Anotherblog

Greek

Greek
I’ve completely finished the Pimsleur tapes now, and started going back over them. I haven’t made a start on the iPod stuff yet - I’m hoping to tonight - but the more I think about it, the better this solution sounds. The nice thing about the iPod is that I can record a whole bunch of short translations, and then group them into several different areas - divide them into areas depending on how well I know them, divide them by length, divide them into Greek -> English and vice versa. Then, depending on whether I feel like learning or revising or comprehending, I can select the appropriate subset. It’s such a nice system it almost deserves to be sold.

I started thinking about how it could be improved further. The obvious one is voice recognition, but it’s also well out of my ability to implement. Instead, it would be nice if I could press a button after each phrase to indicate whether I got it right or not. Then it concentrates on the ones I get wrong more often.

It would be nice to be able to set the phrases semi-randomly, so that the phrases get repeated at the “ideal learning period” ie. repeats should occur at about the one-minute mark, then at the five-minute mark.

And it would be cool to be able to shorten the gap between the phrase and it’s translation, depending on how quickly I respond.

None of these features are really possible on the iPod at the moment. But I have a feeling that in future, when Palm-pilot style computers are more powerful and ubiquitous, that these features will finally go in. And this will make languages about as easy to learn as they can be, at least until we get language chips in our heads.

Ears bleeding
I’m back listening to Commodore 64 tunes, from my favorite games from way-back-when. It’s making my ears bleed, but I keep listening anyway.

Long weekend

Saturday
I was feeling a bit under the weather (which was hot) on Saturday so skipped out on John D.’s wine-tasting dinner, stayed at home and played Final Fantasy X, on which I have now clocked up just over 24 hours of gameplay, which I can’t quite believe. Perhaps it counts time that I’ve had the game on pause - I tend to pause, turn off the TV, and go and do something else, fairly often. One of the big problems with the game is that you can’t just save anywhere. You can only save at the dedicated save-points, an innovation that serves only to annoy.

Sunday
On Sunday we went to a BBQ hosted by Anna’s best friend. Unfortunately, I had neglected to inform this fact to Chris, Amanda and Andrea, so when they arrived at our place at 3:15pm or so, we were still desparately trying to extract ourselves from the BBQ, thus simultaneously making two groups of people rather cranky. Buggah. Anyway, the rest of the evening was good. We’ve been roleplaying the “Bright and De’Ath” ’70’s-TV-detective-show game again - this time a movie-length episode - and it has been going quite well indeed. This time around Bright and De’Ath are summoned to Egypt, where there have been mysterious deaths in the road-crew of the band “Crystal Gravity”. Last weekend we played it for almost three hours, a lot longer than I can usually sustain the energy, but it worked well. This time, I lasted about two hours, so we rounded out the night by playing “Lord of the Rings”, which we very frustratingly almost won, only failing at the last dice roll. Amanda played us some of the songs that she and Chris had composed, and very grand they were too - I’m kinda hoping we’ll get them onto the upcoming Spit album.

Monday
On Monday, we drove to the Blue Mountains and did some bush walking there, along with Chris & Amanda and Andrea and Jon & Kate. It were good. I’m not usually mad-keen on bush-walking, but it has been long enough that I quite enjoyed it, particularly as the pace was fairly slow. Chris & Amanda and (to a lesser extent) Andrea and Anna kept bounding ahead while the rest of us ambled along and tried to come up with ideas for short films that we could make using the marvellous scenery.

The one big annoyance - or rather, lots of small annoyances - was the flies. We had a big picnic lunch, and the flies were everywhere. I’m *still* feeling a little twitchy. Then home again; Kate cooked us dinner and we played scrabble until the wee hours.

Anyway, it was pretty great. Anna wants to go bushwalking once a month now.

Lights

Lights
“Team” Barry passed on some info about a pair of 2.5kW lights up for private sale for $800. Very tempting indeed. It would make my lighting kit just that little bit more formidable - all I’d need after that is a couple of portable lights (the ones that run off 12V rather than mains power) and I’ll be set for life. Or until I’m making a feature, anyway.

Weekend
Let’s see… got a board-games night tonight, and a wine-tasting party on Saturday. Monday’s going to be a busy day of Blue Mountains walking, I think, with Anna & Amanda & Chris & Andrea. There’s something else, too, I could swear there is. I wonder where my portable brain is.

radwm
I’m getting some automation stuff together, finally, to reduce the manual workload of administering the sucker. I’m still being a slack-arse, though. It’s been three weeks since the newsgroup opened, and I’ve still only posted the FAQ once. I’m trying to get *that* automated too, but need to rewrite bits and pieces and consolidate all the info, and boring stuff that you don’t care about.

Most of my time is taken up with adding spam-blocked addresses to the no-acknowledgement list - not strictly necessary as long as I’m prepared to pipe radwm-errors to /dev/null, but I haven’t gotten that desparate yet. Spam-block addresses are a real pain for the software. I’d love to automate the process, but that would require a big block of dedicated time instead of a whole lot of small bits of time. Then there’s the archiving of the posts - every post gets stored, and there’s limited space on the server. Gotta get a script together to automatically get backups off the server and on to my mac.

