Holiday...celebrate...

Ugh. Hung over. Still excited, but more subdued.

Waiting for the sheets to dry before I can go to bed. Here's what's been occupying me for the last three minutes or so...

Neeeeeeerdcore.

Tilt shift moves can be freaking awesome.

Home alone tonight with the cat while Dana is interstate for work, so naturally I'm up late on the internet scouring all the tubes for interesting bits and pieces. The cat is ensconced in his box next to the screen. The bird noises in the above video drove him crazy.

Heh, silly cat.

Good night.

Morning tune

To any fans of drum and bass who haven't checked out Calyx & Teebee's All or nothing album, you need to get on it.

OH HAI

What up internet? Don't you love Fridays. Here's the soundtrack to my morning.

It's a freaky freaky cat video, Bowie.

By cyriak (via Boing Boing)

Interactive architechture

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

PERSPECTIVE LYRIQUE from 1024 on Vimeo.

Got the sucka



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.

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:

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!

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.

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.