Grahame's LJ

Let's play operation!

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:37:36 GMT

Well, it's time to go get knocked out and hacked up again. I've got a nasal polyp operation scheduled for the 2nd of February. It's been four and a half years since I first had them removed; nobody knows how they form, but they do know that if they're hacked out there's a 30% chance they won't come back! Who can beat those odds? :-)

In fairness, it's not a stationary probability distribution; each time I have them removed the probability of recurrence is reduced. It's somewhat amazing that nobody knows why they happen, the accepted treatment is to hack the things out... and I find myself looking forward to it.

Surgeon seems like a nice bloke. I presume I'll have to go see an anaesthetist, and I've got a CT scan scheduled for Monday. The thing that always amazes me about the medical system is how it lurches from inactivity to activity; you wait a month or two for an appointment, and then bang, everything is happening :-)

On Prednisolone for a week, then for a week before the surgery. Slightly freaked myself out reading the side-effect list, but that list is fairly scary for most medication.

Old Year's Resolutions

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 23:05:50 GMT

With apologies to flyingblogspot, this does seem a neat idea; so here is my list of retroactive resolutions for 2009.

Start a project to be happier

De-clutter; give away lots of stuff

Move out of Nedlands and into an exciting new area

Continue with my photography hobby

Start getting into birdwatching as a related hobby

Make a bunch of great new friends, get out of the house more

Spend much less time watching TV; partially achieved by no longer owning one

Be greener (recycle more, waste less water and electricity, …)

Upgrade bike with panniers and a rack to make it much more useful for bulk haulage

Get outdoors, do gardening

Reconsider a number of strange preconceptions

Read more, and on more varied topics

Attempt to lie to people less, even when that is difficult or lying is the socially normal thing to do

Loose weight, slowly over a longish period

Start attending weekly half-assed running group

Start eating smaller, better quality (nicer) meals

Perhaps stop making so many things impossible, when they really aren’t

… and now I’m off birdwatching / a-photographing. Have a good day people :)

Garden photographs!

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 10:19:45 GMT

As promised, here are balcony garden photographs (click to see the set on flickr):

I'm feeling quite happy with how it's going :) Next thing is to make a trip to Bunnings and get some more soil, and then plant some of my vegetables. I'm excited about the Bok Choy, I've read reports it grows very well in container gardens, so I think I'll plant that next :-)

The Bokashi bin is up and running, yay!

Messing about

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 08:49:07 GMT

Above is bunnycronkite. Playing about with the video recording on my SLR; that was taken using my 35mm prime lens in fairly decent light, with a very small aperture. The bunny manages to stay in focus a lot of the time. Terrible camera work, etc, etc, though :-)

Camera can do HD recording, and has a microphone. I've muted out the audio, as nobody wants to hear me struggle to breathe Vader-style.

Hope everyone has a great new year!

Gardening!

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 15:17:12 GMT

Thanks to some christmas presents, I'm now set up to grow some food on my balcony. At the moment I've got a few succulents (from cuttings), some shrubs, and a planter pot full of herbs. I planted some dwarf sunflowers on Christmas day, and they've already sprouted. I'm going to grow bok choy, sugar snap peas and tomatos as soon as I get down to Bunnings for more supplies :-)

I'm excited about growing my own food. A wonderful Christmas gift was a Bokashi indoor compostor (thanks H!). I will easily be able to feed my plants using scraps and leftovers, and will gift leftover compost to friends with gardens.

Anyway, yay for gardening!

Merry Christmas!

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 13:40:20 GMT

This year I've decided to make a charitable donation rather than give christmas cards. I've donated to Oxfam's water appeal, so as to allow them to provide a poor family with a Hippo Water Roller. It seems a great invention, reducing the burden on women and children transporting water over long distances.

To all of my friends — thanks. I wish you all a happy christmas!

New camera body!

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:00:53 GMT

About eighteen months ago I decided to get into photography. I read a few reviews, and picked out a Nikon D60 as my first camera body. I didn’t want to get anything too expensive until I decided how serious a hobby photography was.

Anyway, photography has been a great hobby, and I’ve gradually acquired more equipment. Recently the D60 has been feeling quite limited, so today I bought a better camera body - a Nikon D300s. Tried it out a bit today, I’m quite stoked!

Grebe pair building a nest

The above photo was taken with the new camera. Not a great shot, but I’m pleased just because I managed to capture two Australiasian Grebe in the act of building a floating nest. These are quite small birds (about 25cm long), and they were reasonably far away. Nice to see that someone’s shirt was dredged from the lake and recycled by them. One of the grebes has a few small chicks, very very cute.

