I’ve also hit a bit of a slump in bible reading which isn’t magically solving itself… I put it down to playing too much catchup when I got back and not prioritising God’s word anywhere near as highly as I should have done. But now it’s a matter of actually resolving that before all of a sudden I’ve been back a month and still haven’t! Prayer is welcomed, of course.

I have also been sleeping well (if anti-socially?) — New Zealand does good things to you like that. I think I could quite happily live there, though a few more warm clothes would need acquisition first. That said, I have no plans to run away. Quite enough is keeping me here for the next 2 years or so, methinks. This is the latest I’ve been up in nearly a month methinks, so I’d best be off. More regular updates may be forthcoming at some point in the future. Life gets in the way of blogging sometimes — it’s not all bad!

p.s. yes, Harry Potter comes out in about seven hours. No, that does not qualify as ‘life’. (Close, though)

The trace had to be a little eclectic for realism’s sake, so I didn’t just do the redraw with Ctrl + D transform ninja skills, but let the software trace it. Big mistake.

It was one of those things that InDesign got a little upset about the complexity of — which is okay — and had to import as encapsulated postscript instead of as native vector data — which is also okay. Trouble was, it wasn’t just borderline too-complex, it was stupidly over the edge. I stuck it on the A-Master (which keeps me sane and the .indd filesize down) and got to work for about a week on the rest of the content and so forth. As we get closer to press (I was aiming for today… others apparnetly have different ideas) I’ve started doing the Indd->PDF shuffle and discovered the absolute pain of waiting for it to “render” (basically that’s what it’s doing) the EPS onto every page as it creates the PDF file.

I endured this for about two days and then finally snapped this morning, went back to Photoshop with the source image and processed it to make it look similar enough before pasting the raster scan into the A-Master in the traced thing’s place.

As if by magic, the generated PDF size dropped from 55MB to under 4MB.

Raster images are your friend.

p.s. hopefully I’m back here now. Am away next week with GPRS Internet only, then in New Zealand (with Internet, albeit with uncertainty about having a computer in the accommodation). Yes, busy as ever. On Facebook quite a lot, because status updates are more managable than full blog posts!

Either way… highly recommended editions.

Also to acquire when next book shopping: Alice in Wonderland, for some opium-fuelled holiday reading. And perhaps Hitchhiker’s Guide to see if I can endure it nine years from when I last tried… less likely fuelled by opium, but from all reports it sounds bizarre enough to warrant suspicion of the involvement of some other mind-altering substances!

Holiday reading = after June 22nd, whereupon my last exam occurs. Then, off to lead on a study camp (perhaps time for reading? I can justify Alice as being in support of the HSC English ‘journeys’ core!) for a week, three days back home in Sydney (undoubtedly to be insanely busy) before going away to New Zealand from the 4th to 16th of July. My how time flies. I may or may not be at university in an equal capacity next semester due to a whole bunch of things, primarily related to its perceived importance and myriad other opportunities that are cropping up all over the place. It would be, for example, nice to have some money in exchange for funny hours in the form of more work (which I think I prefer to regular and boring hours) and not have to pursue useless assessments (I speak of one particular subject that has copped flak on this blog over the past few months) around this.

The CYIADA thing is progressing nicely. Michael came on board about a month ago as chief code monkey, which has been nice coz I’ve been spending a bit more guilt-free time in Photoshop. There is a two-fold reason for that, first of which being I don’t feel like I need to try and prototype anything on my own, and the other is that now he’s developing stuff, there’s an imminent need for front-end to make this thing saleable! We’re close to landing on a new name that doesn’t sound like something you’d use to gas people with.

There’s a meeting tomorrow arvo wherein we will speak of many things (except perhaps for shoes and ships and ceiling wax and cabbages and kings), involving a progress update, an extensive argument about names and inclusiveness, prayer, another argument about launch dates and where/how it’s going to be hosted, who’s providing SMS, how much money we’re planning on losing and for how long, how we’re going to promote it, open sourcing things we write, and lots lots more.

