A Piece of Old Christchurch History - First "Jade Garden" Location

Many people know this old building as the old "Canterbury Public Library" building

For me, this was and always will be: "The Original Home of 'Jade Garden' - Dim Sum Chinese Restaurant"  (although apparently, they may have been in one other location before this one IIRC)

 

I was inspired to write this little oral history down for posterity when stumbling across the photo below earlier today (complete with the caption that showed below it). It was one of the first times I'd come across a decent photo of the place, so thought it was a good chance to write this down. 

Canterbury Public Library 19 December 1981. Exterior of the former Canterbury Public Library building on the corner of Cambridge Terrace and Hereford Street. Christchurch Star archive photo

(NOTE: Once again, am reposting this long-form post from my Mastodon for archiving - though this probably means the AI's will now ingest this too... sigh)

Blast from the Past: Cathay Pacific 747 Cardboard Model Plane / Glider

When doing some long overdue cleaning of one of our bookshelves yesterday, I ran into the following fun little guy:

IIRC, it's a Cathay Pacific 747 cardboard plane model from a Meadow Fresh milk-carton promotion here in NZ. It would have been from the mid-late 90's (as it uses the "brush tick" tail).

(At least that's what I think it's from! I could be wrong, with it potentially having come from an in-flight activities pack for kids instead, since I do have a few of those... somewhere...)

 

The Last Lunch

Wow, it's been 5 years ago to the day when this photo was taken.

Yum Cha at "Tai Chi" (Spitfire Square, Christchurch) in March 2020

 

It was from our last "dine in" meal at a restaurant before the first COVID lockdown (that we headed out for shortly after Ardern's first 1pm nationwide address).

This photo then went on to be one that I wound up staring at longingly for *months*, desperately craving some Cheng Fun (and being unable to make any ourselves). You could say it got me through the pandemic...

Reflections on my time working with Lilypond

Recently, I saw a post from a music student mentioning that they were thinking of writing up some stuff on the techniques they'd learned while using GNU Lilypond - i.e. a LaTeX-like "music typesetter" with its own custom input/programming language (doused / polluted with a heavy dose of Guile-Scheme).

This post gathers up some of my own notes on my own journey with these tools, and how this has tied into where I am today. Come to think of it, this year actually marks something like "just over two decades ago" that I was doing this shit (since IIRC, I probably started doing all this back in 2004!) - jeez... time flies and makes you feel old when put like that!

Trip Down Memory Lane + Resurrecting An Old Project

I know it's technically a "work night", but I just went through my drawer trying to dig out my ancient mockups for a project I've recently revived.

I had originally built it as a thing for Dad to use for outreach activities - Back in the day (i.e. back in 2009, from the comments in the source code I've been porting between machines), I'd managed to get the core engine running, but ultimately ran out of time (+ also, a suitable distribution tech stack back in the day), so had ultimately abandoned that project.

Anyway, recently I've been resurrecting it as a motivating toy app to play with Haxe + HaxeUI. 

 

* This seemed like the perfect project for learning this stack + playing around with it. It was a relatively simple + straightforward little piece of tech that is small enough to be easily implementable / portable (i.e. within constraints of what I can safely manage energy-wise + time-wise on top of long days of fulltime 9-5 weekday job commitments). 

* It was also an almost perfect case for this tech stack (i.e. the HTML5 deployment option is particularly attractive for someone who has never been able to get CSS layouts + Javascript coding to really sit well with my worldview).

 

In other words, this was the PERFECT type of small toy project to tinker around with during the evenings now, as I try to re-establish a small pipeline for me to get a bunch of small fun projects done for myself, where I have full + complete control over every aspect. No questions asked. No input from third parties accepted or needed. 100% owned by me, and for the sole purpose of me having a creative outlet to do fun stuff for myself.

2024 Recap

Happy New Year!  Time for a brief recap of 2024 I guess.

