I took a lot of pictures with our new camera, a Digital Rebel XT, over the weekend and the techniques I used got me thinking about the way the very definition of photography has changed...at least for me.

I've always been fascinated by cameras - a Canon EOS 100 was my first major purchase after I started working as a programmer. When I was 14 or 15 I used to get all the free brochures from our camera shop when we lived in Saudi Arabia and read them over and over again, comparing the features on each model. I also read a lot of photography books and I knew all the basics of apertures, film speed and shutter speed before I owned a camera.

The one thing I rarely did was actually take pictures. Film was expensive, developing even more so and there wasn't much scope for experimentation with weird pictures on a budget. So I just kept reading about it, about how to get the image you wanted directly onto the film with the right camera, lens, composition, settings and filters. There was some information about darkroom techniques: basic cropping and composition...changing the image after you'd taken it, but that seemed unlikely to be something I'd get into. Like most keen amateurs I'd be working hard to get good pictures straight onto the film and not worry about modification after the fact.

But the digital camera revolution changed things for me. I can remember the first time I used one. I was at a birthday party (Hi Anestis!) and a friend of his brought a small digital camera along. I was asked to take a couple of pictures, and I got such a rush when I snapped a picture, looked at the little screen...and there it was! No guessing, no hoping the light was right...it took the guesswork out of it, and best of all, every picture was FREE! You could take as many as you wanted, weird ones, stupid ones, or whatever and not feel $0.20 leave your pocket with every click.

I was very happy with this whole arrangement for many years, happily using fully automatic cameras that seemed to do the job of taking basic pictures of people, places and things. And all the pictures were well lit, cropped nicely, thanks to free software like Picasa (which I'm even using now to write this post!) As the mega-pixels increased I found that I didn't need to zoom in as far - I could just crop a generously wide image down to the interesting bit and still have enough detail to make it look good. The software made it easy to take a competently taken picture and make it look terrific. Final images that would have taken a lot of training and darkroom skills were a mouse-click away.

It seemed a shame all that stuff I'd learned about manual control of photography wasn't being used...but this weekend I found a good use for it! The Rebel XT has several manual modes and, while you can use it in "point 'n' shoot" mode you'd better stay in good light and not try anything too fancy. If you want to take pictures under a range of conditions though, you'll need to understand how a camera works, because the rules are the same as they were a hundred years ago. The XT will tell you if areas of the pictures are overexposed - they've gone "flat white", containing no information, and if you try to darken the image or process it in some way, that area of the picture will immediately reveal it was a bad source image. You need to make sure the source image is just right if you want to have the software produce a beautiful final image. I think that's a lovely synthesis of the skills I learned as a kid with his camera brochures and "How To Take Pictures" library book, and the adult I've become who loves what software (and some money!) lets us do.

I had a really nice day today, waking up late after the lovely night out with Rob, Harper, his brother Daniel and sister Lisa. We went out for drinks, air hockey, music and pool. I found a South Park pinball table with a game ready to go, something I used to REALLY hope I'd found when I was a youngster with only one 10p piece to spend, and this machine was very good to me: I got a multiball and a replay on the very first ball. Second ball disappeared in mere seconds, and the third was so-so. I gave the replay to Lisa, to make up for playing air-hockey like a maniac :)

I had a little drive around Wilmington this afternoon, then drove down to the beach to take some pictures. You can see them at my Flickr account. I'd passed a restaurant called the Portland Grill earlier, on my way to the beach, that looked good so I returned there for an incredibly good meal: a "Shepherd's Pie of Duck", which used mashed vegetables instead of mashed potatoes, and duck instead of ground beef. I followed that with, rather unusual, roast antelope (it came from here) with veggies, sausage and sliced pear on a pumpkin compote. Sounds weird, I know, but it was unbelievably tasty. Some ice cream to finish and I was done. I'm flying back home tomorrow; it'll be good to be home, but I've really enjoyed my trip up here, especially glad to have met Robert and his family.

Wilmington, North Carolina
I'm visiting my friend Robert Lurie for the first time, on the occasion of the first public reading from his biography of Steve Kilbey, the lead singer of The Church. I've run Shadow Cabinet, a fan site for the band, since 1995 and been a fan for many more years. During all that time there hasn't been a single book about the band or its members, so fans who wanted to know the band better (whether the band wanted it or not!) had to rely on collections of interviews, such as the hundreds I collected for the Shadow Cabinet website.

But many of those interviews cover the same ground over and over again and leave one hoping for a more in-depth work. Then Robert Lurie comes along and just does it! The project was done for his Masters degree, and will also be sold to the public, with the possibility of more books to come. He interviewed Steve many, many times and let me be among the first to thank Steve for participating in a project that will make a lot of people very happy.

So I flew in to Wilmington last night and will spend this afternoon typing up some relevant items for Robert to look at. I love hotels with free wireless Internet access!

Spring Water

Spring Water
Originally uploaded by sirenbrian.

I took this photo in Saratoga at one of the many natural springs there. This one actually tasted OK, but another one we tried was really awful :) !

I've switched my picture hosting from Buzznet to Flickr, simply because flickr seems to have won the battle. Buzznet was nice, but flickr has so much more traffic; using bloglines.com I've set up RSS feeds which get new pictures of "great dane", "melbourne" and "malta" every day from buzznet and from flickr. The buzznet stream hardly ever has pictures, while flickr can have a couple of hundred!