I should really update the CYIADA project blog, too, but we haven’t got staggeringly good readership over there anyway (well, not compared to here, though perhaps more after Southern Cross’ coverage — at the end of that article, which is effectively buried online, though less so in print… ironically we need online readers far more than print ones!) so hopefully that will wait until we settle on a new name (and associated domain name acquisitions take place).

Oh and in unrelated news, my camera turned up. It wasn’t in Selo’s car. This is a good and a bad thing… good because I have no money to spend on a still camera right now, bad because I have no reason to buy a new one even if I did :P It’s still got another six months of life left in it I think, though it’s looking pretty abused. Still takes decent pictures. I’m so happy with its performance over the last two and a half years (link goes to first photos I took with it), seriously. I will struggle to make up my mind when it dies about what kind of camera to get… a larger SLR would be more useful for production stuff and night time things, but this is so portable… I don’t know.

And there is a decent sized blog update.

Now, I should stop procrastinating and prepare to kick off some fairly pressing freelance work when I get back from uni tonight! Uni assessments, also, are proving to be rather worthy of procrastination. Ahhhh… I keep remembering “one more thing” to write about: 28 Weeks Later proved to be a seriously scary zombie flick. Saw it with Ben and Tori last night. Was ultimate year 10 flashbacks, only with added alcohol and late nights without concerned parentals! We went to Pizza Hut all you can eat afterwards… its so disgusting but such good fun :P

As for the movie… it’s quite messy. But it was spectacularly produced… I need to re-watch the first one, but I’m pretty sure it was much more in-your-face suspenseful. It sets up for a third film at the end, which vaguely irritates me, but… well, rumours have it that it’ll be capped at a trilogy only. And this was a really good sequel, so I don’t think it’ll matter too much. Wikipedia has full spoiler detail for 28 Weeks Later… See the film first instead if you can normally handle that sort of thing.

Four jobs I have had

1. IT support/troubleshooting guy
2. Westfield Christmas decorations assembler at some signage place
3. Web… something. Designer/markup guru/accessibility consultant/CSS wizard/JavaScript mangler extraordinaire. That’s really a job title.
4. I’m all out, I think. Can I do “Three things” instead?

Four movies I can watch over and over again

1. The Matrix (and ONLY the Matrix, not :Reloaded or :Revolutions, because they sucked bigtime)
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
3. Underworld :D If anyone (in Sydney) wants to go see the sequel sometime let me know…
4. Ice Age

Four places I have lived

1. Lat: 33:54:24S (-33.9067) Lon: 151:13:01E (151.2169)
2. Lat: 33:54:44S (-33.9122) Lon: 151:12:50E (151.2139)
3. Lat: 33:54:23S (-33.9063) Lon: 151:13:30E (151.2249)
4. Lat: 33:55:09S (-33.9190) Lon: 151:14:14E (151.2373)

Four TV shows I love

1. Um. Wrong person. I’m going to tag Steve at the end of this post, which should be most amusing. Hopefully he’ll name a podcast instead!

Four places I’ve vacationed

1. New Zealand
2. A boat. A big boat.
3. Mansfield, VIC
4. Tea Gardens/Hawks Nest, NSW :)

Four of my favorite dishes

1. I hate this question.
2. I can’t even choose food in a restaurant, from a menu.
3. Let alone with out any guidance in some forever-bounced-around-the-blogosphere meme.
4. This is my answer. My favourite dish is indecision.

Four sites I visit daily

1. Google. Duh.
2. Quirksmode, but rarely not-through Google.
3. My comment-spam moderation page :-/
4. whisper.joahua.com, for music playback. I’ll post about this sometime.

Four places I would rather be right now

This isn’t really a valid question seeing I’m doing this on a weekend. Not fair.

1. Bed.
2. Floating in a pool somewhere. Not normally me, but for some reason that has enormous appeal right now.
3. On a couch, reading a book (without thinking “I’ve got so much other stuff to do! I haven’t got time to read!”)
4. Making engaging rich media for the web. Scheduled for later today. One of several exciting things coming soon!

