Inconsequentia

This week was an emotional.... ride of some sort. I might get around to talking about it some more soon. Friday may require some Buzzcocks to ensure it's navigated successfully.

Because I've been thinking a lot about video game music lately (which may or may not be a healthy thing). Now I have the Ghostbusters theme song stuck in my head, because the 8-bit version that played throughout the 1984 Commodore 64 Ghostbusters game was arguably the best part of it. The intro screen even had lyrics! And a bouncing ball! It was incredible.

Anyway, if there's anything better than a good 8-bit version of a song, it's hearing that song played with a Tesla coil. And so the youtubes provide.



Why yes, busting does make me feel good!

The Transformers: The Movie was the greatest movie ever made. Also, I'm very happy that this song was just released for Guitar Hero. But less happy that my xbox 360 is too broken for me to play it. :-(

It is making me very happy.

Because I was on call this weekend, I wound up camped on the couch watching DVDs and eating an unreasonable amount of ice cream. As a result of that, here's some very brief reviews:
- The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor. Apparently the writers were too busy with fanservice (seriously, how many times can a character refer to something they did in an earlier movie before it gets boring?) and CGI effects to bother with a plot.
- The Wrestler. I cannot begin to describe how much I loved this movie. It's beautiful and brutal and glorious and depressing.
- Sunshine: I love the premise for this movie. But the buildup seemed rushed. The final act assumes far too much knowledge, leaves a lot of interesting threads from the start of the movie completely untouched, and is downright bizarre.
- Death At A Funeral. My brother recommended this to me in a conversation about how much arse Alan Tudyk kicked in Dollhouse. It requires an uncomfortably conscious suspension of disbelieve, but is otherwise hilarious. And yeah, Tudyk plays it pretty well.

My movies to watch pile currently consists of two Akira Kurosawa movies; The Hidden Fortress and Seven Samurai. By the time I get through those the bittorrents should have finished delivering me Ride Lonesome. And for crying out loud, when is Lesbian Vampire Killers actually going to be available in Australia? It is perplexing, is what it is.

This time tomorrow I should have my new Akubra Federation IV. It's a model that's very popular with Indiana Jones recreationists, but I still want one anyway.

I am worried that my blag posts lately start off strong, but fizzle badly towards the end. But I'm posting this now anyways.

Finding Copy Cats was the most amazingly brilliant thing I've ever done. So much awesome.

I can't choose between Willie Nelson covering Time After Time or a suprisingly good cover of Life Is A Highway by somebody I've never heard of.

My boss is off work all this week on account of having a new baby. So I get to do his job. Tremble before me, mortals!

Also, a large package stuffed with fine merchandise arrived on my doorstep this morning, a fact that I celebrated by running inside and ripping it open while giggling like a schoolgirl. So many fine shirts that I had trouble deciding on just one. But I am glad that I get to face today in my new Robot in my Eye tee.

(PS: For those playing along at home, yes that does mean that I am now in possession of the greatest hoodie ever made. AUGH indeed.)

Baby steps.

Honourable mention to Pearl Jam's Release. Pretty much the entirety of Ten has been a huge influence on my life for a lot of different reasons. Release has a lot of wonderful memories attached to it. And hearing it tonight added a new one.

But I also heard Paul Kelly tonight, and thought he was worth sharing.

On Friday afternoon I cast my eye around looking for places a shortish drive from Sydney that I hadn't yet visited, and stumbled across Taralga, a town with 4 churches, 2 pubs, and 400 people. *shrug* As good a place as any, thinks I.

Google maps suggests a route that goes via Goulburn. But that looks like a very long way around, and I've done enough freeway driving, and hey, the Wombeyan Caves Rd looks interesting, and it's shorter!

The first thing I learned this weekend is that pretty much everything has a wikipedia entry. Including the Wombeyan Caves Road. Reading it is generally recommended.

