Why? Why not?

Well, the time at work is now coming to an end, and it’s time to jet off to the mysterious land known as America. If I get the chance, I’ll try and post while away, but don’t count on it (hah! as if you would!).

In other news, Trang gave me my birthday present early, as it’s my birthday while we’re away, and now I have the sweet sweet super duper collector’s edition of The Two Towers extended Edition DVD, with funky Gollum statue and extra DVD. Yay! And lots of thanks to Trang for such an excellent present.

As regular readers would know, I cosplayed at the Sydney anime convention, Animania, this year. The organisers of the con are now producing a DVD of highlights, and they’re made a trailer. Funnily enough, the trailer features me in a key bit near the end, which I thought was pretty cool. So I thought I’d share the joy: Grab it here.

Well, I just got back this morning from a night spent in Wagga Wagga. Yesterday, I went out there to do what should have been a one-and-a half hour job. Unfortunately, it was a six hour job, and meant that I missed the last flight out of Wagga. So I spent the night at the lovely Lincoln Cottage Motel. Which I was not happy about.

Oh well, c’est la vie.

Oh, and it’s less than two weeks until we leave for the States. That really crept up on me…

Well, I’ve seen Matrix Revolutions now, and it’s interesting to compare and contrast reviews of it with my experience of it.

Reviewers seem to be either disappointed by there not being enough exposition, or excited by the action sequences, and happy that there is less ‘overblown philosophising’ than in Reloaded.

Personally, when the credits rolled, I was pretty happy. There were some quite big things that were left unexplained, and I thought the really, really big Zion action sequence was too long, but I was pretty happy with the way the themes were pulled together for the end of the trilogy. Some quotes from reviews:

The special effects are a lot better than the second film, yet when I saw the sentinels attacking with tentacles and the long tubules of snaking plugs sneaking up on neo I thought to myself, ?These brothers sure watch a helluva lot of Hentai.?

filmrot.com

…the cold truth at the heart of the matter is that what the Matrix films take almost seven hours to tell, Alex Proyas’ Dark City told in less than two, and with more poetry besides.

filmfreakcentral.net
On a wholly different note, I stumbled across Defend America: US Department of Defense News About the War on Terrorism today. Looking at the site, all I can say is that I’m grateful that the US military’s propaganda team is still living in the fifties or sixties.

Woohoo! Only a few more hours until the Matrix marathon. Eight hours straight at the movies. It’s going to be sweeeeet.

‘A night in Fantasia’ the Infinity8lue Ghibli/Final Fantasy concert was great! Although I would have paid the $35 just to get the chance to hear ‘Liberi Fatali’ (aka the FFVIII opening sequence movie) live, everything else was great as well.

I’ll post something about Revolutions tomorrow when I get up.

No update for a while, so here’s some interesting links:

Kid’s Play – what do the kids of today think of classic video games? Some great quotes: (about Donkey Kong: “What color is he supposed to be? Green? And why can’t we get past this first level?”, about Tetris: “Which button do I press to make the blocks explode?”, about the (infamously bad) ET game: “Maybe another movie company that didn’t want you to like E.T. made this game.”)

On Saturday night, I’m going to see Infinity8lue’s ‘A night in Fantasia’, an orchestral presentation of music from Studio Ghibli anime films (eg Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke amongst others) and Final Fantasy Games. Should be cool.

Speaking of entertainment events, the Ritz is having a triple screening of all three Matrix movies on the night of Wednesday the 5th/morning of Thursday the 6th. I’ll be going, but I’m not organising a big group this time. Sorry, but I haven’t had the time, and now it’s too late. I think I may even be pushing it to get tickets for me. If anyone wants to come, I suggest buying your tickets from the Ritz very soon.

Unpacking and settling in continues unabated – it’s going to be nice when everything is sorted out, but we have lots of work to do yet.

Well, I moved in with Trang over the weekend – which went fantastically. The removalists we got were so very worth the $70 dollars extra we had to pay on top of what we would have had to pay for a truck – they were finished in an hour and a quarter. Then Rommel and I went shopping at the Supacenta while Trang and Bi unpacked stuff. It was great to come home and find all my books unpacked!

Oh, and we got a new, extra large TV. Yay! Plenty of DVDage at our place ahoy!

And the moving at work is also pretty much finished now, so I have a chance to have things calm down and get to catch up again on jobs.

Well, it’s been an utterly crazy week. As of last Friday, my department at work is on a different floor – and I was the coordinator of the move, and of making sure that the place was actually finished. And we’ve refurbished our comms room on the old floor too. Which has meant I pulled a couple of 9-11 or 12 work days, which left me quite tired this weekend. But, that didn’t matter too much when Trang and I went to my sister’s place to see her and her new son Ryan, since they’re fresh home from the hospital, and to watch the NRL grand final (which was a truly excellent game of League.)

Trang and I took my niece Phoebe to see Finding Nemo this morning. Wow, Phoebe is so cute. And she was so well behaved. She’s only two, and it was her first visit to the movies. But she understood that we needed to be quiet when we were in there so all the other people could watch. She was a bit scared at first because we walked in during the trailers, the screen was big, and the volume was way up. So we moved right up to the back row, and she was comfortable soon enough. She sat there quietly for most of the movie, needing her nappy changed once, until she had enough and asked to go home after about an hour. But, she had a great time, and got to eat lots of the sorts of food that she doesn’t usually get lots of, so that was all good.

I love kids.

Some linkage today for those of you who are interested in web design:
First up, Listamatic, a collection of ways you can use CSS to style lists, like I have on the left. There’s also a tutorial here. Basically, the argument goes that, if you’ve got a list of links forming a navigation bar, then the best way to structurally represent that in your HTML document is with a list. Then you can use CSS to change the formatting of the list to make it look pretty much however you want. That’s the beauty of CSS.

Secondly, that site has a nice list of articles about various web design issues. Also handy links about general web design/CSS use issues are: A List Apart, run by CSS guru Zeldman, Position is Everything, a handy list of techniques and discussions, and Eric Meyer’s css/edge, a collection of simply amazing effects that can be pulled off with html, CSS, and a compliant browser. Also handy is Meyer’s list of CSS Links. And for testing your layout, nothing’s better than Loren Ipsum, the fake Latin text that’s been used for layout testing for centuries.

There’s all sorts of cool stuff you can do with CSS, especially to do with accessibility and different media types. For example, you can set up your pages so that you get a ‘printer friendly’ page automatically when you try and print, by setting specific rules for print media that hide extraneous detail.

Well, Trang, Grem, Erin, and I had a great weekend in Canberra visiting Helena. I cooked pizza on the Friday night, which I was pretty happy with and everyone else seemed happy with as well. Saturday we hung out and went and saw Pirates of the Caribbean during the day, and went out for dinner for Helena’s birthday at night. Sunday, we had brunch, went to the Kingston markets and bought chilli, and went to Floriade. All in all an excellent weekend. I do love the Kingston Markets, especially the food section.

As you can see from the right bar, I’m playing GTA: Vice City again, the den of iniquity that it is. I’m stuck on a mission that involves my character picking up drugs for some Haitians from under the noses of the cops. Unfortunately the cops aren’t too happy about it and keep mowing me down like a stray daffodil on a Sunday.