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Tea Minus Juan
We fly to Reno this afternoon, pick up our rental bikes and meet our fellow camp mates. Tomorrow we head out to the playa at dark o'clock and setup camp.
Then the fun begins...
Plain Talking
I got reminded again today of how much Australian slang I use day to day.
My experience with Americans so far has been that they speak very plainly and get quite confused if you don't as well. The stereotypical Australian playfulness with language doesn't translate very well. Any sort of reference or pun leaves them stumped. Service staff in particular get derailed.
I recently replied to an email late at night asking the recipient to get back to me "when he was vertical again". I wouldn't really consider that Australian slang but if you were to say that back home most people would work out what you meant.
At the end of a meeting I was in yesterday one of my colleagues asked that an agenda item be added.
Work out what DQ meant by 'keen as mustard'
I didn't even realise I'd said it until he mentioned it. One of the other Aussies in the room, Woz, looked at me blankly and mouthed "they don't know?".
No they don't. I'd covered the etymology of keen as mustard in a previous post and explained. They just looked at me blankly.
So today we were sitting on the balcony drinking whiskey (it's Whiskey Thursday after all) and I said something in Australian slang again. Yet another Aussie, Astrid, commented that I did use a lot of it. Well, of course, I haven't been here long enough for brain rot to set in.
Besides, if they think I'm gonna arse about and talk like a bloody seppo they're a few tinnies short of a six pack. ;)
A New Hope...err...Host
My colo box is getting evicted any minute now and I have swallowed a bitter pill and let it go.
Having your own colo box is like having a shed for a non-geek. You get to mess about on it without worrying what anyone says and you can install whatever you like. I'm going to miss it.
The inimitable Andrew has graciously offered to host the few things I truly need. That unfortunately leaves my nethack server dead in the water for the time being. Fear not fellow adventurers, it will return.
I'm not ruling out getting another colo box. It's just that right now is not a good time to be setting one up. I'd ideally like to have a box in Australia and trying to set that up remotely would be a nightmare.
I'll be in Oz sometime in the first half of next year to do the US Visa dance again so I think I'll just wait till then.
icarus.chaosengine.net has flown high and served me well for 5 years. Not bad for a box I bought second-hand in an auction with a dead CPU and RAM. May the silicon gods welcome you into their arms.
Taking Pictures
Back in February I decided I wanted to get back into photography. I did my usual amounts of research and eventually bought a camera mid-March.
The reviews and articles on Ken Rockwell's site were really useful. He has some very good things to say about the Nikon D40 along with the Nikon 18-200mm VR lens. I had a few people recommend getting the best camera body you can afford or getting one with blah blah fancy features. I figured that until I relearn the basics all the extra stuff is just going to get in the way.
I ended up getting the D40 plus the 18-200 VR lens and a SB-400 flash (which was less than just the D300 body). I've taken over 5000 photos since then and I'm starting to get the shots I want.
I took some photos of bees in daffodils on the way to Fnf bee1 bee2.
I'm pretty happy with how those shots turned out and I uploaded them in less than a week. Using Picasa has made post-processing and uploading the photos much, much easier.
Music In The Hills
The weekend just past Tanya and I went to 'Friends and Family', a music festival/campout run by Cloud Factory. We went last year as well, courtesy of our good friends Weaver & Andrea.
This year was epic. The lighting and sound for the main event on Saturday night were out of this world. The other events of the weekend were all lots of fun too.
Tanya dressed up as the Green Faery, with faery wings lit up with EL wire, and handed out Absinthe lollipops we bought from Lollyphile. They were very popular :)
This year we took advantage of a 25% off sale at REI and bought our own camping gear. We're going to Burning Man this year with the BloodyMaryLand camp so I wanted to test it all out first. A three day campout in a less formidable environment was perfect.
The instructions that came with the tent were terrible and the North Face website is an abomination. After clicking around I found the section with downloadable tent pitching instructions. Of course it's out of date and our shiny new tent isn't listed. Though it wouldn't matter if it was as the PDFs they do link to return a 404.
Even more fail. I found a review that mentioned the website for this tent http://him35.com. It's a single page with no content. Woo.
North Face, you suck.
Dream A Little Dream Of You
I had an amazing lucid dream last night. I won't bore you with the details, you really had to be there.
It did however remind me to post about something that happened a few weeks ago.
I've recently gotten back into playing music again after a very long intermission. The idea had been rattling around in my head for a while and watching Tanya learn to play the ukelele became the seed.
I was still unsure if I had left it too late to start again. I happened to mention this to a friend who plays guitar. He made the very salient point that it's never too late to start. I was sold.
Fast forward several weeks and I am thoroughly enjoying playing my uke. I went and said thanks to my friend for the sage advice. Only he has no recollection of the conversation. I describe the circumstance. We were standing in a music store talking about music and....oh...hang on...that was a dream.
I realised it was a dream when I couldn't connect that memory with any others. How did we get there? Why were we both in a music store? Which music store?
Once I started probing the edges of the memory it was obvious it was a dream. Even now that memory is so vivid I wonder if he's just messing with me.
At least I'll be able to play my uke in the padded cell :)
Shared Distributed Music Backup System
I have a cunning plan.
Buy a few 1Gb USB sticks. They only need to be 1Gb. Backup an album or two that you have to a USB stick. Give the USB stick to a friend that doesn't have those albums.
Now you have an offsite backup of those albums.
Your friend might to listen to the albums while storing them on your behalf. (This would be out of your control, alas) If they did listen to the albums however, they might be convinced to acquire it themselves. When they do acquire it, they'll want their own offsite backup and so they give the USB stick to a third person. ad infinitum.
In this way someone always has an offsite backup of the album somewhere.
There may be some other side effects that I haven't identified yet....
A Tale Of Cocktails
Our first cocktail party/experiment after our Cocktail 101 course seems to have been a success. Many cocktails served and only one injury. The table in question has been severely reprimanded. Hopefully there will be no repeat performances from our erstwhile furniture.
Next step is scaling up these hijinks and finding a place to store all the booze.
About Face
I'm now importing my blog into Facebook's Notes app. The import is lossy though, no tags and no links back to the original post.
The Facebook blog import help page helpfully tells you to use Feed Validator but the error page when your feed is invalid...doesn't.
You can enable comments on your imported blog posts but they're only accesible inside Facebook and there's no easy way to get them back out. So they're disabled for now. I'll revisit if I ever get comments setup on my actual website.
Learning Day
Yesterday was a great learning day. I started a 2 day Getting Things Done course and then went to Bourbon & Branch Beverage Academy for a "Cocktails 101" course.
Both were interesting for different reasons and will lead to further personal development ;)