I've imported all my old pictures and posted some new ones, mostly taken during the recent hurricane. Look on the right side of this page and click on the link to see what other photos I've taken.

Work finally has their power back so we'll be back in the office on Monday.

The house is in good condition and our power is back on! The back gate got blown off its hinges, a few roof tiles slid off and some of our trees are looking a bit sorry for themselves, but otherwise we're unscathed.

Actually this storm gave us a soft landing, because the temperature after the hurricane passed was a very pleasant 70 degrees fahrenheit, which is the coldest its been since last winter! While the power was off we read, listened to music on Deanne's iPod and battery-powered travel speakers, I played games on my Nintendo DS in a room lit by about 30 candles. Around 10pm Deanne called me outside to see the sky; it was a spectacularly clear and starry night, so we went for a little walk with Patch and looked for satellites. During the night the power came back on and things are very close to what passes for normal :)

Pictures later on, after we've cleared out the fridge and freezer.

Hurricane Part Two
It's about 9:30am and the wind has really whipped up. We were woken up about an hour ago by the peaks in the wind; you know how you can ignore wind up to a certain speed and pitch, but something in your brain says "worry" when the speed peaks. I kept opening one eye to see if the bedroom fan was still spinning, indicating our power was still on. So far its flickered once or twice, but it's still here. The TV is out but the good ol' Internet is hanging on!

No damage or leaks in the house yet, which is great news. We'll have some breakfast and keep an eye on things. I read the *real* hurricane will pass over West Palm Beach from 10am till about 2pm, so things may crank up a little more, and I may yet get to see a hurricane eye.

Hurricane Diary Part One
If any of my family and friends are reading this to see how we cope with the storm, I suppose I'd better write something or they'll think I've been washed out to sea! Deanne and I are urgently ('pass the wine') attending to the important business of securing ('and the cheetos') our house. A trip to Home Depot and ('how about a foot rub?') the supermarket for sensible, solid supplies ('Where's my copy of "20 More Things to do in an Inflatable Raft"?') mean that we're ready for the storm.

Seriously though, it's a tiddler compared with the Category 3 storms that hit us last year. It'll probably come ashore as a Cat 2 and weaken as it crosses the state. I don't know anyone that is evacuating the area, and we get two days off work, so we're going to catch up on paperwork, footrubs etc.

In other news, we hired a public insurance adjuster to represent us when dealing with our insurance company. We're still waiting for a decision on LAST year's storm damage, and it seems that being patient and believing their representatives when they say "We'll take care of it this week" over and over again...well, it gets you nowhere. I hate being a noisy, angry customer, especially when I don't think it actually accomplishes anything...shouldn't being a nice person get you better treatment? Apparently not. So our guy is a Paperwork Judo afficionado and says things will move along smoothly from now on, which is a great relief.

There's a good breeze outside, but the main event is about 24 hours away. I'll keep posting as long as the power stays on.

My stack of home video tapes are up to almost eleven years old, so I figured I should try and digitize them before they become unusable, and that precious footage of times past is gone forever. Of course I'd forgotten that I was in a Mad Beard phase when I started filming this and that, so there's some cringe-worthy moments to be seen. This stuff hasn't really been watched for a very long time, so it's a real pleasure, unfortunate facial hair aside, to see it again. This is me in October 1994 on Rye Beach, near Melbourne, where my parents, myself and girlfriend Kate went for an afternoon picnic. It's also the place where I filmed the end of my mum's nose moving when she talks, just to prove to her that it does, in fact, do so. The word "seven" got the biggest proboscal deflection :)

The other picture is of Simon Borda and myself - he used to be married to my cousin Marthese. Its nice to see I trimmed the beard for the party :) I had a beard for many years, though I can see why my wife very insistently says NO when I suggest growing it back again - firstly it doesn't grow evenly enough, and secondly I'd be terrible at maintaining it and soon look like a hermit again.

The process of getting these tapes saved is, as usual, a friggin' nightmare of incompatible cables, dodgy hardware and dying appliances. The video capture card was unseated in its PCI slot and thus refused to even show up as being installed in the PC. Opening up the PC to fix this led to a half-day crusade of wire untangling, USB hub replacing (three stops to find what I wanted, a seven port one), a VCR with a dodgy loading mechanism that now refuses to eject the tape. My 8mm tapes will play in my camcorder, but since I can't connect it directly to the PC I need to go via the VCR's line in, but it is so paralyzed with fear about the stuck tape, I can't even get it to change channels.

So the VCR will be taken to the repair shop on Monday, I'll buy an adapter so I can handle the 8mm tapes, then I'm buying a bloody digital video camera! Goodbye analog!

My friend Daniel, in a successful attempt to get me back on the web, challenged me to do the "Five Favourite Tracks" thing; so here's my choices:

Kings - The Church: This one is from the Priest=Aura album, from 1992. Its got a combination of what I love most about the Church: poetic lyrics ("And kings will come/and years will pass/stars burn cold/beneath the glass/and days will glow in distant time/in distorted haze/the zebras graze"), a measured heaviness in the rhythm section, and their trademark jangly guitars.

