Anotherblog

Bondi

Bondi
Anna and her cousin are spending four days at an apartment at Bondi beach - although Anna’s still working for the period, she loves the idea of going to sleep to the sounds of the surf, and also likes being able to walk to the beach. I stayed there last night, and while the surf was pretty nice, there was one major problem: Anna’s cousin snores worse than anybody I’ve ever heard. It’s amazing. We went to sleep fairly early while she went out to the pokies, and I didn’t hear her come in, but I *did* wake up the moment she started snoring.

Fortunately, Anna knows about this problem, so we had earplugs, which I put in. The snoring was still pretty loud. I managed to get to sleep again after about half an hour, which was very good by my standards: I normally have a lot of trouble with snoring or mosquito noises, and just get angrier and angrier until I get up and do despicable things to the sources of my misery. But those days seem to be over now.

It did make the whole sleep/surf thing a bit pointless, though.

Happy birthday CB!

Happy birthday CB!
My little sister Claire-bear turns 25 today, which makes me think: wow. Three days after my 25th birthday I broke my leg, and I missed WOMADelaide; it seems like two or three years ago at most. Hardly nine years.

Dad drew a picture to commemorate the occasion. Anna and me at the top, then Eodhagan and CB, then Marco and Jen.

Mind-blowing, eh?

Mind-blowing, eh?

I think this is probably the best optical illusion I’ve ever seen. We had an excellent talk on colour perception today, in a lunchtime seminar. Completely mind-blowing, especially the bits about metamerism.

The problem goes a bit like this. We’ve got very limited colour vision, obviously. We don’t see into the infra-red or ultra-violet. But it goes further than that. We’ve got sensors for red, green and blue in the cones in our retinas, and different mixes of that allow us to perceive a whole bunch of colours.

The objects that we see usually reflect/emit a very wide spectrum of light, with different frequencies emitting at different intensities. Essentially, our take on the colour of the object is done with a three-point sample. We miss a lot of the complexity of the true “colour”.

What this means, is that you can have two objects that reflect wildly different spectra, that will, none the less, appear as exactly the same colour to us because of the sampling errors of our eyes. This is called metamerism. It’s only really a factor when you create a representation of that colour - for example, a painting, a photo, or an image on a screen. To us, it looks like a good representation of the original object, but in fact, it’s lousy - it would look ridiculously wrong to someone who had, say, four or five colour receptors in their eyes (even if their colour sensors didn’t extend into UV or IR) instead of the three we have.

Apparently, various armies made use of this during wartime. Camouflage works because the object appears the be the same colour as the surroundings, to our limited colour senses. Some people are born with slightly different pigments in their eyes, and so have different “sampling points” for their colour recognition. To them, the camouflage tuned to our eyes looks completely obviously out of place.

This may be old-hat to y’all, but I don’t recall being taught this in high-school. I’m still a bit stunned.

Filmwise

Filmwise
8/8 this week: I had a bit of a problem with #6 - I remembered the film from childhood, but couldn’t work out the name of it. In the end, brute force got me most of the way there: a search for “dragon” in the imdb.
I was pleased that last week’s poor effort was due to my not having seen most of the films I missed. The only one I’d seen was “The Sting”, and the picture for that one was very obscure.

Film making
Anna & I & Jon & Kate went to a film group evening and listened in at all the professional and semi-pro people talking about film-making. It was a long way more professional than I was interested in: I tried to ask what level most of the people were at (what production budgets do most of you work at? I’m at 0 to $100), but phrased it badly and was righteously smacked down by an actor who I vaguely recognised (eventually) from one of the Matrix films. I don’t think there were any other “weekend warriors” there. One person said that, as an actor, he never, ever worked for free, and that it was insulting that it still happens. He got a lot of applause. I was pretty much ready to slink out at that point, but the others were still pretty interested so we hung around through some spirited debate about working overseas, heard some people introduce themselves, heard a pitch for an acting workshop and a casting/crew call for a medium-budget horror film, and then took off to have dinner at a vegetarian restaurant in the city.

It could have been mildly depressing - I certainly copped a couple of sneers and a wee bit of hostility - but I think it was mainly because the state of film-making is quite poor in Australia at the moment: everyone was talking about how little work there was.

