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Back again

Last entry of the year
The last of the holidays were pretty good - about as relaxing as I could hope for, considering the number of friends and relatives we met. All that laziness has, once again, driven down my urge to write about things, so it’ll probably be intermittent weblog entries for a while.

Tropfest
I’ve come up with an idea for a tropfest film that I’m still vaguely hoping I’ll have time to finish before 16 January. I’ve written a bit of the script and I’ve talked about it with various friends, and I think it’s coming together, although in a quite different way from how I had first envisaged it. I’ve given myself a deadline of tomorrow to have the script together properly, so that I can start notifying friends that I need ‘em to help me out. Now’s the time to stop answering the phone…

The Two Towers
I’m too lazy to really get into a serious analysis of this, yet. I enjoyed it a lot. On the other hand, I had plenty of niggly problems with the script. I need to see it again. When I saw Fellowship the second time, the flaws seemed to disappear and I could properly enjoy it without constantly jumping out of the action and thinking “Wow. Lord of the Rings. I’m watching it.” I suspect it may be similar with this one. I’ve never really considered myself a LOTR purist, but some of the changes irked me, particularly the exorcism scene. Now that I’ve had time to mull over it for a while, I’d like to go back and watch it without the distractions. I have a little theory that these films are substantially similar to good music - it takes a couple of viewings/listenings to really get into them.

Work
Back at work, and being pretty lazy - there are only one or two people here, and I’m just working on Windows service installation/uninstallation code - pretty basic stuff, really. Probably a pretty good way of getting back into it.

Jon’s Dr Who Novella
I can’t remember the name of Jon’s Doctor Who novella, but a bunch of us got together on Sunday and read through it and commented on it while Jon and Kate took notes. It was pretty exciting for me. I’ve read some of Jon’s early drafts before, but never participated in one of their read-throughs. We got through the 45k words in about eight hours - five of us reading about 9k words each, and then lots of talking about it in-between. It’s pretty cool. I’d read a plot-summary for his earlier novel-length version, and the tightening to novella-length have done a lot for it. Jon described it as “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Doctor” - lots of big emotions and martial-arts action, stuff that I couldn’t possibly conceive of writing myself, but brilliantly handled as always. And Jon’s ability to pop out quotable quotes just doesn’t quit - there was at least one zinger every couple of pages.

Further holidays

Further holidays
Now in Townsville, having a very relaxing time… played a bit of table-tennis, swum a bit, sat around watching old TV a bit, visiting friends a bit. Yet to contact Sandor or Marco, but spent a bit of time with David Astley and got thoroughly confused about when TTT was showing on boxing day - hope he can change his tickets to the correct session time! The full list of people now going along is:

Anna, me, Jennie, Marco, Claire, Eighagan, Mum, Dad, June, George, Jenny Elliman, Chris, Amanda, Ted, David A., Ev, Nat.

It’s gonna be huge.

Anyway, June & George (Anna’s parents) arrive tonight, and we’re trying to organise a trip to Magnetic Island tomorrow, and there’s a lot of Christmas shopping to be done and catching up with a lot more people, so this will once again be a fairly brief entry…

On Holidays

On Holidays
At an internet cafe - so to speak, as there’s no coffee that I can see, and it appears to be the basement of a computer parts store, with no air-conditioning and of a size smaller than my bedroom - and sitting around waiting for the bus to arrive to take us to the airport for part 2 of the trip: the Townsville connection.

The holiday has been goood so far. I’m not going to go into too much detail, ’cause I’m on holidays, so I’ll just summarise into points, like a good computer programmer:

- big party with Claire & Eggy and Jen & Marco & Mom and Dad and many Brisbane relatives, much chatting and pool-playing and eating and a pretty full day.
- introduced to the joys of Dance Dance Revolution. Played it a lot.
- Went to feed dolphins, go sand-toboggoning on Morton Island.
- Saw brilliant film “Spirited Away” with Ev, spent day with him wandering around & got to hear three new Spit songs plus new V2 Schneider stuff. Glorious.
- Looks like the new Spit albums aren’t going to be together before Christmas… bummer.
- Yah.

