List

Flight to Auckland : $XXX
One Night Accomodations : $XXX
4th row tickets : $XXX

Crossing Counting Crows off The List Of Bands I Love And Never Got Around To Seeing Live? Fucking Priceless.

May 21st in Auckland. Counting Crows and some British Band, The What? The Where? ....... The Who! that's it, The Who. I suppose we'll stay and watch them as well, unless there's something better to do. Let's see, who's left on the list?

1. Pink Floyd
2. Huey Lewis and the News
3. Aerosmith
4. Brad Paisley
5. Indigo Girls
6. Van Halen w/ Roth
7. Maynard Ferguson (crap I think he's dead)
8. Boston (crap, more dead guys)
9. Smashmouth
10. Bryan Adams

Waves

Last week I bought a couple of kids size wetsuits for RC and RJ. Nothing fancy, got 'em used on trademe.co.nz, a fancier NZ version of craigslist. I wouldn't compare it to ebay, anyway. They've got spring suits, but the spring ones just don't cut it here. Since the suits came, all they want to do is hit the beach with the boogie boards. We went out Saturday for a while to break in the new suits. I was at work for half the day on Sunday, but I was home early enough so we went out to eat and got home at about 7:00pm. "Can we go, can we go, canwegocanwegocanwego?" So we threw the stuff in the truck and hit it until we lost the sun. Not as nice as the three to four footers on Saturday, but still some twos and a lot of threes.

Fast forward to Monday afternoon at work. I get a random email from one of the compositors with the subject "is this you?" well, actually, yes it was me. Turns out that he was down at the beach at the same time taking some pictures and he had taken a few of the boys and me boarding.

Before I get to the pictures I've got to give props to

Karim Sahai, Travel Photographer

whithout whom I could not bring you these amazing pictures

The Boys patiently waiting.

RC and I catching a wave.

RJ dropping in on a nice one.

They're going to be ready for learner surfboards pretty soon.

Steam

Wow


Awesome steampunk case mod

Review : Burn After Reading

I've been pretty remiss in doing movie reviews for the last copule months so I'm going back through some of the one's I've missed.

I was pretty hesitant seeing this after the fiasco of a movie that was the last Cohen brothers offering but hey everyone deserves a second chance right? Especially a second chance with a cast like this. Well they almost lost me with this one, I wanted to not like it. There's quite a few things going on, different plot lines, but the reality is, this is movie about how fucked up people are. Regardless of their station in life, or their circumstances. People are not only fucked up, but they bring it on themselves.

Now, however true that maybe, it's not exactly a recipe for a great movie. Frankly it makes for a stupendously grating movie, no matter how much humor you try to shoehorn into it, it's a movie about idiots. I found myself rather unsympathetic to, well, everyone in the movie. Except maybe for Malkovitch, but his ex CIA agent Osbourne Cox is pretty unlikable anyway. It's a whole movie of anti-heroes.

J.K. Simmons and David Rasche, however, were the saving grace of this movie as sort of the Deux ex Machina of the film, watching the idiocy unfold from afar. They don't have a lot of screen time, but, man, those two were the best part of the movie. Not only that, the way they look at the goings on, helps you look at it in a way that you can appreciate the humor in the situation. J.K. Simmons in particular is brilliant. If you missed it in the theatre, and judging from the box office, you probably did, you should still give this one a try at home.




Five out of Ten

Review: Slumdog Millionaire

I hadn't heard anything about this movie until it won a bunch of Golden Globe awards. I honestly didn't know even what it was about when we went to see it. As it turns out, it's a sometimes funny, sometimes gritty, always engaging story about a kid from the slums of Mumbai. Directory Danny boyle (Trainspotting) took a good story, and made it a great movie by simply telling it in an interesting way. To avoid spoilers for those of you who haven't seen it yet, I'll just say that it can't be more highly recommended. I give it






A) 2/10
B) 4/10
C) 6/10
D) 9/10

I'll go with D, nine out of ten, final answer.

Picinc

Ahh, the good old days. Crew Picnic at Pelenor Fields. Link goes to 3k original.



Can you find me?

Diablo Rojo

Holy crap. I'm never going back in the ocean ever again.

10 foot long squid with thousands of needle sharp teeth, that will fucking eat you. Not like, on accident, like, look Juan fell in the water and one squid distracted him while he was flanked by three more squid that don't care what he is as long as he's made of meat. Oops now he's dead. Just remember boys and girls, mother nature hates you and wants you to die, preferrably in as gruesome a manner as possible.

Seven pt 2

Less inspired rugby on Saturday. The US reverted to form and got destroyed by Argentina and South Africa, though their final result was still better than last year. We might have gone a bit hard on Friday so it was a little more laid back on the second day. England pulled off a shocker and stunned the Kiwis for the title at the end of fulltime. It seemed to put a bit of a damper on the crowd, although Courtenay was still packed untill three or four in the morning. Us oldtimers didn't even make it untill one.


Here's some pix.

Seven

The International Sevens Rugby League is in Wellington this weekend. Two days of seven a side rugby with seven minute halves. It's awesome. Some of us cut out of work early (at five, leaving work at five is early, *sigh*) last night. There was some fantastic rugby, The US went 2-0 in group play, which is unprecedented for the historically weak US side. Kenya came from behind to stun South Africa in an epic first round match, much to the delight of the local crowd who are not big fans of the Springboks. They like the Austrailians even less and took great pleasure in the beatdown the NZ side laid on the Austrailians. And it's really just a big party. I don't know why but it seems like there's a rule somewhere that says you have to dress up so just about everyone is in some kind of costume. Good times. Got a few pix from yesterday. I'll get some more today and get them up on flikr when I get a chance.

