The other end of the day

I'm often walking home towards sunset these days, and there have been some stunning sunsets to enjoy. I've been wanting to get down to the beach and photograph one for a while now, and finally managed it today. It's not the most spectacular, but it was very nice:



(you can click for a larger version).

Very pretty. I'm hoping to get down to the beach on many more mornings and evenings, as it's a very nice place to take a walk, as well as a photo.

Flight of the Conchords TV Show roXXors

Having watched 2 episodes of the Flight of the Conchords TV show, I am entirely impressed by it. It is great. I love the Flight of the Conchords TV show. I thought that the first episode was good - maybe not quite as strong as the BBC radio show, but still very good. I love the live recordings of their music, probably moreso than a lot of the more polished studio recordings, and the TV show featured slicker versions of songs (for example, the I'm Not Crying song in the BBC radio show is a live recording, and while less polished is slightly more awesome (to my ear) than the (admittedly also fantastic) version on the TV show). That said, the song at the start of episode 2 of their TV show - Inner City Pressure - is absolute genius. Hilarious, inspired, genius. My hat (and I was wearing one today as it was fairly cold on the walk to school) is off to those very clever chaps. I loved the whole second episode, and I can't wait for next week's show :)

Early Morning Wildlife

I went for a stroll this morning, and took my camera with me. I'm not much of a photographer (though I would love to get a digital SLR camera with a couple of lenses to play with - winning one as a prize somehow is the only way that's likely to happen), but I do like to take snapshots of things from time to time.

I find the beach quite beautiful, especially on a clear day. I took a few fairly random shots, watched sand trails swirling in the wind (that was very cool), and enjoyed the fresh morning air and sunshine. These are my 2 favourite shots:





I'm only about 40 pages from finishing the third book I've read this term. That's not in any way impressive - I used to read a couple of books a week when I was a projectionist, and now I'm down to less than one a month on average. However, with the advent of reading-whilst-walking-to-work, I have managed to read almost three books in one term (five more school days to finish 40 pages, shouldn't be a problem). So, hooray for living within walking distance of my school :)

Phoenix, Holidays, Moviefest

Furniture up for grabs

Surplus to requirements: *One futon sofa bed *One old double bed (slat base plus matress) Will trade for chocolate.

Happy birthday Debbie!

Today is a very important day, being the birthday of young Debzter. So I say HAPPY BIRTHDAY!, and then I go hand in my relief for this afternoon so I can go home and say it in person :)

Baby Photo #1

This is our first baby photo:



As you can see, the baby's still quite small. From the measurement taken of the top of the skull to the bottom (end of the spine) they estimated 14 weeks and 3 days, giving a due date in early December (11th?).

Now, I've never been able to see much in ultrasounds of babies on TV, but when you're actually there, and the foetus starts doing the macarena, it's pretty awesome - and pretty easy to see that it is a tiny little person. Some of the stills from the scan are reasonably clear though - like this one that shows the head, the spine, and one arm:



Anyways, I'm sure we'll take millions of photos of our kid, but there is no question that these are the first ones :)

Happy birthday Debbie!

Today is a very important day, being the birthday of young Debzter. So I say HAPPY BIRTHDAY!, and then I go hand in my relief for this afternoon so I can go home and say it in person :)

Busy, as per usual

Reports. Major Production DVD (editing the matinee, making the DVD). Senior exam marking. I actually almost enjoyed mowing the lawn last weekend. It was certainly satisfying to tame the wild grass. If our lawn were about a third of its current size, but equally flat, I think it would not be an unpleasant chore at all. Well, a fifth of its current size. Roughly. In other thrilling news, I have taken to eating vegemite sandwiches for lunch. This is a change from the peanut butter sandwiches I ate in term 1. Sometimes I have cheese in my sandwiches too, but usually I do not. Mote it be. Lastly, I'm reading some 1990/1991 Kurt Vonnegut - a novel called Hocus Pocus. It's very good - a reflective novel told in first person by a character who is in prison, looking back over his life. The Vietnam War, education, prisons and such are its main subject matter. I'm reading it whilst walking to work, and am about half way through now. I love the feeling I get when it's time to pick a new book to read - so many choices, such a richness of variety. What will be next? It's neat. Peachy keen, even.

