:: aaron-77.com ::

Our Christmas present arrived

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 07:38:00 +0000

Our storage unit was installed today. :)

Well, it's not really our Christmas present as such, it just happened to be ready in time for Christmas - we've been meaning to get one since we moved in (can't believe it's been a year and a half already) and finally started the process back in October.

One of the stipulations imposed by body corporate was that the wall behind the unit - which is made of open bricks for air flow - needed shade cloth installed on the outside to prevent anything like possums etc from getting in behind the unit. We've already had one possum crawl into a small space in the garage and then die, leaving behind a not-so-pleasant smell that took a while to locate.

So as the unit was being installed, I attached the shade cloth. I wasn't looking forward to doing this because it was not as easy as it sounds:

Obstacle #1: I had to drill 30+ holes into brick.

Obstacle #2: The shade cloth started over 6 feet off the ground.

Obstacle #3: The ground was on a slope, so the ladder needed a chunk of wood under one leg.

Obstacle #4: There were several trees and other miscellaneous plants in the way.

Obstacle #5: A 6-inch PVC pipe ran along the wall, anchored every 2 meters or so.

The building manager loaned me a few tools for the task, such as a ladder, a hammer drill, a crow bar to lever the pipe off the wall, and some chunks of wood to level the ladder off and hold the pipe away from the wall while I slid the shade cloth under it.

I must have moved the ladder at least a dozen times between the only two places I could fit it amongst the plants. On top of that, I'd say I climbed it several dozen times - I'd set it up at one spot, climb up, realise I forgot the drill, go back for it, get back to the top, then realise the masonry anchors were still at the other end, up too high to reach, meaning I'd have to move the ladder and start over again.

6 hours later, I was finally finished, completely exhausted, drenched with sweat, and feeling a little light headed. I managed to only have one close call with falling off the ladder, and only had one very minor injury when I forgot the hammer was on the ladder - I went to move the ladder and got quite a rude shock when the hammer literally landed on my head. :S

I'm so relieved it's done, but I can barely lift my arms right now. I dread to think what I'll feel like tomorrow :/

Anyway, here's the photos of how it turned out, starting with the storage unit itself.

Dexter is dead. Long live Dexter.

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 11:46:00 +0000

"Dexter" - my MacBook Pro - died early this morning.

I put him to sleep last night, and when I got up this morning, he refused to wake up. The power light would come on, the DVD drive would make a sound, then the light would go out again.

I tried all the reset procedures, with no luck. So today I dropped him off for repairs, and strangely enough, I'm hoping a dead hard drive is to blame.

I'm hoping this is the case because I'd imagine a hard drive is fairly quick and easy to replace. Of course, at the same time, I'm also hoping my Time Capsule backup works!

So for now I'm back using my old G5 Powermac. It's actually not as slow as I remember it. I'm glad that I hadn't got rid as I was thinking of doing: I haven't used it for a few months now because a) it consumes a lot of power, even when turned off, and b) it can't run Snow Leopard.

Maybe if I wish really hard, and be good all day tomorrow, Santa will bring me a shiny new laptop for Christmas! (though I hear Santa already spent all his money on a storage unit for his parking space)

New design

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 10:58:00 +0000

A week or so ago I started messing around with a test page to learn a few more things about CSS, and to see if I could manage to make a nice-looking, XHTML-compliant page that looked exactly the same in all the popular browsers. After gradually messing with it more and more, I got to liking the simplicity of the page. A few minutes in Photoshop gave it a bit more colour, and I was sold.

And that's what you see here right now.

Technically, I believe the design itself is completely XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.1 compliant, but the code I use for on the Photos page (Frontbox) seems to throw a CSS error or two, and basically none of my blog posts from Blogger do not comply with XHTML (especially all the embedded Youtube videos). Ideally I'd like to fix that, but it would be too much of a pain. At least this worked as a proof of concept that I may actually be able to make a fully compliant site. :)

Once the design was ready, it still took a few days of work to get it to play nicely with Blogger. In the end, I had to make a Blogger classic template that actually builds a PHP script with the content hard-coded into a few variables. This data file is included when the site is rendered, so that the recent entries etc down the right are always there, and always up to date.

Another change I made was to use the Smarty template engine to keep the data and layout separate. It's the first time I've used Smarty, and it was pretty easy to write all the templates necessary, so it's definitely something I may use again in the future.

The last part of the re-design was to include a Photos page, which pulls data from my Picasaweb albums via RSS. I'd done this over on travellingoakeys.com so it came together pretty quick.

