Fri, 03 Oct 2008

Brunswick Boogie-Woogie

Acrylic paint, foam roller, "wooden canvas"/fibreboard, foot upon foot of masking tape (of which I swallowed some quantity cutting it with my teeth). I painted the center stripe with a can of Montana Black and it bled from under the tape terribly. I should have tested it first. The Piet Mondrian inspired design was scratched out as an "original" with steel square, ruler and compasses, but is probably closest conceptually to 1930's Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow. It doesn't look anything like Broadway Boogie-Woogie, but I took the name anyway, as a magpie would.

It strikes me that a better approach is to paint the canvas black, and then mask in all the lines with tape, and then paint the panels in. I'll do something like this with white lines and day-glo panes for my small panel series.

I saw local silkscreen artist and nice guy Pav has put up a huge installation of his businessman vs gunslinger prints on the side of the local Omara supermarket - but he used double sided tape instead of wheatpaste, and the rains have brought them all sagging down sadly onto the pavement. In other street art news, fuck 10c and his attendant who defaced the excellent pair of Ghostwriter murals on the wall of the panelbeaters at Brunswick Station.

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Fri, 26 Sep 2008

What's Going On

I wrote something to generate Cut-Ups from creative commons licensed videolog footage. Flex is suprisingly pleasant to program in - nice work Adobe, this one's a winner.

I've been playing a lot of Uke lately, got a new Melodica, cut some stencils, volunteered at the legal center. I'm hoping to do some Woodblock Graffiti soon, but I won't be bolting anything down, I think.

I listened to Genius/GZA's Liquid Swords today, it's one of those rare records where just listening to it constitutes a valid answer to "how did you spend your day". All the samples from Shogun Assassin are a nice addition to a very well crafted record.

I also played Sonic and the Secret Rings on the Wii. It doesn't quite reach the same standards, although who knows, maybe it'll get better. I'd like to polish off a few games so I can trade them - don't feel I can drop e.g. $75 on Warhammer: Age of Reckoning when I don't know how much time I'll be able to commit to playing it.

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Thu, 11 Sep 2008

Shadenfreude

I learned a great Japanese expression from Wikipedia today.

他人の不幸は蜜の味

tanin no fukō wa mitsu no aji

(others) (ownership particle) (unhappiness) (subject marker) (honey) (ownership particle) (flavour)

"The misfortune of others is the taste of honey." Classy! I love Japanese idioms. I have a really nice reference book of them, and you could just read them, alone, for hours. They're a linguistic meal in and of themselves.

I have been enjoying an opportunity to exercise my Japanese lately - Mitsuru Sugaya recently republished a cute little story he wrote back in 1984 about the history of the Apple ][, which is, of course, really the history of Steves Wozniak and Jobs. I'm translating it, but I can't really sit down and do anything in depth until Property is handed in on Monday. I will say it's about ten times faster to work on than Natsuko no Sake because it's not full of technical rice agriculture terms! :argh:

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Mon, 01 Sep 2008

Tzatziki

Tzatziki is my favourite food in the meze family (I actually like the Turkish variation, cajik, best of all - it's a little thinner). It's easy to make (particularly if you're ghetto like me and just combine 150g low fat greek yoghurt with 65g grated cucumber and garlic to taste - about 200 calories) or you can just follow a proper recipe with drained yoghurt, lemon juice, olive oil etc.

Instead of wasting money on "pita crisps", just grab some pita from your local bakery (Omara - 69c for 5 the day after they were baked, what a savings) and toss them in a sandwich press until the water leaves them. Better result than commercial, imho.

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Wed, 13 Aug 2008

PidginEmote

I wrote a very simple blosxom plugin that lets me integrate pidgin emoticon themes. It's a bit yucky and makes some possibly unwarranted assumptions about file format, but I think it's a lot nicer than a few of the alternatives like smilefie (no disrespect!) and it can load SAGF directly.

Code release tomorrow, if I have time.

:science:

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Mon, 04 Aug 2008

Bleh, or The Case of the Missing Mason

I thought I'd found a weak piece of argument in the judgment of Mason J in The Tasmanian Dam Case ( 158 CLR 1 ). I mentioned it in passing to the lecturer during break, and then she called on me to explain it during the second half.

I wasn't prepared and flubbed the explanation. Other people rightly called me on it, and now I look stupid. Coming off losing the witnessing practice round (which was quite funny, all the same), today has not been a good communication day for me.

For the sake of posterity, I am going to try and explain what I meant.

Mason J, @ [9]:

It is submitted that the suggested requirement that the subject matter must be "of international concern" means that it must be international in character in the sense that there is a mutuality of interest or benefit in the observance of the provisions of the convention. Thus, we are invited to say that a convention by which the contracting parties agree to enact domestic laws requiring persons in motor vehicles to wear seat belts does not deal with a matter of international concern because no nation can derive a benefit from the wearing of seat belts in another country. This is by no means self-evident. Drivers and passengers cross international boundaries. They are likely to observe in other countries the practices which they observe at home. International cooperation resulting in a convention insisting on compliance with uniform safety standards may well benefit all countries. The illustration is instructive because it demonstrates how difficult it is to say with accuracy of any treaty or convention that observance of its provisions will not benefit a contracting party.

I read this as follows:

  1. It is implicitly claimed that some treaties lack an international character (here, a mutuality of interest or benefit in the observence of their provisions).
  2. For example, a treaty regarding the domestic use of seatbelts.
  3. But this treaty does indeed have such character.
  4. *waves hands*
  5. It is difficult to predict if and how a treaty will benefit its signatories.

