I’m feeling a little bit Italian, right now. Not much, but just a bit.
This morning I made myself and housemate espresso before getting the bus down to the Office, where we have devotions with the office people 3 times a week.
Then for lunch, I had a mozzarella and sun-dried tomato panini, from the local “Sandwhich club” which Euan and a bunch of others often get lunch from to bring back to the Shed.
Then for dinner, I made lasagne. Myself, I kind of like this whole cooking thing. Especially when I remember to not try and burn down the house (I’ll tell you about it later…), and don’t squish eggs in mid air all down the side of the cupboards and on the floor, and also when I don’t by accident tip the slice of cheese-on-toast over and dump hot cheese all over the base of the oven.
Yes, all of those have happened this week. I’ll explain later, but right now I want to talk about my lasagne, as it really was quite OK-ish, maybe. I’m always terrifed about making food for people. But it’s one of those “I’m scared because I’m scared” things, rather than “I’m scared for a good reason” things. And I’m trying to learn to (a) tell the difference, and (b), ignore the first kind of scaredness.
Well. I thought the Lasagne was alright.
Anyway. He did have seconds, so it can’t have been *that* bad.
And he did say he wasn’t hungry really, before eating.
Maybe that’s cos I’d said I’d never made lasagne before, and he’s seen all the other chaos of the kitchen I’ve had this week.
Anyway. So at the end of the lasagne, post washing up, what’s the first thought to my mind? Well, after the Espresso, Panini and Lasagne filled day, only one thing remains!
No, it’s not a good red wine. I wish we had some for dinner too, but we didn’t. It is, of course,
Gelato!
OK, so we don’t have any Italian icecream in the house, but we do have some old random English ice cream which past housemates have left.
And I have an espresso machine.
So, Hot frothy chocolate, and icecream! What a way to finish the day.
My otherwise quite unflappable very German
amused-in-a-quiet-way-at-Daniel’s-cullenary-insanity housemate is truly
shocked at the idea, and tells me I will explode one of these days.
All that sweet stuff right before bed.
Maybe he’s right.
Those Germans can be quite sensible, at times.
Nevertheless,
“Shiver me timbers!” I cry, and reach for the chocolate sauce!
It’s been a while since I posted any photos here, so here are a few choice pics for your enjoyment, and for the general visualness of this blog.
So, because of the whole coffee obsession thing that’s going on right now, here is the first ever coffee-type thing which I managed to get out of the machine:
Kind of bleh… Which is why I moderately proudly present:
Cappuccino! Well, almost. It tastes better than it looks. And, being a computer image obsessive person as well, I had to play with the colours. Dunno if it makes it look any better, or worse, but it was fun, anyway:
I always knew a few people who loved trains. I even knew one or two people who built model rail-ways at home, usually in some deserted far off loft or study.
I’ve suddenly discovered, much to my surprise, that this is not one or two isolated individuals, but in fact apparently a large percentage of the male population of this part of the UK.
I never expected to learn that.
They call themselves Anoraks, and about a third of the people I’m working with belong to this group.
OK, So trains can look quite cool, and I am working with the media and computers team of the company, so it’s no surprise, I suppose, that you find a higher pecentage of people here with high IQ / arcane / obscure hobbies…
But it’s not just little nerdy geeks with glasses wandering around with notebooks and flasks of tea getting all excited about 7.25" gauge K1 engines and 1937 liveries, it’s a lot of guys, of every background, upbringing, shape, size, character and personality.
We had finished setting up for one of those J.John conferences, and were hanging out round the back waiting for it to be time to start, when this anglican vicar looking bloke wandered up, and they all ended up chatting about trains.
And all the rest of the guys too: those few who don’t have a thing about machines that roll around the place on parallel tracks get excited by all kinds of other things.
There’s a bloke here who gets very excited about trucks, vans, busses, and other large automobiles.
When I say “excited”, I mean in the kind of “eyes light up, bounces up and down and starts talking animatedly and waving his arms around” kind of way.
And he’s not a tiny geek. He’s an (roughly) 8 foot tall construction yard manager from London.
I watched two guys across the room at a pizza evening last week. They were discussing the intricacies of the AT command set, and the fun to be had trying to fix router systems by logging in backwards through a modem to solve networking problems.
Let’s turnout to a diverging track for a few moments, and I’ll see if I can work us back to this rail at the next set of points.
I went out yesterday an bought a whole load of books at charity shops. I finally got a copy of St. Augustine’s confessions.
