Lion Dance Bricks Builds Completed

Yay!  I finally finished my "Lion Dance Minibricks" build this afternoon (after spending the last 3 weekend afternoons working on it)!  🥳

Got this one in Vancouver last year (having originally wanted another one that I ended up having to internet order instead).

Of all these Chinese designs I've built recently, this one is perhaps the most solid + structurally sound of all of them. The only problem was trying to figure out how the layers lined up, as a few layers had lots of bricks packed into tight arrangements that it became hard to figure out which was which! 

(The problem was such that today I had to redo part of the girl's face, as I'd added the middle between-eyes chunk one row too far back!  Fortunately, the whole lion-dance head came off relatively cleanly, and apart from one or two stragglers that needed to be manually placed first, I managed to get the whole head to snap straight back on after I'd made the tweaks... not once, but twice!  Phew! Things would've been bad had I had to undo all that to get back down!) 

2025 Roundup

It's the end of the year again, and time for another "year in review" post! (Just a quickie, to get it in before the end of the year - I'd intended to include a photo collage with this post, but don't have time + energy to put that together)

 

Highlights:
* First trip to Canada  (Vancouver + Okanagan Valley)
* Getting promoted to Principal Software Engineer + Getting to apply a release to the live system
* Staying overnight at Tekapo for the first time + capturing a lunar eclipse there
* Creating my "MediaSlurper" tool for automating backing up Camera + Phone data (which I've since been using *heavily*, multiple times a day)
* Formally wrote up a spec for "WhioDoc"
* Celebrating Dad's 70th birthday
* Getting my pretty ball dahlia
* Switching to new standing desk setup  (+ including a proper "Luxo" style lamp)
* Seeing one of RNZAF's retiring C-130H Hercules doing a short-field landing at the Airforce Museum in Wigram (i.e. its new permanent home)
* 1st full year living with a heatpump in my room! 

 

Canada Highlights:
* Treating Mum + Dad to High Tea at Empress Hotel
* A&W
* Victoria Tour day
* Capturing pair of Osprey at Vaseux Lake
* Spotted Lake
* Meeting relatives + family friends for the first time - Most notably, meeting a frail elderly relative who had a bad fall + subsequently passed away a week after our visit (!), along with getting to see see some others again for the first time since covid / or for first time in 30 years.

 

Challenges:
* Dad getting hospitalised + being out of action for ~2 months with a badly infected leg (+ subsequent slow recovery) - To say the least, it was a highly stressful, scary, and very sobering experience. I'm very thankful that we are all still able to celebrate the end of the year together!
* Disruptive Uncle staying with us for a month - Ugh... yeah, let's not mention this again. An even more stressful experience, but for different reasons...
* Losing my old desktop workstation to PSU failure (but *still* haven't managed to get around to fixing it)

On "Life's Greatest Pleasures" After A Period of Travel...

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!

 

Public Transit Audio-Only Recordings - A Fun Travel Keepsake

A discussion with a friend yesterday about portable audio recorders had me thinking about something fun to do while travelling that I only really recently realised I should try doing more of.

That is: Recording short audio clips (in addition to any video clips I'm already capturing, though again... more random clips from different places are again something fun to have) from various places during my travels - and in particular, doing it for any public transit route you end up spending a lot of your time during the trip using. 

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

 

[Trip Report] Sydney 2024

This is an abridged version of a more detailed post I'd been preparing (and subsequently never got around to finishing). As with the Wellington one, I might come back to attach some photos to it at some point, but the aim is to just get quick and dirty up so I have some notes on it. So without further ado, here is the "abridged" version

So back in July this year, we headed over to Sydney for a week - mainly to attend a cousin's wedding, but also to do some sightseeing. Oh, and it was our first overseas trip in 5 years (i.e. the previous was pre-pandemic in June 2019, and as it happens, was also for a family gathering in Sydney).