Four bloggers I’m tagging

1. Steve
2. Ben
3. LTTD, mostly because I want to see how a collective weblog would deal with this whole… blogging equivalent of chain-mail thing.
4. I can’t think of anyone else (who hasn’t already been tagged/done it) I’d want to inflict this on :P

This is interesting, because I once completely shunned that whole ‘e-mail survey’ thing, but now recognise it as a not-entirely-neccessary not-entirely-evil neccessary evil. Having said that, still not a huge fan :P

Until about three weeks ago, I was convinced I was going to take a year off between finishing school and starting uni to work full time. I’d roundly insulted a small web firm a couple of weeks before leaving for New Zealand, re-building their site with CSS in about three hours (it wasn’t perfect, but it was a decent effort) and going into their office to tell them their version sucked and mine was better. To date, the website in question hasn’t been ‘fixed’, as it were, but I got a call the day after I returned from New Zealand asking if I was interested in coming in for an interview. I’ve been working four days a week there since.

Tori came back. We spent some time together, and I kind of realised that putting off University for another year wasn’t a brilliant move, contrary to what more than a handful of… older people… had said. The main reason is probably social (which I don’t ever talk about too much on here, I guess), but financially it’s not… compelling… to stay any further away from the other side of Uni any longer than is neccessary, because “that side” means a job/career I’m interested in as a longer-term option, hence financial stability more so than in an industry I’m perfectly interested in provided I get to do the things I like — and where I am presently fortunate enough to be in a position where that’s pretty close to what I’m doing — and indifferent about it (the industry) otherwise. Social/political information theory notwithstanding, because that’s an entirely separate kettle of fish that relates both to my pre– and post– uni directions. Which are, incidentally, IT/connectivity/accessibility now, and education later. Somewhere in the middle there’ll be (is?) a fusion of the two, which has been bandied about a little over the last 12 months. I had a very interesting conversation RE: something along these lines last night, which will hopefully evolve into something in the not-too distant future!

So yes, as of Monday I’m officially an Arts student at the University of Sydney. In a way I feel bad about this because I’d said to work that I was planning on sticking around in a near-F/T capacity for a year (and at the time I had been), but at the same time this feels so much more… sensible? Plus everyone was mind-blowingly nice about it, even though I called on Saturday to say I’d be in late Monday because I had to enrol (because of when the offer had come in, and because I’d been putting off saying it the week before).

Anyway, in summary: I’m working nearly full time doing web development in an awesome role where I get to do lots of CSS, semantic-web junk, usability work, and some occasional JavaScript (though mercifully not too much! Still learning. If anyone else in Aus is interested in getting a copy of Jeremy Keith’s allegedly-excellent “DOM Scripting” book, let me know so we can order a few copies from Amazon and get cheaper shipping, because no-one in Australia is stocking copies for another month or three!). And as much or as little server-side work as I want. At the minute I’m unequivocally saying “little”, but that might change at some point, maybe. I’m going to uni, too. That doesn’t start until March, so I’m going to be working ‘normally’ up until then, and after that feeling my way according to timetables, how much of a life I have, how broke I am, etcetera!

Tied into the whole work thing, my first to-be-promoted-on-TV website is going live sometime in the wee hours of Sunday Monday, which is audaciously exciting. Not in the least because it will hopefully attract insane amounts of traffic, and the CSS-is-good-for-your-bandwidth-costs argument carries weight here!! It also features AJAX, chiefly for usability/bandwidth-saving reasons… but also because it’s just damn cool! Anyway, there will be posts, screenshots, etcetera (probably saying the same kind of thing I just said, only naming names and with pretty pictures!) scheduled for release here to co-incide with the site’s launch, so… watch this space.

