Archived Blog
I just saw a photo of the Death Valley National Park, taken from space, and it really is very very pretty.
If you have time to download 3Mb go to page listed blow, and click on the picture to see the full size image. It’s worth the effort.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17247
Last weeks I continued my first pay year trend of recklessly impulse buying DVDs that catch my eye, and bought online the first season of a british drama that I had seen half an episode of on TV about a year ago.
And as with my previous impulse buys I have not regretted it at all.
Well almost not at all.
You see British TV being what it is, the episodes are really high quality, but you only get 6 episodes per season (as opposed to American TV where you get twenty-something episodes a season, but half of them are crap, and the other half vary between tolerable and possibly rewatchable).
As such the problem arises that when you sit down with a season on DVD you end up watching the entire season in one go (as I did yesterday), and then you lamenting the fact that you don’t have any more to watch.
….maybe I can import the next season or two from the UK..
Over easter Simone and I went down to Canberra to visit our best people (my best man and best friend James and his cool wife Chantelle, and Simone’s matron of honour Tash (best woman would be a perfectly accurate term, but sounds a little odd somehow), and her great husband Dave (bloody Dave’s. Far to many of ’em. Bloody everywhere they are)).
It was superbly good to get away, and even better to spend the time with such great friends.
And on the monday we had a golf day.
Now apart from Simone, I don’t think that any of us have done much more than watch golf on TV, but I must explain that we had a really good time none the less.
In the morning we had a lazy sleep in and went for a bit of a walk around the neighborhood after coffee at a local bar. Then we went and played a quick 18 at the local minigolf course, after which we had take-away-lunch-of-your-choice, topped off with easter eggs, and spent the remainder of the afternoon playing 4 player “Mario Golf: Toadstool tour” on James and Chantelle’s Nintendo gamecube.
It was so much fun that since arriving home I have been forced to go out and buy a gamecube and Mario Golf, so that Simone and I can continue the fun.
As if we didn’t have enough to do with our time as it was…. 🙂
I have in the past commented several times on my opinion that a really worthwhile application of digital technology lies in the ability to digitally photograph, catalogue and store the contents of old and rare (particularly religious) texts so that they should be accessable to everyone.
The other day I stumbled on another little technology that makes this an easier and more realistic prospect.
It’s called DjVu and is a new image compression system designed specifically to allow documents to be scanned so as to be readable, and to compress the resulting files to be smaller than if they had been compressed with other systems such as JPEG.
One step closer.
Simone and I have taken to frequenting a new restaurant (which is to say that we seem to be going almost once a week at the moment for various reasons).
It is called Azafran, and does modern australian cuisine.
Given that they manage to get me to try (and invariably enjoy) things that I generally don’t eat (Steak on two occasions and Mussels on another) they do do a really good job, and I felt they were worth a comment on the blog.
The restaurant itself is a converted house, with tables on the deck, and in the front and back rooms of the house, and with really friendly staff (several of whom we are already on a first name basis with), who make the small restaurant atmosphere really pleasant.
It’s BYO at this stage, so grab your favorite bottle and go try it out for yourself.
Some of you may have noticed that over the last week or so this blog has been changing color, shape and viewability (ie. it’s been on the fritz and offline fairly frequently while I fix it).
It all relates to the fact that I use a program called Gallery2 to display my photos, and a program called WPG2 to display those photos within my blog.
Now WPG2 did a good enough job, but it had a few annoyances, particularly in relation to navigating between different photo galleries, so I was all excited when I found that there was a newer version available, which apparently solved many of my bothers.
The only problem was that it required a newer version of Gallery2 as well.
And there was a newer version of the display theme I used for both the blog and the photo galleries.
So I set about upgrading all of these bits, and is always the way I ran into a few… well shall we say hiccups…
Now computer hiccups are nothing new to me, and in fact for me constitute quite a bit of fun I have with computers, as they present an opportunity for a happy afternoon of problem solving. And this was not a particularly serious problem (all my photos were still there, and all my blog entries were still there. They just weren’t immediately accesible), but because it was a problem with files on the opposite side of the world it took a little while (and a couple of attempts (or 5)) to rectify.
Anyway. Long story short everything is now updated, and working fine (apparently), so it’s back to blogging as normal. Hooray.
A few weeks back I saw this random movie in a DVD store, and after reading the back I thought “When I have some money I’ll get this”, and this week I had money, and I wasn’t disappointed by my purchase.
The Movie is another Hayao Miyazaki animated movie (he’s the guy who made Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke and Howls moving castle) called My Neighbor Totoro, and chronicles the adventures of two young girls who move to the country with their father so that they can be near the hospital that their mother is in while she recovers from an unspecified malady.
In the forest near their house there lives a forest spirit who the youngest girl decides is called Totoro, who looks like an enormous gray rabbit with small ears and human teeth. Together Totoro and the girls have various adventures, but the bit that I thought was the coolest was how Totoro gets around: which is in a giant cat with 8 or 10 legs, and windows and seats inside (ie, he’s a cat bus).
It’s so ridiculously absurd that it’s hard not to love the concept.
Anyway, it left me wanting to wander around singing little ditties of my own devising about Totoro and the cat bus (Jack got briefly subjected to one of them), and excitedly anticipating the next visit to see my nephew and niece, who I will show the movie to as I feel that they will love it too.
I’ve started into my surgery rotation, and while I’m enjoying getting to get into theatre a lot and do a fair bit of hands on stuff, both in theatre and on the ward, I’m already a little sick of the fact that because of the way my team functions (or dysfunctions as the case may be) I am basically doing minimum 10 hours each day.
This is good for my credit card repayments, but bad for just about every other aspect of my life.
I found it interesting the other day driving through brisbane and seeing several billboards advertising winter fashion collections for various places.
Whoever the advertising companies were that did those campaigns, their staff obviously never venture outside (or are never allowed outside, or are all gimps, or something), because the billboards sported pictures of beautiful women wrapped up in heavy coats and fake furs, all happily frolicking in snow under wintery gray skies.
Now I don’t recall when we last had genuinely winterish gray skies for more than an hour here, let alone when the last time it snowed in Brisbane (if it ever has…), and as for wrapping up in jackets and furs, well, it’s fine if you’re trying to loose weight in one of those bizarre “You can sweat yourself thin!!!” infomercial schemes, but otherwise generally a little superfluous.
Just another example of consumerism gone mad, when the concept of what winter should be takes precident over what winter actually is.
While reading through a friend of a friend‘s blog today I came across a funny and slightly disturbing little internet based game.
Type “[your name] needs” into google and see what comes back.
Apparently Dave needs:
And that was only on the first 2 pages of results…