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.

Last week I got myself a new toy from a second-hand camera shop. :) It’s a Seagull 4B-191, an old Chinese medium format TLR (Twin Lens Reflex). After using my friend Kat’s Holga for a while, I was tempted to start experimenting in the world of nice big 60mm x 60mm 120 film.

Using it is great fun; just the handling of the controls, the flip-up lid, the quirky horizontally mirrored top-down viewfinder with shallow depth of field all make the necessary tweaking quite enjoyable.

I’m doing some surgery around these parts. Some things will be a work in progress for maybe a day or two, so bear with me :)

What do I and Rugby League player Andrew Johns have in common? Yesterday, I competed in the NSW state taekwondo championships. In the first round of my finals fight I let my guard down, which my opponent subsequently took advantage of, kicking me squarely in the left jaw and fracturing it. I didn’t realise what had happened at the time, and there was no visible damage, so I finished my two rounds but disappointingly lost, only scoring 1/3rd as much as he did. Today I visited a bunch of radiographers, dentists and hospitals, but the good news is I don’t need surgery. Just a couple of weeks of painkillers and eating through a straw, and 6 weeks later it will be healed (in theory)! I have to get an X-ray every week until then, so I’ll see how it goes.

Two X-ray images on the one weblog page. That’s quite worrying.

Last week was a pretty busy one. One of the highlights was the demonstration our taekwondo club put on for new students, with punching, kicking, shouting, breaking wooden boards and roof tiles - fun for the whole family. One of the lowlights was realising afterwards that my foot was horribly swollen, red and rather painful. The doctor thought it was broken, but the subsequent xray thankfully proved otherwise. Thanks to the mashed up soft tissue and ligaments though, I’ll be limping around for a few days yet. *sigh*

A perfectly intact bone structure.

It’s been a while since I’ve done much on here, a bit of a shame really. My portfolio’s rather out of date and I’m quite unimpressed with everything here, so when I get the next chance, I think I’ll tear it all up and put it back together again. I need to somehow make it easier to post, since I’ve had things to mention but haven’t had the time/motivation to do it. Most of the time I’ve touched this site, it’s been to clear up idiotic comment and trackback spam, and I’ve finally put in a few countermeasures which might hopefully slow things for a while.

While I was browsing through my web statistics to try and fight referrer spam, I noticed a whole heap of search engine referrals. It looks like a 3D model of mine comes up on the second page for an images.google.com search on the quite generic word “body“. Even quirkier is that a search for “cut” turns up two Blender images side by side on the first page of results - one by Jakub ‘jimmac’ Steiner, who I met at the 2004 Blender Conference and a quicky speed modelling session by me. Funny :).

Whew, just got back from a few days down in Melbourne, for the Australian Open Grand Slam. There were some awesome matches, (saw Agassi, yay!), surprisingly good weather, great company, and hopefully some nice pics when I get my films developed. Seeing it live and courtside really makes me appreciate just how much skill these players have. Going to be away again for the first part of this week, so I’ll be back and ready to do stuff on Thursday.

If you like the French tech-funk-house duo Daft Punk, or retro 80s anime, the combination of music and image, or even just innovative uses of media, then you’ll probably like Interstella 5555, a DVD I picked up quite cheaply the other day. It quite correctly claims to be an “animated House Musical”, depicting the story of a group of four intergalactic musicians, captured by a scheming manager to be transformed into a manufactured band on earth. The animation is set to Daft Punk’s album Discovery, and oozes with groove and style, being produced by Leiji Matsumoto, creator of well-known 80s anime such as Galaxy Express 999 and Captain Harlock. You may have seen the videos for One More Time or Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger on their own - these are actually just a few small segments of the overall production. There’s a good review here.

Yesterday I had a first glimpse of the work of Lee Bul, a South Korean artist currently exhibiting at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. I wish I’d heard of her before, because her work is quite incredible. Lee’s work spans a few different genres including performance, video and interactive media, though it’s her super-futuristic sculptures that have made a name for herself, and it’s those that are mainly on exhibition at the MCA.

Poster at the exhibition

Been doing some fiddling here, keeping my web eye in (and getting sidetracked from my stupid photo gallery script). I came across a bunch of tools that all the cool kids are using, so I decided to give a couple a go, and am pretty happy. The first is del.icio.us, an interesting experiment in public/social web bookmarking. My list is here. Another neat thing about del.icio.us is that it exports the list as an RSS feed, which seem to be undergoing an explosion of different uses these days, and I’ve done some minor hacks to Feedsplitter, allowing my links for each day to be integrated in the blog posts here. Cute.

Another thing I’ve given a try is FeedBurner which can wrap an XML news feed and insert all sorts of other things in it, like del.icio.us links, or photos on flickr. So if you actually consider this site to be interesting enough to check back on, hook up my feed in whatever RSS reader program you use (Firefox 1.0 has a neat feature for this now, which they call ‘Live Bookmarks’).

Finally, I’m home from Europe and have shaken off the residue from my first real taste of the wonders of jetlag. 48 hours of no sleep, plus a time-shifted body clock, plus temperatures 30 degrees higher than when I left didn’t really go down too well. But that’s been and gone and I’m now finishing off the taxes and paperwork that were waiting for me here, soon to start putting some of my (overcast and grey, sigh) photos online. While I was out in Newtown on Sunday night with friends from uni, I came across a DVD which I just had to buy: WarpVision: The Videos 1989 - 2004

It’s a compilation of 32 music videos of artists on the Warp label, like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, LFO, and Nightmares on Wax and by directors such as Chris Cunningham, Alex Rutterford, Pleix, and The Designers Republic. I haven’t finished looking at them all, but so far, they’ve been damn good. While I’m at it, I’ll also plug the awesome DVDs sitting next to this one on my shelf: Directors Label: Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry. Get these now!

I’ve made it out of (the very interesting) Russia intact and well, and am back in Amsterdam for two more days to reunite with my laptop and prepare for the terrible trek back home that awaits me on the 16th. Since I had to change my booking at a late date, I got a terrible connection, meaning that the entire Amsterdam to Sydney journey will take me roughly 31 hours. That’ll be just a barrel of laughs. *ahem*

I also now have 2.5GB of photos to sort through, plus 4 or 5 rolls of film. I guess now that I have a little digital camera too, I should really get around to fixing up my crazy homebrew PHP web photo gallery thingy into something more usable and reusable. Anyway, till next time (when I’ll be a lot warmer than I am now).