As for Uni? English, Philosophy, Classics and (Ancient) Greek are currently on the menu. Greek… may be swapped out, possibly. For Linguistics or maybe Latin if anything, but possibly not. The reasoning behind it — because I’ve attracted many strange looks as I tell people I’m planning on studying Ancient Greek — is essentially:

1. Learning another language (any other language) helps me understand English better. Doing English, no-one will ever explain grammar and structure of language to me. It sucks. Admittedly, Linguistics could prove to be useful in this department, too.
2. Ancient Greek ties in with the Classics courses I’m taking. Don’t ask me to remember what they are, or even look them up, because I don’t have a copy of my preferences (they took it, because their stupid computers were stupidly broken. I’m so glad I’m not studying IT!) and it’s not available online yet and I’m just lazy. And trying to get this massive post finished so I can get back to having a life, or something.
3. The New Testament is written in Greek. As Kristen so eloquently expressed it last night:
   

   You can be one of those people at Bible studies who go “Well, the greek word for that actually means ‘this is ambiguous…’”

   Heh. Marcelo coughed something that sounded suspiciously like “Moore College” (a Sydney Bible college) when he found out, but that’s not really what I had in mind choosing it… maybe, though!

Anyway. The blog has nearly caught up to me. Almost. There’s a bunch of other stuff happening, but this is the glut of stuff I needed to write at some point and had been putting off!

Tori is leaving for Europe tomorrow (tomorrow when this post goes live), and she’s not getting back til January :-( Hence the improbabilty of my posting at least in the next 48 hours, and possibly before I leave if it takes me longer than expected to pack/get organised.

I also may or may not have a heap of photos to post when I get back. We leave in… a handful of days now, and I still haven’t decided which/how many cameras I’m taking, nor have I bought film. Bleh!

There is, however, something that would probably make me want to run more. This ridiculously cool GPS training device! It’s like… hey… you’re a geek. And you want to run. With gimmicks that are arguably useful. Buy me, buy me!

Somehow, though, at $US330ish plus shipping, I don’t think it’s going to happen. The solution? Start jogging with a backpack and take a car GPS unit (already have one)!

Yeah, not terribly likely, either. Ah well. Hopefully The Trip to New Zealand coming up (have I mentioned that online yet? Geez… maybe not… how bad) will serve to kinda remedy the whole lack-of-exercise situation and create a habit for when I get back. If I haven’t mentioned that on this site before (I don’t remember doing that, I don’t think I have), then… consider this notice. I’m going to NZ from Saturday the 12^th of November until Monday the 5^th of December. Tori leaves to go to England on November 10, so that’ll be distraction enough after finishing the exams and just before packing… and hopefully NZ will be enough of a distraction for me to not realise she’s on the other side of the planet for a while (and vice versa, I imagine…)

I’m planning on taking lots of photos, but haven’t decided which camera to take yet. Or, more accurately, how many I will take. I’m definitely planning on taking my Pentax SP500 w/ 28-70mm lens, but don’t know whether my little Pentax qualifies. I can see it either getting broken or full very quickly. Contemplating getting a harddrive-based reader thingo (something like this HD-DM40 from Anyware, about $215 from a retailer), but quite uncertain. It’s just more stuff to carry in a backpack that’s already going to be substantially full.

Plus, as I’ve told some people before, I like film grain. It looks nice. Far nicer than digital compression artifacts or the sensor crapping out in low light conditions. One of Hayley’s photos on year12.joahua.com demonstrates this nicely, because it’s not a good photo, but it’s very nice and characterful… mostly, I think, because it was shot on film not digital.

So, I can live with my own inability to use a camera perfectly meaning I get a handful of blurry shots, and it costing a little more to get photos developed/make mistakes. The question is, should I have a secondary camera for quick photos that I can check the quality of immediately, just in case? I could probably drop my SP500 in water and it’d survive after a [probably quite expensive] service… I can’t say the same thing for the digital. Funnily enough, the tiny digital would ultimately take up nearly as much space as the chunky SLR, because it would mean I’d be carrying a charger for its batteries, a hard drive, and a charger for the hard drive, as well as the camera itself. I could just not use the hard drive and try to find a net cafe, but that’s something I’d rather not rely on. I could also buy another SD card or two before we leave… which is a distinct possibility, given how cheap those things are getting (I saw a 256MB card for under $30 yesterday, and wasn’t even looking. 512MB cards can be had for under $50). Problematically, they’re absolutely tiny and I can just see myself losing one.

