Category: General

With my mother newly back in the country after 3 months in one of the most gastronomically homogenous countries in the Western World, we decided that we had to take her to ‘somewhere Asian’ we narrowed the choices down to Thai (Claire and I are both completely crazy for Tom Kha Gai) or Chinese, and what with Canton being so fabulous, Chinese won out. Canton is one of those places where the more people you have, the better your dinner will be, with just 3 people along, we had to fake it by ordering waaaay to much food.  It worked pretty well.

Saturday was Karajoz Great Blend day, Russell Brown‘s little micro-conference featuring a couple of cool things, a discussion panel, live music, and good coffee.  It worked out great, I thought.  Though I didn’t think the keynote speaker (Danah Boyd) did a very good job.  She clearly had a great deal of knowledge in the field of community websites (MySpace specifically) but her presentation was so scattered – I mean, really completely without focus – that it made it hard for me to get anything out of her speech.  The couple beside me lost patience with her a bit sooner than I did, the husband saying "This is never going to go anywhere, is it?"  I couldn’t help but agree.

More confusing was the gentleman from TVNZ (I’m afraid I didn’t catch his name) who stood up to speak briefly about FreeView, the coming terrestrial/satellite digital TV platform.  He started off very promisingly "FreeView is an open platform, you can use it, you decide what you want to do with it, and it’s easy to access." and then went on to outline the facts, which basically ruled out anyone normal having easy access at all (which I hadn’t even considered as a possibility until he hinted at it, before then taking it back off the table).  In fact it’s quite expensive to pump your content into FreeView, though he wasn’t actually clear on the physical mechanism for how you get your content into the network — do you need to have your own satellite uplink?  I have no idea.  But you do need millions of dollars, serious resources, and loads of equipment.

I think FreeView could be a super great thing, with more channels potentially allowing for lots of niche content that doesn’t necessarily appeal to a lot of people, but those it does appeal to it does so enormously.  For example, how about a 24 hours a day loop of New Zealand created short films?  That would be really cool.  Or a TVNZ or TV3 channel which just plays all their licensed Sci-Fi content all day and night?  I’d love that.  And obvious things like a BBC channel, though I don’t know what their licensing terms are like outside of the UK.  If FreeView were to hire me to be their Mr. Awesome, I’d make it into a wonderful exciting service.  After this guys very brief speech, I’m not sure how wonderful or exciting it will be at this stage.

Moving backwards through the Great Blend line-up, we make our way to the first people on stage, the guys from Misshapen Features who produced the parody piece Star Lords, a  video mashup of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, which is some really great stuff, it starts off like one of those ‘Romantic Comedy of the year: The Shining’ or ‘TopGunBrokeBackMountain’ mashups that got suddenly popular a while ago, and then evolves somewhere along the way into a music video with Yoda and Gandalf busting mad break-dancing moves.  A little over-long perhaps (though not in the same way as my Earth Sandwich thing was) but very funny for the most part – funny and eye opening.  It’s interesting to see how similar a lot of Peter Jackson’s shots in Lord of the Rings were to the composition in George Lucas’ Star Wars. 

A couple of other video pieces were shown, but nothing that compared very well to the ‘Star Lords’ main video event.

Now moving, perhaps confusingly, forwards in time….  Following the break after Danah Boyd’s keynote – during which I chatted with various people about sundry things, and Chris Knox about weird movies we’ve seen – there was a discussion panel featuring a handful of commentators (and a dude that was added to the panel at the last minute, and I think shouldn’t have been, sorry Matt).  Robyn was up there, but didn’t really get much opportunity to share her thoughts.  But the person that really stole the show, at least in my humble opinion, was Justin, the founder / owner / whatever of SkyKiwi a New Zealand Chinese Community website that is most interesting in that if you’re not Chinese, you’ve almost certainly never heard of it, and you definitely can’t use it.  He was great, very funny in an extremely dry way – perfect deadpan –  and very successful (Russell pointed out that SkyKiwi is currently pulling in over a million dollars a year in advertising revenue).  I think we could have done with a lot more from him, and maybe a bit less from Danah Boyd (it might even have helped her, she’s clearly very bright and well informed, she just needed more focus).

We hung out and chatted with friends and others while SJD played, then decided that we all – well, Robyn, Simon & Lin – fancied a spot of dinner, so we made our way caravan style to Minsokchon for Korean only to find it closed, and newspaper up in the windows – I hope it’s just being refurbished, I loved that place and would be disappointed if they close, so instead we headed down to Dominion Rd for the second Chinese banquet of the weekend.  Finishing about 1.45am, we dropped Robyn off on the way home, and hit the sack to watch some American TV.

All in all I’d say that it was a really good night out, and that Karajoz coffee is really good stuff.  I’m not sure why we hadn’t tried it at home already.

Up at the crack of 6 hours later, I pulled out my mountain bike for some maintenance before kicking off to meet up with Louise to ride a mountain bike trail she’d recently discovered called the Manukau Hop.  It was pretty nice, really great scenery, and no real challenge (no technical riding at all, mostly along walking trails) and we’ll probably have to do the trail again soon.

Today?  Well, let me just say that any day on which you have lamingtons for lunch has to be at least partly good.

Is Zombie Standard Time, that’s roughly GMT+NoSleep.