Othertime - Steve Kilbey: From his Unearthed album (1987), this is my favourite of Steve's "little songs", a short, descriptive, melodic and very singable song.

The Sun and the Rain - Madness: They were my favourite band until I found The Church, but I still love hearing their music: it's very English, a culture I was immersed in for a while as a child. It's an uplifting song that I finding myself quietly singing whenever I get caught in the rain.

2nd half of Before and After Science - Brian Eno: I can't choose just one song from these masterpieces of restraint. "Julie With", "By This River" and "Spider and I" have not one wasted syllable, and Eno's mastery of ambience doesn't need repeating.

Amarok - Mike Oldfield: OK, it's 60 minutes long, but it's still only one track! It's a pain in the ass to fast forward through, but why would you want to? It's a rhythmic, insanely melodic collection of tunes and guitar choppery. Oldfield's best, IMHO.

By the way, Daniel has become a great spokesman for public transport users in Melbourne - I'm proud of you, mate! As many of you know, the USA is not known as a country that values public transport: I hope Melbourne keeps investing in their system, which is (was?) a big part in making Melbourne one of the worlds most liveable cities.

I'm not sure why I stopped blogging so suddenly, but I think it's time to get back on board. We've just come out of a stressful few months, which sees us still waiting for settlement from the insurance company on damage to our house from last year's hurricanes. Also Deanne's car was in an accident and sat for about 6 weeks at the body shop before they even started work on it. After some yelling they agreed to rent a car for us, and it should be finished "any day now." We'll probably sell it right away, I think.

On a more positive note I've taken up archery as a hobby. It's a lot of fun and has put a bit of muscle on me! When I got started I had trouble pulling the bow back after just a few shots, but I can now get through a set of 50 arrows fairly easily. We meet at an indoor range called "Gators 'n Guns" every Monday night and shoot over a twenty yard range. I'm the only one there who doesn't also hunt for real; I'm just there for the exercise and trying to improve my aim. I'll take some pictures and post them here.

Work is going well - we just installed a new version of our Release of Information software at three hospitals, the highlight of which was spending a weekend in Las Vegas before the L.A install. I did something I'd always wanted to do: play craps in a Vegas casino! I gave myself a budget, which I stuck to, and though I ended up losing it all, I had a couple of streaks where I doubled my stake in short order. It's a good game to play once or twice, but, like all casino games, the odds are against you. I'll stick with playing it on my Nintendo DS from now on.

Hey there! Long time no see - I've been quiet for a while, but its been an eventful couple of months. We sold our house back in Australia, we're still talking with the insurance company here in Florida about the damage to our house from the hurricanes in September and my main computer just refused to boot up - I think its because of all the dust inside. So it's time to buy a new case and transfer the guts into a nice new dust-free and SEALED home.

For some reason I felt like buying some original art. We have some posters on the wall, but its not the same as having something unique, something original, so I got onto eBay and took a look at drawings and paintings. It's been great so far! My favourites are ink drawings by a guy called Kenneth Eccles, who makes exquisite line drawings. I've bought lots (more than a dozen!) of small ones and two large ones, and I was so pleased with them that I rushed out and got four of them framed. I really like seeing art that is clear (as in "I can see every line he's drawn) but still produces a nice image with different textures and "feels". It's hard to describe why you like something, isn't it?

I got a call from Keith, my brother, and we chatted about Tivo, Bittorrent, Java, Azureus, Firefox...jeez, what a couple of geeks :) Hopefully Deanne and I will be going up to Jersey for a visit some upcoming weekend.

Patch bounced around the park on Saturday afternoon. Keith got the dog's website working again and all is generally happy and good with the world. Deanne and I have decided to sell our house in Australia and after just a few days I think we have a sale! The paperwork wasn't quite ready for a buyer to arrive yet, but we've got a verbal agreement so it's pretty much a done deal. For the first time in 5 years we'll be without a financial tie to Australia.

In other, slightly geekier, news, I've been working on a mashup of Church songs. I've mixed together samples from 15 songs by The Church and I think the result is pretty cool. The band's singer, Steve Kilbey, just auctioned the original notebook in which he worked on the lyrics for their last album, Forget Yourself, and I joined a small group of Church fans who bid on it. We won! Steve gave permission for the book's contents to be scanned and made available on the Shadow Cabinet image gallery, where fans will be able to see the book freely, and perhaps be inspired to work on their own music.

Today I found a very interesting blog that has nothing to do with the usual topics of pet pictures, politics, science fiction or technology. EnglishCut is the blog of one of the famous tailors of London's Saville Row, where some of the world's finest men's suits are made. He talks about the culture of high-end tailors and the work that goes into the suits he makes. Very interesting reading!

Time for an actual blog entry, I think, rather than picture of our ever-so-cute pets. That said, however, I posted 6 new pictures to my buzznet account...of pets! I took Garibaldi to the vet yesterday - he's developed fuzzy spots on his eyes that had us worried. It turned out they're called "Florida Spots", or "Florida Keratopathy" and luckily for us they are not a threat to his sight or health. The cause is still unknown but is suspected to be a virus and results in small "opacities" or "fuzzy spots" in one or both eyes. They reach a certain size (usually quite small) and just stop; I'm guessing they stop when the cats immune system kicks into gear. The vet told me the only case he saw where the spots continued to spread was in a cat with feline AIDS; he had a weakened immune system and couldn't protect his eyes from the spread of this virus. So if your cat has this condition, make sure its not some other condition, and if not then don't worry about it.