Rude words

Sometimes saying lots of rude words is a good way to relieve stress. Not as good as taking a holiday, I'm sure, but as a stop-gap measure, not too bad. It's not a habit I indulge when at work, or often when at home. It seems that trying to get a computer to do something is one of the main triggers for my excessive use of profanity. In other news, I spent way too many hours doing marking yesterday. And I have reports due this week. And more marking. It's all highly tragic, though somewhat ameliorated by the holiday that's coming in 3 weeks. Of course, I have to work on the first 2 days of the holidays, but there are more days after that which I will be enjoying in a big way. Lastly - I've been enjoying reading the forums for the 48 hour film competition. There's always a lot of lively discussion following the 48, and there has been some silly sour-graping this year (there is every year - no surprise when people slog their guts out for a weekend then disagree with the judges' decisions). I was a little rude to one such sour-graper: politely rude, but a lot more sarcastic than I usually am on a forum. It was fun, though not really productive. I tried to write in a helpful manner, with a little bit of a sting in the tail. Anyways, this paragraph is after a pararaph that begins with 'lastly', so it really shouldn't have any content, or even exist at all. I shall simply end with a sad fact from today: I left school so late today that it was too dark to read on my walk home. Although ending on a sad note isn't really my style, so I'll say that the reason I left so late was that I was editing a show using Premier Pro 2. Multicam function is teh awesomes. Seriously - it's a huge leap up from old PP (version 7 - ie pre version 1). It took less than 2 hours to edit together 4 cameras worth of footage of an 80 minute show :)

Well Met

Whew. Sometimes changing what you do at work can be very tiring. Last week I visited another school, and was charged with the responsibility of absorbing information rapidly for about 3 hours. It was intense, and really tiring. I was wiped out by mid-afternoon! Today, I was also out of the classroom for a lot of the day, but this time it was for a 3 hour long meeting to discuss ICT use in the school. 3. Hours. Now, I'm sure there are people who have 3 hour long meetings daily, and for whom they are not a challenge. But I was getting more than a little restless at several points in the meeting - especially when I felt we were making slow progress. Overall the meeting was great and some good stuff came out of it, but I suspect I became a little blunter and more forceful in my contributions as my patience wore down. I made many constructive comments, and am not worried that I was too pushy, but I definitely started to express myself in strong terms towards the end of the meeting. I kinda like putting ideas out in meeting type situations, as I always feel like I can back up what I'm saying, but am not so in love with my ideas that I won't listen to criticism. At least, that's how I see it ;) The end result was not a huge amount of tiredness on my part - not more than I usually have at this point in the week, anyway. But that's quite a bit in and of itself.

Movie Watching

Seen: Pirates of the Carribean 3, and Destination Earth (Jenni's Angels' 48 hour film). One was a tightly put together, funny film with awesome special effects. The other had pirates in it. Actually, they both had awesome special effects - Destination Earth had cool graphic reminiscent (sp?) of Hitchhiker's Guide, whilst Pirates had more than 3 hours of eye-candy. More. Than. Three. Hours. I enjoyed it, but I had a bit of a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach when the climactic sea-battle was about to start, and I glanced down at my watch to see that there was a whole hour left to go. I hope the 'director's' cut is shorter than the theatrical cut :) I will rant about the post-credits bit later...

