Anotherblog

Weekend

Mildly interesting
It only just occured to me that I am marrying into a family that has a George B. Sr, and a George B. Jr. who is following in his father’s footsteps (in this case, opal mining). I shall report further resonances as they reveal themselves.

Weekend
Another busy one. Took mum to the plane on Saturday morning, then got the BBQ cleaned and shopping bought in time for the birthday party at lunchtime, which was pleasant and fun, especially since Anna’s mom brought some salads (as did many of the guests) and Anna’s dad did the cooking. Meanwhile, when the party was closing down, Anna’s friend Maria did the washing up. Superb. All I had to do was clean the BBQ twice, and sit around having a good time with Chris, Amanda, Andrea, Kyla, Ted, Bill, George Jr., Maria, George Sr., June, Carey, Beaver, John, and Claire.

Loot
I’d deliberately asked some people for no loot, as there was no chance whatsoever that I was going to remember their birthdays in return, but several people got stuff anyway (or I forgot to tell them not to). Scored a kinda-tamborine from Ted, which will be rather useful and potentially a song-destroyer for Spit recordings, “The Chaser” annual from Anna, and a bunch of playstation 2 games from Bill. Cool. The PS2 games were “Medal of Honour” and “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4″. Pretty good so far, although as with the fightin and snowboardin games, learning all the combos in the skateboardin game look a bit tiresome. We’ll see… so far it’s just fun skating around the level.

So tired

Tired
Took the afternoon off work today, ’cause my mum had just arrived for a quick overnight visit. Yay! She’s here now - we’re about to head off to Anna’s parent’s place for dinner. Then tomorrow is my birthday lunch thing, which is looking increasingly like it won’t be a hangi (Anna called to get permission this time, and it’s fine, but the weather isn’t.)

Busy. Tired.

Birthday
So yesterday was my 33rd birthday, happy birthday to me, and eh, it was OK. Went out to dinner at “Bogarts”, a cool restaurant in Glebe and got thoroughly stuffed and quite unable to sleep so I sat up reading “The Office” scripts, available from all good ABC bookstores. Funny. Good. Glad I read the scripts rather than watching it, as I just can’t stand watching embarassing comedy, of which this is an excellent example.

A curious note. Whenever I watch embarassing comedy, I find it a great deal easier to watch if I look through a hole that I make with my fingers (OK, this itself is a source of embarassing comedy, muchly amusing to Anna, which is another reason I do it). It only just hit me the other day that this is a very simple, obvious mechanism to remove myself from the scene. The reason I dislike embarassing humour, on the whole, is that I imagine myself in the situation. It’s a little pathetic that framing the screen with my fingers makes it easier to cope with.

One Hour Photo

One Hour Photo
I really didn’t want to see it, but Anna dragged me along last night to the mooovies to watch One Hour Photo. And, surprisingly, it was good. I was expecting it to be a “Hand That Watches The Fatal Attraction to the Cable Guy at Cape Fear”, or such-like, which had been strongly implied by the ads. However, the film itself was done almost entirely from the Photo Guy’s point of view, showing him as creepy but a better-developed character than your common or garden psychotic. Apart from an unusual dropping of the ball at the end - no, not what you’re thinking - I enjoyed it muchly.

Spit
I worked a bit more on getting better copies of the Spit demo stuff on-line, but progress is slow and frustrating. Grr. The portable minidisc player only outputs through the headphone jack. I recorded the entire album as a wav file, then as I was cutting it into individual tracks, noticed that the background hiss levels were much higher than I’d have expected. Listened back to the minidisc. Fine. Really not sure what was going on - possibly a mis-match in impedence - so I grabbed the proper minidisc player, which has a line-out. The levels on it are just that *little bit too high*, it’s very frustrating. I had tot turn the OSX input levels down to the minimum, and it is still perilously close to topping out.

Problems are compounted by the fact that sound recorders for OSX are way dodgy, not that they’re any better for the PC. All I want to do is record and be able to hear what I’m recording, so that I know the levels aren’t too harsh. The biggest, most irritating thing of all is that minidisc recorders really ought to have digital outputs, but don’t because of stupid bloody copyright protection laws. I have perfectly legitimate uses for minidisc recorders, but I am artificially constrained to a stupid Analog -> Digital -> Analog -> Digital scheme.

