Posts Tagged ‘photos’

No backing out now

Monday, December 24th, 2007

Well, I’m officially all packed and moved out of my house.. I’m staying with Chris and Fran for a few days. My plane leaves for Melbourne on Thursday (wow.. 3 days away…) afternoon. I’ll be staying for the first week at the King Street Backpackers, and who-knows-where after that ;)

I start work on the 2nd of Jan, and have been told to turn up to a client’s site first thing, so it looks like it’ll really be a trial-by-fire – should be exciting.

Had my leaving party on Saturday, thanks heaps to everyone who came along, I had a good time catching up to you all (and drinking waaaay too much). James took heaps of photos, they can be seen here.

An update Redux, Electric Boogaloo

Saturday, September 8th, 2007

Ok, neglected things here for a while….

Holidays photos are here. I had an awesome time on holiday, did a bunch of cool things, like sailing a catamaran, and scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef. Damn, that was just too awesome. Also got to see a bit of what Australia is like, and has cemented in my mind, that I need to move over there (Melbourne specifically) to live.

Relatedly, everyone is leaving Chrischurch. Two of my friends are about to go to Auckland, one is  off to Melbourne herself on, um Monday, One has pretty much decided to shift to Wellington at the end of the year, another thinking about Dunedin, one is considering study in the US, my flatmates want to travel through Europe soon. ABANDON SHIP, LAST PERSON OUT PLEASE TURN OFF THE LIGHTS!

Just had a very stressful day, where things were very uncertain about my work situation, and it was looking like I was going to be unemployed just as I need to be saving money for the move to Oz.. but thankfully it looks like things have worked out perfectly, and I’ll be finishing up at my current place just as I’m looking to move. *whew*

Having hardware troubles with my PC. Very inconvenient timing. Decided that the motherboard is toast, which means a big upgrade in the pipeline as I can’t get a replacement part :( Not a welcome expense, but I’ll take the new machine over to Oz instead of building a new one over there. Swings and roundabouts I suppose.

Also the app I’ve built isn’t fast enough. I expect it will handle a large concurrent client load, but the individual request/response time is too long. Had a play with a profiling tool for the first time. Kind of cool. Decided that lookups/calls to EJBs, even “local” ones is really damn expensive and probably isn’t helping things. Hmm

Weekend of random

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

Friday: Went to see some bands with Rosalie, Ronnie and Adam showed up as well. Rosalie’s friend who was supposed to be playing that night didn’t. Also, the bands all turned out to be of the heavier variety, which made me very happy. Best of the lot were the most excellent Magnum Opus from Wellington.

Saturday: Woke up feeling a bit shit, Chantel suggested I come over, and go for a wee drive for a bit. She suggested we go to Kaikoura for Fish and Chips, and me being in a go-with-the-flow kind of mood, said, “Sure, why not?” Drove up there, got the food, got in the car, and she said “Why not just keep going?” So we did. All the way up to Nelson.
Got there, decided we needed somewhere to stay the night, so I thought we could try the Tahuna motorcamp that we stayed at last time we were there. Made it over there right before the office was about to close.. and asked to get a room with linen, pillows etc, as we only had the clothes on our backs and whatever else we happened to be carrying at the time we left. Got a pretty nice cabin too.
After watching a bit of Terminator 3 (so funny), we went into town to see what was going on. Being winter, only about half the bars were open, and to my horror, the local Grumpy Mole was the pick of them. Chants got accosted by two very drunken Chilean guys, who spoke very little English, and one of whom was quite determined to have his way with her practically right there in the street. Joff to the rescue with as much Spanish as I could remember, and into the Grumpy we went, danced a bit after Chants made the poor bar girl make us Castaways.

Sunday: On the way home, we stopped at the swimming hole south of Blenheim, took a bunch of photos, stopped at a small boutique chocolate factory / stop where I got a couple of treats. Chants drove all the way from Nelson to Kaikoura.. including over the rickety old car/rail Awatere bridge (we got some video footage of that to freak out Mo).
Arrived at Fran’s birthday pot-luck dinner probably only an hour late. Pretty good effort if you ask me :)

PHOTOS HERE

48 Hours: “Dr Underscore, or how I stopped worrying and learned to become chemically dependant”

Thursday, May 24th, 2007

It’s Thursday, and I think maybe now I have finally recovered. Over the weekend I ended up working on a short film for the 48 hours film competition.. My sister did one last year, and convinced me to ‘help out’ this year, little did I know I was going to end up directing the bloody thing!

We ended up with Sci-Fi/Monster as our category, and went the sci-fi route, and ended up with a fairly convoluted story about some global pharmaceutical company who was forcing the entire planet into thinking they were sick. Our protagonist then gets sent to eliminate the head guy. Now that I look back on it, it was way too complex a plot to squeeze into a 5-minute film :)

We had a lot of fun making it though, and managed to rope in quite the cast of thousands (well maybe 20 people )  to help out in the end… although I doubt anyone will forget the 3 hours of standing in the cold to shoot what ended up being 30 seconds of on-screen footage. Being able to drill into Chris’ head and have blood go all over the wall was totally worth it though (Note to self: look into an alternate career making horror splatter films). Kudos to James for swallowing about half of the blood mixture which contained a delightful mix of golden syrup and detergent. Yum yum!

Once we fix up the wildly varying sound levels, and colour-correct some of the shots (and have the credits roll for a bit longer than a second and a half), we’ll put the film up on youtube or something.

Viv had the presence of mind to take some photos of proceedings, her photos are here. I think Chris got some too, if I get hold of them, I’ll include the link.

Photo

Saturday, May 12th, 2007

Finally got round to uploading a photo I’d taken of this wee grasshopper to my deviantart profile.. I think it turned out quite nice with the re-colouring work…


(Click on the image to see the full sized one)