Yay! After missing its last few visits for various reasons (including being out of the country, a snowstorm, and being far away from the airport occupied with other activities), today I finally got to see the "NBA" livery A380 (A6-EOD) with my own eyes at last!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/aligorith/albums/72177720330215352/
Finally getting around to posting some of Wednesday's silvereye goodness today
Some highlights:
1) Mr and Mrs Harakeke Head
2) Check out this funky shadow cast on its head by the unopened (?) flowerheads
3) A different pair that happened to come at the same time but stayed apart. I love how this one looks like it's breaking the fourth wall
4) The juvenile - You can only tell from this photo from the slightly "fanned out" wings (i.e. whereas adults usually have those folds tightly packed, juveniles seemingly have some trouble with that, and often fan those out slightly and flutter them, along with their microtonally off-tune 3-note (f'' d#'' e'') repeating calls whenever their parents approach with food)
Loads MOAR pics here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/aligorith/albums/72177720330132688
Well, this happened way earlier in the season than I had been expecting!
A BIG thank you to Mr and Mrs Harakeke Head for giving me the chance to take this shot during their lunch visit (having missed capturing them during their breakfast visit).
(Unfortunately, the image is not quite in focus - or at least not quite in the way that I really wanted, but will take this one for now, as it's better than nothing! Will try again when you next come :P)
In case you don't know, the last few years, I've been trying to move from "single stationary birdy" into "multiple at once" and/or in motion. So being able to capture what looks like a mating pair (given how they arrived together, and happily feasted from the same flower in close proximity to each other is a relative rare thing)
In this update:
The saga continues. Turns out the distro I initially tried is quite badly configured for what I want in general, but the other two I will subsequently trial will also have their own set of issues too!
Status: Still trying to figure out a good base setup via a VM. (Actual hardware support when I finally finish up enough ongoing projects to justify rebooting will be another matter later - and will likely require another round of figuring out if the problems are worth self-diagnosing vs just trying something else)
Update 2025/11/12: I've managed to get the audio problem on my Manjaro VM sorted by running the instructions from https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/Troubleshooting#stuttering-audio-in-virtual-machine, though I did have to restart the VM (as the systemctl command kept complaining about not being able to access other users / etc.)
This year the Silvereye Season officially kicked off *way* earlier than usual, with the first flowers opening last Sunday on 26th October! (Previously, this didn't happen until after 1st November)
The first bird sighting was the next day (though I didn't get any footage of that, given it was a fleeting visit behind net curtains, with no camera on hand, and a phone that couldn't focus in time).
In the days that followed, were the first photo of one (through the net curtains) on the morning of the 29th:
Fast forward to this morning, when I finally got my first "proper" shots - of a "Harakeke Head" no doubt:
This is one of my favourite photos from the other day when we headed out to New Brighton over the long weekend
I got a whole bunch of footage I'm quite happy with, but what I loved the most from this set was all the photos I got of the seagulls being able to literally hover at a fixed point in space with their wings outstretched, due to the really strong winds out there that afternoon (which seemed to really pick up by the time we were halfway along the pier)
With this particular photo, I'd been taking photos of the gulls just hanging in the air, and then I hear + see this AirNZ jet starting to turn in for a northern approach, so i knew I just had to try and line them both up together in a frame together... somehow! 😂
Last night, I finally got around to paying the Upper Riccarton War Memorial Park a visit. It's recently been opened on the site of the former War Memorial Library, utilising a few heritage items from the former library in its design.
What was most surreal though was standing there trying to photograph this "most Kiwi" of artworks (complete with a Buzzy Bee, Anzac Donkey, and Red Poppy), while smelling the fragrant dinner-rush exhaust from the nearby Chinese restaurants!
It should probably come as no surprise to most folk that I am avowedly and firmly in the camp that is against any of the following:
* Smoking
* Vaping
* Recreational Drug Use
And yes, in case you're wondering:
* I class "cannabis use" under "Recreational Drug Use"
* I can't stand the smell + taste of alcohol either
With this week's official EOL of support for Windows 10, the impetus to try to look into migrating to Linux again for my personal desktop workstations has grown stronger again. Especially as I refuse to have my personal machines associated with Microsoft Accounts that will inevitably mean that various personal info gets inadvertently leaked onto OneDrive (including various sensitive files / settings / etc.), it feels like time to give this another crack, now that I'm using actual desktop workstations instead of laptops with weird hardware...
As I documented on this blog many years ago, the last time I tried switching to Linux, things didn't go so well back then. Particularly, as I was on a HP laptop that had a bunch of very-hard-to-support crap, and I was trying to dual boot it. I'm hoping though that things go smoother this time through a number of different decisions!
What an interesting mashup of two artists I quite like!
1) Ravel is one of my top 5 (maybe top 3 even) favourite composers. The others being Tchaikovsky and Thomas Newman.
I certainly went through a phase a few years ago of listening to his works while plugging through some rather tricky stuff at work (i.e. a "JSON diffing/patching/rebasing engine" *ahem*).
2) I've also loved watching Tiffany's vlogs for a long time now. Among other things, I've gained a *much* more thorough understanding + appreciation for piano music and the nuances of piano-to-piano differences + effects of playing technique. (Also, finally seeing how/why people always about spending time "practicing"... yeah, there are some things I could've done different in the past LOL). Gotta also love the random squirrel / chipmunk sightings too!
3) Wow, it's very interesting seeing Ravel's house! That mix of an idiosyncratic little cottage filled with so many little interesting trinkets + art, surrounded by a nice garden with some colourful trees + water features.
4) Also, it's always special getting to see talented artists getting to bring to life the instruments of historical figures. There's always something special about getting to experience a composer's music in the spaces they once inhabited, as they may have first heard them.
As has become a bit of a family tradition in recent years, we've recently popped up to Wellington to attend the "World of Wearable Art" Awards Show (i.e. "WOW") again this year.
IIRC our first one was in 2015 (???), and again in 2016 and 2019 (with gaps in between due to busy years, with lots of other things / other big trips + travel taking place). Then COVID happened, before we finally started heading back the last few years again. So yeah... we've done this trip "a few" times now...
Overall Impression: This year was a massive improvement on the last few editions, re-centering the show on what made it great in the past (i.e. bringing it back to what it was like the first few times we came, pre-Covid).
Thoroughly enjoyed it, and more importantly, left creatively re-invigorated + inspired to try to do more awesome stuff again in what little free time I get.
The only real quibble I had about this year, is that I personally thought most of my personal faves were robbed / overlooked for prizes, OR even just placings (as at least in the awards presentation, they only had like a winner and a runner-up, instead of like "Top 3" as in previous years IIRC). Then again, a few of the categories had so much awesome stuff, it was hard to really pin down who *should* have won in that category, so it was tough work to be a judge I guess! An interesting problem to have I guess!
One of the greatest pleasures in life is having that first bath / shower after travelling - especially the first one when returning home to your own bathroom after being on the road! 😊😍
~~~
The next best one is collapsing in your own bed again, which I'm feeling is gonna happen very soon.
The "first sleep" will probably not be evading this insomniac for much longer tonight...
What may be a challenge though is staying asleep after waking up in the middle of darkness, still absolutely exhausted and buggered, but also not enough to go back to sleep for longer than a shallow almost-an-hour burst...
We shall see! The land of nod beckons!