Anyway, I gave up in disgust after an hour or so of trying to get things working. I’ll try again tonight.

Lots of stuff

Spit
Further activity on the “Spit” front - the current demos on the webpage are a bit dodgy in quality, and it’s entirely due to the minidisc -> computer transfer. Fortunately, I’ve (finally) worked out a way of doing the transfer on the mac - a surprisingly difficult feat, considering how easy most other tasks are - and hopefully will get better-sounding recordings tonight. We’ll see. Amanda recorded another song at roleplaying on Sunday night (though the recording quality was fairly poor - more on that anon) which I’ll try and put up as well. It is, after all, a demo.

Recording quality
I was a little techno-snubbed to find that my cheap-ass microphone hooked up to the minidisc recorder provided a greatly superior sound to my extremely expensive one. The reason? The extremely expensive one is a shotgun mike, very directional, and the only way I could get acceptable levels was to stand a couple of metres back. When I did so, the guitar tended to drown out Amanda’s voice.
On the other hand, the other microphone had a much more limited range, and only really worked with it being tens of centimetres from her mouth, which meant that the guitar was relatively weak, and her voice came out beautifully clearly (which is good, because she has a fine singing voice).

There’s probably a moral there, but my techno-geek side refuses to acknowledge it.

March
Anna and I went out to the anti-war march on Saturday, and found that it was a bit deserted. We asked the similarly befuddled police what was going on. “The big march is tomorrow,” they said. “But there’s supposed to be another smaller march today.”

Well, there wasn’t, and damned if I can work out where I got the information on the alleged Saturday march. I thought that Nola had said Saturday in the email that she sent out, but noooo, she got it right. I think that my brain just fritzed.

The real march
Anna had to work on Sunday, so I wandered over to add to the numbers at the peace rally at Hyde park. I failed to organise to meet with anyone, so ended up wandering around fairly aimlessly - disappeared for half-an-hour for lunch - until the march started happening. Walked along in that for a while, trying to look out for people I might know (completely hopeless task, of course) then caught the train back home and went to roleplaying.

Most of the time I was just thinking about the war. I talked about it briefly with a radio reporter (after being intrigued by his minidisc setup) and was reasonably coherent, I think, but I’m not at all satisfied with my “moral clarity”, to borrow a phrase. I think this is a topic for which I need to assemble all of the arguments that I’ve heard, and burrow down to the base assumptions to work out what I really think. It’s all to easy to hear other people’s arguments and accept them without delving - my friends have a variety of opinions that are frequently stronger than mine, and in some cases, completely opposed.

It’s not unusual
Brain fritzing continued in my unwarrented belief that there was a party with friends Owen and Sinead on Saturday night. As it turned out, it was Saturday the 15th of *March* that they were talking about, having not mentioned the month in the email. For some reason they assumed that I’d just *know* it was March they were talking about, just because they happened to mention it was a St. Patrick’s day thing.

All right, I suck.

Anna and I were fairly pleased to have Saturday night off anyway. Friday had been very hectic, with all of those valentine’s day related activities. Games played. Odes sung. Cards hidden and found. Silliness ensued.

Sofa
The great-big-lounge-suite arrived on Monday, so we spent a great deal of yesterday relaxing on it. Soon we will have a sofa-warming party, a DVD watching type thing. Yay for the giant sofa!

Feeblitude denied!
After all the depressing feeblitude in the knowing-what-the-hell-is-going-on stakes over the weekend, I was rather pleased that at least
a) my table-tennis skills are going from strength to strength, and
b) my recall of Greek is actually much better than I was expecting.

I’ve been absolutely powering through the Greek tapes in the car. It’s the second time through, but I was still expecting to have forgotten more of the earlier tapes. But it’s all there. Happy.

Mooovies
Anna and I saw “Undercover Brother” and “Top Secret!” on Saturday, then “Ghost World” and “Clueless” on Sunday. Undercover Brother was a blast - clever and witty in the same way as “Top Secret!”, which was quite excellent on second viewing. Likewise, Clueless was just as delightful as I remembered, and even more quote-filled. Ghost World was pretty good, but didn’t really convince me as well as it might have. The friendship between the two main characters seemed cool right from the beginning, unlike in the comic. Not quite as bad as Jack’s “transformation” into a lunatic in “The Shining”, but still enough to put a disquieting air over the beginning of the film.

