Brush with death

Via Wooster Collective:

Memories

I’ve spent this morning going through photos for pictures of my grandfather, Harry Trelogan, who passed away on Thursday afternoon. It’s made me realise a couple of things.

First, that my picture taking habits have changed quite a lot over the past ten years – I used to take hundreds of photos, put them on facebook, store them in big batches and look at them occasionally. Not any more. These days it’s all about snapping a quick shot on the mobile and working out the best way to share it with people. Once it’s sent or uploaded or whatever, I just don’t think about it again. Photos aren’t memories any more, but more a method to crack a joke.

I’m not sure how I feel about this really, but now that I am actively seeking photos for memories, I can’t help but feel I might have it around the wrong way.

The second is that who my grandfather was to me has changed a lot over the years. My earliest memories of him (and many after) were always of him as half of pair – Gran and Gramps. Those memories revolved around visits to their house, being spoilt rotten, crying together at the sad scenes in Dumbo, Terry’s Chocolate Oranges and being showered with love. They were hugs and biscuits and comfort.

Later, he was a role model to me in humour, hospitality and sharp dress sense. To this day, I am yet to see another man wear a neck scarf with such aplomb or meet anyone quicker to offer you a drink when you walked in his door.

More recent memories are centred on the decline of this health, where his personable nature was increasingly clouded with confusion. Even during these days Harry maintained a strong work ethic – mum and dad’s garden has never seen such sustained attention as when Harry was still able to potter.

Throughout all these different understandings and perceptions of him there were common threads of sometimes surprising sensitivity, unconditional love and wit.

The last thing that I realised was that despite not having seen him in almost a year (and even then it was challenging to see the man I once knew), I still miss him more now that he is gone.

It's a freaky freaky cat video, Bowie.

By cyriak (via Boing Boing)

Don't drink and drive bro

The NZ Transport Agency has way better drink driving adverts than anything in Australia...

Watching that was thirsty work. I could murder a beer right now.

PS: all right, one more for the lols.

Pallets and puppies

Now that the weather is starting to improve, I’ve been feeling the need to get some things growing in the garden. Unfortunately, most of the garden still needs another week or two before the green manure crop has sufficiently decomposed so that it doesn’t damage new roots.

To kill time until then, I decided to try out a recycled shipping pallet project that I’ve seen around a couple of times on the web (for example here and here).

The idea is basically to take an old abandoned shipping pallet, reinforce it a little, wrap it in landscaping fabric, fill it up with dirt, plant it out, wait for the roots to take hold and then prop it against a wall as a simple vertical garden.  There are more detailed step by step instructions at the links above.

Sourcing the pallets can be a bit tricky – there’s a fine line between abandoned and stacked waiting for the pallet company to collect them. Thankfully a misspent youth of nicking traffic cones and empty kegs from the back of pubs left me well placed to deal with this moral quandary.

We cut the pallet in half to make it a bit more manageable – a full size pallet would be ridiculously heavy when complete and would also cost a fortune to plant out. Here’s the pallet sanded down and ready to close in the back:

 Around this stage the neighbour’s puppy came to visit:

Reinforcing the back with some cheap treated pine fence palings:

Below you can see the pallet filled with dirt. We’ve wrapped the back and bottom in landscaping fabric to keep the dirt in while allowing for drainage, and covered the front gaps with chicken wire to keep the dirt in. We had to cut holes though this to plant in.

Plants, planting and planted:

 

 

The finished product just needs a few weeks horizontal for all the plants to take root properly before it’s propped against the wall. I’ll plant out the top gap around then as well. The plants are mostly succulents mixed in with a few grasses and some potted colour for the top.

Roll em up!

via boing boing

Beaurtiful video of ferrofluids

Saw this amazing video on the Scientific American website this afternoon, it's bloody amazing.

It's called 'Morpho Towers -- Two Standing Spirals' by Sachiko Kodama.

Counting down the minutes until it's time for an afternoon beverage in the sunshine...

From Vimeo - A Day in California

Saw this video by Ryan Killacky on Gizmodo during my lunch time browsing today. I've seen a couple of videos in this style, and I always love the way they manage to make people look like little lego men running through a landscape. I also love the similarity between some of the landscape and flora in it and Australian landscapes.

A Day in California from Ryan Killackey on Vimeo.