In Babylon 5 news, JMS has just revealed that the planned B5 movie "The Memory of Shadows" is not going into production. Sad, but seemingly inevitable for this brilliant show that just can't catch a break. Crusade was born on the wrong network and got shut down before the first episode aired, Legend of the Rangers' ratings were killed by a football game, the collectible card game got cancelled and the video game got screwed by Sierra-Online. It's weird - there's any number of Star Trek and Star Wars games, B5 makes a huge profit for WB and still it's beaten like a red-headed stepchild.

I've been recording more music over the last few days and learning how to use the software and hardware I bought. I wrote a song called "Civilized", which started out as a merry little ditty called "Tropical", but mutated. I still have more work to do on it, but it sounds quite nice at the moment, IMHO. The lyrics are a sort of paen to the future, urging people to think for themselves and not waste their lives being bound to the superstitions and beliefs of the past. I got a bit upset after watching a documentary on celibacy in the Catholic Church which talked about how in 1139 the church decided that all clergy, not just monks and nuns, had to be celibate? Why? Putting the theological "married to the Church" excuse aside, it was so that thousands upon thousands of clergy would have no heirs and so would pass all their money and land back to the Church when they died. Follow the money and there's your answer, all dressed up in sanctimonious mumbo-jumbo.

I got up earlier than usual for a Sunday morning, so I think it's going to be a very productive day :)

Wonderdog gallumphs across the sands of Jupiter Beach. 

Patch bounding around 

I like this one - looks like a courtly ritual of some kind. Actually it was just the little one inviting Patch to chase her. 

When Patch gets in close, it can be a bit scary for a little dog to see! 

Patch played with this six month old Labrador puppy for a few minutes. 

Mum and Dad are fostering Harley for a year. She is being specially trained to work for the Australian Customs service, sniffing out drugs in the airport. They have a list of behaviour to encourage, like being comfortable around people, being able to go down slides because she'll be working on luggage ramps a lot and not being taught to sit on command, because she'll be trained later to sit when she smells food in a piece of luggage.

I had a busy, busy morning today, because Deanne is coming back home tonight and I've left most of the errands till the last day again :) I returned some clothes to a store, took our car in for an oil change, got a refund from the Post Office for getting our Xmas presents delivered late, vacuumed the whole house and put laundry away. Then I had some breakfast :) I also have to write an email to the good folks who run The Church's website because they want to make it better but they're not sure how. I'm going to tell them to make the front page be more functional and less "stylish" - a big brown splat is not the way to welcome fans and new listeners to your band's web page, IMHO.

My own Church site, Shadow Cabinet, is coming along nicely. I finally found out how to put a piece of content *before* the news items on the front page, so I can permanently lead with thumbnails of the most recent three (perhaps four ?) albums. I'm also scanning a lot of collectables from my collection into the Image Gallery - my old scanner died an I bought a new one. Just $50 shipped from Amazon and it's doing very nicely so far.

I signed up for photo printing service Shutterfly this morning after realizing that the Kodak camera dock and printer we bought is, you guessed it, extremely expensive to refill. The colour catridge costs $20 for a 40 photo "roll", and you can't "stretch" the use of the cartridge - it actually advances a spool with each print you make, and stops when it reaches 40 prints. That's fifty cents per photo - I can have prints made online for half that cost, so I'm going to try that out.

Lastly I've had a fairly steady nosebleed situation for the last couple of days. I'm not sure what brought it on but I'd better see a doctor about it. It clots fairly quickly, but when the clot comes out the bleeding starts right up again.

Lots of interesting things have been happening lately, but for some reason I kept putting off blogging about them. I wonder why that is ? I don't have a good answer, but I think it's because my boss at ScriptRX used this blog to make sure I was in Australia when I said I was. This put me off writing or even thinking about blogging for a few weeks. Pretty nasty, I think. Anyway things didn't work out over there and I'm back at DSS.

There's lots of good stuff happening though ! I'm recording more music for the guy at Frightmares, who is planning to put out a DVD of his work ! So my music will, hopefully, be on a DVD for the second time. The second time ? Yes, Curt Stewart is sending crew copies of the DVD of "The Wedge", which also used one of my pieces called "A Good Beginning". You can find it in the "Brian's Music" link on the right side of this page. And as a result of being included on The Wedge, I'm now in the IMDB !

I bought a Zen Touch 40GB which I really like, except for the touch sensitive "slider" on the front, which is too sensitive even at the lowest settings. Shame really, because the price is good (about $310), sound quality is excellent and the battery lasts 24 hours. Deanne got an iPod and some nice travel speakers and she really loves it too. I'm a consciencous objector to joining the iPod Cult who think $250 for a 5GB mp3 player is a good buy. "Ooh, but its got colours ! And white headphone cords !". Sorry, not for me. But the wheely slider on the iPod is easier to use than the vertical slider on the Touch.

