Sundae lies

From Tori

Tonight while dri­ving me home, Josh and I stopped at Mac­cas and bought a choco­late sun­dae. He asked me whether there are McFlur­ries in China and I said yes. He was glad, and joked that this isn’t some­thing he’d be will­ing to give up for Jesus. We laughed, because this isn’t true. We both would give up much more than McDonald’s ice­creams for Jesus. I love this boy.

# by Josh Street on October 12th, 2009 Tags: , , , , , ,
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Red

Dust storm over Sydney @ University of New South Wales

Sydney’s cov­ered in a dust storm this morn­ing and everyone’s talk­ing about it. It’s pretty funky coloured and unprece­dented in recorded his­tory. Tori says Thank God in her new blog (at least, that’s the blog’s focus :)) — oth­ers say more amus­ing things. Here’s a sample.

““UFO?” — my brother, “no, dust storm” — me. He looked upset.”

“[name] proudly wel­comes you to Syd­ney Ranga Day. You can’t see us, but you know we’re out there.”

“[name] would hate to be hold­ing a cli­mate change deniers press con­fer­ence in Syd­ney today.”

“Appar­ently you shouldnt go out­side if u have asthma” [sic] — stat­ing the obvi­ous award

“[name] won­ders if, due to global warm­ing, jesus will return on a cloud of orange dust?”

“[name] is won­der­ing how he got inside a sepia photo?!”

“[name] wants it to rain so she can make a mud pie on her car”

Hey guys i had this big bag of red dust that i left out­side, but how [sic] can’t find it. Would any­one know where it is?”

# by Josh Street on September 23rd, 2009 Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
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Reflections on an exciting and terrifying letter

This evening I received a let­ter of nom­i­na­tion from my uni­ver­sity sup­port­ing my exchange appli­ca­tion. My heart is greatly torn at this news. God is not with­out a sense of irony! Tori and I both pray for a future serv­ing God together, but the process to attain­ing this is not, it seems, one with­out pain or dif­fi­culty. We antic­i­pate more long months apart, and I face leav­ing Syd­ney, its com­forts and securities.

In Syd­ney, there is secu­rity in so many things. I trust in fam­ily, in friends, in per­sonal and pro­fes­sional net­works, in job secu­rity and my own abil­i­ties. I trust in credit cards, Inter­net providers, news­pa­pers and mobile phones. All of these things come to noth­ing, dis­solv­ing in the face of study­ing a lan­guage so rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent from my own first lan­guage. Yet, were I to achieve any degree of com­fort­able­ness in this lan­guage, at least some of the things in which I falsely find secu­rity would, with­out sound rea­son, assume that posi­tion of trust in my life once more.

The one true thing to trust in is com­mon to all lan­guages, all peo­ple, and every place on earth. There’s just one sure and cer­tain hope that is unfail­ing. When every thing and per­son on earth gives way, Jesus alone is our hope and stay. (So thank­ful to God for Tori’s reminder of that in the midst of my freak­ing out about all of this tonight — you are a wise and godly woman Tori!)

Busi­ness strat­egy, inter­net devel­op­ment, and the excit­ing insan­ity of startup work in an amaz­ing indus­try with the best col­leagues will trans­form into, near-exclusively, the well-trodden path of labo­ri­ous lan­guage study, learn­ing through hum­bling fail­ure and the neces­sity of con­stant cor­rec­tion by even the clos­est of friends. Yet lan­guage learn­ing opens doors, com­mu­ni­cates truths, and, sim­i­larly to the insan­ity of star­tups, is spurred along by neces­sity and an urgent need for improvement.

For my part, I’m learn­ing to trust God more and hav­ing the false objects of my hope called out in front of me by even the sug­ges­tion of hav­ing to leave them behind. It’s funny, because I thought I’d thought about this — I guess as things become con­crete prob­lems get harder to ignore! Strangely, the things I had thought will be dif­fi­cult to let go and live with­out — a car, a great IT setup, books, pur­chas­ing power due to con­strained exchange bud­get, etc. — hadn’t even come up in my mind yet (though they may later).

