HKLNA-Project Announcement
March 2007

Best Wishes from the HKLNA-Project in
The Year of the Boar!

The Chinese New Year has come and gone.

TOP NEWS - As so many times before the HKLNA-Project has been put on hold for lack of sufficient means and little or no support from those responsible for its need. My heart goes out to those who could benefit most from the Project -- namely, the majority of East Asian youth who are compelled to while away many otherwise productive hours of their young lives in pursuit of a language that they will likely never use, but for the most trivial of purposes, or alternatively, in the achievement of artificially created, unnecessary ends. Little sympathy can be shown, of course, toward those who continue to ridicule, resist, or actively seek to destroy the Project. Those who keep waiting for the Project to happen without lending a hand can be viewed with little better favor. No matter, the Project will move forward in whatever form it is compelled to take, because both fact and theory justify the Project, and those who finally come to know it understand this.

SLIDESHOW - No further progress has been made in the creation of the promotional CD/DVD, but further progress is still expected, as the task is already so close to completion.

TECHNICAL UPGRADES - The first fruit of many hours of technical self-study resulted in an important, but small, technical achievement -- EARTH's first animated Chinese New Year's greeting card using an SWF Flash document produced with Adobe®'s (formerly Macromedia®'s) Studio 8, Flash (version 8) software and, of course, Creative Suite 2 in Apple®'s Tiger operating environment. The two boars were obtained from digital images of ancient Grecian art, the tree (species unknown) was obtained from a digital photograph taken by the Project's Director in Ma On Shan Park, and the bird (an egret) and boat (a Chinese junk) were created from digital photos downloaded at no cost from the internet.

In addition, all broken links on both EARTH's and the HKLNA-Project's website have been repaired. Navigation will have hopefully thus improved for newcomers to the Project. Keep in mind the current goal is eventual comprehensive site renovation in order to make the Project more attractive to would-be donors and potential supporters by whatever means, if only word of mouth.

TSONG KIT for Chinese Language Beginners (website) - Work on the Tsong Kit website, like work on the HKLNA-Project, remains temporarily suspended.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS - Special thanks to Apple® Computer for the best computers available, the best operating system anywhere, and a terrific place to host a website and to Adobe® software for making the internet a visual delight and an attractive place to discover, disseminate, and exchange information. Thanks also remains to those who have supported, if not the Project itself, then at minimum the Project's Director over the past five years. Your continued patience is appreciated and will eventually be remunerated.

By the way, if you make use of the HKLNA-Project or Tsong Kit websites, please do not hesitate to say thanks and do not forget to reference the Project in your footnotes and bibliographies. It is the little things in life that make each day worth living.

Sincerely

R. A. Stegemann
HKLNA-Project Director
asiapacific@mac.com

EARTH - East Asian Research and Translation in Hong Kong
http://homepage.mac.com/moogoonghwa/earth/