Aegir’s Rantings

So what have I been doing lately? SWEET FUCK ALL. I’m sick.

Apparently my asthma has reared its ugly head again, I’ve been cramming various inhalers and anti-biotics and whatnot down my throat with now only slight success. Hopefully I’ll be somewhat alive by tommorow that I can start planning things with the lady… Those of you who know will know which lady I’m on about, but regardless, SHUT UP ABOUT IT, I TOLD YOU NOTHING!

Plotting, well, stuffs. Opening shared bank account for funding of various photography projects and other things. Eyeing off another Velbon tripod. Trying to figure out ways to spend less money than I earn, etc. etc.

One thing that has happened lately has made me an exceptionally happy camper; GMail now supports IMAP, which is a good solid bit of quality. I can now access my mail from my phone (S60 3rd ed. phones have good email clients), and my laptop, and via a web interface and have everything in sync. Combined with over 4 gig of storage, it realy is the email host to end all email hosts.

Had a bit of an embarassing incident with my camera. Started panicking because the viewfinder had suddenly gone really blurry. I had the camera sitting with the cap off for ages thinking that there was some condensation or something in the viewfinder and that airing it out would help. That obviously wasn’t the issue, and so I started fretting over warranties and whether to unscrew the viewfinder and clean the thing myself. I whinged on IRC for a bit and SpComb had the answer. I promptly headslapped. It was the viewfinder focus adjustment nob on the side. It has a habit, apparently, on the e410 and the e510 (what SpComb has) of turning around out of focus when stored in a bag.

That saved me a bit of embarassement if I were to of gone in the store.

Apart from that, I’ve been sitting on my backside doing absolutely nothing. I played around with some staff twirling and long exposure photography, which led to some interesting results. I want to do a bit more futzing around later with it, but it’ll have to wait until my lungs heal up a bit more.

Soddery and bollocks, I do say. Soddery and bollocks.

Interesting weekend. Caught up with Liz on Saturday after work. Had dinner at my place (a rather un-apetizing pre-made lasagnia the ‘rentals had cooked with some salad and garlic bread). she crashed on the lounge. After a breakfast of toast the next morning we headed out to Kuitpo forest with the photography gear, which is to blame for photographs like this appearing on my flickr:

Kuitpo forest certainly is beautiful in the wintertime (It’s supposed to be spring, but you wouldn’t think it with the weather), it’s brilliant how such a beautiful forest can pop up here in the driest country in the world. Good for us because it allowed to photograph the type of shots we had been plotting for some time, and had been whinging that we’d likely have to go to Europe to shoot them. I was a bit worried that Kuitpo forest would be a lot scragglier and infested with Australian natives than it was, but those fears were certainly laid to rest (It was the first time I had been to Kuitpo forest since I was a very young lad, my recollection was hazy, to say the best).

That’s not to say that it was really that easy getting into the place. We missed the entrance twice in a row it was raining so heavilly, said “Sod it” and went and bought pies at Clarendon bakery to scoff down. After a bit we managed to see far enough infront of us on the road to chance driving back. Third time was a charm and we managed to get in the place.

While it was bucketing down, after a few minutes it did clear up enough that we could atleast make a break for the trees, which did give quite suitable cover to attempt the first few shoots.

I found a lot of the first shots very hard to do, as Liz was still quite wooden towards the camera, but I was quite pleased with how she opened up later on into the set. The photo above of her sitting on a pile of logs, which I dubbed ‘The Forest is my Throne’, after an album by Satyricon (With a track of the same title on it), turned out especially well. Amusing considering I would have missed it if I hadn’t flicked back through my photos, it wasn’t until after I took the shot I realised just how bloody well it turned out. The photo has been racking up trophies on Flickr, to boot. I was quite pleased with that aswell ;).

Following that we did a bit more photography back in my car, and then drove out towards the coast to do a bit more photography.

It was so damn windy we just didn’t bother, and ended up driving out as far as Myponga for fun and profit. Sure it was fun, and we ate icecream, but there wasn’t much profit, as the Myponga Markets were the dingiest little markets I’d been too in a long while. We didn’t stay long and promptly up and effed off for the hour’ish long drive back to my place.

Twas a good time had by all, and my pie was certainly quality. I’d almost drive back to Clarendon just for the pies the bakery makes :D.

Well, I finished up working at the Adelaide University some time ago, I was only contracted on for 6 months tops to begin with, so I knew it was coming regardless of how hard I worked to try and stay. Ended up working at the Royal Adelaide Hospital for a bit. PEER dumped me there with little in the way of information. Kicked around for a month, set a good impression (So I thought atleast), but the boss there thought I’d be better suited at other companies and sent me back to PEER, with the reccomendation they find me more nerdy tech-fu jobs.

Well, they sent me to another dedicated cabling mob. But I can’t say I’m not happy.

