Anotherblog

Anna is not being paid

So, over to Anna’s place last night… she was rather unhappy about a slight workplace disagreement in which she hasn’t been paid in the last four months. One of the managers has AIDS and decided that he would live it up in his last years of life. He bought himself a yacht using the massage therapist’s pay cheques, and concealed this from everyone while making excuses. And it looks like Anna and the other therapists are not going to be paid.

What staggers me is that the manager is still there. He hasn’t been run out of town on a rail. How is this even possible? The whole thing has been a farce from beginning to end - they’ve been giving Anna the run-around about the pay, requiring her to get an Australian Business Number for unexplained reasons, and then claiming when she got one that she needed a “Personal ABN”.

Well… perhaps it isn’t as bad as it sounds. There’s certainly a lot of confusion on the matter, and it is hard to trace how people get paid by the hotel - there are layers of subcontractors in there, in a labyrinthine tangle of bureaucracy. Perhaps this manager doesn’t even exist, except as an excuse as their paymaster. What’s more, it appears to change every couple of months. Perhaps it will all work itself out.

Haha! Gosh I’m feeling optimistic today. I caught myself thinking that I might get the keys to the new place sometime this week. I walked over there last night and sat on the deck for a while, listening to the noise of traffic and planes and trains, and all I could hear was the distant grumble of Sydney and birdsong. How am I going to get to sleep when I live there? Will I miss the hustle-bustle of New Canterbury Road? Not bloody likely.

I watched a coupla episodes of Buffy last night after getting home, including a rather good one (albeit with a creaky premise) that was a nice excuse for Anthony Stewart-Head to exhibit a bit of range - there was this chocolate bar, see, that reverted people to teenagerhood (so that they wouldn’t care when the vampires came and stole a bunch of babies - hm, dodgy) and Giles became an angry young man briefly, and in places was brilliant.

Finally, Jon has sent the letter requesting permission to film on a train for MobileNet, and the shooting script for Bullet Hole continues slowly but surely. It is getting a slight kick-along from the fact that as soon as I’ve finished it, I can stop paying rent there… presuming that I move out before we start filming :-)

Pool table vs. cancer

Shopping for a pool table on Saturday… ah, what a pleasant experience apart from the salesman talking about cancer instead of trying to sell us a pool table. No, I’m not kidding. But the pool tables were beautiful, and the “dining tops” that ya shove on top to make the pool table into a dining table - well, they were much less shoddy than they sound. Three piece, polished wood, very nice if extremely large dining table. And my fears that it’d be difficult to sit at the table were relatively unfounded - we’ll have to hunt down taller chairs than normal, but I tried one out and it was pretty decent to sit at. I was afraid that the sub-table assembly (that’s technical builder talk, folks, I mean the bit under the slate) would be too low. It wasn’t, at least on the one we were interested in.

Anna’s mother June suggested that I was a good boy, but henpecked. This was inspired by my protestations that I really did want to buy a pool table, this was my idea and not Anna’s, really! June smiled and nodded tolerantly with a slight pitying look. No really, I said, really I wanted to get a pool table even before I met Anna. More smiling and nodding and she patted my arm and told me I was a good boy but I should stand up for myself.

And Anna thinks she’ll beat me at pool. Heheheh.

We went to the paralympic closing ceremony on Sunday. It was pretty good - highlight was that guy walking on his hands again, which they’d turned into the centrepiece of the closing ceremony. He hand-walked to the centre platform, sat down on a comfy chair, and pressed a button that set off many, many fireworks in close proximity to him. There was so much smoke drifting across the field that I thought he’d have suffocated in it - but sure enough, he got up again and hand-walked over to his position in the parade of nations. There was a bunch of parading things around, which I always find dull, some extraordinarily tedious speeches, and the re-emergence of the roos on bikes. Circus Oz reprised their upside-down man joke (a clowning routine of a race and medal ceremony done entirely upside down and backwards) and some acrobatic work, all of which was difficult to see because it was so far away and had bright lights all around it. Luckily there were big TV screens. Thank goodness for TV! Hey, wait a minute…

If I sound grouchy, it’s because I was and am feeling kinda sick. It cost effort, dammit, to raise my hands and clap them at any point so most of the time I sat there like a non-Jim-Carrey grinch. There were good moments - the walking-hands guy, and the Whitlams, and the Seekers doing The Carnival is Over as everyone said they should.

