Delayed Gratification

Game Over

2011-05-17T16:15:00.000+10:00

As foreshadowed in the last post on this blog, around five months ago now, settlement on the townhouse occurred on 24 December 2010, in pretty much the last possible timeslot that it could for 2010. We picked up the keys that afternoon and had a celebratory beer in the empty lounge room. Then, it was all hands on deck with Christmas preparations and a couple of days dedicated to food and the company of excellent people before flying out for Perth.

It was a jam packed, stressful couple of days, but it was great.

I haven’t posted on this blog since, and despite all the other things that I wrote about on here, it really seems that the house was central to the sustainability of this blog.

I still want to keep sharing my head with the internet, but home ownership feels like a new phase in my life, so I’m going to do it over at a new blog – the bleeps, the sweeps and the creeps (http://machinethatgoesping.blogspot.com/).

Join me!

I leave you with a rather excellent video from BoingBoing - an montage of old school video game deaths set to an 8 bit version of 'Mad World' (originally by Tears for Fears - this one is for you Dougy).

PS: I can't leave sign off a blog post entitled 'game over' without a clip of Aliens - this is also dedicated to my man Doug.

Possibly one of the most stressful weeks of my life

2010-12-22T15:59:00.001+11:00

This is the first time in weeks I've had time in front of the computer to do something that's not work or house related. The title above refers to the confluence of the final stages of the house purchase, trying to organise Christmas, and a particularly difficult few days at work. Thankfully through a combination of sheer bloody mindedness, Dana's organisational prowess and some good teamwork around the office, it looks like things will come together for settlement tomorrow afternoon, or Friday morning at the latest and that we will meet a significant milestone at work.

In my previous posts about the arcane and entirely opaqe process involved in settlement, I indicated that I found it all quite confusing. Unfortunately, it seems to have proved quite confusing for the veteran players involved whose job it is supposed to be to make these things happen on a regular basis. As a first time homebuyer, it's been a truely signifcant challenge trying to get all these things together when we don't even know what they are and what has to be done, but if there's one thing to learn from it all, it's that you can't really rely on anyone else to make any of it happen. I hate being one of those people who has to push all the time for things to happen and harass people - after all, for the most part they're just doing their job - but that is what you must be in this process.

It's also one of the few times in my life where I've found it to be a real challenge to work through things calmly, where my emotional response has been so strong that I've had to really work to keep it under control and remain rational. Some aspects of it all still make me seethe a little bit just thinking about it, but as long as settlement occurs properly tomorrow or the day after, I think I'll be able to let go of it all. Plus I'll be off work for a couple of weeks, removing another annoyance, and it will be Christmas and I'm going to get to be around some of the people I love most in the world. This can only be a good thing.

I actually feel quite serene and positive about the whole thing at the moment. Things have quietened down at work, there is a beautiful view out of my window (see the picture below) the weather is finally better and I'm really enjoying Tame Impala's "Innerspeaker" album. The album really reminds me of the Beatles for some reason, and is excellent.

There's also been some really excellent things happening recently, in addition to all the annoying house stuff. We went to Melbourne for Dana's work Christmas party, which was super excellent, and also managed to catch some old friends while we were there and get all of our Christmas shopping done. I had a collection of excellent work Christmas parties as well (Team, Group and Department), one of which had some really excellent food.

Life is good. As soon as this house stuff is sorted, it will be super freaking excellent.

PS: OK, so this is going to sound super corny, but on re-reading this I feel I should add that one of the reasons that life is good is the Dana. This week would have been impossible without her, and I would probably not be getting keys to a house any time soon without her. Dana - you make things awesome.

Stop motion light play

2010-12-07T21:40:00.000+11:00

I've been meaning to re-post these for the last couple of weeks - they're a pair of cool stop motion light animations I saw on Gizmodo (which they of course posted on from somewhere else). Click on through to the Vimeo pages for the full artist's information.

Nowhere Near Here from Pahnl on Vimeo.

Subcarpati - Am crescut pe la Romana from z00x on Vimeo.

If you haven't got anything good to say...

2010-12-01T17:50:00.000+11:00

...then at least try not to get too ranty.

As people around me who ask me about this sort of things, I'm getting a little bit tense about the house situation, which is why there haven't been any updates about it for weeks now. This afternoon, I've got a bit of time to burn before netball, and I think I'm just about comfortable enough to write about it.

Since my last progress update in early November, pretty much nothing has happened. The house is still ready to move into. No more of the driveway needed to be replaced. It took another couple of weeks after that for all the requisite paper work to be re-submitted to the ACTPLA, the ACT planning authority, and we were advised about two and a half weeks ago that it should take ACTPLA two weeks to re-approve, and then it goes to the titles offices for registration. That's where things fell over last time.

If all goes well with the titles office, it should take approximately a week to be registered. Which brings us up to the end of this week, although I'm estimating that it will more likely be next week. The registration of the title, as I think I may have mentioned earlier in my eternal harpings about the build, is basically when everything is done, and it signals that there are 14 days until the end of the contract, in which there is a flurry of activity from all sorts of lawyers and banks and things and they get a big cheque and week get some keys. I don't pretend to understand the things that happen in that process - I thought the whole 14 day process was settlement, but apparently it's actually a point in time, before which a series of papers are signed and exchanged and important meetings happen with gathering intensity, culminating in the ecstatic moment where the house is actually ours. That's how I understand it at the moment, although I admit there may be some artistic licence in the whole thing.

Licences, that reminds me. Our lawyer/conveyancer (I'm pretty sure the lady who is doing it is not a lawyer, even though we signed up for one at a law firm - fat lot of good it did us) finally got around to getting the terms of the licence agreement (to re-hash, that's the rental type agreement between us and the developer that would enable us to move in before settlement) and while it looked good in terms of the 'rent' they would charge, there were some pretty suspect penalty clauses in it. Specifically, we'd be liable for a massive jump in rent, to the tune over about $800, if there was any delay in settlement after the 14 day period when the title is registered. Normally this would actually not be too much of a worry - we're pretty sure we'll get all our ducks lined up in that time, but it's getting awfully close to Christmas, where the requisite lawyers and bankers will not be around to participate in the orgy of papers, declarations, deeds, insurance waivers and bank cheques. It would also apply in addition to the penalty clauses already in the contract of sale, which are not insubstantial in their own right.

In short, it's a bit of a risk that we're not keen to take, despite the possibility of moving in early.

With the timetable as it is, if we're lucky, the best case scenario is that we move into the place the weekend before Christmas. The next best is that we take some time mid week, and move in the days before Christmas. The next best is that we settle on like 23/24 dec and move in after Christmas, when we get back from Perth. The worst option is that settlement falls after everyone buggers off and we pay penalty fees until every one's lawyers et al get back from their Christmas break, although the agent has promised they will argue that the penalty fees should be waived for that period if this occurs. Much as I appreciate that sentiment, I don't know how much success they would have in that scenario - the developer hasn't often listened to them so far. The last option, and while it's not hugely attractive, it's better than the worst, is that there is some delay with registration of the title, and settlement doesn't occur until after Christmas some time.

So that's where we're at. For the most part at the moment, we're trying to manage our expectations and make sure everything is lined up so that we can move quickly if we have to. The waiting game is frustrating, but we're getting pretty good at it these days - I'm thinking of developing some sort of zen philosophy based on it all.

I also realise this blog is becoming mighty boring without any nice pictures about the progress of the house or what we're doing, and also because I haven't even had time to post other odds and ends on here because of work. I'll try and rectify that at some stage in the future, but probably not right now. Instead, I will just let you know that the netball season is in full swing again, and we've had some real crackers in the past couple of weeks. One of the finest moments a few weeks ago involved the opposition goal shooter having a bit of a tanty and storming off to cry in the gents after pretty much every pass to him was blocked by myself in goal keeper, or our goal defence. His salty tears tasted of victory that night....

Silly Jokes

2010-11-04T15:06:00.000+11:00

Delays, delays, delays

2010-11-04T14:37:00.001+11:00

The closer we get to the end of this whole house process, the more emotionally involved in it I get. When we were six months away from completion, a three month delay was easy to be philosophical about, but when there’s supposed to be only a week or two to go, a three week delay feels like a major blow.

Similarly, each small bit of progress or good news at this end of things elates me, which in turn makes it really hard not to get my hopes up. It’s a bit circular really.

As you might have guessed from this preamble, we’ve had news of another delay with the unit. Last time I wrote about it, we were expecting to hear back any day that title had been registered, flagging the beginning of the 14 day settlement period. Instead, we heard that the ACT Govt assessor didn’t think the driveway was wide enough (despite it being the width approved in the development application) due to a recent legislative change. Unfortunately, the assessor couldn’t tell them how wide it needed to be. In addition, because the driveway is concrete, it can’t easily be widened like bitumen, and has to be ripped up and replaced.

We didn’t get too much more information than that. For example, we don’t know the scope of the changes needed to the driveway. Is it just the part that joins the road, or does the whole length of the internal access road need replacing? We’ve forwarded a series of similar questions on to the agent, but I’m not totally hopeful that we’ll get a comprehensive response. I don’t necessarily blame her for this, I don’t think she gets much information from the developer and I don’t imagine the information that she does get is always that accurate or useful. Plus there’s a third party in this that has proven useless in the past – the ACT Govt.

I like to think I’m usually quite even minded about bureaucracies, what with working in one, but this one really is a waste of space. The combination of excessive and often silly, counterproductive regulation and an inflated self importance has stung us a couple of times already in this build and I fully expect to experience more of it once we are fully fledged home owners.

For example, the washing line that went mysteriously missing. Apparently it had to be taken down or screened because it was visible from the road, which was unsightly. The reason you could see it from the road? Because we’re not allowed to put a full fence along that edge of the property (chain link or hedge only), as they ‘separate homes from the rest of the community’. Never mind that the hedges will grow to obscure it, or that we’ll be growing plants through the chain link that will also shield it!

There is also regulation that mandates that all new houses must have either a washing line or a dryer. Since the line had to be taken down, the developer has installed a dryer in the unit. This rule means that our house becomes massively less energy efficient, which is directly contrary to the ACT Govt’s environmental policy goals. It seems to be a fairly regular occurrence that the tension between competing policy priorities has been ignored completely, with little, or sometimes just misplaced effort to fix them. As someone who works in a policy area, this sort of heavy ineffective regulation makes me cringe!

My self-diagnosis for a lot of these problems comes from the very nature of the ACT Govt, which sits as a hybrid of an oversize local council and an under resourced state government.

I acknowledge that all of this may be unfair to the ACT Govt, and as a first time home builder, I should accept there will always be some issues, and this is the same with authorities everywhere. However, I can only speak to my experiences, and they really do seem to be a cut below the rest.

It’s a good thing that there are some decent perks to living in Canberra that are unaffected by the planning authorities.

Despite the tirade above and my general level of grumpiness about the whole thing, there is also some positive news. We had a nice gent from a landscaping place to measure up our courtyard for a deck this morning, and they’ve already replaced part of the driveway. I don’t know if they need to replace any more – it didn’t look like there had been any work done to rip up any other parts of it at least. If not, then we might actually be able to move to settlement fairly soon (fingers crossed). This small piece of progress was actually enough to cheer me up quite a bit! I’m hoping that we get some more positive news in the next week. Fingers crossed.

Edit: I just realised how whingey that all is. To bring the mood up a bit, here's a video of a guy moonwalking with a shopping trolley:

House update - pics of the garden and fencing

2010-10-24T00:50:00.001+11:00

As noted earlier in the week, we're in a bit of a holding pattern at the moment, waiting for the registration of the title. Since we've pretty much planned the interior of the house to death (and we can't really get in there to get started), Dana and I have been turning our attention to the garden and courtyard. This has led me to get out the grid paper again, and start plotting things out. This hasn't really got us too far - as it stands, we've only really agreed on two or three things. It also doesn't help that we don't know the first thing about gardening.

The first is that we want to put a deck in the courtyard. Pictured below, the courtyard is approximately a 6m x 6m square, if you count the space all the way out to the fence line. The recess into the building itself is about 6m on the longest side and 3.5m and 4m on the short sides. This means the deck we're thinking of wold be about 6m x 3m, with a step or two down to the garden (depending on how deep it will be.

It looks a bit scrappy in there at the moment, with the builders droppings and Canberra's clay-tastic soil, but it will look great once there's a deck in there. The deck will be flush with the top of the bricks at the sliding door - this is the floor height inside the house. Now we just have to get someone to build it for us. If anyone knows someone who can do that sort of thing, don't keep it a secret! I'm getting the feeling that it will be a real challenge to get someone to do this, and will take us ages.

The next thing that we've agreed on, is that we'll put in a crushed gravel (or is it called deconstructed granite??) pathway in from the gate at the side of the house, through the courtyard and into the little backyard. I think I'll probably end up doing this myself, as it doesn't look super complicated, from what I've seen online. I'm finding the idea of improving the soil to the right level and trying to choose plants a far more daunting task.

Here's two views of where the crushed gravel pathway will be, the first from the gate where it will originate, looking through the courtyard, along the side of the house and out to the backyard, and the other looking up to the gate and the courtyard from the backyard. To give some context, the deck will be to the right in the first pictures, and there will probably be a garden bed of some sort along the fence line at the left. My preference is that the pathway will meander from side to side a bit, swerving away form the wall to avoid the tap, and then coming back in with a small paved area under the clothes line. Speaking of the line, I've just noticed from looking at these pictures that it's gone walkabout. That's a bit concerning, it was there last time we visited the site. I wonder if it's been flogged, or has been removed for some reason. Must look into that.

Anyway, in the last portion of the garden, the backyard (or rather the 3.6m x 8m ish rectangle between the house and the road) is still a bit undecided. Dana wants to put some raised garden beds in there for veggies, and I guess the path will terminate somewhere in it. The picture below shows the backyard, and you can see the baby hedge that was planted a couple of weeks back. This area will have pretty much full sunlight (I think), so I don't know how well the veggies will actually do here.

What you can also see in the above picture, which was new just today, are the early stages of the chain link fence that is going in behind the hedge. I was actually pretty happy to see this, because I had thought it wasn't going to be put in - we had originally only seen it as part of the landscaping plan, and it wasn't on the final approved landscape plan. It also means that the garden isn't quite so exposed to the the pathway and the road, which you can see next to it.

Here you can see one of the holes dug for a fence post (Dad, I dug a hole), and the fence next door, which is a little further along. According to the latest update from the real estate agent, the fence isn't actually supposed to go in until after the registration of the title, as it's not actually an approved structure. It doesn't actually need an approval from my understanding, but if it was in already, then it could delay the registration of the title. The sharper readers may have spotted a slight anomaly here - if we don't have registration of the title, and the fences isn't supposed to be in until after the registration of the title, then why is the fence going in? I do not have an answer for this, although Occam's Razor, as advocated by many sci fi movies (e.g. Contact, which I finished watching about an hour ago), dictates that the most obvious answer is probably correct. I'd say the most obvious solution is that there is a breakdown in communication some where between the ACT Govt, the developer/builder, the real estate agent, and us. This is not uncommon.

Anyway, this has got far more lengthy and wordy than I had intended, so I'll leave you with a picture of the tree at the front door of our house, which is part of the communal landscaped area.

Music that has been stuck in my head - A tale of two tunes.

2010-10-21T12:53:00.001+11:00

This morning's tune is from Detroit Grand Pubahs, and is dedicated to my workmate Pauline. Unfortunately, Sony won't let me embed the full clip, so here's a bodgy one that someone else uploaded:

The full clip can be found here, and is very much worth the watch, if only for the midget cowboy and his fake beard.

The second tune is from a couple of weekends ago - I blame Rage in the morning...

This one also suffers from Sony not liking to share all its music on youtube - I can't even see the original video on youtube because it's blocked in AU. I shake my fist at you Sony.

If you can seek out the original, I like it for the Kightrider-esque bike. Plus the chicks on bikes are hawt - makes me want to go for a ride.

House update

2010-10-21T12:40:00.002+11:00

It’s probably time for an update on how the house is going. Things are moving quickly these days (although still not quickly enough) and many small milestones seem to be rushing past on the way to settlement. The house is 100 per cent finished! All of the appliances are in, the communal landscaping and fencing is complete, and all the issues we noted in the pre-settlement inspection should now be addressed.