So far this week I’ve done about 46 hours, the weekend is already mostly gone and I’ve not done a huge amount. I’ll likely go bike riding tommorow, and continue sitting around the house lusting after a Nokia e61. The concept of getting my hands on a wedge phone with full QWERTY keyboard and a 2.8″ landscape screen appeals to me for, mostly, one reason: SSH. Mind you, I’ll either have to swap SIMM’s with my N95 with the full 3G access, or put a cheap prepaid SIMM in it and rely primarilly on WiFi.

Speaking of mobility, I’m loving sitting in Mickie D’s before work munging down on muffins or hotcakes and surfing the net, talking to mates in the USA, etc. The teeny 12″ x31 has been a great purchase. I’m starting, though, to silently, optimisticly hope that the rumors I’ve been hearing about when leapord releases that it’ll install straight onto an normal PC based system turn out to be true. I’d rush right off and buy a copy of leapord and throw it on my computers, I really would. As much as I love Linux, I’m getting to the point where I’m more concerned with content and the manipulation/collection/organization/creation of it than terminal junkying.

Perhaps it’s more because auto-mounting of removable storage broke on Debian and I’ve been too damn lazy to reinstall or fix the problem. Or perhaps that F-Spot is prone to being a crusty bitch at times.

Meh.

Speaking of F-Spot and content creation, I’ve been going freakin’ nuts with my n95’s camera and my nice shiny E410, getting more and more into photography, learning what I can. My Flickr has been getting steadilly more populated. My deevart has been getting neglected, it’s just not suitable for the photos I take. Deev should be reserved for absolutely stellar one-off’s, I just can’t justify uploading photos to it for the most part.

I leave you with a picture of the old Santos building (Now Westpac) taken from the top floor of a parking garage. Raor.

I haven’t blogged in a while. Actually, to be rather honest, I haven’t done a lot of anything in a while. I might say that I’m concentrating on the North American Buildings Set, before turning my attention to the Japan Set and my station sets I’m working on. But to be truthful, I have a gander at the NFO every now and again, do a few lines worth of changes, and then I don’t touch it again for months on end.

I bought a bike not too long ago, nearly $1400 worth of mountain bike from hell. And you know what? I don’t think I’ve ridden it more than a few times since I got it. I spent around $2000 on my new desktop computer - all of my coding works were postponed until I built it. With its dual widescreen monitors I was supposed to work through my projects at lightning pace. You know what? I did a reformat a few days ago and have been so shat off that I’ve just left it and haven’t touched it in days.

I bought a $1300 digital SLR and a cheap $700 seccond hand IBM Thinkpad X31, and you know what? That’s where all my attention has been lately.

To be quite honest, the things that are keeping me tethered at home are pissing me off the most. My bedroom is a disaster zone at the moment, I have nice new furniture I bought recently, I thought it would make home a nicer place to be, but my room is already a bomb-site.

Not quite sure how to phrase it, but I’m getting sick to fucking death of living at home with my parents. I come home from work, from working full weeks - not part time, and I’m exhausted, I’m barely sat down for fifteen minutes and I’m badgered with this, or I’m badgered with that. When I’m not, I’m huddled over my computer doing something completely inane. I’m somehow spending entire days bouncing between TT-Forums, Google Reader, my email, IRC, and then occasionally playing BF2. I’ve been managing to waste away entire days. I’m taking a week of paid annual leave, and so far it’s wednesday and I’ve done absolutely eff all.

I haven’t been doing any staff/fire twirling in ages either. I was recently invited out to a local event and I fluffed off on it and sat on my arse for the night. Now, okay, I am recovering from a nasty bug that’s flying around, had my flat on my arse all week at tradeschool (That’s likely another module that I’ve failed, but ohwell). But it still shats me off that I’ve been lounging around for so long doing sweet naff all.

Now, as for my projects? No, they’re not abandoned and they aren’t up for grabs. I’m getting sick of the pointing and hinting to the matter. Would you go up to someone who shares a hobby you do and ask them to give you one of their works because they’re too burnt out/busy to finish it? No? Same applies here. Despite being burnt out and shagged off at the world, the projects I work on mean a lot to me, they are things I’ve invested, in cases, well over a years worth of work. I’m not throwing them away for some set ‘leader’ who thinks they have any right to authority over me and my work. Krtaylor, I’m looking at you. Leave me alone.

I’ve been more annoyed lately, because I know roughly what I need to do to pull myself out of this hole I’ve dug myself, yet I can’t quite bring myself to actually do it. This hole I’ve dug myself applies to so many aspects of my life; dating, recreation, organization/management, work, online, you name it.

So yeah, if I seem a little, eh, lazy, then yeah, theres a reason behind that. Just bear with me for a bit while I sort myself out.

Wooot.

I have my bike, and the computer is on order as of this morning.

The loan went through. Awesome.

I’ll make atleast a three-quarter arsed effort at a post later :).