I spent a long time deliberating over whether I would go to the 2006 Blender Conference or not. My bank balance has been pretty unhealthy recently, and as great as it would be to see everyone and be a part of the excitement again, I wasn’t sure if I could afford to travel halfway around the world or not. I came to the last-minute conclusion that it’s going to be pretty tight and not really affordable, and that even so, I would go anyway! :)

Apart from the real reason for the conference, being around all the others, eating, drinking, discussing, brainstorming, I’m going to be giving a couple of pretty informal talks on the Friday - ‘Making Elephants Dream’ with the others from Orange who can make it, and also a lighting and compositing workshop with Andy Goralczyk. I’d like the keep both of them pretty informal and fun, the latter more about nifty tips and tricks, like in my previous curves session.

Straight after the conference, Bassam Kurdali and I will shoot over to Belgium for a week, to teach a four day 3D course using Blender at the Flanders Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Antwerp. This should be very interesting and challenging, though not new - we held a series of one day courses during our time at Montevideo in Amsterdam. The students are a group of fine artists who are looking for ways to integrate 3D technology into their work. I’m very happy to be able to help them with this, and curious to see what they come up with.

• I think the editors at Blendernation.com are stalking me. Should I be scared?

• Added curve shrinking/fattening to Blender, to help making tapered curves nice and quickly. Coming soon after I also added Mac tablet pressure support (there’s X11 support now too, still no Windows yet :/ ), Campbell had a nice idea about a freehand curve sketch tool that could support adjusting the curve taper radius with pen pressure.

• Finally, after a few months of searching, my friend Julien, his friend and I have been accepted for a reasonably nice terrace in south Surry Hills. The location is fantastic and I spent the last couple of afternoons cleaning and fixing up my old bike so instead of sitting on buses for hours I can ride it around just like back in Amsterdam! Yay! Move-in date is slated for the 26th, lots of packing to do by then!

There’s been the usual flurry of reporting around the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference keynote address. I watched the video this evening and subsequently found a few interesting tidbits that haven’t been mentioned that much in the big internet news, and I might as well post them here, this site being my insignificant outlet to the world :)

Right now, some of the Orange and Blender contingent are living it up in Boston at SIGGRAPH 2006, the premier Conference/Festival/Tradeshow for the digital graphics industry and community. This year, we’re lucky enough to have a booth on the main tradeshow floor, the ‘Open Source Pavilion’, shared with people from other open source graphics projects like Inkscape, GIMP and Verse. The booth was sponsored by a few sources, but largely by an extremely generous private donation. We’re right there in the trenches just next door to Houdini and ZBrush.

Unfortunately I’m not there myself, I really wish I was. But the next best thing is the fantastic video blog coverage that Bart from BlenderNation is producing each day. It’s giving the event a great feeling of community involvement, so do go and check it out and see some of the faces behind the internet aliases!

Rarely does one see a truly funny, biting and original Australian satire, but ABC TV’s The Chaser’s War on Everything is most definitely one. After previous experience from their satirical newspaper and other TV shows such as The Election Chaser and CNNNN, they’ve been producing War on Everything for about 6 months now, and I’ve been following it very closely.

The team is ever vigilant in exposing and revelling in the absurdity of our society, media and public figures and don’t shy away from offending people or getting themselves arrested in the process of getting their points across. Parts of it seem similar to what I’ve seen of the Daily Show in the US. Some of the humour would be lost on non-Australians, but hey, it’s just started being offered as a free weekly download, courtesy of our most excellent national broadcaster. I’m not sure if previous episodes are going up there, but there are clips on the website, and full episodes in *cough* other places.

Another video podcast I’ve been catching up on is from a show that aired on SBS a while back is Speaking in Tongues. It features John Safran (ridiculous Jewish satirist of Race Around the World and John Safran vs. God fame) and rambling elderly social activist Catholic Priest, Father Bob Maguire discussing all matters bizarre concerning religion. The pair also have a radio show on JJJ radio which also has a free podcast. Anyway, the video podcast is here, free and courtesy of my tax dollars and the wonderful SBS TV.

The other day I used the Bleep paid music download site for the first time. I’d heard about it quite some time ago, but at that stage it had quite a small selection of music, mostly stuff from the Warp catalog (of which Bleep is a subsidary thing, or vice versa.. can’t remember but they’re connected in some way).

Now they seem to have much, much more available, from all sorts of labels. You won’t find any top 40 trash in there, and it’s mostly geared to the Warp audience, a bit more electronica, experimental, avant-garde, blah blah, which is fine by me. The albums I picked up this time were Aluminium Tunes by Stereolab and 28 by Aoki Takamasa and Tujiko Noriko.