Melbourne library

Jon Hamm, you the man.

From Emotions with Jon Hamm

Amusing blog of the day.

Path of Blood

Path of Blood - Demon at the Crossroads of Destiny from Eric Power on Vimeo.

Saw this awesome short film on Boing Boing. Apparently the guy that made it (Eric Power) is seeking funding via kickstarter to make a feature length version.

Find out more over at his website!

Friday = excitement.

But not as exciting as an N64!

EVEN BETTER IN THE REEEEEEMIX! DRUM SOLO!

Two days off is just not enough.

The transformers you never knew about

Saw this over at Cracked.com, purveyors of fine interweb crudge, in a post about terrible bootleg toys.

First: Titanic Bot - sunken boat in disguise! WTF.

Second: Voltromas - Voltron Thomas the Tank Engine.

Check out the full post for more classics like 'RobertCop'.

90s gaming



Nuff said.

PS: props to my man Mark for forwarding this on.

The advertisers have probably won (or why I dislike the Simon Baker ANZ ad)

I've been thinking for a little while now how much I hate the ANZ ad with Simon Baker that's on TV at the moment. Dana is probably sick of hearing me whinge every time it comes on the box (I don't know why I still call the TV the box, it's not a box anymore, it's a big flat plasma panel - habit I guess). I'm not sure what it is that really grabs me about it, I seem to be able to ignore most advertisements and let them wash over me mindlessly, but this one always annoys me enough to speak out/mute/change the channel.

I think initially it was that he says he knows what I'm thinking, and then proceeds to tell me what he thinks I'm thinking about banks while failing to make eye contact with the camera. This annoys me, and it's completely off the mark as well - I'm not thinking about banks at all. I'm thinking about how much I dislike being told what I'm thinking and WHY WON'T HE LOOK ME IN THE EYE?! I'm also thinking 'why is an Australian doing an advert for Australians, about an Australian bank, filmed in the US with an American accent? And while we're at it, is he supposed to be his character from the "The Mentalist" or what?'.

If I were thinking about banks, it would probably be more like 'I wish I didn't have to put up with bloody incompetents to get our mortgage - is it that hard to have a mortgage package that is highly competitive AND not be useless bastards?', but that really is beside the point, because I can't think about banks when the advert is on. I'm too busy thinking about how much I hate Simon Baker and his annoying commercial.

It turns out someone on the internet is at least part of the way there with me already, as the parody of the ad I bumped into on YouTube this afternoon evidences.


I find it immensely satisfying that someone somewhere in the great wide internet has come to the same conclusions as me without ever having met me.

My message to advertisers: please don't tell me what I'm thinking. I don't like it. And it is disconcerting when someone is talking to me but doesn't make eye contact. Please don't do it.

PS: Those whole post and the amount of thought I've put into this ad has probably been exactly what the advertisers wanted. I understand this. It doesn't mean I like it.

Crazy Horses - Aotearoas newest gang

Crazy Horses show you how to pick on people.

Interactive architechture

"Perspective Lyrique" (via boing boing) - an awesome projected facade from Lyon in France.

PERSPECTIVE LYRIQUE from 1024 on Vimeo.

The deck.

Thanks to the efforts of Dana's dad (David) we now have a rather excellent deck in our courtyard! As David has pointed out a couple of times, it was actually probably only a two day job, but we took our time a bit more doing it.

Here's the courtyard before the deck:

You can see the rocks marking out where the footings for the deck will go. We hired a jack hammer to dig the holes out. We were originally going to hire a post hole digger to do the job, but the helpful gents at the hire shop said the combination of the rocks and the clay would probably render it useless. The jackhammer was awesome! Definitely the most fun power tool I've ever used. I don't want to dig holes in the garden without one ever again!

Jackhammer and resulting post holes:

Once the post holes were dug, it was a matter of combining timber, stirrups and concrete with about 600 screws.

Stage one - footings, bearers and ledgers in. This is the second day building the deck.

The next day we put the joists on and started getting the decking on. We ended up buying a drop saw to cut all the boards to size.

Dana proved that women can multitask - drilling and sawing at the same time!

The final day was devoted to getting all the decking on to the frame. Below you can see the deck at the start of the last day, lunch time and the completed deck at the end of the day!