Good to see that all eleven of the official and all of the unofficial three-letter-words-for-parts-of-the-body came up. Gotta go now… plane to catch.

Quiz

Quiz
OK, I’m bored now, so here’s a quiz (to which I think I know the answers):

Three-lettered words for Parts of the Body
There should be ten of these in total. The following words don’t count: Tum, zit, bum.

I’ll make a start:

eye

Now it’s your turn. Click on the comments and add to the list…

One day to go

One day to go
Work finishes at lunchtime tomorrow, when we head off to the cricket. Everything has been going pretty much to schedule so far, apart from organising accomodation in Brisbane, and booking tickets for The Two Towers in Townsville.

In the former case, it’s just slackness on my part. In the latter - well, as it turns out, we can’t book tickets for either the Reading or Quin cinemas in Townsville, except by going in in person and buying them. I called Dad up at work and begged him to get the tickets today. It’s particularly frustrating because the website claims that we can book tickets over the web, gives you full instructions, but when it comes to actually allowing you to book them… well, the movie date/times are supposed to be hyperlinked to something or other that allows you to actually buy tickets, but there aren’t any hyperlinks. So much for the internet. All our hopes rest with Papa…

At least I have all the Spit CDs now, right here next to the desk. Most pleasing; I’ve had a bit of a listen and they’ve turned out about as well as I could have hoped for - there are one or two songs where there’s a bit of distortion, but since the songs were recorded fairly primatively to begin with, it’s not too much of a problem.

Meanwhile, I’ve booked dinner with Paul & Greta for tonight - they finally met Anna, after a comical series of near-meetings that ended with Paul’s avowal that she didn’t exist - and hit it off well, so this could be terrific. I’ve gotta leave work earlyish and get some stuff to eat together…

Two days to go

Two days to go
Two more working days until I have two weeks of holidays! But first, there’s the work xmas dinner tonight, picking up the CDs and sending a bundle off to Dave tomorrow (hopefully), and the cricket on Friday - Anna might be able to come along. Then off to Brisbane on Saturday, Claire’s party on Sunday, all day with Ev on Monday, visiting relatives on Tuesday, off to Townsville on Wednesday, then hopefully just christmas shopping and talking and eating and going to the beach and sitting around watching DVDs until The Two Towers on boxing day. Then, back to Sydney, and we’re straight into doing a read-through with Jon & Kate of their latest novella, and finally back to work the next day.

Should be fun!

Heist
David Mamet does heist movie in sleep. Many plot twists make no sense at all in retrospect, much like The Spanish Prisoner. Kind of unpleasant, but still moderately tense and at least it’s better than “The Score”, with which it shares far too many plot-points and characters.

Blade 2
Wow. Even duller than Blade 1. OK, an obvious question pops up at this point, but I’d actually forgotten most of Blade 1 and sorta remembered it as being OK. Watching this made me remember what it had really been like. I don’t think I’ve ever fallen asleep while watching a movie before, but this one almost did it. Amazingly tedious plot, absurdly repetitious gunplay/swordplay/fisticuffs/fu. I watched it as a guilty pleasure, but was unguiltily bored senseless.

Movies in which the female lead shows cool fightin’ skills early, then becomes unaccountably feeble thereafter:

Blade 2
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

And now, I open up the comments for y’all to add to this list. Please?

Spit

Spit
Spent most of last night putting the Spit albums together on CD, and then delivered them to the CD printing place this morning. Phew! That’s one of the big commitments out of the way, for the moment at least.

Suddenly!
Just as I complete the above sentence, the CD ROM dudes call to tell me that my on-CD artwork CD doesn’t work. Grr! This makes me very, very annoyed at Windows XP, yet again. I have had *absolutely no luck* burning CDs from WinXP, possibly due to some bizarre hardware incompatibility (not that the hardware is obscure). I burned the CD with the artwork, and it locked up just as it was finishing. However, it seemed to open the files perfectly happily when I reloaded the CD, so I shrugged and passed it on. Of course, the CD ROM people can’t read it.

