samvara: Feline person in drab armor wielding a sword and shield (ESO)
2014-08-20 01:21 pm
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New Hobby – playing Elder Scrolls Online

Born out of many happy hours playing Skyrim before ESO launched in April. Initial exposure was[personal profile] zorana's fault, closely followed by [personal profile] maharetr  who also got into Skyrim and brother J. who pointed out ESO was about to go live and enthused at me over the Beta.

BEST THING: The thing that blows me away the most is that I have now become accustomed to constantly seeing female non player characters of every race performing all the roles. It took me over 200 hours of gameplay to start taking the abundance of female characters for granted. That’s over 200 hours that I spent feeling surprised and delighted every time I met a new female NPC. Now I just get the odd burst when I encounter another married same-sex couple engaged in gay activities like fighting pirates, memorialising their long, happy life together, or dealing with the health issues associated with being a secret werewolf.

NEXT BEST THING: gaming group with [personal profile] maharetr, [personal profile] ascetic_hedony and A. after we all realised we were more invested in roleplaying Khajiit then we were in optimising for racial bonuses. We meet once or twice a week and Do All The Quests or run around Cyrodiil (the player killing map) screaming and dying together. There is no situation that cannot be improved by a fireball trebuchet.

WORST THING: No ‘reason’ field when you add a character to your ignore list. It’s not essential, but it’s an excellent indicator a complaint is accurate if an account has a lot of ignores and comments like ‘gold farmer’ ‘sexist jerk’ or ‘troll’ associated with them. Having said that, the chat tone is surprisingly good and I've seen some nuanced social policing going on.

samvara: Photo of Modesty Blaise with text "All this and brains as well" (Default)
2014-08-14 09:28 am
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Online Drawing Exercise!

Vase-Face exercise, I drew it left handed and appear to have drawn a man with a very grecian nose.

http://drawright.com/vaceface.htm



samvara: Photo of Modesty Blaise with text "All this and brains as well" (Default)
2013-05-30 11:06 am
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WizTree glee

Wot I learned recently:

I somehow managed to fill the (tiny 60GB) drive on my work machine and could not work out where the problem was. Everything was slooooooooooow. Our fabo IT person showed me a neat tool WizTree that swiftly identified where all the big stuff was so I could delete it with extreme prejudice. Yay!

Was it... my sekrit stash of movies? ...my massive collection of music? ...the complete works of APOD?

Nooooooo, it turns out our corporate AV software suspects my constant SQL database work is evil (it is!) and quarantines it all... 10GB of deleting later me and my laptop are a lot happier.

I ran it on my home machine and found ~65GB worth of etilqs_ files courtesy of FireFox and another 30GB of outdated iDevice backups.
samvara: Photo of Modesty Blaise with text "All this and brains as well" (Default)
2013-03-14 12:50 pm
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Google Reader closing doors

I know a lot of people bailed when G+ launched and pulled the sharing feature but since I am a solitary reader it didn't both me too much. I will however need an alternative. For now I'll be trialling Feedly* which has a Firefox plugin that syncs with Google Reader and I'll see if that works for me.

What are people using and what do you recommend?

*which is no doubt getting utterly hammered right now.
samvara: Cartoon picture of Agatha Heterodyne and text "One cannot be corrupted by science, and science alone is my master!" (GG - Science)
2012-12-09 09:33 pm

Christmas light Stargate project

When the QFHC bought our house last year we were told by the previous owners they participated in the Christmas lights tradition. We bought in late December, had 3 couches and the fridges for New Years, and moved in January so lights weren't exactly on our radar back then.

I thought it would be nice to do something this year and since we're not big Christmas people I did something the entire household could get behind. A stargate.

It took me about 2 months of weekends - although a lot of this was thinking and workshopping - and on that note special thanks to [personal profile] maharetr, [personal profile] chaosmanor and[personal profile] cupidsbow, Andy, [personal profile] madradish and the many people who contributed wonderful encouragement and a steady stream of ideas.

Here is the entire process.