Games
Got “Fluxx” and “Scarab Lords” from Games Paradise, and have played a fair bit of them with Anna. She absolutely loves Fluxx, to the point that I’ve had to point out the time as she suggested yet-another-game. It’s simple and addictive in that “Uno” kind of way. Scarab Lords is a bit more complicated, and we’ve yet to really get into it, but I’m still enjoying it, despite having lost every game so far.

More Spit Demos

More Spit Demos
I’ve added a whole bunch of songs to the Spit webpage. Chris & Amanda came over last night and recorded a bunch of songs while the kids remained largely distracted by the playstation. Superb stuff, though I had problems using the minidisc/pre-amp setup, this time downstairs where I managed to get it working before. It *must* be a loose connection in the pre-amp, somewhere. Just has to be. Anyway, we managed to get a couple of songs recorded using the shotgun mike, which has a different pre-amp (who’s batteries were almost run-out, thus explaining the rather low sound levels). Anyway, I’m very happy with the results. We’re going to do some more recording this weekend.

And, Ev’s minidisc of Spit goodness arrived. Unfortunately, I set the playback level too high when recording these to mp3, so a couple of the songs have level problems (crackly sounds). I’ll redo them tonight, hopefully.

All in all, I’m just a bit overwhelmed by it all - the quality of Spit stuff is just amazing at the moment…

Ted
Ted dropped over as well and acted out the major plot-points of “Star Trek: Nemesis” complete with howls. He also dropped over the “magicdog”, a big paper-mache dog-thing with mirrors embedded in it. I kinda like it, but Anna wants it put where nobody could possibly see it. Fair enough.

Spit

Spit
A bit more work on Spit last night and today - put some more lyrics up, and started gathering materials for the “Info” and “News” sections. All good.

Table-tennis
My table-tennis rating rather briefly went above 1000 yesterday, for the first time ever. 1000 marks the average point, as I understand it, which means that I am now just below average (having lost two games to somebody rated at 980). It’s much easier nowadays for ratings to go up and down like crazy, ’cause we’ve gone over to the new international scoring rules - first to 11, change serve every two points. Much faster games.

Nausicaa
Finished watching “Nausicaa” last night. Fine flick, but rather minor and simple compared with the Manga, which was largely impressive *because of* the depth of thought put into it. I can see how people would see the film and think “so what?”. The Manga is a different story.

More parties
Anna’s been getting stuck into doing as many parties as possible, I think. Next weekend we’re going to a St. Pats thing with Owen R., and the weekend after I turn 33, so we’re doing another BBQ. It’s likely to be a fairly enormous do, provided we get invitations out in time. Chances are, if you’re reading this, you’re invited…

Bend it like Beckham

Bend it like Beckham
…utterly formulaic while trying desperately to be quirkily different. I was won over, however, by the charming lead character. So I enjoyed it.

Spit
Don’t hold back on those web-page-design suggestions, folks…

Busy

24
I finished watching 24, and was a bit disappointed. The big revelation of the traitor made very little sense, and I’m not sure they intended it to. Actually, looking back on it, a whole lot of it didn’t make much sense. Still, it was thrilling (or, at least, the first 12 hours were thrilling. After that, it kinda fell apart) and well acted.

Lotus
Sent the first three chapters across to Jon & Kate’s agent. I had no idea I was such a poor speller until I ran the chapters through the spell-checker. While there were many typos, there were quite a few instances of “It’s spelled like *that*? Oh!”. Now there’s just the waiting.

Spit
I got some extra space on otherleg.com and put Spit on-line. I’ve no ideas on page design, so I think I’ll just do content for the moment until inspiration strikes me (or someone points me at something good that I could rip off).

There are a couple of demo songs there. Check ‘em out.

Mononoke Hime
It turns out that Matt, one of the guys near me at work, is an Anime fan. I lent him the Nausicaa manga and Porco Rosso, and in turn, just the other day he lent me the Nausicaa video, along with Laputa: Castle in the Sky and Mononoke Hime. Last weekend was so busy that I’ve only had a chance to start watching Nausicaa. Impressions so far? Rather amazingly different from the book. Nausicaa is a great deal more violent, for one thing.