Here's the before shot again for some contrast:

And finally, here's David, inspecting the work:

Now, all that's left to do is to wait until it's warm enough to use it!

Got the sucka



Getting through Monday morning - a tale of two tunes

Early start at work today and terrible weather has me on struggle street. I find these early morning starts both exciting and also draining - exciting to be involved in something important and urgent, but when it's finished, normal work seems so mundane and boring.

This morning was one such morning and I am relying on coffee and some tunes to perk me back up again. Here is a quick sample of two I've enjoyed this morning.

The first is an oldie from Swedish chip tune and stop animation boffins Rymdreglage. I swear I've blogged this before somewhere, but I couldn't find it when I searched the old one. I really dig the lego animation, makes me want to spend and afternoon with a big old box of the stuff.

The next is off a Diplo track that gets stuck in my head all the bloody time - 'smash a kangaroo'. It's like an adults only version of Wilcannia mob - ' down river'.

Good luck with your Monday.

Down the garden path

As alluded to in earlier posts, I've been undertaking some landscaping work in the garden for a fair while now. The excellent people who work with me have been suffering my talk of my weekends in the garden for a long time now, and in all honesty, they probably will for a while longer.

The main focus of my efforts so far as been a pathway from the front gate down the side of the house and round the back of the house. Those that follow the old Delayed Gratification blog about the extended purchase and building of the place may remember this post with pictures of the garden before we moved in. Here's a picture from that post from the side of the gate down the side of the house before I started on the pathway:

From when this was taken until the work on the pathway started we grew some pretty serious weeds down there, which in turn resulted in the compost pile/mousey nest recently removed from the courtyards.

After removing the weeds, I had some assistance from friends digging out the pathway to a depth of roughly 100mm and a width of around 700mm. Digging makes it sound much easier than it was. The reality is that a shovel barely penetrates more than a centimeter into the clay heavy soil, which had been compacted by the building process. We had to use a heavy mattock to work our way slowly along all 25m of the pathway in about four days of back-breaking labour.The rock content of the soil also makes it tough to dig in, often resulting in bone jarring ricochets and sparks where you hit a bit of flint. Here's the pile of rocks and left over concrete that came our while doing the path:

As hard as the excavation was, there was a tremendous sense of achievement when it was finished. The next step was to edge the pathway with plastic landscape edging. The edging is pretty heavy duty - 150mm high by about 7mm thick - but the plastic stakes from the same brand are bloody atrocious. They're long enough at about 300mm, but their construction just doesn't hold up to the conditions. For starters, they're reinforced down only one side, which means that while you may knock them in vertically, they list over as one side meets more resistance going through the soil than the other side. Secondly, they bend and absorb the force of the hammer knocking them into the ground, so that the force is dissipated rather than driving being translated through the stake and driving it into the ground.

Basically, they're just crap and they weren't up the the soil conditions. I ended up having to remove all the ones I managed to actually knock into the soil and replace them with the 300mm galvanised steel stakes I used for the rest of the edging. I did almost all of the edging on my own (with assistance from Briggs, initial B, for one stretch) until the last couple of stakes, when Dana decided she'd like to help out.

The first stake she knocked in went well. The second, less well - it into a water line in the garden, and before we knew it, we had a moat instead of a pathway. Imagine, if you will, the pair of us running around like headless chickens without a clue what to do. First we rang the water provider, where a bored telephone operator told us that if it was on our property, we should look for the stopcock (the stopcock, genius!) and call a plumber. 

Unfortunately, it was a public holiday and plumbers were in short supply. In addition, apparently the grey pipe that our water comes in is some sort of a rarity in plumbing circles, which no one was prepared to fix. Eventually the 20th person we rang said he knew someone who'd mentioned it at a site somewhere. He gave us a name and number, with instructions to say "Jim" sent us.

Above you can see the repaired pipe. It took the plumber we eventually reached all of 10 minutes to fix it in the end, although it took him a day to turn up. Nice guy though, and while the wait was frustrating, it meant we didn't have to pay the public holiday or weekend rates.You can see from the picture above that it's pretty lucky we hadn't hit the pipe already. You can also see that we had to dig a ruddy great hole in my pathway to fix it.

Here's the finished excavation and edging, with the hole filled in. I ended up having to shift the pathway over by about 100mm to avoid the line of the pipe. Knocking those last couple of stakes in was a little bit nervous.