Note that I say addressed, and not fixed. Things being what they are, the builder is entitled to argue that some things don’t need to be fixed. Apparently the best thing for it is just to note every single tiny little thing that could possibly considered wrong with the place at the pre-settlement inspection, because they you will at least get most of the big issues fixed. Having said that, I’m fairly confident that there weren’t any really big issues that wouldn’t be fixed by an extra lick of paint around the place or a clean. Work was already being done to address these things when we measured the place for curtains on 8 October.

Speaking of curtains, we got two quotes in the end and they were interestingly divergent. We have a total of six windows in the place, for which both places quoted us for tracks and the same fabric. We had originally intended to have them quote for exactly the same installations, but one of the companies provided us with more options that will help us save space and make the curtains look better. Their representative was also 100 per cent nicer, had better taste, and was a much better sales man. So much so, that despite the quote being more expensive, and for more fancy things, we’re going to go with them.

This is the fabric that we went with in the end. This picture doesn't really do the colours justice, and the bits that look like light grey are actually silver. Following a trend established early in our housing adventures, it’s going to take a little longer to get hold of than some of the other options – about an extra two or three weeks on what a more standard option might take. Fortunately, it’s a lot cheaper than some other the other options that we had looked at.

The three aspects that really made our choice more expensive was the type of curtain rail, the way the curtains are pleated and additional privacy screens on the three bedroom windows. The privacy screens are actually pretty cool – basically you can see out of them, but people can’t see in. We found them to be a pretty attractive option, given the proximity of our bedroom windows to the edge of the property. In addition, Canberra’s weird property rules mean that you can’t put a decent fence on the part of the property that fronts onto a road. This means until the hedge grows up, our bedrooms are a bit exposed. The screens sit inside the window on a roller blind, beneath the curtains.

The end cost is going to be about $1.2k a window, which burns a bit, but they’re going to look great. I guess some of the burn is reduced by the perceived added value to the house (or at least, that’s what I tell myself).

We’ve also been going through the confusing, annoying, and occasionally erroneous pile of paperwork that goes along with the finances. We’ve got unconditional approval, and it’s all in train. I’m not going to say any more on it, because it’s already eaten up too much of my time and willpower. Suffice to say that it’s not pleasant to commit to such large amounts to debt.

The final 14 day settlement period should be starting any day now – we’ve actually been waiting for the last week or so to hear that it has started, so hopefully we won’t be waiting too much longer. As I keep telling those around me, we kind of have an asymptotic (this is not quite the right concept, but mathematics was never my forte) situation about moving into the house – we get closer and closer to moving in, but we never actually get there.

We’ve also been turning our mind to the garden. We really want to get a deck in there, and we were thinking about trying to get it done before Christmas – but given that’s only two months away, I can’t see it happening. We’ll know more once we start getting quotes.

The funniest thing I have seen today

2010-10-15T13:24:00.000+11:00

I have a cold and feel horrible. Yet I am still at work - this does not compute.

projectors and pretty lights

2010-10-12T17:07:00.000+11:00

A video of a light show at the Vimeo Festival and Awards afterparty last week. The light show is pretty cool, although the music is a bit crappy quality and doesn't quite sync up.

Amazing Building Mapping - Vimeo Festival from Dan Ilic on Vimeo.

Now get back to work, you slackers!

Guitar Hero Metallica

2010-10-06T18:24:00.000+11:00

So I clocked GH: Metallica in hard over the weekend - I was a little disappointed by how easy the final track (The thing that should not be) was, but the excellent pain of completing One on hard more than made up for it.

What it really did though, was remind me how much I love Metallica! I've had a real craving to listen to them the last two days as a result, but I don't have any of their albums (I had a bit of a boycott against them after they made Napster cancel my account years ago in the whole Napster v Metallica thingy). I think this is something I might have to rectify at some stage.

The one track that has really been spinning round and round in my head, due to a combination of the weekend's gaming and the frenetic pace of work at the moment is Battery - what an awesome song!

I look like an idiot listening to this stuff at work, because I can't quite stop my head from bouncing a little to it. Speaking of work, it's been getting pretty challenging recently, but I've actually been really enjoying the uptick in pace - makes me feel like I'm squeezing everything out of the day

I would also like to share this excellent video that came to me via Glennboi and the H dog.

More awesome than a double rainbow...

More house stuffs

2010-10-06T18:02:00.000+11:00

Progress on the house continues - the valuation from the bank came back last Friday, with the excellent figure of $445,000, which represents a capital growth of like 8.5% since we signed the contract last year! It also means that our loan valuation ratio will be 75%, meaning no mortgage insurance and we should qualify easily for the rather excellent home loan package that we applied for.

We've also made some movement on curtains, after an initial set back. The set back was that the fabric that Dana and I had chosen and obtained a swatch of is no longer available! We've had to go back to the drawing board, which I think Dana has found quite frustrating. I've got a slightly more philosophical attitude about it...

Anyway, we have chosen some likely swatches from the shops and we have arranged for the real estate agent to let us into the house to get a couple of quotes on Friday. I'm really excited about this, because it means that we should be able to get the curtains done fairly quickly after settlement, so we won't have to live with sheets on the windows for too long.

Here's one of the fabrics that Dana is quite keen on at the moment:

I might add some more after I've been home and seen what Dana has brought home from the curtain shops today.

House update

2010-09-30T17:32:00.000+10:00

The last couple of weeks have actually been kind of a big deal for the house, but I've been too busy to blog about them. In roughly chronological order, we've visited a different mortgage broker on a colleague's recommendation, chosen and applied for a home loan with him, done the pre-settlement inspection of the unit and got the certificate of occupancy!

The last one happened late yesterday, and it means that the registration of the units plan should now be underway. That process should (fingers crossed, knock on wood, etc) take about 2-3 weeks, at which time the 14 day settlement period should begin. Which means that we should be taking possession of the house in 4-5 weeks, like forreal.

The house itself is pretty much complete, sans appliances and hot water system, which go in pretty much the day before settlement (otherwise they get nicked). This is a little unfortunate, as we were hoping that they would be in when the bank did their valuation (also this week), but we didn't really think we should hold off any longer.

More on the valuation and the loan and what it all means at a later day. Right now, I've got a date with a glass of beer.

As a wise woman once wrote: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a public servant in possession of a pay cheque, must be in want of the pub".

I am Iron Man

2010-09-29T15:15:00.000+10:00

Good news and bad news (both unrelated to the house).

The bad first - my headphones went walkabout from work during a moving day last Friday. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth - they were a fairly nice pair, bought for around $80 from the Akihabara shop while in transit in Tokyo. They were getting on a bit, but still had good sound and I had some sentimental attachment to them.

Now the good news, I got to go out and buy some new Sennheiser canalphones (CX300 - II)! They sound great and have excellent sound isolation, which is a mandatory requirement for open plan office living. Some more good news - we got newer (second hand) computers as a result of the moving day, with new shiny (for me at least) Windows 7. And I netted a window seat again, with an excellent view of the plaza outside the front of my work.

I'm using the new headphones to listen to Black Sabbath. Here's a video of Metallica covering Black Sabbath's Iron Man, I think at Black Sabbath's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or something. Anyway, it's a good cover. Yeah.

There are other things to blog about, but I need some more time to think about them before I put them up. Which makes them sound more ominous than they are, it's more just that I don't have time at the moment!

Friday video art

2010-09-17T12:56:00.000+10:00

Another lunch time browsing find, this is a result of the "lets colour" project. And it's awesome.

Via Gizmodo.

Hopefully that's some colour to get you through your day. Quite frankly, I cannot wait for mine to be over, thank feck it's Friday.

PS: Pulled the trigger on a home loan application yesterday morning. I was pretty sure we weren't going to bother with a broker and just go to the bank, but we took a last attempt at a broker a colleague of Dana's recommended. Long story short, he was excellent, and I think we got a really good deal on the loan. I cant wait until the pre-settlement inspection on Monday!

Eat them up, yum yum.

2010-09-13T15:58:00.000+10:00

Found this video in a hazy, post luncheon haze today. Stop motion pacman on a large scale.

In other news, it turns out Sri Lankan food is really excellent. I'm so full, I just want to take a nap.

cs_747

2010-09-11T02:50:00.000+10:00

Watching Wesley Snipes muddle his way through 'Passenger 57' reminds me so much of playing counter strike, specifically the map cs_747, which was based around a hostage situation on a 747. Good times, I feel like a nervous teenager just watching videos of it on toutube. It reminds me of a golden age of gaming where my reflexes were massively fast, and I could focus ridiculously well on games for hours on end....

I might be pretty rusty these days, but around 5 years ago, I would totally have hit you with a BOOOM, HEADSHOT!

Ah, the memories...

PS: HA, FPS Doug - the epitome of BOOM HEADSHOT!

I have more in common with that dude than I like to admit.

I've noticed you around

2010-09-11T01:59:00.000+10:00

Word to your mom's, I came to drop bombs, and all of that sort of business. Today's announcement comes to you care of me sitting up late waiting for iTunes downloads to finish. The bastards are dragging on and on, but at least they're going faster tonight - last night I was trying them on after work, and it seems the peak period between 7 and 11pm is the worst time for vodafone 3d - ironic, as this is probably the time most people need to use it.

However, this is the world of 3g broadband - unreliable, unstable and often unusable. Take this as a public service announcement to anyone weighing up the most cost effective options for internet access as I once did - 3g may be cheaper than a wired interweb connection, but the quality is simply not comparable.

The title of this post foreshadowed the inclusion of this clip - it's weird, because it's not even that great a song, but man does it get stuck in your head. I blame the schools.

Anyway. I'm currently watching/ignoring passenger 57. It's one of those movies that I totally enjoyed watching 10 years ago when it first came out, but on this viewing, really makes me wish there was not a TV in the bedroom. This is something I'm planning to rectify in the new house, but for the moment, late night movies are the thing.

Of course, youtube has the trailer for your edification (is there anything youtube can't do!??), and it turns out I'm eight years off - it came out in '92, which means I must have seen it at least 15 years ago. Sometimes I forget that a bunch of years have passed, and I'm not 19 anymore. In fact, I think there's a certain amount of willful ignorance on my behalf - I like to think that I don't think or act any different to when I was 19, but my salary and the responsibilities I have seem to indicate otherwise. Damn you, reality!

Wesley Snipes just whooped some dude's ass with his bare hands and feet - the dude has some faux martial arts skills! And he's just also delivered one of the key lines of the movie "always bet on black"

Anyway, enough of that crap (and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't crap), what I really wanted to post about was some new dates for the house! The most solid of which is the pre settlement inspection date! We're booked in to check out the residence and make sure it is what we signed on for on the afternoon of 20 September. I'm pretty excited by this, because it actually means that settlement is not far behind!

That's actually a pretty big thing - previously we had been told that there would be a massive lag between the unit being habitable and being able to settle on it, because the ACT govt was taking a long time to register the final plans. I'm talking up to three months between the units being finished, and final registration of the units plan, which had us in a bit of a flap. Thankfully, there's been a legislative change, and now it should be done in like two weeks. I can't tell you how much I want to be in there (and more than that, actually take ownership of the place), but I guess you'll have to just take my work that I'm pretty keen to get in there.

The upshot of the new time frame is that it might not be worth moving in under licence any more - under the revised schedule, we'd only be in an extra 2-4 weeks before settlement is completed - so we might just save our money until we actually own the place (OMFG, how exciting is owning the place!?!?!?11?!1?11!eleven). Having said that, if being in early means we are paying less rent, it might not be too bad, even if it is a shorter amount of time that initially intended - it all comes down to the proposed licence agreement, which we still haven't seen yet.

Anyway, despite the possible delay to moving in, I'm taking these arrangements as a positive - the settlement date has actually got closer, and a concrete date on the pre-settlement inspection is a very good thing.

Oh yeah, the other great thing about today, is that it's my birthday. It's been pretty sweet so far, I've taken delivery of an ipad, some rather excellent single malt whiskey, red dead redemption, the girl with the dragon tattoo on blu-ray and a bunch of cupcakes. I'd also had a degustation dinner with wines.Life is friggin excellent - good times.

I'm going to check this out on the ipad:

Everybody stay cool.

PS: Holy poop, there's a streetfighter game - it's not ipad specific, but it's still on.

PPS: we're up to the point in the movie where Wesley Snipes has a gun, and is totally shooting dudes. This movie really makes me think Blade was the peak of his career. Mind you, last I heard Mr Snipes was in some sort of massive tax issues like Paul Hogan - hopefully he handled it with more aplomb.

Bleep'n'skweep music

2010-09-01T15:31:00.001+10:00

I've been listening to Ratat's LP3 and LP4 today while trying to get my head around a particularly convoluted piece of work, and it has helped me no end. The mixture of weird ambient sounds, bleeps and skweeps has been just the ticket. It helps that there are no lyrics to distract either. Here are two of their latest album, LP4:

Check out cartoon anti-drug video some joker posted with the second track - made me chuckle a little.

The music reminds me of one of my favourite scenes from Spaceballs

They don't make comedy as good as that any more...

2010-08-30T22:07:00.000+10:00

Managed to get on site last night - things are getting really close to completion, or at least it feels like it. since we were last on site, they've got all the internal driveways in, the garage roller door is on (and seems to be on most places), the clothes line is up, and all of the power and phone points are in! They've even put the controller for the central heating in, which is quite exciting. The inside of the place has been cleaned up and the mirrors installed in the bathrooms as well, things are getting closer.

In fact, it's probably easier just to look at what hasn't been done yet - I can pretty much count them on one hand! The most obvious is probably the carpets, although I'd expect them to be last. Then there's the appliances (oven and dishwasher), the fencing and the landscaping in communal areas. The final elements missing at the holes in the roof under the skylights in the en suite and laundry.

Quite exciting! Still no word on when we can move in, which is a bit of a piss off, but it's still great to see progress.

I didn't manage to get any more photo's, and in fact, we were pretty lucky to get in the house at all, as most of the lockable doors were locked. I do, however, have a picture of the buffet unit we bought with the couch, and the curtain fabric samples against the carpet sample.

Unfortunately it's not that great a picture - I actually got kicked out of the store for taking it. Apparently they're worried about people getting knock offs made from the picture or something, which I think it a little silly. Plus, it's not really a nice way to treat someone who's recently spent almost $8k at your store! Rude buggers. Anyway, it's all solid timber, and the doors in the front slide to the sides in front of the drawers. It's actually going to be the TV unit, so we're going to have to get a drill and make some holes in the back for the cabling. It's bigger than it looks in the picture as well. Anyway, I'll get a better shot when we actually get it delivered.

In the meantime, here's a the carpet sample with the curtain samples from Duckcloth against it.

As you can see, my favourite one looks the best, and I think we're going to go with it.

Anyway, I'd better get to bed. Until next time friends!

With Lasers, wormhole generators, and sonic thrusters

2010-08-28T12:14:00.000+10:00

I've read a couple of places on the intertubes recently that at the 2012 Olympics in London, the Modern Pentathlon will be switching to laser pistols for the shooting events.

It makes me happy that all my teenage years spent plying Virtua Cop 2 in the Arcade was not wasted....

I'm sure that somewhere along the way, someone, somewhere is going to up upset that a laser pistol might require less skill, no compensating for the wind or whatever.

To those people, I say: welcome to the future. Robots will be along shortly with mind bending future drinks to take your mind off it.

We've seen a drop in all three measures of workforce engagement

2010-08-26T16:48:00.002+10:00

Hello! Fancy seeing you here - it's been a while, and I bet you thought I'd forgotten all about you.

This is simply not the case - I've just been swamped at work and have been going through a massive reading phase recently. I've been averaging around 3 books a week since about mid-August. I blame this on the staycation and also Dana ordering a lot of books off the internets. I'm starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel in terms of books at home though, will need seek out other pursuits. Or buy more books...

The work side of it is a little bit interesting. By rights, working in a policy area that both sides of Parliament are swearing blue that they won't be active in, it should be really quiet and cruisey in the caretaker period. But unfortunately, this has not been the case, due to a couple of things. The first is that the time frames for the issue that I'm working on are really tight, and there's not that much room to stop and do nothing. In addition, the time frame is being set by Fair Work Australia, the federal industrial tribunal, which doesn't take that much notice of elections.

The second is that we had a re-structure, and my direct supervisor took a voluntary redundancy. As she wasn't replaced, I've had to take a few extra duties.

None of this is really that exciting to you, I'm sure. Suffice to say, I had a whole heap of work to do and now, I'm in post election limbo, with much less to do. It's actually pretty demoralising not knowing who I'm going to be working for, and not being able to get working on it. Don't get me wrong, we've done a lot of prep for either way, but there's not much more that I can do without actually having a Government.

