Five Minutes

Well, I’m here. I’ve managed to avoid being carted off to hospital so far and have hence already done better than Melbourne. If I make it through tomorrow without medical intervention, I’ll have bested Dunedin, too.

Since it’s already 1:30 am here (my body’s saying 11:30 courtesy of the time difference, but that’s still too late, given how little sleep I had last night courtesy of Evan and Mel’s engagement party), instead of paragraphs of prose, here’s a photo from the car park instead:

(Side note: I managed to remember my camera, its lenses, the cable to connect it to the computer, and my tripod… then managed to forget the tripod mount for the camera. I suck.)

As Western Australian readers will likely already know, the Guildford Hotel burned down last night. It’s quite upsetting on a number of levels — as anyone who’s lived in the north-east of Perth for any length of time will attest, the Guildford was a major landmark in the area and was, along with Alfred’s Kitchen, the night-time heart of the town of Guildford.

Beyond that significance, on a more personal level it hits home because my father has been working at the Guildford Hotel for the last couple of months. Fortunately, the owners of the Guildford own a number of other businesses around Perth, and nobody’s lost their jobs due to this. Still, having talked to Dad about the plans for the hotel and what was in the works, it must be incredibly frustrating for them to have to go back to square one — and that’s in the best case scenario where the façade can be saved, which is hardly guaranteed at the moment.

Tonight I went out to Guildford after work to see it for myself. The really surprising part is the loss of the bell tower — it changes the entire James Street skyline, and not in a good way. I’ve popped a few photos up on Flickr, and linked a couple below that show some of the aftermath. Dad tells me that the inside, bar the bottle shop at the back, is just a mess of twisted building material and rubble.

For comparison, Dad’s been nice enough to let me reproduce a couple of photos he took a few weeks back as part of an application for a heritage grant for improvements to the façade and the interior. Below, the Guildford as I’d prefer to remember her and as I hope to see her again.

At least I got to eat some pea and ham soup at Alfred’s. I’ll be really upset if anything ever happens to that.

I promise this won’t turn into a photo-blog (or at least if it does, I’ll set up a fresh blog for that so it’s not picked up on any planets), but this caught my eye (and my mind’s desire to play with my Nikon D60 and its 55-200 mm lens) while looking out the window about half an hour ago…

I’ve been rather frustrated with my camera (an old Pentax point and shoot) for a while. It’s not that it’s a bad camera, but the lack of manual control over things has been irking me after spending a couple of years playing with increasingly nifty video cameras at uni. So I resolved that, once I had the money, I’d be upgrading to a digital SLR.

Well, I had the money yesterday, so I exchanged it for this:

Specifically, a Nikon D60, which is one of their entry-level DSLRs, along with 18-55 and 55-200 mm lenses. Even after a brief play with it, I wish I’d done this a year or two ago.

Should be good for my upcoming trip to Latvia and parts beyond in July. More details on that soon. You know, whenever we figure out where the hell we’re actually going. Current candidates include Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Should be fun.

For the record, that’s not my bear. I was involved in the tie situation, however.

Is it just me, or does the koala as printed on the OSDC bag bear a striking resemblance to the dog from the Rubber Johnny video clip? (OK, it’s probably just the eyes, really.)

Just don’t ask about the People’s Tow-Away Zone.

My suspicion last night that ndiswrapper would cure my wireless ills appears to have been correct. It’s a bit of a step back, really, since it means (a) that I’m reliant on the Windows drivers and (b) that I had to switch to a 32-bit Ubuntu install since Apple don’t provide 64-bit drivers for the AR5418 wireless chipset on the Leopard DVD, but I’m not getting dropouts and stalls every couple of minutes now, so I guess I’ll have to grin and bear it.

Happily, everything else has worked out of the box in Ubuntu Gutsy. In fact, it’s probably all worked a bit too well — I had an afternoon of tinkering with things planned, but everything got configured much quicker than expected, which now means that I have no real excuse to avoid studying for tomorrow morning’s exam. Damn you, efficient FLOSS developers!

Oh yes, the in-built webcam works, too. That promises to be… minutes of fun. Oh well, it’s still better than studying.

Well, I got the feature film synopsis in only three days late (that was the assignment deadline I mentioned whooshing past a couple of days ago). I’m not especially happy with it, but I figure I’ll at least get to change it around completely before starting to worry about the scene breakdown.

It was nice to get that out of the way, but it was equally nice to come home tonight and be able to spend about half an hour watching a pair of quendas (bandicoots for you eastern state types) scoot around the back verandah eating whatever they could get their paws on. Mum had her camera to hand and grabbed a few photos, including this one:

I actually wanted to call my Summer Winter of Code project Quenda, but figured it would have been too close to Quanta.

Still, my thought for the day: At least I’m up to date on my assignments again. Until tomorrow, at least.

I decided yesterday that I really wanted to see the lunar eclipse in all its glory, or at least as much glory as could be gotten here in WA, which wasn’t as much as I would have liked, given that totality was reached not long after sunset. My initial plan was to drive a bit away from Perth’s lights and set up camp (metaphorically speaking, at least), with one of the hills around Toodyay being a prime candidate.

That was a great plan until this satellite image came to pass:

So, foiled by mother nature, I decided to get even and drive far enough northeast to get out from under the blanket of clouds that apparently ruined viewing for Perthites. Ultimately, I ended up atop Marshall Rock, which is near Bencubbin. You can view the approximate route I took with the help of some Google Maps goodness — while not the most direct route, it was largely dictated by me chasing the blue sky I could see to the northeast by the time I’d reached Dowerin. Took a darned sight less than 4 hours, 54 minutes, too. (Side note: I’ve thought more than once that storm chasing would be an interesting hobby to get into, but I don’t think I’d dare show my face now at any sort of storm chasing gathering with my first chasing experience actually being for blue skies.)

Once atop said rock, I met a lovely retired couple from New South Wales who were camping in the park and had decided to come to watch the eclipse from the best vantage point as well. So, we sat, we waited for the sun to go down, we worried for a while that it was all a giant hoax, then we discovered that the moon’s appearance had simply been delayed by what looked like some dust in the atmosphere combined with the relatively low brightness of the moon at that point.

Unfortunately, that dust/low brightness situation seems to have put paid to my attempts to photograph the eclipse, even with the usual night mode settings. In related news, I think I’m ready to accept donations to the buy Adam a camera that doesn’t suck fund. Fortunately, approximately eleventy billion people have posted photos in various places, so I shall instead point to this photo on Flickr by evilhamaya as a reasonable approximation of what I could see.

Except, you know, I was sitting on a giant rock in the eastern Wheatbelt. That has to count for something.

Speaking of, I do have one photo which at least shows what the view from the rock looked like before sunset:

Yeah, I know. It’s not the same. But still, the eclipse was awesome, I’m glad I went to the trouble of driving there (and back, since I have to be at uni at 8 am tomorrow and hence couldn’t stay the night in Bencubbin), and as an added bonus, the Milky Way looked even more incredible than usual, given the lack of ambient light out there.

(Satellite image © Commonwealth of Australia 2007, Bureau of Meteorology, originally sourced from here.)