There are lots of these blue dragonflies around the lakes in Hyde Park. They’re pretty cool! Anyone know what the proper name for them is? I haven’t got any books on Australian insects.

Anyway, yay new camera!

Senior First Aid

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:37:07 GMT

The last couple of days I've been doing the Senior First Aid course down at St John Ambulance in Osborne Park. It was fun! I've been meaning to do a first aid course for a long time. Work has become very proactive on health and safety, so I asked to go on the course.

It definitely wasn't hard, and it was fun. Spent quite a bit of time manhandling people around and practising CPR - the rest is a combination of powerpoints and anecdotes. The test at the end is pretty trivially easy, although I doubt I'd have got it right before the course. If you were considering doing such a course and putting it off endlessly for fear it'd be Really Hard (as I had), such fears are IMHO unfounded.

Armada: a django interface to GTFS feeds

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 06:51:54 GMT

Announcing Armada, a system for accessing and playing about with Google Transit Feed Specification datasets.

At the moment Armada will:

import a google transit feed to a Django (actually, geodjango) database; see “load.py”
generate maps from that (see “map.py”)
show you stop timetables and other very basic information, via the webserver (see “python manage.py runserver”)

I’m really keen for anyone interested to collaborate with me on this project. I’ve been very reticent in the past to work with others on spare-time projects, probably just out of pointless fear of criticism. So please, go grab the code (it’s in a Mercurial repository on google code), and if you want push access to the project let me know.

There’s pretty well no docs, so if you get stuck let me know :)

A little sketch of what I plan to add next:

a system to create JSON ‘documents’ from the database. As an example, a JSON file with all necessary source data to generate a stop timetable off-line. This document will then be shoved into a CouchDB instance for quick lookup. Then people can write little apps which grab the JSON and generate the timetable. A reference app will be provided for each document class, written in Javascript.
add map generation to the route view in the web interface. The map code is done, just a matter of glueing code together.
add route timetables to the route view in the web interface
add searching to the web interface
query ‘stops near me’, given a point on the earth. This should be easy using Geodjango / PostGIS.
possibly routing. Google do a good job of this already though.
mashups! let’s overlay this data with openstreetmap. Let’s look at whether public transport is better or worse depending on socio-economic data in an area. Where are the best served areas, where are the worst? How many buses, trains, etc are on the road at a given time in the day. Plot, chart, … ! :)

There are a lot of datasets available, including data for Perth and Geraldton. I’ve only tested the PTA data with Armada, so there may be unexpected issues loading other feeds. Should be fine though. None of the fare / charging stuff is implemented, because I just didn’t care about it :)

Beautiful maps!

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:04:50 GMT

I’ve been unusually productive this evening, and here’s the result:

That’s a cropped bit from the full image (warning: 3MB, 10244 x 14710). What you’re looking at is all the public transport routes in Perth, plotted using a mercator projection. I’ve taken every path a public transport service can take, and found the sections in common between these paths. These non-coincident sections are then plotted with line-thickness and colour determined by log-scaled frequency of services down the segment.

In this image you can see that St George’s terrace and the other major roads in the CBD are red and thick, as services go down them often.

The image generated includes all services running over the last week. As a random stat, the busiest segment in the whole public transport system sees 11,745 services pass down it per week. Over a 24 hour day, that’s 1.17 services/minute.

Anyway, yay data and graphs and things. I’m going to bed! [ Edit: you might remember me posting something like this a while back. Cameron helpfully pointed out my previous results were incorrect as they failed to add up frequencies along coincident lines. I've spent quite a bit of time fixing that :) ]

... for a bit of fun, here's the entire Geraldton public transport network:

Another good weekened :-)

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:09:38 GMT

Last night I went to Pride with friends. It was great fun! A really good atmosphere, ran into lots of awesome people, and got Perthed hugely. A witch said “Hi!” and turned out to be paperishcup. Took a lot of photos, got coated in glitter that flyingblogspot and Nat grabbed from the street, had an awesome cherry cocktail. Good night :-)

Great weekend otherwise, too. Baked some vegan gluten-free gingerbread men, which turned out to be quite nice. I used this recipe and swapped Orgran gluten-free flour for wheat flour. Seemed to work OK.

Went on an expedition to Perth Zoo this morning. Saw lots of neat things, got really excited taking photographs in the bird enclosure. Saw a blue kingfisher! Stroked a python - that was really cool, first time I can remember touching a snake. All in all, a really great weekend.

