Monday, December 29, 2008

Woo! for too much time on one's hands :-D

Well, it cost me fifty bucks of material, plus about, ohhh, let's say 7 hours of work (keeping in mind I am quite a slow person at, well, most things lol), but I have succeeded in making a case to put my camera in for rides. It attaches to my handlebars :) I had no real idea what it would turn out like, and it's definitely not a pro job, but.....it's MY not-pro job YAYYYYYYY! (I'm gonna read this tomorrow and wonder where I pulled it all from, but let's remember that I have just spent 7 hours not eating or drinking, just thinking about a little box) (that's what he said ;) ).

I'll post pics of it asap k?

I really want to test it out, but it's raining outside :( plus, you know, it's 2.30 in the morning and I'd get some weird looks from my creepy neighbours who stay awake all hours lol (seriously, they really do seem to be awake at ALL hours).

Aside from that little project, today Leonie and I made sushi for Flo's birthday present. I got Flo about a kilo and a half of chocolate for christmas, so I thought something healthy would be a nice change......ok OK who am I kidding, it was all Leonie's idea.
The cucumber we used in the sushi tasted like acid would taste if it was really bad acid, so I had to rush down to the shops to get some more, because we were on a deadline (what with Leonie needing to get to work, and me needing to fulfill my nerdy pursuit of a camera-box strapped to a bike).

Anyhoo, work tomorrow, 1-6pm. Should be a dazzler, like all the others :P...

Saturday, December 27, 2008

Om, I tube YOU!




I've managed to put another youtube vid up. This one is special; my first youtube appearance where I consciously talk to the camera. I did a short intro to the vid (which is of Leonie teaching me how to make sushi), and kinda screwed it up. I went off on tangents about Naruto and Harry Potter, and kept saying "really great". It felt exactly like speaking in front of a crowd does.....daunting lol. Hopefully I'll get used to it :).

One of the coolest things about making sushi was being able to understand the hiragana on the front of the packet of dried seaweed :) it feels like I've accomplished something at least a little productive in this largely wasted university holidays lol.



1: su 2: shi 3: no 4: ri
I have no idea what the thing above 'su' is though, perhaps someone could enlighten me?

When editing it in Moviemaker in Windows Vista (on Leonie's new laptop) the video wouldn't encode properly to start with. It kept encoding it so that a green bar filled the bottom half of the screen. I was confused as all heck, so googled "Windows Vista movie maker green bar" and found that it is a very common problem on Vista. Having found instructions on how to change a setting in the start menu, I finally encoded the movie and uploaded it (which took ages also, not sure why hmmmmm). But anyways.....woo! Haha.

Other than doing video stuff, I have been, well, just bumming around really. The chickens still haven't layed yet :( but I'll wait for another couple of weeks before I really start worrying about that.

Something interesting happened yesterday. I was in the middle of a bicycle ride with Tony (best mate), and we were heading down Laverack Barracks Road (as the name suggests, there is an army base that runs right along the length of it, about a 2-3km stretch of straight, smooth road, great for cycling). In the distance I could see a police car on the side of the road, and as I got closer I could see two policemen standing next to it pointing spped-guns at us lol. As I approached them I shouted "how fast am I going?", to which one of them shouted back "50km/h"...
Now this was all cool, except that my speedo said that I was only traveling 46km/h.... :S
This either means that my speedo is calibrated incorrectly (which I don't mind so much about) or the policemen's guns were wrong (I highly doubt this), which entertains the idea of false speeding tickets lol.

That same day I worked a five hour shift, followed by two hours of squash (I won two of the three matches I played against Fred and Campo), a small run, and then a barbecue at Leonies house. Man I love their FOOD! lol It's so good. There were these spicy prawn kebabs, yummmmm!!!!! steaks cooked three different ways, tandoori chicken, a weird but cool salad (the ingredients included feta cheese, pine nuts, and WATERMELON chunks) were just some of the things on the menu. And awesome desserts that I can't spell the names of (Indian lol). Yep, definitely an excellent dinner :-D.

