Anotherblog

I have no wishes, and my first wish is to retroactively have three wishes.

Final day of SVG working group meetings. It’s been good, but hooboy, what a lot of work. We were originally going to take Thursday as a holiday, but during the meeting we voted to work that day instead, which kinda blew my plans to spend the day with Ev and Anna out of the water. I spent it sitting in the meeting room instead.

Ev headed back to Brisbane last night - terrific having him over, and I really wish I’d had more time to talk to him. The big SVG Working group party at our place on Wednesday night was the longest we got to talk, and that had lots of other people around at the same time, so it wasn’t the kind of heart-to-heart we like to do. Anna and I will be heading over to Brisbane in March some time, I hope - Jen & Marco will also be there some time then, and we’ll try and coordinate with them for that. But Mum & Dad will be over in Sydney in early March, and I’m travelling to Cannes in late Feb/early March (fortunately not overlapping with Mum & Dad being in Sydney) so it looks like I’m in for a busy month!

Back to the meeting.

Passive voice must not be used.

I’ve been very, very busy over the past week, and this week is likely to be just as busy. Last week, Anna made a short film “Westenders”, for which I did the technical stuff like camerawork and sound etc. (which turned out very well despite my fears that her enthusiasm would lead to it being somewhat in bad taste - I just get paranoid sometimes.) Thus, there were many late nights and frantic work to get the film finished before the tropfest due date, and we just squeezed it in - I ended up doing a few hour’s worth of editing just before running the Wednesday D&D game. And there was lots of preparation for the SVG Working Group meeting, which just started today.

This week, Ev’s staying with us for a week, and so is Chris L. from SVG. Ev and I have re-recorded five old Spit songs: The Chorus Rhymes With Fire, The Mackeral, Metaphysical Meanderings, Just Fine, and Stuff The Whales. We gave Garage Band a try, and although it’s a little primitive, it did just fine in the end, though we had to start over on TCRWF when we realised we’d forgotten a verse - it’s just not as good at cutting and pasting as the more professional packages.

On the very, very bright side: I found out - at last! - what was wrong with the FocusRite, and it was, of course, very simple. Ever since I got it, there has been the occasional circumstance where the audio out of the FocusRite (which is a compression thingy and power source for a good quality Rode NT2 microphone) had some buzz on it. Incredibly frustrating! Sometimes, it’d even pick up radio.

The problem? The entire unit is mono, and I was connecting to it with a stereo cable, because I didn’t realise it’d matter. In retrospect, of course, it’s obvious: the FocusRite connector inside the box had two contacts, and the stereo cable had three, so the third contact was just floating, or connected to the case, or something. And thus, because the other side would pick up the voltage on that third wire, which would be a buzzing sound. As soon as I connected with a mono cable instead of a stereo one (which I’m quite sure I’ve done before, by accident, and thought that the problem had solved itself) it worked again. Hooray!

Anyway. Chris & Amanda came over on Sunday and we had a BBQ lunch and recorded backup vocals on “Just Fine” and did a new version of “Stuff the Whales”, and then they took off and Jon & Kate came over and Ev went out to see Elvis Costello, and we played music and watched “Lost” and “Battlestar Galactica” with Chris L., who must have been horribly jet-lagged (he arrived at 6:00am on Sunday morning from France), but he was very patient and agreeable.

Today? Frantic lack-of-organisation, including a very poor internet connection at the hotel, for the SVG WG which *really does require a very excellent internet connection, which I specifically asked for*. Everyone’s a little bit grumbly, and I’m feeling very guilty and disorganised, but there’s just been so much happening lately, so very much…

More house-hunting

I almost forgot: we did some more househunting on Saturday morning as well. Unfortunately, none of the three places that we could afford were any better than our place in Marrickville, and certainly didn’t have the “zing” of the Annandale place. So we looked at a place that was up for $1.6 million, just to see what that amount of money buys, and yeah, it had zing. Enormous rooms, high ceilings, amazing design, heritage house, just gorgeous.

Unfortunately, it has now set one a new unobtainable standard. One hopes one can avoid having it affect one’s judgement. Now if you’ll excuse one, one has one’s caviar to finish.

