Odd: those moments when you are tired, and you look at a sentence of English and fail to make a swift leap from sound to meaning, and realise how German it all looks.
Am very much looking forward to my holiday. Have left everything until the last minute, or at least it vaguely feels that way right now. Tomorrow morning I must clean the flat, then lunch with family. Plenty to do on Sunday as well; hmm!
It's strange to think that if everything goes to plan, I'll be in Canada on Wednesday; although that's achieved by travelling back in time quite some hours. I'm pretty sure that's going to mess with me. Had a play with Google Earth this evening and had a look at the great circle path from Kuala Lumpur to Los Angeles; passes quite close to Japan, then over not much for a long way. A very long flight!
Reading a bit on the net this evening about customs in the US and Canada. Amusingly most pages about Canada written for people from the US seem to focus upon admonishing them not to be rude. A few things are odd though.
Coming from a crazy, socialist country with a fair (ish) minimum wage I'm going to have to remember to tip people. Some sites say 10%, others say 15%. Apparently the neat way is to multiply the sub-total for GST on your receipt, although presumably that only works in Canada. Does anyone know what you're actually meant to tip?
Also, anyone have any recommendations for places to stay in the following cities? I can find places on the net, but if people I know have been and can recommend somewhere even better! We're going through Vancouver, Victoria, Seattle, Las Vegas, San Francisco and Las Angeles. Thanks in advance to anyone that replies :-)
Excitement in the world of Grahame this evening, a trip to the movies! Saw Hancock with a few people. Greater Union now does assigned seating - I don't approve. Spoils the fun of wandering around trying to pick a spot to sit!
Hancock was pretty damn fun, I really enjoyed it. Nothing particularly memorable about the film, just a fun movie to watch. I probably enjoyed the movie a bit more having been forewarned by ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
greyreviews about the Hancock is America metaphor. Of course, I'm now curious at what point I'd have picked up on it. I'd like to think I'd cotton on by the end, it gets fairly blatant!
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cheerfulWoke up this morning with annoyingly bad asthma. Seems to have cleared up now, but a bit of a pain - lost a day when I had fun stuff I could have done instead of pottering about at home. Oh well.
My iPod is now loaded up with applications. There's quite a lot of cool stuff in the App Store, including a surprising amount of software for non-English speaking markets. I can't remember seeing that much non-English software for the Palm back when I used to look at Palm's software website.
One of these evenings I'm going to have to learn Cocoa and start writing some simple applications. Interesting how most of the standalone applications on the iPhone platform are really just better interfaces to web services.
Facebook have an iPhone version of their site that is using stylesheets to make the pages act just like a normal iPhone application; I wonder why that isn't getting used as much as standalone apps? A bit surprising giving that just changing some CSS would seem a lot simpler.
cheerfulSo, I'm pondering getting a new mobile phone. My current phone is a Motorola V3X, and is dying. It seems to be rebooting more often than can be explained by the generally sub-par software it runs. This happens most often when I answer calls, which is unfortunate..
Anyway, does anyone have a tip on the right phone to go get? Apparently any 3G triband phone is going to work okay in the US. All the iPhone plans seem to suck, so while I'm quite keen on the iPhone it seems a bit mad to actually go and buy one.
I was thinking of getting a hiptop from Telstra; $30/month for unlimited data seems pretty sweet. No more boredom at bus stops. I've just noticed that it's 2.5G which probably means it won't work in the US. Blah.
Anyway, who recommends what for phones? I don't want to get another lemon like this Motorola, all looks and no functional software! :-)
This evening finds me tired. Stuff that was meant to be easy and just take a couple of hours ended up being a bit of a mess, all worked out okay in the end though. Very hard to find somewhere in Perth that will sell you a gigabit ethernet card in a hurry; eventually found a computer store I didn't know existed in a basement just near Quality Comics. Oh well :-)
I have been drinking a pot of tea fairly steadily over the evening. Civilised. I've got the pot wrapped in a giant towel, which has kept it pretty well insulated. I wonder if anyone has done a thermos tea pot. I should google that.. oh man, I want one.
