The Queen's Funeral

The droning sound of the solemn funeral march music, bells tolling, and the glum faces of everyone - the elderly royals in particular - taking part in the arduous funeral procession as it slowly trundled back and forth was quite a sight to behold (especially watching the processing turning corners - wow... that's a thing of beauty). A very very sad moment in time is the most fitting way to describe it.

3 Pieces for Christchurch - March 2019 - #WeAreOne

A month ago today on 15 March 2019, a deadly terrorist attack was unleashed upon two mosques in my hometown, Christchurch NZ. Inspired by and in response to the outpouring of emotion in the wake of this horrific event, I wrote a whole bunch of music during this time - I guess partly as a coping mechanism in the wake of each day's events. From these pieces, I've picked the following three as they fit well together under the general theme of healing for a broken community.

Happy Chinese New Year 2018 - Year of the Dog

Wishing everyone a productive and joyous Year of the Dog!

Season's Greetings and Updates

Just a short post today, to wish everyone a slightly belated "Season's Greetings"! I hope that you've all been enjoying some time off to spend with your family and friends, as 2017 draws to a close. Hopefully everyone is getting some much needed Rest and Relaxation :)


As for me, well, I'm certainly getting my fair share of rest (though I'm still waiting a bit for the "relaxation" part) after what has been an epic, draining year of near constant go-go-go on a series of big projects with tight deadlines. I guess all those late nights and stress have finally caught up with me, as over the past week, I've basically been forced to take some serious time off nursing what seems to be a nasty convergence of exhaustion/infections/asthma/allergies, all rolled up into one ugly ball of tiring mucousy coughing attacks and sleepless nights. It sucks getting sick (especially just before/during Christmas - in fact, I can't remember it having happened before), but it's probably a definite sign that it was time for a break!

BTW, before getting sick, I'd originally been wrapping up a few posts covering graduation day photos (this was the Friday just before I got sick), and a review of Coco (which we luckily managed to catch during early-bird screenings several weeks before it opens here). When I do get around to getting these up (probably next week or so), I'll probably backdate them to when I'd originally intended to post them (since the content will make more sense that way).

In the meantime, that's me for now.  Seasons Greetings again to all, enjoy your holidays, and good health to all :)

PhD Graduation Celebrations

I still can't quite believe all this just happened a few days ago, but on Friday, I graduated with my PhD in Computer Science! Yay!

 

Shaking the chancellor's hand on stage

Photo with the Vice Chancellor, Chancellor at a special event afterwards

Chance encounter with former Prime Minister, Sir John Key, at the Arts Centre while taking photos

The Dr is In - PhD, BlenderDev, and Upcoming Project Updates

Woah! It's been over 2 months since I last posted anything here again :(

During that time, I've ended up being super busy with various projects/commitments (which I'll outline below). Unfortunately, this has meant that my todo list/postponed-project backlog had to take a back seat again, along with squeezing in time to write stuff here (Note: This post itself has ended up being rescheduled several times already even!). Hopefully I'll finally manage to get enough time to start making some progress on some of the things I've been wanting to do since early March (EDIT: actually, it's been since October June 2016)! Stay tuned...

Happy Chinese New Year 2017 - The Year of the Chicken!

Regarding the recent quakes...

In case you haven't heard, there was a massive 7.5 earthquake north of Christchurch (near Hamner Springs) that struck last night just after midnight.

Unlike the previous ones we've had, this one went on for a very long time - for some 2-3 minutes by our rough estimation... much much longer than any previous quakes we've seen (and we've seen literally thousands in several years at this point). It was also relatively gentle (comparatively speaking): instead of any sharp jerking, shuddering, or horizontal shunting (i.e. the most destructive type of quake motion), we were instead treated to a "lost at sea in a heavy swell". The ground seemed convulse beneath our feet in wobbly waves of undulating motion. Combined with the gentle swaying of all the walls, light fittings, and other free-standing objects, the flickering lights (which threatened to blink out at any moment), and doors banging open and closed, it was quite a sickening feeling. I can only image how bad sufferers of motion sickness find travelling to be...

