Anotherblog

My current obsessions

Obsession 1: Guitar Hero.
I’m stuck on “Crossroads” on the Hard difficulty level, though I can now regularly get to 60% through. It took me ages to get past 9%. Anna got to 10% on her first try, which just goes to show something or other - probably that she has faster reactions than me. Despite this, I’m enjoying it a lot, and not getting frustrated. Even doing badly at this game can be fun.

Obsession 2: Archery.
Went to archery on Friday and Saturday mornings, because I obviously don’t need any sleep any more. I got a 57 on Friday, which was nice, but more exciting was that on Saturday I got a clicker for my bow. The clicker is a little flexible metal strip. The clicker sits near the nocking point on the bow. You load the arrow with the clicker resting against the shaft - settle down - so that the clicker is kinda sorta holding the arrow against the bow. The real purpose of it is to go “click”, which it does when you’ve drawn the arrow so far back that it passes over the the arrow head - it clicks back against the bow. You then know that you’ve drawn the arrow back to exactly the right point, and you let go.

So: you draw back, take aim, draw back a little bit more, wait for the click, and let go. That means that you’ve drawn back exactly the same length each time, which makes the arrows more accurate on the vertical axis. In my case, though, the arrows are a bit too long, so I was having to draw a *long* way back - much longer than I usually do - to get the click. My instructor is shortening all the arrows, so when I go in again on Wednesday, it should be comfortable. I’m looking forward to it.

Filming Cars

I didn’t realise the Pixar film “Cars” was coming out quite so soon, or I’d have started hurrying more on my own short film about cars. Now it’ll inevitably look like my film is ripping off the pixar one, which is a bit of a bummer. I’ll have to watch it and make sure we don’t have any jokes in common.

So, I worked on the script on the weekend, and then Anna and I did some filming on Sunday with Kyla & Dave & Jon & Kate, and it worked out very well and was a lot of fun. We used all 86 of the toy cars, pulled a bunch of them around on pieces of fishing line, and felt like big kids. Wonderful. Good footage, too.

Then on Monday, I did some filming at lunchtime with a bunch of people from work. We had about a dozen people to tow the cars around, and once again, it was terrific fun and the footage looks cool. And now I can’t do any more footage with 86 cars: I returned most of them to their owners, along with the chocolate (one lindt ball each. I wonder why Lindt don’t officially call them lindt balls?), and most people were very happy, and keen to see the final product, which I promised in the indefinite future before the next Tropfest is due. There’s plenty of filming to go before it’s finished. I’m hoping to use people from work, and to film in lunchtimes.

Now that all that’s out of the way, I’m tired. Filming is hard work. Now that I weigh myself every day (the No Sweet Things If I’m Over 86kg Diet) I really notice the effect of exercise on my weight. I was about a kilo lighter than usual this morning, and it wasn’t water loss.

But sometimes…

Sometimes deadlines make me feel ill and tired. I think it’s actually lack of sleep that’s doing that, and the deadlines at work, but I’m still not coping particularly well with the (mostly self-imposed) “Cars” deadline, which resembles stage-fright more than anything: I want it to look good, and I deeply fear that my ideas aren’t going to look good enough. I have decided to bribe people with chocolate instead. Hopefully that will make the lynch mob go away.

I could really do with a stupid high-concept movie plot to happen to me about now: I’d take the “universal remote-control” one, or even the “He’s a pro-wrestling animal wrangler - she’s dictating her entire life live on the web - they’re cops!” one that I just made up.

Cars short film

I’ve been thinking about the Cars short film recently, and just got a kick up the pants: some people at work want their cars back. So I’ll give things back on Monday, after doing filming throughout this week and on the weekend. Very convenient. I work much better to deadlines.

Gaiman

I saw Neil Gaiman speak at Town Hall last night. It was good: he was entertaining and had plenty of stories, and the audience had mostly decent questions. I was reminded a little of the ability of politicians to divert questions into the topics they want to talk about, except that Mr. Gaiman uses his power for good: whenever he got less-than-inspiring questions, he managed to come out with a funny anecdote anyway, even if it was only peripheral to the question.