Tony and I were supposed to have a run this afternoon, but he is sick with a flu-type thing, so I will go it alone I suppose. Oh yeah, followed by a walk up Castle Hill.
Speaking of Castle Hill, it is one of the foremost projects for filming as soon as I can work out how to strap the camera to my bike :) maybe a tailor-made job is required hmmmm...

Thursday, December 25, 2008

Shift key plus semicolon, plus shift key plus 0 key = :)

Whoa, I am glad Christmas is over again! This may seem a bit weird, but hear me out.
The whole point of Christmas as far as I can see is

a) commercial sales profit

b) religion (note that I put this as the second aim of modern Christmas)

c) Family

a) was ruined for me, because I spent the lead-up to today working in retail, selling the stuff that you all bought for "low low prices", and spent the rest of the time stressing about what to get everyone.
b) was never really in the picture for me to begin with.
And c) was messed up this year because Mum, my li'l sis, and Mum's partner are away in New Zealand. Dad lives 60km out of Town and we didn't drive out to see him this Christmas (he comes into town frequently, but we usually go and see him on chrissy day). and the remaining three of us (me, my big bro Fred and big sis Flo) tried to hang out today but let's just say it didn't really work out.

So Christmas = Bust.

I know that's fairly negative, but I'm just saying that it wasn't such a good christmas when compared to some of my previous years.
Although in saying that, I did go around to Leonie's place to have lunch with her parents and Grandmother, and that was actually pretty nice :). They can cook I tell ya what! I love Leonie's family's cooking.
And the other good bit about today was the cleaning I got done around the house. I say I did, but it was actually Leonie and I who toiled on this momentous holiday. It's interesting, but while in my back yard this arvo, I heard several next door neighbours mowing their lawn, so it mustn't have been just me doing some overtime labour.

I have tomorrow off thank goodness, time for more cleaning, a bit in the house and alot in the yard. I've been slack to say the least with the chores.

Fred and I have surpassed our download limit for the monthly internet. Bugger. It won't get reset until the 6th of next month :'(. Now I can't watch Youtube videos without having to wait about fifteen minutes for them to buffer... wahhhhhhhhhhhhhh.....haahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!

On the camera front, I've finally been able to pay for my Samsung s1050 (Paypal is such a pain with it's waiting periods), but the guy I bought it off (in the U.K) is on holiday until the 5th of January, so I probably won't have it until mid to late next month... frowney face!

And to top it all off, I have lent my 500gb external hard-drive to a chick from work so she can get mass amounts of my anime off of it. So now I don't even have anime to comfort me in my late-night boredom. I have resorted to something I used to do years ago; Listen to audiobooks while I play solitaire :S sound nerdy/ultra boring? Well, it is both those things lol, but meh.

Tomorrow, Leonie is taking us to the Boxing Day shop sales. I don't know about anywhere else (other countries I mean) but here in Aus, Boxing Day is when everything goes on sale, when shops mark down their stock, sometimes to a ridiculous extent.
I saw on the news today that in America, due to recession, shops had their lowest pre-christmas sales in fifty years this year. Lol the way the reporter was casting this story made it sounds like the end of the Earth. "Code red, code red, Americans can not, I repeat CANNOT afford as many christmas presents as they could before".....yep, I'm a nasty Pastie for making fun of them, but they make fun of the rest of the world so it's a taste of Americas own medicine (in saying "they" I'm making some extreme generalisations, most likely wrongly so, I know many nice and uncrazy Americans, and at the same time know many not-nice and very crazy Australians, so yeah it all evens out).

Meh, I'm tired, time for some Terry Pratchett Audiobook plus solitaire, then bed.