Weekend Approacheth

I have had an interesting week - a visit to another school on Tuesday, and lots and lots of classes to teach. I am very much looking forward to the weekend. I started up a wiki for my year 12 class this week, and had them adding pages for their research projects. It's been quite interesting - anyone can edit any page, so there were a number of silly comments on the first day, but by the end of the second day the few silly people had pretty much settled down and are using the wiki fairly responsibly. It's kinda neat. I told them that the school would probably have a school-wide system set up before next year (I suspect moodle is going to be that system), and that they were cutting edge. I also asked them to respect the wiki's hauora, and that if they wanted to pwn each other or write comments like 'ur gay' they should do so on Bebo, not the wiki. After stressing that there's no way to retrieve work, and that anything they save over is gone for ever, the few silly kids stopped changing each other's pages. I had to explain it a couple of times, but the move from 'hey, I can anonymously screw people over' to 'hey, stop anonymously screwing people over' was pretty quick (in most cases). It's nice to see teenagers taking responsibility for their actions, or controlling their behaviour on moral grounds rather than out of fear of punishment.

Changing facial topography

I had many, many hours of sleep over the weekend. Many more than I had in the previous weekend (or any weekend since the holidays, I suspect). It was very, very good and it led to an interesting transformation. I was yawning in the supermarket (even catch-up sleep cannot defeat the yawn-inducing power of waiting at the checkout), and I put one hand up to rub my cheek lazily and discovered that my face had subtly changed shape. Gone were the swollen, puffy lower eye-lids that are standard issue for Matt during term time. Gone was the palpable delineation between sleep-deprived eyelid tissue and cheek. I'd somehow de-panda-ised my eyes, through the simple technique of getting some sleep. I am led to wonder what other changes might take place, were I to regularly get enough sleep? Might aches and pains that I have come to regard as chronic symptoms of aging in fact be signs of over-tiredness? Sadly, it's not even 3pm Monday and I can feel that I've already refilled 80% of my tiredness batteries. Le sigh. I will await the long weekend with baited breath, and after that, the holidays! (where Debbie and I are pretty keen to make another 3 Moviefest films. Or more. After all, the entry fee is only $25 and it's soooo much easier than making a 48 film. yes, this will make me tired. but at least it will be the good kind of tired. apparently i have given myself a 'no capital letters' pass for this set of parentheses. i can type in lower case with impunity as i weild my 'get out of punctuation free' card like a monopolist intent on some free parking)

Late Nights, Spending $

Interesting stats from the 48 Hour Film Competition: 490 teams started nationally 77 teams missed the deadline 24 teams MIA (I think this means they registered, but didn't show up on Friday to compete) That's a lot of short films! Our heat is on tonight, so I'll be having a late night. It doesn't start until 9.15pm. I'm looking forward to seeing (hearing) how an audience reacts to the film - Debbie reported back that there was a fair amount of laughter when she showed it at school, so maybe it's not as flat as I feared. I am curious to see how it's received. On the spending $ front, Debbie and I have been talking lately about how it's awesome to save money for future plans, and yet be able to spend $ from time to time on things that make our daily lives more pleasant. There are 2 obvious examples - a heat lamp/extraction fan combo for the bathroom, and a big LCD TV that we've bought this year. It took me a while to get my head around the idea of spending large chunks of cash on nice stuff, rather than deferring spending for some future goal. It's awesome to have made that mental shift though. The stuff we've bought hasn't stopped us from saving, but they are awesome things that we use every day. I like trying to achieve a balance where we're saving regularly, but not missing out on the simple pleasure of a non-steamy house, or a cool big TV to watch shows on (mmm, Heroes is ready to be watched when we get back from the supermarket). Continuing in this trend of sometimes buying nice stuff, I've ordered a new computer. The old beasty we've been using was a low specced machine three and a half years ago when we bought it - it'll be nice to have a mid-range modern PC to use for the next few years. The old machine might make it into a classroom at one of our schools as an editing machine for short films - it's quite capable of handling Moviemaker. I decided to spend the extra $ to get a 500gb hard drive in the new PC - I figure with video projects like the 160gb horror film, and the 150gb school production that I'm working on, 500gb is actually a reasonable size to get. Now, to the supermarket, then back for Heroes. Then, on to Wellington for our heat...