“Even now I cannot fully understand why the Greek language, which I learned as a child, was so distasteful to me… "
I found this sentence funny, in itself, but lets keep reading for a while, and a few pages later get to this:
“For I understood not a single word and I was constantly subjected to violent threats and cruel punishments to make me learn.
“As a baby, of course, I knew no Latin either, but I learned it without fear and fret, simply by keeping my ears open while my nurses fondled me and everyone laughed and played happily with me.
OK, after that huge long ramble about my personal life, now a bit about work.
Written almost a week ago, which is a bit confusing for me reading it now, but the internet has been sketchy.
I’m quite busy. In a good way, I think. We’ve got these conferences of J.John, which are kind of messing up everyone’s schedule down in the shed. Basically it’s every Tuesday and Wednesday, in 2 different cities. So we send crew down Tuesday morning at 6am or so, rig all day, gig in the evening, pack down, finished by about 2am or so, then the same again the next morning, finishing everything and back to Carlisle at around 3amish.
This week was week 3, out of 10, and was my first time on crew. The team leaders here had figured out a complex scheme to try and reduce the load on the crew, by sending different shifts of people from Carlisle, so that no-one had the complete 2 days of 6-am to 3-am, which is kind of killer. Anyway, I was in the car that shuttled down at 6am on Wednesday, arrived about 10 past 8, rigged all day, did the conference/thing, de-rigged, and then came back. I got dropped off home at around 4am.
I was expecting to be doing graphics, mainly using a programme called songpro (evil programme. the latest incarnation which they have here is even more evil than the old version we have on the ship…) for displaying lyrics on the screens during the singy bit and also some titles and playing videos too. The guy who was supposed to be doing the graphics the first day, however, didn’t go back to Carlisle, but instead stayed on for the second day, and said it made no sense for him to no do graphics, since he knew how it would all work with the band and everything, and so could get it perfect.
Not everyone from the first day crew, however, came back the second day, so I ended up “shading”. I hadn’t been shown yet how that all worked, but had a basic idea. At the most basic level, shading is kind of just doing changing the Iris levels, gamma and blacks and colour correction live on the cameras, from the OB truck, during the whole show, so that cutting between shots it looks the same, and so that the image on screen looks good and is “Legal” TV levels all the time. So once we’d rigged, I spent as much time as possible playing with the controls, figuring it all out.
I also had a bit of time before the event to play with the Jib a bit. Now that’s fun. I thought the crane on the cranedeck was multi-tasking while swinging a big stick around. Well, the jib is even more complex, as not only do you have the big stick, but you have a *lot* of people sitting around underneath it, and have various screens and stuff to not bash into while swinging the big stick around, and also all the usual pan/tilt controls for the camera at the end of the big stick, and Zoom and Focus as well.
One of the things I love about the “Peanuts” cartoons are the tiny little things that I love. If that makes sense. For instance, this one thing I love about the Peanuts cartoon, is Snoopy’s book that he writes occasionally “Has it ever occurred to you that you might be wrong?” as part of the whole debate thing with Lucy. I love those books.
Anyway.
Has it ever occurred to you that you might be mad?
It’s been of late the rather disagreeable experience of mine to have occurring to me with disturbingly increasing regularity the possibility that I myself might be in a somewhat insanitous state.
I challenge anyone to diagram that sentence, and send me the picture…
Insanitous sounds rather unhygienic, but it’s not. I just mean “mad”, in a slightly more complex way of speaking.
To take simpler mode of address, I’ll quote Freddie Mercury:
“It’s finally happened, I’m slightly mad.”
Anyway, the current evidence I have towards this conclusion is The Strange Affair Of The Coffee Maker In The Daytime.
I feel remarkably Adrian Plassish as I type this, in a “this is dead serious to me, but I get the feeling people will laugh at me about it, because it’s so stupid…” sort of way. Like his paper-clip story.
Settle back, gentle reader, and prepare thyself for an epic journey into the mind of one convinced that he is no longer all quite there.
It all began like this…
This house is great. I’m really enjoying living here. right now, I’m sprawled across one of the *three* sofas in the living room, with my laptop, and a pot of Earl Grey tea.
Seriously, how can life get more chilled out than this?
What could there possibly be to complain about?