The funny thing is, everyone else where I work reached this point weeks ago. A friend summarised it with a lol public servants:

Hopefully it will all be over soon, but to be honest, for the sake of the next three years, I think I'd rather just have them go back to the polls and someone get a full majority. You think this whole independents horse holding the power thing is bad now, wait until there's some essential bill that Parliament can't pass because Bob Katter's a nut bar in a cowboy hat. It'll be double dissolution before you can say "how's ya father" and we'll be right back where we are now.

Another six weeks of annoyance vs. three years (and probably less) of stagnation in the Parliament? Shit choices either way really. Although I guess if you go in for politics generally and it means the other side (which ever that is to you) doesn't get their way for another three years, there might be some consolation there.

Bleugh.

In other news, I'm going to Foreshore in November with Dana and kindred spirits Karla and Esa. It costs a mint, but I'm looking forward to a few bevvies in the sun in a nice location and some tuuuuunes. I'm also looking forward to laughing at Tiesto.

"OHAI2U RAVERS, I ARE NUMBER 1 DJ LOL!!!1!1"

To balance out the Tiesto, here's some Noisia and Phace. I've been listening to Phace and Misanthrop's 'From Deep Space' this afternoon, and it's keeping me positive.

The sample 20 seconds in to this till about a minute always makes me smile. Also making me smile in that particular clip are all the ravers caught making made nightclub faces. Somebody make some noise (or some such) for the DJ!

To round it all out, here's an absolutely awesome clip that was on Giz a little while back of some stop motion animation. I also dig the soundtrack. Hey Daver, this one's for you (no play dough though).

I love lamp

2010-08-11T23:38:00.000+10:00

I've been pretty busy recently with both work and play recently, which has led me to neglect this blog. Thankfully I've got some time off at the moment, which gives me a chance to get a post out! There's been plenty of house related goings on (although we haven't actually visited the house in a while). The most exciting of which is that we have some more detail on the licence agreement and an estimated move in date! I'm choosing to ignore the fact that all dates provided by the builder so far have been hopelessly inaccurate, and have instead opted to hope this one will be better.

Anyway, the most recent time frame puts us actually moving in (!!) in 4-6 weeks. There are two things that give me a bit of hope that this will be adhered to - first that the properties are starting to look more finished and I can actually see it happening. The second is that we're starting to get some detail about the licence agreement! The most salient information we have so far is an estimated fee in place of rent - $350 / week. It's a good $125/week less than the rent where we are at the moment, so it's pretty good odds that we'll take the licence agreement when it is finally properly offered.

The only fly in the ointment at the moment is that the timing is less than ideal for me at work - I'll be very busy around that point in time! I had hoped to take a week or two off to move in and get the place sorted out properly, but that's probably not going to happen now. It's a minor annoyance though - I'll just be so damn happy to get the keys to the place!

More news on that as it arises.

We've also managed to get our hands on a carpet sample for the new place, which is actually a bit darker than I remembered. The swatches of curtain fabric that Dana ordered from duckcloth.com.au arrived as well, and the lighter one goes quite well with the carpet. I love it when a plan comes together.

We've also had a good friend pick up the lamp we ordered a while back, which is now assembled and in our living room - I'm sitting under it right now! Here's a picture of Dana sitting under it:

Wheeeee!

Until next time ladies and gents, keep your laces loose.

A successful day

2010-08-01T16:52:00.002+10:00

A quick note to say that we had a successful day shopping yesterday - we bought the couch and a buffet (which we're going to re-purpose as a TV unit). Contrary to the advice we'd had previously, the store said it will be ready in three weeks, but they're going to store it for us until we're ready to move in. Exciting! I was going to take a picture of the buffet, but I completely forgot when we were at the shop - I'll try and remember to take one again some time.

In addition, we checked out a few curtain places, and had some productive discussions around curtains. We found a couple of places that would be happy to make curtains with the fabric Dana found on duckcloth.com.au (blogged about previously), which was promising. We actually found a few swatches of cloth in the shops that were quite good as well, and would probably be a fair bit cheaper.

Dana's been looking for alternatives to side tables, because we won't really be able to fit any in around the couch. She's come up with the idea to use small stools that can be moved around, or used for additional seating as needed instead. A leading choice at the moment is the replica Xavier Pauchard Tolix stool pictured in several colours below.

These have the advantage of being stackable and well sealed against the weather, so they could be used outside without too much worry. However, they are quite expensive.

I'm feeling really upbeat about the whole thing at the moment, good times. Now time to finish watching season one of Mad Men and argue with Dana about what sort of home theater setup to go with - she prefers the more streamlined home theater in a box type setups, where as I prefer a more chunky (and slightly higher end) dedicated receiver and speakers. I have a suspicion that her point of view will probably win out in the end - it usually seems to.

Edit: I should clarify the reference to the home theater setup above - Dana would prefer that they were invisible, or in fact, were not purchased at all, where as I would prefer some sort of ridiculously expensive and ugly home theater room instead. The discussion at the moment is about where we compromise between them all, based on budget at the available options. And also that we don't have a home theater room.

Shark vs. Elephants

2010-07-29T09:22:00.000+10:00

Last night, Fonzie and the Shark Jumpers free-shot their way to victory past the cocky White Elephants, their second victory against the pale pachyderms this season. The teams were evenly matched, and despite an early lead, it looked like the Jumper's poor stamina might loose them the game in the final quarter.

Thankfully, a series of obstruction and contact calls on the Elephants kept the Jumpers in the game.

It all game to a head in the final minutes of the game, where the Elephants took the lead for the first time after trailing by a small number of points all game. The Jumpers equalized, but it looked like it was too late for a victory....

...until their goal keeper decided to muscle in on Jumper goal attack, Matthew Patterson, just as the buzzer was called! This resulted in a free shot in extra time, which Matthew converted to the winning goal!

Fonzie and the Shark Jumpers have jumped another shark.

Curtains and "moving in under licence"

2010-07-28T17:22:00.000+10:00

We had an email from our real estate agent yesterday about completion dates, and options for moving in. The builder has said that they should have the certificate of occupancy by the end of August, which means the units will be habitable, and finished for all intents and purposes. The date of settlement (which, as I understand it, is when both parties get what they are promised in the contract - ownership of the unit for us, money for the builder) will then depend on the registration of the units plan with the ACT Govt.

This is where things fall down a bit - the ACT Govt could take anywhere between three weeks and three months to register the units plan. It probably should take a lot less, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a rule somewhere that it must take less, but this is not something that the ACT Govt seems particularly worried about. After the units plan is fully registered, there is a 14 day settlement period. So the best case scenario adds five weeks (three weeks units plan registration, 2 weeks settlement) to the time that the unit is ready for occupation physically, and when we could take full ownership of it.

Which is a bit shit to be honest.

The builder/developer have suggested an alternative option, which is that the owners to be "move in under licence". My understanding of this is that we enter into a sort of special landlord/tenant relationship with the developer, with a fee payable at settlement in lieu of rent. We don't know how much this will be yet, or any of the other details of the potential agreement. This will come from developers lawyer to our lawyer at some stage in the future.

Much as it frustrates me to give more money to the developer despite the whole thing being at least 7 months overdue, I'm actually rather keen to take this option. You have no idea how ridiculously keen I am to get into our new house and start sorting it out properly. Of course, for that to work, there would have to be scope in the agreement between the developer and ourselves for use to do things to the house. For example, we would need to be able to have TV aerials, phone lines, curtains etc installed. Otherwise it wouldn't really be worth it.

Speaking of curtains, Dana has been making moves on that front. She's recently requested swatches from online fabric company duckcloth, which should hopefully arrive in the next couple of days. They're variations on the same theme, and they are Henry Approved, pending a gander at the swatches.

This is my favourite of the two. The other, seen below, has a different background colour that just doesn't appeal as much. Having said that, I'd probably be happy with either, and it's hard to imagine what the curtains would actually look like from a picture on the internets.

The plan at this stage is to try and buy the fabric online and then have someone else make it into curtains for us, and install the necessary curtain rods (or whatever they're called). This is not something I can do myself - I am no handy man. We're going to get on to that this weekend, in addition to couch purchasing!

Very exciting times all round, I can't wait until the end of next month!

I'm going to head home and prepare for tonight's netball game. We're without our star centre due to injury, so I hope we can still hold our own without her. If I recall correctly, we beat the team we're facing tonight last time around. However, we also managed to almost poke one of their eyes out in the process. It was an accident, but I wouldn't have been too happy if I were them.

Taking care in caretaker

2010-07-27T12:18:00.000+10:00

Now that the election has been called and Parliament has been dissolved, Canberra enters a special time called "caretaker" in which the public services continues day to day functions, but can no longer have ministerial or cabinet approval on more substantial issues. This means that policy directions, stakeholder consultation and major projects are all basically put on pause while the country works out who the Government is going to be for the next couple of years.

For a policy area like the one I work in, this means that things get very, very quiet for a while. This has already started, and the feeling on the floor is rather frivolous and festive.

The problem for me, is that because I'm on a temporary task force at the moment dealing with a very specific issue, and I've also just lost the only other member of my team to the restructure, I still have a metric butt load of work to do. I'm finding it really challenging not to get caught up in the relaxed mood of everyone around me when I still have a lot to do!

To this end, sound isolating canal phones and the music on YouTube are my best friends.

Here's what I'm listening to right now:

A little warning on that, the visuals are a bit whack. Plus, you know, it's dubstep so it won't appeal to all tastes.

The upshot of this for blog readers? The frequency of posts will probably bump up a little bit in the near future. We're also getting closer and closer to completion on the house, so there will probably be lots of things around that to blog about.

For example, the real estate agent has advised that she will be sending out an email about the estimated completion date today or tomorrow, which I'm really looking forward to. Hopefully this will inform the timing of any more furniture purchases!

Now, time to eat some lunch, and then make annoying phone calls that I don't want to make.

Couchgate 2010: The Winner.

2010-07-26T17:44:00.001+10:00

So. After further deliberation, and a telling seating test with some close friends, we have a winner in the couch choice saga. And it a circle of life, triumph of decision making by committee moment, it's the same bloody couch we were looking at months ago.

That's right, the winner is the Club Grand 2 by 3 seater from Bay Leather Republic, pretty much exactly as pictured above.

We've mapped it out in the lounge room of the new place. We've sat on them both in the same day. We've argued about colour options. This is it. We're going to order it this weekend. I'm feeling very comfortable with the purchase, and now only a little bit frustrated that it will take a further 10 weeks approx before it is made.

Now we can turn our wearied decision making powers to other issues. Dana is choosing to focus on curtains, and has lots of ideas about it. I'm actually fairly happy for her to do whatever the hell she wants on that front, but I will retain a power of veto, just in case.

Instead, I've been inspired to look at other furniture for the house, like "occasional" tables (which I think means little tables to put your drinks on pretty much), lamps, coffee tables, and other cool odds and ends. I blame a recent coffee table acquisition some friends of ours made that I saw for the first time on the weekend.

This is a replica Isamu Noguchi coffee table, (available from all sorts of places online, like Matt Blatt, ClickOn Furniture and Milan Direct), which looks even more gorgeous in real life than it does here. If my friends hadn't just bought one, I would seriously consider buying one for our lounge room - not in the least because they're cheaper online than a lot of the horrible generic crap that you see in furniture shops and they look soooo much better!

I'd never even looked into the world of replica designer furniture before, but I think I'm in love now. There's so much stuff that I like on those three sites linked above, but one of my quick favourites has been the work of Sean Dix (a selection of which can be seen here). So much more to discover and enjoy!

I'm not sure if it's some sort of huge artistic faux pas to buy replicas, but I'm pretty sure that originals would be far out of reach anyway.

I'm going to keep looking at the beautiful design to distract myself from the horrendous restructure that's currently going down in my workplace.

Speaking of distractions, its time for pub trivia - the mighty Dugongs ride again tonight!

Marketing works

2010-07-23T10:36:00.000+10:00

I'm so very looking forward to the Tron Legacy movie, their slick advertising and flashy special effects have me salivating already!

I'm waiting until December with baited breath! In the mean time, I think I'm going to try and find a copy of Tron - I wonder if it's available on blu ray...

Colouring in the lines

2010-07-21T18:03:00.001+10:00

I realised it's been a little while since I last posted on here. There's a few reasons for that, but the leading contenders are work (busy!) and also no successful site visits. We did do a drive by the other day, and it doesn't look like there's been too much progress on our house, but there's been some serious digging going on in preparation for the rest of the internal roads.

We also ordered a lamp for the living room (mentioned previously) from Aero Designs. I'd hoped to have it by now, but they tell me they're having issues with their suppliers.

Anywho, what I can say, is that we've been thinking a lot about couches. There are currently pictures of them spread all over the living room floor, and their pros and cons come up at least once a night. Will the one we're keen on be too big? Does it look too big in the new place? Would it fit in our current apartment? What about the colour? Will we have enough seating? Could we actually fit any other seating in anyway? Leather of fabric? Which colour?

Sometimes we think we've resolved a lot of these questions, or at least have answers for them, and they come round again to haunt us. I guess the biggest one that was a problem for us early on and continues to be is whether the couches we're interested in will fit. Actually, I was just reading an earlier blog post, and it really looks like we've been going round in circles for a while now.

The funny thing is, since I first wrote about it, I think we've almost come full circle. We decided that the couch that we were keen on at the time was too big for the space, at 3.1m by 2.5m in an L shape. This led us to look at all sorts of other options, but the one we've just about settled on now is 3.3m by 2.475 - really not that much different at all, and in fact, bigger in one dimension!

However, I've convinced myself that this will actually work, for a couple reasons. First, I've bought some grid paper, and have spent a good half hour of my lunch break sketching out the the proportions of the room and the couch, and I think it will be all good. I may have copped a bit of flak from my work mates for my diligent ruler and pencil work, but I still think it's worthwhile.

Second, we've revised how much room we need for the dining area - we're going to have quite a lot less crap in there in the end. Third, the couch we're thinking about now is quite low, and the ends of it can double as side tables. The short end of the L, facing towards the TV also will not have an arm rest, but a low cushion instead, thus not cutting the end of the couch off.

Finally, the couch we're looking at is modular, and can be converted into a different configuration if we have a large dinner party and need more room in the dining area. It can also be converted into a decent size bed for overnight visitors.

For those that have talked to me recently, you may well be aware that I'm talking about the Kato from King Furniture.

The version pictured here is not exactly what we're thinking of getting - we're more keen on the 'deluxe' line that has slightly deeper seats. There are a lot of different packages that you can get, but the one that we're leaning towards at the moment is pictured below.

There's still scope for us to change our mind a bunch more times, but we're actually considering ordering it in the next couple of weeks. King Furniture have a sale on at the moment, and manufacturing time is about 2 months. If we order now, it should be ready around when we get the keys.

Until we do get the keys, I'm going to keep playing around with the grid paper - it's good to see what we can actually do with the space. It's so big and empty at the moment in there, imagining anything in there is quite difficult.

And now on to netball. Fonzy and the Shark Jumpers have actually had a fairly good run since we dropped down a league (we were previously far above our skill level and were consistently thrashed). We're still not regular winners, but we're actually contesting more games now. May even get round to writing up a game at some stage...

Now it’s time for a little braggadocio, while I swing my arms like Ralph Macchio.

2010-07-12T21:45:00.001+10:00

Home sick today, which is very lame. On the bright side, we did get to have a look inside the house yesterday, after all the builders (and sunlight) had left for the day. The more time wears on, the more obvious it is where you can get into the site without jumping the fence. I almost feel like they aren't trying to keep things secure any more, there's a huge gap in one section of the fence.

Mind you, it does make life a little easier for nosey future home owners.

Anyway, there were a few interesting things to see on the site. As mentioned the other day, part of the internal driveway has been put in.

Unfortunately, this is not in our area of the site at all. Still, it's good to see progress around the place.

However, there has been some things happening around our end of the site, namely a kitchen and some painting!

Here is the kitchen in question! Note Dana sizing it up with a professional eye. The bench tops are a pale ceaser stone and the splash back is a white tile. Interestingly, it looks like the telephone line comes into the kitchen, which actually makes it a bit of a weird spot in terms of router positioning. I might look into getting a second outlet put in when we get the phone line installed, just so we don't have to have the router on the kitchen counter.

I'm also pretty happy with the bench space and cupboard space - it's heaps more than what we have at the moment!

