29 August 2006

Podcast 1 is up!

Alright everyone! Podcast 1 is up and ready to go. RSS feed here.

Playlist-
"Waltz for Zizi" - The Seatbelts - Cowboy Bebop OST Boxset
"Brother Gildas" / "Calliope House" - Boys of the Lough - Lonesome Blues and Dancing Shoes
"Funny Bunny" - The Pillows - FLCL OST 3
"Cimmaroncito" - Davy Bones - No Reason

All artist reserve rights to their respective properties.

If you have any questions, comments, or feedback about the podcast, please contact me. I'm not experienced with this sort of thing, so any advice would be greatly appreciated.

27 August 2006

Podcast 1

I just finished converting my Audacity project into an MP3, and I've sent it off to my webhost (friend). I'll let everyone know as soon as the podcast has actually been released. And now, laundry! Wooh!

Back to Auckland

I've survived my trip down to Christchurch. Man, that's a really great town. I'm starting to wish that I had applied there instead. Oh well. We can't always do the right thing on the first time. Now I need to get back to work on my thesis. Hopefully, I can get at least a little bit done tonight.

Conference Day 1

I’ve been a few hours in Christchurch now, and despite the cold, I really love it here. I think this is one my top list of cities to live in someday. Now I’ll just have to convince Crystal that she also wants to live here. I don’t think that it should be too hard if I can get her here in summer time.

The city is full of really old looking buildings. Many are what I think is termed Neo-gothic and others are Neo-classical. This means that a lot of the buildings look much older than they really are. It makes for a very beautiful town though. As I walked along the River Avon, I saw trees in bloom. It may still be winter here, but spring is on its way. I’ve taken a lot of pictures of the interesting buildings and trees and other things. If I get things right, they’ll just be loaded up with the blog entries proper.

After wandering aimlessly around town for nearly an hour, I managed to find a nice Italian restaurant, by the name of CafĂ© Valentino. I don’t know why I picked this place, aside from some gut reaction. The Italian food seemed really appealing at the time. I loved the restaurant. The food was delicious, and the old brick building with walls decorated in theatre posters, and 1950’s crooner music made my day. I’ll be going back there again if I get the chance. I snatched a menu so that I can remember where they are and get everything figured out.

Just before sitting down to write this, I went to the convention center and picked up my registration packet. Seeing my own name in the program of any conference, let alone a professional one, gave me a bit of a thrill. I’m not sure if I am more nervous or more excited. I can’t wait to see some of the other speakers and programs. I think I will learn some things on this trip, and I hope that I can make a few professional connections as well. Maybe a company will decide that they want to fund my research because they have an interest in it.

And now, I’m going to go walk around with everyone else for a bit and see what’s what. I’ll be back later with more of our shenanigans.

21 August 2006

Last.fm

Looks like my tweaking has been successful. You can now see my last 5 played songs on the right sidebar. I've also added a link to them on the sidebar, since they have been so kind to provide this functionality with now charge.

Last.fm

A couple of friends just linked me to Last.fm, so I'm going to try and add a feed from my profile there to the blog. We'll see if that ends up working out. Also, I still haven't done any further work on the podcast. I want to do some more things tonight, but WoW is looking awefully shiny again. Also, I have a plane to catch tomorrow. I still can't believe that I'm going to Christchurch. It should be a really cool trip, but I don't think I'm going to have any time to do the tourist thing.

20 August 2006

Is this love?

Lately, I've been thinking that I would give up seeing most of the friends that I've made in New Zealand, just to have my fiance around. Does this make me a terrible person?

19 August 2006

Firefly

I have managed, due to a busy schedule and many other things on my mind, to not catch an episode of Firefly until tonight. What I have to say after watching three episodes, is that the show is great and I recommend viewing of it to everyone. Also, I think Joss Whedon may have watched Cowboy Bebop a few too many times.

17 August 2006

Raptor Hide Harness

The recipe is mine! Mine, mine, mine! I had to wait an hour next to the vendor to get it, but its so worth it.

I'm going to sleep now.

Poster

I've finally got some feedback from my second supervisor for my poster. I think I'll have the whole thing finished by the end of the day. Good news for me certainly. I just have to remember to grab my iPod cord so that I can get a good map from him of my field area.

DVD R

So, I think I'm finally going to give up on moving files with email and go purchase a DVD R to take my files to and from Uni. I don't really want to spend the money, but I think that in this case it will help me to get my work done more quickly. I just need to make sure that the Univeristy computers have DVD writers.

16 August 2006

Three more pictures



Here are three more pictures. I'm finally understanding how to use Picasa, so I should be able to publish a few more pictures per day than I expected. Posted by Picasa

First picture

So, I'm playing around with Picasa now to publish my pictures here. Seems to work fairly well. I'll be adding a pictures a day or so. This is a picture of us at Te Puia thermal park. Some really neat geysers and also Maori arts and crafts. Posted by Picasa

Writing

I'm getting a little bit tired of the whole writing thing. It seems that everything that I sit down to get to it, something comes up in the writing that I need to leave. Either I have to check a resource, or go to the library, or ask one of my advisors for clarification. All in all, its not a very fun process. I hope that I can get everything written that I need before September.

Vacation

Sorry to leave you all hanging for so long. I have very good reason this time. Mostly it revolves around being away from the internet for a period of time. The cause of this absence is the important part though. I just had a two week visit from my girlfriend, who goes by the internet moniker of ZeldaQueen. Well, I shouldn't say girlfriend anymore. She is now my fiance`. So, really good things happening there. On the other hand, she has now left to return to the US, so I'm feeling sad again. But, such is life.

I'm back to work on both my thesis and my podcast. I have most of the material that I think I want for Episode 2 recorded. In case you are interested the website for the film is here. All I plan to do with it is edit down the raw audio that I collected at the shoot and add some introductory sentences and a few comments. I haven't recorded anything more for Episode 1 however. I have a current target length of that podcast of around 10 minutes. Hopefully things will work out the way that I want them to.

I'll be in Christchurch next week for the Natural Hazards Management conference, so anyone who is interested in that sort of thing can come and see my poster presentation of my thesis research. The thesis seems to be going well. As I'm sitting down to write, the biggest difficulty that I have is finding all the notes that I need to complete all the sentences. My current manuscript is up to halfway through Chapter 4. I think I'm about halfway done with the first draft. The manuscript currently has a lot of missing references and figures, but I really want to get all of the text in before I start playing with the pictures, mostly because MSWord does not tend to treat them kindly.

I want to remind everyone to check out The Gameslave. I haven't done anything on their recently, but my friends have all been active in my slackerness.

When I get back home tonight, I'll find some of the better pictures from the vacation and post them here.