Dinner was nice, though, and I told Jon & Kate about my idea for a full length film about a kidnapping, about which I worked out some more details as I was talking to them. Which was nice.

Spit

Spit
I did some minor modifications to the Spit website on the weekend (ie. wrote something on the main page), and I also did some mixing of the songs - particularly “Andrew Ain’t Got No Alias”, “Cumberland Highway”, and “Closer”. It’s a little bit frustrating, actually - I’ve realised, listening to Alias, that it could really do with some backing drums and bass, but I don’t have the equipment or skills to do either. Still, it was all I could do to avoid rushing out and buying a bass guitar on Sunday.

Actually, I could probably do the bass with the keyboard. It’s the drums that are lacking. I need a CD of drum loops.

Guitar
I have also been practicing the guitar a fair bit again - mostly trying to get some speed for hammer-ons and pull-offs. Progress is slow. I also, stupidly, missed guitar practice last night because I forgot it was Monday. My brain has been working very slowly, thanks to:

Japanese
I ploughed through the rest of the Hiragana on the weekend, and managed 47/50 on the test with the full set of basic character groups this morning. So *that’s* going well, at least. But I have noticed that my near-constant concentration on the Hiragana has made the rest of my brain act very, very slowly.

Art gallery
Anna and I went to the Art Gallery yesterday and had a look at the high-school exhibition there. It was extremely good - the paintings were first-class, and there was some envious talent in the short-film area, talent that almost made me depressed but got me thinking about making films again. Aargh! I’ve… got… to… focus!

Here’s where I’ve been

Here’s where I’ve been

create your own visited country map

Very little to say today

Very little to say today
I have a stinky headache thanks to yesterday’s excesses: big pizza dinner with Owne, Rich and George, and drank some of Rich’s homebrew, and woke up this morning at 87kg. Today, therefore, is a day devoid of sweets (my usual source of caffeine). I think I’ll have some tea.

One cup of tea later
I still don’t get why people drink this stuff. Even *with* milk or sugar.

Filmwise
Hmm… the filmwise competitions have usually got a lot of zingers in them - they really don’t like having many people get all the questions correct. So I’m usually a long way off the pace - and this competition is no exception. I’m pretty sure I’ve got #1,3,4,7,8,10 and 15. I think #2 is either “A Hard Day’s Night” or “This is Spinal Tap”, #11 could be “The Others”, and #16 is probably “A Mighty Wind”. #5,6,9,12,13 and 14 are mysteries.

Suddenly!
Nothing happened.

Better

Better
I’m better now, thanks to some nice hard work, which solved some of my problems and distracted me from other ones. As a consequence I got home late last night, but Anna was working late too so I picked her up and we went home together and immediately plonked down on the sofa and snuggled until we fell asleep. There’s a simple equation:

importance(Anna) > importance(problems)

…which I will occasionally forget when she’s not around. But really, it is very simple.

Stressed & Depressed

Stressed & Depressed
Yup. But enough about me…

Ted
Is happy! Which is grand. He came over last night and we chatted about his recent Japan trip (which I will not spoil) and played some of the Eyetoy games.

Hiragana
43/50. Bugger-all progress, really.

Filmwise
3/8 this week, numbers 1, 3 and 8.

Procrastinating

Procrastinating
I have been quite procrastinatory lately, even more than usual. The weekend was filled with much time in which I could have been doing many useful things and instead went out of my way not to do anything. Much of it was spent wandering around the house daydreaming. Fortunately, I was able to be useful on Saturday by participating in the readthrough of “Prisoner’s Dilemma”, along with Kyla and David and Rob and Jon & Kate. It took most of the day to get through the remaining 30k words, but we did it without too much effort, largely thanks to the fact that it was rather good and had many imaginative Prisoner moments, twists, etc. that answered most of our objections to various plot “problems” that we thought might be present. So, good.

It was actually very inspiring, though this didn’t mean that I did any writing on Saturday night or Sunday morning - Jon & Kate and I went to a nearby party that Anna was at and we ate much dessert, then groaning and ill went home and collapsed in a heap. Sunday was very lazy indeed, as I suddenly had a desire to reread “Ender’s Game”. I went to Galaxy bookshop and bought it and read it, and then played various games with Chris & Amanda & Andrea and ate lots more (including the rather excellent Lindt Toffee Chocolate, which I had not seen before) and that was the weekend.