RobotBlogger

Brisbane has all sorts of weird and wonderful things about it. One of them is the weather.

i know...  I haven't done this in ages.   So much has been going on.   So much.  In case you haven't yet realized, life is complex and sad and wonderful and crazy and so much.  It's like when you surf a wave that's a little too big for you; exciting, scary, fun, wonderful, painful, sobering, enlightening.  Sometimes you ride it out like a hero, sometimes you crash.

Cleaning up some hard drive space, i ran into a bunch of videos from a few years ago.

GIANT manta ray. This guy was huuuge, our divemaster said 25 feet across. 

Months back, Brie bought me an a m a z i n g surfboard for my birthday. It's a Classic Malibu, by the legendary board shaper Peter White, up in Noosa. We were driving all over town looking for board shops, when we stumbled into the Custom Malibu shop and this interesting story.

Peter White still makes boards the old fashioned way - by hand. For over 20 years he's been carving foam blanks down into his world sought over board shapes. I met him in his shop, while looking for a longboard.

We got to talking, about boards, Australia, why we're here, videogames, all sorts of things. Eventually the conversation came back to boards. I wanted a longboard, but not an old-skool one, something like the modern take on a longboard. With a twinkle in his eye, Peter disappeared to the back and came out with something very special. A longboard indeed, but a strange one, one with channels - channels on a lonboard? - yes and a three fin tail. Very wide and thin, a huge nose scallop and that odd back end sporting a performance shortboard setup. Total frankenstein hybrid. Very cool.

On the stringer (balsa wood spine down the middle) where the board shaper writes the details and often signs the board, there was a curious extra addition:    "Mine"  This was Peter's board, one of his many experiments and evolutions, one of a number of arrows in his quiver so to speak, such is the luxury when you're a board shaper.

Needless to say, it was perfect. Better than perfect, it would be ages before i'm good enough to appreciate all the thinking and refinement this board has to offer, but i don't mind having the headroom.


Beautiful boards!

The other half of the operation, Janet White.

The epoxy shop - this is where the boards get their hard outer coating and graphics 


http://www.classicmalibu.com.au/

Labels: classic malibu, noosa, surfing

Fraser island, the worlds largest sand island. A UNESCO world heritage location with the purest dingoes in Australia and one of the cleanest freshwater lakes on the planet. You can polish jewelry and brush your teeth with the sand, it's that fine and clean (didn't try this...). It's accessible by 4x4 only, and somewhat rugged driving occurs inland, with the main 'highway' being a 100+ km long section of immaculate beach.

On our last day, the island was evacuated due to an incoming cyclone.

Dingoes. All over.


One of the giant sand dunes, with lonely trees


The haunting shipwreck


Some plant which looks cool with a camera stuffed in it


Sunset (i suspect, since i'm rarely up early enough and/or sober enough at that time to operate a camera)


Ok, this isn't actually Fraser.. it's the bit of land just on the other side where the ferry leaves from


Cyclone approaching


Time to leave...


Lake Mackenzie. One of the purest lakes on the planet. Crystalline blue pure water


Cane toad on the beach


Dingo, looking for trouble (or open cars with groceries)


This isn't actually Fraser either, it's on the mainland just on the other side, and i actually think it's famous. You know that road people drive down at the end of the movie when they drive into the sunset and roll credits? This is that road used for every movie, ever.


The Banksia only opens its seed casings during a fire. How perfect? The soil gets a bunch of nutrients and all the competition is gone. Nature = smrt


For an entry about Fraser island, there sure are a lot of non-Fraser island photos: This is the landscape by the ferries RIGHT NEAR FRASER


Ok this shot is actually of Fraser, and its endless beaches


A goanna. Smaller one, apparently. Sort of like a dinosaur, but without that chase scene in the kitchen


Dingo. (resists joke about baby)


The problem with camping is who will be in the site next to you
(NOTE: DVD player on chair. We jokingly watched nature videos for like 2 mins until the joke ran dry)


Sand islands are ALL SAND. That's basically the only way you get to be 'the worlds largest sand island'.
(NOTE: Road is made of sand)


Beautiful!


Are you honestly unsure how this tree got the name Strangler Fig ?