So the Wombeyan Caves Road starts with a couple of very nice wineries near Mittagong. And ends with a very pretty camp site at the Caves reserve. In the middle is mostly a single-lane dirt road (and a narrow single lane, at that), that rates as one of the most strenuous I've ever seen. Don't get me wrong, it was fun, in a fairly perverse sort of way. But there were rockfalls. There was a (admittedly very cool) single lane tunnel. There was a large herd of cows that needed tricky negotiating to avoid spooking them off the road and down a crevasse. There were a lot of blind single-lane hairpins. There were a lot of signs advising to sound your horn on blind turns. There was a lot of me sounding my horn.

I'm fairly sure I know precisely where I blew my front-left tire. Shortly after one of the rockfalls there was a block of stone, maybe 10-15cm high, in the middle of the road. I was worried that it wouldn't actually fit under my car, so swerved about as far to the right as I could. Unfortunately, that just lined it up properly, and I whacked it with the tire. But I didn't really get faster than about 40km/hr, so didn't notice until I pulled up outside the Argyle Hotel in Taralga. Needless to say, that happened a lot later than if I hadn't bothered trying to take a shortcut.

Apparently there's a lot of roadworks happening around Taralga at the moment, and the Argyle is usually fully booked out by the crew doing the work. But because of the amount of rain they've had in the area recently, this weekend's work had been cancelled, so the boys filling the pub had buggered off home for the weekend. But when I walked in they still hadn't gotten around to making any of their rooms up again. So I said "well I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to park around the back for ten minutes anyway so I can change my tire", and then did that.

The second thing I learned this weekend is that you really should check the pressure in your spare tire occasionally. As I lowered the jack I was incredibly dismayed to watch the shitty emergency wheel sink almost but not quite as far as the busted one I'd just pulled off. But by the time that happened, the pub owners had managed to get a room ready, so I put off the problem of finding an air compressor until the morning.

I like the Argyle. Very unpretentious country pub. Pub-style accommodation is a bit of an acquired taste, but it's cheap and comfortable.

This morning, the sensible option would have been to cop the 44km trip to Goulburn to fix my flat tire. But I was headed the other way and I knew there were two or three towns on the 100km stretch of road to Oberon. As it turns out, none of them have a service station either. So the trip took a lot longer than expected, but I didn't have any plans so I didn't mind.

Coming back over the mountains, I took a spontaneous detour to Jenolan Caves. I've been to the cave site twice, maybe three times before. But for fairly complicated reasons had never actually taken a cave tour. Today I finally put an end to that, and walked through the Chifley and River caves. Both incredibly awesome. The River cave, especially, is fantastic. The history of the area is almost as fascinating as the caves themselves, and I ended up buying a book on Oliver Trickett, the surveyor who discovered and mapped out a lot of the caves in the area. The fact that the book has a lot of very awesome cave maps may have influenced my purchasing decision slightly.

The drive from Jenolan home took nearly four hours all told. Hit heavy traffic on this side of the mountains, and I was somewhat speed-limited by my crappy emergency spare tire. Stopped for dinner in Parramatta, and then came the slightly more circuitous route home via Victoria Rd. But now I'm home, and sleepy, and the cat keeps trying to curl up on my keyboard under my hand, so it's time to go.

This weekend was supposed to be a 16 hour marathon, starting at midnight tonight, running the fairly major platform upgrade that's been consuming most of my headspace at work for the last 9 months. So I avoided making plans, well, most of this month in preparation for the final sprint. Luckily I had my shit together, and for the most part actually had time for a life, but this was still going to be the big one.

Wednesday we realised that the customer did not have their shit together (I could rant at length about working with telcos, but apparently that gets you in trouble). And so the release has been postponed. Most likely until May sometime. That left me wondering what to do this weekend. Spontaneous roadtrips don't feel quite so spontaneous when you spend a couple hours at work planning them. But I'm comfortable with that, so that's what I did today. Tomorrow I get the fuck out of town for a while.

I was going to find something completely different to clag here. But when I logged in to youtube this came up in my recommended videos, for which I think I have haqr_spice to thank. And, well, I like it. So there.



Have a good weekend, yo.

Today is turning out to be an epic fail. And I'm expecting to be working approximately 14 hours tomorrow. And a few more Sunday morning. But I'm trying not to think about it.

