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Bits and Pieces

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Today marks the passing of Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple and (depending on whom you talk to) either the enemy of the free computing world, a visionary who made the world what it is today… or somewhere in-between.

In celebration, some people on twitter have been posting brief #myapplehistory tweets, listing the apple hardware they’ve owned, in chronological order. I considered doing that, but my history with apple is relatively brief and full of profanity. However, as I thought more about this I realised that Jobs had affected my computing life as one of many, many designers and engineers, and that while my history with apple hardware specifically might not be so interesting for me to reminisce about… my history with computers in general might be more so.

My first computer, a Commodore PC-5.

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How To Make Breakfast Correctly

Sunday, July 17, 2011

This my morning breakfast when I have no time constraints and I feel like imitating Hedonismbot. It is the correct way to have breakfast. It’s a concasse with nice things in, sitting on toast and under the second-best thing ever conceived – fried eggs. (The best thing ever conceived is poached eggs, but IMHO that doesn’t quite work as well for this)

You will need:

  • spanish onion
  • two small or one and a half medium tomatos. Roma is fine, just use more
  • whole-grain mustard (can use the variant with honey – in fact I prefer it)
  • hot english mustard
  • some basil pesto
  • one or two small mushrooms
  • three slices of the nicest bread you can find (turkish is excellent, sourdough is good, wholegrain will do)
  • a heaped tablespoon of butter, or there-abouts
  • three eggs
  • some jalapeños – the kind sliced and suspended in brine unless you’re Kurtis and want to die of heat
  • tabasco sauce

stuff wot hasn't been chopped

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Twitter Pastries

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

 

I experimented with making damn fine pastries. Due to the live-tweeting nature of the process, I have named them ‘twitter pastries’, and here is the recipe.

Ingredients:

  • Puff Pastry
  • Tofu, unflavoured. In my case, some “Organic Tofu” thinger I found hidden in the darkest part of the health-food section of a dis-used aisle in my local supermarket
  • Thicky sliced eggplant
  • Haloumi cheese
  • Blue cheese
  • Grated parmesan cheese
  • Flour, plain
  • Butter
  • Milk
  • Olive oil
  • Brown onions & some mustard OR caramelised onion relish
  • Salt
  • Previously prepared / store-bought Red Cabbage & Apple. (Not hard to make, but time-consuming. Easier to purchase)

Steps:

There’s a few options in terms of order – I wanted to be doing the sauce when the pastries were cooking, so I just spooned the sauce atop the finished pastries. Another option is to make the sauce in time to put it within the pastry. If you want to do this, just time your cooking accordingly.

PREPARATION:

  1. Drink some wine – go on, you know you want to!

THE PASTRIES:

  1. Defrost a few sheets of the pastry and cut them into two long sheets
  2. Heat up a frying pan to a good searing temperature, with some olive oil and salt in
  3. Fry the eggplant first, until brown on both sides
  4. Next, fry the tofu – again, until brown/golden
  5. Finally, fry the haloumi – this is much quicker
  6. If you’re manually caramelising the onions, do that next
  7. Once all this is done, stack the contents, ladle some of the onion atop, and wrap it all up in the slices of puff pastry – if you’re putting the sauce inside, it and the red cabbage would obviously go in here

THE SAUCE:

  1. Put about 30-50 grams of butter in a saucepan and melt it with a little salt
  2. Once this is done, melt about 20-ish grams of blue cheese into the butter
  3. Sprinkle in some plain flour, stirring until it becomes a thick paste
  4. Start pouring in milk in small amounts, stirring each time until you have a consistency that suits you – in my case, I kept it fairly thick
  5. Increase the temperature and melt in the parmesan cheese
  6. Once this is done, either add to the pastries or keep it ready to put on top

If you aren’t putting everything inside the pastry, then you want the sauce on top and the red cabbage to one side.

If you’re not quite as hungry as I was, you could spend the time to make the pastry into lattices and put the sauce & cabbage in layers, but I was pretty darned hungry so I left it be.

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Pizza or a Natural Disaster.

Saturday, January 15, 2011

It’s hard to pick what I like most about Pizza.

Possibly, it’s the evil sure-to-be-bad-for-you nature of the cheese atop it.

Maybe it’s the simplicity of something which makes a sandwich – a food item supposed to be the simplest and most “packed lunch” of meals – look gourmet.