There's also been some painting going on - no idea if the final coat has been done yet, but it's all a lot whiter than it was before. There's also tiles in the bathrooms and the laundry now!

The skylight's mentioned the other day have been installed on the roof, but haven't quite yet made their way down into the interior.

To round out the post, here's a clip from nerdcore pioneer, MC Frontalot. The visuals aren't much, but the music's better. I did have to look a few words up in the dictionary though. To help you out, braggadocio means empty swagger, or that style of rap where the MC talks up how awesome they are.

Edit: I swapped in a better clip - the recording in the previous one sounded a bit poo. This one is from the intro to the doco "Nerdcore Rising".

Skylight

2010-07-10T22:59:00.000+10:00

Popped past the house this afternoon - unfortunately there were people working on site (industrious buggers) so we didn't get to check out the paint job that was going up last time we popped by. Things are coming along nicely around the site though - I think all the buildings are just about water tight, but some of the garages are not quite there yet. Some of the internal roads are going in as well, which makes the place that much more finished.

From the outside, there were two new additions to our unit that were of note - they've installed the skylights! I was quite happy to see this, as the en suite and the laundry were looking quite dark on our last visit. I was also pretty happy that there is one installed in the laundry - I haven't checked in a while, but I didn't think there was one on the plan!

Things are coming along nicely anyway. I still think they're going to be pushing things to get everything finished this month, but I can always hope. The silver lining, as always, is that the longer it takes, the more money we'll have in our pocket when we're ready to go. Barring some horrible intervention, it will certainly be ready by December, when the contract stipulates it must be ready, and we start being in danger of missing out on the first home buyer's boost (touch wood). However, I'd be lying if I said I was happy at the prospect that we might have to wait longer than the end of August to move in.

Anyway, the completed skylights remind me of this track from the Blade Trinity soundtrack:

I enjoyed it, even if it does sound like futuristic elevator music...

Anyway, I'm going to get back to enjoying a lazy quiet weekend - have been feeling under the weather all week, and I think being a hermit for a weekend is the only way to go.

I leave you with a little video a found care of Google Reader's recommended feeds. It's a video made by a student of the University of Hannover in Germany - check the original Vimeo post for the full details. Anyway, it's a CG projection of Super Mario Bros on to a wall.

Super Mario Bros. from Andreas Heikaus on Vimeo.

BIG BANG BIG BOOM

2010-07-07T13:26:00.001+10:00

This was a lunch time Google Reader Play find - hasn't had a bajillion hits on YouTube yet, so I thought I'd repost it here. This is BIG BANG BIG BOOM, a wall-painted animation by artist Blu.

The YouTube description calls it "an unscientific point of view on the beginning and evolution of life ... and how it could probably end."

I like it, but I can't even begin to imagine how much time and paint went into it!

PS: no updates on the house, haven't had time to make it up to the site recently.

Entertainment, art and clothing

2010-07-01T13:25:00.000+10:00

Having just handed over an exorbitant amount of money for stamp duty (that I wouldn't have to pay if I'd bought a house any where else in Australia), my mind has already turned to things that I want, but cannot afford to purchase at this juncture. Some of them may well still be mine in the future, some less so.

The first would be in the "probably not" category - the artwork of Shawn Smith - which was featured on Engadget Alt recently.

The two pieces pictured above are "Gemsbock" and "Re-kindling". I encourage you to check out some more of his work at his website. Shawn created these three dimensional versions of pixel art, which I've always rather enjoyed. I may even have blogged about it at some stage. Anyway, they look excellent. They seem to be mostly made of small painted wooden blocks.

The second item I was lusting after this morning is an AV receiver and some decent speakers. This are firmly on the list of things to buy when we move into the new place. I haven't really made a choice yet, and there are ongoing discussions with Dana about the aesthetic nature of such a purchase (she thinks they're ugly, whereas I think they're beautiful), but we'll get there in the end. Speaking of Dana, she's discovered the magic of RSS feeds and is now subscribed to this blog. Hi Dana!

Anyway, at the moment, I really like the options from Yamaha.

Pictured here is the YHT-694AU, which retails at around a grand. I'm hoping that discussions with Dana can be progressed by the smaller "bookshelf" style rear speaker, and the knowledge that the receiver and central speaker will probably be hidden by a TV unit. It remains to be seen if that will be a successful angle. Wish me luck.

The last is a very groovy t-shirt from Etsy store Happy Family featured on gizmodoAU (if memory serves me correctly, anyway) called "Robot and Triceratops.

Two mortal enemies, together at last. Not really much more to say on that one.

To round what has been a thoroughly nerdy post out, here's a rendition of the Tetris theme on bottles....

PS: I totally forgot to mention, the Fonzy and the Shark Jumpers, my netball team, had an epic victory last night. We are also pioneering a special move I like to call "the Shark Jump" where you do a cross between a star jump and an epileptic fit in front of the opposition if they get the ball. Go the Jumpers!

Couch update

2010-06-28T15:30:00.001+10:00

We put some more thought into the couch situation on the weekend and visited a few stores. I'm much more positive about the whole thing. For starters, it looks like we could maybe still get the couch we wanted in the first place, but just in a slightly different configuration. Instead of the L shape with a two seater and a three seater arm, we could go down the parth of a three seater with a chaise on one site. This would still get quite a bit of seating (and crucially, allow 2 people to lie on it at the same time) and fit into our living room.

However, we also rather liked the alternatives available at King furniture as well. Those funky modular jobbies are actually looking rather attractive, especially with some of the cool fabrics they come in.

One thing is certain after the weekend's shopping - there are whole warehouses of terrible couches out there that I never want to go near. I think we've narrowed down the choices quite well, now it's just a matter of refining and ordering.

It has also not become apparent that there will be at least a six week wait between couch purchase and one turning up. This may put a crimp in our original plan not to order one until we move in...

Heh, crimp....

ELO rule

2010-06-26T16:16:00.000+10:00

I was reminded at the pub the other night how much I love ELO. You should love them too.

Yeah.

Has everybody seen this or what? WHERE'S THE GODDAMN ARNIE AT?

2010-06-23T16:58:00.003+10:00

I saw this in an ad this afternoon (well targeted, google ads) and it's blowing my mind. I don't know what to make of it.

I mean I'd heard they were remaking the original Predator with Adrien Brody instead of Arnie as Dutch, but had dismissed it as hyperbole. It seems like it's not a total remake, and I'm actually rather glad of that.

But holy crap! Lawrence Fishburn!? The "are you a mexi-can or a mexi-can't" dude (aka Danny Trego)? EPIC LOLS!

The best part? The cast list on IMDB lists characters called "Bezerker Predator Black Super" and "Dog Handler Super Predator".

HA!

PS: I'm a Mexi-can!!!

Couchy couch couch

2010-06-22T23:13:00.002+10:00

The last time we were on site, we did some very rough and ready measurements of the living room to see if the couch that we'd picked out would fit - and woe! - it doesn't look like it will.

The Club Grand, from Bay Leather Republic, met my key priorities of being comfy to sit on, and long enough to lie down on. It met Dana's exacting standards of style and quality, and it wasn't too deep for her munchkin stature. It also gave us enough seating, which I worried about a little for the lounge room. That might sound a little silly - after all, there will be just two of us living there - but we like to entertain a lot, and we really need the extra seating. It also sorted out the worry of matching any other seating in the lounge room with the couch, as there would not really be room for any other seating anyway.

I should also point out that we do already have a few arm chairs, but they really need recovering, and we were going to retire them to the spare room anyway. The spare room was going to be a study/library/reading room. I'm really looking forward to that room.

But I digress. I've been spending some time tonight thinking about alternatives. I've got a couple of thoughts about it at the moment. The first is something that Dana and I both like, but I don't know if it would really work in our living room - a "chesterfield".

I really like these couches, but they really seem like something that should be in a bar instead of in front of a TV in the living room. I'd love to have one of these the study for example. However, it may encourage me to drink scotch on it, which I probably don't need.

The next option is something a little more modern.

This is the Kato, from King Furniture. You've probably seen some of King's adverts - they're pretty aggressive with them . Every time I go to their show room, I change my mind about them. For example, I usually end up hating the couch I went to check out, but having my world rocked by another one in the show room. I think the problem is that the colours and way they are set out can vary so much. Anyway, the modular nature of the King's couches gives us the ability to get more seating in with only the one couch in a limited space, which is attractive. I'm yet to fall in love with any of them yet though.

The other way to cut it of course, is just to go with a more standard route, with a (nice) couch. This route is a little tricky, at least with online browsing, because I can't seem to find anything that great! The couple of options that I have seen are, of course, in the US, and not Australia. Maybe there's more, and my web-fu is just to weak to find them. I don't know, it's getting late, and I'm getting tired.

Here are a couple that I did find. Unfortunately I have no idea what they're like to sit on, or where to get their equivalents in Australia. I can't help but feel the best thing to do will just be to take a big trip up to Sydney and check out what's available.

As a side note, looking at online shopping in the US makes it really obvious how much more we pay for things in Australia. I'd find it quite frustrating if I didn't love Australia quite so much.

As I've been writing this, some crappy E! special about the Kardashians has come on the TV. I've just learned more than I ever needed to know about these people, who's primary claim to fame seems to be that they knew OJ Simpson and his wife. I think it's time for bed...

ZOMFG they're painting!

2010-06-20T21:21:00.000+10:00

Just a quickie to say that we popped past the house this arvo, after a lovely lunch at the Smokehouse Cafe at Poachers Pantry (and a visit to Clonakilla to pick up some vino), and the windows were covered up with black plastic.

This can mean only one thing - they're painting! I'm so excited!

Unfortunately, there were some builders on site, so we didn't go in. Apart from Esa - Old Father Time has no fear. The other interesting thing about the site is that the last couple of houses all have roofs on them now. Looks like we might just make the July completion estimation, which would hopefully mean a late August/early September occupancy.

Adventures in trespassing...

2010-06-17T21:48:00.001+10:00

Last weekend was a long weekend in Canberra, and I feel like I got at least three weekends worth of stuff packed in there. One of the things I got packed in there was a proper fence jumping and exploration of the site. While we were on site, we ran into another home-owner to be, doing exactly the same thing.

He was pretty keen to be friendly, but he did tell us a few interesting things, foremost amongst them, we don't actually have to jump the fence - there are a whole heap of places you can just lift a bit of the fence up. I felt a little silly when he pointed that out. He also gave us the name of an online curtain company, and showed us the cornice-less design (he called it square set) in his unit. The square set thing looks pretty cool, very modern.

Then he told us why he bought his unit (because of the view, that someone had since obscured with a house). Then he showed us the extra light fittings he had installed. Then he showed us the kitchen bench top that wasn't the one he wanted. You get the picture. Nice guy, very keen.

Anyway, there has been some more progress on the site. Most of it seems to be going on in other people's places - one of them has all the light switches installed, all the tiles, and most of the kitchen - but there has been some in ours as well.

Here are all the cabinets waiting to be installed in the kitchen. I think the big one in the front will be the bench.

There's also waterproofing around the shower and bath in the bathroom. You can also see the vanity unit that will eventually be installed in there as well.

Same goes for the en suite - waterproofing and vanity.

Its kind of interesting seeing how some really small things make the house look finished. The two pictures above show the newly installed cornices in the living room and the gap between the walls and the roof in the kitchen, where they will be installing the kitchen cabinets instead. It's such a small part of the room, but it really makes the living room look more finished compared to the kitchen.

These two pictures are not from our unit - they're from another one in the complex that is a mirror image of ours. I've just included them to show what the kitchen and lounge room will look like when they're a bit further along. You can see the light fixtures as well!

Anyway, new season of ER just started in GO, and you'd better believe I'm watching that shit! George Clooney AND Noah Wiley are back on it!

The Presets - If I Кnow You (Tania & Jori Version)

2010-06-16T11:54:00.000+10:00

I started writing a full post on house progress last night, but it was defeated by TV and red wine.

Instead I present you with a track from a CD that someone lent me at work (MoS Uncovered 2) which is "chilled" remixes of the popular house that MoS like to push, interspersed with older tunes that someone who is clearly not me considers classic. Predictably, a lot of it was shit, but I really liked this track, maybe because I'm a sucker for the Presets.

Excellent music for a rough morning at work.

To follow on the "best of chill out remix '96" theme, here's another track I enjoyed - the Stakka and Skynet remix of Morcheeba's "The Sea", a prime example of what happens when dark side drum and bass producers go soft:

PS: Happy days, Blogger.com has reinstated the spellchecker! We will all benefit...

ABSOLUTE GENIUS!!!1!1!!eleven

2010-06-15T12:12:00.000+10:00

The frequency of posts on here is getting rather low due to the new job - I actually turn the majority of posts out during my lunch time or other quiet periods at work, so being really busy taking new things on puts a real restriction on it.

Anyway, we had a "site visit" over the weekend and I do have lots more to say about the house, but I just don't have enough time to post it properly now. I'll get on to it when I have the time and inclination. For now, I leave you with a video that a mate forwarded on today.

It combines two of my favourite things - Streetfighter and white trash TV. Enjoy.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Of house interiors

2010-06-08T23:05:00.001+10:00

Over the last couple of months, Dana and I have been thinking more and more of what we'd like to do with the inside of the house. This is coming home even more now that it's already completed. For example, we've started looking for curtains, we have a couch pretty much picked out, etc.

In light of this, I'm going to try and post a bit more about the thoughts we have and the decisions we make regarding the interior. Hopefully this will mean that I'm chronicling excellent choices that we will love forever, and not a whinge about not being able to find good things in Canberra or the exorbitant price of having things shipped here. I'm upbeat about the former, but there may well be some of the latter.

Anyway, to kick it off, we decided on the weekend we want to get a Chad Floor Lamp, available from Aero Designs.

It's also available in black, which I think we'd probably go for. We saw it in an Inside Out magazine - I got Dana a subscription to it for our anniversary last year. While a lot of the stuff in it is totally not my thing, there's an occasional gem in there, and its quite good to get ideas and see what's available.

Anyway, the lamp is supposed to cost around $340, which doesn't seem that bad after having a look at some nicer ones in the shops recently. I reckon it looks ace.

To end things off, here's a track I really enjoyed listening to at work today - "Angels and Fly" by High Contrast (feat. Nolay). It didn't help me concentrate at all, but it did bring a smile to my face and get stuck in my head all afternoon.

House update - blurry camera phone shots and exciting news

2010-06-08T00:10:00.001+10:00

After a few weeks without a successful visit to the site, we managed to get a good look inside the unit again on the weekend. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera on me at the time, so I had to make do with taking a few pictures on my camera. As a result, the quality isn't too great on them, but you can at least get a bit of an idea about the progress.

Being a building site of a certain stage of completion, things are looking rather messy. The above shot shows our garage, which now has a back wall, and in this shot is housing some gyprock for one of the other units, two baths and a Dana.

Here's one of the front doorway, where things are looking similarly messy. Those with a good memory might spot that the supports for the porch roof now have concrete footings, which is good to see. They were a bit precariously sitting on random offcuts of wood before.

Here you can see the living room, with its newly erected walls. The second shot is where the kitchen will be eventually.

Here is the bathroom, and the vanity unit that will eventually live in it. The vanity is currently hanging out in the living room, with another vanity destined for one of the other units, and a laundry sink.

Here's the garage from another angle. Plenty of room for the car, plus bikes and the early stages of a classic Jones junk collection. Hopefully it will never be quite as bad as mum and dad's place - I think not purchasing a boat or a trailer for it to travel on will be an important part of avoiding this.

And finally, here is a picture of the courtyard with the final brickwork and cladding completed. While you can't really see it in this picture, it was good to see the final colour of the cladding.

So there are the photos; now on to the exciting news! We had an update from the estate agent and developer about the estimated completion date. The exciting part is that the estimate at the moment is that they will be done in July! I'm not entirely sure how - there are some units that still don't have roofs on them yet, and then there's landscaping etc to sort out. Its still very positive news. The only real dampener on it is that when it's finished, the plans have to be registered with the ACT Govt.

Those who recall the last time we had plans go through the ACT Govt may see the problem already.

Registration of the plan can take from three weeks, to three months depending entirely on how long the ACT Govt take to process them. I'm crossing my fingers that it will be measured in weeks, rather than months, but it's still a bit of a gloomy prospect. Its one thing to wait for them to be finished, but another entirely for them to be finished, and just be waiting around for the paperwork, especially when we will just have paid an exorbitant amount in stamp duties to the authorities processing the paperwork.