And the iTunes software, though a little braindead in some areas, at least does a proper two-way synch with your player. The Creative Labs program is "additive" only, meaning it won't delete anything from your player. So if you, for example, change a filename, or update your ID3 tags, you'll send down a fresh copy of the song to your player, but it won't delete the old one ! I ended up finding an open source program called NomadSync which does the job properly.

I downloaded a pile of free music from Epitonic (especially enjoying The Clientele (Rose, you might really like these guys)) and LegalTorrents. I bought a Clientele CD too, so there's +1 for the value of giving away unencumbered MP3 files for promotional use.

Deanne is in Cleveland, Chicago and Tucson for the next two weeks, so I'm in charge of house maintainance and all that. I already ran a bunch of errands and will be contacting roofers (to fix hurricane damage), taking cars for their 3000 mile services etc. I still have very little patience for these things; I know, I know, they're important, they have to be done, but at least now I can be accompanied by my favourite music everywhere I go.

And watch for the pictures from Titan tomorrow ! If all goes well you can thank Boris Smeds, a man who single-handedly discovered a fault in the communication system between the Titan probe "Huygens" and the Cassini orbiter. If not for him, we'd have nothing from the Titan landing. Engineers rule !

Siesta, by Hellblazer

Siesta
Originally uploaded by Hellblazer.

I'm going to try using flickr's blog posting service to put someone else's picture in my blog. This is a beautifully Maltese picture; it reminds me of the short time I was able to spend with my grandfather, Arthur Smith, before he passed away when I was four years old. We sat on the steps of his house in Balzan and played, I suppose :) My thanks to Hellblazer for taking and posting this picture.

I've been working hard on the Shadow Cabinet site (http://www.shadowcabinet.net) and I'm quite pleased with it now - it's a fan site for my favourite band and I've learned a lot about content management and also how to use the free software called GIMP for image editing. My fractal explorations are still going strong; there's four new images in the "Brian's Fractals" link on the right side of the page, and I have some more coming.

Me in front of the Melbourne skyline by the Yarra River. 

The family sings happy birthday to Benjamin - the poor little guy was asleep by the time the cake came out :) 

Mum looks at the *huge* Christmas display my Uncle Percy built in the window of his new house. 

A sparrow eats leftover food 

Mum and I watching Dad do his singing at the Yarraville Pokies Club. 

Me and my dad - he's dressed up to go and do a show. 

Me on the balcony of my parents home. 

I'm In Australia !
Deanne and I decided to surprise my Mum and Dad by sending me on a two week to Australia ! It's just me, though, because Deanne has so much responsibility at work with her promotion to Product Line Manager. I haven't been back home since we emigrated in July 2000, so there will be a lot of catching up to do with friends and family...and lots of baby names to learn !

The trip itself went smoothly, starting with a 5.25AM flight out of Florida, then to LA, then Tokyo, then Melbourne. I had to go via Tokyo because that's all that was available. It wasn't too hard to pass time on the flights - I had two seats to myself on both of the long flights (about 12 hours each) and I had a good book and good movies to watch.

When the taxi dropped me at Mum and Dad's house around 10 AM I left my bags by the front door, knocked, and stepped around the corner. He answered and I waited a few seconds, then slowly stepped out to see his stunned face, mouth wide open. Big hugs and a few tears and laughs later we settled down and had a little drink and waited for Mum to come home from her weekly bridge game. She sometimes goes to lunch afterwards, but thanks to Dad's cousin Rose (who knew I was coming) inviting herself over for lunch she had made sure Mum would be here to see me nice and early.

When she got home and beeped the car horn so Dad would open the garage for her, Dad, Rose and her husband Ray all went outside to say hello. Instead of lifting the door though, Dad just hit it and said "Open Sesame !" She looked at him like he was crazier than usual, but when he hit it again, the door slowly lifted to reveal a set of skinny hairy legs...then khaki shorts...then a blue and white baseball shirt...and then me ! The car lurched forward as she was so shocked that she'd tapped the accelerator instead of the brake !! "Whoah !" says Dad and Mum just stopped the car, got out and gave me a big, big hug. It was really nice to be able to surprise them both - thanks Rose and Ray !

Australia hasn't changed much since I left, of course, but it was interesting to see what I'd forgotten that I'd forgotten. The soft curve of the blue taps in our bathrooms, the earthy, salty smell of the creek behind our house, and how closely packed all the houses are in our suburb. Everything looked a little smaller than I remember too, but it seemed cosy and comfortable to be home again. I'm very happy to be back for a while.

I went back to Westgate Concert Band, a community band that I was involved with for more than ten years. I turned up un-announced, as it gets a good reaction and there were a lot of wide eyes when I walked in. But it got better ! They were just about to rehearse a vocal duet from Phantom of the Opera, "That's All I Ask of You", but the male singer hadn't shown up. No sooner had I sat down to listen to the band rehearse than conductor Roy Hamilton put the music in my hand and said "Can you sing that ?" Wow...two minutes after walking in after four years away, I've got a microphone in hand and warming up to sing a duet ! It went really well, with harmonies and everything - what a great way to walk back into band ! Roy said afterwards he'd just been wishing I was there because it was the kind of song that would suit my voice...and then I walked in :) ! I said hello to everyone afterwards, of course, and played trumpet in the second half of the rehearsal. It's a great feeling to be part of a group again, musically speaking, and I was surprised at how quickly everything came back to me. I'm going again next week and hopefully some of my old friends who weren't there this time will be there.

