kstruct

(although I did accidentally skip the 24th and had to make up for it on the 25th)

So, yes, the one or two people who actually read this regularly probably noticed the unexplained posting frequency change, which basically resulted from me happening to post entries for the first few days of April and wondering if I could keep it up. It seems to have resulted in a significant jump in site visitors (about 30%) though that’s probably mostly bots and a result of someone updating a rather popular link to the IB Notes site hosted below here.

I doubt I’ll be keeping up anywhere near the same schedule, since I found myself scraping the bottom of the barrel on a number of occasions (which anyone who was reading no doubt noticed). It is interesting what you come up with when forced to write something - Like some sort of blog automatic writing game.

Technorati Tags: blog, frequency, automatic writing

I was throwing a frisbee around for a while on Friday with a few guys, one of whom plays ultimate quite regularly. I always through I was at least vaguely competent with a frisbee, but apparently there’s a lot more to it than I’d ever realised.

Wikipedia describes eight different frisbee throws, plus variations, and the only one I can actually make work most of the time is the backhand. Anyway, it looks like the forehand is the one I’m going to have to spend some time practising if I’m going to throw one anywhere near these guys again in future.

Technorati Tags: disc, frisbee, ultimate

I had been thinking about going to this (I’m usually up for any sort of world record attempt which isn’t life threatening), but it looks like I’m not going to make it. I’ll be pretty surprised if they actually manage to make it (Canberra doesn’t seem the hop-hop-est town), but it will probably be fun anyway.

RAPID MOVES PRESENTS

GUINNESS BOOK OF WORLD RECORD ATTEMPT

THE BIGGEST HIP-HOP DANCE CLASS

 A FUNDRAISER FOR THE RED CROSS

Hosted by Nige from 104.7

DATE: SATURDAY 29 APRIL 2006

VENUE: AIS ARENA
TIME: 10:30 - 12:00
COST: BY NOTE DONATION
TICKETS: FROM RAPID MOVES OFFICE
ALL PROCEEDS TO THE RED CROSS
TASK: a 10 minute choreographed routine with everyone participating fully!
INSTRUCTOR: Fiona Freeman from Rapid Moves with the Rapid Moves Dance Crew
LEVEL: suitable for beginners and up. All ages!
WHAT TO WEAR: Sneakers and clothes you are comfortable moving in. e.g. tracksuit pants and top
FORMAT:
1. Warm up
2. Learn all the sections of the routine
3. Attempt the record with a 10 minute routine
4. Reattempt (if necessary)
WHY NOT JOIN US FOR A CLASS BEFORE THE EVENT TO BRUSH UP YOUR SKILLS?
BEGINNER CLASSES 14 yrs+: Thursday 7:00 - 8:00 or Friday 5:00 - 6:00
CHECK OUT OUR WEBSITE: www.rapidmoves.com.au   for more class times and costs.
Thank you for enquiring with Rapid Moves about our Guinness book of world record attempt!

I look forward to seeing you grooving away & putting Canberra on the map

Technorati Tags: world record, canberra, hip-hop

While I didn’t take a camera with me, a few photos of the balloon I was in (on the day I was in it) have been posted on flickr by Ben Harris-Roxas.

It’s the orange one with green, yellow, red, blue stripes then orange again at the top. Click through for bigger versions (though you won’t get anywhere close to actually seeing me in there).

It’s a pity there’s no dominant tag for the balloon fiesta, because judging by what’s been put in the Canberra tag lately, there are a lot more than have made it into the Canberra Balloon Fiesta pool.

Technorati Tags: canberra, balloon, fiesta

I have to say, I was pretty happy with the last impro show - more so than I have been for the last few at least. The audience was small-ish, certainly down from last time, but seemed to have a lot more energy.

Chris did a great job as MC, and kept everything moving along quickly, which meant we got through a lot of games (always good). Unfortunately Dave and I were knocked out prior to the final round (we though we were making a good comeback after intermission but as it turned out, I don’t think anyone scored less than a four (out of five) in the entire second half.

Overall though, the highlight for me was being part of an alphabet scene which, while less than perfect, didn’t fall flat on it’s face.

Technorati Tags: canberra, theatre, impro

I was up in Sydney today, and spent a bit of time wandering around the Museum of Contemporary Art in the Rocks up there. To be honest, I didn’t even know it was there until I was idly wandering past.

Sam Taylor-Wood’s exhibition was interesting, but didn’t entirely grab me. I guess there’s something about taking emotional portraits of a bunch of big name actors which seems a little more like name dropping than art.