Well, there’s no internet at home. Is this a bad thing? Well, kind of. But also, it does stop me spending inordinate amounts of time online, which I did over the whole furlough, to my shame. 3 months to rest and do anything, and most of the time I spent online. Silly. So, it’s probably a good thing that I’m not online here, and can just write emails that I need to write, and then send them from the Shed. And spend the rest of my time at home cooking, reading, playing clarinet, and exercising. Oh, and sleeping, of course.
Secondly. And far more seriously. There is no coffee maker here.
I say it again, for emphasis.
There. Is. NO. Coffee. Maker. Here!!!
Shocking! But true!
There is a kettle, and a teapot, and plenty of instant coffee, of the “Fair Trade” and the “Nescafe” varieties - both of which are vile - but a brewed mug of the real stuff? Not a chance.
So, how can I solve this crisis, I wondered, then had the brainwave: I can buy a coffee maker.
In the UK they have this really weird store called Argos, where everything is in this funny HUGE catalogue that you can get, and then you write down the item order numbers, or SKU or something, give it to the clerk, and it gets brought in to you via conveyor belt, or so. No browsing around the store, just the catalogue.
What ho, blog. It’s me, the author of this blog, writing again. I do that, every so often, you know.
I’m sitting in my house feeling very domestic, and kinda lonely.
House did I say? Yes indeed. It’s a fair sized place, 3 bedrooms, dining room, kitchen, sitting room, bathroom, etc, etc. And only 2 of us living here at the mo. And my housemate is frequently gone, filming abroad or doing a bunch of conferences for “J John”. I’ll be helping with that from next week.
Anyway, I’m feeling very domestic as I just made meself a slightly over-large mexican meal, so feel kinda stuffed, and have done the washing up, and have a load of washing in the machine, making churney sorts of noises at me, as those machines have a want to do.
I’ve been here in Carlisle for about 6 days, and it’s been a very random week. I arrived Tuesday evening, and this dutch bloke, one of my new colleagues, gave me a quick tour of ’the shed’ where we work (an old bus hanger that they’ve taken over and have a bunch of OB-trucks (Outside Broadcast), busses, and so on and offices in.
My housemate, and most of the people who work in ’the shed’ were out doing the first of these conferences for J John, and so were not around. So I was wandering around this house, making myself at home, buying fruit and stuff, in someone elses house, whom I’d never met. Weird feeling, to be sure!
Wednesday and Thursday we had a set of “fund raising training” seminars we had to attend, with the whole staff of our company here in Carlisle (quite a lot, about 30 or so), and a few others from other groups about the place. So that was lots of sitting around and classroom stuff, basically.
The conference people had got back very early Thursday morning, and were asleep most of the day, but then we met up that evening, and basically most of the single guys who work at the shed came and invaded our house, we cooked some pizza, and watched a stupid rubbish movie.
(If anyone offers to watch “You, me, and Dupree”, don’t. It’s a waste of time, vulgar, and so totally down-the-line american comedy it’s just not funny. Virtually no american comedies are really funny, but this one is just resoundingly boring. About the *only* redeeming feature, and this doesn’t by any way redeem so far as to make it worth while, is that the young married couple don’t get a divorce, decide at the end to stick togeather, and that their guy friend doesn’t have sex with either of them. Bleh.)
Hey, the pizza was alright.
Friday was my first “real” work day, I got myself a tiny wee office, have a funky mac book pro to work on, with Final Cut Pro Studio on it, and was editing/top and tailing the footage from the J John conference, so we can make a DVD and sell this week’s talk at next week’s conference. This is apparently going to be one of my tasks while I’m here. Not too difficult, but took me waaaaay longer than it should have done. I guess I’m just out of practice, and trying to get my bearings in the office, and all. I’ll get the footage from this week on Thursday, so hopefully can get this one finished a lot faster.
As well as the Cairo Curse, I’m also having to put up with the Curse of Being a Web Designer.
That is to say, never being happy to leave something well enough alone.
Anyway, on this machine the blog looks fairly happy now, using the new blogger template system, and some new stuff I’m playing with.
Some random geek knowledge for you:
The traditional/oldschool method of introducing new technologies/research, or protocols for public use was to write an “RFC” or “Request For Comments”.
Basically those were (usually) longish documents available online freely, waaay back even on ARPANET, and have shaped the internet as we know it today.
More information about RFCs can be found on the wikipedia.
What was the reason for this brief history lesson?
Well, none at all, really. Except that I would like to request comments on the new theme / style of this blog. Any comments?