 

~~~ 

BTW, Crowdstrike happened while we were there, which made for an interesting experience.

  * It was surreal walking around the bustling waterfront at twilight:

          * Just before leaving the hotel after a nap, I'd seen the headlines, and started hearing all the bad news filtering in... But then, out the window I'd seen the stunning sunset, so wanted to dash outside to photograph it from the waterfront (knowing that I wouldn't get another chance to do so during the rest of my stay). So, there I was at the waterfront, wondering how things were going to pan out (i.e. it was still a developing story at that point, with lots of doom and gloom news spooling up at that point in time).  

          * It was quite a spectacular sunset (though sadly missed the best part of it by the time I'd gotten outside after waiting for the slow lifts), with a piano-busker playing "The Pachelbell  (AKA RIP Cellists)" (funny/timely since we were going to a wedding the next day), while watching the crowds of people (a mix of tourists + locals) just going about their business blissfully unaware/ignorant of all that chaos unfolding around the world, while also looking up at all those office towers with lights on feeling for all the IT guys there (and also back home) who now had a terrible fire on their hands

   * It's funny that only days earlier (Tuesday to be precise), I'd only just learned about the existence of Crowdstrike. And that was because my office workstation was running slow that day (and had been for a few days), when launching any new processes, prompting me to investigate what was happening (i..e I thought was only MsPaint, but it soon turned out to be everything, including opening new tabs!). 

         * At the time, I'd chalked it up to me not applying some Windows updates yet, which I assumed would get applied while I was away. But since I was heading away the next day, I decided to leave it alone. Little did I know.... the first time I'm out of the country in a few years, this thing then proceeds to knock out everyone's IT systems. 

         * Who knows... could I have helped the world avert this thing if I'd sounded the alarm that it was acting weird at few days earlier???

[Trip Report] Wellington 2024

At the start of this month, we headed up to Wellington for our semi-annual pilgrimage up north to check out the World of Wearable Arts show, get our coconut buns fix (since we don't have *any* dim sum places offering them here in Christchurch), and fit in another tour of the usual sights (i.e. Te Papa, waterfront, Lambton Quay, Old Bank Arcade, etc.)

In the interests of getting this post up (since heck, it's nearly the end of the month now, and also I haven't even finished working through my Sydney ones, or the MtCook ones from earlier in the year), I will likely end up making separate posts for some of the highlights below if/when I ever get around to finishing editing the photos (almost done, but not for some sets), uploading them, and curating them in a blog-post. Otherwise, I may just link to the relevant albums, since that's easier...

 

NOTE: This post will likely be updated with images in due course as I get them processed + uploaded. But the text comes first, so I can tick this off my personal todo-list (not that posting these really matters)

WOW23 - Wellington Weekend Trip

WOW... what a weekend! (Pun intended) 😊

Top Highlights:
✅ First trip out of CHC in over 3 years!
✅ Finally got to have lunch at Grand Century again (+ got hands on a whole bunch of coconut buns 😋). Discovered a bunch of new favs there too this time 😋 🤤
✅ Finally actually visited the Botanic Gardens. A surprising birding heaven! Saw multiple tui, pair of keruru, a kaka (!!!), and a bunch of fantails.  Possibly heard bellbirds too?
✅ Attended WOW again (+ got to stay in closest hotel this time)

(Trip notes cross-posted from a Mastodon thread for posterity)

Thoughts on Urban Transit Infrastructure Design

Here are some personal observations of various urban/city design factors, and the relevant considerations. I'd drafted a few other versions of this in the past, but this one seems to fit the bill quite nicely (+ got finished), so this will be the one that goes up...

Inspired by this headline, here are some of my current thoughts on these matters:

* Most places reachable in < 10-15 mins, *by any means*  == Yes, agree that's the ideal scenario  (and is what life was like growing up here in Christchurch NZ). I've found that, especially for anywhere you need to go frequently, having to spend more than > 10 mins each time is quickly quite aggravating + draining.

In that light, the monster 40 min to 2.5 hr commutes that Americans frequently claim they have are therefore quite unfathomable. (Then again, maybe that's why there are so many messed up folk out there doing drugs and alcohol... again, things that never made sense)

* Many places reachable in ~10 min, but ONLY by walking / 2-wheeled contraption (and hailing a cab/Uber is not an option as distance too short for them to bother) == Personal hell. It's an annoying way to live... Grocery shopping is particularly aggravating (as you're limited to the 1-2 small bags you can reliably carry + manage to pack/unpack several times in a hurry)

Blender 2.8 Code Quest - Here I come!

Tomorrow marks the start of my next big adventure - travelling quite literally half a world away (with a 12 hour time inversion to boot)!

As most readers of this blog would probably know by now, next week, the Blender 2.8 "Code Quest" begins in Amsterdam. 10+ core developers of Blender will be gathering in the Blender Institute/Animation Studios for several months to get Blender 2.8 ready for public use - finishing off many todo's from the 2.8 project and/or laying the foundations for the next 5-10 years of Blender development!

Early tomorrow morning, I'll be flying out to join the team, spending some 26 hours or so of bone-crunching, butt numbing long haul flying. (Alas, this is one of those times when New Zealand's relative isolation from the rest of the world is a bit of a curse). Sitting here typing this tonight (while wrapping up a few last preparations on the stuff I'll be bringing along), it feels quite surreal to think that soon I'll finally be meeting many good friends and colleagues "in the flesh" for the first time after knowing each other for over a decade, and having spent many years watching the conference/BTS content wanting to visit Blender HQ and hang out with everyone.