What I did really like was the Tim Noble and Sue Webster installation (I don’t think that particular piece was there, but several in a similar vain). Basically, it’s a bunch of welded metal which just looks like a clump, but displays a silhouette (or several) when a light projector is placed very precisely. The pieces which were actually on display seemed to play a little more with negative space than the one linked above, but in truth I liked it more for the novelty than any real artistic value.

Anyway, all in all, definitely worth a visit, though I do wish I’d organised things and been there for the guided tour.

Technorati Tags: sydeny, mca, art

One of the reasons for my switching to Windows was that I was hoping I’d be able to find a decent, free, RSS reader like NetNewsWire Lite (Though I’ve got the full version of it these days). FeedDemon sounds promising, but doesn’t seem to have a free version. I could, of course, run the now abandoned (though seemingly still for sale) Sauce Reader, which was quite usable back in the day, but it seems silly to commit to something which is no longer being developed. I might try out SharpReader but their website doesn’t make me confident about the likely level of polish.

I don’t suppose I’m expecting any better suggestions (though that would be great), but it seems really strange that there’s not an obvious choice. I once heard someone say that one of the big reasons for the popularity of web apps is that so many windows users have been made afraid of installing new software (particularly when it’s free and internet related). I was sceptical at the time (I suspect it’s more about unix developers not having any halfway decent GUI toolkit), but perhaps there is in fact something to it.

Technorati Tags: windows, rss, reader

We got to launch again in very light wind this morning, and since we had no other passengers, I got to go up with the balloon. Canberra really is gorgeous from above, especially in Autumn. Though I’m not normally, I imagine it would be rather difficult to be afraid of heights in a balloon. The basket seems very stable indeed, and for the most part you can’t even tell that you’re moving as you drifting right with the wind (though that changes if you’re descending rapidly.

We didn’t travel too far, going up from the launch site, east over to the Hyatt hotel, then back to the high court and around a couple of times before landing neatly between the high court and Questacon. That said, the view from just that little patch of airspace was stunning. Of particular note were the patterns the fog made over the lake just as we got up - Just a light spider-web of mist flowing over the lake. It’s hard to imagine that the whole lake was once just a river flowing through a valley.

Anyway, enough rambling on about balloons - at least until next year.

Technorati Tags: canberra, balloon, fiesta, view, autumn

We got to launch balloons for the first time since I’ve been crewing today, which was quite exciting. The morning was particularly cold, more so than even the experienced crew were accustomed to, and the wind was finally moving away from the airport, both of which made for good conditions.

Once we got the balloon (which goes by the name Flying Fox) into the air, we followed on the ground for about an hour, meeting them as they landed on the edge of the lake in Yarralumla. The first question everyone always asks me is whether I have ever been up in a balloon myself, and though I haven’t and can’t really compare, chasing from the ground seems like fun. Today the wind was pretty light, so we weren’t in much of a hurry, but I can imagine in stronger wind it would end up a bit like the tornado chase scenes in the movie Twister.

The conditions for tomorrow (Sunday) are also looking promising, so hopefully we will get up in the air again for the final day of the festival. Though I haven’t really had a chance to take a camera, there are quite a few photos of the balloons on flickr.

…and finally, the balloonist prayer, because I thought it was cute when I first heard it today.

May the winds welcome you with softness.

May the sun bless you with hi warm hands.

May you fly so high and so well that God joins you in laughter and sets you back into the loving arms of Mother Earth.

Technorati Tags: canberra, balloon, fiesta, hot, cold

The grand linux desktop experiment is over.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been progressively moving everything over to my Windows partition, and setting up a new Fedora core 5 box to actually do development on (mostly remotely). Back when I started, pretty much everyone else in the team was using Linux, and so it seemed like it would be much easier to take advantage of everyone else’s experience that way. Since then, a number of things have happened to make having a linux desktop less attractive.

• We’ve accumulated a number of windows users, who have started sending around those Outlook calendar invites. Thunderbird just presents them as blank emails, and after a month of having Evolution crash on a daily basis, Outlook feels like a great change.
• The release of the free version of VMWare has encouraged most of the team to start running both operating systems, meaning that I can just as well ask them Windows questions as Linux ones.
• I discovered that my laptop is actually capable of monitor spanning. After fiddling with the X server configuration to no avail, it was nice to see Windows just work (more or less - I can’t workout how to move the task bar to the other monitor).
• I discovered puttycyg which makes cygwin actually quite usable (as opposed to the horrible default cygwin terminal).

Anyway, there are a stack of annoyances, but none of them have been killers so far. It’s great to have a cut and paste which works reliably (except for putty, which insists on being different to every other windows app I’ve seen). In the end, neither Windows nor Linux seams to be really ready for the desktop market (compared to my Mac), but unless I’m going to bring my own into work, that seems like a bit of a lost cause.

Technorati Tags: windows, linux, desktop, switch