Five Minutes

A picture of somewhere you’ve been to

Unlike day 3, my problem here is too much choice, rather than not enough. My favourite travel photo, though, has to be this one from my trip to Tbilisi two years ago. (I haven’t even done any post-processing or retouching on it. Admittedly, that’s mostly out of laziness.)

A picture of you and your friends

As I mentioned back in day 1, I don’t really like having my photo taken. I also have disparate circles of friends, which means that I’m going to be slighting a lot of people no matter what photo I pick. Plus, looking at the few group photos I have to hand, most involve one or more people I either don’t really know or don’t want to know any more.

So, instead of a real big group photo, here’s a small group photo of four of us (actually, five of us, but one’s off camera) playing nutball over the New Year’s break in Busselton.

That’s me on the left, losing my religion. Or at least my sobriety. And, for what it’s worth, I really don’t wear hats very often, in spite of the evidence so far.

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.