I plan to get the sub base for the pathway delivered tomorrow so that the pathway is at least half way useful. It will involve lifting and shifting about two cubic meters of stuff, so I'm going to get my weekend exercise without doubt. 

For now, I'll leave you with this handrawn animation re-creation of Terminator 2, celebrating 20 years since its release. The music is a chiptune track by Rymdreglage (try pronouncing that five times quickly).

Pingu makes drum and bass

An oldie, but it stillmakes me smile.

Outpost compost heap: a decisive victory

These past few weeks have seen a drastic revaluation of the battle lines in the war on mice, spurred by a trip to the tip with a load of weeds. The weeding was a subset of a wider garden landscaping operation, which has been taking substantially longer to complete than originally intended. Kevin McLeod would be chiding me for having unrealistic expectations and not enough of a contingency budget, but that's another story.

All that is relevant to the war non mice is that a substantial pile of weeds has been gently composting on the bare earth of our courtyard for about two months. The pile was always destined for the tip, but hadn't made it there for a variety of reasons - not the least of which being that I could not be bothered.

Little did I know that I was already paying for my laziness.

When I finally got around to removing the pile, I received a nasty shock - the mice had made themselves a mouse home under the warmth of the decomposing weeds. And it wasn't just made out of the organic matter of the weeds - they had been constructing earth works. There were several channels and even a little tunnel dug into the ground!

I'm not sure if I've mentioned it before (but I will surely mention it again), but the soil in our garden is a heavy clay which dries rock hard, but forms a sticky thick mud when saturated. The fact that the mice had managed to burrow into it was pretty impressive.

I only saw one mouse scatter when I deconstructed the nest, but I haven't had a mouse inside the house since. The bait on the traps hasn't even been nibbled. Three weeks without any mousey encounters is the longest we've gone since the war on mice began. I've done some reading that suggests mice only wander in about a 10 m radius of their nest.

I'm hopeful the elimination of the nest has solved my mouse problem, at least for this season. Next year I'm going to focus not only on the entry points to the house and trapping any that come into the house, but also on looking through the garden for nests.

What I'm listening to today

Diplo's 'Decent work for decent pay' LP, which is mostly Diplo remixes, plus a few that he's produced. Example:

And some proof that not all of High Contrasts remixes in the style of dnb are worth it:

Life in the bus lane

When I moved into the new place at the start of the year, I gave up my urban walk to work life style for a far more suburban existence.

This has had it's benefits and drawbacks. I now spend around an hour a day sitting on buses and a variable amount of time hanging around at bus stops. I also don't see the local drunks getting into their morning long necks at the corner store, or the small congregation of Turkish (I think) guys having their morning catch up. I actually rather miss these things.

What I don't miss are the regular break ins in the apartment parking lot and living on a main road, not to mention the occasional altercation with the local colour over my ownership of the beer I've just purchased from the corner shop.

You may think I include the time spent on the bus as a downside, and at first it was. However, as the morning walk to work becomes a more distant memory, the more I enjoy the contemplative moments jostled in amongst the other wage slaves, the more I enjoy starring out the window like a zombie insulated from the world by the glass and the small speakers nestled in my ear canals.

This is one of the best parts of my day. My mind is at its most relaxed and wonders with abandon. I am close to people, I am one of the mass, but we do not need to communicate, just be.

I almost feel sorry for the suckers stuck in traffic on the other side of the glass.

PS: this post was written entirely on my phone while on the bus on the way to work this morning. Only this post script and some minor formatting was added aferwards. The wonders of modern technology!

Death to all butt metal? (or some music that I heard over the weekend)

Gem is killing it tonight - back to back episodes of 'As Time Goes By' followed by 'Gran Torino'!

Anyway, I heard this track on the radio yesterday and was very amused by it. It's pretty much the lyric 'I'm like Tom Cruise off of Top Gun' over and over again. Surprisingly it doesn't get old as quickly as you might think. 

The video clip made it even better.

Next track I heard in the small hours of the morning on Rage. Art vs Science was guest programming, and I pretty much dug every track they played (playlist here). Anyway, one clip made me laugh my arse off - 'Death to all but metal' by Steel Panther.