In the afternoon I helped Dad get set up for his show at the golf club, and met all his friends there - very nice people indeed. He's got a nice setup for doing a show; karaoke machine, speakers, amplifier etc, but Mum and I were feeling too tired to make it to the actual show. But he's doing another one today in Yarraville, so Mum and I will be there for that one. We also stopped by to see my Uncle Percy and Aunt Carmen in their beautiful new house. He's doing a really nice display of Christmas decoration, so watch out for when you drive by !

Lastly I want to thank my wife, Deanne, for her support in getting me to Australia for this visit. She's got a lot to take care of while I'm away and I really appreciate what she's doing for me, Mum and Dad.

I'll start calling some friends today and organizing lunches, dinners and large amounts of drinking (in at least one case) to catch up.

In front of the Statue of Liberty on a lovely Sunday afternoon. Sadly we couldn't get inside but it was a cool place to be anyway.

As you can see, we spent the weekend in New York. That sounds mighty jet-setting of us, but it actually the first vacation we've had for a couple of years. Deanne needed to be in the city for a day of training this week, so we decided to make some time and went up early to take in the sights and sounds of New York. There are more pictures on my buzznet account (see the "Pictures" area on the right side of the page) if you'd like to see.

It's a great city; you can really feel the energy of the city as you walk around; every shop seemed to be open all the time, and there was a theatre, or skating rink, or outrageously hip and colourful shop around every corner. It's definitely well-suited to using the public transportation system and just plain walking - there's not much parking space available, so you're better off not trying :) The weather was cool enough to let us wear nice jackets, something we can't enjoy in Florida, but not so cold that you wanted to be inside.

We saw a musical called Dracula on Saturday night, visited the Statue of Liberty on Sunday afternoon, dinner in Little Italy, and the Rockettes at Radio City Musical Hall that night. The first show was not really my thing, but the staging was exciting and the guy playing Dracula was excellent. The Rockettes were perfect - a great show for anyone who remembers Christmas as a child sees it.

Personal highlight for me though was seeing Eric Idle of Monty Python ! Yes, he was walking down 6th avenue and I recognized him right away, said "Mr Idle, it's a pleasure to meet you and thank you for everything you've done, I've enjoyed it all." or something like that. He nodded and smiled at me, but didn't stop - he looked like he was hurrying to get somewhere. He's the main force behind the new Holy Grail musical is opening in a couple of months; perhaps he was organizing some aspect of that ?

So there it is, my weekend in New York City - an immense and exciting city.

Breakdancers in Battery Park. These guys were still going when we got back from our visit to the Statue of Liberty - a long days dancing. 

Times Square advertising 

Election and Horror Music
It's been a heck of a couple of weeks at Casa ClarkSmith. Deanne voted in the election, of course, and waited in line for 7 hours to do it ! She was going to be out of town on the day, Tuesday November 2nd, and Sunday was the only day she could do it. I dropped her off at noon and went to the library; "wait about 90 minutes then come and get me" was the plan. When I returned she had barely moved, so I went home with the promise to return with food at 5 pm when the doors were locked so she could eat something. I came back as promised, got locked in and we didn't leave till 7 pm. The people in line were very nice though and I think they were mostly Kerry supporters. We talked about life, the universe and everything and I spent a lot of time with a lady who is the editor of one of the sections of the Palm Beach Post. She said she'd never met anyone who thought quite like I did :) She's an artist too, so I talked about copyright law, the Creative Commons, Larry Lessig and Janis Ian and I promised to send her an email with more information and links that I find interesting.

Sadly, President Bush was re-elected in a total bloody surprise to me. I have a lot of faith in democracy and for a couple of days it was pretty shaken by the idea that so many people actually believed what this man told them. But after some reflecting I came to the conclusion that he appealed to that part of their minds where facts didn't apply and nebulous things like faith and morality were more important. Oh, and of course its not a secular morality as in "how can we make life better for more of our fellow citizens via healthcare and better wages", but instead the religious morality that is more concerned with "protecting marriage" by making sure gay people don't have the chance to set up a normal life for themselves. And lets ban abortion as soon as we can load the Supreme Court with conservative judges who'll reverse Roe v. Wade."

The silver lining, if there is one, is that President Bush will have to clean up his own mess and can make no excuses for the misery that is to come. It'll be him that history blames; it's just a shame that the massive deficit he's racking up for future generations can't be avoided, just so he can make evangelicals feel good about themselves.

Musically I'm finally getting down to business ! I downloaded the free version of Acid Express to record my keyboard playing and make loops so I didn't need to actually play correctly for more than 30 seconds :) I used Audacity to generate a click track, and sent my client the music he'd asked for; a reworking of "Ghost" without the drum track.

DSS contacted me and asked if I was ready to begin the next phase of the ROI software, which I suspect will be eating up a lot of my evenings and weekends for a while. I said yes, of course, and mentally noted how many projects I'd better finish (like the music above) before I get stuck into it again.

It's dinner time, then I'll go and see if DSS has sent the specifications for the software.