(yes, I know the images are missing from the side-bar. I’ll try and code a new sidebar image thingy tomorrow in perl or something so I can get the more modern pics too…)
Well, we’re back in Cyprus. Egypt was fun, I like Cairo. I don’t like the Cairo Curse however.
The Cairo Curse is the euphamism for a local stomach bug which quite a few people seem to get.
I got it. Woke at 4am on the day we were travelling back, and wished I hadn’t. Not a very pleasant day, all in all. Anyway, I’m mostly recovered, I guess. Still don’t feel to wonderful, and realised today I leave Cyprus in 7 days. So that means I have a heck of a lot of stuff to do.
So I started doing the ones I can manage without leaving my room, speaking, or walking too far. Such as updating my blog to the new blogger template system… Alas, it’s all going a bit pear-shaped right now, and as I have to finish making a slideshow for tonight (I’m doing a Doulos presentation thingy at the Anglican church “upper room”, if anyone sees this and is interested, 7pm, all welcome….), and the template thingy didn’t quite back up all as I wanted it to, it may take a bit longer for me to update to the new template than I hoped.
So if the site looks a bit of a mess at the moment, I’ll get it fixed and pretty for tomorrow.
OK, so here’s the project I did yesterday and this morning for fun. I like keynote.
It’ll be much better, the timing is rubbish, and audio isn’t very good, and the graphics are in need of much work, but I’ll be away for the next 4 days, so I’m sure the vast community of brummieatsea readers will tear it to pieces by the time I’m back.
(may or may not work. try again if it doesn’t. Google video doesn’t seem so reliable with this for some reason)
I’ve found that blogger has kindly been putting my photos I upload here to the blog into a “Picasa Web Album.”. Wasn’t that kind of them? So, it’s possible to look at all the pics in one place. Very spiffy.
It also can do flash slideshows and all sorts. So I’ll be playing with that. I need to update this blog design a bit anyway. I also will try and write a perl script to make the picasa album appear as the old fliker one does in the sidebar ->.
I don’t have much time left in Cyprus. We’re going as a family to Egypt this evening, for 4 days, and then after that I leave about 5 days later. Kind of scary how fast time has flown.
Then it’s off the UK for 2 months, then to Doulos.
Here’s another couple of boat/sailing sketches. The one on the left could be a Wayfarer, but the one on the right is way bigger.
I’ve been trying to make a video about Doulos to show later this week (once I’m back from Egypt) to people, and will probably post some of that later on.
I’m not very happy with Apple right now.. I had to reinstall the computer *again*. That’s like 7 times since I got back from Doulos. Why? Well, many of the times is not Apple’s fault, it’s true. I did replace the hard-drive, with a bigger one. That was moderately monstrous. They really hide those hard-drives well inside the poor laptops. Virtually impossible to get out. Anyway, the reason I had to this time was because I upgraded to Leopard, but alas, half my software doesn’t work properly with it. It’s a much nicer OS than tiger (looks-wise, but also technology like Quick-View, Spaces, and so on.
The version of Garageband that came with my laptop (only 3 years ago) doesn’t work with Leopard. I’m supposed to pay for the upgrade, which I’ve read may not work on this old a mac. This old?! Good grief.
Then Final Cut Express 4 doesn’t capture video properly on Leopard. It does about 3 mins, and then freezes.
Also Protools doesn’t work (even though I don’t have a copy, we were using it at the office for the show of Esther audio last month, and had to keep a Tiger machine around to use it…).
Anyway.
However, Apple Keynote is a very nice programme. I’ve used it to make some presentations, about Doulos, and now I’m actually working on an animation about the ship. It’s so basic, for animation. Almost too basic, I think I’m kind of pushing it’s limits, but it works. Once I’m done, I’ll post the video here.
I really have so little time left, and so many ideas and projects I wish that I’d spent more time in. Part of me feels really worried that I’ve wasted this time, and not used it as I could. On the other hand, I have this other either lazy, or else wiser, part of me saying
I’d like to spend a few minutes waxing lyrical about ArtRage2.
This is one of the coolest programmes I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a computer art / painting package, is relatively cheap ($25 USD), and very easy to use. Here are a few of my latest works:
Which is my dad and I sailing, on his boat. (Wayfarer, MK2). And…
I feel kinda homesick for the big ol’ rust bucket named Doulos. Both from memory, (well, I did check the number on the sail for the wayfarer, and I did have to check where the name was painted on in relation to the Anchor (sad!), but other than that, no ref. photos or anything.)
