Five Minutes

It’s a little difficult to believe that I haven’t blogged since the end of January. I haven’t just lost the habit, I’ve buried it in a secret location in the Gobi that only male-line descendants of Chinggis Khaan can find. So, rather than bore people who are still reading and haven’t just hit j or k already in Google Reader (depending on their reading habits — I’m a ker myself), I shall instead rapidly summarise the last six weeks.

I got a real, paying job, which I start on Monday. It’s a Perl <insert inarticulate grumble here> programming role (people in Perth probably already know who it’s with just based on that). I’ll likely post more details on that when I figure out what it’s really all about. For now, it just feels strange to be going back to full-time work after 54 weeks out of the saddle.

After dithering on the subject, I did end up signing up for a Graduate Certificate in film stuff. I only have time to do one unit a semester, but that’s enough to keep the creative juices going. I hope. First project: a music video, due in about three weeks, give or take. Now I just have to resist the urge to do everything in stop motion.

Frustratingly, not only am I still not allowed to drive after my overly dramatic collapse in Melbourne in January — barrels of fun when you live in the sticks with wildly inadequate public transport — but I haven’t even had the required follow-up with a neurologist yet. (I have, however, had all the requisite tests, and everything has apparently come back normal. Yes, that means I now have scientific proof that I actually have a brain.) Most of the neurologists in Perth have, as a minimum, three month waiting lists even for private patients, and having found one who didn’t have such a long waiting list and who had a good reputation, he’s since cancelled my appointment six times. We’re going for number seven tomorrow, and if it doesn’t go ahead, it’s going to be mighty awkward mighty fast with my forthcoming work commitments to schedule another appointment — with him or anyone else.

Truthfully, given the difficulty I’ve had getting places since I got back from Melbourne (friends and family have been good, but there’s only so much you can ask), I’ve spent entirely too much time at home feeling sorry for myself in the last few weeks, and not enough time doing stuff. Including blogging. Really, it’s time to kick myself out of this funk. So, to summarise this self-indulgent post:

…because, hey, it beats the hell out of just watching TV all day.

Base image Mastermind Azrael taken by Kjirstin, and used in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic licence.

I’ve just had my first whooshing sound of the semester as a deadline whipped by at a rate of knots without the associated assignment actually being ready. Not a happy feeling, considering we’re still the best part of two weeks from the mid-semester break. Unfortunately, I just haven’t figured out yet how to juggle the seemingly insane requirements of the units I’m doing this semester, and consequently, two of the units (Feature Film Scriptwriting and the dreaded Internet and Java Programming) aren’t getting much love at present, let alone anything outside of uni.

Speaking of which, sorry, people waiting for a PEAR DB release. I haven’t forgotten about you.

Anyway, some things are happening, at least. The Computer Science project I’m working on is cool, and terrifyingly large in scope at present. (I’ll write a proper blog post about that later in the week, hopefully.) My latest film project has started shooting, and as we work our way through that process, I’m gradually realising just how much I’ve dropped myself in it as editor. The next time I write a script with that much chromakey work in it, I’m making sure that I don’t actually have to do anything related to said chromakeying. As things stand, I have to composite four — actually, it might be five, now that I think about it — scenes in post, including one against a virtual set which I’ve only had time to partially build so far. I mean, There are walls. There’s a screen. There isn’t anything resembling a door, though, and I still have to match the lighting to the actual set-up we’re using against the bluescreen, so partially built might be optimistic. Slightly built might have been a better phrase. Next time, we’re using flats, even if I have to spend all weekend painting them.

It’s interesting watching shooting take place for a script I wrote, though. I’m sure it’s even more fulfilling for Reuben, our director, since it was his story idea in the first place, but I keep feeling both proud of the fact that the scenes being shot are the ones I scribbled out, and worried that if we suck, it’s going to be largely my fault — you can talk about how the director is the true author of the film all you want, but JMS has referred to certain things on Babylon 5 being writer problems, and I suspect that most of the potential issues with this film are going to be in that basket.