Wil Anderson (his interviewer) was fine, and was obviously a fan. I was expecting to be familiar with most of the anecdotes, as I read his weblog, but he obviously keeps his best anecdotes for such occasions as this.

He read from a brand new short SF short story “Orange”. It, too, was good.

Guitar Hero

Anna and I continue our addiction to Guitar Hero, snatching time whenever we can to lay down some cool licks. I’m finally up to the last song in Medium level (though I was taking it easy, redoing quite a few of the earlier songs to try and get five stars or at least four, and consolidating my technique). It’s a lot of fun, but I’m beginning to think that it will actually improve my normal guitar playing too. It’s not a perfect match, of course - it simplifies almost everything - but in terms of finger speed and rhythm, I’m quite sure I’m getting better.

In other news, I’m hosting a Magic tournament tonight - we’re drafting Ravnica block, and everyone’s looking forward to it a lot. It’s a really fun block to draft, and we’ve come up with some twists to make it even more interesting. Rather than drafting all the ravnica packs first, each drafter secretly picks which pack to open first, then we all simultaneously reveal them, do the draft, and then do the same with the second and third packs. Should be interesting.

Incidentally, it’s nice to see such polite discussions occurring between CB and Marco on the topic of environmentalism. Very civilised! Most unlike most boorish internet debates!

No time

Between jet-lag, work, teleconferences, archery, D&D, and Guitar Hero, I haven’t had a lot of time for things like updating the Spit webpage with anything resembling a nice homepage. I have, however, put the podcast back up there, and this time, it’s complete (though if you’ve already heard the previous version, I think you only missed the last minute or so of “I can’t believe it’s not badder”.)

I hope to get some time this weekend, though Spit will then be competing with golf, archery, the Cars short film, Dr Who, the video delay line project (for which I finally got permission from work), and of course Guitar Hero, if I can wrestle the controller away from Anna for long enough. We’re both rather addicted, you see.

Guitar Hero

I got home at 5:00am yesterday morning, and went to sleep until about 10:00am. It was a good sleep (though it didn’t stop me from feeling incredibly sleepy today, as I am right now), and when I woke up I decided that before I took my ps2 to a modchip-installing shop, I should check whether the Guitar Hero I bought in Sweden might work anyway. It said on the box that it was for PAL televisions, so the only thing preventing it from working would be the region-encoding.

And lo, there was rock. Guitar Hero, purchased in Sweden, works in an Australian ps2. I spent an hour or so playing it, then went to a BBQ, then got back and continued until I was too tired to go on. I’m most of the way through the “Basic” game, and I’m loving it. A very cool game, much more interesting than Konami’s Guitar Freaks, in that it has more fret buttons and a whammy bar. The reviewers were right - it’s possible to play the game sitting down, but you never do.

Home again

I’m back in Sydney, a little sleepy, but satisfied. It was a good trip. We did a satisfying amount of work. I wandered around Stockholm on Friday with Doug S. - we got to the Vasa museum again, which hadn’t changed a bit since I was last there ten years ago - and I made it to the plane in good time, and although I didn’t get the same legroom as on the trip out, I did get a seat at the very back, and there was nobody sitting next to me for the whole trip.

I’m comfortable with air travel now. When we were taxiing at Stockholm (Arlanda) airport, I started reading a newspaper. It wasn’t a particularly interesting newspaper. I vaguely noticed them going through the safety procedures, and then, the next thing I knew, they were serving dinner. I completely failed to notice the takeoff.

Stockholm

The weather continues to be fantastic, and the meeting continues to be productive and good. We’ve gotten a lot done, and I’m feeling positive about our progress. Also, I am drinking far too much coke, and eating many chocolates. There is no way in the world I’ll be able to have sweet things when I get back to Sydney, not for at least a week.

Also, my jet-lag has been virtually non-existant. Very unusual. I think it’s because I went out drinking with everyone on the first night, and didn’t get to sleep until midnight, and I did a similar thing each subsequent night. I’ve been feeling fine with six hours of sleep, which is also very unusual.

So, still waiting for the other shoe to drop.