Then there’s the pressing requests from moderators to get the software to pass cross-posted posts to hand-moderation automagically. Devin thinks the software can cope with this already; I’m not so sure it’ll be simple.

Anyhoo. Enough brain-dumping. I could have just said that I don’t have very much to say today.

Greek

Greek
I haven’t started the iPod Greek transcription yet, and have almost finished absorbing the Pimsleur audio tapes. So, I was quite surprised and pleased, when browsing through Borders at lunchtime (I hate ‘em, but they have the only good computer-book selection in the Macquarie centre) to see a big fat Greek language course. It claims to be comprehensive, and the one used by the U.S. foreign service when learning Greek. I had heard of it from the Pimsleur site, I think, in which it said that although it doesn’t have a “Greek 2″ course, you can go over to this one. I rejoiced and bought it, then shoved tape 1 into the car on the way back to work.

Well, um. I have been rather spoiled by the Pimsleur course. This lot - produced by “Barron’s” - may be the most comprehensive, but it’s pretty poor otherwise. An old man with a 1960’s era microphone shouts out words and phrases, repeating each word or phrase twice, then moves onto the next one without an audio translation (you have to have the book open for that). He sounds tetchy and mildly confused, as if he doesn’t exactly understand why he’s being made to say these things over and over again. Useless for driving, and there’s no breakdown of the words as there is in the Pimsleur course. I’ve been had.

I guess I’ll persist with it, though the fact that I can’t learn while driving is a bit of a bummer. I may use it as the basis for the iPod transcription, for words that aren’t covered in the Pimsleur course. What a pain.

Final Fantasy X
I’ve been playing this rather odd role-playing game for the last couple of days, since Andrea lent it to me. It’s pretty good, and will no doubt occupy me to the end. I just hope I can hold off from doing too many late-nights.

Redhat Linux 8
I’ve got a second computer on the desk at work, with Redhat 8 installed on it. This is for a port of a server that I’ve written. It looks pretty good - very much a copy of the Windows layout, to get people familiar with the look-and-feel, no doubt - and I’ve not had the slightest problem doing anything yet. Not that I’ve had it long enough to try much.

Picking up Anna

Picked Anna up from work
Anna wanted a lift back from the hotel where she’s still running her massage business, so I dropped in and picked her up on the way home. I stopped eight times to consult the map, made five wrong turnings, and spent about twenty minutes driving around back streets getting steadily more weirded out by my lack of direction sense. I know I’m not particularly good, but it’s at times like this that I realise just how bad I really am; the completely wrong combination of over-confidence, tentativeness, mistakes in map-reading and shockingly poor short-term memory combine in exactly the wrong way to ensure that this is probably the number one thing-that-I-am-crap-at-but-still-do-anyway. I got Anna to drive home, once I’d located the hotel.

Further work
I’ve organised to help Lachlan (the cameraman from “China Doll” who looks a great deal like Hugh Jackman) out with his corporate video stuff in mid-February - coincidentally, this is happening on the day after our deliverable is due, so there are no worries there. And most of our work team will be away in Japan getting instructions for the next phase of our project. This may well be the time to implement the game “Go” as an example of client-server interaction…

Blah blah work blah
So yeah, not much to talk about really…

Fires in Canberra

Fires in Canberra
Thrilling and terrifying account from Dave at http://www.otherleg.com/lexifab/lexifab.html makes it really sink in what has happened in Canberra. I got a shock this morning finding out that Mount Stromalow Observatory had been destroyed - some of my friends in Adelaide (hi Anne) have many tales about working there. Amazing. Dave’s account of coming over the crest of a hill and seeing the fire, makes me almost wish I’d been there with the video camera.

Filmwise
Answers to those filmwise questions from the other day have come up, so I thought I’d pass them along.

1. Fast Times at Ridgemont High
2. She’s all that
3. Hollywood Shuffle
4. The Mexican
5. The Outsiders
6. Go
7. Twin Fall, Idaho
8. My Best Friend’s Wedding
9. Mulholland Drive

Short Films

Short Films
I spent most of Saturday helping out “Team” Barry, Mick, Judas and Midori make a series of sketches for a comedy show they’re putting on. It was pretty interesting. The comedy was very obvious, once again, but the acting was pretty good and the pace of shooting was just superb. These guys really don’t muck around. Everyone knows their role, and is focussed on getting things done quickly. We were finished by 4:00pm once again.

The sketches themselves were divided into two lots - one, a series of mother-in-law jokes, and the other, a cranky clown at an Australian backyard BBQ, doing a series of semi-comical interviews. Actually, some of those were rather disappointing. There were a dozen or so genuine interviews with children between the ages of six and ten. None of them went particularly well. The problem was really that the interviewer was trying hard to get cheap laughs, and the kids were pretty quickly realising they were the butts of the joke, and clamming up. There were a couple of kids who were quite open and talkative at the beginning of the interviews, but due to the poor questions (and that he would sometimes ride right over their answers) by the end one of them was near tears. Urgh.

