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May 9th, 2012
 | 09:17 pm - Little Skyrim thing ...
So, I know there are some people with a bit of an interest in Ye Olde Tymes[1] on my flist. In your (humble?) opinions, what would the interior walls of an active castle/keep/fort have looked like ?
In my limited experience, most of the walls would have been covered by wood panelling, tapestries, paint, plaster, or antlers, or some combinations of the above. Very little bare stone would have been left visible in the public areas and living quarters. The only places I've seen with all bare stone are ruins.
But in Skyrim, every single castle, tower, keep and fort has pretty much bare stone walls all the way through ... it's been bugging me for a while now. All the effort into making the game pretty, but somehow they got their ideas for the interiors by only looking at a few ruins ? Bit lazy, really.
[1] Sorry :)
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Current Mood:  weird
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April 22nd, 2012
 | 09:57 pm - Bits and pieces ...
Right ... Bub is just over four weeks old ... how did that happen ?! He just got here !
... time is doing strange things at the moment, apparently :)
So, on Tuesday last week I went back to work, and mostly survived (lacking in sleep by the end of the week, of course, but I'm used to that).
Bub is doing well, and ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=91.6) rwrylsin has posted her four-week update, and more photos (go see the photos, they're cute !). (she also posted a cat update)
So far six of Bub's eight grandparents have visited, and I think they've all found him adorable. At some point, we need to visit Adelaide for the final two grandparents - those of you who have travelled with babies and/or young children, what's the best age to do it, and would it be better to fly or drive ?
Other things ... I appear to be watching The Voice (Australia, apparently everyone else has done this format already), not quite sure how that happened. They're doing blind auditions at the moment, and I like the general positive vibe from the coaches, even for those performers that none of them choose for their team.
I've been playing Skyrim (since late January), and finally finished the main quest. There are still major questlines I haven't touched yet, though, and I have a bit less free time for some reason, so I think it'll keep me going for quite a while yet.
I've made more bookcases ! One in stained pine, one in multi-coloured paint (Lego colours, more or less - the yellow, red and blue were matched from bricks I took to the paint store, green based on the nearest match I could find on paint swatches, and orange based on us having some orange paint around from some previous jobs). The Lego-coloured one is taking a while to paint - in retrospect, I should have made it from MDF instead of pine, it's taking quite a few coats (especially of the yellow) to get the coverage I want.
Finally, a little bit of disappointing news - this will be the first Olympics since 1948 that hasn't had an Australian fencer competing. Clearly it's up to rwrylsin to address this by training up a bunch of super-sabreurs (should be ready by 2028 or 2032 !).
Belated Edit: I messed up the "more photos" link above, please try again !
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Current Mood:  tired
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April 1st, 2012
| 10:44 pm - Day 9 of Baby ...
So, today we decided to be brave (some would say foolhardy) and head in to the Baby and Toddler show at the Convention Centre. The main goal was to try on a couple of different baby carriers, with optional goals to find a mirror to put in the car so we can see the baby in the rear-facing car seat, and find something as a present for our new nephew. Oh, and stay vaguely sane and upright while doing all of that.
Amazingly, it all went pretty smoothly - Bub[1] apparently likes being driven around and slept for most of the driving time, and also likes being pushed around in the pram. We also found a carrier that seemed to work - they let us wander around the place with it for about 30 minutes, and he slept almost all of that time. We did try a different carrier as well, but it didn't seem as easy to get into, nor as comfortable for Bub.
Also found the mirror and present, and got home just in time for the next round of feeding to begin.
Meanwhile, rwrylsin has posted some photos, and her status report at 7 days.
Broadly speaking, things are generally going ok, we do get breaks of 3-4 hours while Bub sleeps in between feeding sessions (I think we've moved on to cluster feeding, so the session itself takes an hour or two to complete). Have managed to finish a couple more small fixit jobs around the house too, hopefully I can cross most of them off the list while I'm on leave (two more weeks).
[1] Like rwrylsin, I mostly call him Bub, Bubski, Bubkin or Bublet, and hardly ever use his actual name. I'm sure I'll get over that soon enough ...
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Current Mood: tired
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March 25th, 2012
| 09:32 pm - Baby update ...
World, meet ProbablyAlistair[1]:
At 2 days (and a bit) old, he's so far been pretty relaxed and laid-back - to the point of dozing off in the middle of trying to feed. We're working on that :)
He's been bathed, visited, blood-sampled, and we're reasonably sure that he's now been mostly named (still working on a middle name :) ).
Mostly he spends his time sleeping, though, and looking adorable (see above).
rwrylsin is doing well too, resting lots and tending to ProbablyAlistair, with some help from me (I have to pop out to feed the cats (and myself) a couple of times a day, which is why I'm here posting this :) ). So far, all is going pretty well.