It could be that a pizza is almost always customised. When you have pizza, you pick the extra bits. Sure, it’s the same type of pizza ordered by every other customer of the same delivery joint, but you pick to make it extra spicey.

You choose to leave or take the anchovies.

It’s up to you whether you tell them to double the sauce or leave the pineapple off it entirely.

Perhaps it’s that it comes hot in a box to your door, with no effort required on your part – that you eat it on your couch, relaxing, with a breeze flowing and knowing you’ve dirtied precisely zero pieces of cutlery while having dinner.

Or maybe, just maybe, it’s the knowledge that a pizza night means something happened worth relaxing over – even if it’s just surviving another week, and having friends worth sitting down to watch a few movies with.

But sometimes, when your twitter and facebook feed is peppered with people who’re giving away furniture to people who need it, donating money or just trying to find out whether members of their family are still alive…

…what you appreciate most about pizza, in those situations… is that you have you’re able to eat it at all.

It may be just a Pizza Night tonight… but right now, I’ll be making damn sure I don’t take pizza nights for granted.

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An Apple: Try One of Those Next

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Part of the fun of being part of a fast-flowing social network like Twitter is that, when you get a moment away from work, you rarely find yourself with an interesting article to read, linked from some friend or other.

Today, I found myself reading an article on brand loyalty and fanboy-ism. Obviously, the big thing that you think about when discussing this is Apple. It’s not so much because Apple fanboyism differs that much from, say, Linux fanboyism or loyalty to a specific gaming console… it’s more that Apple integrate this sort of behaviour into their marketing model.

The key thing that this article brings up is the idea of self-justification – that when you buy a luxury product like an iPad, you are more likely to do whatever you can to justify your purchase rather than, say, mumbling a bit about it and leaving your ~$1k tablet on the shelf collecting dust.

Like all good articles, this got me thinking…

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The Craft of Filmmaking

Monday, January 10, 2011

For a living, I write computer programs and I write about, review & criticise video games.

But what I really care about is filmmaking.

Since 2005, I have written & directed two completed feature films, about a dozen short films, a web series spanning 13 episodes and some other projects.

None of these were commercially funded, all were released for free over the internet, and including the cost of slowly accumulating the A/V and editing kit over the years have probably cost me and the people who’ve helped me produce them a sizeable chunk of our incomes for each project. That’s not counting the value of our time spent working on them, either. Time we could easily have spent watching movies, playing video games or getting drunk at the pub.

There’s a reason I keep doing it, despite this.

When I develop software, there’s a few things I have to know. Web standards, quirks with browsers, coding methods, database techniques, et cetera. It’s a challenge, and I love that. But I’ve been doing it for most of my adult life now, and I’m growing tired of it. There’s only so many database-driven web applications you can write before they start to all meld into one big mess of CSS, AJAX and ‘Update’ buttons.

Being on set, making a film, and these are the kinds of things that I need to keep in my head at any given moment…

Scenes, performances, schedules at this location, shot-lists, which shots I might use in the edit and which I might not, the background noise and the way were recording the audio in a given seen, who’s available at a later date if we need to loop any audio or shoot pick-up shots, keeping an eye on the video & audio files we’re capturing to ensure we don’t lose them, when and where food is coming from, the emotional states of those involved as cast or crew, the battery levels of all the equipment, backup plans for when the plethora of things that can go wrong inevitably do go wrong, the logistics of getting kit home after the shoot, permission to film in different places, which copyrighted logos might be in shot that I need to hide, fabricating fictionally-branded replacement items for precisely the same reason, release methods, who paid for what, basic OH&S concerns…

That’s just what springs to mind right now in the three minutes I gave myself to write that paragraph. Beyond all this you need to have figured out all manner of questions and choices: if you want a fast pace, do you want to mostly keep to close-ups? Do the performances match the pace you’re after? Do the angles chosen and the lighting techniques employed match what you’re going for?

Logistics aside, every part of it s a huge swathe of creative choices, most of which require that you keep almost the entire film in your head at any given point.

Coding is not an easy job. It requires knowing multiple languages – gone from most coders’ lives is the idea of working with ‘straight c’. My work requires Python, HTML, CSS, Javascript, SQL and a few other things. But regardless of how complicated it is, it’s still easy next to filmmaking.

I (figuratively, not actually) may be years off being a “brilliant” programmer.

But I will never be a “brilliant” filmmaker – because I don’t think there’s really such a thing.