Main Highlights

* Trips to Mt Cook, Sydney, and Wellington

* First full year at work supporting the important operational system we're responsible for (and getting it stable / fixing all the major-ish quirks that popped up after it launched in late October 2023)

* Taking the plunge and getting a new camera setup (Canon R5 - Mirrorless) after years of using my trusty Canon 7D

* Capturing multiple Auroras, after years of trying unsuccessfully

* Starting a mini collection of my favourite aircraft as detailed diecast models at 1:200 scale (i.e. Emirates A380 + Cathay Pacific 747 in old "green-white-stripe" livery)

* Finally getting a heatpump for my main home-office  (hot room days be gone!)

* Hosting visitors a few days ago + reconnecting with a bunch of old friends

* Returning to actively posting longer-form posts on here (after a few years away mostly posting on Twitter) 

   * I'm still trying to figure out some plans for migrating off this platform onto a more stable / sustainable solution under my own control...

 

Firsts

* Spending time actually exploring the Mt Cook national park  

* First overseas trip post-COVID 

   * And, actually, having this happen after actually contracting COVID for the first time - probably at a local healthcare facility

* Flying in Premium Economy - especially on an A380 flying out of my home airport - that I paid for myself.

* Visiting the Blue Mountains + various other Sydney locations

* Seeing + Photographing an Aurora for myself... and from my back yard at that!  Then getting to do so again multiple times again during the year!

* Capturing a kookaburra + pelicans + "garbage bird" in Sydney

 

Blasts from the Past - Reminders and Remnants of Different Times

Sometimes you just cannot make these things up!  Either that, or "The Algorithms" pervading our lives these days are getting much better at juxtapositioning contrasting but related things together. Anyway, I digress.  Tonight's impromptu post is inspired by the following 2 snippets that popped up across my various feeds this evening:

   1)  Local newspaper had an article saying that a *third* building at my former High School had just been deemed "quake prone" - with all three buildings having been built either shortly before my time there, or during my time there, and all having been places I'd spent a bit of time in.

   2)  An old clip of Bill Gates giving a demo of Visual Basic back in 1991

 It's funny how these things go sometimes, isn't it...

 

Happy New Year 2019 (and a recap of 2018)

It's been a long time since I've posted anything here - May 2018 to be precise (!). Since then, a lot has been happening - so much so that I haven't really had time anymore to put together posts here. Some of these things I can't quite announce here publicly yet, but you'll no doubt find out in due course :) So, without further ado, here are some of my highlights of 2018.

In short, my 2018 was an epic year of travel, new experiences, and hanging out with many good friends old and new.

End of Year Rambling - 2016 Edition

Lo and behold, it's already the end of December, and the last day of 2016 too! How time flies...

Pardon the lack of updates here over the past month(s). As you may have noticed, it's been a rather hectic few months for me as I'm currently locked into a soul-sucking death march tussle with my PhD project (also known as the dreaded "write up"). There's still a few short/long months left before I'll be done with it; whether it's short or long depends on your worldview - short when it comes to the mountain of work remaining (eek!) and long when thinking about the amount of time/energy required to get it all done (double eek!). On the bright side though, come May 1st (all going to plan, fingers-crossed), I'll finally be able to resume work on my ever-growing backlog of 1000x more exciting projects... Hang in there Blender animators - there's heaps of goodness just around the corner!

Therefore, the past week and a half I've been having a "real Christmas vacation" - that is, no work, no work-like things, and no "projects"... Just taking a break, and enjoying life like any "normal/regular/sane" human being does when this time of the year rolls around ;)  So, I'll keep this post short, so that I can get back to my holidays :)

Looking Back at 10 Years (and Counting) as a Blender Developer

Woah, I can't believe I missed posting this a few days ago (*), but Wednesday (9 November) marked 10 years since I've had commit rights as part of the core Blender development team! Yipee!

While I actually started developing Blender earlier that year (a search on BlenderArtists reveals that I finally got the codebase compiling in June 2006 for the first time, after many failed attempts), my first major contribution to the Blender codebase was my patch for the Transform Limiting Constraints that got accepted on 14 August.