The only thing I still need to sort out is the comments on the blog entries. Hopefully that's not too hard.

I think that's enough tech talk for the night. I hope you like the new design.

Update: I've fixed the CSS validation issues with Frontbox :D Also, you can verify my site is XHTML compliant by validating the Sites page. Just for that, I'm displaying the compliance badges on the right over there -->

The Gate To Hell

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 02:02:00 +0000

Just found this online: Derweze, which is Turkmen for "The Gate".

It's a crater left by geologists exploring the area in 1971. During drilling, a natural gas cavern collapsed, leaving a crater around 50-100 meters across. The fire was to burn off any potential poisonous gases, and it's been burning ever since.

Here's a couple of videos of it:

Very cool/freaky :)

(found at Boston.com)

This is how I roll

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 11:56:00 +0000

I had my first game of Dungeons & Dragons today, and it turns out that it's actually pretty fun.

Drew, our Game Master for the day, is an old hand at it - he even met his wife while playing D&D, so it can't be as nerdy as we all picture it to be. :)

To start off with, we picked our characters out pretty much at random - I picked mine based off the big grin he had in the picture. Anyone that happy's gotta be a bit of fun to play, right?

Then the rolling started

My first few rolls were HORRIBLE. I'm talking 2's and 3's on a d20 (20-sided dice, numbered 1-20). I think in the first encounter I didn't hit a single target. My one saving grace was that my character has excessive amounts of armour. I may not have hit anything, but nothing was able to hit me.

In fact, over the next couple of encounters, my character shrugged off so many hits that when we all started drawing little caricatures of our characters, this is how I drew mine:

He ended up with the nickname "The Mailbox" because so few attacks got through that he might as well have been wearing a big mail box for armour. You can see he's named his long sword "Giselle", and as day turned into night (in real time, not in the game) Giselle started to inflict some very handy damage on a few key targets.

After about 3 encounters - one quite epic - for around 9 hours of playing, we finally came to a bit of a break in the game and called it a day. One of the memorable moments of the day was when this happened:

The guy in the whale had run away from the encounter to warn a couple of other guys, so he was outside the playing area. We'd written beside him (the table had a plastic cover over it so we could write on) his damage taken: 11. Then Haley drew the circle around him so we wouldn't forget that was his damage. From there, Ash & I added the rest to make him "beached as".

The funniest moment of the day, though, was when we were in the town, and Curt was asking every NPC where the hookers were. After unsuccessfully ending his search for hookers in the tavern, he said "oh well - I'll roll for epic dance moves instead". As it happened, at this exact moment Ash was in the middle of having a drink of beer, and after making some choked sounds and going very red in the face only barely stopped himself from snorting beer out his nose. :D

So in the end it was rather fun. Between the beached guys, the rolling for epic dance moves, characters named "Prof. George Phelps" "Dr Pronto" and "Poochie", and crucifix-wearing mailboxes wielding large swords named Giselle, I have to admit that I am rather looking forward to my next D&D session. :)

Some things I saw walking home

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:04:00 +0000

During my commute home today I saw a gold stretch Hummer with the number plates "24CT H2". There were probably a dozen people inside listening to (and singing along with, if you can call it that) Nelly's "Must Be The Money". I wonder if they knew how much like douches they looked.

Then on the ferry, I saw a woman with a hair do shaped like the aliens' heads from Mars Attacks. It was quite freaky, and she even had that look in her eyes too. Needless to say I was among the first to get off the ferry (so that I could get home and blog about it)

New server

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:06:00 +0000

After a few months of putting it off, I've moved this site across to a new server.

All seems to be going smoothly so far...

Awesome fight scene

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:11:00 +0000

I'm quite the fan of kung fu movies - Jackie Chan and the like - and this has to be the most awesome fight scene since Kung Fu Hustle:

It's a single, 4-minute steadycam shot, with henchmen flying everywhere. Must have taken an epic amount of choreographing, which would have included the cameraman.

It's from a movie called "The Protector." Will have to see if I can find this movie somewhere to check out the whole thing.

2 years

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:33:00 +0000

Last week (tuesday to be exact) was 2 years to the day since I ruptured my achilles.

In some respects, I can't believe it's been that long, but in others I can't believe how much has happened since then.

The achilles feels pretty good nowadays. It's definitely not as good as it was before, but I'm sometimes amazed how well I can walk given the injury and the fact that it healed on its own.