No matter what I do, what I learn and how much experience I accumulate – no matter how fantastic the people are that I work with, no matter how incredible the concept, the script and the hardware & locations are… there’s always room for improvement.

Unlike everything else I have ever attempted in my life, making films is something I can do forever and still be learning more.

Or, y’know… perhaps I’m just in love with film because I can’t take this damn rose-coloured glasses off.

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Creativity & Criticism

Thursday, January 6, 2011

So, right before bed, I casually glance at my twitter feed and note that somebody has decided to tweet to a favourite comedian of mine that he sucked on a recent tv show. It was marginally more intelligent than, “you sucked” or the more common, “err u suck”. In fact, it was relatively eloquent, for a ‘net criticism. Something to the effect of, “Your appearance was ruined by your attempt at comedy.”

Now, this rather threw me. Not what s/he/it said in this series of tweets, but that s/he/it bothered tweeting it at all toward this comedian.

I’m a creative person. I make things – I tell stories, usually in the form of films. I’m not at the stage yet where people see them in any volume, but enough people see them that I do get commentary in the form of emails from folks occasionally, and I certainly get comments from friends – especially those I actively solicit criticism from.

Thing is this – just what is the point of giving away something so bland as what amounts to, “your form of humour does not appeal to me.”

This is not a criticism. This is useless information unless it’s asked for.

I know there are friends of mine who dislike some or all of my work. It just doesn’t appeal to everyone. Even the things I am the most proud of – the things I love the most out of my body of work, do not appeal to swathes of my close friends and family. That’s just the way it goes. So if I explicitly ask them what they thought, it’s fine to reply with something like that.

However, some random joe turning to a writer/comedian/performer/artist/etc and saying, “I do not like your stuff,” is chaff not worthy of transmitting across the internet. It’s of no consequence. A criticism like, “Your regular stuff appeals to me, but this did not,” isn’t very helpful either, but at least it has some body to it.

Criticism is important. Very important. But a creative person will usually seek it out from people they trust – whether it’s people who they expect to like something or not.

I dislike a great number of things. I dislike lots of comedies, dramas, tragedies… you name it. I don’t see the need to seek out the creator and tell him that it didn’t appeal to me.

Neither should you.

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Wellington is Dark.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

So, we’re here in Wellington. Day one of our two week holiday. Plans are: two days here, ferry to Picton, scenic train up to Christchurch, then we rent a car and zoom about the place. Much of the zooming will be punctuated with things like a plane trip to Milford Sound and a helicopter hiking tour thingy to a glacier.

I hear glaciers are nice. Also, cold. Also, white.

At the moment, from the 15th floor of our hotel, I can see nothing. Wellington is dark. Maybe it’s as pretty as they say; maybe it was all a lie, like the wine that does not exist in the bar fridge. BOO! Boo, I say.

The plane trip was pretty neat. Nice food. Passable booze. Not nearly enough super-fun turbulence (WEEE!) but there was one small problem… all the in-flight videos were 4×3 squished to a widescreen panel, and as if that wasn’t bad enough – they weren’t de-interlaced properly! Looked awful. I gave up and watched a few episodes of Six Feet Under on my iPad.

Now, to google things to do in Wellington tomorrow…

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My Vote (sans profanity)

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Note: This is a re-written version of my slightly drunken rant from the other night, with the profanity removed. Normally I wouldn’t do this, but I think people may actually be right… even I’ll admit there was a wee bit too much profanity, which probably worked to the detriment of whatever it was that was going through my head at the time.

MY VOTE DOESN’T COUNT.

This is a common response to anyone daring to bring up politics around a young person these days. Twenty-something. Late teens. Early thirties. Shit, some people these days who qualify as a young person are at an age where, had they been born a half-dozen centuries ago, they’d be an old man by this stage in their lives.

But they say, “My vote doesn’t count”, and why should it? Statistically, you’re one person. You sit in a safe seat. You bothering to vote means nothing! 62% of people vote for party A, 36% vote for party B, and the rest vote for independents. John Jackson’s 0.05% uranium tax doesn’t go far enough, et cetera, et cetera.

When some guy says to you, in response to this, “Oh yeah? Well, in the famous scare election of nineteen-hundred and whoop-de-fridge, four people decided the election in your district – it could happen again!”

You know it isn’t likely to be the case. It won’t happen. Your vote won’t matter. You might as well wander in and scribble, “I am a cockatoo’s droppings mutated into human form,” for all the good it’ll do.