Busy weekend

I am tired. It was a very busy weekend: Anna decided at the last minute to do a tropfest film (entries are due on Tuesday) so we were running around getting prepared and doing filming. The topic isn’t really my kind of thing - a Greek-Lebanese cross-dressing soap opera - but the participants were enthusiastic and fun-loving, so I have to regard it as a success so far, even if we have trouble editing around the fits of the giggles. That was responsible for most of my current exhaustion.

I played golf on Saturday morning at Wakehurst golf course (60 from a round of 9 holes, equal to my last round there) with Owen, and one of his friends from Ireland.

His friend from Ireland had a remarkable way of holding the club. Apparently, there are a number of people who participate in the Irish sport of Hurling and also play golf. They invariably hold the club with the left hand where the right hand would normally be, and vice versa, which is how they hold the Hurling stick/club/thing. For a right-handed person, the left hand is normally at the end of the club, and is the power hand, while the right hand is further down the club and is the control hand. Holding the club with hands the other way around is something that never occurred to me, and I didn’t even register that he was doing it until several holes in. I’ll try and get video later. He was certainly hitting the ball with power and accuracy - he did the best of us (54) and apparently there are people with that grip who have low-single-figure handicaps. It is, however, difficult to get tuition, as the golfing pros are completely unable to cope with such a radically different grip, and will always suggest changing it.

On Sunday afternoon, Jon and I went off to an ex-Baltimore Developers Group meet-up, and chatted with many people we haven’t talked to in yonks - Winnie, Fotini, Carlos, Kath, Greg C., Sen, Pierre, Louis, Kirrily, and respective partners. All good. Pity we had to take off early, but we had much to do that evening - Jon came over (Kate was too knackered) that evening and we watched Lost and Battlestar Galactica (which is just brilliant at the moment) and played music and talked and watched through Anna’s raw footage.

I also managed a bit of work on War of the Worlds and finally finished it off and posted it, despite mild misgivings. Sometimes those entries are difficult.

Email working again

I’m not sure what changed. I think it was just that the re-registration has finally propagated to the darkest corners of teh interweb. In any case, my regular email address is once again working.

Spambots - start your engines!

Email not working

Bother. Email to “andrew otherleg com” (fill with usual symbols) is still not working. Meanwhile, if you want to contact me, try shellshear optusnet com au or andrews cisra canon com au.
Hopefully it’ll all be working again soon. I must fax Network Solutions my new contact details so this doesn’t happen again in five years’ time…

Five Years Later

If you were wandering about the temporary loss of service to otherleg.com last night: yup, my domain name hosting ran out, five years after I last renewed it.

Five years ago, every single contact detail I had was different (apart from my name - the change to “Andrew Who-Has-No-Alias” hasn’t officially gone through yet.) I just hadn’t gotten around to faxing Network Solutions the forms to prove it’s all still me. A lot has changed in the last five years, but not as much as I might have expected from a five-year plan I may or may not have written five years ago.

I s’pose this’ll happen again once we move house.

Affording things

The good news after talking with the accountant: we could probably afford that place if we sold the Marrickville house. From a quick look through equivalent places in Marrickville, we might even do better than $600k for our house - most other 4 bedroom places are $650k to $700k. But there’s no way in hell we could get the loan without selling our house, and I suspect that the property will be long-gone by then. Still, we might as well get this whole process underway over the next few weeks.

Golf

I played golf with Owen on Sunday again, and got 56 on the 9 holes (Owen got 53). Driving started well and went out the window on the fifth hole or so, but my chipping and putting are improving a lot.

Twelfth Night

Anna surprised me on Monday with the instructions to turn up in the city at the MLC Centre at 7:00pm, and to keep my eyes closed. It turned out she had booked tickets to the Sydney Festival production of Twelfth Night. And very interesting it was, too: the entire production was in Russian, with English subtitles (projected onto the walls above the stage) from the Shakespeare source.

It was an all-male production, which made the gender-bending of the story all the stranger, and caused nervous laughs from the audience in the first bit, until everyone got into the story. By the second half, the comedy was coming thick and fast. Sir Toby was especially good - a thick-set old Russian guy who was also wonderfully nimble and graceful. Partial standing ovation. Anna fell asleep for a short time in the first half, but had completely gotten into it by the second half, despite not being familiar with the play.

A very accessible production, despite the language barrier and mental gymnastics of having a woman playing a man (who was actually a man) falling in love with a man who was in love with a woman (actually a man) who in turn was in love with the original woman playing a man (actually a man).