Justice Mason is correct both in saying that the benefits of treaty can be difficult to predict and that the hypothesised seatbelts treaty has benefits of an international nature, but this isn't, as I understand it, the question being put forward by Tasmania. In fact, the digression does not speak to the first point at all. If the seatbelt treaty provides benefits of an international character, it is worthless to discuss it in the cause of determining whether a formulation grounded in the idea of mutuality of interest or benefit is the correct construction of "international concern". It is comparable to producing a multitude of white swans in an attempt to disprove the existence of the black. What is needed is an example that lacks what Tasmania claims to be the defining characteristic, and then a verdict on whether it nonetheless maintains the dependent characteristic.

Paragraph ten goes on to argue that the existence of international co-operation necessarily connotes international character, a different view of the term which I do not necessarily disagree with. This answers the question put at [9], and it does so without a requirement to consider benefits at all. In my humble opinion, a better framing of the ninth and tenth paragraphs would have been to remove the seatbelt analogy from under the proposed construction of "international concern", cutting from the end of the first sentence of paragraph nine to the beginning of ten.

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Tue, 15 Jul 2008

Cutter / Plotter

This is coming along too - I have the blade mounted up, etc, and actually cutting acetate! Of course, once it cuts something out entirely, the blade tends to tear against the hole, and there are some problems with the scratch-guard I built ( vis if it extends all the way on both sides, the sandground rollers can no longer get traction on the paper - not doing so exposes the ends and also means uneven paper pressure ).

People cutting adhesive backed vinyl don't have this problem because the vinyl is on a substrate. Perhaps I need to bond the acetate to heavy cardboard with spray adhesive or something.

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Wed, 18 Jun 2008

Magneto Was Right

"Commission" for Dre.

Original comic frame:

Shirt:

The print went really well, at least for the face. It came out really crisply. The lettering was alright too, although the paint mix was a bit thin. I think I'm going to swear off mixing my own textile medium. The big problem was that I stupidly went to seal it before it was fully hardened, and I think the calico I was using was dusty - a bunch of dust fused into the paint, which I had to pick out with jewelers loupe and tweezers. Goddamn. Next time, I will iron from the inside out.

This isn't my pattern, by the way - you used to be able to get these on CafePress before Marvel brought down the hammer.

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Mon, 09 Jun 2008

Something is eating all my bandwidth.

And I have no idea what. As a pre-emptive step, I'm shaping my machine for a while. There's an interesting article on doing this on OSX using the BSD dummynet interface here.

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Fri, 06 Jun 2008

Updates on the Graffiti thing

Since I posted my trite and overwrought letter to the justice department here, I should mention that they've actually responded with two well thought out, polite and reasoned letters, so that's great. Unfortunately, in the first one I somehow morphed into "Ms. Bryn Davies" and now in the second "Ms. Byrn Davies".

Oh well. If the world ever turns into a 1984 style dystopia, I guess that's one more watch list I'm not on.

The letters are in confidence, but I'm sure I can disclose that at this time, Justice has no plans to revisit the legislation or the consultative process, but that they might do so in the future.

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Fri, 30 May 2008

Attn: Melbourne law students.

The vending machine on 2F is stocked with chunky Kit-Kat caramels for $2.20, which come with a code for a $1.69 iTunes song. If you buy music off iTunes, and you think an effective 51c pricepoint counters the fact they're caramel, hit them up.

There is of course a catch, and it's that you can only load 5 per iTunes account. I used mine to buy the Sexual Healing B-Side from King of the Mountain, because I have no shame and I'll pick up the A when I get Aerial after the exams.

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Sun, 25 May 2008

Cantonese for the young Imperialist

From Walter Brooks Brouner's "Chinese Made Easy", 1904.

Reminds me a little of a controversy while I was in Japan about an English school that taught employers how to effectively bully English speaking workers in their own language. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find any mention of it on google anymore.

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Tue, 20 May 2008

.

woke up this morning
feeling excellent
picked up the telephone
dialed the number of
my Equal Opportunity employer
to inform him
I will not be in to work today

"Are you feeling sick?" the boss asked me
"No sir," I replied,
"I am feeling too good
to report to work today.
if I feel sick tomorrow,
I will come in early!"

 — Pedro Pietri

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Fri, 16 May 2008

User created content, aka "Why we can't have nice things":

From the IMDB page for Lord of the Flies (1963):

"Plot Keywords: Dead Children | Overweight Child | Bare Butt | All Male Cast | Disturbing more >"

Indeed, these are truly the core themes of this monumental work of English Literature.

You're making a mockery of the product!

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Sun, 11 May 2008

Classical Music

Sometimes, when I'm sick or upset, I like to listen to classical music - usually Sky.Fm's 'Mostly Classical', because my ISP restreams it as free bandwidth.

The third song I heard after turning it on tonight was Handel's Water Music Suite #2, one of my favourite pieces of music. What are the odds of this happening?

Well, despite the sheer amount of music output by classical composers in Handel's period, pretty good, and largely because music stations are run by people, who play records selected by A&R folks, who listen to tapes from performers who read from sheet music republished by printers. Each have preferences and tastes as to what they like, and to some extent, those are formed by the music they themselves were exposed to. Is the ongoing popularity of say, the Water Music Suite or the Brandenburg Concerto #2 (a record so good we sent it into space) a true barometer of quality, or are these pieces in the grip of a self-fulfilling prophepopularity? Is that even a word? (Spoiler: no.)

Where am I even going with this? Who knows.

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