I'm still a little weary of it, but I'm able to do most things unimpeded. I still don't really run on it, but that's more from me being rather unfit right now. I would like to get back into a bit of training and the occasional fun run, just to keep fit now that I don't have a weekly sport to play. Though I have been getting back into riding to work once or twice a week, so that's a start.

Very Lucky

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 20:52:00 +0000

On Sunday, my uncle and his family were coming home from a holiday up the coast with some friends. On the way home, they had a fairly major accident, but thankfully all 3 of them are more or less ok - my uncle has a few fractured vertebrae that they're a little concerned about. It could have been much, much worse, and when looking at the photos, it's hard to see how it wasn't.

They were traveling southbound along the Bruce Highway, each towing their caravans, when my uncle's caravan started to sway. Despite his efforts to get it back under control, the car went into the ditch between the north and southbound lanes, did at least a partial roll, and came to a stop on its side in front of the northbound traffic. Their car was then hit by an oncoming car, with the impact directly on the roof above the front seats.

I'm glad Mum told me they were ok before she described that last bit!

Here's the photos:

Here's all that's left of the caravan:

And here's the newspaper article about it yesterday (click for full-size):

New timelapse video

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:01:00 +0000

A few months back I made a couple of timelapse videos and was quite pleased with the results.

What I wasn't pleased with was the Canon software for the Mac, which crashed around every 2 hours. As such, I recently grabbed a Phottix TR-90 timer remote off eBay. It plugs into the camera's remote port, and has a heap of settings for delay, interval, etc. It arrived yesterday, so on dusk this evening I gave it a try and this was the results:

Each segment is almost 400 shots (the remote can do up to 399, or unlimited), with most at 1 shot per second except the last two, which were every 2 seconds to allow for the longer exposure time. They're all played back at 25fps, with a soundtrack I threw together in GarageBand - that's the first time I've tried that and I'm fairly happy with the results.

I don't think I posted the links to my first few timelapses, so here they are:

Dusk & Night time lapse, Brisbane
14hr Day & Night time lapse, Brisbane
Clouds Time Lapse, April 5 2009

Now that I'm not tethered to the computer for these, I'm hoping to take the camera + tripod + remote out and about to find some interesting subjects - all of these so far have been shot from our balcony.

Update

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 12:28:00 +0000

Apparently people still read this, so I should do an update because after the last post it might appear something bad has happened to me.

Nothing bad has happened. In fact a couple of good things have instead.

First I should update on the heart issue: it is "just some ecoptic beats", according to a cardiologist I saw. Echocardiogram and two halter monitors couldn't find anything serious. It still happens maybe once a week, and it's still kind of terrifying each time it happens but I'm learning to keep myself calm afterwards and that's helping quite a bit.

Those weren't my only trips to hospital recently though - about 3 weeks ago I had sinus surgery and septoplasty. After having difficulties breathing through my nose the last few months, it turns out I had "allergic fungal sinusitis", which left my right sinus completely blocked. This was worsened by my very crooked septum, which was almost blocking the left side.

It was only day surgery and was all performed with an endoscope so even though it's only been 3 weeks you'd never know to look at me. The best part is that I can breathe normally now! I have already noticed an improvement in the quality of my sleep. So if you have any sinus issues don't think twice about the surgical option.

The other good thing to happen was that Em and I went to Japan for two weeks at the start of May. It was FANTASTIC and I already want to go back again. We did an Intrepid tour that took us to Tokyo, Nikko, Hakone, Takayama, Hiroshima, and Kyoto. The group we were traveling with was fully of really great people, which was almost the best bit about the trip. Hopefully we'll get to see some of them again when we visit Europe in a year or two's time.

That's about all for now. I will leave you with a few other sites to check out:

aaronsphotos.com - my new photography portfolio site.

Travelling Australia with the Oakeys - my sister's new blog for the round-Australia trip they're currently doing in a 30-foot "fifth wheeler", which is like a caravan on uber-uber-steroids. :)

My first ambulance ride

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 05:07:00 +0000

This morning, Emily and I were doing a bit of housework - tidying up, dusting, etc, and getting ready to do some vacuuming. Nothing too strenuous. I stopped for a drink of water before getting the vacuum out, and suddenly started to feel ordinary. Very ordinary. I was a bit light headed, and a bit short of breath, and noticed that my heart was racing.

I told Em I wasn't feeling too good and she suggested I lie down for a bit. After a few minutes I started to feel a bit better, but 10 minutes later I started to get the same feeling. I've not had anything like this before, so I didn't want to take any risks and given I didn't feel like standing, let alone walking anywhere I suggested to Em she call an ambulance.