The other big downer about the shoot was that it was so very, very hot. We were all outside, slathered in sunburn cream, and sizzling. I was holding the boom mike. Pretty hard going.

China Doll
Anna and I went to Tara B.’s farewell party, at which she gave a private showing of “China Doll”, the short film I helped out on late last year (it was the film shoot in which we got locked out of the building for three hours). The film was pretty good. Lachlan had edited it very tight, much tighter than the script had suggested, and it worked pretty well. I’m involved in two tropfest entries this year, between “China Doll” and “Single Dad”, although I haven’t had any more creative input than doing the lighting and holding the microphones. People are beginning to ask me when they can help me out with my short films. Gotta get my act together.

Ryan
I found out that Ryan, one of my friends from Baltimore and subsequenty “Society Cookery 2″, was in a car crash recently with Ben and Edwin when they were travelling around south-east asia. The others were fine - wearing seat-belts - but apparently Ryan was sitting in the back seat and had decided not to put his seatbelt on because he had bad sunburn. He was thrown from the passenger window when the car started rolling. Apparently he’s recovering at home now from the operations - they had to remove his spleen (!) and fix up his broken vertibrae (!!). I only found out yesterday, so there’s a bit of catching up to be done there…

Catch Me If You Can

Catch Me If You Can
It’s not bad. I was kind-of dreading it after seeing the ad, as it seemed as though it was going to be one embarassingly incompetent impersonation after another - the main character is a habitual con-man, and the ad has one particularly excruciating moment in which he tries to get the other Doctors to concur. Fortunately, the ad was just as deceptive as the main character. Oh, sure, it gives some of the surface details, but the whole film is rather enjoyable and I barely cringed at all. Which is notable, because I cringe easily.

The Shining
I figured that midnight wasn’t late enough to go to sleep, so watched “The Shining” with CB and EG until 2:00am, then staggered into bed. Still, I enjoyed El Shino just as much as I had the first time. The atmosphere is wonderfully, genuinely creepy, in the way that I assumed all horror movies would be before I saw any. Oddly, most horror movies try hard to evoke an atmosphere of normalcy, at least for the beginning, and by the end the normalcy has generally resumed. The Shining was more like Eraserhead.

Greek
I’ve finished the Greek tapes. Well, I’ve listened to them all anyway - the last one needs a bunch of relistens to drive the words into my memory, but I now know their entire scope. Actually, it’s a little bit disappointing. One of the big problems with the tapes was that they had taught me the formal ways of saying things, which don’t tend to get used very much in day-to-day life. Fair enough, for the traveller to Greece who knows nobody there, it may be of minor importance to know the informal phrasings, but in talking with your Greek girlfriend - let’s just say that there’s quite a bit that I’m going to have to relearn because, to Anna’s ears, it has the air of over-polite mockery - the formal forms are very rarely used nowadays, even with strangers, much as it is in in France.

Filmwise Tournament 2

Filmwise Tournament 2
I’ve entered in the second filmwise tournament, and it’s just as hard as the first one. So, in a futile attempt to cheat outrageously - take a gawk at these pics, and let me know if you can figure out from which films they come.

Firstly, we have a couple of hats.

Next, some cut-ups. Apparently the first one isn’t a particularly good movie.

Now, some invisibles.

Finally, some morphs. These are faces of one character put onto the body of another.

So - any clues?

CB

CB
CB and Eggy have nicely taken the warm bed left by our French guests, and the extra guest - another French woman - is staying in the guitar room. It feels all nice and sociable, except that I’m currently going through some kind of weird learning-curve-frustration thing at work, and it’s made me rather irritable. I’ve been trying to just stay quiet so that this is not as obvious, but I really need a bit of tension-relieving exercise…

Table-tennis
…one vigorous table-tennis session later, I’m feeling a little less tense. But I still have this frantic “must know everything now, no time for learning” thing happening. I’ve taken myself from the backwaters of the project, an area where I knew what I was doing and was ahead of schedule, right down into the pit of must-be-done-yesterday, and I’m still trying to puzzle through the code. It’s pretty well written and documented, so I’m hoping I’ll get on top of it soon, but I’m getting very distracted by all the renovations going on around - the smell of the paint going onto the meeting-room walls (blood-red, oddly), the ladders and drills and hammers… and then there are the continuing distractions of the rec.arts.drwho.moderated newsgroup, which I thought I had successfully delegated to just-home, but my forwarding isn’t working properly and I’m still getting the stuff here.

Anyway.

I had a dream last night. I was playing sport with all the guys at work. We were playing soccer at the Botanic Park in Townsville. I was unable to kick the ball at all, and people were trying not to openly mock me. All the others were playing very well.

I have subtle dreams.