Ask the internet!

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:02:06 GMT

This rather awesome egg was discovered while taking photographs of birds. Unfortunately the photograph doesn’t give much of a sense of scale. It was (at a guess) about 3cm long, smaller than a chicken egg. Anyone out there know birds and care to suggest what it might be?

Face up to Climate Change

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 12:12:39 GMT

Yesterday at my birthday picnic, I took the opportunity to bug people to participate in Faceup to Climate Change. It's a neat project, a photographic petition. You have a photograph taken of yourself holding your petition, then upload the photo to the website. The Greens send your photograph on to Rudd and your MP.

Thanks to flyingblogspot providing bright marker pens and paper, I managed to take shots of a few people at the picnic for the petition. I've emailed those photographs to their subjects: if you didn't get the email, poke me and I'll resend :-)

Anyway, thought I'd plug this petition as it seems worthwhile.

Birthday!

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:53:06 GMT

Yesterday was my twenty-eight birthday. Thanks to everyone that sent me good wishes, in person or electronically. I had a great day - cycling, a bit of self-indulgent shopping, Italian food at a cafe for lunch and Tapas for dinner. Awesome gifts too - some awesome photography books from my Mum and a flyingblogspot original painting. Neat!

I've taken this week off from work, and I'm finding it really healthy. Haven't even looked at work email. The escape from work definitely feels good.

Now, back to reading!

HDR

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 12:37:55 GMT

I was randomly reminded that I’d been playing with HDR some months back. Feeling fidgety this afternoon, so I headed out with the camera and the tripod and attempted to take some outdoor shots. This is tricky as you want to pick subjects that won’t move much between exposures. In my case, while you fiddle with the camera changing shutter settings, as unfortunately my camera doesn’t do exposure bracketing.

If you look at the above image of the bench, you can see some ‘broken’ bits of sky around the trees. The tree branches have waved about a bit between exposures creating the effect. Fortunately there wasn’t much wind when I took these shots. :-)

I took quite a few sets of images. The two results I like the most both feature Peppermint Trees. I think the bark provides an interesting texture and it’s normally difficult to see the detail of it. Also, they are covered in spider webs which are normally difficult to see!

Anyway, if you want to see my HDR stuff, have a look at my HDR Set on Flickr.

Geocaching hijinks

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 14:31:16 GMT

Great day! flyingblogspot and I went geocaching. For anyone that hasn’t heard of it, you use a GPS to find ‘caches’, which are usually a little box containing a log, and possibly treasures people have left for the next person. We managed to visit three around Nedlands and Dalkeith. Good fun, and nice being outside in the sunshine and heat. It all seems very ‘Neverwhere’ to me - a previously unknown aspect to many places. Saw many interesting waterbirds, and amusingly didn’t have anything near a useful lens to photograph them. Next time!

I took this shot up at the Dalkeith war memorial. It’s part of the indirect fire sight on a 25 Pounder Mark II artillery gun which was used at El Alamein. I took the photograph because I thought the texture of the surface was interesting. It now strikes me as fairly ghoulish. The carefully marked charts are designed – and have been used – to direct exploding shells upon human beings. Horrible.

Politics of Food

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:31:21 GMT

Cycled down to Fremantle this evening and went to an event organised by the Bluestocking Institute on The Politics of Food at the Edmund Rice Institute for Social Justice. It was really great! Lots of people brought food, then we all shared, and there were interesting talks, and I'm really enthused to follow up on the things I now know I want to know about.

Managed to not entirely cling to the people I knew, and met a bunch of interesting people. Lynn MacLaren even complemented me on the blue hair - I'm such a bad Greens member, I had no idea who she was until she was introduced later. Oh, and I managed to track down the people that had baked the absolutely delicious vegan biscuits and thank them, man they were good.

Feeling really pleased with myself, the ride there was 19km, slightly hilly and with a head wind. Managed to do that in forty-five minutes; absolutely fantastic ride, the best bit being riding past Leighton Beach with the massive sun setting over the ocean. Just came home, 15km ride - a bit shorter because I took Stirling Highway, though much more hilly. Managed those 15km in thirty minutes, which is pretty good going I reckon :-) 42km for the day!

Anyway, yay, great and interesting talks, and yay the people that organise them.

It's SPRING, bitches.

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 05:40:15 GMT

The bee has confirmed it. We have spring!

Hoping everything is going well with Alysia and Bernard's day, and they have a great wedding later. :-)

Rockin' out

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 05:31:02 GMT

It's not just me - this otter is definitely doing air guitar. Rock on, slurm lovers!