Oh yeah, P.S: if any of you non-existant readers out there are interested in what the life of an assistant Language Teacher in Japan is like, go to www.jasoninjapan.blogspot.com or www.joshuazimmerman.com/blog for some insight. Both bloggers write descriptively and are very entertaining in their recounts of their daily activities over there in Jap :)

Sunday, December 21, 2008

ouchhhhhhhhh

This morning was a pain in the butt-side! For a start, I haven't had a day off work in what seems forever. The fact that today is a Sunday, and therefore a better-payed shift, did however make me a little more enthusiastic.
My alarm goes off, in it's almost subtle yet indistinguishable tone.
"Right, up we get".
...
"Why haven't we moved? Are we lazy?"
..."arghhhhhhhh my back is screaming at me!!!!!"
I literally had to half roll, half crawl out of bed. My lower lumbar area was hurting, it was ouchies, IT WAS ABSOLUTELY CANING! (is caning an Australian colloquialism? it means really, REALLY, hurting).
Riding to work was no fun at all, although the air was crisp and the scenery lush and vibrant-looking due to an early-morning rain-shower. I ride a Cinelli Unica road bike (bicycle that is, not motorbike). This means that even when I don't ride with my hands on the "hoods" or on the "drops" (hoods are just above the brakes/gears, and drops are the lower bits of the handlebars, the "horns" if you will), my body is about halway to jacknifing whilst riding. Needless to say, this wasn't improving my lumbar situation. By the time I arrived to work, I was ready to turn right around and head straight for home, with the words "ice pack, heat pack, bed" being the prevalent keywords swimming in my consciousness. But, being the good worker that I [sometimes] am, I narrowed my eyes, stared down a huge pile of stock to be shelved, and dove into the shift. I worked willingly, ignoring the ever-increasing pain. I toiled tirelessly, shunning the nervous system signals coming from my stomach reminding me ever so kindly "ah, did you forget something? Breakfast?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?". I laboured lovingly, assuring myself that I didn't have food poisoning, albeit the cramping sensations coming from my stomach and bowels tried to convince me otherwise.........
And then I started work.

Seriously, it was the worst shift EVER! Until, that is, Leonie bought me some lunch halfway through, and I borrowed a buck off her to buy some cheap and nasty cola, the caffeine in which pepped me up to no end :). Thanks Leonie!

After work (did I mention our basement/loading dock smells like raw sewage right now? I think I know what the culprit is.....you guessed it, probably raw sewage leaking from a pipe), Leonie and I went to Stable on the Strand, which is like a mini-mini festival held every year at the Strand (beach), in Strand Park (imaginative names right?).
It was pretty fun. The whole place was decked out pavillion-style with fence borders painted to look like stone walls. Once we stepped through the gates, it was out of Townsville, and into little Bethlehem. Heaps of people were in character for the people of the time of Jesus' Christ's [supposed] birth. Centurians and other Roman soldiers, beggars, carpenters, weavers, seamstresses, maintenance boys scrubbing "walls", potters, people filling out the Roman census, e.t.c.



Leonie's friend Bianca was in a montage-style play depicting all the, I suppose, important biblical events leading up to the Jesus Christ bit (Adam & Eve, Noah's Ark, Joseph, yadda yadda yadda). It was made more entertaining by "Satan", an actor in a smart red shirt and black vest. He constantly roamed the stage and audience, yelling random shite and "cursing" people or something lol. It was pretty funny, and he pulled it off well through sheer confidence and loudness haha. I got most of it on video, but I'll talk about that later.
After checking out the food stalls, more biblical stuff, a glance at the petting zoo (cute lambies mawwwwwww), and the rock concert happening on the beachfront (some pretty nice heavy rock takes on classic christmas carols lol), Leonie and I stumbled upon another stage-area away from the others. To be honest, I didn't have any part in finding it. All I heard was a squeal of pleasure from Leonie, and saw her running towards the area. It turned out that some hiphop dancers (from out of town I reckon) were performing. I ran to the center of the crowd and whipped out the camera in my pocket and started recording. This was made hard by the fact that Leonie kept shaking me and yelling "aw man! This is so COOL!" lol, funny girl.

Now, some big newssssssss. I have finally, after a year or so, put another Youtube video up on my account (shock amazement!). It is the one I've just been talking about, the hiphop dancing one :). I've done some basic editing (credits, fade-in/out) and uploaded it just now. Hot off the press!

If anyone ever actually reads this blog (signs pointing to noooooooooo) chack out my youtube channel. My avatar name is "ensortion" ^_^

Anyhoooo, signing out now.
Peace to all and to all a goodnight, except insomniacs, for whom that old saying holds little or no meaning :P.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

2nd-hand Samsung S1050 ^_^

I just bought a second-hand Samsung S1050 off of Ebay. Woot-woot!