Hearing The Music Again
It's been a good few days for my music. The nice chaps at frightmarestheseries.com, who are using my piece "Ghost" as their intro and credit music asked if I had any more like it - he said "I recently received an email from someone who really enjoyed the show, and the "sweet-ass sounding theme"!. Sadly I don't, but among my projects-for-the-near-future was the task of getting my recording sessions going again. This seemed like a good opportunity to get started, so I went out and bought a keyboard, microphone and little pre-amp doodad for talking to the computer with and will be doing some recording this week. I hope I like what I produce !

I've also made great progress in getting Shadow Cabinet into its new skin. The Mambo CMS I'm using can be hard to set up; they just changed versions and a lot of the old components don't work any more, but with a few nights work I managed to get it all going. It's nice to be able to load up the content and know that I can change the appearance later on without much work at all. I loaded a lot of the old tour photos in this morning and might be able to publish something in a couple of weeks. I feel like I'm into the fine-tuning part now, though I still can't figure out how the menu system works.

Deanne had a long week in Miami and Boston and is catching up on some sleep right now. I'm going to hook up the 200 GB external drive I bought from newegg.com and start doing regular backups of my whole hard disk - I've put too much time into what's on there to think about starting again !

I've posted my first diary entry over at geekrant.org entitled "Becoming a Shareware King". I'm going to document the trail of woes as I try and get someone to buy Mercury MailRoom, my lovely, excellent and supremely useful email utility. Why am I (and Shannon !) the only one who thinks so ?

Segway for only $2488 ! Hmmm.....might have to reach for credit card....

I've begun work on the rebuild of Shadow Cabinet, my site about The Church. I'm using Mambo, Apache, PHP and MySQL. It took a couple of attempts to get things configured right, but all the bits are talking to each other and I'm converting all the content into a sleek, modern web site. It'll be nice to have everything in a flexible "skinnable" kind of form, where if I don't like how something looks I can just alter the style template behind the scenes without needing to modify hundreds of pages myself; that's probably why the old site got so glacial - it was just too hard to change anything. I'm going to pop over to geekrant.org and start writing this up.

Buzznet has put in a "buzzwords" feature which will shortly allow you to subscribe to a daily dose of pictures by keyword: I've set up my bloglines.com account to search flickr.com (another photoblog site) in the same way, looking for pics of Malta, Great Danes and Melbourne.

Y'know, for someone who still thinks of himself as introverted, I'm bloody not.

My favourite picture of Marty Willson-Piper, taken at a concert in Melbourne...thinking Churchy thoughts again :)

Lots to think about doing
Deanne's going to be away for most of the next three weeks, so I'll have plenty of time to make a start on some of those projects I mentioned last time. Thanks to Daniel and Sean for the suggestions about content management systems - I might make a start on a refurb of Shadow Cabinet, my Church web site. Did you know the background on the front page has been there since the first day ? That was in June/July 1995 ! It used to be the only major site with info about the band, but there are many excellent sites out there now, including the band's own official site. But I've still got a good collection of interviews and a lot of photos. I think I'll winnow the site down to just that, and make an "archive" section for the other stuff that was all hand-built that it'd be a shame to lose. I always wanted to make a lyrics page with explanatory notes and discussions about references in the lyrics. A wiki might be just the ticket for that, 'cos I won't have to do any of the work - just make a site available.

I have a box full of Church clippings from Brett Leigh Dicks, who used to be (still is ?) a freelance journalist and gave me his whole collection of Church newspaper clippings. Back when there was literally almost nothing to read about the Church and I was a ravenous fan, this was such a treasure trove. I read most of them, but got lazy and didn't actually type any of them out. A big hello to Brett if he sees this :)

Things are going great at work - I'm almost 100% comfortable with all the stuff I'm in charge of, Patch enjoys going in to the office with me, and I stream the DroneZone all day, which puts him to sleep and me in a working mood ! I've ripped almost all my CDs to this hard disk now, to the extent that it's takes quite a bit of peering at the CD rack to find one I haven't already done. Winamp tells me I have 7201 tracks; about 27 GB of music. It's great to have it all at my fingertips, but it's hard to remember what I wanted to listen to next...I may have to get moodlogic to build some playlists for me.

Oh, and thanks to everyone for the alphagrams (which, it turns, was a bad choice of name for them) - there are several in the comments on the previous postings. I think CAD's is my favourite (Chris, was that you ?), followed by the lawyer one. I'll have to try and write a coherent one myself too !

I thought this picture of the huskies was really nice - they look almost attentive and obedient, don't they ;) !

I've been using emusic.com a lot this week; they have a lot of ambient/electronic music that I'm interested in and they're even carrying Margot Smith's two albums, which is a good thing. She worked with three members of my favourite band The Church on her "Taste" album but sadly she hasn't put out any more albums since then. They also have several Ashra Tempel albums, who Marty Willson-Piper said are really good. We'll see :) I'm also enjoying Daniel Lanois's "Shine" and Basque's "Falling Forward".

I downloaded the Google desktop, which is such a no-brainer I can't see why Microsoft have not done it. Their file find command in Explorer is *so* slow and inaccurate and there are already so many shareware products that index the content of your hard-drive that it seems very strange for MS not to come out and write their own. Oh well, you snooze you loose.