The ambulance guys were really good. By then I was feeling better, and they checked me out and found everything seemed normal. I was still not feeling near 100% so they transported me to Greenslopes hospital where I was given a bed in the emergency room.

They hooked me up to a few devices and took some blood and told me they probably won't know what it is unless they can catch it on an ECG.

Maybe an hour later, while all but sleeping, it happened again. My heart rate hit about 120-130bpm while they frantically plugged in an ECG to see what was going on. By the time they had me connected it had returned to normal again. They left me plugged into the ECG for about another 2 hours in case it happened again so they could catch the whole thing from start to finish.

At a bit after 2pm, maybe 4 hours after arriving, they told me everything looked okay and I could go home. The blood tests were all fine (except the thyroid test, which they don't do on weekends), and my heart rate looked fine, even when it was really high - despite being fast it was still regular.

So I'm back home now with a referral for some more tests this week to see what's going on. The diagnosis is that it's some kind of Tachycardia.

I think part of whatever is happening may be attributed to me almost going into a panic attack whenever they happen. Having a fast heart rate after exercising feels perfectly normal, but when it starts to happen while you're sitting still feels very very wrong indeed, and it's quite scary.

The perfect end result to this would be that they find I'm just allergic to housework, seeing as that's what set it off :P

One Wild Storm

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 05:28:00 +0000

Em and I were visiting friends at their new house at Redbank Plains yesterday and got caught in one of the wildest storms to hit Brisbane in the last few years.

The house and cars seemed to survive unscathed, but some parts of Brisbane have received substantial damage. No real surprise given the wind!

Not sure what sort speeds those gusts were hitting, but Amberley (20kms away) recorded 60km/h winds with gusts over 80km/h.

I heart storm season

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 22:31:00 +0000

We had a really active electrical storm go through last night, and instead of using the dslr, this time I thought I'd go with the video camera. Here's the highlights from about 25 minutes worth:

Perfect weather for the beach...

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 02:22:00 +0000

I'm off down to the Gold Coast for a buck's weekend, and the mother nature decided to have some fun at our expense and it's supposed to be a wet weekend.

Oh, well - good weather for staying indoors and drinking :)

But before I go, here's yesterday's photo:

Emily got some roses the other day and I figured they'd make a nice subject. Unlike most of my photos, I've done a bit of colour adjustment on this to make it more interesting. Unfortunately I couldn't get Photoshop to play nice with the colour profiles, so it lost some of the reds when exporting :(

Photo a day (or so)

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 12:14:00 +0000

I'm trying to get back into my "photo a day" routine that I started (quite) a while back. (You can see past ones over at my photo blog.) I don't know how well I'll stick to this, but I'll try my best to pick up the camera as often as I can and find something to take a photo of. With our new view I'm sure that won't be too hard :)

First up, yesterday's:

Believe it or not, this was shot with the lens on backwards. This has the strange effect of turning a zoom lens into a macro lens, meaning super close up photos. I can actually get closer than this to the subject, but didn't want to get the lens too close to the flame. I'll probably post a few more like this in the coming weeks as I play with this technique.

And now today's:

Nothing too special about this - just a plain old shot of the sunset from the balcony. I missed a great sunset a few days ago, but today wasn't too shabby. Again, I'll likely post more photos like this. I'll try to find different things to shoot, but I'm sure it will be tough to resist.

It's been good to pick up the camera again after neglecting it for the last few months. The achilles really put the brakes on all my photography work as I couldn't get out and about to do it.

Oh, speaking of the achilles, Monday was the 1 year anniversary of the injury. I can't believe how quick the last 6 months have gone compared to the first 6 months!

The commute

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 07:51:00 +0000

I'm trying to ride my bike to work most days, but on the days I don't
I catch the cross river ferry and have to put up with views like this :)

All settled into the new place

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 10:20:00 +0000

We moved in on august 9 and are well and truly settled in and
unpacked. It's been great so far, other than a couple of extra
financial burdens thrown in at the last minute.

The first of these was a rates increase. We're still not sure how much
they're going up by, but the suburb as a whole is going up 27% - among
the highest in Brisbane.

The second was an interest rate increase before we'd even made our
first payment. They've since dropped the official rate, but we haven't
received that cut just yet.

But after Riverfire a fortnight ago it is all worth it :)

We had a fantastic view of everything and had a great night all up.

That'll do for now - Wipeout is on :)

Mobile blogging!

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 06:17:00 +0000

So that it might inspire me to get back to blogging I have set up
blogging from my iPhone :)

I have lots to talk about with lots going on lately so I'll do a few
small updates in the near future to get caught up.

