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.

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?”

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！

[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.

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.

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?

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.

Die, bitch
May your days be filled with insufferable pain
It’s not like I ate my sister’s brain
She deserved it, stupid horse
I’ve decided to eat her, pass the sauce!
Kristen is a Novotel
Tori is a Novotel as well.
The hotel industry is huge
Ebenezer Scrooge
is pegging pegs on Josh

There is no rational explanation for any of this.

What is it with the movie industry and milking successful movies these days? Of course, I’d go and see the sequel, but that doesn’t mean they’d be able to make it anywhere near as good as the first!

The only exception to this rule, of course, are films which are never intended to stand alone, drawing from a rich (or not so rich) background of film material in order to create parody. That’s okay. Again, sequels are still bad, but following up a concept isn’t. I saw Shaun of the Dead last night with Tori and Ben, and it has to be one of the funnier movies I’ve seen for some time now — especially given the ever-so-slightly twisted genre employed.

After the movie, we went drifting around the city for another two hours or so, visiting the most excellent “Sydney Life” exhibition in Hyde Park, as part of Sydney’s “Art and About” event this year. There’s a series of canvases strung up along the main pathway in Hyde Park North (today is the last day it’s up), with prints which are about 4 meters wide. My favorite was either “The True House” or a piece inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “Midsummer Eve”. Tori stood staring at “Mark” for ages, so I guess that’d be her favorite, and Ben seemed to have an affinity for “Heath Training” , although I may be wrong.

If you’re around the city this afternoon, and they haven’t taken them down yet, go take a look: it’s worth it.

I’m still not over how much the radio edit of that track sucked. Bleh! Anyway. The vocal trance version of Hello was seriously sweet, especially after you consider it wasn’t done in-house — that is, without access to original tracks and other such useful things. So yeah. That’s my randomness for the day over ;)

What else? Oh. Saw Dawn of the Dead last night with Ben and Tori — it was kind of like 28 Days Later, only probably produced on a much higher budget (28 Days Later was a film grant production, but it didn’t really show, aside from the fact that it was shot on digital rather than telecine — even then, they claim it was a deliberate stylistic decision rather than the result of any budget constraints). Oh, and it was more gory and less suspenseful (if that is a word — if not, it is now) than 28 Days Later… that said, it was hilarious at times, although whether this is an inherent attribute of the film itself, or simply a by-product of the audience and company I saw it in is something which I’ll leave for someone else to decide!