Well, let’s pretend for a minute you’re wrong. That your vote did matter.

So what should you vote? Well, it’s your business, but you need to do more than just think long and hard about whether you’ll vote for the same party as the one your parents vote for or not. Read some non-mainstream websites. Watch debates (not just the big ones). Follow political writers whose sentiments you agree with – and some whose sentiments you most definitely don’t. Read some that make you angry. Some that make you laugh. Ingest all the information you can, whether written or filmed, to make the most informed decision you can.

You need to think about the merits of the political parties. Just what do they stand for? What are their platforms? Their policies? Why do they make sense to you, personally? What about your local candidate?

What decision are you going to make?

Well, that’s your business. But there is one question I’m sure you’re still asking – why bother? The same question as before.

Because you are not a vote.

You are a person.

By learning – by reading, by asking, by coming to a decision, you spread something. You spread knowledge, education and experience. Even if it is just the experience of reading about the issues and who stands for what.

Someone brings up politics at the bar, around the dinner table, or while you’re playing a round or two of Call of Duty, and you are no longer the backwards, ignorant non-entity you are now. You are somebody with an opinion. With some facts or thoughts to throw around, with or without the obligatory wry smile (that’s your choice).

You know what just might happen? Somebody might listen to you. Somebody might think you’re right, and your vote becomes two… or three… or four. Or somebody might think you’re wrong, and change their previous “my vote doesn’t count” opinion to one that results in them voting in the opposite way.

You don’t need to be one of those in-your-face bastards handing out flyers to make a difference in an election. You just need to do one thing: read a bit, learn a bit, listen a bit, and make a choice.

There’s one thing you spread by being an informed voter: the desire to be an informed voter.

Your mind and your voice are the most important tools you will ever own.

Use them.

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My Vote

Monday, August 16, 2010

MY VOTE DOESN’T COUNT.

This is a fucking common response to anyone daring to bring up politics around a young person these days. Twenty-something. Late teens. Early thirties. Shit, some fuckers these days who qualify as a young person are at an age where, had they been born a half-dozen centuries ago, they’d be a fucking old man by this fucking stage in their fucking lives.

But they say, “My vote doesn’t count”, and why should it? Statistically, you’re one person. You sit in a safe seat. You bothering to fucking vote means fucking nothing! 62% of people vote for party A, 36% vote for party B, and the rest vote for independents. John Jackson’s 0.05% uranium tax doesn’t go far enough, et cetera, et cetera.

When some fuck says to you, in response to this, “Oh yeah? Well, in the famous scare election of nineteen-hundred and whoop-de-fuck, four people decided the election in your district – it could happen again!”

You know it isn’t likely to be the case. It won’t happen. Your vote won’t fucking matter. You might as well wander in and scribble, “I am a cockatoo’s droppings mutated into human form,” for all the good it’ll do.

Well, let’s pretend for a minute you’re wrong. That your vote did fucking matter.

So what should you vote? Well, it’s your fucking business, but you need to do more than just think long and hard about whether you’ll vote for the same fucking party as the one your parents vote for or not.

You need to think about the fucking merits of the fucking political parties. Just what the fuck do they fucking stand for? Why does that make sense? What about your local candidate? Just what the fuck decision do you make?

Well, that’s your business. But there is one question I’m sure you’re still asking – why bother? The same question as be-fucking-fore.

Because you are not a vote.

You are a person.

By learning – by reading, by asking, by coming to a decision, you spread something. You spread knowledge, education and experience. Even if it is just the experience of reading about the issues and who stands for what.

Someone brings up politics at the bar, around the dinner table, or while you’re playing a round or two of Call of Duty, and you are no longer the retarded, ignorant non-entity you are now. You are somebody with a fucking opinion. With some fucking facts or thoughts to throw around, with or without the obligatory wry smile (that’s your choice).

You know what the fuck just might happen? Somebody might listen to you. Somebody might think you’re right, and your vote becomes two… or three… or four. Or somebody might think you’re wrong, and change their previous “my vote doesn’t count” opinion to one that results in them voting in the opposite fucking way.

You don’t need to be one of those in-your-face pricks handing out flyers to make a difference in an election. You just need to do one thing: read a bit, learn a bit, listen a bit, and make a choice.

There’s one thing you spread by being an informed voter: the desire to be an informed voter.

Your mind and your voice are the most important tools you will ever own.

Fucking use them.

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