Anotherblog

Exhausted

I’m utterly exhausted. Yesterday was one of those weird days where I had an all-day teleconference from 5:00pm to 2:00am, so I had the rest of the day to meander around the house. I went to archery in the morning, which was a bit of a write-off because it was too cold and windy, and then I played Guitar Hero and had a snooze and went into a music shop and got too carried away. I bought a very cheap hihat - we now have a workable but non-space-consuming drumkit - and a cheapish bass effects box for the bass guitar, which proved to be lots of fun, hooray.

Then, the teleconference for the rest of the day. It was very, very cold last night, so in the dinner break I drove through the pouring rain to Bing Lee and bought a heater for the study. Happily, the teleconference went well, and we won’t have to do another one like it for a good long while, he said, optomistic as ever.

Tonight, there will be beer drinking. Rich has a batch of beer that will have to be thrown out unless we drink lots tonight, so we’re on a noble, noble mission.

Juggling animation

I’ve been working on a whole bunch of projects, oscillating between them wildly, but the one I’ve settled into lately has been a SVG juggling animation thing.  I spent all last night standing in front of a white sheet backdrop pretending to juggle for the video camera, and then looping the footage, vectorising it, cleaning it up, and synchronising it with the existing juggling ball animations.  Fun but tiring and very inefficient.  It’s just me, so it’s a real pain calibrating so that I’m in exactly the same position for each animation of the loop.  Still, I’m coming up with some efficiencies and procedures to follow for future use.  Hopefully I’ll have something to show for the weblog soon, though I’m afraid that, because it’s SVG, you’ll need to download the Opera webbrowser to view it, which limits it’s immediate impact.

Unfortunately, this obsession is spinning off a whole bunch of other obsessions.  I keep thinking I should write a program to make the calibration and image output easier - say, something that rapidly alternates between a still photo and what’s live on the video camera for a set period of time, and then records what’s on the video camera.  I could use my video-delay-line project as a starting point - I still need to write something to save the images…

Busyness averted

Last weekend wasn’t nearly as busy as I was expecting, either, as I decided not to go to the prerelease or to Archery on Saturday morning. The BBQ lunch on Saturday was minimally attended (which I kinda expected, since the last lunch held for that mob only had a couple of people as well) and was pleasant and relaxing, and we didn’t bother going to see Pirates, expecting to see it on Tuesday instead (which didn’t happen either).

Sunday was a bit more hectic - I played squash with Paul (and got smashed, as usual) then rushed off to Dave & Kyla’s place. We watched “The Call of Cthulhu”, faithfully done as a silent film, an episode of “American Gothic” (Potato Boy, good ‘n’ creepy), and a Dario Argento “Masters of Horror” film, “Jenifer”, which was a bit ordinary. Then we recorded the first half of the first chapter of Prismatic, and I rushed off home. Jon came over and we played music, and watched Doctor Who, which was rather good.

Dammit. “Rather good”? “A bit ordinary”? I’m out of sorts. I need to do some FF. Just feeling run down at the moment.

Anna’s off to Greece

Anna left for her holiday in Greece on Tuesday night, and is now enjoying the delights of Evia.  I’ll be joining her later, but for the moment I’m hanging around at home at a loose end.  Or rather, I would be except that I haven’t spent much time at home, so it hasn’t really sunken in except for the fact that the bed is cold.  I went to D&D last night and stayed up late, and I’m playing squash tonight and then doing the teleconference.  No time, Toulouse!

Weekend

I have a very busy weekend ahead. This evening, the magic tournament. Then on Saturday, either archery or the coldsnap prerelease, followed by a bbq lunch with Anna’s acting friends, and going to see some Pirates in the evening. On Sunday, squash with Paul, then horror movies and audio recordings with David & Kyla, then an evening of music and Doctor Who with Jon & Kate and others. Absolutely packed.

Health checks at work

I had a health check at work today, which was mostly OK except cholesterol.  The overall level is OK, but there’s good cholesterol, and there’s bad cholesterol, and I have too much of the latter.  Less bad cholesterol needed.  At the last health check, my cholesterol level was fine, so I suspect my recent efforts to go off sweet drinks have an unexpected side-effect: I’ve been eating more chocolate and other sweets, which have more saturated fat (coke and V, as bad as they are, don’t have any fat at all), so there we have it.

I’m giving up on that experiment.  When I have caffeine-free days, I’ll go without sweet things altogether.  And, of course, I’ll try and cut down on takeaway foods and other sources of mondo saturated fat anyway.

Guitar Hero

Actually, when I last reported on Guitar Hero, I hadn’t finished crossroads.  I have now, though, and I’m down to the last two songs in Expert level: Cowboys from Hell and Bark at the Moon.  They’re not even remotely fair: I can barely get past 10% of Cowboys from Hell, and Bark at the Moon is even worse.  I think I should probably practice them up in Hard mode for a while, and see if I can get a better score there.

Meanwhile, I’ve been going through the other songs again, marvelling at how easy everything seems in retrospect.

For the record, I still don’t do hammer-ons or pull-offs properly.  Haven’t got the hang of them, though I hear you’re supposed to hold them slightly longer/later than you might expect.  Techniques that really do work are sliding my index finger up and down the buttons for “runs” of notes, and double-strumming (strumming both up and down on the strum bar) - essential.

Week without caffeine

I’ve been one week without caffeine now - as an experiment, I extended my no-sweet-things thing so that if I’m below 85kg I can eat sweet things, and if I’m below 84kg I can drink sweet things.  I was curious as to whether my love of chocolate would keep me hovering at 85kg, or my love of coke and V (dammit) would push me down to 84kg.  So far, the former seems to be true, and I’ve been drinking only water (or, occasionally, beer).

It’s an absolute bastard at about 3:00pm each afternoon.  I was nodding off in my chair today.  But I’ll stick with it a bit longer.

Sports junkie

I managed the trifecta this weekend: archery, golf and squash. All went very well. In fact, I got one of my best ever scores for golf: 47 for the back nine at Warringah. What’s particularly interesting to me is that I have been playing very, very badly, and I stopped playing for a month or so, and this was my first game back. Mysteriously, my drives worked, and my putting was not the usual disaster.

Squash was also unusually good: I played against Paul-whose-dad-is-a-squash-coach, and we were pretty much even, considering he started with a handicap of 5 (for 15 point games). The handicap went up whenever he won a game by more than 2 points, and down whenever I won a game by more than 2 points. I ended with a handicap of 3. But we were both pretty exhaused by that point.

And archery was, as usual, fun but tiring. I’m beginning to get used to the new bow weight (34lb) but the scores are still wildly varying: my best was 55, and my worst was 38.

So now I’m sore, but in a good way.