The Bomfunk MCs also made an appearance, with a track that was superfly when it came out, but now looks pretty dated. I still dig it.

I took a strategic nap at one point and then woke up to Pink Floyd - Echoes Part 1 (Live at Pompeii). It was an amazing way to wake up, and the perfect track for both the time of the morning. An excellent way to end the night.

Epic.

Now I'm going to finish watching Gran Torino and iron some shirts. Hardcore!

Cooking with Christopher Walken

Christopher Walken prepares Chicken on a Throne.

via Lifehacker.com.au

Morning music

A tune to listen to (and an awesome video clip to watch) before you've had your morning coffee.

This is Rippled by All India Radio, video clip by Oh Yeah Wow.

Mousey casualty

Awoke this morning to another sprung trap. Have left it in the trap while I'm at work as a warning to all his little mousey mates.

This brings the death toll to 11. If I ever get a cat, I'm not going to need to feed it.

War on mice

I’ve been at war with the mice now for around two months. They caught me unawares with an early Autumn offensive and gained a foothold in the house before I knew they were there. However, a swift and coordinated counter-offensive soon decimated mouse numbers in the house, and moved the front line to the garage. Much like the Gaza strip and the ruggedly beautiful region of Kashmir, the garage remains disputed territory.

The mice’s point of entry into the house is the internal door to the garage, which has a gap underneath it. I’ve since blocked this off with a makeshift doorsnake (aka a towel). This has stopped incursions into the body of the house, but needs to be replaced properly each time the internal garage door is opened to be effective.

Last Friday, I returned home after having a few drinks at the pub after work, and saw that the ‘doorsnake’ had not been replaced properly. I thought nothing of it at the time as I had far more pressing concerns – namely a full bladder. In the contemplative moments that followed while I addressed this concern, I realised that I was not alone in the WC.

A pair of beady eyes watched me from behind the toilet brush holder.

The eyes met mine and for a second we contemplated each other – me in a slight alcoholic haze and he with a look of pure mousey malice.  The situation gradually dawned on me and I let forth a manly bellow (which may also have been a girly scream, depending on your social construction of reality), at which point the little furry bugger made his move.

And it was a tricky move. He wasn’t keen on a dash for freedom. Instead he circled around behind me, making the safe assumption that for the time being, I would be immobilised in front of the lavatory. Unfortunately for the mouse, a lack of higher cognitive skills meant that he had not planned his next move. He ended up circling around behind the cistern, ending up in the same position behind the toilet brush holder.  

We were at an impasse.

I slowly backed out of the WC and quickly set about positioning traps around the toilet door. I retired smug in the knowledge that the mouse’s days were numbered.

Source: juliasegal.tumblr.com

Little did I know that I was facing my most devious mousey foe yet. The cold light of morning revealed that the bait was gone from the traps, but they had not been sprung. In horror, I checked all the traps in the house and found that the furry mastermind had managed to same trick on all of them. And he was still in the house.

The mouse triumphed that day. The war continues.

Things begin anew

I’ve started a new blog, because the old one had lost its purpose – its underlying purpose was always to vent about, inform friends about and celebrate the purchase and construction of my first home. Since settlement, that purpose is gone.

However, the blog was about 50 per cent house related and 50 per cent other things that I felt like sharing with the world. This last 50 per cent has been swirling around my head since we settled on the townhouse and this is my place to channel it into a new outlet.

Why the name? Well it was originally going to be ‘bleep bleep’, after listening to the Ratatat track ‘Mirando’ on the bus one morning (which, incidentally, has a sweet video clip which I’ve embedded below), but it turns out that name was taken.

So after some further thought and discussion with workmates (who seemed rather keen on an amalgamation of public service canon and my current war on mice - ‘frank and fearless admice’), I lifted this name from one of my favourite scenes in Spaceballs. Michael Winslow is a genius.

Thank you to Clare and Kat for your artistic guidance. I’m sorry my final option had nothing to do with anything either of you suggested.

The URL is, of course, a reference to a Monty Python sketch from the Meaning of Life, which always makes me think of my Uncle (who was a hospital administrator).

I look forward to sharing all the things that I like to share with the internet. Expect posts on:

• Music that I’m currently listening to;
• The war on mice;
• Gardening;
• Netball; and
• Random stuff from the internet.

I’m looking forward to it already.