Quick (but HUGE) Update

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:47:00 +0000

I haven't updated for a while because I've been a bit busy lately, and not entirely because of GTA IV :)

Em and I have bought our own place! :D

It's a 2-bedroom, 2-bathroom apartment at Kangaroo Point with a great city view. It was one of the first places we looked at over a month ago, when we weren't yet serious about buying a place - I still have a few months left on my lease, and Em had all her money in a term deposit. All the places we looked over the following weeks didn't quite compare back to this place for one reason or another. So we were rather surprised to find out after 5 weeks on the market, not only was it still for sale, but the owner had dropped the price!

Even though we were still not serious about buying, we both felt that perhaps this was a sign we should get serious. So we did :)

After 3 or 4 days of negotiating, we managed to get the owner down to a price we were happy with. It's now been about 10 days, and after the building inspection came back all good last week, I got the call late yesterday afternoon to say our finance was all good too. So it's now official!

It doesn't settle until July 3rd, so it's not quite ours yet, but it's all but there now.

This is one of the few times in my life I'm actually looking forward to moving! :D

Temporary new home

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 11:43:00 +0000

Kitty and I are at Emily's tonight (and maybe until further notice) after the hot water heater in my unit decided to leak water through half the unit.

Thankfully none of my stuff got wet, but I'd reckon the carpets are ruined - basically the water got under the carpet and as we walked on it the water was drawn to the surface. There was actually a funny few minutes while I stood there looking at it going "wtf?" cos I couldn't work out what was going on. The kitchen floor was too dry for so much water to have come from that direction, so I couldn't think of any way it could have got wet... then it dawned on me what was on the other side of that wall. (I only really thought of it because I remembered the episode of the Sopranos where Tony's basement floods after the water heater dies)

Good thing a safety switch was installed only a few weeks ago, otherwise all that water might have been live - the switch had tripped and refused to be switched back on so something was definitely waterlogged.

I'm not sure how long it will take them to repair the damage, so we might be here for a few days yet.

:(

Six Months!

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 07:56:00 +0000

Today marks the six month anniversary of my initial injury. It seems to have gone by so fast, yet so slow.

Today is also the three month anniversary of the second injury. That seems to have gone by pretty quick.

The achilles should now be about as strong as it's going to get, but there's still 3 months to go on the muscle tear. It feels pretty obvious that the muscle still has a way to go - when I extend the leg I can feel the lump that is the scar tissue. It's getting less and less obvious as the weeks go by, so it won't be too long now.

When I am paying attention to what I'm doing I feel like I have barely any limp left. When I'm tired, distracted, or trying to walk quicker it comes back.

I did a fair bit of walking last night for the Lions game, so the leg was very exhausted today and I was limping noticeably. It was a good reminder for me, though, that I do still need to take it easy for another few months yet.

I can see through time!!!

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 10:20:00 +0000

I bought a jar of Patak's vindaloo paste (hot) a few months back that I've put off cooking while Em was here because she's not trained up on hot foods (yet!)

Tonight I was struggling a little finding something to cook that appealed to me. My eyes settled on the jar and I figured tonight was the night. :)

I had a brief moment of wondering what I was getting myself into when I opened the jar and almost couldn't breathe. I figured it's concentrated stuff, so that's probably to be expected.

After simmering for 45 mins or so the rice was done so I served it out and had the first mouthful...

ZOMG HOT!!!

I think my nose started running that second. I realised right then and there that my curry skills were about to be put to the ultimate test. Not only was I faced with the bowl full in front of me, but a quarter of a jar serves 2 people, and I'd cooked up half a jar's worth! So I have at least 3 more generous servings ahead of me, not including tonight's.

Normally when I cook for myself, I put the leftovers in a couple of containers, and finish it off in the next few days. For instance, last week I cooked a green curry chicken (another of my hot favourites!) and had it for dinner and lunch for the next 2 days straight. Yes, I like green curry chicken that much :D

This, however....

I'm a little scared to have too much of this in too short a time span for fear of what it might do to my digestive system. :/

I guess the good part of this is that the leftovers should last for a while - I can't see anything surviving in that! :)

SHAZAM!!!

noreply@blogger.com (aaron) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:06:00 +0000

I'm a huge fan of icanhascheezburger.com and have always been tempted to share some of my favourites here, but sadly I enjoy too many of them for that to be possible.

I'm making an exception for this one, though, because I still get such a good laugh out of it! :D