Anotherblog

New life

I’ve been adjusting to new life with Veronica over the last week and a half. We’ve now combined most of the kitchen stuff (and thrown out a lot of old crockery and pots & pans etc), and done some cooking together. I baked some barra on Sunday night and marinaded some tuna steaks for last night, very nommy. The kitchen is pretty much a smoothly running machine now, and I’ve done more cooking in that kitchen in the last week and a half than in the previous two months!

We’re still very much in organisey mode, carried over from the wedding preparations. The house is benefiting greatly, but our relaxing time is mostly just playing guitar/piano, watching Arrested Development, and playing games together. I predict, however, that in another couple of weeks I’ll be back into projects - Dave’s wedding video, the Cars short film, and a DVD of our wedding, not to mention my MMORPG design. Archery is going to be a little more difficult now that Veronica and I share a car, but I should be able to manage it on Saturday mornings most of the time (not this week though; got a “Shards of Allara” magic tournament on Friday night.) And pretty soon I’ll be running “Horror on the Orient Express” for my Wednesday night D&D mob, just as a change of pace.

I’m really luxuriating in the freedom my new guitar is giving me. Every time I play a piece nowadays sounds like the best I’ve ever played it. It’s amazing the difference the guitar makes - the Teresa has a much better dynamic range, a richer bass, and a brighter high end. The fretboard is slightly lower, so barre chords are easier to do, and the combination of lower fretboard and brighter high end means that any hammer-on/pull-off sounds better too.

And getting back to work hasn’t even been too bad. Von and I drive to work together and she teaches me bits of Cantonese and we listen to classical music. We were listening to Rodrigo’s Concierto de Arenjuez this morning. Amazing the power the piece has (especially the Adagio) despite how many times I’ve heard it! I must have five or six versions on my various classical guitar CDs.

The lunchtime gang are approaching the end of episode 1 of Darths (about 205 comics worth) and thankfully it’s still thoroughly enjoyable, so we’re going to continue. Hooray!

Wedding Video

Here’s the video I create as my speech at the wedding. All the timestamp subtitles are accurate.

It was very well received!

Married!

I married the very lovely Veronica on the 25th of October. Hooray! More news once we’re back from our honeymoon. Melbourne has been great. We just got back from a ride on a hot air balloon.

Mezzacotta

It has been somewhat remiss of me to not mention Mezzacotta until now. It’s a project that the lunchtime gang have been working on for the last four months, after deciding that we really have too many half-baked ideas not to be sharing them all.

So, Mezzacotta will be collecting all of these crazy schemes. The webcomic up there is the first of them, and it uses my favorite web technology: SVG. The work on the webcomic was mostly Mr McLeish and Mr Morgan-Mar, so I think I can be free to say that it really looks fantastic. Not only the comic, but the whole experience is well designed.

Also, it has a truly amazing archive.

…okay, NOW it’s dead.

Yes, the faithful speed racer, a.k.a. Derek, is dead. I was driving it home last night and the engine started to overheat. When I (slowly) got it to the mechanic this morning, they discovered the coolant pump had failed at some point (probably because of the plugs problem earlier) and the engine had fried.

My extreme reluctance to spend any more money on this thing combined with the fact that repair would mean taking the engine out, means that I’ve called it: the car is kaput.

More exciting car repairs

So, the car problem happened again - losing acceleration, clearly missing a cylinder. I got the car most of the way to work, and then walked the rest of the way, and called my mechanic. He was very apologetic, but asked as a favour if I could check whether the plugs had come loose again. I had a look, thought I’d found the plugs, and they weren’t loose, so reported back. He sighed, and said he’d be over at about lunchtime.

By 11:00am I had to feed the meter, and I decided to have another look for the loose plugs. And found them. Two of the plugs were, in fact, out, so the car had been running on two cylinders for a short distance, ho ho. I pushed them back in, and it ran fine again, hee hee. Drove to the Canon car park and called my mechanic to tell him not to come, heh heh. And he had just arrived, a bit early. Poop.

I’ve often felt like a bit of an idiot around my mechanic. This was no exception. “Oh… yeah, I found ‘em.” He loves to tell me stories of other clueless customers, so I’m sure he just got another story. I really wish he’d ask me a computer question, or something…

Technolust

The new Canon EOS 5D Mark 2 camera is coming out soon.

It has a movie mode. It can do 1080p video at 30 fps. One guy has already create a movie with it.

Canberra, car

The trip to Canberra was very nice. Dave & Fiona & Jimbo & Simon met Von, and I met Conner, who was endlessly entertaining. We chatted, ate an extraordinary dinner, chatted some more, watched Conner, went for a walk, slept, had breakfast, watched episode 1 of “No Heroics”, and had one of the most relaxing weekends in ages. It was glorious.

My car has had a reprieve. I picked it up on Saturday morning, and it appears to be in fine working order, and without costing a significant amount of money. Bizarre.

Tonk! Wubwubwubwubwub gluk.

The subaru has finally gone too far. Too far, that is, for the head gasket, whose mind has been well and truly blown. I haven’t gotten the cost estimate back yet, but it’s pretty academic: there’s really no point repairing it this time. It’s going to be well over $1000. It’s dead. Time to see how much it’s worth as scrap.

The final miles occurred yesterday, on the way to work. It had been driving a bit rough recently, and since it was nearly due a service, I figured I’d book it in this Saturday. However, yesterday morning I revised that date forward to “as soon as possible”. The car was actually shuddering at the stop lights, and wasn’t operating at full power. It was clearly sick. Poised part way to work, I decided to nurse it the rest of the way there (it was way too early to take it to the mechanic). Then, with a few kilometres to go, the temperature gauge started pointing towards the sky, so the rest of the trip was *really* slow (the temp went back to normal on idle).

At that point, I had deep suspicions I was doing the car no favours by not immediately pulling over and calling for a tow truck, but I also didn’t have my mobile with me, and I figured dead is dead; there is no way the damage was going to be minor whether I stopped or went on.

I got the car towed from work, and then found out the bad news today. Sucky. If only the train station at North Ryde was up and running! At least Luke K. is happy to give me a lift.

Derek (that’s the car’s name, on account of the numberplate ZLA = Zoolander) was a bit of a family heirloom - that’s the second car passed on from Mum & Dad that I’ve written off. The previous one was the imfamous Ormond (Orange-Red Monster Of Near Death).

…and this is the blog post I would have written if Derek was actually dead.

In fact, although when I called the mechanic, the apprentice told me “It’s the head gasket”, he also added “but Pete will tell you more when he gets back”. What Pete eventually said was “Not the head gasket. Just a lead that’s vibrated loose; it was only running on three cylinders. Still, there’s some weird things going on. I’ll get back to you.”

So Derek is still on the operating table. More news tomorrow when we find out why the engine was out of oil and water so recently after being filled with both, and whether running on three cylinders for about 20k has seriously damaged the engine, reverting the status of the top half of this weblog posting to “true”.

Night Thoughts

So, I went to the effort of learning the famous and rather beautiful Cantonese poem “Night Thoughts”. It would appear that I’m in good company: