I'm participating in Movember, Jos is having to put up me wearing a horrible moustache for the month as I try to raise money for charity. Don't let her suffering be in vain! Donate!

This weekend was choccas.

Friday night held the Neckerdam Knights game, there was some nice advancement of everyone's plots and my character managed to get Haunted By His Past (dun-dun-DUN!) while still keeping his secret from everyone else. I do enjoy the character driven game we have at the moment, there are so many plotlines but we still haven't hit the "which one of the world destroying events do we tackle first" or even the "there's no time to do character stuff, everything else is too important" zones yet. Heck, my character managed to get time to buy flowers for a possible date, and still get plot stuff happening. Mmmm, game balance.


Saturday headed to Haikal's place for a games day. Haikal cooked some home-made curry and chilli (beef rendang and a chilli of some description) - both super tasty. We played a bunch of games:

• SPANC - Space Pirate, Amazon, Ninja, Cat girls. A simple game with art by Phil Foglio. Poolboys for all!
• Alhambra - A city building game with colours of money, colours of building purchasbility, and tiles to build a city. I don't normally like these sort of games, but this one was quick to pick up and good fun to play.
• Betrayal at House on the Hill - I played this twice at a friend's place and had to buy it immediately. We played it twice at Haikals place and other people immediately asked where to get it. A co-operative house exploring game until a Haunting occurs and once person becomes the Traitor (most of the time). We found a tentacle-beast in one game and the house tried to eat us in the other.
• Arkham Horror - ... 1 hour to set up... played for 6.5 hours... managed to defeat Cthulhu by permanently sealing 6 gates. Oh man but this is a complex game, my copy is on loan to me from a friend who wanted me to figure it out (or at least figure out how it was fun) to run him through it. I think we're getting a good handle on it. Slowly.

No rest, as Sunday held mad amounts of house-work before heading into Portside with Jolyon for lunch with friends. We ate at Byblos, a Mediterranean place with taste Mezza and a cocktail menu larger than the food one. The food was delicious, I managed to order a meal that came with chips (!?!), the lamb slivers were yum with the sauce. I recommend it, but it is a bit pricey. I made sure I left enough room to have MÕvenpick ice-cream, they make some of the best choc-mint as instead of chips or small sticks there are shavings of chocolate through the ice-cream. Their maple and nut was good too.

Curses, still haven't received many donations for the MS Walk.  I'm going to have to try further afield.

ROSEA is joining the MS Moonlight walk this November, meaning the participating crewmembers will be walking 10ks in full Steampunk regalia. For the event, I'm wondering if I could fill the ThinkTank with helium to make it easier. If you can, and I know it's hard with all the other worthy causes lately, have a visit at the sponsorship page and help us help MS research.

• ROSEA page
• My page

http://labs.mppark.jp/hige/
This is freaking me out.

Health update. I'm almost, kinda, sorta, nearly back to full strength after two sets of cold-attacks that mean I've worked 5 days in the last two weeks. Colin says bleh. I've got a lot of catching up to do at work, which meant today's public holiday was an unplanned for delight. Last night had Jos and I thinking of doing all sorts of activities - these were shelved when Jos didn't get out of bed until 10 (she was up late and slept in) and we weren't finished breakfast until 11.

We booked Harry Potter movie tickets at 3:35pm and set out to the Brisbane Gardens for a bush-walk before-hand; unfortunately checking the travel time via Google revealed we had 45 minutes to do a two hour walk, so instead we went to the art gallery. We were already in the car at this point so we just detoured into the city to park at Southbank. $35 for 4+ hours parking. No thanks. We drove to Wooloongabba, found a street park and caught the bus.

Neither of us had been to the art gallery for a very long time, and it was well worth it. The current special exhibit was American Impressionism and Realism around the late 1800s and early 1900s; we arrived in time to get a volunteer guided tour. It was very good, I learned what the hell impressionism and realism in paintings actually meant - it makes some sense now - plus we got to see some great artworks. Jos may have some inspiration for the next steam-punk picnic, which is a good thing.

Afterwards we picked up some snacks and went to the movies. It was an enjoyable movie, ignoring the French girl next to me whose phone went off a few times and she started playing with it. Gah. Still, interesting to see the characters and actors of the Harry Potter franchise growing up. Worth while. Leaving the theatre we were met with the forecast storm, thankfully I brought my umbrella. Especially when it started hailing. Only small, but pointy - at first I thought someone was throwing small stones at me until I saw the white things on the ground. So that was exciting.

On the walk to a bus station to get back to the car we walked past Piaf, a French restaurant Jos wanted to try, they seated outside next to the brassier so we were nice and toasty warm. Jos had a spatchcock dish, and I had a Toulouse sausage dish. Very tasty. Dessert was an apple and chestnut tart for Jos and a creme brûlée for me. Mmm, a near perfect brûlée. Since we ate so much we decided not to catch the bus back and instead walked from South Brisbane to the 'Gabba; really a short walk and we both felt much better for walking over public transport.

An Australian Steampunk event was held for Brisbane Steampunkers on Saturday, we had about 35 people turn up all told and some fantastic outfits. Most of the pictures are on the Facebook event at http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/event.php?eid=99289119155 but we're working on moving some of them to non-Facebook areas so non-Facebook people can see the outstanding efforts. A few select shots are behind the cut.

Teaser:
( cut! )

(x-posted all over the place)

This Saturday was the first (possibly annual) Steampunk Brisbane picnic that I organised. I'll put up a bigger post later, when I grab more pictures from talented photographers, but here's a teaser: ( Teaser! )

I was lucky enough to notice Moo when they did their first cross-promotion with LiveJournal, where you could get 10 free mini-moo cards, delivered anywhere. Yes, even down here to Australia. I put up a few of the photos I really liked and the resultant cards came out very nifty; everyone I showed them to agreed (maybe more of the concept than the shots ;) ). With the steampunk picnic coming up, I thought now would be the perfect time to get a few quick cards thrown together for the Professor; and it would mean giving some money to the guys at Moo who I think deserve it. Problem was coming up with a business card.

One idea I had knocking around in my head for a while was the Maze Generator I built a while ago. This thing takes any dimensions and spits out a one-path maze for you, using an algorithm put on the web by J Kirwin (link now defunct). Playing with the dimensions, I finally got a maze that would fit on a moo card - but it was still just a maze. How to make it belong to Professor von Explaino? The solution came in my site redesign, which Retro rocket had just finished. Incalculatable wrangling had gone into the design work for the interrobang-cog that was the Professor's signature emblem - mucking around further with PHP and I found a way to embed the logo behind the maze with just enough alpha-ing that the maze came through and the logo was still visible.

Just in time for the picnic!



(X-posted from the Professor's journal, better photo when I find my camera again)

I think I have proof I was getting over something icky yesterday by taking the day off work. Today, out of the blue, my brain decided the best thing to think of was a mashup of Nation and Henson. The Daleks Take Manhattan.
( some snippets )

Just a quick one, upgraded the cog generator on vonexplaino.com so you can add spokes and a mooring hub. As you were,

EDIT]: Edited due to LJ's input box deleting most of the content before posting, because that's fun apparently.

So I haven't been able to say anything further regarding the big secret because it hasn't gone anywhere yet. While those involved have been assured that something will happen, at some point, the current status is "give me ambiguity or give me something else." *sigh*

In an unrelated topic, honest *casual whistle*, my new style for my home site has gone up to absolutely no fanfare. Budget cuts, don't you know. While you can still access the site from lapse.nerdvana.org.au I'm now the proud owner of http://vonexplaino.com/ — huzzah!

I've got a journal over there where I'm posting Steampulp shenanigans with hopeful regularity. While I do have code links under "Experiments" and a code post in the blog, I'm probably going to remove those and have the only experiments shown Steampulp related ones (direct links to devices, the cog application, the jaeger application etc.). I'm not entirely sure, though, as I have had some of my applications discovered and used by google-hunters — the GURPS lite character generator and life-path generators to name a couple.

Oh, and mandatory Connie update. I had the door closed to my room this evening so I could work without hearing Master Chef, but as soon as Jos opened the door to ask me a question Connie ran in, jumped on my lap, and decided I wasn't paying immediate attention to her so forepaws walked up my chest until she could face rub against my cheek and chin.

Cute kitty is cute.

OK, so now I can tell you a little bit more about why I'm excited. Because it's close to being confirmed.

You may want to be watching Channel 10 Brisbane news next Monday/ Tuesday nights. Some friends and I may be on it. There's a chance it might be shown on the Ten News Videos page. Fingers crossed.

Update: It's now sometime this week. Curses.

I am so incredibly excited right now. I wish I could tell people why, but this has to remain a secret for a week in case I jynx things and get lynched.

To my fellow secret-holders: shhhhhh!

This has been some months in coming but devil may care, all around good guy Aleks tagged me in ye olde "Seven things you may not know about me" meme. ( My responses ) There are apparently some rules that go along with this, but I mock their petty requirements. I tag Kevin Rudd, the cast of Neighbours, Phar Lap's ghost, Pi, the sound of one heart breaking while another soars, Count von Count, and the surprisingly legitimate love child of Cthulhu and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Hi there, long time no speaky. It's been a while but I'm trying to get back into the ol' LJ vibe so it's catchup time.
( Melbourne trip and Birthday weekend )

(as suggested by Rocketpilot)

The Comedian -> Jokey Smurf
Ozymandias -> Vanity Smurf
Silk Spectre -> Smurfette
Rorschach -> Grouchy Smurf
Nite Owl ->Handy Smurf
Doc Manhattan -> Brainy Smurf

OK. I watched the Watchmen. I liked the Watchmen, as I'd read the Watchmen. Other people have made better review posts, I will merely giggle at the cinema-screen-sized-wing-wang and move along.

I'd like to watch Coraline. I've enjoyed the web site, read a few reviews, so I hoped onto the local cinema site to discover when it'll be out in Australia.

August.

America is seeing it right now, and I have to wait 5 months.

Until studios/ distributors can figure out why that's a problem piracy will continue to be rampant.

(Note: I'm stupidly going to wait until August like a good citizen, so no spoilers or pointers on how to get it now please)

Since I've got things I copy back and forth between work and home machines; plus I don't cart the desktop everywhere I go, I've started using DropBox. Sits in your task tray (win, mac, lin) and works just like another drive but it syncs to a central server where you get up to 2Gig of space. And it's free for that amount of space, and a subscription fee to get 50Gigs of space.

Been using it for ages, works fantastic. They're currently doing a promotion such that if you sign up by this link we both get an additional 250M of space. Free! Huzzah!