We should all be back home sometime on Tuesday, with the first visit from grandparents sometime on Tuesday as well (with four sets of grandparents scattered 160-800km away, it might be a while before they all get a turn !)
[1] In the tradition of dalekboy's MaybeZoe :)
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Current Mood:  calm
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March 23rd, 2012
| 11:21 pm - What a day !
So, I was thinking that I would post about having an exciting day this week - that being Wednesday, where an expensive boat caught fire and sank, not far from my office.
Today managed to be even more exciting than that, though ... we have a baby !
Born at 17:04 today, 3.45kg, 49cm, name still to be determined :)
Has the right number of fingers and toes, one pristine suit of skin, and a good set of (newborn) reflexes. Both rwrylsin and baby are doing fine.
( The full story, possibly TMI-ish in places (labour and birth stuff). )
So, sleep soon, and then tomorrow after setting things up for fencing training (minus rwrylsin, of course), I'll be heading back in to see how rwrylsin and baby are doing, and hanging around there most of the next few days I imagine.
... I think it might be time for a quiet celebratory dram of whiskey.
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Current Mood: happy
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March 20th, 2012
 | 10:36 am - The Soundtrack of Cthulhu
(Another belated post on what I've been up to lately.)
Two Sundays ago, rwrylsin and I visited our friends G & T, and their friend Y, for an afternoon of Arkham Horror.
Amazingly, Team Human managed to pull off a win against the eldritch horrors of Azathoth, skirting along the edge of sanity and doom to save Arkham (for now).
In the background, we played some music that turned out to be well-suited to the game, three albums by Sopor Aeternus & The Ensemble of Shadows (ok, even the band name suits the game!) - "Es Reiten Die Toten So Schnell", "Todeswunsch", and "The Inexperienced Spiral Traveller". They hit just the right mood of weirdness and other-worldliness for roaming around and dealing with eldritch horrors and squamous monstrosities.
G & T are servants to a couple of cats, and apparently I was the Lap Of The Day - I had one cat on my lap for most of the game, and managed to fit both of them on my lap while we were sitting around before dinner.
All in all, a nice way to spend a Sunday.
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Current Mood: calm
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March 8th, 2012
 | 12:04 pm - A touch of black ...
Ok, been a while since I posted. First, something that happened on Feb 28th - I saw the Sisters of Mercy ! They were in town for the Soundwave festival (which I wasn't going to), then announced a gig at the Corner Hotel for the 28th. I figured this was a rare chance to see SoM Down Under (I am pretty sure that they toured some time around the late 80s or early 90s, but I was living in Adelaide and they only played in Melbourne - although I can find no evidence on the online lists of SoM gigs that I've found).
Anyway, I duly dressed in black and went along, admired the various frilly shirts, stompy boots, and makeup (and that was just the guys !), and had a great time.
In a way, the current Sisters of Mercy are a kind of Sisters of Mercy cover-band - Andrew Eldritch is still the lead singer, I'm presuming the drum machine is still Doktor Avalanche (these days appears to be three Mac laptops !), but the guitarists are just whoever he happens to be touring with at the time. They played with lots of energy, though, and Eldritch still mostly hits the right notes in the right places (not bad for 53!). On one hand, it would have been nice for longer versions of some tracks, and on the other hand, to fit in some of the less-often played tracks - so overall, I'm pretty happy with the set list chosen and 21 tracks played in 90 minutes.
Of course, people were taking photos and short videos, here is a sampler of the whole set.
And (just so I can remember it later!), here is the set list :
Dr Jeep / Detonation Boulevard
First and Last and Always
Ribbons
Crash and Burn
Logic
No Time to Cry
On the Wire
Gift that Shines
Arms
Dominion
Summer
This Corrosion
Alice
Anaconda
More
Flood II
(encore 1)
Somthing Fast
Vision Thing
Lucretia
(encore 2)
Top Night Out (Instrumental)
Temple of Love
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Current Mood: happy
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January 24th, 2012
 | 05:26 pm - Meanwhile, in Go news ...
Every now and then, I play a game or two of Go (mostly against the computer). I haven't been following news from the Go world in recent years, but it seems that computer Go has advanced quite a bit from when I last checked.
Previously, the strongest computer Go programs had reached roughly the level of a 10-kyu to 5-kyu player[1] - well short of even amateur 1-dan level, which is a fair way below the level of professional players.
It looks like computers are catching up now, though - all thanks to programs based around Monte Carlo Tree Search. One program using MCTS is currently ranked around 5-dan on KGS. Recently, a team using the program "Zen" managed to beat a 2-dan (amateur) player in a best-of-5 series, 3 games to 1. More to the point, it looks like the algorithms seem to be highly parallelisable, so simply throwing more computer power at these programs makes them even stronger.
