"There is nothing more desperate than an Englishman frantically trying to scrape enough Marmite out of an empty jar to cover the other half of his slice of toast."

Me, just now

Just thought I'd share that

Round 3

The last one, I promise....

Round 2

Just me getting my ass kicked some more....

Very British....

Just got my passport renewed... Only the British could charge S$450 for a passport then only accept payment it cash (had to wander around trying to find a cash machine). Still it was much easier than renewing my passport in England. I was the only person there and the nice woman who took my form seemed glad of the company. I wouldn't have been surprised if they'd offered me tea and biscuits...

More strange photo fun....

Had another play around with HDR photography. This time I remembered to take a 'before' picture just using the regular night settings of my camera. I kind of like the results (full size pics here). I had to do a little photoshopping to get rid of the window frame which make a nasty line on the left side. I like the way the yellow safety screen is picked out in the HDR photo. I would like to darken the sky a bit, but I haven't worked out how to do that in Photoshop yet. Ok, so I also need to haul my ass outside and work on my composition, but still... I had a lot of fun taking them and playing with Photoshop.

Orchid fun....

I'm definitely getting old, I'm taking an interest in gardening.... I bought an orchid when I went to the Orchid Garden with Kat. They are pretty cool, they come as little babies (probably not the correct term), in little sterile tubes of food (looks a bit like a tube of fly food). I didn't get around to doing anything with it for about a month, but I finally found a pot for it at the weekend. I got a strange hydroponic type pot, which just has gravel in it (orchids don't need much food). There's a resevoir for water in the bottom (less chance of me forgetting to water it) and a string wick which draws water up into the gravel.











Not a great final pic, but the orchid doesn't really poke over the top yet....
I'm curious to know if/how long the orchid survives....

Safety advice?

I noticed this by the lift at work today... Admittedly the top part is pretty standard, but with the wheelchair picture I'm taking it to mean one of the following:

1. In the event of fire, handicapped people are screwed

2. In the event of fire, handicapped people should fling themselves down the stairs in their wheelchairs.... not sure if that's better or worse than then fire....

Facebook...

Read this on BoingBoing and thought I'd link to it as we were talking about Facebook and why I refuse to join which go along the lines of: I am not a 14 year old girl, I waste enough time already, hugging someone on Facebook doesn't do anything for me, I don't care what most of the people I have ever met in my life are doing right now (except my friends, who I prefer to exchange real communications with, even if it is infrequently).

Facebook will sink under the weight of socially obligated "friendships"

Didn't get to do any sparing today, not enough time. But what I did get was the movies which Marcus recorded of my fighting (getting my ass kicked) by Yang (a guy who I swear can fly)... I also discovered from watching the movies that the rounds are only one minute long... You can tell how knackered I was by then end of the first round because I'm wandering off to the wrong corner...

Round 1



Will try and upload the other two rounds tomorrow, this one took ages...

Gladiator...

Had great fun at Arnis last night. Went to both classes again (in a fairly suicidal way), but I was allowed to try sparing for the first time, which was lots of fun... Got dressed up in a huge helmet with a cage on the front an lots of neck padding, also got a groin guard and I was given a 'padded' stick. I have discovered the following:
1. The term 'padded' is relative, it still hurts when you get hit, although I was too knackered to notice.

2. Fighting is really hard work. We did 3x2 min rounds with 30 seconds break in between. I now have much more respect for boxers... It was one of the most tiring things I've done, much harder that the 45 min workout which we had to do before it (which probably didn't help).

3. Most of what I have learned during the lessons vanishes in the first 15 seconds and the whole thing rapidly degenerates into two 6 year olds with sticks (at least in my case).

4. It is surprisingly fun. I'm looking forward to doing it again. (once the bruises have gone down and my muscles have recovered).

5. Its really hard to take pictures of yourself to illustrate bruises...

Photo fun....

Starting playing around a bit more with my camera... lots of fun to be had, so many settings to use (understand). Also started experimenting with High dynamic range photography, which is a method for taking several photos at different exposures and combining them to get cool pictures. This isn't great first attempt (lots of funny reflections from my apartment window), but it was fun to try.... I like the fact that the pictures tend end up with strangely vivid colours.














