Anotherblog

Yawn

Another busy day of worky-work. Along with the cycling, I’m feeling particularly productive at the moment - at the moment I can’t wait to get back to the coding again tomorrow (well, OK, I can) because the code is particularly fine. That’s what you get from a bottom-up redesign. Oh, and the fact that I’m two weeks behind schedule, roughly speaking.

You were expecting, maybe, more?
Well, OK. Kit Watson, enthusiast extra-ordinaire, is now unemployed and working on a script for us to film. Hopefully she can get some of her natural enthusiasm onto the page (and the production), ’cause if she does, it’ll be a winner. Anna, lovely creative genius and funniest woman alive, is also working on a script, which will be a very rude film if it works correctly. Kyla Ward, genre cliche and droll dry wit, is also working on the final draft of “Magic”, which will kick arse, though hopefully not mine. Now if I can only get Bethany Fellows to write something, there will be no bounds to what is possible. The cumulative mass of script will block out the sun, creating rather moody lighting that we can take advantage of for film noir. We think of everything!

The work “Brain” should not be used in lyrics that are not intended to be funny
But “synergistic” is alright.

Actually, I can feel a “Spit” song coming along. Time for another album, guys! Break out the kazoos, we’re baaack!

Then, there’s always the small matter of releasing the previous album. Right, I’m enthused. Time to get onto it. Or possibly to go home and get some sleep. Yeeeesssss. Sleeeeeep.

Bike

I’ve got a bike, and it’s hurting me a lot. Actually the pain is one of those alleged “Good” pains, the pain of exercised muscles. I didn’t do much exercise on the weekend, but I was still feeling it this morning when I got up to ride out. Ugh. Still, the route is becoming familiar enough that I don’t have to think much while I’m riding, and the time is beginning to fly by. It’s not quite yet at the stage that it got to in Townsville, when I rode to University every day - I would occasionally wake up, and then suddenly be sitting in a lecture.

Normal enough, you may say, but I mean wake up at home and suddenly be sitting at a lecture at university. The ride and shower were completely forgotten. It was a little surreal. I couldn’t remember a single detail of the bike ride. This is my theory as to why time seems to pass faster as you get older (and I’m certain that it does). When you do the same-old, same-old every day, it just doesn’t register on your memory. You don’t even get a “See 14/3/92, 15/3/92, … 18/9/98″, it just isn’t there at all.

The only solution is to do new and radically different things every day, thus slowing apparent time and making you live longer, as long as the new and radical things are not in the slightest bit dangerous. And that’s my solution. I resolve to play a different PS2 game every day!

Hm, this theory might need a little work.

Guitar
My guitar tutor moved to a new and inconvenient location in Chatswood, so I was beginning to think about quitting. But we managed to work out a new strategy - I don’t take my own guitar to practice, which allows me to ride my bike, which saves a good forty minutes of walking. I tried it on Thursday last week and it worked admirably well, so that’s that. It takes about an hour to get to guitar practice, which is OK. Now I need to start practicing again. He’s given me some lovely 16th Century pieces, quite easy to play and sound terrific when he plays them.

Tired
So tired.

Pool table

The pool table at work has been getting quite a work-out. I’m not playing as well as I’d like, so I’ve won a couple and lost a couple, but I’m sure I’ll get up to speed fairly soon. The trouble is, I really am used to having a couple of beers in me when I play pool. These things become cliches for good reasons, you know.

More bike riding
I went into a mild frenzy of acquisition yesterday, bought a trip meter for the bike, a rechargable light, some road-tyres (I currently have mountain-bike tyres) and some goggles. The trip meter was surprisingly easy to install, and confirms that the trip to work is about seven kilometres. I don’t think it’s very accurate, though. Cycling good! However, I forgot to charge up my usual light - it’s also rechargable, but it’s a real pain to do so, ’cause it’s just a pair of C-size NiCad batteries, so I have to run them down, get them out of the light (screwdriver required) remember to charge them at work - the bit that I forgot - and then reinstall them and cycle home. And I haven’t installed the new light yet, so I think I’ll probably be doing the train/walk thing tonight.

