Archive - May 2007

It was YB's birthday on Tuesday and, to celebrate, we went to Luna Park on Saturday. As it is her last year in her twenties, she decided it was fitting to go to an amusement park and act like kids, going on silly rides and stuff. I'm not one for rides but Luna Park is such a good opportunity for pictures.

The highlight of the trip was Coney Island; DB pondered that we were old skool... but how can you beat silly mirrors and slippery slides. As we entered the building I raced ahead to take happy snaps of the girls on the various rides and a random guy came up to me, thinking the girls were some kind of celebrities or something, and asked me if I was a professional photographer. No I'm not and no the girls were just having fun. DB and I decided to try out the big kids slide, which is crazy high, as we were about to slide down we questioned what the hell we were doing up there but, after the first go we were immediately back up the stairs for a second go. Fun. Later a group of us tried the Wheel of Joy, where you sat on top of a spinning cone and tried to stay on the longest. I slid off fairly early but DB was challenging for a win when she stacked it and did a full forward roll over her tiara and got a couple of bruises. Awesome!

None of the other rides at Luna Park quite matched Coney Island, except maybe the Dodge 'ems, which is classic. YB decided it was more fun to try to avoid being bumped, which only just made her even more of an appealing target! We also tried some of the games. The first was a sort-of race where you tried to roll balls into holes, each hole makes your chariot fish go a certain distance. Three Bangarra dancers had a go and we got third-last, second-last and last positions. We have shamed our company. Later on JS and I tried the Clowns; I initially thought that high scores are good and felt dejected half way through when I was only on four when we found out that we should actually aim to get a LOW score. Consequently I did pretty well and got a Cat In The Hat, which I gave to JPB. He loved it...

This is the other thing that has been taking up my spare time. It's fucking awesome. I got the PS3 a few weeks ago now and, besides a few old PS2 games that required a PS3 system upgrade to be playable, I haven't really had a true PS3 game until the weekend when I finally decided to fork out the dosh (and, even with the 15% discount, is still a heck of alot of bread). It looked awesome in the shop and, fuck, it looks awesome at home. 'cept that I don't have a high def TV. Which is now high on the wish list!

It's gritty and violent. Racing around improbable circuits, the immediate highlight of the experience is actually stacking it, which happens quite often to begin with. Engines explode, wheels fly off in all directions, and your driver violently slams into the rock face or plunges down the mountain to his or her doom, all in dramatic slow motion. It's wrong but it's oh so cool!

Anyway, I'm still pretty crap at it, JPB is doing better than me but I managed to win a race around the top of a devilish mesa before JPB. I guess by the time I get back from Melbourne he'll be awesome at it.

I haven't previously had much time for the behemoth "Social Networking" site that is MySpace. What's the point when you have your own blog site??? MySpace seemed so limited in it's ability to be customised, unlike a drupal site like this one that is endless in it's scope. A profile box, a list of favourite music and film and stuff, a bunch of friends... it was easy to be quite cynical about it.

Until I found out about div overlays. It's brutal, like hammering a nail with a sledgehammer, but it frees you up to get quite creative. Although in executing it you can run the risk of creating a page that doesn't look anything like a MySpace page, which could confuse your average MySpacer. Retaining some kind of resemblance to a plain ol' MySpace page is still necessary.

So I've gone and customised my MySpace page, which is why I've neglected this site for a while, and now it looks pretty. I used a design that I had previously planned to implement on this site, the mirrorballs, except that considering I haven't been clubbing for a while now it doesn't seem all that appropriate. I may change it to a dance sort of picture perhaps... Anyway, the possibilities with div overlays are endless! I've also done a couple of others: Science of Sleep (the prototype...) and True Stories. The last one I only finished on the weekend and it's real pretty; not hard to do when there's already a design format to follow, I basically didn't stray too far from the existing publicity material. There's been the usual cross-browser problems (don't get me started talking about Mac Internet Explorer 5.x, I don't think it knows what to do with a negative margin, I'm just hoping nobody actually uses that browser anymore especially since MacOSX comes with Safari) but on the whole, I'm happy with it.

Take a look, add yourself as a friend, go nuts in the comment box! Come to the show! And don't forget to drop by mine as well...