At least I get the chance to fix them in post. (We’ll fix it in post is the film student mantra, it seems.) Of course, said fixing might require sock puppets…

Yep. Just like that.

I wrote this on Sunday morning, mostly from the comfort of a table in Dylans, Albany’s best diner-café-restaurant thing. No affiliation besides lots and lots of childhood meals there.

For the first time in fourteen weeks, I’ve managed to go two days without needing to work on (or think about) university. The clichés of clean country air and peace and quiet have worked their wonders — I’ve even managed to have two good nights’ sleep in the face of a sleep-talking roomie, so things must be looking up.

Yesterday we went on a hired minivan for a wine tasting trip. (We also took a trailer for the wine, which turned out to not be overkill as I thought, but just enough kill.) Our hosts, David and Anne, clearly know their wine, and we went to a succession of outstanding wineries, most notably Xabregas just outside Narrikup. While the cellar is encased in barbed wire and looks like a viticultural Guantánamo, the wine is fantastic. It’s even more fantastic when you realise that the riesling on sale for $50 a case is actually an outstanding wine in its own right — thank $DEITY for clearance sales! (Like I said, we needed that trailer.)

The last place we went was Zarephath Wines. It’s an interesting winery, as depending on who you ask, the six people who live there and run it belong to either a commune or a cult. Either way, they seem to have an unhealthy obsession with building and launching boats.

At any rate, despite a couple of slightly iffy moments (the guest book which asked for basically every personal detail except blood type and tax file number was an interesting take on the idea), the expected big push to consider their movement didn’t come, thankfully. Better yet, the wine there was pretty good too, if not quite as good as Xabregas.

Today most of the group have gone up to the Porongorups again to check out a bamboo farm before lunch, but I’ve decided to be difficult and have instead come into Albany by myself. The Albany Car Classic is on, which has caused a few annoying road closures (why can’t we walk down the eastern footpath on Aberdeen St, if no cars are crossing it?), but my mission was to come to Dylans and test out their pancakes once again.

Happily, Dylans is just as good as I remember. In fact, apart from a few minor things (such as newer posters on the walls), it’s really exactly as I remember. It’s actually a little weird walking in and seeing everything as it was fifteen or more years ago. For a brief moment, I felt eight or nine again. Still does just as good a trade as it did then, too.

I need to walk back up shortly towards Dog Rock to get picked up, so I’d better go while it’s not raining. (The sun’s shining now, but I lived in Albany long enough to know that’s just a sign that it’ll probably rain again in five minutes.) I’m looking forward to the rest of the weekend being just as relaxing as this; the only problem is that I’m not sure I’ll want to go back to Perth tomorrow and worry about my last scriptwriting assignment.

Damn. So much for three days without university-related thoughts.

This humble little blog has ended up on a couple of Planets lately: specifically Planet SoC, the Google Summer of Code planet which is getting a limited feed of GSoC related posts, and Planet Linux Australia, who are unfortunate lucky enough to be getting a full feed at the moment.

So, uh, hi. I’m Adam. For the benefit of the Planet SoCers, I’m going to be working on a GUI frontend for debugging PHP applications. When I’m not doing that, I spend entirely too much time in film edit suites, writing scripts of both the film and computing variety, taking part in the usual third year computer science group projects, and trying to work my way up the PEAR bugs-fixed ladder. When I’m not doing any of that and I have money, I go to excellent conferences and take part in ill-advised experiments with wireless networking.

Sometime this year I hope to get a full night’s sleep. I’m planning it sometime in December after OSDC. Until then, expect occasional rambling blog posts. Like this one.

Like a lot of people, I have an interest in my family history, compounded by the fact that it’s actually pretty blurry before my grandparents’ generation. The National Archives of Australia launched a service yesterday which provides service records for everyone who served with the Australian Imperial Force in the First World War. It’s been slow, flaky and there’s been the small problem that the search link on the aforelinked page doesn’t actually work, but I’ve finally been able to get a service record for my great-grandfather, Private Martin Allen, who served from 1917 to 1919 in the 11th Battalion.