Glass-half-full
Nice imagery, courtesy of the new-look Scott McCloud website: [Rick Veitch:] “While some see the glass half full and some see it half empty, Groth tends to smash the glass against the bar and start slashing with the jagged edge!”.

Birthday joy

We went to the “Wok Station” in Pyrmont for Anna’s birthday dinner. It was scrummy. I often have lunch there, and was rather pleased to see that the dinner menu is much expanded over the lunch one, which was fairly chunky to begin with. Food was excellent, service was fairly ordinary. The meals were quick (they always are) but the table was dirty from the previous diners, and didn’t get cleaned until we asked, and I didn’t get any rice, despite asking several times. Anyway, we were considering going to Kalide, Alistair’s experimental music extravaganza, or to see a movie. But Anna’s voice had packed it in due her cough, and we just headed home for a rare Andrew-massage.

Hic
I cought the hiccups and couldn’t cure them, no matter what I tried. All my usual tricks - breath-holding, drinking water upside-down, drinking water with blocked nose - didn’t work, so I tried some of the more outlandish ones - lying on my back with right leg and left arm raised, and then the reverse (just in case I had misremembered it), blocking nose and ears and blowing until my sinuses started crackling - and then tried to remember some more while Anna kept leaping up and trying to scare me, a cure I’ve never found to work. I’ve been collecting a list of cures for hiccups for a while, for a short film, but I couldn’t find it. In the end, I went to sleep and woke up without hiccups. Apparently, however, I was hiccuping in my sleep for a while.

Bike riding
25 minutes! Well, about that. I set off, according to Anna, somewhat after 9:00am, and I arrived at work at 9:26am. I’m really pleased with that effort. I didn’t even feel particularly exhausted, even as I was going up the hill known as “The bitch”. In fact, I didn’t have to go to the lowest gear at all in the entire ride. I can definitely feel myself getting fitter now, even after only three days of riding. Happy!

Pool table
They just finished assembling the new pool table at work, so I’m off to see if I can scrounge the first game. I suspect that I’m a bit late, though…

Anna’s birthday

For Anna’s birthday, she gets to work at the store alone today - none of the other therapists can go in. Still, she does get official recognition of another year passing, which is a bonus. Oh, she also got an enormous quantity of flowers from just about everyone she knows (except me, ’cause I found out in advance) and a bunchload of books and stuff.

Cycled again
This time I remembered my towel. But the trip home yesterday was the interesting one - I didn’t have a map on me and relied on my internal navigation and knowledge of the area. Well, I made it down Pyrmont Bridge Road fine, but it all went downhill - and uphill, and downhill again - from there. Somehow, I ended up at Newtown station, reoriented myself, cycled on confidently, ended up at St. Peters station, reoriented, brilliantly started heading into town, turned around, worked my way to Sydenham station, and then I really did know the way from there so a mere ten minutes later I was home. A total of one hour’s cycling in the end. I was almost screaming with frustration in the bits where I realised I was lost and my efforts to reorient led me further astray. But the ride was fairly easy.

Anyway, I’ve got a photocopy of the offending area in my bag now, which should prevent similar embarassments in future.

Weekend of Rayman Revolution

Well, despite accusations of Playstation-induced laziness, I hadn’t actually touched it in a month or so. But that was before this weekend, when I bought Rayman Revolution. The long weekend passed in one long daze of running, jumping, riding small rockets, shooting mechanical pirates, and assorted bizarre conversations with cartoon characters. Anna was working for much of the weekend, which was probably just as well, but remarkably didn’t seem too perturbed by the latest frenzy of non-productivity, merely smiling and snuggling, and standing in front of the TV to entice me downstairs for a game of Lost Cities (of which we played something like twenty-five games, so I guess it was a very gamey weekend indeed).

Society Cookery
Oboy, oboy, oboy. Friends at work, Ryan Walker, Ben Smyth, and Edwin Dawson (who left a while ago to form the backbone of gamespot.com.au) made a short film a couple of months ago called “Society Cookery”, and just finished editing last weekend or so. They encoded it on a rather snug little codec, and stuck it on CDs. I watched it on the weekend, and was blown away. Now I have to show it to everyone I know. I could not stop laughing, and the amazing thing is that it got funnier and funnier each time I watched it. I don’t know whether it is because I know the people involved, but - wow. It kicked arse. Anyway, I’m sure they’ll have it up on the web at some point, so I shall point to it then.