Anyway, I have more to say on the subject, and also a whole bunch to say on our plans for the interior, but I've just noticed it's gone midnight and I need to get some sleep!

Eat them up yum yum

2010-06-04T11:17:00.001+10:00

Today's tune to get you through the morning is "Pacman (Power-Pill Remix)" by Power-Pill (aka Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin). There's a couple of different uploads of this tune on youtube, but only the one below features a mish mash of Tron clips.

Ahhhhh yeah. Makes me want to go and watch the original Tron again. To help get you in that same nostalgic mind set, here's a blurry 1982 trailer of the original Tron:

For extra laughs, here's the description on the youtube post:

FrankSchenk6 — February 07, 2008 — Kevin Flynn is a former employee of the software corporation ENCOM, now running a arcade. Flynn has been trying to hack into ENCOM's mainframe computer to find evidence that ENCOM's senior executive Ed Dillinger stole four video games he created. But Dillinger's supercomputer "Master Control Program" foils Flynn's efforts and dictates and controls most of the computer systems. One night, Flynn's former girlfriend Lora and her boyfriend, ace computer programmer Alan Bradley helps Flynn break into ENCOM to shut down the MCP with Alan's security program "TRON". But MCP uses Lora's matter transmission program and converts Flynn into data and sends him into the computer. Flynn finds himself in a electronic world ruled by the MCP and his evil chief henchman Sark, where computer programs are the alter-egos of their creators and are forced to compete in gladiatorial games. With help from Tron, a heroic and fearless security program and his lover, Yori, Flynn sets out destroy the MCP and help Tron liberate the system from the MCP's control, by destroying the MCP is Flynn's only way of returning to the real world.

Gold! I have to admit though, I didn't realise this movie was quite as old as all that. If it came out in 1982, it's older than I am, which makes my nostalgia for it a little misplaced. Whatever, it's still awesome.

So awesome that Disney are remaking it in 3D. 3D!!1!1!11one!!1eleven

Stereo sound, straight to your earholes!

The trailer actually looks pretty good, despite the reliance on the 3D gimmick. Unfortunately embedding is disabled on the clip, so you'll just have to follow this link here to watch it. I recommend it. I really hope it ends up being good.

Edit: I'm totally going to make that pacman track my ringtone!

Digitized fart sounds

2010-06-01T16:19:00.001+10:00

ZOMFG second post in one day!

Toooo much reading complicated things is doing my head in this afternoon. Then this track came on from a repository of drum and bass singles and VIPs I keep on hand for emergencies: "Move VIP" by Trace and Rymetyme.

I know what you're thinking, it sounds like digitized fart sounds. I don't care, it was just what the doctor ordered this afternoon, and I want to share it with you all.

That is all.

PS: if you followed a link thinking this would be about the house, scroll on to the next post. This is just an afternoon mind dump about music that I like.

PPS: We all know it's true that the best thing Goldie ever did was "Innercity Life". Starring in Snatch was a close second. I'm yet to see anything else particularly good come out of him. Some dudes on fb just (inadvertently) reminded me of this, and I thought that should be said.

Edit: The same dudes just reminded me that he was a bad guy in a Bond movie. I won't make the call that he was a really awesome one, but I would at least put it above nothing particularly good.

Ah yes, aint that fresh - everybody wants to get down like that

2010-06-01T13:28:00.000+10:00

Good news house progress followers - the unit in our complex that went back on the market (for a substantially increased price - see previous posts) is now under offer! Hopefully this means it's selling for the ticket price on the site of $455k. This is pretty excellent for us, because ours is a slightly nicer place (on paper at least) and is a substantial increase in value from a year ago when it was first on offer.

I was fairly certain that the unit would sell for a fair bit more (given Canberra's crazy property market), but I worried that $455k was above what the market would pay.

In other news, there were some fairly fast paced changes at work last week that saw me start a new job on Monday morning, after finding out about it on Thursday. Its a position I had expressed interest in, so I see it as a positive move, but it's work that I've never done before, so I'm currently feeling a little out of my depth. This isn't aided by the fact that I don't actually have a director as yet (she hopefully will start next Monday) and that it is the first time I've moved to a completely new job since I joined the public service.

It does fulfill a personal goal I've had to be part of a "taskforce". Now all that's left is become a member of thinktank.

I'll leave you with a song that was stuck in my head and prompted me to listen to some hip hop today (and then go back to dark, dirty drum and bass).

Art imitating life

2010-05-26T12:46:00.001+10:00

I saw a snippet of this video during my lunch time browsing in a short doco posted on Gizmodo about pixel art. The doco itself wasn't hugely interesting, but some of the pixel artwork that it shows off looked quite interesting, especially the animations.

This one took my attention, because I've always loved side scrolling platform games. The story follows the life of the hero, in brief, after he beats the boss and rescues the princess.

The other art that caught my attention in it was the rather excellent Pixels by Patrick Jean, which did the rounds a little while back. Pixels is well worth the watch, if you haven't seen it already.

Now, get back to work, you slackers!

House update - almost caught looking around the site

2010-05-24T15:21:00.001+10:00

We went to have a look at the house on Sunday, and we got a bit excited to see that the internal walls are in, and it looks like all the cladding on the outside is finished. This puts it at just about lock up/air tight stage.

We were so excited, we jumped the fence to go and have a look inside without taking any precautions; usually we at least circle the block to see if there's anyone working on the site. To cut a long story short, there were workers on site, and luckily we saw them before they saw us. I don't think they realised we were there, but we legged it at full pelt anyway.

As an aside, I was reminded of sneaking around my high school at night one weekend as a misbehaving teenager. On that occasion, we seemed to have free run of the place, and delighted in drinking a smuggled beer in the same spot we ate lunch on a school day. However, being young and in search of a thrill, we then proceeded to sneak up on the security guard's post and were chased off the campus.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand.

Despite the set back, it was still pretty exciting to see that there are interior walls up! The two places next door have been painted as well, which hopefully means ours will be painted soon too. I was really interested to see how far along the units that were already painted a couple of weeks ago were fairing, but unfortunately, that's exactly where the workers were.

We also started looking at curtains over the weekend. I learned a few things, first amongst them being that I don't have a bloody clue about curtains. I had actually thought it was all relatively simple, but it does not seem so.

The second thing I learned is that there are not many curtain places open on a Sunday.

The third thing I learned is that I really don't find curtain shopping enjoyable. Thankfully Dana has far more enthusiasm for it. My negative reaction to it actually surprised me a little bit - I've quite enjoyed all the other house shopping we've done, especially furniture shopping.

We did, after looking through a lot of swatches in the single shop that was open, manage to find one curtain fabric that we both agreed was quite nice. I couldn't find a good picture of it online, but it is the curtain fabric in the background in the picture below:

It was, at least, slightly gratifying that we mostly came to the same conclusions about the fabrics. Previous conversations with Dana (and an understanding of her likes and dislikes in colour learned over time) had me a bit worried that she would want something much more striking, where I would favour something conservative. Next weekend will (unfortunately) involve more curtain shopping. Maybe this time, we'll even talk to a sales person about how much it will cost and things like installing tracks.

Schwarzanegger Friday

2010-05-21T15:58:00.001+10:00

This demands posting - prepare youreself for 10 minutes of Schwarzanegger glory.

I only wish they'd included a horse or camel punch in there...

Props to Patto for forwarding this on (and less props for the Age for showing it to him.

PS: have just about finished experimenting with twitterfeed. I'm going with a partial implementation - while it's good to have automated posting, I don't think everything I post on this is worth spamming on fb. Twitter I don't really give a shit about, so that will take it all.

Edit: Matthew, I hope you are reading this. MATTHEW MATTHEW MATTHEW!

I heart Hot Chip...

2010-05-19T17:57:00.001+10:00

... or at least the two albums of theirs that I've got (The Warning and Made in the Dark). I just saw a clip on youtube of theirs that I was not impressed with at all. Sometimes it feels like a small betrayal when a band I really like releases an album that I don't like, but I guess I can't hold it against someone if they don't want to make the same tracks over and over.

Anyway, enough of that mindless drivel. Here's a link to a clip of theirs I really do like - Over and Over. Unfortunately, the emedding has been disabled (curses!). I'm using it to relax my mind before netball tonight, with the possibility of another ignominious defeat.

Friends and accquaintances on twitter and facebook may have noticed that these posts and my google reader shared items are now being pushed regularly to facebook and twitter with twitterfeed. It's something I'm trying out at the moment. Please let me know if it's annoying, otherwise you're likely to keep seeing it. It does rather help having it automated, and it makes me feel like I'm not neglecting facebook when I'm sharing all the interesting things I read on google reader instead. Why should I worry about neglecting fb? That I cannot tell you, but still I do.

Rather than bore you with the details of my rather mundane week, I shall instead share a rather groovy video I saw on Gizmodo.

ENVISION : Step into the sensory box from SUPERBIEN on Vimeo.

In other news, I've spent some time with a measuring tape and ordered a custom shirt from http://www.indochino.com.au/. I'm interested to see how it pans out. The cost was around US$99, which isn't too far off what I pay for a nice cotton business shirt at the moment (less on sale). I'm going to write it up for the office newsletter as well, which I may well repost up here at some stage.

Now...off to netball!

Frash Metal Friday...

2010-05-14T15:45:00.000+10:00

It hasn't been quite as busy today, but I'm feeling pretty brain dead regardless. This has made the banter of the next section over more of an annoyance than usual, so I've had my headphones in all day trying to avoid them.

The best part of this is that I spent most of the arvo listening to the best of Black Sabbath. I went through a huge stage of listening to Sabbath a lot last year, but remarkably, have never really got particularly sick of it. That's a bit of strange thing for me, because I often tire of music quickly - I can never stand to have a CD sit in a player for more than one play through at a time. I always thought that was pretty normal (why would you want to listen to the same tracks again if you've just heard them?!), but Dana feels differently. If she had her way, the CD in the car player would never change.

Anyway, this brings me to my favourite track of the afternoon's listening: Turn Up the Night. When this started playing it was one of those rare unplanned moments where the music fits your mood and situation perfectly and you can't help by smile. This time round, it was the completion of a tricky document I had been working on that did it for me.

Here it is:

Now for something completely different: Big L - Ebonics. A1++ wordplay, would trade again.

Ahhh yeah. Knock off can't come round soon enough.

Sometimes everything happens at once

2010-05-13T16:14:00.001+10:00

Have been really busy at work with developments on a few things I work on. It's good to be busy again, but my head has been swimming a little bit trying to keep up. Watching the below video may help to put you in the same mind state:

On top of that, we've been meeting with a mortgage broker recently trying to work out which home loan to go with, and on top of that how we want to structure our finances when we get the house. While the second half of the sentence is still very much up in the air (making the first problematic as well) we did come to a very good conclusion while at the broker - we have enough money saved up now for a 20 per cent deposit (or for those who read my earlier musings on the subject, an LVR of 0.8)! This is very exciting, as it means that we don't have to worry about paying mortgage insurance, which was looking like at least $5k.

Looks like all that saving has been paying off! I'm glad, because I'm getting sick of tinned soup for lunch, and I'd hate to think that my tastebuds had been suffering for nothing.

However, it does mean we'll have less money left over to pay for all the other things that need to happen when we get in there. Our previous calculations had left us with plenty left over for the new couch we want to buy, the curtains, the aerial and the garden. It looks like I will be eating canned soup for lunch for a while longer.

The other alternative is that we opt for a loan where the lender takes a current market value of the property, rather than the contract price. While I had previously thought this was a fairly common place scenario, according to our broker, it actually narrows the choice of lenders quite a bit.

Decisions, decisions!

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain perform Shaft

2010-05-10T15:25:00.001+10:00

Words fail me.

Props to the man like Mark Bothe for forwarding this on to me.

Edit: They also cover Teen Spirit, rather amusing.

Minor house update (no pictures)

2010-05-10T10:54:00.000+10:00

We did a quick trip up to the house on Sunday, not expecting any progress. We were pleasantly surprised to see that they had installed some of the cladding above the windows on our unit, and have started installing insulation.

What was slightly more interesting was seeing some of the progress on the other units. At least two of them were being painted and having the kitchens installed, as well as the tiling and the inside of the wardrobes. One of the most advanced has the same floor plan as ours (but mirrored) so we could get an idea of the kitchens.

I'm happy to report that they look quite good, with plenty of cupboard space (something that we lack right now) and a glossy white finish on the shelves and draws. I think it's going to look really good when the bench tops are on!

I'm really looking forward to our place catching up with that. Will try and get photos soon.

In other news, we're going to see our friendly mortgage broker (Gregor) tonight, which should be good. He was really helpful last year and I'm looking forward to see what he has to say tonight.

TGIF!!

2010-05-07T16:20:00.001+10:00

Words don't really express how happy I am that it's Friday, it's 15 minutes to work drinks and knock off. I'm going to let Kool and the Gang take a run at it instead....

There's extra reasons for it to be good, like poker tonight, good news for a mate, busy times at work and.....*drum roll please*.....

Promotion! That's right, the job I'm acting in and did a terrible interview for in March is finally now official confirmed to be mine. It feels more satisfying that exciting, but it's bloody good to get it sorted.

Ken Flow Chart

2010-05-04T16:30:00.000+10:00

Found this while flicking Google Ready Play in some downtime at work.

Source: http://rhizome.org/editorial/3492

Pusherman

2010-05-03T10:41:00.000+10:00

I've had this song stuck in my head all morning. Curtis Mayfield knows what it's about.

House update!

2010-05-01T23:25:00.002+10:00

This evening we finally managed to find the site unmanned and got to jump the fence and see the progress inside! I've got a few pictures, although the low light didn't result in totally great shots.

Here's the front of the house and the entry way. Eventually the gaps that you can see in the first picture above the porch and the garage will be filled in with a kind of beige coloured cladding, as will all of the areas above windows around the rest of the building. You can also see that the roof above the porch has a couple of bits of wood supporting it, and the permanent supports are all wonky. This is because the concrete bases for the permanent supports haven't been installed yet - for some reason they do them about the same time as they put the gyprock up on the inside. I have no idea why.

Here's the living room and the kitchen. No real big changes since the last post on the house, apart from the wall behind the wooden frame. One exception to this is the little wooden frame where the fridge will go, which also gives an approximate position for where the kitchen counter will be. You can see that on the right in both of the pictures above. One other thing that has changed, but you can't really see in this picture is that one of the dodgy bits of work on the wooden frame in what will be the pantry cupboard has now been fixed. Yay!

We have a bath! No interior walls yet, but we have a bath. I do rather enjoy that you can look straight out of the window while you bathe.

Along with a lot of other wiring, they've also installed the ducted gas heating in the roof. At the moment it looks like giant silver intestines hanging out of the roof cavity. With the wiring in place, we can get an idea of where the power points, aerial sockets etc are; they were left off the original plans. Thankfully they all seem to be where we'd want them - specifically the aerial and power sockets fit where I want to put the TVs.

Dana took the opportunity to measure up the windows for curtains. She's always thinking ahead. At least that's what she says, I think she just likes the idea of curtain shopping.

These were piled up in our garage. Roughly half the other units on site have got some of the internal walls up, so here's hoping ours will be up soon as well!.

And here's the proof - this is the living room of the unit two doors down. It has the same plan as us, but for a few more windows in the south side of the building. It was really weird going into someone else's house. It gets more weird to go in the other houses the closer the get to completion and actually start looking like homes.

Here's their bath!

It's been weeks since we last made it onto site, and it could be weeks more before we get on there again. There's so much happening on site right now, hopefully it won't be too long.

PS: late night TV is pretty terrible. No wonder people choose to download TV rather than watch the crap that's actually broadcast....

Tuuuuune

2010-04-21T16:59:00.000+10:00

Today's Tune of the Day is Raiden - Infection (E-Sassin rmx). Sci-Fi tech drum and bass at it's finest.

The perfect antidote to annoying work and loud workplace neighbours.

Property musings and economics 101.

2010-04-13T13:06:00.000+10:00

You may recall a few weeks back I blogged about one of the units in our complex going back up for sale at a considerable increase over the initial price. The asking price at the time was 460k, a 16 per cent increase from the initial price of 395k a little over a year ago. At the time, I was quite chuffed, because I saw the listing as a possible indication of capital growth in our unit.

Unfortunately the property is still for sale and they've now dropped the asking price by 5k. See below for a screenshot of the listing.