Weekend
Big weekend. On Saturday Anna had organised another high-school reunion, this time a more informal one. Given the Hangi excitement of late, we decided to (finally) put together the BBQ. It ended up taking several hours to do, so it was lucky the reunion was a dinner, not a lunch thing - I was working *very quickly* until Anna pointed out that the first guests wouldn’t be arriving until 5:30pm. The BBQ is very nice. It has four burners and lots of space on either side, and cooked the meat quickly and well. Happy. I only burned the sausages a little bit, so I’m pretty pleased, and feeling just that little bit more Australian.

There was a lot of alcohol consumed at the party. As usual, I got fairly loud and excitable early on, and then very quiet and withdrawn later, so that I spent a great deal of the latter bits of the party not being there. Everyone was talking high-school stuff anyway.

On Sunday, Adrian and Eva (hiya!) invited us over to their place for lunch. They’re the fine folks who ran the Spanish restaurant until recently, and are now taking a bit of a breather before getting stuck back into it (prompting much empathy from Anna). Eva makes a mighty garlic mayonaisse. She contributed one to the BBQ on Saturday night, and when it was over we scraped up the remainder and I took it to roleplaying on Sunday evening. Niiiice.

Sound recording
Very frustrating. I’d been having considerable problems with recording using the minidisc and pre-amp setup that I bought a few years ago, due to a low hum that proved nigh-impossible to remove. As you may recall, Ted helped me get rid of it by suggesting that we take the sound-recording gear downstairs and physically separating the power cords from the microphone leads. It worked a treat.

So I took all the sound-recording gear to Chris & Amanda’s place, and would you believe it - the low humming noise was back. We tried moving the gear around the place, but couldn’t get rid of the hum, and so ended up giving up. Very frustrating. Anyway, they’re hopefully coming over some time this week, and we’ll get their Spit contributions together and up on the website. I’d just like to whet appetites by mentioning that the songs are very good indeed.

Agent

Agent
Kate passed me the details of her agent, and suggested that I send him the first three chapters of “Lotus”… very exciting. She reckons it’s publishable, which is fantastic because I can see a lot of improvements yet to be made. I’m a bit worried about sending in the first three chapters, as I don’t think they’re the best, but if Kate reckons it’s OK, then what the hell. Just gotta take those anti-diarrhetics and run the thing through a spelling/grammar checker, and send it before I think about it too much.

radwm
Administering radwm is taking up all the time that I used to spend browsing the web, which is interesting. The actual job itself is a bit tricky, and I’m sure that whoever takes over from me will shake their head and just laugh at the kind of things I have amateurishly done. Oh well. It’s not as if I’m being paid, or there are people clamouring to take over the job.

Hangi
Anna cooked up another Hangi for lunch on Saturday by getting up at 6:00am and lighting a fire in the hangi pit. By 8:00am, the police had visited, and asked her to put it out as there was a total fire ban. She did so, but it spontaneously relit (no, really) and the Marrickville council people came around at 10:00am and threatened big fines ($600) and were slightly mollified when they found that it was for a Hangi. So we were pretty lucky. Anyway, by 10:00am, the coals and rocks were still hot enough that Anna buried the food anyway, and the Hangi went ahead. Despite the hosing down, it was still hot enough and the food came out very nicely, so we sat around (me, Anna, Anna’s parents and cousin, and Chris, Amanda, Cailan, Elena, and Andrea) and got thoroughly stuffed on what will probably be our last Hangi for a while. Fortunately, Anna bought me a BBQ for my birthday (a fairly late birthday present, but those who know my timeliness will not be surprised to note that I had no grounds for complaint) and it’s just a matter of putting it together before we’ve gone from traditional NZ to traditional Aussie.

Furniture
Anna’s dad and I spent a good portion of last night going over to Ted’s place and getting some of the furniture that he won’t be needing. Three book cases, a desk, a chest, a set of folding chairs (for my mooovie!) and a big paper mache magic dog that Ted needs someone to look after, and wouldn’t fit in the car. Then Anna mercilessly made us rearrange the spare room. So my mac is now on a nice, big wooden desk instead of the tiny dinky plastic one, and we have much extra book space. Strangely, the spare room looks no more cluttered than before, and even a little less so.

Universalis
Having heard about this game from Dave’s blog, I absolutely had to have it. And so it shall be, in a couple of weeks.