Elephants Dream - 10 Years of Open Movies

What a neat mashup - the Cycles renders look gorgeous!  (I have to say though, that the more you think about the dialog in this little shot and the rest of the scene, the more confusing it gets, and the less it all makes sense... hahaha)

EDIT: On rewatching again a few days later, a new interpretation that somewhat makes sense does come to mind... hmm... 

5 Years On - An Eerie Day of Parallels

It's that time of year again - a day on which we Cantabrians reflect on a traumatic event which caused immense death, destruction, pain, and anxiety... the deadly February 22, 2011 earthquake at 12:51pm which forever changed the face of the city. This year marks 5 years since that event (a milestone of sorts). Somewhat morbidly, there were quite a few eerie similarities between that day and today...

Power out in Lab 2 just after 12:50!  (Feb 22, 2016... )

Bubu Day

Happy Blender Day - 10 Years Developing Blender, and counting!

Yesterday marked 22 years since Ton wrote the first lines of code for Blender! Thanks Ton! I don't know where would we be today if Ton had instead decided to have some fun in the snow, or to just hang out having a few beers that day instead ;)

Significantly for me, 2016 marks my 10th year as a Blender developer. IIRC, I finally managed to get Blender compiling back in about May that year, and got commit access in early November.

Year in Review - 2015

Bam! The end of the year is upon us again, so it's time to do a bit of customary introspection and look back at the year just passed... and what a blast 2015 has been!

Looking Back - Childhood Trip to Hamner Springs + Its Links to Blender...

This post was originally going to be a side note tacked on to the end of the previous post. But then it grew and grew until it got big enough to be it's own thing. So, here it is: The story of my 1997 trip to Hamner Springs, and its important links to Blender history...


EDIT: While looking up the maps, I found that I had been mispelling the name of the place. It should really be "Hanmer" not "Hamner". Still, truth be told, I like my spelling more... it sounds more... "tasty" ;)

An Unwanted Anniversary - 4 years on

 Forget Me Not flowers in our garden - Photo from this afternoon

Blast from the Past - Reviving my first computer (Windows 98)

With the Chinese New Year looming in a few days, I got the idea to revive an old project I worked on some 12 years ago: an interactive greeting for the Chinese New Year. Just like this year, it was the year of the horse, hence the impetus to revive the old project, which I ultimately didn't manage to distribute at the time due to various technical issues - namely, having used an absolute path to the character file needed to power the entire thing! There was just one problem: all the files for this were stuck on the oldest of my computers...

My Windows 98 Desktop - As it looked for many years when I still used the machine. The layout shown here is the one I'm most familiar with. Subsequently though, the layout would end up getting trashed everytime daylight saving changes rolled through.

So, for the past few days, I've been trying to find a way to transfer the files off the machine in question, my Windows 98 computer - the first one I had at home and which I learned to program on, among other things. However, with the ways that technology has evolved since we got this machine in early 2000 IIRC, it soon became apparent that making this happen would be quite a challenge.

Goodbye Bubu

Last night, my beloved goldfish passed away, having lived a relatively happy life (though marked by a number of traumatic incidents).

Here are a collection of some of my favourite photos of Bubu taken at different times during his life:

 Perhaps my favourite shot of all - August 2012

Another from August 2012

Trapped - August 2011

A typical pose - October 2010

The wallpaper on my Toshiba for many years - May-July 2010

Nostalgia - A visit to my Primary School

Nostalgia is a funny thing. Regardless of how you may have felt about something - whether it be a place, person or people, event, or period - from earlier in your life "back in the day", looking back, you'll often find yourself having a strong sense of fondness for how things were. Accompanying this, there is also often a kind of curiosity about how things are now. Is everything still the way that it was back then (or as you seem to remember it)? Has the passage of time been kind on those aspects which you hold most dear? And what is there now that wasn't before, that those following in your footsteps now get to enjoy and cherish?