I'm fairly novice at the property game, but around six weeks without an offer and a drop in price is not usually a really great sign. It seems that the vendor (who I think is probably still the developer, given the clauses in the contract about on selling before settlement) probably over valued the place a little.

Further examination of houses for sale in Franklin (see image below, click for a larger size) shows that there are three bedroom houses available for purchase for less than 460k. Perhaps it's not so surprising that the unit hasn't sold yet, given the obvious advantages the houses (and their land) have over the townhouse at a similar price.

However, it's also worth noting that all the three bedroom houses in a similar price range are under offer. I'm fairly hopeful that they'll go soon, and the unit in our complex will then be the most attractive (in terms of price at least) option in Franklin for a place with three bedrooms. Please note, I haven't really considered the two bedroom houses listed there as comparable properties - they're bloody tiny!

The length of time 7/56 Christina Stead St has been on the market may also reflect the general dip in the first home buyers market that was an inevitable result of phasing out the fist home buyers boost and rising interested rates. According to an article I read this morning on news.com.au, not only has there been a drop in the number of mortgages applied for recently, but the percentage of mortgages accounted for by first home owners has dropped from 28.2 per cent in May last year to 18.1 per cent in February this year.

It's all a bit of a balancing act really - the benefit of capital growth due to a strong market needs to be balanced against the increase in interest rates, and higher mortgage repayments. Fairly basic economics really, but something I'm still learning about now that I have a reason to maintain and interest about it.

Where this all comes back to me, as I mentioned in my initial post about unit 7, is that the price that this house go for may have an impact on how my unit is valued by the bank when we finally get a mortgage. If the house is valued at more than 80 per cent of our loan amount (we're aiming at 350k for reference) then we don't have to pay mortgage insurance. The ratio of the value of the property to the loan amount is one of my new favourite pieces of jargon about the property industry - the Loan Valuation Ratio, or LVR. According to my calculations, our property needs to be valued at approximately 440k to avoid mortgage insurance (i.e. 350/440 < .8).

So will someone please buy 7/56 Christina Stead Street already, for $440k or more. Please. You'll save me like $5k.

Week 26 (and bleep bleep music)

2010-04-12T13:01:00.002+10:00

I was thinking that I should stop calling these weekly updates and just call them house updates or something, but that would require going back and re-tagging all the previous weekly update posts, which I'm not going to do.

Anyway, I finally made it up to the site with a camera and took a few more pictures. Unfortunately, they're not that great because there was someone working on the site, which precluded jumping the fence and getting a better view. Much as I found this annoying at the time, I can't really complain that people are working on the site on the weekend - the more work done more often on the site the better!

I did manage to snap some through the fence, and what you'll notice straight away, is that in addition to all sorts of brick walls, there's a roof!

Booya! The astute among you may also notice the pallet of roof tiles in the foreground. As you'll see in the next shot, despite there being guttering etc, the roof does not yet have tiles.

You can see Dana's bike in the foreground here. I'm happy to report this is the second time she's made the ride up to the site. There may be hope for her becoming a cyclist yet...

I've included a shot of some other units around the site that are a bit further along to give an idea of the colour of the roof tiles.

Now we play the waiting game once more. To help tide you over, here's a version of Pink Floyd's Money from Dark Side of the Moon in an 8-bit format. Ahhh, the nostalgia...

Edit: Also: Master of Puppets in 8-bit. This has amused and entertained me for well over a minute now.

My Blog-Fu is weak

2010-04-09T12:34:00.003+10:00

Haven't fired out a post for a while, so I thought I'd throw some words together. After the flurry of activity that was Feb/March, things have slowed down to a more managable pace. Work has been pretty slow, and I'm still waiting to hear back about the job I went for back in March (which also happens to be the job I'm in at the moment) and the wait is certainly dragging on a bit. It has cast a bit of a pall over work generally, even though things are fairly interesting at the moment. But the less said about work the better.

On the house front, I haven't managed to get up to the site and take some good photo's since I last blogged, for a combination of reasons. These include builders working on the site (precluding a good ole fashioned fence jumping) and terrible weather when I've had time to visit. The end of daylight savings for the year has also made getting up to the site after work to take pictures difficult, as half the time it's already dark by then.

I miss daylight savings (and summer) already! Having made that slightly maudlin statement, the weather at the moment is pretty choice. Autumn and spring really are the best times of year in Canberra - usually lots of sun, but with a crispness to the air which I really enjoy.

Speaking of the nice weather, I've been trying to take advantage of it as much as possible recently, with several bike rides and some bush walking. I even managed to get Dana to ride her swanky bike all the way up to Gungahlin (around 11km from where we live at the moment) for breakfast the other day, which was a major achievement. I've also helped form a mixed netball team, which has been interesting and very confusing. We're called "Fonzy and the Shark Jumpers" which I've had to explain to many many people. Troglodytes.

To save me the trouble of explaining it again (and you, the reader, the embarrasment of asking) Wikipedia has all the answers and a you tube video of the original is below.

Waterskiing in a leather jacket?!? Will that crazy Fonzy ever learn?

And again!

I think maybe one of the reasons I've been caining the excercise recently (as well as the video games) is that I haven't really been enjoying alcohol that much of late. This may shock those that know me. It's also too expensive, and I'm saving pennies like nothing else to cover the stamp duty on the home, which is due in July, 12 months after we signed the contract. The stamp duty caught be a little off guard as well - I've had the deposit saved for ages, and in my mind the stamp duty was covered by the first home owners grant (and boost). Unfortunately, the timing of things means that this isn't really the case, because the stamp duty needs to be paid up front, before the completion of the house, and the grant/boost are paid as a rebate, straight to the bank, after settlement. This is not really a problem in terms of our ability to pay them, but it is frustrating. I had thought I had the majority of the scraping and saving sorted for the moment.

As a side note, I think the ACT is just about the only place in Australia where I would have to pay stamp duty; all the other states more generous exemptions for first time home buyers. However, the ACT have more limited sources of revenues than other states, so they're less generous with their exemptions.

But the Canberra property situation is for another post.

Anyway, what was supposed to be a quick post has now eaten through half of my lunch break, and I'm starving. I'm off to get some food and buy a dressing gown (the mornings are getting a chill to them). Hopefully should have posts on the house, bush walking, and netball soon, or at least when I can be bothered getting round to resizing pictures.

Quick house update (but mostly game nerding)

2010-03-29T12:13:00.001+11:00

A very quick update to say that the house now has some bricks on it! Had a quick look on the way home last night and we have bricks to the roof line on the north side, and about halfway up on the southside. Will try and get up there to post some pictures soon. I was planning on cycling up there after work today, but the weather is a bit on the foul side, so I might not make it.

In other news, as anyone who I've talked to in the last week or so can attest, I've bought a copy of Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition, and have been spending all my spare time playing it. I've been looking forward to playing this for a couple of years now, pretty much ever since it came out in 2008. It was one of the first purchases I was planning on getting for the ps3, but I didn't end up picking it up until last weekend.

It's been really interesting playing it, the change of format to first person shooter has made the gameplay much more tense and scary, which is a mixed bag for me. It makes it slightly more exciting, but I'm not that great with scary things, so I find myself saving way too often and having to take breaks when it gets too much. I'm still not totally sold on first person shooters on a console either - I miss my mouse and kb! I think the game would be much easier on the PC as well, I would certainly never bother with the faux turn based V.A.T.S system the game utilises as a nod to it's turn based combat roots.

That all seems quite a negative paragraph, so I should reiterated that I love the game and am finding it tremendously addictive. I especially enjoy that grenades and mines are much more useful than they were in the first two games, and that it's much easier to be sneaky. The storyline is engaging and the freedom that the fallout series gives the player to customise and take their own path through the wasteland remains intact, which is something I always loved.

Anyway, I don't want to start reviewing a game that has been out for years and already extensively reviewed elsewehere. Suffice to say, I'm enjoying it.

Week 22

2010-03-22T22:03:00.000+11:00

There's nothing much new to report at the site. We're still waiting for the brickies to get round to our unit.

Some other exciting news - one of the other units is being advertised on Allhomes, and it's going for a good 16 per cent more than they were asking for it when we signed on for ours. If that's any indication of the capital gains already earned on our place we won't have to pay mortgage insurance and it's also quite a nice little gain!

Here's a screen grab of the listing.

For reference, this one was going for $395k in the middle of last year when we signed on for ours. It's now listed for $460k. I'm not sure why it's back on the market - maybe someone pulled out, or maybe it never sold the first time round. Either way, if it goes at that price, it bodes well for us! The unit is a bit smaller than ours and it doesn't have an attached garage.

Back at work and (semi) healthy

2010-03-18T12:05:00.000+11:00

I'm back at work, and while I can just about string a sentence together again and feel 100 per cent better than I did, I have no enthusiasm for it.

Thank god for Google Reader Play, even if it does bode badly for my productivity. I leave you with this rather clever add/internal marketing thingo from a publisher in the UK. It gives me hope for the future.

Via Gizmodo (via boingboing, etc. etc.).

Week like....21 (I think).

2010-03-15T19:31:00.000+11:00

I'm off work sick, don't really feel very verbose (having trouble stringing a sentence together atm), so I'm just going to post some pix of the house that I took last week. The big news? Part of the roof frame is on!

First a couple of pictures of the house. Note the partial roof frame!

Here are some pix of the roof frame from inside. Nice and airy!

Here's a shot of the neighbours. As you can see, the brickies are only two doors down. They need to brick up the garage before they can finish the roof frame.

To close, a couple of pictures from around the site. The units you see above are a design with a detached garage, so they don't need the bricks all done before the roof frame could go on.

I'm gong to eat lentils and think healthy thoughts.

More on Melbourne

2010-03-10T16:12:00.000+11:00

As you might be aware, I recently had a short trip to Melbourne for entirely recreational purposes. I was going to do a straight up recount of the whole adventure, but Hugo already beat me to it and covered most of the big stuff over here, so I'm just going to give impressions and thoughts.

Melbourne was a trip marked by running late, failed meetings, hanging around killing time in bars and unadulterated fun. It started, for me, with a taxi that wouldn't turn up and the prospect of missing my flight. The flight was caught in the end, at the cost of parking at the airport for the entire trip. Apart from the slight stress, it was actually really nice to cruise into town on my own at my own pace. After flights and skybuses, I had a short wander about until meeting up with Pete at his work and dropping my bags off and taking some time for a coffee in the cafe under his office. We had some excellent Japanese for lunch at a sly sushi place with vague menus - the deluxe, super special or ultra sushi lunch deal?

The rest of the day was a blur of pubs, wappers, taxi and tram rides. I met Hugo's mate Krispin, who was a bit of a legend, and a good man to slay a few beers in the sun with if you ever get the chance. I also got to visit two parts of Melbourne wholly new to me - Brunswick and Camberwell. Brunswick was a nice (if eclectic spot) and from my limited experience, Camberwell seems to be filled with rappers (American or otherwise) with names that consist of three letters living in run down share houses. We met the GDP, DNA and AOI and hung out for like a minute yo-yo.

As an aside, I used to think that if I had a rap name it would be Long Island Ice Tea, but now (and after that whole "down low" speech on SVU) I reckon it should the TLA, the public service rapper. With the dope evidence based policy styleeeeee!

The other thing I noticed about Camberwell, was that it was a bit far out. Given that it was still within tram distance, this is probably just a side effect of living in Canberra too long.

What else to say about day one, but that Hugo's gig was pretty awesome. There was a never-ending rider, and apparently my designated role as "the dude that yells at his mate on stage" was enough of a performance role to give me access to it. I love Melbourne bars! Even if the staff won't give me a Redbull and look down their noses at me for having suggested I might like to purchase one.

Day two in Melbourne was fairly laid back for me - hung around Pete's place (which is really freaking sweet) in Richmond, did the crossword, had a big breakfast at 1pm and watched season 4 of Weeds on Pete's fiddy inch plasma. Gently eased into beers and BBQ at Pete's place, with excellent company. I laughed so goddamn hard, and it reminded me of excellent bygone days in Perth at Meriwa street with my Perth boys.

I should take a moment to give some major league props to Pete and his (ZOMFG) wife Christine for putting me up and going above and beyond the call of duty in opening their front door at 2am and dashing to the airport on the day four. Better people you will not meet. And did I mention their house was friggin SWEET? Because it is.

Day three involved a pretence at shopping in town, followed by an authentic community radio experience; I accompanied Hugo to an interview at RRR in East Brunswick. It was cool to see how it all worked, and to actually sit in a radio studio. For most of the interview I hung out in the green room with the naughty offspring of the lady who does the country and western show. I was tasked with keeping their volume down to a dull roar so that their shrill voices did not make it through to the broadcast. I was not always successful.

The day then dissolved once more into bars and beers. We visited the rather yuppie Cookie in town and the rather excellent Lambs Go Bar in Fitzroy. Props to Joelle for suggesting that one. Lambs boasts over 100 beers, and we did our best to sample them all between us that night. This contributed to the night becoming pretty fuzzy by the time we headed into town to catch pots and pans music, courtesy of UK DJ/producer Dom & Roland. It's a bit hazy, but I remember enjoying the man like Dom. Unfortunately, he was not enough to keep me awake, and after a nap in the club, it became clear that it was time to head home, or at the very least, that the bouncers weren't going to let me get any more sleep at the club.

Day four of the trip, the final day, was scarily similar to the start of the trip - a very real threat of a missed flight, and an upset Henry in front of the cameras from "Airways". Thankfully Pete came to my rescue, and with an inhuman feat of driving, got me to the airport in time to check in. I think I managed to get to the counter a total of 2 minutes before check in closed - plenty of time!

All in all, the trip was excellent, caught up with some great mates, met some new people who were more than worth the time of day. It was also excellent to explore more than the CBD of Melbourne. Don't get me wrong, there's lots to see there, but I feel like I've got the feel of it for the most part, and was ready to check new places out. I can't wait to get down there and do it all again soon!

The Prodigy

2010-03-09T20:14:00.001+11:00

Last Wednesday night I went up to Sydney to catch the Prodigy with some mates. As I posted earlier, the Prodigy are one of my all time favorite acts - The Fat of the Land was the first CD I ever bought (I think I had to buy a CD player just to listen to it; my Fisher Price cassette player would no longer cut the mustard!).

I still remember the first dance/rave gig I ever went to - Digital in 2000 at the Entertainment Centre in Perth, which I think has since been knocked down. Anyway, the absolute highlight of that gig was the Scratch Perverts dropping Prodigy's "Out of Space". The atmosphere was electric, the roof was low and the crowd was large. Everyone knew the words, everyone sang along and it was a perfect moment in music for me. I might add that this was not some drug fueled moment of chemical happiness - I barely had an idea what that sort of thing was at the time.

It solidified in my mind that this music and these gigs were for me. Not only that, this seething mass of people felt the same way! It was amazing.

The rest of that gig was a real eye opener for me, and positive in every way. A close second to "Out of Space" being played was being acknowledged by Judge Jules, who I was pretty keen on at the time. I can't say my admiration for him and the music he played have stood the test of time the way the Prodigy have. At that stage in my life, I'd been to a couple of Big Days Out and a Regurgitator gig, all of which were scary experiences of drunk surging crowds and mosh pits. I loved the feel and risk of them, but they had nothing on the people and the music at Digital.

But I digress. The point is, I friggin love the Prodigy, and I've been wanting to see them play for around 15 years now. And last Wednesday, I finally saw them..

I approached the gig in a pretty terrible mood - I'd interviewed for the job I was acting in at work, and I felt I'd pretty much blown it. A combination of nerves and an enduring hangover from Melbourne had contributed to what I feel is probably one of the worst interviews I've ever done. I haven't heard back from it yet, but while I went into it a sure favorite to get it, I came out completely unsure of myself. It's in the hands of the interviewers now. In addition to that, Brian and I has driven for 3 hours up from Canberra and I was knackered.

In that mindset, I went to the gig thinking that the Prodigy couldn't possibly be as good as they'd always been. After all, it had been 15 years, they were old dudes, and I totally wasn't in to their last two albums.

It took all of 5 minutes of their set for me to be absolutely blown away.

In a word, the gig was amazing. They have such unbelievable stage presence, the light show was awesome, the bass incredible, and the crowd was going off. I couldn't have hoped for a better set list - heaps of stuff from Fat of the Land, which remains one of my fave albums of all time, as well as all the best shit off every other album they've done. I was so happy that they didn't just come out and play their latest stuff - instead they pretty much just took the best tracks from all of their albums. They only track I could think of that I missed was "Charly", but I am well aware that this is a personal fave rather than an acknowledged anthem.

