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).