Little trail down to one of the many lakes


Photos don't really do this place justice....


Cyclones make big angry waves


These guys look all nice, but they're going to B&E the stereo out of that shipwreck


The main form of transportation


Aliens often land on Fraser Island. We hung out with them for a bit and they were all 'Take us to your leader' and we were all 'Whatever, pass the bottle opener' and it sort of ended on an awkward note.


Duststorm!



OK, here's the deal. Great white sharks live densely off the coast of Fraser Island. This was one caught a number of years ago. There's a permanent 'No Swimming' rule for the main ocean side, due to massive riptides and the likes of these lovely fishes. CAN YOU COMPREHEND THE SIZE OF THIS MONSTER?
(i've always wanted to start a daycare with the name 'Shark-Eyes Daycare, cold, calculated caring', but suspect it would bomb)


Bye Fraser, see you soon hopefully!

The video from Kirk and my GCAP talk in Melbourne has been uploaded to the innerwebs

Block 486 is a rare collection of ancient inland cedar trees.  They're estimated to be between 1000 and 2000 years old, and is the only known location of ancient cedars like this on the planet.If you want to know more, there's a great little documentary on it, and a few links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NRFsExiB5A

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7ifmA64Tck&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExHW3M5GSZQ

http://www.ancientcedar.ca/

It's been a while since i've blogganated. So many things have happened...  some of them are even bordering on interesting.   

Brie and i drove down to Byron bay today to meet some friends from work, and go for a snorkle / dive at a very small island offshore called Julian Rocks, followed by a lazy Byron Bay afternoon lounge on the beach. That was the plan, anyway. Things changed.

Since Brianna's scuba ticket got lost by the scuba shop in Vancouver (they lost mine too) we decided to snorkel while the others dove. Dived? Daven? As we were getting ready, one of the staff came by and said 'Are you sure you want to do this? the conditions are bad...' He continued to tell us that the swell was about 10 feet high, large waves crashing about, and that the snorkeling area was much smaller, due to safety and currents and to prevent you from getting smashed up against the rocks. It wasn't encouraging.

Brianna, wisely, immediately backed out.

Another couple decided to go ahead and do the snorkeling. Now that Brie wasn't going, i asked about converting my snorkel trip to a dive trip. I knew i was in the PADI dive system computer because i took a diving course way back in 1989 when i was barely a teenager. They found my license in the computer system and i got the go ahead to dive. It had been a couple of years since my last dive in French Polynesia... but i decided to do it. It all came back right away. Brianna had a good time cruising the used bookstores in Byron (great apparently) so it wasn't too bad we split up. It was a good thing she didn't go snorkeling... the waves were insane and it started storming and pouring with rain.

After the dive was done, swimming back to the boat i saw the two snorkelers in there huddling and depressed. The waves were so crazy and the ocean so rough, it must have been a horrible experience at the surface.

These aren't my photos, they are from this great website: http://www.julianrocks.net/
But, i did see all the these guys in the below photos!

Sea turtle:
















Blue Groper:


















Lots of Wobbegong sharks!






























Clownfish:

















Parrotfish:
















Redspot Wrasse:














Blue spotted stingray:
















Lots of stripeys:
















Yellow finned leatherjacket:
















Spotted boxfish:
















Spotted porcupine puffer! There was a HUGE guy which swam right up to me, looked at my face - i'm talking less than a meter away, and swam off. The guy was bigger than a loaf of bread. Cute!


















































Lionfish:



















Overall, a great dive!

Lots going on. Super busy not-sure-how-this-is-all-going-to-happen

1. Milestone at work: due next Wednesday
2. Serious amount of stuff to do before then
3. Giving an hour long talk to hundreds of people at the CGAP computer nerd festival in Melbourne on Friday. Only slightly begun the presentation. A good 6-7 hours left on getting it ready
4. Flying to GCAP on Thursday, staying till Monday, then to Sydney, Taipei and Vancouver
5. Need to pack and get ready for trip back (somewhere in there)

I guess i can sleep on the plane(s)!

Noosa, and the surrounding area, such a great place...
















Our car looks pretty fly with 2 surfboards on top, but not as dope as that blue ute in the background!
