Fruity

I've been playing around with some digital music tools, mostly a software sequencer called, of all things, Fruity Loops. I'm totally hooked. This sounds pretty crappy because all I did was plop down the camcorder with my amp on one side and the computer with horrible sounding little game speakers on the other. I'm on the lookout for a used mixer so that I can balance everything out and feed it straight into the camera. I'm also waiting for a 5m optical interconnect so that I can feed the computer into the stereo for those times when it needs to be, shall we say, a bit louder? :)

Over

I give Israel 10 years, tops, of existance. Expanding settlements in the West Bank preclude a two state solution and while some may argue that there's already a system of apartheit in place, given current demographic trends, apartheit will be a numerical reality in about 10 years. Virulent nationalisim and extreme religious orthodoxy continute to drive West Bank settlement building at rates that are increasing by five percent per year. Stopping the building and negotiating a two state solution is the only hope Israel has for long term survival. I doubt that it will ever happen. I just wonder who will get to keep all the nuclear weapons.

Tough

It's hard being right all the time.

LONDON (AP) -- Bill Gates and other donors are giving more than $630 million to the international effort to eradicate polio, after the disease spiked and spread to seven countries that were previously polio-free......

Otaki

The gang went pseudo-camping at Otaki this weekend with some families from work. We were trying to go Friday night to Monday morning but some crazy rain Saturday night had us home by Sunday morning. We were at a campground about 100m from the beach. RC is getting pretty good at catching the waves on the boogie board, it will be learner surfboard time pretty soon. It was dog friendly, which is nice. Although I forgot the rain cover for the tent and had to go back home and get it Friday night, luckily it's only about an hour North.

Pix are here

This just in ...

People are stupid.

It's called "Herd Immunity" and people who don't vaccinate their kids deserve a good old fashioned Polio outbreak except, oops, it's not just the people who aren't immunized that will get sick, it's everyone. You have a social responsibility to vaccinate your kids. Welcome to the 21st century, these aren't your ancestor's Dark Ages.

Joe

So my friends Eric and Beth have family in San Diego. They usually go home every year around Christmas time. Get back to the states, see the family, eat some real mexican food, that kind of thing. Well, we're pretty busy right now, and Beth isn't working, so she took the kids and flew back to SoCal a couple weeks early to stay with family. Once we wrapped up some stuff at work, Eric flew back by himself. So, he's sitting on the plane, in business class, and he ends up talking to the guy sitting next to him, as you do, it's the Auckland to LA leg, you can't really ignore someone for 12 hours that you're sitting next to. Anyway, Eric asks the guy what he does for a living, and the conversation goes something like this.

Eric: What do you do for a living?
Person: Oh, I'm a singer in a rock and roll band.
Eric: That's awesome, what kind of music do you play?
Singer: Like Billy Joel.
Eric: That's cool. It's great that someone's keeping his music going since he retired.
Billy Joel: No, not like Billy Joel, I'm Billy Joel.

Ouch.

I love how Joel tried to play it off since Eric didn't know who he was. "I'm just a singer in a band". Of course Eric is the kind of person who always seems lucky, so when you hear a new Billy Joel song, and he's talking about the guy on the plane who doesn't know who he his, you'll know where the story comes from. The icing on the cake though, was this.

Eric: So, how do you like travelling with your dad?
Mrs. Joel: I'm his wife.

Twelve hours is a long time to sit next to someone on a airplane.

Happy Holidays

Merry Xmas, Happy new year. Blah, Blah. Hopefully everyone is well and having a good year end. Weta is closed for two weeks at the end of every year, so my poor widdle typing abused hands and my muddled brain are getting a rest. There are heaps of new pix up on flikr

STFU & GBTW's photostream

and Mrs. STFU put her xmas letter up in blog format.

Mrs. STFU's blog

Both of those are set to be relatively private. If you don't have permission and think you should, let me know and I'll see what I can do.

I'll see you all next year.

Surrender

Ok, I surrender. I give up trying to run a web server from the office. I signed up at flikr.com and I've started uploading the stuff from my gallery. It's here

My flikr photostream

but I've got the permissions set pretty strictly so I'll have to add you as a friend or family before you'll be able to see anything. Let me know your login.

Base

wingsuit base jumping from doubleA on Vimeo.

Help

So we're eating. W is spooning whatever it was we were having, some sticky, food type substance onto #4's plate. Sticky is the important concept here. It's not just dinner, it's sticky dinner. No, I don't remember what it was, doesn't matter, it was sticky, that's the important bit. Ok? We're all on the same page? Can we continue please? So Mrs. is shaking the spoon up and down a bit, since, not only is the dinner sticky, it's tenacious. It's clinging, nay, sticking to the spoon with great determination. It's late in the fourth quarter and the home team of food and various coefficients of static friction are looking unbeatable as W, gravity and inertia can't seem to get the offense together.

"#4 can you help me out, please?" says W, looking for a utensil to come off the bench and give the offense a lift.

#4 stops talking to #1, quicky asseses the situation, reaches out and grabs W's hand holding the spoon and starts shaking it up and down. Cal beats Stanford. Down Goes Frazier. Hilarity ensues.

Official

It's official, I signed new contract on Friday that will carry me through almost to the end of the show. I'm officially a 'CG Supervisor'. We're still waiting to hear back from immigration on the status of the application for residency, and having a contract extension should help. Residency will make it easier to get a home loan, and so on down the line. Hopefully the new deal will be the first domino. I'm still supposed to be in New Orleans in August. Maybe I'll take a couple days and hit the East Coast.