Craig Box's journeys, stories and notes...
You can't take a picture of your new camera, with your new camera.
Instead, you can document the first picture your new camera ever took:
It's the Canon S5 IS (S1, S2, S3, S5 - where'd S4 go?), and yes, 48x zoom is plenty to see the hairs on Pete's nose.
Got VHS tapes? Borrow a friend's DVD recorder and copy them to digital. Unless, of course, you borrow said DVD recorder, and find it dead.. then find it has magically come back to life a week later.
14 VHS tapes in the cupboard... net stuff worth saving: 10 minutes worth.
Interesting notes: programs I used to watch on TV before we got the DivX Channel: The Sopranos, Boston Public & Ed.
Here's the 7 minute piece that was worth keeping for posterity: an interview David Strassman did with Tim Finn.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtS-PbcD8Dk[/youtube]
(Americans don't get quite as much Neil and Tim as we do down here, so they like when people like me put things like this online...)
Off The Record (ok, the name sucks) is 1 year old today. Wow.
How did I find this out? Someone randomly suggested it might be Prof Eric's birthday today, and I mentioned it last year. (On a different date however). Pretty cool co-incidence though.
How did I confirm it? I was asked to enter my username and password to post this, so I guess WordPress cookies have a 1 year lifetime.
What better way to break the 13 day silence than to point out that Roger Waters is coming to Auckland on January 29. According to his website, he's playing "Stadium". I really like the ambience of "Stadium".
ickets from Ticketmaster from 27 October, but of course their website doesn't know its happening.
Update: according to Brain Damage, the stadium is North Harbour Stadium, and you might be looking at $180 AUD for the cheapest tickets!
I enjoyed Rockstar: INXS as live rock covers, played by a talented band, with sometimes some crappy singing in front of it. I came to enjoy the competition too (enjoyed it far less after the New Zealand Herald published the winner over four weeks before it aired in New Zealand). INXS's subsequent world tour included four dates in New Zealand (and has so far lasted almost a year, unlike the planned Rockstar: Rock Star Supernova "world tour", which they added a Canadian date to in order to qualify), the third of which I attended last Sunday.
I bought the tickets about three months ago; last week, I stressed for an hour after having lost them. I have three other sets of tickets in my drawer at work, and I turned the office upside down looking for them. I then convinced myself that I didn't actually buy any, but my friend Joe, who I was going with, must have bought them. Then I remembered him paying me for his, etc. Thankfully they turned up in my big stash of shows-I've-seen tickets (between the Rolling Stones and a Black Caps vs WI Twenty20 game).
The last time I went to the Logan Campbell Centre was to see Oasis, in 1998. I can only assume it's got smaller since then! Great venue though, well shaped and coloured - would suit theatre as well as rock. The opening band was Autozamm, who we arrived too late to see most of, but were still good as ever. Mixed a bit too loud for the event.
I was asked how INXS were by a few people: I found it very hard to tell my opinion. I thought I'd sum it up in numbers:
2.5 beards? Well, Andrew Farriss obviously has a full beard, so that's one; Kirk, Tim and JD really only qualify for half-each. Kirk however would make a fantastic entrant during Movember.
JD seemed a little too cliched rockstar. "It's fantastic to be here in Auckland Noo Zeeland, two nights, peace and love to the world, man". There was also some strained gangster-rap-esque lyrical riffs between songs, which might have been INXS back catalogue that I wasn't familiar with. However, the band was tight, the vocal delivery was pretty good on the old stuff and great on the new stuff, and without having seen a Hutchence-lead show to compare it against, it was a good night out.
As those of you who know me personally will know that I am, quite vocally, not someone who enjoys programming. My main problem is that I write code so infrequently that whenever I sit down I've forgotten either the syntax of language or the parameters of the API, and find more time is taken with reading the docs or finding suitable examples than actually writing or thinking.
I visited my parents yesterday to help my 16 year old brother study for a test, and he also asked for some help with a programming assignment. Due either to a recent loss of computing equipment, or general difficulty in deciding on a language for teaching programming, they're using QBasic. Last time I used QBasic, I hadn't gone through a university degree and learnt half a dozen programming languages, so I found it all a bit easier this time. The problem was that I had no idea if half of the things I wanted to do had syntax in QB: you can't specify an array using numbers[4] = {1, 3, 6, 8}, so an example on the web (the only time I had to go outside of the help) pointed out that you use READ and a DATA statement. I remember seeing DATA statements in Commodore 64 code printouts in magazines, and not having any idea how the stuff quite how they worked. Surely it's easier to specify your data inline, rather than in a DATA statement? Isn't BASIC supposed to be, well, basic?
Anyway, below the fold is what I wrote. The goal was to teach my brother, and his brief was "write a roulette game". I insisted there would be no GOTOs, and no functions/subroutines, as he hadn't covered them at school. Generally the code had to make sense so he could read it and figure out how it all worked.
We finished it, and then, like the bastard I am, I deleted the bit that tests for odd and even and made him rewrite that. I suspect he'll find this post before actually rewriting it himself. Maybe not enjoying programming runs in the family.
From the IRC quote database @ bash.org:
<calin> we had a guy at school that wore black lipstick.. and was all gothy.. and then one day we caught him buying an assvibrator
<ecoli> ew.
<ecoli> wait, you "caught" him?
<ecoli> like, you were behind him in line at the assvibrator store?
<aero> he doesnt answer
*** Quits: calin (No route to host)
I was out at Harvey Norman purchasing a ducting kit for my dryer, when I saw an assvibrator (with attached shiatsu massager) that I just couldn't walk past. It was conveniently sitting in front of the vaccuum cleaner bags, when you always have to ring the person at home and find out what model of vaccuum cleaner you actually have.
It comes with a big list of donts, including pointing out it has a "15 min auto shutoff" because it's dangerous to use for longer. To me or the machine, I don't know (they say it gets hot if you run it for too long, and you should let it cool. I wonder what the duty cycle is? Is 15 mins in every hour OK?
Wow. I went to IHUG's Rock-Paper-Scissors competition website last night in Firefox on my Windows laptop, and there was a WMV plugin sitting there. I clicked play, and nothing happened. Oh well.
The next morning, I had need to find the website again to post a link to it, and so I opened it in Firefox on my Ubuntu pre-Dapper PC, and lo - the video starts playing all by itself. Most unspected but cool. Totem and GStreamer have come a long way.
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