Sunset fishing











The subtle blue tones of twilight
















Who is this little guy?
















Flashlights in the sand














Gradients... Even when you copy the exact warm and cool colours in CG, you never get it to look quite like this















The stars shine big and bright in..... Noosa

Brie and i took Crispin and Zoe to the Noosa beaches today. We had a grand time relaxing in the sunshine and did a little boogy boarding. We weren't alone. The ocean was full of Portuguese Man 'o Wars.

So here's my thinking. Ok, this is Australia, this is a very BLUE thing from the ocean, i bet it's dangerous.

I picked up two with the strap from my boogyboard and took them over to show Brianna and Zoe.

Deeply blue, strange and wonderfully bizarre creatures. They were all over the beach, everywhere.

Back at our beach umbrella, i took one of our empty water bottles, flushed it out and filled it with seawater. We put the little blue guys into the large mouthed water bottle. They were alive!

Now, people seem in contradiction about these blue monsters. Some websites say that they've never caused a human death, other websites say that they have. Some say to treat the sting with cold water, some say hot water! What everyone agrees about is what the stings are like: 'Excruciatingly painful'
'Exceedingly painful'
'Intense pain may be felt from a few minutes to many hours and develops into a dull ache which then spreads to surrounding joints'

Lovely. A beach littered with thousands of sudden intense pain contraptions, and nobody says a word.

Miraculously, these things aren't a single creature, they're a gang of different gizmos called zooids, all living and working together. The air sac / sail to help it float, a stomach thing, the deadly stinger strands which can grow to 10 meters long. Somehow they all get together and hit the seas in search of paralyzing small fish and other innocent sea creatures.

The air sac secretes a slime to neutralize the evil toxins of the stinger. This slime works very well, apparently, to neutralize stings. So if you get stung by rubbing against one, rub some other part of it then rub that on you to solve the problem. Sure!

A few times, every once and a while, someone will ask 'Have you ever seen a bear in Canada?' 'Oh yeah,' i tell them. 'A few times.. Had a run-in with one once and it was pretty scary, but they're basically just big and black and run away. Up north the Grizzlies are much worse, but you don't see them much.' By then the question asker has pretty big eyes and seems to be pretty surprised that, you know, we dare to go outside with bears hanging around.

Surprised about a handful of bears in the deep forest, when there's thousands of little blue torture landmine globs sprinkled all over the beaches - and that's just one of the many zillions of excessively potent death creatures lurking about.

Here's some shots of the eclipse from the other night. Fun times!

When it was fully eclipsed, it had such a surreal 3D look, like it was going to fall out of the sky!

Click here for full size high resolution image

This link was given, with the statement: 'No pressure'

http://www.gameconnectap.com/speakers.html

(scroll down)


We have to entertain and stimulate a bunch of computer nerds? What do computer nerds like? Aren't they choosy and all particular? Crikey...

Ok, Melbourne photos are up. Wonderful city. I can blather on about how it's a real city (stores are open past 5 on a Saturday (the gating factor between a town and a city), there's decent public transit, etc.)

Brie - sometimes mentions that i use 'too much' punctuation in my written dialog; excessive dashes - 'misuse of 'quotations'' etc., but i think it's part of my *style* :) Anyways, have a look at the Melbourne pix.

....We're writing songs right now. Lazy sunday, glass of white wine and a pile of keyboards. Things have been worse....

So we've been a bit busy in the studio. Two projects: Recording a singer songwriter Mike S 'Unsung Heroes', and doing a remix of a Dntel track. Dntel is a member of Figurine, The Postal Service, and is one of the founders of microhouse. While i'm not fond of the name, i do dig some glitch, and find some of the early microhouse stuff to be great to work to. Isolee in particular has some fantastic stuff and is a favorite of mine. It reached #3 for all of Metacritic in 2005 - pretty surprising for glitch techno.

Recording Mike was a lot of fun. We did all the tracks live, and it only took a few takes. Our live/recording room is pretty wet and bouncy with the 10 meter ceilings, so i decided to mix in some stereo ribbon mics in a secret configuration for a bit of a live/ambiance sound. The vocals are through a tube condenser mic, which i've heavily modified (surprised it works still!). He's got 4 more tracks which we're in the middle of working on. They're freakin awesome. Mike has such a great voice.