Suggestions, anyone?

I found this button on an oldish jacket today, and thought it was sufficiently cool to share. The jacket was tailored in New Zealand by some guy/company called Peter Wain (yeah, I’d never heard of them either… a quick Google didn’t turn up anything), and the buttons consist of a cast with significant height, subsequently filled with some clear plastic.

And this is take two, as Mozilla crashed.  Actually, why am I typing this in Mozilla?  Konqueror has nice spell checking and stuff!  I’m normally pretty good, but a second opinion can’t hurt, now can it?  *switches browsers*

Ah, that’s better.  Haha, “Mozilla” is showing up in red text… no, we’re not anti-competitive ;)

Yay.  So, about… life.  Seminar presentation.  I’ve already bitched to half the world (so it seems… half my world, anyway… probably more!) about how poorly I thought it went, but hey, for the other part of my world (the purely-connected, non-“Met” half), I’m ranting here, too.  Feel free to ignore me if you think I just need to STFU and get over it.

Yeah.  This seminar was meant to go for ten minutes.  Mine went for fourteen.  I’ve never been great (read: utterly hopeless) at timing things, especially of this nature, and brevity has never been a strong point either (phonecalls should be billed in 30 minute blocks, not per 30 seconds!).  This, however, was appalling.  As I said, it went for fourteen.  That isn’t too bad, in and of itself…

Had I finished.  Knowing full well that my timing was probably way out, the seminar was prepared with designated “exit points”, for use in a scenario such as… oh, say, the one that occurred.  Essentially, there were premature conclusions which wouldn’t appear premature should I have to use them.

All that is based on the presumption that I actually DO think to use them… oh, yes, that old “thought” thing.  Evidently too much.  So I hit a break in presentation, and asked how long I had gone for: they said 14 minutes.  I thought I was perhaps just over 10, 12 at the most.  It shouldn’t have been panic inducing, but then, I’d just endured a pointless 30–45 seconds of DVD footage due to impossible cueing (my frog, the buttons on the front of those things are fiddly.  Give me a remote anyday.), and knew I needed to make up for that somehow.  I don’t know.  I basically forgot that nice conclusion which was glaring fiercely up at me from the sheet I held less than a meter from my face.

That, of course, isn’t the thing which annoys me most.  If my stupidity doesn’t affect the overall quality of content delivered, then that’d be no problem.  Unfortunately, without my use of an appropriate conclusion, the whole thing falls down somewhat.  The study of ONE appropriation, no matter how in-depth or well presented that may be, does not constitute “a range of” other contexts.

I looked over the presentation again, and I’ve estimated that were I to run the full length of my prepared content, it would have gone for approximately 25 minutes.  Damn, my timing sucks.  I say “prepared” content because I should have liked to go longer… perhaps I’m not a public speaker for a reason? ;)

Despite all that, I continue to agree with others who have described this assessment as one of, if not the most enjoyable assessment they’ve ever undertaken.

But it’s over.  So that probably means I should stop working on it, and focus on myriad other assessments building up, hey?;)

Oh, it’s not so bad.  A moderately huge business thing on Monday, which I’m a tad nervous about, an English listening task on Wednesday, which I could care less about, but not by much, and a Modern History essay which is due Thursday.  Then a week?  Maybe two?  I don’t know… until yearly exams.  Bleh!

And a certain Herr Goldrick is trying to convince me to do HSC stuff.  I’m uncertain why.  Apparently is shall “reassure” year 12.  More so than paid staff shall?  Bleh.  I don’t see why a certain person continues to be employed.  It’s funny, seeing he’ll be present for their rehearsals, and yet Goldrick is convinced that I need to be there because I was there for the trials.  Yes, well, certain others who shall be witnessing aforementioned rehearsals WEREN’T there for the trials, because they had better things to do with their time.

Grrr.