Fwd: Sending Stargate Project from iThoughts



Stargate powered up
samvara: Photo of Modesty Blaise with text "All this and brains as well" (Default)
2012-09-19 11:01 am
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Move on the Sun

A gorgeous vinyl record arrived in the post recently being the physical representation of the Move on the Sun album I've been listening to for the past two weeks.

The project was to collaboratively produce a summer album and it's very collaborative and very summery. I can imagine playing this in the backyard over lazy BBQs or hearing it outside at a very cool tapas bar. I think this is the first time I've bought music before listening to it then just letting the various songs grow on me over time.

My favourite is The Grind which is a lovely mix of sounds by Music: AlmostSound & Krrr, Produced by Krrr & Dr. Gory, Mix: jeffpeff, Lead Guitar: Nels Cline, Drums, Bass, Saxophone, Synths: AlmostSound, Organ: Mel Shore, Lead Saxophone: Kerrnie, Trumpet: ScowlinBaby, Trombone: Antoine Bellavance, Vocals: Ashes2Ashes, Additional Guitar: Krrr & lyrictician, Additional Synth: Robo_J

I love that it's a remix project and that it's available for further remix.
samvara: Photo of Modesty Blaise with text "All this and brains as well" (Default)
2012-09-19 09:30 am
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A New Way of looking at the Sky

Professor Bryan Gaensler - Director of the Centre for All-sky Astrophysics - gave an excellent talk on wide-field astronomy technology, the projects that feed into the SKA project, and what they hope to achieve over the next few years.

Astronomy is still the sexiest science.
samvara: Cartoon picture of Agatha Heterodyne and text "One cannot be corrupted by science, and science alone is my master!" (GG - Science)
2012-08-07 08:12 am
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Maaaaaaaaaaars

Conveniently at 1:30pm in the afternoon where I live so we watched breathless from work while the seven minutes of terror unfolded.

Totally not 'shopped pics from Mars
samvara: Photo of Modesty Blaise with text "All this and brains as well" (Default)
2012-06-05 01:48 pm
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[Melb / Sydney] Open MRS (Medical Records System)

If you are interested in joining the effort to build on Open MRS (Medical Records System) after being inspired by Roy Singham’s keynote, you are invited to register for the hacknights being held tomorrow, Wednesday 6 June 2012 in Sydney and Melbourne.
samvara: Cartoon picture of Agatha Heterodyne and text "One cannot be corrupted by science, and science alone is my master!" (GG - Science)
2012-05-31 10:13 pm
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Agile Australia 2012 - Day 2

Breakfast at Laurent Bakery, a fantastic cafe which does salmon quiche *love*

Read more... )
samvara: Cartoon picture of Agatha Heterodyne and text "One cannot be corrupted by science, and science alone is my master!" (GG - Science)
2012-05-30 10:54 pm
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Agile Australia 2012 - Day 1

Fun and interesting. 850 people on a single floor was a bit overwhelming at times, I think we needed some sort of quiet(er) breakout area.

Read more... )
samvara: Photo of Modesty Blaise with text "All this and brains as well" (Default)
2012-03-22 10:38 pm
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2020 Social Media for Business: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Talk held at UWA about ... social media use for ... businesses!

Read more... )
samvara: Cartoon picture of Agatha Heterodyne and text "One cannot be corrupted by science, and science alone is my master!" (GG - Science)
2012-03-15 12:13 pm
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Agile Australia 2012 - 30-31st May in Melbourne

I am going to try and attend, I'll be there the weekend before for AHBL III so it seems ridiculous not to extend my stay and soak up the program.

*starts negotiations with work*
samvara: Photo of Modesty Blaise with text "All this and brains as well" (Default)
2012-03-07 04:48 pm
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Autostitch...

I fell like I'm 99% working night and day but I found some time to trial a panorama application that stitches your many shots together into a single view.

Heck of a view... View from high up - picture appears to curve in the wrong direction but tres cool view.

Skyline with incoming rain - L. took this one L. took this, long distance avoids the curve problem

Water feature lit up Or this water feature where it's less obvious

Bladerunnerish view from hotel Totally reverse curved but makes me feel like an extra on Bladerunner