(more…)

I’ve been awaiting the arrival of the Summer of Code mentoring organisations, which were due today. Sadly, there seem to have been some technical glitches at Google, as they first posted five or six mentoring organisations, then dropped them again and put up a message that they’ll be posted here soon.

Obviously I now have the time to actually take part in the Summer of Code (plus, the money would be really handy), but the catch is that I have to figure out what I actually want to attempt. The obvious thing to do is something PHP related, given my work background, but I don’t know if I’d actually be happier picking something a bit different as a change of pace. (I was, for a moment, interested by the idea from Richard Lynch on PHP-DEV to write a JIT compiler as a SoC project — then I attended my PLP lecture on compilers and thought better of it.)

Unfortunately, this is the point where I start second-guessing myself because I’m not visible enough within the open source community and hence feel as though it’s not worth applying for anything. I guess the challenge is to get over myself before the application deadline on March 24 and get at least a couple of applications in.

Anyway, I look forward to the list of organisations and project ideas going up. I’ll doubtless post which ones I apply for on here — provided I actually do apply!

I feel slightly lost without my work e-mail account. This is strange.

OK, I’m more missing the comics feed in Klutz, but the point stands.

I have nineteen and a bit hours remaining at my current job before I finish up and spend the year as a full-time university student. (And, hopefully, a more regular blogger.) I’m now in the funny twilight zone where I don’t really have a hell of a lot more left to do besides a couple of small pieces of training and packing up my desk, yet I still have to be here for a couple more days.

It’s going to be a bit odd being back at university without actually having a job to worry about at the same time. It’s a calculated gamble to make sure that I do reasonably well and graduate this year, but I don’t yet know if it will actually be a positive or a negative when it comes to focusing — perhaps I need something else to switch to when I don’t want to concentrate on uni. Alternately, I may just be freaking out about tossing in paid employment for the first time in a long time.

Better get back to work, I guess. Ah, xkcd archives.

I haven’t had much motivation to blog lately, as is doubtless apparent. After the relaxation of Christmas and New Year, work didn’t so much creep up on me as hit me over the head with a sledgehammer repeatedly, which has pretty much sapped me of any energy I might have had to write, or exercise, or do anything much beyond work and watch cricket.

I’m hoping that going to LCA next week will help me to get back into the swing of things. Certainly last year’s ended up being a great way to kickstart the year, both on a professional and personal level, and I’m hoping that this year’s will be no different. If only there was some way I could work in a side-trip to Queenstown again.

Ah well. A man can dream.

Do you ever record yourself?

Vocally, I mean. Get your minds out of the gutter. Just talking, or narrating, or singing, or whatever? Occasionally, I do — it’s probably one of those things that’s a hangover from spending years yelling at taxi drivers and inebriated punters, but it’s interesting to hear yourself recorded. Often, it reflects more of who you are than you think. If you’re nervous, that always comes through a treat. Yet, reading something in a way that seems to be full of nuance and feeling often comes over flat, or clipped.
One of the things we did in scriptwriting class this semester was something that I’m sure happens in every writing class: we read the scripts of our fellow classmates out, much like a read-through. Apart from hearing your script read out, which I’m sure is an interesting experience (due to my usual do-it-at-the-last-second ways, I didn’t actually have a script at any point that was in a fit state to be read silently, let alone aloud), it’s a chance for everyone else to have a crack at voice acting, in a way. People (and by people, I mean me) really get into it at times, doing accents, trying to emote using nothing but their voice, trying to make the narration of scene descriptions and the like sound interesting.

Yet when you do it by yourself, it seems dry, and flat, and passionless. I don’t quite know how that works. Maybe it’s the setting. Maybe the nuances and subtlety that you think are there all the time really aren’t. Who’s to say?

All I know is that I prefer the inferred emotion of speaking without dwelling on it to the boring monotone of trying to sound interesting. I think it may be better just to leave the speaking to the classroom and the microphone to the odd Skype call.