As you might imagine, an absolute pinnacle of the night for me was hearing "Out of Space". It was even better than it was 10 years ago!

Check out the crowd in the shot above singing along like it was 1994. Freaking excellent!

My camera ran out of battery fairly early on in the gig, so I didn't get as many pictures as I might have liked. I think this might have actually been a blessing in disguise though - I always spend too much of gigs watching them through a camera or a phone trying to record it. It's a bit pointless really, there's usually better footage on youtube the next day, and you don't get to experience it all properly.

Having said that, I DID manage to get a bit of video, and I was pretty stoked with the quality of it! (Hooray for free new camera!) Now that I've got somewhere that I might actually want to share it, I've also tried a first for me, and put it on youtube. Check it out:

As you might be able to tell, that's the Prodigy playing "Breathe", which totally went off.

I'm not actually sure what track is playing in the above clip, but it looks purty.

A most excellent gig. It was the perfect way to get my mind off the shitty job interview. I'm so happy I spent the time and effort going to see them. It's also going to be one of the last times I head up to Sydney to catch a gig with my man Rob for quite a while - he's embarking on a European extravaganza for like a minute yo, and will be sorely missed.

If you ever get the chance - go see the Prodigy. They're awesome.

BACON ROCKET!

2010-03-09T17:01:00.000+11:00

From Rathergood.com via Gizmodo.

How can we dance when our quads are burning?

2010-03-09T11:13:00.001+11:00

I've decided to become an advocate for clean living. Or at least less alcoholic living.

Things have calmed down a little bit since I last posted, but I'm still washed out as all hell. In addition, I'm hobbling a little still from paintballing on Saturday. Surprisingly enough, I got off fairly lightly on the actual paintball impacts - I have a few bruises, but they're not that big. Some of the other participants were not so lucky. I will post some pictures up when I find some time (promise).

No, it's the muscle aches from running and crouching and kneeling behind cover that are really sore. My knees in particular are hurting. My quads are also up there in the sore-ness stakes, with hip flexors rating an honourable mention. These injuries were not helped by some enthusiastic dancing later on that night. The worm made an appearance, which is always a source of pain.

I did check the on the house over the weekend as well - no changes on my lot. A lot more roof frames have gone up on the other ones, but due to the attached garage design on my unit, I don't think the roof frame can go on until they've put the external bricks on. This is because the garage has no other internal frame, it's just the bricks, but the garage also supports part of the roof. On the bright side, there's a lot of brick laying going on around the site. Fingers crossed it will progress soon.

I leave you with an instructional video on how to do the worm. I think he's doing it in reverse personally, but who am I do argue with a breakdancer that white?!

The week that would not stop

2010-03-05T16:45:00.002+11:00

So tired. Too much stuff to fit in. Arg.

Currently doing my best to make it to the end of the day so that I can meet up with the Esa Mess (aka party planner extrodinaire) and help him prep for the bucks tomorrow. I've had a good run of productivity today, but it has not been sustainable.

This has been the week (fortnight!?) that just won't quit, and it's not over yet. Don't get me wrong, it's been awesome (although has had its low lights) but I'm not sure how much longer I can handle the intensity; I'm bloody knackered!

I promise there will be proper posts on some of the festivities in dure course, but in addition to the intensity that was Melbs to kick the week off, there has been/will be:

The job interview;
The Road Trips;
The Prodigy;
The Bucks Part I - Paintball in the rain; and
The Bucks Part II - The gambling.

Somewhere in there I'll get some sleep. Hopefully.

There are already some pretty good youtube vids up from Prodigy, but I'm going to see how the ones I took on my camera turned out before I put them up. Be prepared for me to gush a lot in the post about the Prodigy.

To close, here are two versions of one of my favourite tracks of all time, No Quarter, originally by the Zep and also covered by Tool (see below). This is the kind of track that makes me feel calmer and better about the world when things are getting too much.

First the original (albiet a live version):

Edit: Holy poop, I just watched that clip through - very weird. The album version, which I think is slightly better, is also on youtube, but I it just has the cover art. Moving pictures are more interesting...

Second the Tool version (with some strange video a random youtuber made for it):

Tool rock. If anyone can do a decent Zep cover, it's them.

Melbourne

2010-03-02T11:08:00.001+11:00

Melbourne was, in a word, delirious. I'm going to have to think quite hard to distill it into a blog post, so I'm not going to bother with that right now (have other things to worry about, like interviewing for my own jearb!).

One thing the weekend did was to remind me how much I enjoy Gary Numan, even though I only really know like two of his songs. I was going to post up a whole bunch of youtube videos that I found entertaining, but unfortunately youtube's fancy new format is somehow incompatible with my work computer (I blame IE7) and the embed links take like 5 minutes to load.

Here's the only one I managed to get after a lot of pissing about.

In summary - Gary Numan and NIN both rock, new youtube and IE7 bad.

peas.

Week 18 - Full frame with windows

2010-02-28T19:24:00.000+11:00

It's been a while between full posts, so I thought I should try and get one up while I endure a hangover. Thankfully the hangover is not too bad, and is definitely mitigated by the excellent hospitality from Pete and Christine. But more on that in another post at another time.

This one is about the house, and it's fancy new frame and the dirty, dirty windows in them. They really are quite dirty.

I've actually ridden up to the site and taken pictures twice already, so I have a lot to put up.

This first shot shows a familiar view from outside the fence, where the most obvious change is the windows in the bed rooms. It was a pleasant surprised to see these in place!

This shot is taken from the front of the garage. Interestingly, the garage will not have an actual frame, it will be composed entirely of brick. on the left there, you can see the front door (right at the top of some dude's shadow..).

.
Here's a different view of the entry way. I'm not sure why I didn't get a better shot of it, but for some reason I did not. I quite enjoy that the front door will have a wooden frame, and that it's got glass on either side of it. That was quite a pleasant surprise - in fact, a few things about the windows and glass generally surprised me. For example, the windows onto the courtyard were quite a bit larger than I had anticipated. I was worried that it would all be a little bit dark.

Speaking of the courtyard, here's a shot of it. As you can see, there's enough glass on it to let the light and the outside in. On the one wall bordering the courtyard that you can't see in this shot (on the right) there is also a window that pretty much is the entire height of the wall! Awesome.

Here's a picture of the window that you can't see in the previous shot.

Here's the view from the living room out to the courtyard from the living room.

This is the back of the garage from the living room. I've included this shot because this is where the TV will live! I'll be spending a lot of time looking at this wall, or rather the thing in front of it.

This is the living room, looking from the wall where the TV will be. On the left you can just make out the windows, and in the middle, what will be the kitchen. There's really not much to see in the kitchen at the moment, except for some drain holes. The kitchen is actually a bit of a mystery - we know what the bench tops will be, and have a vague idea of the layout from the footprint plan, but that's pretty much it.

This is another one of the downsides of buying off the plan. However, so far most of the things we didn't know about have turned out fairly well (the windows for example). I hope the trend continues.

This is the view down the corridor towards the bedrooms and bathrooms.

There were also a few things that weren't so great to see. The three shots above are all things that I thought were a little bit shoddy. I don't really know construction, but it seems to me that these three things at least could have been done better. Maybe it's like this in all houses, and you just can't see it.

There are lots of nails around the site - I especially like the coil above. It reminds me of Old Painless from Predator.

Yeah!

This last shot is of the last rays of sun on the park over the road. This is pretty much the view from out bedroom window.

If rap was a game I'd be MVP...

2010-02-24T13:41:00.001+11:00

My man Macca forwarded me this today. I don't think it's entirely kosher, but I did laugh pretty hard.

HA! In other news, I declare pub lunch a success.

The Navigation Act 1912 - Part II, Division 9 - The Discharge of Seamen

2010-02-24T11:54:00.001+11:00

So I cycled up to the site last night (a substantial feat in itself) and am happy to report that there are frames in the windows! I jumped the fence and had a bit of a walk around my future house. I'm really happy with the size and number of windows and the courtyard is going to be an excellent place to have a party when everything's finished.

I took about a billion pictures, but don't have time to crop, resize, upload, post, etc atm. Will hopefull have a bit of time while waiting in airports and hanging around in Melbs over the weekend to select the best ones for blogging.

Today's track of the day - Mutantionz II by Black Sun Empire, off the Mutationz EP.

Are really sure you want to make that an election issue?

2010-02-23T17:23:00.000+11:00

I've pretty much had enough of work today. Since I'll still be here a while longer, I thought I'd take a moment out before my brain explodes and do some reading and a quick post. I've been loving Google reader's "recommended" fucntion at the moment. Sure it's not all relevent, but it seems to be doing a fairly good job of finding stuff that I'm interested in. On the flip side, it probably says alot about how much Google knows about me, which is a little creepy.

Now that I think about it, they really DO know a lot about me, so I shouldn't be surprised at all that they can profile my likes an interests. They even know where I spend my days! They even know where I am right now!

Thankfully I don't really care. And it has led me to a few cool things, like Glennz Tees. I found Glennz Tees via an interview on Vector tutes+ (that Google reader recommended) with Kiwi designer and illustrator call Glenn Jones, who makes up half of Glennz Tees. I would never have come near it if it hadn't been recommended.

I really like his work, the style and the humor of it resonates well with me.

The store is full of more awesome designs that make me wish that threadless's hive mind didn't vote up so much shit that it's hard to find t-shirts I like on there. If I wasn't trying to save so much (and failing) I'd totally order a bunch of tees, starting with the one below, Living Room Legend:

The prices are pretty reasonable, looks like around US$20 for most shirts, which is comparable to threadless, and probably still cheaper than what you'd find in an Australian shop.

Anyway, I'd better get back to work. Too much to do and too little time.

PS: I really miss the spellchecker function in the blogger.com post editor!

Fully framed mate!

2010-02-22T21:37:00.001+11:00

Just a very quick note to say that the house pretty much has a full frame now. I took some pictures on the weekend, but it's a bit hard to see the progress from the shots - will have to roam the site at some stage soon and get some better ones. Will see if there's time before the trip to Melbs.

No time to post properly...

2010-02-22T13:46:00.004+11:00

I'm only working three days this week as I'll be in Melbourne next week. Combined with Parliament sitting, things are pretty hectic at work, so I don't really have time to post with the time and love you all deserve. Instead, here's some planning for Melbs, peppered with youtube vids.

Plans for Melbourne are fairly sketchy, but based around gigs I'd hope to hit, it goes roughly something like this:

Thursday night my man DOS4GW is playing a gig at Bar Open in Fitzroy. Should be all skittles and beer, check out this bandcamp page for a listen of his last album.

Friday night Hugo seems keen to catch Gaslamp Killer, which I'm A-OK with.

Edit: after some youtube-ing, GLK is a little confusing. All the tracks that are by him on the youtube are very laid back funky things (ref "Degasse" below), but all the live stuff I can find is filthy dubstep. I'm not sure which I prefer more - they're both awesome. I'm really looking forward to this now!

Second edit: OK, found this dodgy quality youtube vid of a set he did for a BBC Radio 1 gig. Looks like it's a little form column A, a little from column B. Sweet.

Saturday night, I was planning a civilized catch up with some friends, hopefully followed by some ridiculous bassline business by the man like Dom and Roland (a slight warning on the background music on that link - too loud). I haven't been to a decent (or even a single) drum and bass gig in a while, and I'm really looking forward to it. The latest Dom and Roland album rocks pretty hard. Check out the clip below - "Jungle Beast" for a bit of a taste.

That's just about it in terms of gigs that I want to hit. I'm really looking forward to being in a town where there are excellent gigs on every weekend! Canberra does get some OK stuff, but its few and far between, and I end up going to Sydney to catch lots of stuff. Anyway, I'd better get back to work, there is too much stuff to do!

Rainy weekend

2010-02-15T22:28:00.000+11:00

As mentioned in an earlier post, the weekend's plans had revolved around outdoor activities. The foremost of these was a bike ride. It was Dana's birthday this week, and I got her a new bike. It's a pretty sweet bike, in a retro style and a lavender colour. It's an Electra Amsterdam original 3i

Dana's is pretty much as you see here, but it now has a wicker basket on the front for additional "cuteness". It's quite a contrast to the road bike that I ride!

The design has a dew advantages apart from the retro look, or at least according it marketing mumbo-jumbo. These include an enclosed gear system that can't get clogged up and doesn't need servicing regularly (apparently most do, which was news to me). The other is a pretty much completely enclosed chain, which means it lasts longer and you can't get your trousers dirty on it.

The slightly more questionable benefits are the upright riding position, the big comfy seat and the forward positioning of the pedals, which contribute to a very cruisey ride. I don't know if that will be a benefit on a longer ride, but you can't help but smile when you ride it.

Unfortunately the cycling plans were ruined by Canberra's crazy ass weather. The middle of summer, and what happens? Around 100 mm of rain! It's a massively good thing for Canberra, which is as dry as ~~a nun's nasty~~ dessicated coconut most of the time.

This is a drainage channel near where we live (we live in Braddon, the channel is in O'Connor). I go running (or walking) on the pathway next to it every morning. It's about 2m deep by about 4 wide across at the top. In this picture it is a gushing torrent!

The drainage channel meets up with a few others, and eventually pours into Lake Burley Griffin eventually. The Lake is artificial, created by Scriviner Dam (not sure of the spelling). There was so much water flowing into the Lake that they had to open the overspill on the dam, which looked pretty awesome.

The picture above (and all the rained out shots) were taken by a friend of mine on the weekend. It's usually dry as a bone on this side of the dam.

The rain also made for some awesome scenery.

It probably seems a little strange how much I'm going on about some rain, but we really don't get much of it in Canberra, and it's been a great thing.

It did mess with our plans for the weekend though. We found an excellent alternative - Season 13 of ER. People may diss this, but I have a real thing for it. I've got pretty much all the seasons that have been released yet (1-13) on my shelf. It's a guilty pleasure that I've taken a bit of flack for, but I care not. It's excellent.

In this season, Weaver has an unexpected career change, and the sassy ambo joins the staff as a doctor. Kovac and Abby have a baby! Pratt's brother comes out of the closet. It's all happening!

Weel 16 - partial frame

2010-02-15T11:51:00.001+11:00

The key thing about this weekend in Canberra is that it is VERY FREAKING WET. We've had something like 85mm in two days here which has precluded all the out doors activities I was planning for this weekend. I'll post about one or two of them in a bit, but this post is about.....(drum roll please)....a partial frame!

That's right, the rear part of the house, where the bedrooms are, now has a frame.

Hooray for exposed wood! Dana tells me it's not even a thing that the wood is all exposed and wet, because it's treated pine - I'm not sure if I actually find that particularly reassuring, but there's not much to be done for it. And as should be clear by this stage, the house will have a timber frame with a brick veneer on the outside.

I had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine who used to work in a design/architecture firm about wood frames versus brick (aka double brick). I came from the perspective that double brick houses must be better, because they were more solid etc. However, according to my friend, there's really no difference in terms of structural integrity, or insulation, or any of the other arguments I could come up with. He also pointed out that they had some advantages. I'd be lying if I could remember what they were now, but I would imagine saving space is probably one of them. I imagine they'd probably be a bit cheaper and easier to put up as well.

Anyway, back to the house.

Above is the view into my future bedroom. Note the massive puddles everywhere on the building site. It's wet.

This shot shows where the walk in robe will be. We were quite stoked to have a walk in robe, which I thought was a mega luxury. Unfortunately, I've since estimated that Dana's clothes will take up at least an additional wardrobe. On the bright side, at least there will be a place to put the chronically overflowing dirty clothes hamper(s).

As you can see from the two side on (ish) shots above, the front part of the frame still hasn't gone up. If you look closely at the first of the two, you can see the windows piled up in what will be the courtyard. Never fear poor windows, you'll have a home soon!

This is another unit on the site that has the same floor plan as ours (but mirrored). This one is quite a bit further on than ours. I've included it just to show what ours will look like a bit further down the track.

This is the house next door to the one with the same floor plan as ours. I've included it because it's the first indication of the sort of height the end product is going to be.

One thing I haven't included, which I will have to in the next blog post, is a picture of some of the external walls on the other units that are already along. It's good to finally see the colour and texture of the brick in the flesh - it's been a long time since we looked at the sample board. It's a fairly dark neutral tone, nothing fancy, but inoffensive.