The Post Mortem Post

So - how did we do in our first 48 outing with a Kapiti team? * Ideas - good premise, some good scenes, but split focus between 3 groups (class of students, teacher, guidance counsellor): 7/10 * Humour - some good jokes, especially towards the end, but a slow (joke-lite) start: 5/10 * Technical Stuff - well, you can hear all the lines and see all the peoples. No interesting camera work, OK music, sound fair but not as good as it would have been if our microphone hadn't broken some time between Saturday 7:30 and Saturday 10am: 6/10 * Working to Deadlines - had a rough cut by 11am, a safety cut (perfectly hand-inable) by 3pm, and got the more-or-less finished version (computer crashed when outputting the final final version) handed in 45 minutes early: 10/10 Overall grade for the film itself? Probably 6/10. It gets better as it goes along (the worst 2 scenes are right at the start, and they're not bad - just not particularly interesting/funny), and I quite like the last third or so. Sadly, I think we did a much better job with our practice film than with this one. Of course, the practice film took us 49 hours to put together (without driving to Wellington to hand it in), so in that sense we did much better this time. I am now very keen for Moviefest, as I wants to make more short films :) PS: About 40 - 50% of our takes were unusable (had to call cut early) because of planes overhead. The fine weather sent hundreds of people up for gliding and flying around, and apparently a large number of them decided to circle around and around the school where we were filming!

All done

Another film project complete. Our tape is on its way to Wellington (the driver left about 10 - 15 minutes ago, so even with traffic she should be there a good half hour ahead of the deadline). It's very cool to have finished on time, and be into the relaxing/recovering part of the weekend. My folks happen to be in town, so I shall have to see if I can get hold of them and catch up. I'm really keen to see what other teams have put together - this year's Jenni's Angels film sounds very cool indeed. Unfortunately our heat is a 9:15er, so I shall have a late night in the middle of this week. I keep waiting for a quiet week, and forgetting that down-time exists aplenty - it's called the middle of the holidays. I don't think we'll make it to the 9:15 Jenni's Angels heat (also a weeknight), so we shall have to make cunning arrangements to see their film (or go to the regional finals to see it, or wait for the national finals on C4 ;) ) Lastly, does anyone want 2 tickets to see High School Musical on Tuesday at 7.30pm? We have 2 spare tickets, and could fastpost them to you if you're keen.

48 - Another Update

Well, it's 8:30pm on Saturday night. We've had one or two hitches (microphone that was tested and working at 7:30am not working on set 2 hours later, for no identifiable reason*; computer refusing to boot up at 10am despite having been fine 2 hours earlier**), but things have gone relatively smoothly. We have finished shooting stuff, and have captured most of the footage. I'm now going to attempt to get an assemble edit put together before I get too tired/brain-fried to function: I figure that gives me no more than 3 hours. So far, so good. * We had a backup microphone - sadly not with us, so I had to drive home and get it. ** Computer now working, problem unknown.

48 So Far

Genre: Unnecessary Sequel Character: Gerry Reid, a hypochondriac Line: What do you call that? Prop: A rope Premise: 2 Miss With Love Sydney Poitier, a young female teacher, has just started work at what she believes to be a rough school. However, her father taught at the school a long time ago and completely changed the student body. There are no rough students, no bad behviour any more. Poitier tries to 'change' the students, but finds it disheartening as she is not really making a difference. Eventually the students realise what the problem is, consult the guidance counsellor, and hatch a plan to make their teacher feel better. Bad behaviour ensues, and Poitier finds her purpose in life again. Script = 75% written, and looking quite filmable. Huzzah!

More Quotage

Robert Anton Wilson again: What the alpha males had forgotten was that the science of weaponry had already evolved to the point where even a small minority of angry, rage-filled people could blow the whole planet to hell. Even if they had understood this, it is doubtful that the alpha males would have tried to create a world in which it was impossible for anybody to get that angry. Such a goal would have seemed Utopian to them. They could not guess that it was actually a necessity on any advanced technological planet. Reading en route to work continues to be the knees of a bee. At the current rate, I should be able to finish a couple of books per term just in the time it takes me to walk to school and back. That is awesome (and environmentally friendly!).