Anotherblog

Rebuilding PC

And now: the slow process of rebuilding my PC. It’s probably going to take a couple of weeks to get most of my applications up and going again, and I’ve definitely lost my Kawa (a Java IDE) licence details. Oh well. This whole incident has left me surprisingly mild - there was a lot of stuff lost, but it was a big mess, too. Starting over is simple and clean and neat.

Jon and I discussed what we’d do about Mobile Net - CityRail have been dragging their feet so much that we may have run out of time. I’m champing at the bit to get something done, but Jon is overworked, with far too many simultaneous projects. Bullet Hole is receding further into the future, so I’ve thought about re-jigging it a tiny bit. The whole “keeping the flat until Bullet Hole is finished” is sounding more and more bullet headed as I go… still, I can just count it towards the cost-of-film. As accounting exercises go, it’s a bit lame. I’ll feel a lot better if I can get someone staying there for the interim, sharing the rent.

Anna and I went to the mooovies last night and saw “Snatch”. Near-identical in feel to “Lock, Stock, and two smoking barrels”, it was still a whole lot of fun, and had a couple of set-pieces that were brilliantly constructed and paced. And Brad Pitt continues to surprise, with a (according to my Irish friends) near-perfect Irish Gypsy accent.

Dead hard-drive

Bottom. The hard disk is broken, defunct, deceased. So, what have I lost? Lots of email, a little bit of work, and the registration details of half a dozen shareware programs that I own. I’ll probably find out more as I go along - I’ve made backups of all my personal work every now and then, but the last one was over a month ago. Hm, I think there are some lost drafts of Once Upon A Time there, and probably all my “making of” OUAT written stuff is down the gurgler. Yes, quite a bit of personal writing, lost. I might try to get the HD fixed just to get it back. Oh well, at least I’ve started moving stuff over to otherleg.com. There are printouts of most of my stories somewhere, and I’ve emailed some home as well.

Last night went pretty late. I helped out David P.’s friend to create a short video sequence for her PhD presentation - it ended up taking about 4 hours, mostly due to the computer misbehaving. In the end, I printed a copy onto CD and handed it over - 11:30. Then Anna and I had a couple of games of pool and collapsed into bed.

Ev had a cold in Canberra last week and passed it on - well, it was kind of inevitable because he, Anna, and I shared the living room floor for the week. So I missed work on Monday - complete coincidence that the pool table arrived that day, honest…

Spit recording sessions

I’m back! Did you miss me? I missed me, but I was aiming at my foot with a Visual Basic gun and… oh, never mind. Too early.

El Machina Obscura, my computer at work, is refusing to boot up and the system administrator is working on two more-urgent tasks at the moment so it looks like the rest of my morning is going to be fairly free… I’ve done about all the paperwork I can usefully do, so all I can do now is sit around and snaffle the computer of someone who’s away to do web surfing. It is my second day back at work after the Spit sessions, and I still have a cold.

The spit sessions were excellent. In the end, we recorded 14 tracks of nonsense, several of which had truly beautiful tunes. I supplied all the musical instruments (except two kazoos, which don’t really count) and Ev supplied all the musical talent, and then we worked like yapping scots terriers for three days. Anna got bored. She didn’t end up recording any vocals, which was a bit slack of us, but most of the songs were Ev on vocal and Ev on guitar anyway… oh well, she found other things to do. On the other hand, I was fascinated by the whole process - we recorded guitar and vocal tracks separately for every song with Evan’s hard-disk multitrack recorder, and it was very interesting seeing the whole process in action. I sung one song, did chorus in two others, and speaking parts in another two. The time was over before we knew it (apart from Anna), and we had a wrap party sort of thing with some singalong stuff. Typically, I brought the video camera along with grand plans of using it for lots of stuff, and it only ended up getting used to take pictures of Linda’s new place, and for the wrap party singalong.

Other important news: unbelievably, the pool table and king-sized bed arrived on-time on Monday. We’ve played almost a dozen games of pool in two days now. It’s a fantastic table. The only down side is that the dining top they gave us didn’t match the colour of the table - which is odd, because that was our only requirement of the colour, and it was the reason that it took two weeks to get organised instead of one day. The king-sized bed is on rollers, so goes scooting about the (wooden-floored) bedroom at night. We keep the balcony doors shut, just in case. It may be king-sized, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be sneaky. Look at Richard III. Or what about George III? Or Henry VIII, it was pretty sneaky of him to invent a church just so he could get divorced. I just don’t trust those king-sized beds.