Hopefully this means that soon I'll be posting some of my own pics, not others, and maybe even some youtube vids (:O shock horror!).



Like I mentioned in my last post, it is kind of like, my Christmas gift to myself :) I've been considerably more tight-arsed with my money this year than previously. I deserve a treat :) right? Right? (needing justification of purchase here lol!).


I watched Paprika tonight. Very messed up, yet awesome because of it's plotline, imaginative themes, moral questions (are dreams better left alone, or should they be analysed until they all merge into one collective dream?) and impressive animation effects (duh! it's anime, of course it's going to be cool). I've downloaded the main theme song "The Girl in Byakkoya - White Tiger Field" by artist Susumu Hirasawa. Very flowing and lovely. Good for dancing alone to in my house lol where no-one can see my lame moooooooves.

'Night

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Christmas = spending :(

Well, let me start out this post by saying how great it is to sleep in! I love it, soooooooooo much. Waking up to the rustling of sheets from rolling over is just so much better than jerking awake to the screeching of my alarm. Yep, that's right, I haven't had to get up before midday since Saturday (it's been three sleep-ins in a row then), and tomorrow is another :D.

I bought my li'l sister's chrissie present the other day. I got her things to take on her holiday trip to New Zealand with Mum and her dad. I miss you Mum :'(.

On the topic of christmas presents, HOW FREAKIN HARD IS IT TO FIND A SUITABLE PRESENT FOR EVERYONE?!?!?!?!?! I have finally figured out what to get my bro Fred, Leonie's is in the bag, my little brothers has been decided, Mums and Annies (li'l sis) have been given already (they left yesterday), but I still don't know what to get: my Dad, Stepmother, big sis Flo, friends Tony and Campo, the list goes on...
The ideas that keep popping up in my head are all quite expensive :(... and I only have until next Thursday @_@!!!!!



My christmas present to myself (I reckon I've been good) is a new digital camera. I haven't owned one for about four years, and I'm ready to photograph anything in sight! hehe...
No, but really, I was thinking about possibly strapping it to my bike and taking it on rides with me up Mount Stuart/Castle Hill/Hervey's Range e.t.c. (video footage). Plus it'll be good for uni stuff like Anime Club (yep, I'm a MASSIVE nerd), get-togethers and other whatnots.
Anyhooooooooo, the point of this little rant is that cameras are expensive! That's why I'm getting my dad to search for one similar to his (Samsung s1050) because I like it, and he'll probably be able to get it cheap online :). And maybe want to go halves in it for my christmas present?????? :P who knows.

Also, on the topic of expenses, I took my Toshiba Portege tablet laptop into the repair shop today :(. I have tried and tried to get it working for ages, but when it comes down to it, I just don't know shite about anything computer-related...now it's going to cost me minimum $250 for something that I should, by rights, be able to fix myself.

So by my estimation, Christmas this year is gonna cost, well, a hellavalot!
Plus, my flatmate is moving out soon, and it'll just be Fred and I living here, so expenses will shoot up there too. Woo for taxes and rent O_o

Peace outttttttttttttttttt

Sunday, December 14, 2008

Caleb's pictures of beautiful Rural Japan

Aha! Finally the pictures I promised.

These were all taken by Caleb House, a JET participant in his first year of ALT (Assistance Language Teacher). They are are only a fraction of the pics he has, but they pretty much capture the essence of them. He is stationed in the Kyoto prefecture, close to Osaka. But, as you can plainly see, not so close that he is short of beautiful landscapes of bamboo and deciduous forests :) (especially beautiful in these pictures due to Autumn).

Thank you, Caleb, for giving me permission to share your pictures.

If anyone would like to see any more of this Japan area, go to www.youtube.com and channel search for 'extravpenguin' to reach Caleb's profile. His video footage is just as thorough and well presented as his photography.

These pics all make me want to go rural when going to Japan....and you?







The pictures above and below are of Green tea fields. Yum! Green tea! :) Love the symmetry of the perfect lines.