Busy
February 10th 2003 -
24
I finished watching 24, and was a bit disappointed. The big revelation of the traitor made very little sense, and I’m not sure they intended it to. Actually, looking back on it, a whole lot of it didn’t make much sense. Still, it was thrilling (or, at least, the first 12 hours were thrilling. After that, it kinda fell apart) and well acted.
Lotus
Sent the first three chapters across to Jon & Kate’s agent. I had no idea I was such a poor speller until I ran the chapters through the spell-checker. While there were many typos, there were quite a few instances of “It’s spelled like *that*? Oh!”. Now there’s just the waiting.
Spit
I got some extra space on otherleg.com and put Spit on-line. I’ve no ideas on page design, so I think I’ll just do content for the moment until inspiration strikes me (or someone points me at something good that I could rip off).
There are a couple of demo songs there. Check ‘em out.
Mononoke Hime
It turns out that Matt, one of the guys near me at work, is an Anime fan. I lent him the Nausicaa manga and Porco Rosso, and in turn, just the other day he lent me the Nausicaa video, along with Laputa: Castle in the Sky and Mononoke Hime. Last weekend was so busy that I’ve only had a chance to start watching Nausicaa. Impressions so far? Rather amazingly different from the book. Nausicaa is a great deal more violent, for one thing.
Weekend
Big weekend. On Saturday Anna had organised another high-school reunion, this time a more informal one. Given the Hangi excitement of late, we decided to (finally) put together the BBQ. It ended up taking several hours to do, so it was lucky the reunion was a dinner, not a lunch thing – I was working *very quickly* until Anna pointed out that the first guests wouldn’t be arriving until 5:30pm. The BBQ is very nice. It has four burners and lots of space on either side, and cooked the meat quickly and well. Happy. I only burned the sausages a little bit, so I’m pretty pleased, and feeling just that little bit more Australian.
There was a lot of alcohol consumed at the party. As usual, I got fairly loud and excitable early on, and then very quiet and withdrawn later, so that I spent a great deal of the latter bits of the party not being there. Everyone was talking high-school stuff anyway.
On Sunday, Adrian and Eva (hiya!) invited us over to their place for lunch. They’re the fine folks who ran the Spanish restaurant until recently, and are now taking a bit of a breather before getting stuck back into it (prompting much empathy from Anna). Eva makes a mighty garlic mayonaisse. She contributed one to the BBQ on Saturday night, and when it was over we scraped up the remainder and I took it to roleplaying on Sunday evening. Niiiice.
Sound recording
Very frustrating. I’d been having considerable problems with recording using the minidisc and pre-amp setup that I bought a few years ago, due to a low hum that proved nigh-impossible to remove. As you may recall, Ted helped me get rid of it by suggesting that we take the sound-recording gear downstairs and physically separating the power cords from the microphone leads. It worked a treat.
So I took all the sound-recording gear to Chris & Amanda’s place, and would you believe it – the low humming noise was back. We tried moving the gear around the place, but couldn’t get rid of the hum, and so ended up giving up. Very frustrating. Anyway, they’re hopefully coming over some time this week, and we’ll get their Spit contributions together and up on the website. I’d just like to whet appetites by mentioning that the songs are very good indeed.