Month: August 2005

Howzat!!!

Like so many people I talk to at the moment I have been eagerly watching the Ashes Cricket tests. Having grown up for twenty odd years in NZ it is hard to resist the urge to just support anyone playing Australia out of sheer force of habbit, and while Simone does accuse me of bashing her country’s sports teams, the truth is that far more than supporting one team or another I am simply revelling in the fact that for the first time in what seems like more than a decade there is genuine competition within the Cricketing world.

Ultimately if one team wins every time (as the Australians have done for many years now) it take all the fun out of watching the sport. Now however you don’t know what is going to happen. I I mean the other day I found myself thinking that if I had been anywhere near england I would have been buying tickets to the first day of the test (which is usually completely unlike me, because traditionally the first day of any test is relatively slow and tactical) because the matches of the current tour are hard fought, skillful, and most importantly exciting.

I can only hope that it is the start of a broader trend. It really would be fantastic to see some good indian, pakistani and West indian teams get back into the fray as well.

Compilable

On and off for the last few weeks I have been playing a game called FreeOrion, which is a community written open source game based roughly on the Master of Orion style. It’s a great game, but since it’s still relatively early in FreeOrion’s development the game has an irritating tendancy to crash right when you’re getting into it.

Now at present there are only two ways to get the game:

  1. You can download a pre-compiled older version of the game (Version 0.2), which is what I initially did, and have found it to be quite crashy, or
  2. Download the source code and some other software and compile the latest version of the game yourself.

Now I really quite like the game, but have never compiled something like this before, and am torn between on the one hand desire for the game, and on the other hand a bizarre combination of apathy, trepidation and fear of the unknown.

I’m sure that I will eventually bite the bullet and figure out how to compile it, it would be so much easier if they would just do it for me…

Edumication

Over the last couple of nights I have been showing Simone a bunch of episodes from the BBCs 7 Wonders of the industrial world documentary series.

I have of course seen them all before, but it’s still good to see them again, as the are really well done shows, about cool stuff, and highly intellectually stimulating as well, and Simone seems to be enjoying watching them for the first time.

We have also taken to watching David Starkey’s BBC documentary Monarchy on sunday afternoons, which reinforces that the english (and by extension the europeans) have a fantastically rich history, and almost all of it is profoundly messed up. It does make great viewing though.

Political classics

After Tony Morris publicly criticised Queensland Health‘s 1 million dollar sponsorship of the Brisbane Broncos (saying, quite rightly, that the money would be much better spent shortening surgical waiting lists) the government today announced that the sponsorship deal had been cancelled.

What was classic was where their explanation of where the money had been redirected to:
“Funding health services for children in the bush” (ie. Rural Australia).

That combination of political interest is so blatant that I’m surprised that there isn’t an election on at present, because those kinds of vote buying absurdities don’t usually pop up at any other time of year.
Frankly, it’s almost on par with that other classic political amalgamation: Land rights for gay whales…

Head ornamentation

I appear to have developed something of a hat obsession.

I blame phil for this.

Well it’s not entirely Phil’s fault. It’s more to do with my hair falling out and reducing the amount of brain insulation I have.

Earlier this winter I began to really feel the cold on my head, and decided that I needed a hat, and after some umming and arrring (no, not the pirate kind) I decided that what I really needed was a beret. I liked the style, and from previous experience I knew that it looked good on me. The only problem lay in actually acquiring one. For weeks we looked around all the expected haunts and came up empty. Nobody in Brisbane seemed to have berets or know anywhere that did have them.

A couple of weeks after I had pretty much given up finding my beret in Brisbane Simone had to go to Melbourne for an interview and so I went along for the weekend.

While I was down there I caught up with my friend Phil, and I found a hat shop. I bought my beret, and Phil almost bought a fedora for himself, and then we spent the rest of tha day on and off talking about how cool hats were.

The unfortunate things is that having spent so much time looking in hat shops I have now found a whole world of hats that I want. I want a panama for summer. I want a fedora for my suit in winter. I want that other funky little hat in DJs for social occasions. It really does begin to seem silly, but then again I suppose most obsessions are.

Safari Ho!!!

It looks increasingly as though my elective in Africa is going to happen! Yay!!

I have revieced approval from the university in Jo’berg, and am waiting for my registration to come through from the South African Medical Professional

I’ve had my pre-trip jabs. Now I just have to sort out flights, accommodation, transport, health Insurance, indemnity insurance, travel insurance, HIV prophylaxis, malaria prophylaxis…

Feeling alive, realising you are dead

Today we had the day off, thanks to the Exhibition show day holiday.

This coincided nicely with one of my old friends from my college days being back in town from her PhD in Scotland, and so we decided to catch up for a bit of coffee.

A few of her other friends came along too, and what had started as a cup of coffee became three hours of exhuberant chin wagging.

When we finished up there Simone and I wandered up the road to a non-mainstream book store, where I browsed books about alternative history, environmentally sound house design, art history and… well you get the idea.

Upon arriving home I realised that for the first time in weeks I had not been thinking about my exams and instead was raving about the exciting things I’d read, the discussions I’d had, and the ideas that both of these had spawned in my head. In summary I was buzzing and I felt vibrant and alive.

The sad realisation that accompanied this however was that thanks to the self-imposted limitations that my studies had placed on my life this was what I was missing out on while I was stitting at home and studying, and worse than feeling depressed, simply feeling nothing at all.

I hope that once the exams are over I will find myself with more opportunities like this to feel vibrant again.

I don’t know how much I could stand travelling through life feeling nothing at all…