And now I’m at work. I signed more bank stuff today. Maybe the bank will own the house soon and I can have the keys.

The Laboratory

The latest section of Otherleg to hit the wavelengths is The Laboratory where you can (thus far) ask questions of Dr. Clam and check out your weight on Jupiter. Spellbinding scientifical and semi-scientifical stuff is sought for this sojourn in scholarly seventh heaven. Mail me with any suggestions…

Working from home

I’m working from home today. In some ways, it’s much easier - Baltimore has open-plan offices and there are always people talking next to me. On the other hand, there are many more non-work temptations at home. Like el stedocamo. Now, if I can somehow justify how use of a steadicam helps testing of the Java S/MIME libraries, then I’m running smooooth. Hey! Look how smoooothly the Java libraries are running now! If you ran them with conventional handheld camera work, there would be all kinds of memory swapping judders and the streaming would just be like, totally white-water rafting.

No further home news. It’s all down to the bank now - final settlement is fine for my and the vendors as soon as possible, but the bank needs to do random stuff to make them appear useful. C’mon! I wanna buy a pool table and move in!

My Dad vs. Anna’s parents

My Dad met Anna’s parents last night.

Actually it wasn’t too bad, if a bit formal. Dad flew in from Townsville and arrived an hour late, forgetting to take into account the difference in daylight savings. He’s staying in the Marriott hotel in town - a huge room with a balcony around about the size of the room itself. Quite amazing. But we headed off to Marrickville, met Anna’s folks, were subjected to June’s incessant entreaties to eat, eat, eat, and headed off to take a look at my new house. From the outside, of course, because I don’t have the keys yet. In fact, I don’t really own it yet as the bank hasn’t sorted out the final exchange.

I was hassling Jon Blum about getting in contact with CityRail for permission to make a short film, when I found that the reason he’d been slack was that Kate has suspected Bronchitis and he’s been sick himself and he was writing a script for a Dr Who Audio that has a deadline, and he’s putting in submissions for another audio and a book. You hear that, Dave? That’s the kind of excuse that I have mercy on. Get better soon, Kate!

Meanwhile, we’re busy hunting for mobile phone sounds so that I can get them to Evan for the MobileNet short film. Evan has exams soon, and then there’s the Spit music sessions in mid-November. We’re… we’re real busy here. But that’s the way we like it!

Yah. You got that right.

Termite inspection: no termites

How odd. I could have sworn I wrote a weblog yesterday. Oh well… anyway, we did the invasive inspection with the other lot of inspectors, and didn’t find any termites. The vendors were so relieved, they started laughing when I called them on the phone. Looks like the bank is about to own a new home! Yay for them.

Some context first. I requested the invasive inspection - ripping up floorboards - because the place had termites once before. I would only take the place if no live termites were found in this inspection. So we signed the contract on that condition, and the vendor adding something to the effect of: if you *do* find termites, you are responsible for putting the floor back in it’s original state. I am not a very good bargainer. It didn’t occur to me at the time that if we did find termites, then they would want to do a treatment - and would need the floorboards up anyway. Oh well, the vendor is a lawyer, what can I say.

The inspection was pretty interesting. The carpenter ripped up several floorboards in the front room, while I videotaped it (so that if we found termites and had to replace everything, I had a reference for how everything was before) and we had a good look at the sub-floor area there. I had been warned about this kind of thing before, so I was pretty much prepared for the mess underneath - old rotting canvas, moldy wood, and a subfloor that was really too shallow for proper inspections. So we’re going to rip up the entire floor for that room and do it properly. The rest of the subfloor was interesting too - there is a lot of handyman work there, many timbers in direct contact with the ground, some odd bits of timberwork, a dead rat. I found this when we were crawling around under there, weilding my video camera.

Now that I have a new home (or will do, soon) I decided: time to hunt for a pool table, one that can also be used as a dining table. I was a little dubious about whether this could be done, but the very first place I called said “ah yes, a dining top.” But was Anna really as keen as I was on the whole pool-table thing? She said that she was, but maybe she was merely indulging me. As it happens: no. It turned out she’d already called the same place, last year when *she* was shopping for a pool table. She didn’t get it because she figured she’d move out of home first. So we’re looking this weekend.