Working at home tomorrow to get some stuff done. I'll hopefully be up for sunrise so as to take pretty pictures of it. This reminded me of my intention to have a look at a plot of sunrise and sunset times, see the cut for a plot :-)
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Have been playing about with flickr a bit. It's quite a bit cooler than I'd given it credit for. It also has the advantage of being the one site everyone writes plugins for..
.. but I'm getting sick of constantly, needlessly redefining who my friends are. If I have someone on Facebook, I'd like to see them on my flickr contact list. Ditto LiveJournal. LibraryThing, my Gmail contacts list, and many more.
It doesn't need to be OpenID; if I could just list the links in some database (grahame@livejournal == grahameb@flickr == grahame@librarything == grahame@angrygoats.net ... ) with appropriate authentication to make sure I'm not lying, it'd be fantastic.
cheerfulCameron dropped round today, and we wandered up into Kings Park together. We were up there for three and a half hours walking and photographing things - quite a bit of fun. I'm getting used to the camera; I really like the UI, it's pretty good. Some of the shots didn't come out because I did silly things (leaving the camera in the wrong ISO seems to be a common mistake of mine), but looking at the results they improved as the day went on.
Plus, I got a nice walk out of it! Anyway, follow the cut for some photos (or just look at my photostream on flickr).
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Saw the best Perth act I've ever seen this evening. The two leadup acts were average, but Snowman went off. They're going to the UK, and as far as I know this was their last live act in Perth for the known future - but so, so awesome. You can get their albums off iTunes, so check them out. Awesometacular!
Such great, dark and energetic music!
(Boys!Boys!Boys! are a close second, completely different but I'm not disputing their awesomeness either)
ecstaticHmm, 26 out of the top 100. I need to improve that!
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Hey, any of you lot want to go to Bill Bailey with me? I'm thinking of wandering along, but it occurs to me it's much more likely to be fun in company! Tickets here, but might be best to order in a group..
Was out and about today in Mount Lawley and happened to wander into Planet Books. It's a very nice book store indeed. Ended up wandering out with the new Shaun Tan book, and a science fiction anthology. Then on to Dymocks, where I picked up a copy of the Bible, a book of photographs showing Perth over the last century or so, and a guide book to British Columbia.
It's strangely hard to find copies of the bible, and surprisingly enough I didn't already I own one. I want to read a bit of it; the trigger is mostly my failure to get biblical references in other literature. If you try and read Moby DIck or (particularly) Ulysses by James Joyce, you run into trouble.
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bouncyWandered down to the travel agent yesterday and bought myself some tickets. I leave Perth on the 29th of next month, stay that night in Kuala Lumpur, fly to Los Angeles and then catch a flight up to Vancouver. I beat my good friend kattiko there by a day, but it's going to be pretty cool meeting up in Canada of all places!
We'll have until the 16th of August to wander about western Canada, and then down the west coast of the US back to Los Angeles and from there on home. Not quite sure what we're going to do with that time, but hopefully we'll see cool stuff in Canada, and pretty sure we'll stop by in San Francisco. This is going to be awesome!
Anyone with tips on places to visit or stay on the western seaboard of North America, your comments will be appreciated :-)
cheerful.. from theducks
1. your name or username
2. lefty/righty?
3. letters you like to write
4. letters you don't like to write
5. write "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog"
6. tag 5 people
happySo, I had a lot of fun last week when I went to a play, so I'm going again. There's a play called Motortown on at the Blue Room, anyone want to wander along with me? Going to go on Friday night.
cheerfulWalked from work down to play soccer. Stood at a traffic lights and a bloke on one of those high speed electric wheelchairs stopped next to me. Got talking for some reason, then he started telling me about his visions of Jesus and how they signify that the end times are coming. Fairly whacked. He zoomed off at high velocity, those things seem to have become impressively fast.
Played my third game of soccer for the week today. We got owned, the other team was decisively better than us. We held up pretty well though considering, and I really enjoyed the game. Huzzah, and so forth.
happyGoing to go see paperishcup's In the Shadow of the Wild on Friday at 9.15pm. Anyone interested in wandering along with me and grabbing food in Northbridge beforehand? You can reserve a ticket on the web site.
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