To go off on a complete tangent, my parents are going to New Zealand tomorrow evening.  (YAY!)  This’ll probably mean a several-hundred fold increase in productivity, for various reasons (namely that there is no pressure to “appear” to be doing work of any particular kind — time management CAN occur unheeded, thankyou very much).  The lovely LCD device is going with them, in the hope of attaining a tax break… I don’t know how all that stuff works, so I won’t speculate further…

That’s the last few days in a nut-shell.  Today was a write-off.  Absolutely.  Apparently Heath is upset about the en mass desertion of his school, but given that they’ve never had an established “Bring your school books and work in case it rains” policy, I don’t think he has any right to be.

I left it too late to escape, and subsequently lost a day which could have been spent tending to assessments.  St. Andrews Cathedral School embraces academic achievement and efficient time usage.  What a joke.  Six hours of absolute nothing.  Sure, we did work in physics, the one subject I’m adamant about dropping.  Wonderful.  Other subjects?  Oh, I’m sure I could have worked, had I come prepared with BOOKS.

I’d like to take this opportunity to extend my gratitude to the administration of the school for their astounding short-sightedness in dealing with this situation.  Duty-of-Care and truancy is one matter, actively refusing parental permission to release students so that they may possibly make some use of their day is quite another.

Apparently he is angry.  Well, so am I.  I value my time more than that.  I was looking forward to this carnival, but I can cope with it being cancelled — I’d like to be able to get work done in it’s place, though.

“Normal school day” was a fond catch-cry of administration.  I certainly hope you don’t consider that normal.  This isn’t like broadband, there is no such thing as a “fast churn” process between schools.  Not that I’d really consider moving, anyway — I do love SACS, despite all its capricious oddities.  This sort of thing does irritate, though.  Yes, the situation was unavoidable, but the response left much to be desired.

Hah, the male parental unit is a source of much amusement.  In the morning, whilst hopes of escape still dwelled in the echelons of the imagination, I called the parentals in hope of them calling and ensuring some means of ess-cap-ee.  He was in a meeting, but sent a TEXT message as a permission to leave.  You have no idea how hard I fought not to fall off my chair laughing.

“I give permission 4 josh 2 go home now that the carnival is cancelled”

No joke.  I haven’t laughed so hard because of a text message EVER!  Mrs. Earle found it just as amusing, hehehe.  That element of humour made the day lastable, methinks ;)

Anyway.  I’m off to compose an essay.  Or something.  Hooray for ridiculous SMS messages!

Post your opinion as a comment by clicking the “Comments” link (now located on the left of your screen, below the body of this post ;)

Apparently a New Zealand man sent 80,012 text messages in protest against the removal of an unlimited message plan.  Really makes you wonder why Telecom got rid of it, hey.  I can’t believe how stupid someone could be.  Seriously.

Let’s assume a moderate charge per message of 20cents — that, multiplied by 80,012.  Divided by 100.  Equals sixteen thousand and two dollars, and fourty cents.

What a freakin’ genius.  Not only did he manage to prove why his phone provider had to withdraw the plan (i.e. network spamming and abuse), it also cost him $16,000.40!

Perhaps Telecom NZ are evil, but this isn’t a particularly good reason why — look at their local-loop regulation or something (heh, and Telstra Australia crying foul over that, and the media gobbling their every protest.  Priceless.  Or sickening.), but not their SMS restrictions!

Heck, even with cool providers in Australia, we can’t get uncapped SMS sending — admittedly, I’m only paying 11c to most mobiles (free to others, subject to restrictions also — certainly not completely unlimited), but it makes you wonder what this guy is complaining about.

He thought the promotion was going to 2010?  Bull.  I’m sorry, seems like I’m rambling on a topic I have no knowledge of — I don’t live in NZ, and haven’t spoken to anyone who does about the whole thing, but seriously — has ANYONE ever seen a legitimate business make forward looking promotions stretching SEVEN YEARS into the future (this promotion was around since 2003, was meant to expire at the end of that year, but was extended by six months)?

Unbelievable.