Bugger! Bugger! Bugger!

Table-tennis
So I’ve already played my lunch-time table-tennis games, and now I need to go out and hit something again. Table-tennis is pretty well at the moment. I won one game and lost two, but all the games were against people who were higher-rated than me, so it was good anyway.

Back to normal

Back to normal, briefly
Let’s see - the book has finished (the first draft), Jen & Marco have taken off for Adelaide after a fun-filled couple of days, Anna has arrived back from her trip to Melbourne, and I’ve hit my target weight of 88 kilos, so the no-sugar no-dairy diet is officially finished (until I hit 90 kilos again). Also, work is escalating towards a dead-line this week, so I’m having to work late again… it’s just like back at Baltimore! When Baltimore was still good. This is unlikely to last longer than a week, as Anna and I are off to Brisbane and then Townsville after that, for two weeks of holidays.

Sugar! Free!
Yep, I hit 88 kilos on Saturday afternoon - I had a big unpleasant dream about sugar on Friday night, then woke up Saturday morning to find that I was at 88.3 kilos. It was a fairly simple bit of exercise and not-eating-anything and bam, there I was, sub-88 kilos, and the no-sugar diet officially over. I went out and got a bottle of coke and a caramel slice, and… well… they were a let-down. A big let-down. As much as I was craving it, the sugar wasn’t actually all that satisfying when I got it. The coke wasn’t particularly cold, and was a bit syrupy. A couple of hours later, the caffeine/sugar rush was beginning to feel bad - muscles tensing up, slight buzzing sensation. I have a low tolerance for caffeine at the best of times, but after a single bottle of coke, I was bouncing off the walls and grinding my teeth. No good! I haven’t had any since, and I’m not sure if I’ll get back into the habit of drinking it again, at least for a while. Eugh.

Jen & Marco

Jen & Marco
Marco cooked us up a lovely big pasta dinner last night… really nice, he’s very into cooking and produced a scrummy bolognese, so much of it that we had two boxes in the fridge. Followed by a couple of beers, and we were all verrrry sleepy indeed, sitting around chatting in a dazed kind of way while our stomachs worked and worked.

Work
Not much to say today, except that work is going really quite well. For once, the stuff I’m working with - a library that is designed to convert any document type into a little thumbnail picture - is well documented and easy to implement. I had a prototype up and going in less than a day, and incorporating it has been really quite fun. Hopefully I’ll have it done by the end of today, but it’ll be a pity to wave it goodbye and go back to bloody MSDN documentation.

Jen & Marco

Jen & Marco
They arrived on time yesterday morning only to find that Anna had gone back to sleep after working all night… after protracted knocking, they finally woke Anna up, and everything was grand. We went out to dinner after I got home, ate some very pleasant Thai food on Marrickville Road, then went through their holiday snapshots of South America and the US. Marco and I talked politics and philosophy much to Jen & Anna’s considerable eye-rolling. It’s gooood having them over. They’re fuuuuun.

Anna
Anna took off for another trip to Melbourne this morning. There’s a little group of them determined to make a regular thing of the girl’s weekend out. She’ll be back on Sunday, by which point Jen & Marco will have gone onwards. Still, we’ll meet again at xmas.

Table-tennis
Once again, I’m playing better… Ian B., my nemesis, only beat me 21-16, 21-17 today. Of course it isn’t the same as the competition, but I can’t help thinking about that 13 point lead I blew away in the comp.

Spit
Still busy compiling all the Spit albums - trying to eliminate a little bit of the hiss, get the last couple of tracks transferred from minidisc to the computer, and labelling all of the tracks. There’s a fair bit of work to go, but fortunately, the CD burning place reckons that they can get the burning done in 48 hours, no worries. So I’ll try and finish getting the masters together today, then deliver them on the way home from work on Friday, and that’ll be another of my tasks finished off. Yay! Then there will only be the black spectre of radwm to go.