Other good news: I finally fixed the computer so that the resolution is no longer stuck at 640 x 480. And I copied a friends DV video tape onto a CD, and learned about streaming video stuff, and the fact that DV viewed on a computer really looks quite crap. The problem is that the video was recorded in interlaced mode (we recorded Once Upon A Time in progressive scan mode, which was unfortunate because progressive scan mode only records at 12.5 frames per second, contrary to what the Sony TRV900 manual states). The interlaced footage looked terrible whenever the camera moved - it looked like there were slow-glass venetion blinds across the video, if you can imagine that. I *think* this was interlace artifacts, but I really didn’t know what to do about it so I gave up and left them there. On the bright side, if we put OUAT onto the internet, it won’t have those artifacts…

Steadicam

I now own a DV Steadicam. It is sitting next to me as I type. Now I only have three or four hours to go until I can take it home and play with it. Funnily enough, my arms are already tired from carrying the box to work from where I picked it up at lunchtime. This may be the excuse I needed to start getting fit! Jon Blum has a calisthenics program snaffled from the Canadian Air Force, though how the Canadians let him fly their fighter planes around, I’ll never know. Anyway, this might be the go. That, or a compulsary half-hour practice with the steadicam every morning.

Back to the pest inspection, and I’ve given up on M&M pest inspections as a waste of time and gone over to the people I got for the independant inspection, the ones who convinced me that perhaps it wasn’t as bad as M&M were making out. They’re not convinced that the entire floor needs to be ripped up for an inspection, so we’ll see.

Lifting Floorboards

Apparently there are no carpenters in Sydney capable of lifting floorboards. At least, this is according to the rather desultry searching done by the pest inspection people - the fools! The mad fools! Must I do everything myself?

Contractual Headache

Ooooooh, I have a headache. Not a literal headache, though that will be along shortly, but a metaphorical one brought about by signing the contract this morning. The problem is with the invasive inspection. The inspectors have requested that the floorboards in one room be completely ripped up (!) - and there’s a (fairly sensible) clause in the contract that if I *do* pull out of the contract, all the damage is repaired. Ack! Of course, that particular room has polished floorboards rather than carpet, so we can’t just replace the boards again… tricky, tricky. The reason the floorboards would have to be ripped up is that all the supports under the floor go all the way to the ground, so if you cut a trapdoor, you’ll only see between the supports on either side. On the other hand, those supports should be replaced with brick piers anyway… but I’m only really going to do that if everything *is* OK.

Well, it’s tricky. If I ask that the work is done and it turns out to be OK, then that’s fine - I’ll want the floorboards ripped up anyway because we’d be putting brick piers down anyway. If it isn’t - well, there’s the trick. I’d have to pay for everything to get put back, and that’d be unpleasant - though not as unpleasant as finding out that I just purchased somewhere that *does* have termites… well, I guess that answers the question then.

Pest inspection OK, therefore new Home.

The house-hunting basil nears possible termite-free completion. I got a second pest report, given the enormous difference between the pest report that I got, and the pest report that the vendor showed me. Well, of course there’ll be a difference, cynically - but the difference was so big that I ordered a *third* pest report - and this one largely agreed with the vendor’s. So I’m going ahead with signing the contracts and stuff, but with the provision that if the subsequent invasive pest inspection finds live termites, the deal is off.

Meanwhile, I’ve been mucking around with the brand new Palm M100 that estore.com.au finally sent me (they still haven’t picked up the old one!). I downloaded a couple of games, including the old Loderunner classic, and I’m currently quite hooked on this little quest game - Kyle’s Quest which is rather good for a teensy handheld app.

Also, I watched too many Buffy the Vampire Slayer videos over the weekend, lying in bed with Anna talking about how much we should be doing. We should have been working on Bullet Hole, or Train Trip, or Cycling To Homebush, or maybe getting out of bed and going for a walk, or possibly even making it to the fridge. But lying there felt better.

Hoho. I just remembered what happened to my home computer. It’s been out of action for a while, awaiting upgrade which would hopefully make the CD writer work. Well, we upgraded like crazy, we defragged and polished and rejigged and optomized, and when we had finished I had a wonderful working computer that would only display in 640 x 480 with 16 colours. And still refuses to do any better.

You can’t win them all. Calmness is the only suitable state of mind for approaching microsoft products; otherwise you end up taking stuff out on the hardware, which is largely peaceful and harmless. Except when it is busy cutting your hands to shreds with all the sharp edges inside the computer.