Still trying to recuperate somewhat, but I posted a little progress update with two swanky wallpaperish stills from Elephants Dream over on the blog. Still finishing the menus tonight, and tomorrow I’ll start work on putting Andy’s awesome cover illustration into the sleeve template. In other news, I’ve also scanned my first roll of negs from the premiere and put them on flickr, check the first two pages you see there to see some of the preparations and limo ride from my perspective! There’s one more BW film still to come; Kat promised she’d get some chemicals so we can develop and print ourselves in the darkroom she’s a member of now.

I also spent some time helping her volunteer over the weekend at the smARTarts community arts festival, run by Sydney City council. I was roped in by surprise in the evening, filling in for a missing person in a parade through the streets carrying a giant egg lantern, being chased by sperm and a giant barcoded foetus in an anti-conformist street theatre thing put on by a local performing arts school. Fun for the whole family.

From outer space. A lot to write, I think I’ll take it bit by bit over the coming weeks. At least for now I’m having a few weeks off after Orange and will have some time write, amidst trying to relax and gather my thoughts and energy. Thankfully, after a lot of blood sweat and tears, we pulled through at the last minute and the premiere was a big success, not to mention lots of fun.

I’m still working on a few final things for the DVD, so hopefully it will ship soon. Continually putting pictures of the event etc. up on flickr so keep an eye on that. But for now, time to clear up an email backlog and enjoy the nice weather here down under :)

And now, for a little update to break the recent drought of entries. Yes, I’ve been quite busy. A lot has been happening here in Amsterdam but I’ve only got so much time to spend writing, so here’s a brief run-down in point form.

There’s been a lot going on in my life recently and I’ve hardly had any time to post anything here. The big news is I’m alive and well here in Amsterdam, settled in to an apartment and already hard at work at Studio Orange. The first few days here were spent madly rushing to put the Orange website together which has been quite successful, but very exhausting. We’re now in the concept design phase for this week or so, more info on that in the Orange blog. And don’t forget to support our project and pre-order the DVD, including all production files and making of documentary! It’ll be really good, I promise :)

We’re all posting a blog entry a week over at the Orange site, but hopefully now I’m here, I’ll try and post additional things here, maybe more as a personal diary or maybe just mirroring what I post over there. I’ll have to see… I spent a few days in New York on the way to Amsterdam with Kat, and have a bunch of photos from there I need to clean up and post. I’ve also got a heap of work to do in my spare time (what spare time! I’m still here at the studio at 10:30pm!) making patches to bring over some blender interface work into the official version. So there should hopefully be updates still coming out on here, now I’ve got my head together! I’ll keep you posted.

Just a little update since I’ve been rather quiet lately. The days have more and more rapidly been flying past until I head off to Amsterdam via New York on my birthday, the 26th of August. Typical luck spending my birthday stuck on a plane; here’s hoping that my travelling companion, Kat, will buy me a cake in the airport or something :) It’ll be the first time I’ve lived out of Australia for an extended period of time (not travelling) and the preperations are taking a lot more out of my schedule than I expected. I’m mostly sorted now with visas and relevant paperwork in hand, though there’s still a lot of work (projects, orange stuff) to get through before I leave.

I’m still glowing with happiness today after seeing one of my favourite musicians, Tujiko Noriko, perform last night during her brief stay in Sydney. I’ve been indulging in her wonderfully interesting, delicate, subtle yet experimental ‘avant-pop’ music for a few years now, but have been chronically annoyed after finding out I missed her show the first time she visited Sydney last year for the “What is Music?” festival. She’s been described as Japan’s answer to Björk, but that doesn’t do her justice. As much as I like Björk, Noriko’s far too individual and credible in her own right to have to live under that shadow.

Well, I’m home again, and have no idea what I’m doing up at this hour of night. Sleeping all throughout yesterday and last night felt great at the time, but it probably wasn’t the best way to shake off this jetlag.

I had a most awesome, productive and interesting time in Amsterdam, and a chaotically exciting few days in Tokyo. Thanks so much to Blender international translation coder Shizu and friend for meeting up on Sunday, showing me around and being patient with my horribly broken Japanese. It was fantastic and much appreciated! There’s tons of work waiting for me here now; expect to find out more about what went on, over the coming days.

I came across girlsarepretty.com the other day via drunkenblog, and I can’t get enough of it. The purpose of the site seems to be a little short story posted every day, but the main attraction is the writing - it’s so quirky, funny, interesting, and subtly insightful. Definitely one for the RSS reader.