Interesting times in the Go world - probably a few years yet before the Go equivalent of Kasparov-vs-Deep Blue comes along, but I wouldn't want to put too much money on humans staying ahead now.
The other interesting bit of Go news that I saw recently - there's an Australian-born professional Go player. Her name is Joanne Missingham, and she moved to Taiwan when she was 4, and quickly moved up the Go ranks there. She's currently a 5-dan professional, and has done quite well in tournaments and leagues in Taiwan.
[1] There are two levels in Go rankings - "kyu", starting from 30 (for a raw beginner), up to 1, and "dan", starting at 1 and going up to 7 (for amateurs) and 9 (for professionals). To complicate things, the dan levels are not exactly equivalent between amateur and pro - it's generally considered [2] that the highest amateur dan levels are roughly the same level as 1-dan pro.
[2] At least, it was back when I used to follow these things - with the advent of Go servers on the internet, where amateurs and pros play each other regularly, and pro games are often played/relayed live from tournaments, it's possible that the top amateurs are a bit stronger relative to the pros now.
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Current Mood:  contemplative
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 | 12:30 pm - Brickvention !
So, Brickvention was last weekend. In short - it was awesome !
Brief history (of the ones I've attended - I missed out on the first few [1]) - in 2009, it was held in meeting rooms on level 12 of the Victoria University of Technology building. I can't remember exactly, but I think the public expo had around 2-3,000 people come through.
In 2010, still at VUT, we had around 4-5,000 people come through, with queues stretching some way around the block (since the traffic flow was limited by the speed and capacity of the lifts). This brought us to the attention of the Melbourne City Council, and after much hard work from the committee, Melbourne Town Hall was arranged as the venue for the next year.
In 2011, the event went well, but word had got around - we managed to get over 7,000 people through, and turned many (hundreds ?) of people away. Many more probably gave up upon seeing the queue stretching completely around the block, with an estimated 2 hours to wait before being able to get in. The hall was packed to its limit all day, and the committee were rather stressed by the end of it.
So, this year. Still in the Town Hall, but with two major changes - tickets were to be sold in advance for specific session times, and there would be two days of public display.
There were some trials along the way (e.g. when the booking site went down for around 24 hours due to a data centre move only a week before the event !), but all 10,000 tickets were sold by Thursday morning last week, much to the relief of the committee I imagine.
The public display days ran much more smoothly than last year - the queue for entry to each session was cleared in around 20 minutes, the hall was never over-full, and the lulls between sessions meant there was time for the committee and volunteers to take breaks when required.
Actually, that was another change this time - bringing in a bunch of volunteers for crowd management and general helping out - which again took some of the burden off the committee, and left them some breathing room to deal with any problems which did arise.
The only real issue was getting a bunch of publicity (radio and TV) after being sold out - in some cases, this wasn't mentioned, leading to people turning up over the weekend thinking it would be possible to buy tickets.
Anyway, the weekend was very good, the displays were amazing as always, and I'm sure everyone is planning their builds for next year even now (I know I am !).
You can see some of the creations here, and some of my photos here (more to come, for some reason iPhoto keeps "stalling" in the middle of the Flickr upload - very annoying).
And on to next year, and another move to a larger venue - this time the Royal Exhibition Building, in Carlton. Hopefully the larger capacity and slightly more suitable space should lead to an even better experience for everyone who goes along. Keep an eye on the Brickventures website for updates on the new venue, ticket sales, and registration to the "convention" day for AFOLs, TFOLs, and JFOLs. Time to get building !
[1] Due to being on the wrong side of the planet :-) [2]
[2] Weird, Brickvention has no Wikipedia entry ...
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Current Mood: happy
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January 9th, 2012
 | 12:19 am - Online Opinion ...
Quick poll (mostly for Australians) :
Have you heard of the site Online Opinion ? onlineopinion.com.au
Where do you get your Australian news and opinions from ? Murdoch-land ? (Feral Hun ... errr, Herald Sun / Advertiser / Australian, etc) Fairfax-ville ? (The Age / SMH / etc)
Other sources (Crikey ? ... ?)
I'm wondering because I was recently linked to a post about a new site called "The Conversation", and it reminded me that Online Opinion exists. From what I've seen of it, OO appears to be trying to provide a platform for in-depth articles about Australian (and international) issues, from a variety of sources (including academics, politicians, etc). The Conversation appears to be doing the same. Both sites are not-for-profit and thus less affected by the usual Big Corporate biases.
Anyway, Online Opinion is worth a look from time to time, it seems to do a reasonable job of getting a variety of points of view across.
Edit: And of course, it seems like a bit of duplication of effort - which leads me to believe that not many people (including the creators of The Conversation) have heard of OO, even though it has been around for a few years now.
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Current Mood: tired
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