sweetened, fat reduced, synthetic mush we find in the Canadian supermarket, Italian yoghurt is rich, creamy, and comes in a spectrum of delicious flavours. My favourite flavour is "cereali" or cereals. So far Italy is the only place I have found it.
A fragrant lily blooming defiantly in the swamp, cereal flavoured yoghurt is the panacea of my Italian purgatory. The complimentary opposite to a Persian flaw, one good feature in a sea of bad. For this condition, I propose a new expression: an "Italian virtue". Use in a context similar to "Every cloud must have a silver lining" but with slightly more precision and a touch of ethnic slur.
So the showroom turned out to be a net positive experience. After the third day, I got my pair of Converse All Stars (TM) to glide around the showroom in comfort and style. I can now add one more item to the list of glamourous clothing I have received over the course of this illustrious modelling career. Since I hear the question frequently, I know you are also curious and I will share with you the list:
Technically, it is enough to make an entire outfit.
Sarcasm aside, I am quite thrilled with the new shoes and wear them all the time. Especially now the lesions on my achilles tendons have calloused over and I can walk in them without limping.
Besides the shoes, I learned a lot about the fashion industry. I now understand the sales process, how pieces end up in department stores and boutiques around the world, and a thing or two about mens tailoring. I also made a few friends from the designer's team, the showroom staff, and various people associated with the environment. Many of, if not most of the clients are Japanese buyers so I had the opportunity to rekindle my East Asian language skills.
On Sunday I had the chance to rekindle my East Asian eating skills. A friend invited me to her classmate's Chinese New Year party where I enjoyed some tasty comestibles while ringing in the New Year with some of the few people aware of the event in this city. So Happy New Year.
The friend who invited me is one I have known for a couple of years now. I met Paige in Seoul, Korea while we were both working in Japan. We both happened to be in London in Trafalgar Square in the Fall last year when London's successful Olympic bid was announced. Now we both happen to be in Milan where she is studying. I can draw one of two possible conclusions: The world is small or, Paige is following me around.
We now also have the sweet elixer of life, 54 Mbps wireless Internet access, saturating the air and coursing through the apartment.
In other apartment news, Nicklas has moved out and Nicklas has moved in. Only the person has changed, but the name conveniently remains the same. Nicklas was "Noobie" by the way. "Questions" is still here.
Our water heater broke down one day. This happened to me last summer and it took three days of cold showers to decipher the cryptic controls. Though our heater here is of different design, both heaters employ the same communication techniques. Arbitrary heiroglyphs ensure that no person of any given language can restart the pilot light without exhaustive experimentation and fear of conflagration, fear of flooding, irreperable damage or some combination of all three.
Being all digital, newfangled, and electronic, our Immergas unit employs a further communication tactic. The control panel flashes the number "10" accompanied by a meanacing orange backlight. Is that the temperature? An error code? Some kind of suggestion? It is a message I must interpret as "panic" "panic" "panic" "panic"...
The heater defiantly ignores the Reset button. The other button depicts a snowman, an umbrella or upside down bowl, and a third figure that I think looks like an "On" symbol and that Questions interprets as a timer. Does the snowman, for instance, mean "make the water cold", or does it mean "there are snowmen around, please make the water more hot"? How are the symbols related? What is the average air speed of an unladen swallow? While pondering such questions, cycling through all three settings achieves nothing.
Eventually the landlord becomes involved who determines that the pressure has gone. After using his phone-a-friend lifeline, we learn that turning an unmarked black knob underneath the unit in the correct but unidentifiable direction (and not flipping the unmarked black switch) will restore pressure to the heater.
The situation was escalated to the service professional level and a couple of Italian guys with wrenches were soon stomping around the apartment, draining radiators, and tightening couplings. Incidentally they had the "special tool" required to change the light bulb in our bathroom. So a side-effect of the whole experience is that we now have sufficient illumination to know exactly how dirty the place is instead of just sensing it. [Insert your own models changing a light bulb joke here]
You need not bother checking the Immergas website to chastise my negligence in failing to procure an instruction manual. Available is every single specification and plumbing schematic. Unavailable is TFM (the fine manual).