I can't wait until the rest of the frame is up and things have dried out a little! I really want to jump the fence again and look around the unit.

Until that time, I shall bide my time and wait.

Today's blog is brought to you by the Chemical Brothers "Where do I begin". My mate Shanwise helped me share his appreciation of the Chemical Brothers back in high school, and they're still excellent. This track in particular is pretty much the quintessential Monday morning track. A quick heads up to any of the kids planning to watch the clip embedded below - it's got a few visal drug references in it. It gave me a bit of a shock while sitting at my desk at work, as it is quite possibly not something you'd want your supervisor seeing over your shoulder (innocent as it may be).

Edit: It occurs to me that it is a singular frame, and not frames. Have edited the post accordingly.

Genius

2010-02-12T13:50:00.001+11:00

This made me laugh rather loudly at my desk.

In unrelated news, as you may be able to see, I'm trying a different format. This way media (particularly wide screen youtube clips) fit on the page much better. To paraphrase that most excellent of movies, Starship Troopers, I needed a new template. This is it until it dies or I find something better.

Helmet

2010-02-11T18:11:00.006+11:00

I've spent the last half hour or so listening to Helmet while I wait for Dana to finish work so we can walk home (I'm only still waiting because its her birthday) and I've been rather enjoying it. It's the first time I've actually given them a listen, despite them being recommended to me a couple of times over the past few years.

I've been listening to their 1994 album "Betty" (see above for the cover art). The laid back weight of it has suited my mood perfectly, and has been an excellent accompaniment to my procrastination.

The above is "Wilma's Rainbow", the first track from Betty. Good stuff. And for a bonus, check out the below video of "Gigantor"!

I didn't actually find "Gigantor" a totally awesome listen, but the video is pretty amusing. I'm a fan of giant robots where ever I can get them.

On the subject of music, I really need to get some more on my work computer. The choices are pretty much Kyuss, Karnivool, a single Soundgarden album (not Superunknown, unfortuantely) and half of the White Album. I have no idea what happened to the other half. I need something that's all bass and beats!

Edit: So it turns out Dana isn't even at work - she's been out at some meeting and is going straight home. That's pretty much an hour wasted, if it wasn't for new music. I'll call it a draw.

Week 15 (ish)

2010-02-09T11:38:00.000+11:00

As promised, here is a picture of the slab...

Ha! Ok really, here are some pictures of the slab.

Above is the view from the kerb

Here's a picture over the fence...

And here's a picture of the unit next door. The one next door already has a frame up and the other units on the north edge of the complex were going up on the weekend. That means we're next! We pretty much have to be next anyway, we're one of the only sites left without frames (grumble grumble).

It still looks kind of small from where these pictures are taken, outside the site fence line. However, from the inside, they look pretty good! I'll blog further impressions when the frames are up - will probably jump the fence then and have my first wander around inside my new place!

NOTE: the blogger post editor has removed the spell check for some reason. I'll try and proof read, but expect the number of speeeeling mistakes to go up.

We have a slab!

2010-02-08T15:23:00.002+11:00

Just a very quick note to say that I checked the house on Saturday, and we have a slab! I took some pictures on the new camera, which I will post when I blog on it in more detail.

The weekend itself was a bit epic - multicultural festival and Dana's birthday celebrations dominated most of it. I'm still feeling under the weather and am gladly looking forward to not drinking again until I meet up with Hugo in Melbourne on the 25th.

In other news, Judas Priest and their giant robot stage show rock.

Jay-Z feat. Louis Armstrong - 99 Problems (Bossa Nova Remix)

2010-02-05T10:26:00.001+11:00

This made me chuckle this morning.

Props to my man Daver for posting this up on his Clay and Motion blog (http://daversan.blogspot.com/)

Week 14 (ish) - phone pics

2010-02-03T14:20:00.000+11:00

So I know in my last post about the house I said I wouldnt' bother putting up pictures, but I changed my mind. Here are some I took on my phone last week. Apologies for the low quality, but I didn't have my camera on me at the time.

As you can see, it's ready any waiting for the slab to be poured. It seems like its taken an age to get to this stage. I can't wait for the frames to actually go up so that I can see where the walls are and get a better sense of it.

Sydney

2010-02-03T11:48:00.008+11:00

Just a quick follow up on a previous post - the TCV gig last week was great (John Paul Jones is a legend), and it was excellent to catch up with people in Sydney. A big highlight for me was John Paul Jones's piano interlude, which was excellent. Check it out in the Youtube clip below!

That Youtube user has fairly good quality vids of the whole gig set up as a play list with all the track names. That's actually a little bit shocking - I was expecting just crap phone rips, but the whole gig is pretty much up there and you can see and hear everything. It's amazing what technology can do, but I can see how that would piss bands off - sure its a poor substitute for going to the gig, but its also free, which makes spending $100+ for the gig a little harder to stomach.

Although maybe its not that much of a thing - I'll certainly still go to the gig rather than just watch it on Youtube, its just not the same.

Anyway, here's another video of the gig, this time of Mind Eraser, No Chaser, which I dig.

One thing I did realise while I was up there is that I cannot handle the Tekken drinking games like I used to...although I can apparently still whoop all of you at Tekken while passing in and out of consciousness.

For those less in the know, the Tekken drinking game goes along these lines. You play a modified version of champs and challengers in versus mode, where the champ has to drink when they win, in addition to staying on. While it's a litte crude, the idea is that if one person is better at the game, they will soon be too inebriated to keep winning, giving everyone else a fighting chance. Unfortunately for me, it took Rob and Brian a little too long to hit their stride.

Also did a couple of other groovy things in Sydney, like visiting the beach, catching the ferry to Manly, ate some excellent food (including sushi train, dope style laksa and a bitchin burrito), hit some shops and generally lounged around. I bought a couple of new business shirts, including a blue gingham shirt. That's right, I'm bringing gingham back.

Things that I'm looking forward to at the moment (in chronological order):

Leaving work today;
Pay day tomorrow;
Multicultural festival on Saturday (which will see excessive amounts of exotic food and beverages consumed) followed by;
Drinks for Dana's birthday;
Melbourne in a couple of weeks with my boy dos4gw; and
Prodigy in Sydney in early March.

Just build it already.

2010-02-02T16:53:00.005+11:00

This delayed gratification business isn't working. The delay is giving me this shits proper.

Still no slab, but it should be any day now. To counteract my disappointment at this, I jumped the fence last night and checked out the rest of the sites, including one unit that is a mirror image of ours and already has the concrete as well as a frame up. My conclusion is that the inside looks a decent size. Still fairly compact in terms of the rooms, but comparable to what I have now, with more bedrooms and extra storage.

This makes me happy.

My plans on how to set the living room up look like they will work nicely, although the space will change again when the walls, roof and kitchen are in. At a bare minimum, the TV placement looks like its going to be ace. I can't wait!

We've also had some advice from the real estate agent that says June/July for completion, which gels with what we had estimated, but maybe a little later. No photo's this post. I have some, but I can't really be arsed, and they don't cover any new ground. I didn't manage to take any while I was sneaking around on site last night, mostly because the light was going and I was too excited to be breakin the law (but not in pants as tight as judas priest)...

Now that's out of the system, some other news. Looks like Massive Attack are coming to town. That should freaking rock. Looking like mid-March, so there's another gig to go to, just when I'd decided to be a tight arse again.
Time to get the hell out of the office and play some borderlands. I'm really close to finishing the damn thing, and there are some weird alien mujumbo's that need their arses kicking!

Raymond Luxury Yacht

2010-01-19T09:28:00.002+11:00

Monty Python rocks.

Week....10?

2010-01-18T17:08:00.009+11:00

It's been a long time between drinks on the weekly updates, what with there not being much process since the first part of the foundation was laid.

However, that all changed last week! There are now bricks piled around the foot print of the house, which have hopefully now been laid onto the concrete that was poured like 6 weeks ago. Hopefully I'll manage to pop up and check it out tonight after work. To tide things over until then, I've got some pictures of the different steps that will happen before the slab gets poured.

This is our lot, resplendent with piles of bricks around it.

The next step involves putting up these pole things, which presumably aid in the brick laying. I hope they're not being used as a guide, because half of them are wonky. Maybe they're actually temporary clotheslines for more domestically inclined brickies. Who knows? Certainly not me.

After the "pole" stage, the bricks that were previously sitting around the footprint are..(drum roll please)...laid onto the footprint. My understanding is that the final floor level of the unit will be level with the top of the bricks you can see in the picture below.

Bonus brick laying shot!

The next step is for all the plumbing lines and I think the first bits and bobs of the electrical lines to be sunk into the earth that will be under the slab. My guess is that the bit with all the pipes sticking up in the picture below will be where the kitchen, laundry and at least one of the bathrooms will be.

After all the pipes are in, the ground inside is levelled off and topped with this grey gravel (I think it might be called gun metal or something). The units below have been finished to this stage for a while now while they wait for the rest of the units (including mine) to be completed so they can pour the concrete. I don't know how they stop the concrete from pouring straight off the edge of the unit as the gunmetal is flush with the top of the brick line, but I'm sure those zany builders have an answer for that.

So that's it. Hopefully there will be some more progress this week!

In other more interesting news, I'm going to Sydney for an extended long weekend next week, and catching Them Crooked Vultures play on Australia Day. I'm really looking forward to it, will be good to catch up with some Sydney peeps, hit the beach and play drink the beer (I'm going for the high score!).

To close, here's my fave TCV tune at the moment:

Plasma

2010-01-04T16:09:00.006+11:00

It completely slipped my mind, but we also had a few little events at home before Christmas that are probably blog worth. The first is that I picked up a new TV in the pre-chrissie sales, for a bit of a bargain too.

With a little help from a friend in the brash bargaining department, I picked up a Panasonic 46inch 1080p Plasma (TH-P46G10A) for $1,850, around $650 off the ticket price, and $350 cheaper than I'd seen anywhere else. Pretty sweet deal! Here's Panasonic's website photo of the bad boy:

It seemed so big when we got it that I almost second guessed the purchase - it seemed to dominate the room and it was so much bigger than it seemed in the show room! That wore off in seconds and the size doesn't look too big at all. I'm very happy with the purchase, although at first, it was painfully obvious how low resolution the SD digital channels are.

As a bonus, the TV came with a free camera (via redemption, which is taking forever). The camera is a Pana Lumix DMC-FT1, which is all kinds of rugged, shock proof, water proof etc. It can even do HD video underwater! I'm pretty excited about it, I have never had a camera quite so fancy before, and am very much looking forward to it.

The other big thing is that our housemate moved out, which is most excellent! We now have some additional room in the living room, a spare bedroom and less clutter generally. There's also one less person to consider when we have people over, or want to stay up late etc.

The spare room has already come in handy a couple of times over the Christmas break.

Good times.

On a more sombre note, I leave you with a warning - Don't watch Terminator: Salvation. It's really terrible.

No updates...

2010-01-04T15:48:00.004+11:00

...because there has been no progress, on our bit of the site at least. There is still stuff going on at the other town houses at the site. Mostly ground work things like plumbing and building up the little bits of wall at the base to the floor level and squishing out the dirt in the middle to put the slab on top.

This is not very good descriptive language, but I'm not sure what it is all called. I've been learning a lot about how houses are put together. I'll make sure I put up pictures when they're doing it to our place, but I probably won't bother while they're just doing it to other ones.

Until next time, here is a classic interwebs video where a nerdy looking dude in an orange jumper breakdances with mad skills (yo):

Week 4 - Nothing to report

2009-12-07T12:16:00.006+11:00

Checked out the site yesterday, and there's sweet FA going on for our lot. There was some brick laying going on other the other side of the site for the two story townhouses, which surprised me, because there's still no slab down, and there are big piles of dirt still in the middle of the sites where the brick work is going on.

But then, what the hell do I know about construction? Maybe that's how it's done.

In other news, have decided that I'm going to see the Prodigy next year up in Sydney with my man Rob. Time for some raver nostalgia! This does, of course, run the risk that they'll just play shite off their last two albums (which I have not bothered with, but have it on good authority from my man T-ford that they're a bit naff), but I'm crossing my fingers. Fat of the Land was the first CD I ever bought as a spotty teenager, and it's still a ripper listen to this day. Listening to the Scratch Perverts drop Outer Space at Digital 2001 (at the Entertainment Centre!), which was the first dance gig I ever went to, has to be one one of my best raver memories ever.

I can't miss the possibility of re-living some of that, exorbitant price ($101!) or not.

It's not the same without a room full of sweaty ravers singing along, but here's a taste:

Week 3 - foundations!

2009-12-01T09:35:00.006+11:00

I made it up to the site last night to check out the progress, and the change was quite dramatic compared to previous visits. The foundations have been poured on most of the townhouses (including ours!) and there's building supplies, big earth moving equipment, site offices and multiple portaloos!

I took quite a few pictures, but unfortunately, due to the late hour and my poor excuse for a camera, they're not all that great. Here are the best of them, starting with our townhouse. Note the bloody great earth mover sitting in what will be our courtyard.

The view from across the road (sticklers for continuity may spot that the portaloo has been moved away from our plot - I consider this a victory for the general smell of the area):

And across another townhouse from the south side. To give you some indication of where things will lie, think back to the plans. In the right hand side of the picture below will be the master bedroom. If you follow the line of the foundation to the left, there will be the ensuite and bathroom, followed by the kitchen and the lounge/dining just about where the earth mover is. As noted earlier, the earth mover is actually sitting in what will be our courtyard. I'm not exactly sure why there are so many big piles of dirt in the house, but I'm sure it will all become clear in the end.

You can also see from this shot that we're going to be quite close to our neighbours. I maintain that it's still a step up from an apartment building.

Elsewhere around the site, you can see the site office (which is a new addition this week) and more big equipment!

Bricks! Their colour doesn't really show up very well here, but it's all fairly neutral anyway.

Things are slightly more advanced at the southern end of the complex. These are mostly multi-story units from memory.

Foundations are still being dug and poured on the north west corner of the site.

Didn't make it up to the site this weekend...

2009-11-30T14:39:00.003+11:00

...will try and make it up tonight to do today's progress report. Until then, enjoy this excellent advert for the NZ Book Council:

Week 2 of construction - more fence and a bigger pile of dirt

2009-11-23T12:59:00.006+11:00

I visited the site again on Saturday, and not a lot has really changed. More top soil has been removed, with different areas leveled off to different heights to account for some minor slope on the lot. The pile of dirt in the middle is bigger. I've also noticed a few amenities being added around the site, like a portaloo and a tap. Now the builders can be a little more comfortable on site!

Here is the newly gravelled entry way. As you can see, the main pile of dirt is bigger than before.

The view from over the road. Get used to this view, as I'm sure it will be harder to get on site when they start closing the front gate over the weekends. You may also see that there is a second pile of dirt in effect. Riveting stuff!

The site now has all mod cons.

Our lot from the inside. Note the proximity of the portaloo.

Dana putting up with me taking lots of pictures of dirt. You can just see her patience beginning to ebb in this picture.

Not hugely exciting progress in the grand scheme of things, but better than no progress at all. I'm quite chuffed to be able to see progress for two weeks in a row after such a long time waiting for the DA to be approved. Hopefully there will be some more interesting reading next week.

Week 1 of construction - Fences and a pile of dirt

2009-11-19T12:57:00.013+11:00

OK, so here are some shots of the very initial progress at the site. Firstly from across the road:

The very observant may be able to notice that there the fence doesn't even go all the way around yet - things are still at an early stage. Next the lot itself. As you can see, not a huge amount has happened apart from the removal of the topsoil. If you look very closely, you can see the lines that mark the border of each townhouse plot. They're not very clear at all at this resolution though [Edit: clicky for bigger pixen!].

Here's a close up of the lines that you can't really see in the picture above.

And at the end of the line is a stake with our unit number on it!

And here is where they put all the dirt they collected....

That's it for now! I'm going to try and do weekly updates to keep track of the build process.

Construction has commenced!

2009-11-16T09:43:00.002+11:00

Things are still very much early days at the moment, but a site visit on the weekend showed that things have definitely kicked off. So far, it's just fences and clearing work, but there's also some lines on the ground showing where the lots will be.

I'll put some photos up later on tonight.

We also received an email this morning from the builder, confirming that construction has commenced. It also contains the cryptic line "the developer is confident that the construction period will not be lengthy". I'm choosing to interpret this positively, but it really doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things.

Still no word on what the conditions placed on the approval were.