After about 6 hours of struggling to make my way down into slumber town, I gave up and got dressed. And now I’m just trying to recharge my batteries with StupidCoffee™ which is a thick gluggy double shot, with a couple of spoons of added bournvita, and a couple of heaped spoons o’ brown sugar.  More specifically, it’s made up of horrible.  And milk.

Anyway, for now I’m struggling to underravel a smelly pile of rubbish spewing out of my office radio (a spinswoman talking about the murder of the infant twins, and the blatant disrepect for the law of the land being shown by the family – she just called it the "tight 12" good lord – justifying, exceptionally ineptly, the obfuscation of the murder through the casual use of the tikanga card.  "We want to find the culprits ourselves" she says, as if the family doesn’t already know exactly what happened.)

Perhaps I should just try to enjoy the morning bird song while the sun slowly rises on a velvety mauve sky.

Lordy, there’s enough light now to see that there’s a pretty healthy frost on the lawn.  What a time of year, eh?

I think I might go and walk the dog now, and then perhaps I’ll do a couple of lines of redbull before heading on down to the airport to pick up my mother as she arrives back from 3 blimmin’ months in Italy.

!!!WARNING!!! Today’s entry discusses sickness and vomit in great detail.  Please don’t read it if you’re suggestable or easily upset. !!!WARNING!!!

Today I was working on a video thing (probably be up tomorrow) and around 1pm I decided to take a nice lunch break, looking in the fridge I found some freaking delicious looking bacon, so I made some unbelievably good bacon and (free range) egg sandwiches.

Man, they were so good.  So I chowed down, then dug back into editing my thing together, about 3.30pm I went outside to shoot a bit of last minute footage and I didn’t know if it was just the shock of leaving my warm cosy little office for the out of doors coldness, but I started to feel a bit funny.

I came back inside, and noticed I was sweating, which didn’t seem right, then I decided that I really was queasy, I messaged Claire to that effect, then headed for the bathroom.  I had a bad feeling.

I assumed the position, kneeling before the throne.  Still not knowing if I was really that sick – you see, I haven’t thrown up in about 9 years – I decided that this might not be comfortable if I was going to be waiting around for 30 minutes before the feeling passed, and I could get back to work.
  So I decided to pull the liner out of the bathroom bin, and sat on the toilet with the bin on my lap.

Within seconds, I was throwing up.  Seconds later I was passed out.  I came to and realised I was throwing up, so I pulled the bin back towards me (I’d been throwing up on my shirt, pants and the floor – I was feeling awful.  I didn’t know what the do next, covered in vomit and feeling weak.  I tried to figure things out, and realised the best thing to do would be to pass out again.  So I did that.  I came to throwing up a bit more.  And then I felt quite a bit better.  I mean, not good.  But better.  I sat there for a while, covered in stinking red vomit, with bits of bacon and eggs on my pants and arms.  (It was red due to all the tomato sauce, God it was horrible until I realised that.)

After a while, I carefully slipped off my shoes (which were miraculously un-vomitty) then stripped off the rest of my clothes and embraced the soothing heat of the shower, and a pack of antibacterial soap, for ages.

Clothes in the washing machine, and mop and bucket later, and I decided actually I was really far to weak to continue with doing anything, at about that time, Claire got home, so we crashed on the sofa for a while.  Berocca was really a godsend.

We’d made plans for dinner, and I told her to go without me, eventually finding the energy to cook up some rice, and a dash of salt and pepper, and a little fish later, I was feeling much more human.

No I’m going to bed to watch some Grey’s Anatomy, and hoping I really am over it.

(I’m pretty sure the bacon must have gone over the edge during the power cut, or something.  But it was delicious man.  I had no freaking idea.)

I mean, really, why are so many people ragging on the X-Men 3?  We thought it was cool fun.  Did people expect something other than a mutant super hero movie when they bought their tickets or something?

Also, I’m not giving up any spoilers on Lost, so don’t worry about that.  But we’ve just watched the season finale for season 2, and it was cool.  What the hell is up with the four toes thing?  I’d like to talk more about that sort of thing, and Invasion and stuff.  But it’s so hard to talk to an audience that a. isn’t even remotely interested, and b. those few that are interested might be watching it on NZ TV, in which case they’re several weeks behind, so anything I say will ruin surprises and so on.

Oh, Prison Break is just about the start in NZ, you should give it a go.  It’s pretty good.  (Even if it does take for-berluddy-ever for anything to happen.)

Don’t be a hater.

For whatever reason, when Claire’s mother called her today, she called my cell number (instead of Claire’s cell, or the home phone, that is) and for whatever reason, when Claire changed the sheets, she left my phone on the bed.  So, of course, my phone went into the washing machine.  Still not realising what she’d done, she then put the load into the dryer.

I discovered what she’d done when we were getting ready to go out for some dinner, I couldn’t see the phone anywhere in the bedroom (the last place I saw it, obviously) and when Claire tried phoning it, I asked her if she’d put it through the wash.  She "hope[d] not."

So, when I found it, almost smouldering from the heat, wrapped up inside the duvet cover, still bump-bump-bumping around on a very hot tumble dry cycle, I couldn’t help myself but start laughing.

I’m very glad I didn’t have the nice new Motorola RAZR V3x I’ve been thinking of getting, and I was even gladder when my SIM still worked in an old Nokia I keep in a drawer for posterity.

Of course, I’m not actually ready to drop the (huge) chunk of change on the RAZR (or I would have already done so) so I’m stuck with my silly old Nokia for the time being.