My friend Daniel Bowen has asked me to start writing a regular diary about my efforts to sell my utterly cool and wonderful program Mercury MailRoom, which so far have yielded zero sales. Doesn't seem like there'd be much to write about, but I have plans...why do all geeks have plans ? My List of Plans is currently as follows:

• Try and promote MMR to small businesses that get too much email
• Promote MMR to overworked tech support bods in small firms
• Following my friend Paul Qualls's advice, promote customized versions of MMR to firms that want it to do something special with their database or whatever. Big bucks
• Resurrect my Reptile screensaver and do "something" with it in OpenGL.
• Get my home studio working again. Erm...step one should be get a home studio. Need a microphone and good sound card, so I can record more little tunelets.
• Learn how to set up a web site that gets its content out of a database. Using all Open Source tools, of course.
• Learn how the hell CSS style sheets work.
• Learn to use Blender, the free 3d animation and rendering package.
  
• Scan all my old photos into digital loveliness.
• Record all my good videos into DVD format. I'll do this when some software comes along that makes it easy to add chapter points on a DVD.
• Print out some of the 10 000 digital pictures I have and put them in frames - I love my family, why don't I have more pictures of them ?
• Learn to draw - my doodling started to look almost interesting a while ago.
• Various home maintenance things too boring to think about :)

So that's all my cunning plans. Not quite Rimmer's "Daily Goal List" (Number 37...learn Portugese) but a nice group of interesting projects.

Hey, here's a new blog meme I'm declaring: write a paragraph where each word begins with the next letter of the alphabet. Lets call it an alphagraph for easy googling/memetracking later.Here's my alphagraph:

And begin counting down, even following grey housewives into junk-kindled lines made noisy, or perhaps quit. Raise security though under violence we x-ray your zipper.

Tell your friends :)

The "album cover" pose by Jacob, Brandi and Patch. This was Patch's first trip to the park with other dogs since his spine problem seems to have come under control, and he had a great time :) He's down to one Prednisone pill every three days. 

Venice Window Light

photo by: sirenbrian

I found this while trawling through my photo collection. I took it in 1999 and its in the cathedral in Saint Marco's square in Venice. I remember the floor being really uneven and sort of damaged - it's amazing how much history is left exposed to the elements, but I guess in Venice they don't have much choice.

I'm a Jingle Writer
Another one of my little tunes is going to be used in someone else's work :) I'm proud to pass on the news that Frightmares will be using my short piece "Ghost" as their intro music and on their credits. I'm very pleased that two people have now found a use for my music, which I was always a bit embarassed at never having fleshed out into longer pieces or perhaps into songs. But maybe I'm good at writing short, punchy pieces :)

You can listen to some of my music by following the "Brian's Music" link on the right.

Team America
I managed to get tickets to this much-anticipated movie's preview showing last night. It was hilarious ! "I'm Ronery", the musical lament by North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il was a classic, as was the dicks, pussies and assholes speech. Its structured exactly like a Hollywood blockbuster with the reluctant hero stepping into a role that holds great fear for him, bonding with the team, facing a setback and reaching eventual triumph etc. It strips bare the formula and shows that most of those films would be comedies if they didn't take themselves so seriously.

It was interesting to see this interview with Trey Parker and Matt Stone in which they said they edited the film while they were filming it, which enabled them to alter the script as they went. This makes a lot of sense to me and leads me to wonder why more films aren't made this way. It'd be like me, a programmer, trying to write a whole program without compiling it in small increments as I went. I'd almost certainly miss the mark like Michael Bay did when he made Pearl Harbor :)

So go see this film; you'll laugh, I promise.

A multi-storey boat shed in Stuart got opened up by the wind. 

This is very close to where Hurricane Jeanne came ashore, and lots of power poles were blown over like this one. 

Patch is feeling much better ! This is an older picture of him, but he could certainly do this if he wanted to :) His pinched nerve in his spine seems to be under control thanks to the Prednisone that he's taking. His dosage is down to one pill every two days and he hasn't had an attack since the one I last wrote about a couple of weeks ago. We're hopeful that the condition won't deteriorate any further and that he'll live many more years without that sort of pain again, though as all big dog owners know, the poor things are just not bred to live a long life.

Life outside of Patch-watching continues unabated. We bought another carpet for the other big room in the house and it really feels warmer and more homely in there. If only the big tv in that room worked, I might actually have something to do in that room ! I called a TV repair place and they said to call back tomorrow to talk to someone who might be able to work on a German television with no repair manual. I also contacted the hurricane insurance people and they'll be sending someone out next week to take a look at the kitchen cabinets, which are smelling a bit moldy now. Hopefully we'll get a new kitchen out of this, which we'd been planning to do anyway. We met a fellow who had put in a new kitchen before the hurricane hit and now had to rip it all out and start again, what terrible luck for him.

I've been reading a few political blogs lately, with the election just around the corner, and find Andrew Sullivan a very interesting read, and the most interesting conspiracy theory I've seen so far is at IsBushWired which asks if President Bush wore an earpiece in some speeches he's given (not such a big deal) and also during the first debate with John Kerry, which would be absolutely shocking if it were true.