Per­haps the issue for me is less mate­ri­al­ism, as I had thought, and more pride and an overde­pen­dence on the things that don’t sat­isfy and give life to the full! The absur­dity of this sit­u­a­tion is per­haps best encap­su­lated in the obser­va­tion that I am torn at the spec­tac­u­lar breadth, depth and width of oppor­tu­ni­ties pro­vided. It is ridicu­lous to think that I, such a mediocre stu­dent, should be given the chance to study at a top-5 uni­ver­sity as well as the remark­ably well-regarded Uni­ver­sity of Syd­ney. The ridicu­lous­ness of this is, per­haps, only sur­passed by the fact that I then pro­ceed to com­plain about it!

And both these priv­i­leges are like rub­bish com­pared to the sur­pass­ing great­ness of know­ing the Lord Jesus Christ — this is the most absurd oppor­tu­nity of all. To be loved by the Cre­ator, whose cre­ation (of which I am part) destroyed Him, though death could not hold Him down, such that death promises eter­nal life through Christ’s vic­tory: it is beyond comprehension! 感谢主!

# by Josh Street on September 4th, 2009 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Quoth the geek

[7:35:07 PM] Josh Street says: hey :( you’re offline in face­book :(
[7:35:20 PM] Tori says: sorry inter­net explorer annoys me
[7:35:32 PM] Tori says: im online in opera but stu­pid fb chat doesnt work
[7:35:58 PM] Tori says: (blush)
[7:36:07 PM] Tori says: theyre gonan fix it tho right?
[7:36:17 PM] Tori says: can i send them an email or some­thing?
[7:36:38 PM] Tori says: and what is flock!?

We are com­menc­ing an incred­i­ble journey.

The Arden Shakespeare series, the next month, CYIADA update

Offi­cially what I’ll be try­ing to acquire when I buy Shake­speare from now on. I have their The Winter’s Tale title, and it is noth­ing less than spec­tac­u­lar. It even includes as an Appen­dix the com­plete text of Pan­dosto. The Tri­umph of Time. (the pri­mary source text for Shakespeare’s play). Pages 181 – 225 are devoted to this text alone… very cool. I do won­der if they do the same with texts such as Ros­alynde as appro­pri­ate, or if this par­tic­u­lar edition’s edi­tor was feel­ing par­tic­u­larly benevolent!

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.

# by Josh Street on May 24th, 2007 Tags: , , , , , ,
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Opera + Flash = Snappy

I wrote some time ago about Opera per­form­ing bril­liantly and how, when Fire­fox col­lapsed on me (it’s still a bit shaky — middle-click open­ing of new tabs is now rather flawed, even in the ‘fixed’ release), I fell in love with it. Well, as much as one can with a piece of soft­ware, anyway.

I also wrote briefly of how Tori told me about a very cool media ser­vice called Garage­Band, which pub­lishes music from inde­pen­dent artists free of charge, even going so far as to offer (shock, hor­ror) un–DRM–encum­bered MP3 down­loads of the vast major­ity of tracks.

So where does Flash fit into all of this?

A screenshot of the GarageBand Flash player, about to be discussed

Well. About that. Garage­Band has this nifty Flash player thing going, which is very cool, except for when you’re using Fire­fox: every time I have it run­ning whilst try­ing to do any­thing in the back­ground (that is, within Fire­fox, in another tab or some­thing), the audio buffer dies until what­ever I’m doing in the back­ground has started to ren­der (or maybe resolved a host, or some­thing… whatever).

Opera, on the other hand, han­dles this flaw­lessly. The win­dow pops open, Flash loads faster (notably, using exactly the same plu­gin as the Mozilla fam­ily, if I recall cor­rectly), and I can do what­ever I want in the back­ground with­out it skip­ping a beat. And that, ladies and gen­tle­men, is how a browser should be.

# by Josh Street on August 2nd, 2005 Tags: , , ,
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The Wife not Discovered

An… inter­est­ing poem, com­posed in Eng­lish by Louis, Kris­ten and Tori. Read the rest of this entry »

# by Josh Street on November 1st, 2004 Tags: , , , ,
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