Here's the first track Beautiful

The Dntel track is a bit of a downer. The original is about a washed-up rockstar, unhappy with friends and life in general. We only took the vocals from the original and added everything else. Listening to it again, i'd change 1000 things... What's that saying? 'Art isn't finished, it's abandoned' ...? This is like that i guess. Brie did a great job on all the keyboards, my guitars however are a bit nasty...

Dntel 'Dumb Luck' AdamandBrie_mix

Next up: Finish Mike's tracks. Get him a tidy demo together. Then continue some AdamandBrie remixes, as well as some stuff from another project called 'Viscount' which is.. well.. i'm not sure exactly how that is going to turn out yet... and isn't that all the fun?

Ok, this is like so totally out of order. Brie and i are in Melbourne, an utterly fantastic city. There's been a number of things to blog about, but i'll have to get to them after this, for this is Melbourne and it's worth blogging about right now.






Australian cities are hard to describe, and that might be what's so special about them. LA is like LA, Vancouver like Vancouver, NYC, London, Paris, San Fran, Istanbul, Berlin - dare i say Naniamo, like their respective Naniamos. The peas and carrots don't touch that much, each one rather unique and separate.



Then there's Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. I'll leave Sydney and Brisbane for now, so let's talk Melbourne, since i'm here and it's new and fun.

I sort of sat here for a sec trying to make a metaphor for what Melbourne is like. Thinking about mixtapes, and fashion and TV dinners and how 'the remix' has been the core component of fashion and music since the 90's. Melbourne was around before the 90's, i'd guess, and it was likely appreciated before then too. Funny how it foreshadowed the remix before there even was a mainstream the-remix.

Should any Melburnian be reading this, it shouldn't startle to think that this might be offensive. San Fran is like Melbourne! To be sure, it works that way around also. Everything is relative. I'm just speaking from my personal frame of mind.









What the hell do i mean by this. I mean, Melbourne is like a compilation album, a greatest hits, a mix of familiar things from all over in one package. Familiar and new somehow at the same time. One minute it feels a bit like London, then like San Fran, then like Vancouver - you know - until a parrot flies by or you notice that towering palm tree.

They kept their trams










Brie on a bridge










Hey look! I'm growing a pole out of my head!







More to come...

Curtis and Rachel came to visit, from Vancouver.

It was great to see them, and as an event for while they were here, we rented a big house on the beach in Noosa, which is a very beautiful location.

We went surfing, saw giant spiders, had bar-b-ques, lounged around the pool, etc.

There's a bunch of photos on Robotbreeder.com, but i'm not going to share a direct link here, since there's many embarrassing ones, which don't need further advertising.

If you're a friend, and want a fun trip with surfing and houses on the beach, let me know, and i'll arrange it. It's paradise 4000.

I use a Wiki every day at work. They're great collaborative ways to share information. Who isn't addicted to Wikipedia.org?

So can anyone really add stuff to Wikipedia.org? I think so. I added that scary spider shot, of Mr. Nephila Pilipes, and some of the foxbat shots - i mean, Pteropus Pampyrus.

I guess if they don't take them down, then yes, it is that easy to contribute.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephila_pilipes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pteropus

Every night


Down this river
















Past our window
















Fly thousands of these











They're fruit bats, or foxbats, and they're almost as big as cats, with wingspans almost as large as an ironing board. The descend on Brisbane every night and eat the fruit from the trees right outside our window.

Many more pictures here

OMFG. This is a Golden Orb Weaver spider. It was in the back yard of a house we rented near the beach in Noosa (more on that later)

Ok, i'm not exaggerating, this thing is 8" across. Larger than a side plate. Bigger than a CD - quite a bit bigger - if it stretched it's legs out, it would be the size of a frisbee. It struck fear and terror into my bones, more than anything else has, perhaps ever.

Luckily, they're not poisonous. They're gentle giant, giant spiders. Very interestingly, they have one of the strongest web compound materials on the planet, and they maintain their giant webs for years. This guys particular web was the size of a small trampoline, strung between two trees which were far enough apart to drive a car through.

More on the web strength - it's one of