Film stuff
You’d think that this would encourage me to finish editing my stuff, but there’s not a chance of that until I finish, or am bored with, Rayman Revolution. Should take about a week or so, at a guess.

Cycling
I cycled into work this morning, and made the record time of just over 30 minutes, beating my previous time by about 15 minutes. I think that I picked a better route this time, but it could just be that I’m fitter.

Nah, I picked a better route. However, I forgot my towel, so I’m Mr. Stinky until lunchtime at least, when I’ll try to find a place where I can buy a towel and have a shower downstairs (got the key for the showers yesterday).

More Games
Life seems to be revolving around games at the moment. I dreamed last night that I was a pinball. In more gaming excitement, Carlos, my evil ex-next-desk-neighbour, challenged me to a couple of games of Carrom yesterday, at work. Carrom is an Indian game a little like pool with pucks instead of balls, played by flicking the striker puck with your finger and trying to pot the target pucks into the corners of the talcum-powdered polished-wood table. The board is about 1 square metre in size. It was fun, but despite me being ostensibly more experienced at the game, Carlos won both times, thanks to his habit of picking the board up and sliding all of the pieces into a corner, then whacking them all in with a sledgehammer drenched in goat’s blood. What can you do against skill like that?

The new pool table arrives at work on Friday. People are getting excited.

Lexifab

I’m not sure whether it’s bad form to talk about other people’s blogs, but I felt a certain resonance with Dave’s Lexifab entry from Wednesday (which curiously didn’t appear until this morning) and feel compelled to talk about a bit. Um, I’m not sure how to link to the entry in any meaningful way - the Lexifab archive looks like it still isn’t quite going - but here goes. I also remember watching and being aghast at the Blake’s Seven finale, and being rather in denial about it for a while afterwards. However, I also distinctly remember a rather smarmy commentator ruining everything by saying, in the ads and immediately before the program, something along the lines of “And now, the absolutely, positively final episode of Blake’s Seven”, with a kind of winking sneer. I immediately had a terrible premonition of doom, thus showing that even at the age of 13, I had a wonderful grasp of the bleeding obvious.

Actually, it was amazing how many recollections of my own were dredged up while reading that blog entry. I remember a family friend dying in a car accident, and me sitting at the kitchen table crying, while Claire, my little sister, watched in puzzlement, thinking I was faking it. And I wandered the same thing, because the crying was almost unconscious. I felt terrible, but not particularly sad, and even as I was crying, I was thinking “cool, I’m crying. I wander if I could use this in a film.” And feeling weird because it was such a callous thing to think.

Later, I became more comfortable with callousness, and did actually use the incident in a film.

Anyway, enough sullying my good name, I’m off to do some more work.

At work

A sailing boat slowly manouevers in the gloom beyond the Anzac bridge. Cars zoom across it, a depressing number of four-wheel drives. One person per car. The fish markets are below. In-between - smoke from a fish-processing factory, and seagulls. Sandstone quarry stones lie further along, piled up, pink and black markings indicating, presumably, destination and origin.

Everything going somewhere except me and the seagulls. We leave, but keep coming back.

Hoohoo
Right, that’s the pretentious but out of the way. I’ve been getting a wee bit frustrated at work. Some of the C++ libraries I’m trying to use are not very well designed, and are making what should be a simple task rather more complicated. And it makes it hard to think, too, hard to write interesting things, but doesn’t really stop me from writing whatever comes to mind… after all, this is no longer the Newsroom, is it? In fact, it is just an otherblog. No longer do I feel the heavy weights of versimilitude dragging me into boring exposition!

I did stuff
I woke up this morning and got out of bed.
I said, I woke up this morning and got out of bed.
Ran to the train, with headphones on my head.

Went down to Town Hall and walked off to work.
I said, I went down to Town Hall and walked off to work.
So much fog, I could hardly see through the murk.