General News and Updates - PSculpt/Sketching, Drivers, GPencil, Uni/Work/Life

It's been a few weeks since by last updates, so I thought I'd do a little post to fill everyone in on where things are at.

Clearing the Backlog...

Just a little heads up: if you've been waiting to hear back from me about various things (patch reviews, etc.), hopefully I'll finally get around to clearing this backlog in a day or so, or over this weekend :)

I've just ended up being a bit busier than usual with my research work recently (trying to get an experiment done - recruitment is a PITA with lecture break + having to run people through one by one on the eyetracker, setting up all the data analysis, and updating all the writeups for all that stuff - and pretty much all of that needing to happen around the same time), so things have been getting a bit hectic around here.

In the meantime, hang tight, and I hope to have some nice dev announcements to make shortly when I get around to it! ;)

Leap Day and Quakes

Yay! Today is "leap day" - a day that only comes around once every four years, and which poses some unique challenges for kids born on that day :P  To celebrate, Google put up this awesome cute doodle on their homepage  :D

https://g.co/doodle/fsgbcs

Burnside High '08 - Reunion 2016

This evening, I attended a small gathering of former classmates from high school who graduated in 2008. For quite a few of us (and particularly in my case), this was the first time that many of us had seen each other since the "leavers last lunch" in 2008, so it was quite interesting + exciting to see everyone again.

Happy Chinese New Year!

It's that time of the year again! Today is the first day of the Chinese New Year celebrations. As you may have guessed from the video above, it's the year of the monkey this year (following on from the year of the sheep).  Who knows, this may well be another very awesome year for Blender ;)

For fun, I put together a little short greeting video this afternoon using Grease Pencil. I'm still quite terrible at doing 2D animation - keeping characters on model, drawing them from more than a few "easy" angles, timing, drawing using a tablet, etc. - but I'm quite pleased with how this turned out!

Happy New Year

Happy 2016!

Santa Parade 2015

Just a few photos from the Christchurch Santa Parade held this afternoon.This year I didn't stay for the whole parade, but just popped by for a short time in the middle.

 

Grease Pencil News Roundup: November - Early December

There's been quite a lot of exciting developments and experiments around Grease Pencil in recent weeks! I thought I'd just take a moment to highlight some of those that have caught my eye :)

If you haven't already, check out some of Daniel's latest tests:
Little Fire Lady
GP - "Little fire lady" combining Grease Pencil and VSE (Fan art, Miyuli) from psl on Vimeo.     GP - "Smile Take - Little fire lady" using Grease Pencil sculpt tools (Fan art, Miyuli) from psl on Vimeo.

Interesting Times... An Eventful Day/Couple of Days

What an eventful day it's been today, capping off one hell of a week.  A whole range of events right across the spectrum....

Curse of the Forced Updates (Again) - VM Hosed

Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!

I just managed to completely hose/screw up my Linux VM while trying to fix issues with sound + clipboard + display acceleration being broken after upgrading VirtualBox to a newer version. The VirtualBox change in turn was brought about because of one of those infernal Windows Updates that forced itself on my machine, which ended up completely clobbering/breaking some of the VirtualBox bits and pieces (i.e. I'm guessing the WU ended up deleting/overwriting/"misplacing" some files VirtualBox needed to do its business) thus preventing the VM's from running at all!  Argh!  Damned automatic/forced updates!

Damn! Damn! Damn!

Solar Impulse Pacific Crossing

Congratulations to all the Solar Impulse team and pilot Andre Borschberg on successfully completing the first part of the epic crossing of the Pacific Ocean from Asia to Hawaii!

Classical Sparks - Fireworks Display

Drat! For the 4th year in a row, I've been thwarted trying to get some up-close, in venue, drive-in-and-park-on-the-public-park-grass shots of the fireworks display at the annual Classical Sparks in North Hagley Park. This year, the weather was just really awkward - warm and very unseasonably humid, but heavily overcast (except for the rare moments when I start stepping outside, when the sky seems to briefly clear until I'm fully outside, and it takes that as a signal to start with a light spray mist, ramping up to something more major).

Sigh... looks like I'll have to live with the New Years pics and the shots above till next year again :(