Lunch!

Kilos and kilos of porn just floating around the bottom of the ocean

Hm… blogger was not working well yesterday, and it’s a bit odd today. Could it be the broken submarine cable, so aptly dubbed (Adam Spencer, JJJ) “kilos and kilos of porn just floating around the bottom of the ocean”?

I bought a keyboard with MIDI yesterday, ready to head to Canberra tonight for great gobs of Spit recording. Hm… Goodness Gracious, Great Gobs of Spit!

[scribble, scribble]

The weekend was nicely quiet after getting sick on Friday and heading home early. I lay around quite a lot, and called people on the new mobile phone until the credit ran out (it’s one of those credit-only phones) and I had to go down to the newsagent to get some more. On Saturday, Anna and I went shopping in this enormous home-stuff-centre, and bought a king size double bed. I’m beginning to suspect that this is fundementally similar to food-shopping when hungry - we’re both getting well sick of the futon (of course, we’re taking it to Canberra so there’s another week of it yet) and looking forward to comfort, so I think we may have overcompensated… still, it’ll be nice, and the bedroom is (just) big enough to fit it. It arrives next monday, at roughly the same time as the billiard table. Two luxuries in one day!

The film-making stuff is in a bit of a go-slow zone at the moment, as Jon has far too much on his plate again… it’ll probably all become easier once he goes part-time early next year, but in the meantime it’s proving difficult to get the time to do stuff. I was planning on filming on Sunday, but between my illness and Jon’s stressed state, it didn’t happen. Still, I did some shopping for the costume and thought a bit about the set design, so it wasn’t a dead loss. Meanwhile, the tentative schedule for MobileNet has moved to Dec 10th while we await word from CityRail.

New Home: The second night

Another night in the new home, and despite the slight discomfort of the futon, it’s all very nice. We finally got the hot water working and the back door open. Soon we may get carried away and get the phone connected. We got some extra-ordinarily expensive quotes on fixing up the spare room to allow proper subfloor access, so Anna’s still looking. Thing is, we have to get all that done before we can finish moving stuff in.

Meanwhile, my ambitions have moved from iBook to PowerBook. Egad, this is looking pretty expensive - one thing holding me back is that there is (reportedly) a new generation of PowerBooks coming out in January - is it worth waiting? Who knows? Will the prices on the current models go down? Will I still want them then, when they aren’t as shiny and new? Should I settle down a minute, can’t I just make do with the stuff I’ve got? What kind of attitude is that? Would you like a game of questions?

New Home: The first night

I slept in the new house last night - dragged over a futon, some changes of clothes, and tried it out. It’s nice having a bedroom with a balcony; even nicer is the quiet. There were some planes earlier in the night, a shunting train, and some rainbow lorikeets in the morning. None of which was even slightly a worry. The biggest hassle was not being able to find how to turn on the hot-water system. I’ll try again this afternoon when it’s light outside, I might have better luck then.

Today, browsing, I happened upon an ibook advertisement. Very appealing computer. With the in-built firewire, I could take the laptop with me on film shoots (note ambitious use of plural) and edit on the fly, or nearabouts. I like the idea of that. And it has just enough harddrive space and memory to allow me to do so, not to mention far superior editing suites to el-crappo Adobe Premiere (which has many, many interesting features including footage-losing, computer-crashing, and synchronization-mangling).

Also, quotes on ripping up the floorboards in the spare-room-of-termites, and turning it into the spare-room-of-subfloor-access-and-ant-caps. Then floor polishing. Then moving everything in, including the pool table. The latter is going to be quite difficult if we can’t get the back door open by then…

Oddly, Anna and her mom are getting along better today than in the last six months - it’s only been a single day since she moved out!

House settlement

Settlement today! This means that the house, previously owned by National Australia Bank, is now owned by the ANZ. Yay for me! I’m not sure whether we can start moving in this afternoon. Radical steps like that are probably frowned upon.

Touch of death

My long-running mechanical touch-of-death was exemplified today by the food-vending machine at work.

Previously I’ve had problems with the drinks machine, which has a perverse mechanism that jams only for me. The coin gets stuck in it, and it becomes jammed until the drink-refiller guy comes around to collect the money and fix it again. Nobody else has managed to do this, but I’ve done it four times now.