Baguettes

I found a nice French bakery nearby work, with some astonishingly delicious pastries. Now my stomach hurts from over-indulgence, and I have another must-visit-regularly lunchtime eatery.

Music stuff
Ev was well pleased with our little semi-musical efforts - Anna and I rewrote lyrics to “Loves Me Like A Rock”, “El Condor Pasa” and “Sound of Silence”, then played back the songs in earphones while singing the new lyrics into a microphone connected to the computer. We did the harmonies and then combined them using Adobe Premiere. It was a low-tech but effective way of doing multi-track recording without a multi-track recorder, but next time, I think we’ll buy Cool Edit, or CuBase, or something along those lines. It’ll make it a bit easier, I suspect.

New short film
Kyla and I had a bit of a run-through the script for Magic, her short film. By the end, I was really pleased with the script and we’d worked out some of the technical concerns so it’s a definite go-ahead, with only minor revisions. Kyla’s very busy with other things for the moment, so we hope to have the shooting script done by the end of June, then the storyboarding shortly after that, then all the log sheets and rehearsals done by humdy hum, carry the eight… well, we should be able to start filming in a couple of months time, I reckon. Yay! I got very enthusiastic about the script afterwords, and did a couple of web pages on OUAT. It’s just over half-way at the moment, in terms of content at least. If I keep plugging away at it this week I should be able to knock it over quite soon.

Moving

Linda, Simon & Dave dropped by Ted’s place on Saturday morning in a wee jaunt from Canberra in a three tonne truck. They were here to pick up all of Linda’s stuff that was piled in the front room, and so we all pitched in and filled approximately one millionth of the volume of the truck with Linda’s stuff, so were forced to fill the remainder with drugs in order to feel less embarassed should they be asked to show anyone the contents of the load. And after a brief tour of our place, in which I got to show off my board games but not play them, then were off to Canberra again to try and unpack before nightfall. It were brief, but it were grand.

Radiohead
New album Amnesiac is available for streamed listening on HollywoodAndVine, so I’ve been thrashing it at work until the system administrators screamed that the external link was crawling from all these people listening to stuff live off the web. My thoughts? Well, we should get better bandwidth, shouldn’t we? Oh, you mean my thoughts on the album. Well, it’s one for all those fans of Kid A, among whom I count myself (parsing failure in phrase 2: nonsensical attempt at correct grammar). Again, a bit of a deep album, untouched by filthy commercial concerns, unless you count the radiohead stuffed toys. I’m going to have to listen to it some more before passing on any more of my rabidly objectively accurate opinions, because I have integrity, dammit. Am I not 0000150A:??0HUMLIBConceitedTwit@HUMLIB@@QAE@ABV01@@Z? Do I not stream?

Mummy
Anna and I watched The Mummy on video, and then went out to watch The Mummy Returns at the cinema (in which our sinuses were cleaned out by the bass. Heck, I like ‘em loud, but not when my ears bleed…). Hendy salt? Pardon? Oh, end result. Speak up. Um, the end result is pretty much what all the reviews say - good mindless fun. However, there were a few moments of staggeringly amateurish special effects, which in such a big-budget film stood out like a sawn-off shot glass being substituted in a battle scene involving Michelle Yeoh. Like, one scene towards the end with a character being manhandled by demons in a pit… urgh, the demons were kind of half out of focus while the manhandled character looked like he’d been dipped in blue jelly, frozen, then cut out and wiggled around by an epileptic millapede. Which, if it were the effect they were trying for, would have been impressive. The Mummy Returns was also notable for an astonishing insult to the intelligence of the viewers, and I don’t say this lightly. They *specifically pointed out* that something couldn’t possibly work if done a particular way, and they were completely right, and then later in the film *they did it anyway* (it involved a hydrogen balloon being converted to a hot air balloon - you need lots more space for a hot air balloon, which they rightly pointed out, but the end result hot air balloon was exactly the same size as the hydrogen balloon.) Um, anyway, apart from the deafness, they were both good fun films, and I’d probably see the next sequel at some point, but without any real sense of urgency.