Larger version

Feet

Apparently you're not a proper blogger until you've posted a picture of your feet... so here's mine

(and I was learning to use my new camera)

"I'd rather be a failure at something I enjoy than a success at something I hate"

George Burns

just another day at the umbrella farm

virtuous pain.....

Felt like i needed the extra work out last night so did both Arnis classes again.... I worked out that I did 200 press ups over the course of 3 hours... feel very manly to day, very old manly, I ache like hell and I'm hobbling around like a cripple.

Another tough day in the Rørth Lab

Why my lab are so wonderful...

Have been meaning to write a post about this for a while now, but have just got back from the kite place so it seemed like a good time. So, the story so far is that for my 30th my Lab (and Christian) got me an extremely cool (and very me) present of a remote controlled kite. Unless you've seen the people flying them here, that won't mean too much. It's designed and made by a Singaporean company called 'Go Fly Kite'. It is a fairly big kite, with a model airplane engine on the front. The really cool part is that it also has a whole load of LEDs (lights) all over it, and cos its built from carbon fiber it's really lite, so is very maneuverable. I've been lusting after one since I first saw the club that makes them flying them at night by the river. It looks like a scene from 'Close encounters of a third kind'. Lots of strange alien lights diving and swooping through the air.... Any how, having got it I'm very eager to fly it... so I went to the shop today to try and get a lesson (which they are happy to give). They suggested I try flying the simulator first (the controller plugged into a computer). I was kind of keen to try flying the real thing, but they effectively demonstrated that it is much harder than it looks. My simulator experience went like this.... {Adam makes plane take of with relative ease, plane turns, plane crashes into ground} repeat X times.

So spent a couple of hours hanging out at the shop today (which is cool cos they have big sofas and they're really chilled out and friendly). After much practice I can now make the simulated plane take off, fly around in all sorts of (unpredictable) patterns, and crash into the ground.... They managed to convince me that I shouldn't try the real thing until I could make some sort of landing.... (which is a good point, although they are happy to teach me how to repair broken kites....) Still it was lots of fun and they're happy for me to drop by anytime and practice/get advice and help until I'm ready to fly for real. (am at level 2 of 4). So hopefully with a bit more training I can fly for real next week. Until then, here are some pictures of my kite (as yet unnamed)

Just read....

Just finished reading 'The Raw Shark Texts' by Steven Hall. I really liked this book. I was slightly skeptical at the beginning, the protagonist wakes up lying on the floor with no memories and no idea who he is. He receives a series of messages from himself, with hints of who he is. He discovers from a psychiatrist that his girlfriend died in an accident and he lost his memory after this. I admit thinking at the start of the book that this was going to be somewhere between a book version of Memento and the Bourne Identity (neither of which would have been too bad). In fact the book rapidly takes several more Kafkaesque turns and gets pleasingly strange. I don't want to ruin the book by explaining it more, but it is really worth reading. I also love some of the type setting in the book. Which really adds to the feeling of it. Especially near the end (you'll know what I mean when you get to it).

Buy it, read it, share in the hallucination.

Artistic Genius....

Found this on BoingBoing. The new Guinness advert is amazingly good

Empty spaces...

Kat has gone back to Heidelberg, her absence is palpable...

Sentosa....

Went to Sentosa with Kat yesterday.... It was, on the whole, incredibly tacky... if Disney made an island it would look something like this. Here are a couple of Flickr sets to try and explain this....

First the trip there.... (not on the whole bad)

Then the tackyness of the the nature walk....

Finally Underwater World, which I actually really liked. Took lots of pictures here of strange creatures. Particularly liked the Sea Dragons (Like Sea horse, but cooler) I also really liked the Sea Angels, which I didn't manage to take pictures of, but were really beautiful... (and fluoresce)

Secret Ninja Training....

Kat and my Dad dropped into the end of my Arnis class on Sunday and had a good laugh at me. (This was also the day I decided to forget everything and hit myself in the head with my stick).... Here's the evidence

Kat found this in Melbourne....

Some grooming required....

Haven't shaved since I was 29.... just thought I'd share that...