Have a photo, now for something to blog about...

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:21:20 GMT

I'm not sure if it's always the same parrot, but this week I've frequently had a twenty-eight outside my window. The tree pictured has lots of fresh shoots which they seem to enjoy consuming.

Our office has a reflective coating on the windows, so I'm pretty sure the bird is tapping its own reflection in the photo above. Quite amusing. Unfortunately the photo itself isn't great, mostly due to reflection off the glass - oh well :)

Any of you not from Perth - this is what we call a twenty-eight. They're a subspecies of the Australian Ringneck, and are quite common in the city. You can often see them eating grass seeds in parks. Nice to live in a place where beautiful parrots can be watched from your desk! :-)

Mannix

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:11:47 GMT

Wandered along to a lecture at the Irish Club on Daniel Mannix. The speaker was Alannah MacTiernan, the former state minister.

Noticed that the wikipedia page for MacTiernan was missing a photograph, so took the camera along and snapped one. I've put it up; unfortunately not great, as I had to sit and the back and had the wrong lens and not enough light (tm). Still, looks OK when shrunk down to that size, and is better than nothing.

She was a good speaker, and Mannix made an interesting topic. I didn't know much about him before tonight, always good to pick up some more Australian history.

Indoor soccer update

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:07:50 GMT

Apologies for my slackness! By my count, we have six players for indoor soccer, which isn't quite enough to get the team up and running. So hands up those of you that would like to save the idea, and help get the team up and going!

[ Please? :) ]

People, things and entities... I give you ... SPRING!

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 12:38:05 GMT

1. Kangaroo Paw, 2. Gladiolus, 3. Termites flying from the nest, 4. Ptilotus, 5. Donkey orchid, 6. Dryandra sessilis, 7. Balga flower, with insect, 8. Ixia maculata, 9. Ixia maculata, 10. Geraldton Wax, 11. Duck on the mirror pool, UWA, 12. Flower bed, UWA Mathematics

Edit: titles updated, thanks to evil_megz for figuring out what's what :-)

Wonderful day. Went out this morning running errands, failed to achieve many of them, so achieved other things instead. Then wandered over to oliverm and trs80's house and watched the AFL grand final. The three of us were all going for the Saints, who unfortunately lost. Great game to watch though, and a good tense ending :-)

Spent the remainder of the afternoon wandering about in Kings Park taking photographs. I'm not that happy with many of the shots, and I'm not managing to fade the background out as well as I'd like, but I took some photographs I'm pleased with.

The neatest thing: there were a lot of strange flying beasties. I eventually tracked them down to a tree stump (pictured above.) They were actually termites. The things were climbing out of the nest, drying out for a while, then taking off together in huge, dense formations. I took that shot with my head literally enveloped in a cloud of flying termites. Awesome!

Indoor soccer update

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 06:38:45 GMT

I just rang Lords and Revolution Sports (in Shenton Park). The salient details:

Lords: season starts on the 26th of October. $30 registration fee, $56/game fee. Mixed requires two women on court. Monday or Thursday night - most preference in comments has been for Monday night. (Map)

Revolutions: $68/game fee. Season starts in four weeks. Mixed requires two women on court, and is played Wednesday nights. (Map)

I vote for Lords, it seems a little cheaper and better for public transport. What do you all think?

So far we've got oliverm, patternsofchaos, ataxi, miss_kittylix, and grahame. We're almost there, so put your hand up for fun, or if you know someone who might like to play, send them a link to this :-)

Mixed indoor soccer

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 12:39:33 GMT

Up until last year, UCC/UniSFA had a indoor soccer team - the wonderfully named Burninators - playing Thursday nights at Lords in Subiaco. Unfortunately the council conspired to shut the sports centre for a while, and now that the centre has re-opened people have moved on and there are not enough players to get the team back together.

I really miss playing, so I've decided to try and get a mixed team going. Who wants to play? It's played Monday and Thursday nights. Lords is an easy walk from central subi and the train station (less than ten minutes.) At any one time five players are on the court. It'd be best to have at least seven or eight players on the team, so we've got a buffer in case people don't make it.

My preference is Monday night, but I'm flexible. If you would like to play, post a comment. No great fitness or skill required, and we'll definitely be at the 'social' level of skill, so consider it an opportunity for a regular weekly dose of fun!

Edit: oliverm points out that the team must have at least two women on court at all times, so it's probably wise to have three women at every game. Women, put your hands up! :)