Tickets to China are purchased. Well, almost. I got them from a weird consolidator site, so I had to jump through some hoops: I fax in a credit charge authorization form, then they give me the e-ticket numbers a couple days later. Sounds like a scam, but I didn't find anything negative about them on Google, and a few positive reviews from people who didn't seem like plants. They were a good $100 cheaper than everything else I found, so it's worth a little hassle assuming everything works out okay. Now we need to decide what to do in China. Spending two weeks just in Beijing will probably get boring.

We got an order of shirts in today, and got around half of them out before the post office dock closed. Sorting out the international orders, I spotted one from Yu Miyake, who composed some of the music for the Katamari Damarcy soundtracks. We get the random celebrity sighting at Panic (the musician Seal is a Transmit user!) and it's always a big debate about how to respond. Do we play it cool and professional? Do we act like fanboys? Actually, in most cases, it's just "wow, that guy's famous—and he's using our software!", we laugh about it, and it doesn't go much past that. But this time, I just had to do something to show how much we love his work, so I wrote "You rock! (heart), Panic" on the receipt. I hope he doesn't think I'm calling him a rock.

Lastly, I've made my last (I hope) big splurge on stuff I don't really need but, oh, how I covet. I finally got a replacement for that crappy macro ring flash I got that stopped working after a month (and which I never bothered to send in for warranty). Sigma (my new favorite cheap photo manufacturer) makes one that's a fair bit cheaper than the Canon ring flash—expect more macro shots here—and an alternative to the Speedlite as well. And that's it for this year. Really!