Last night I saw Biffy Clyro at the Metro. Great show with some awesome company. Thinking about that is much more fun.

This post is subtitled "why you should be glad I didn't sing anything at karaoke tonight".

I've been idly wondering how I could ease myself in to starting to write here a little more again. Hopefully this will suffice.

Probably roughly around this time last year, Dad was contacted by his local member (ruh!) who wanted to present him with some sort of defence force award (I'm still not sure of the details, but a little googling leads me to think he was due for a Defence Long Service Medal, can't imagine what else he might have earned). Dad being dad he didn't particularly want to go to a formal presentation ceremony, so the idea got stalled for a while. And then dad got sick and died.

A few weeks ago they got back in touch with mum, and wanted to present it to her instead. Mum being mum she didn't particularly want to go to a formal presentation ceremony, so it got stalled for a little while. Then today they got back in touch with her again, said they didn't want to mail it out to her, and Alby Schultz would instead like to visit and present it to her at home. Mum being mum, she's now going to a formal presentation ceremony. :-P

So mum's going to Goulburn for this thing on Monday. At least one brother is going with her. My life is currently completely consumed with work, with the project I've been working on for the last eleventy months finally launching weekend after next (provided, of course, that it isn't delayed again). But I'm still seriously considering taking Monday off to go down too.

Every time I hear this song I'm surprised by how good it is.



Tonight I am wearing a slightly unconventional costume to a party held by somebody I barely know. At last count I was experiencing 8 separate varieties of anxiety about this.

Busy. Puzzled. Happy.

Neil Patrick Harris' excellent Sesame St outing was a worthy contender for today. But I'm going with my favourite Dr. Horrible song instead.

Ganked from penelly's post. Think of 20 albums that had such a profound effect on you that they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that, no matter what they were thought of musically, shaped your world.

I thought I would try to list mine, seeing as I've been thinking about music this afternoon anyway. I stealthily omitted the tagging bit. Go tag yourselves.

In no particular order:
Ten - Pearl Jam
Siamese Dream - Smashing Pumpkins
Addicted Romantic - Faker
Eternal Nightcap - The Whitlams
...ish - 1927
Silly Songs - Sesame Street compilation
Because of the Times - Kings of Leon
Core - Stone Temple Pilots
...And Justice For All - Metallica
1987: Into The Groove - various artists
Wiretap Scars - Sparta
Fully Completely - The Tragically Hip
Singles - various artists (movie soundtrack)
Give Up - The Postal Service
Louder Than Love - Soundgarden
Eastwards By Removal - 78 Saab
No Touch Red - Bodyjar
Blue Sky Mining - Midnight Oil
Skin - Endorphin
Concert Program - Penguin Cafe Orchestra

Honorable mentions to Halfdave's Stage Fright and any Cold Chisel album you can think of.

Today has been a long, tedious, shitty week. But this morning everything I've been burning on so far is currently stalled waiting for third parties. So I've got time to regroup, and take a break with something a little bit different.

Jay tweeted asking for acoustic covers of songs, which reminded me of Seu Jorge's awesome David Bowie covers from Life Aquatic. Queen Bee is arguably my favourite. Happy Friday!

Originally published at hardy.dropblog. Please leave any comments there.

I really wanted to bring my LCA auction print to the SLUG meeting week before last, but I’d already taken it to the framer and spent a good hour or so trying to decide how it should be framed. The Framing Factory in Roseville do consistently excellent work, and I’m always happy with them. Unfortunately they have a two week turnaround (although I did get a rush job out of them a few days before Christmas, but my mind has blanked out how much extra it cost). Well, today I finally picked it up. And once again they didn’t disappoint.

We went with a 100mm (3.9”) flat white matte, surrounded by a 70mm (2.8”) plain black frame. Apart from a slight bevel on the inside edge, the frame is plain and square. All told, this thing is 1070mmx870mm (42.1”x34.3”), easily the biggest and most impressive print I own.

I couldn’t be happier with the way it’s come out, and I’m incredibly proud to have such a beautiful and prestigious print gracing my lounge room.

I have nothing else to say, really.