First, the Cherry Ripe of long-distance taunting confessed its love affair with the vending machine and refused to part with it, no matter how I beat the vending machine. I’m not the bad guy here, honest. I merely wished to consume the Cherry Ripe and… OK, I’m the bad guy. So, embracing my villainy, I bought another Cherry Ripe (how much for your sister?) in the hope that the vending machine would disgorge both. And it did, eventually, after I changed tactics and asked the vending-machine for a dance. We did the twist, the mashed potato, and finally the lambada, and with that, it relinquished its claim on the Cherry Ripes and I returned triumphant to my desk.

Later today, Carlos the evil next-desk workmate got a packet of chicken chips from the vending machine, and offered me one. Ten minutes later, I returned to the vending machine to battle it out. Money: in. Chicken chips: stuck. Suitably, we did the Chicken Dance, then the Funky Gibbon, and finally the Time Warp at which point the front of the vending machine sprang open. I reached inside, pulled out my chips, and retreated to my desk.

Now, let us never speak of it again.

It was a good, if somewhat terrifying, weekend. I’m the main actor in Bullet Hole, which we intend to start filming properly Real Soon Now. On Saturday, Ted and I walked through the shooting script and made sure it made sense, and then on Sunday, Jon and Kate came over and we did a dress rehearsal with rolling camera. I started realising that the main character in Bullet Hole is really poorly motivated. And also, I’ve never acted in anything before, not for real. Naturally, I felt that I did an incredibly crap job, but I have plenty of time to go over the character, develop mannerisms, get into it a bit more, and ensure that I’m merely dire.

On Friday night, I had the odd experience of sitting down and writing a full short story off the top of my head, in one sitting. It helps that it is non-fiction - an account of the life and death of the various Shellshear household pets. Greta (lovely silly female rottweiler, age 9) had just died before I started writing, but I didn’t know it. The last I had heard was that she was seriously ill, but had made a bit of a recovery. Which makes the story a little more bittersweet. I want to turn it into a short film, shooting the film when I get back to Townsville, and submit it into tropfest - and if that doesn’t work out, try to submit it to a magazine somewhere. It’s probably one of the best things I’ve ever written.

James Wallis, game designer, is sending me one of his latest games. See, Simon? Free kickbacks! I knew this film-making business would pay off!

Really, yeah, they liked it.

Ah…. What good news. The Game designers love OUAT. Andrew’s head hardly fits through the door… I hope his new house has got some big sliding ones so he can at least get inside… :)

But seriously, let’s hope the web-site will eventually enjoy such an accolade…

Beyond that, what can we aspire to next? Perhaps becoming game designers ourselves?

Spit and Trust

Spit being a mockery is probably the best that we can hope for :-)

Hm, I might take along my minidisc recorder to tomorrow’s roleplaying. Perhaps we can bottle some of that wild djinn spirit that we like to call “Chris’ singing”.

I got the film “Trust” out on video last night, and watched it again. It’s one of my all time favorite films, so I could watch it and almost recite the dialog along with it - but I haven’t seen it since I began my vague asperations to make films. The cinematography I remember as breathtaking; viewing it now, I’m beginning to be able to analyse it. Hal Hartley uses a very formal style, carefully posed actors, stark backgrounds, and subtle lighting. Anyway, it’s still a favorite, but I have trouble viewing it objectively any more. It helped that Anna was watching it with me, reminding me that it was really pretty funny too.

Earlier in the evening, we went to see a NASA HDTV lecture. It was a little disappointing - it had everything that it claimed, but it was much less well organised than I was expecting. The HDTV was projected onto an enormous screen with quite astonishing clarity. It was better and clearer than any cinema or TV screen I’ve ever seen before - and for the animations of weather patterns as viewed by satellites, it was worth the price alone. But the lecture was dull. Anna fell asleep.

I got some more head-swelling comments about “Once Upon A Time” from one of the designers, James Wallis, and the person resposible for getting Atlas Games to make it, Nicole Lindroos:

“It’s arrived safely, and been watched and very much enjoyed. Thank you sincerely for possibly the greatest compliment I’ve ever been paid.” - James

“You made an excellent video, and it’s a fantastic testimonial for the game!” - Nicole.

Aw, shucks.