New stuff...

New stuff:

• Pics from New York. I'll get around to some NYC related posts soon. Sooo busy!
• A non-published, but thoroughly orsum article in Articles.
• In soon-to-be-published news, my article in Dirt Action is due any day!
  

New Yoik

Is as I remember it- bloody awesome.

Day 1 weather was ok- sunny after a bit and was great by the time we got to SoHo to meet up with Stephen and Sarah for the first time. (Sarah first time, Stephen I know pretty well)

We're uptownish next to Central Park. Been active and been for a run twice (Rachel three times) through and around The Park. I get lost everytime as I can't orient myself when I am in the northern hemisphere- the sun's all wrong. I got hit by a particularly aggressive dash of jetlag that resulted in me having 19 odd hours sleep in a 24 hour period. I'm over it now, but it has given me a bad back. Too much time in a crappy hotel bed.

We've bought our weekly passes for the subway and frankly the trains are old, loud but frequent and bloody handy. Seen bugger all motorcycles about- mostly Ducati Monsters and scooters. No real suprises there- it does snow like all hell here in the winter so a bike would suck for at least four months of the year- perhaps more.

Out to dinner tonight with old family friends, the ceremony Wednesday, followed by dinner Friday night, the reception (and my speech) Saturday. etc.

Picture post to follow soon...

It must be pod, pod, pod!

It must be love- love! love!

Shall I compare thine new iPod to thine one that hath passed over? No, for thine new one pwns the olde- as it should be, world without end,
etc.

I have a new iPod 60. As has Senor Cameron Reilly at TPN. We are happy in our little world of iPoddy goodness. We need no other sustenance. Ask the miners in Tassie. One day the truth will come out- they ONLY had iPods and survived on the life giving. I have a bunch of videos ready to watch when we go NYCing on Friday morning.

I love:
- The interface- COLOUR my lovelies!
- Video- 2 series of Lost. One Season of: Desperate Housewives, Everyone Hates Chris, Scrubs, House and other videos to boot.
- Leather case. Oh so chic.
- USB cables interface. Holy hell! No need for a damn slow-charging-bloody-annoying firewire.

And the new version of Sharepod (you Google it, I'm @ work and net access is near random) is just incredible. You can download to your iPod without Itunes and the best feature is the ability to upload songs from your iPod to any computer (backups of course). You can get Sharepod to upload playlists or the entire iPod and get the MP3 tag to name the file (and put it into a dir to boot) for you. It's just fantastic- tiny, tiny files that sit happily in the root directory of your iPod...

Speaking of Cameron Reilly, I will be on his G'Day World (once again Google it as I can't link from here) Podcast- talking about the Machinima 101 program @ ACMI (yes, Google that too). We're recording at 10 am and I will post the .rss feed address for your iTunes subscription. Cheers!

Machinima 101

The ever more amazing ACMI had a wonderful weekend of Machinima goodness. On the Saturday Donny and I went to see season 3 of Red Vs Blue. This was followed by a Q+A that was dominated by Halo kiddies who generally shit me to tears.

Sunday was way orsum. The RvB gang returned to show off how and what they do and the great machinima champion Paul Marino showed his wares and a buch of really fantastic Machinima films. Rich Hounslow from my Halo 2 clan came by and really seemed to enjoy himself.

We went out for 1 or 10 beers with the boys and took some pics.


Jason from RvB ("Tucker") signs on


The crowd after the saturday showing


A few delightful brews with the crew. I'm holding up a beer to the camera- Burnie Burnes from RvB is opposite.


The Saturday Q+A L-R: Gus, Matt, Kathleen, Jason, Burnie.


Same again- no gus (he was probably asleep)

We're off soon

Miss Rachel and I are off on a strange journey- to the USA next week!

We're going there to see lil bro' get hitched to the lovely Sarah C(though we've never met.)

Ten or so days in the Big apple should hit the mark. My passport should be ready just in time- that's a definite bonus after giving Jake a bollocking for leaving his so late!

Speaking of passports- check out my first one- "Unable to write" I went to Fiji with Mum and Dad in '73 and as we were all travelling on staff discount, there was some concern that we might have to split up (not me on my own, mind!) so putting me on th passport of one or other parent might be a problem. The answer: own passport!

TWO FOOT NINE!! :)

Meanwhile, down in Tassie...

Much of Australia- and by now a fair prportion of the world- are waiting for two poor buggers in Brant Webb & Todd Russell- to emerge from their earthquake induced hibernation. Sadly, one of their workmates has already been found dead.

In the paper today it listed the items that have been passed through to the pair via a small pilot hole through to their cage/basket.

Monday:
Water
Biscuits
Vitamins
Vanilla flavoured Sustagen

Tuesday:
Dry Clothes
Space Blankets
Magazines
Torches
Spare batteries
Glow sticks
Tarpaulin
paper towels & plastic bags for hygeine

Wednesday:
Family messages
ipod
Digital Camera
Deodorant/toothpaste
basic medical equipment

Why not a Blackberry so they can blog? If they could you might get this:

Day 4
Ipod arrived this morning, and I swear to God if he plays "Working Class Man" up loud and sings along one more time, they'll find a fat version of me with a pile of bones nearby. No jury would convict.
Read magazines again. According to them I'm a loving father and hero.
Well, if sitting in cave- covered in dust and smelling HIS farts every 5 minutes, then hell yeah- I'm a hero.
Played yet another game of eye spy. We have two versions now- dark and not dark. The dark version is getting a bit boring frankly. Here are the top 5 (in fact only four)
"I spy with my little eye, something beginning with:
1/ D- Darkness
2/ B- Black
3/ N- Nothing
4/ F- Fuck-all (I'm pretty sure it's two words. We sent through a message asking for a ruling- one came back saying "Christ, fellas we'll get you out as fast as we can")
5/ don't have a 5th one"

Not dark:
1/ Y- You
2/ R- Rocks
3/ C- Cage
4/ M- more rocks (once again called for ruling- answer came back that they were redoubling their efforts to get us out)
5/ H- hole

Tried telling scary story (used torch under the chin trick) about the girl in the car with the boyfriend going off to find help only to have the madman on the roof with his head- etc. I told it well, but he pointed out that that it wasn't as scary as say, two blokes in a rock fall in a mine. I had to give him that one.

Wanted to post photo blog pic of our "house" but left the lens cap on. Took whole memory card of pics before I realised that. Bummed.

Tonight, to celebrate (though it may not be night and we may not actually celebrate) we are having a rave. The glow sticks are great and hopefully there will be anough room to do a bit of fire twirling. We've decided aginst telling the "surfos" (people on the surface) as they are not really all that understanding to be quite frank.

Cop ya later
Caveman