Category: General

[flv:https://morganavery.nz/media/makingchristmas.flv 320 240]

So of course you never know for sure with Christmas gifts, but it seemed to me that people really liked these.

In short: bottle of wine + Oxfam donation + painting. I like painting a great deal, but making so many at once almost felt like a chore.

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I reckon it depends on the surroundings. With luck and the right terrain, and time to breathe between administering thrashings – I think I could take hundreds or thousands before I was taken down, but put me in a closed room where there wouldn’t be time to recover, requiring maximum short term explosions of brutality, and I reckon this is probably about right.

With 6 months of karate fitness under my belt I think it would be fair to double the number – I’m much faster than people expect of a big guy, but still have all the weight behind my mighty blows. (It’s been years since I trained, and I reckon that if you want to be sharp, you need to spar regularly. Ideally against small children.)

It’s important at this time of year to pause for a moment of quiet contemplation and consider: How many 5 year olds can I take in a fight?

I really didn’t mean to startle you. I knew after your ridiculous launch from the previous lights that you were trying to goad me into racing with you, and I really don’t know why you were doing it, I was just minding my own business, looking for some dinner. So you must have been very surprised, in your turbo VW Passat, when my little Roadster blew you the fuck away. I guess instead of spending money on that blow-off valve, you should have learned how to drive? Maybe next time.

(But it won’t be with me, I don’t know what I was thinking. I never should have taken the bait.)

This charming fellow overlooks Stony Batter.

Only in New Zealand.

Ghetto finger-tracking (that works!) using a wiimote controller, IR LED array, and reflective tape:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0awjPUkBXOU[/youtube]

Taking it a step further, add a video projector & IR LED equipped pen, and you have a wall sized multi-touch interactive display:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s5EvhHy7eQ[/youtube]

As the guy says, it’s impractical – waving your arm around like this leads to something called Gorilla Arm in the industry, and is why you don’t see many touch sensitive computer screens. It’s also why Microsoft’s Surface is a horizontal display.

Details (and source code) available at Johnny Chung Lee’s site.

Browsing around my photo galleries a month or two ago, I couldn’t help but have some very fond memories of my trip down to The Gathering with the delightful Kylie for 1999/2000 New Year. It was awesome fun, we had a bit of a road trip around the place, camped in a wonderful national park (the name of which slips my memory) and headed over to Christchurch where we shacked up in a motel room for a lot of awesome shagging.

It was the year that it rained at The Gathering, but it didn’t dampen our spirits. (Though the toilets dampened everything, including my soul. Argh.)

Anyway, it got me thinking about that whole thing, I was pretty sure they weren’t still running it each year, but I went to the site in search of the truth, and there it was. Well, nothing. The Gathering hasn’t run at Canaan Downs since I was last there (though they held it at another place a couple of times before wrapping the whole thing up), but a new dance festival has sprung up in it’s place – the Canaan Downs Festival, with 125 acts, and running from December 29th until January 2nd. (If it’s the same as The Gathering was, the first day will be nothing but keen campers getting the best spots, and most people will actually arrive on the 30th.)

And so, I’ve been wondering if perhaps I should combine the South Island road trip I’ve been planning for later in the summer with a mad dash down the North Island to go and dance in the sun and eat pakora. (One of my fondest memories of my last Gathering was the Krishna food stall. Damn their pakora were good. They sustained me for the duration.)

I’m still not sure, the only available ferry sailings are looking pretty painful, but it does seem like an awfully good idea all the same.

I was planning, as part of my later in the summer road trip, to do the Milford Track… But I don’t think there’s any way I’d be able to fit it in, and I believe that for this time of the year I’d need to book well in advance. (Never mind that I’ll need to train a little bit.) So perhaps I’ll just fly down in March or so to do that – I don’t think I could face that drive twice in such quick succession, you see. Not after last time – Kylie twisted her ankle in Picton, followed by much driving to find an open clinic/hospital, then a 5-in-the-fucking-morning start, arriving in Wellywood at about 9am, then driving to Auckland myself (up to that point we’d been sharing driving duties).

Anyway, I’m thinking out loud. If anyone is up for it, let me know, but if I do go I suspect that deciding to do it this late in the piece means I’ll be doing it solo.

And not because I’m a petrol head, I mean, I might rather enjoy rebuilding carburetors, but I’m certainly not a one of them. No, I love Top Gear because I’m so very easily amused.