Epic "Nemo" Tank and Sea Turtles @ Kelly Tarlton's

To kick off 2018, I've just spent a few hours cutting together a bunch of some of the clips I filmed while on vacation up in the North Island earlier this month, pairing the footage with a little taste of the music I recorded last year while in the midst of writing my thesis.



Originally, this was going to be just a video of the clips I'd filmed of an epic "Nemo" tank they had - complete with heaps of Clownfish, Blue Tangs, and Anemones - but to make the clips flow together, and to fit the soundtrack I'd found from my collection, I needed to include a few other clips I'd filmed as well

Hope you enjoy it!  It was fun putting this together with the Blender Sequencer - though it was really sluggish with the HD footage, meaning that I had to rerender it a few dozen times to get the timing of the fades down (though it's perhaps not such a great idea with a laptop on a hot day ;).

Over the coming months, I look forward to gradually releasing more of the 3+ hours of music I recorded/composed last year while writing my thesis (with the backing track here being just the first track of "Album 1" ;)  I'm still working through a plan and the mechanics for doing that, so stay tuned!

Christmas Travels 2015 - Highlights from Li River Cruise

Lo and behold, I've been back home now for a week, after being away on a family holiday to China (Guilin + Guangzhou) and Hong Kong over the Christmas break! (Note to Self: It's not fun to wake up feeling sick in a foreign hotel, on day 1 of a multi-week trip. It's equally not fun feeling sick again - despite being fine the night before - at the start of a new year. Gah!)

While going over the photos, I decided to do things a bit differently this time, and instead of putting together long posts of photos + text, I'm going to try turning these into little videos instead. I'll still have a few posts based on the notes I made during this trip (for a change, I did all the note making during the trip, so it'll just be a matter of digitalising them this time), but I'll put those up a bit later on. So, in the meantime, enjoy the first highlights video, from a cruise down the Li River, from Guilin to Yangshou.



The towering karsts (i.e. limestone mountains) look like they came straight out of a traditional Chinese painting. It's quite interesting how they all have such weird and wacky shapes - it's a particular highlight seeing them from the plane... on a relatively flat plain of farmland, there's a cluster of these idiosyncratic pudding-like mountains sitting in the middle of nowhere!

Christmassy Things

Siggraph Asia 15 - Photos Online

Phew! After Nearly 2-3 days of uploading, I've got most of my photo galleries from Siggraph Asia 2015 up. There's still a few bits and pieces I still want to get up there, which will show up in due course (i.e. a key missing album is "Japanese Oddities" - make of that what you will), along with some write ups on a few key things. Anyways, enjoy what's up there already :)

Google+ Photos / Picasa Web

Note: Don't mind the dates... they're kindof messed up (Google seems to reinterpret everything as US time). Compounding the time/date problems was the fact that I forgot to change my camera's time (it doesn't really help for the videos though), and my phone was roaming (so was using local time). So, all in all, the exact times are kindof useless, but the general order should be clear enough.

Note 2: Having put these up, I'm thinking that I should've done this on campus, where I have heaps of internet allowance + faster speeds... dammit... it would've gone so much faster!

Siggraph Asia 2015 - Overall Trip Report

Last week, I spent a wonderful week in Kobe, Japan attending Siggraph Asia 2015! I was there to present my first paper at an international conference - "Grease Pencil: Integrating Animated Freehand Drawings into 3D Production Environments", staying at the Portopia Hotel.

The paper can be downloaded from the first link above. Please use the ACM DL version one, since that's the official one which keeps count of the download stats ;)

The conference was held in a mixture of venues around the hotel where I was staying:

• Most conference talks/sessions were held in the International Conference Center building, which was located across the courtyard from the hotel, and accessible via a covered walkway.
• Registration, Posters, and the Exhibition (i.e. trade show) were held across the road at the International Exhibition Hall No. 2
• Keynote #1 and Reception were held in the Portopia Hotel (Portopia Hall, and Grand Banquet room respectively)
• Computer Animation Festival (Production Sessions, Electronic Theatre) were held in the hall on the ground floor of the conference center (entrance off the courtyard)

Apparently this was the largest Siggraph Asia to date, with around 7000 attendees coming for the conference/exhibition. I don't know the actual figures as I don't think they actually released those, but this was the ballpark figure they were claiming in earlier press releases.

Grease Pencil Paper Accepted to Siggraph Asia 2015

I'm proud to announce some exciting news! My paper (with pepeland as co-author) about our work on Grease Pencil has been accepted to Siggraph Asia 2015!  Woohoo!!!

Siggraph Asia 2015 will be held in Kobe, Japan from November 2-5.  I'm excited to be attending and presenting my first paper at an international conference :)

HKTrip13 - Day 1 - Ocean Park

This installment covers our visit to the Ocean Park theme park in Hong Kong. We only managed to spend an afternoon there (though at least there were no queues for most things - apart from the Cable Car and the Ocean Express to get back down the mountain). Nevertheless, it was a great place to visit. Personally, I particularly loved the Grand Aquarium, Goldfish corner, and the pandas.

HKTrip13 - Day 1

This installment covers some highlights of Day 1, including a visit to the Jumbo Kingdom floating restaurant in Aberdeen.
 

HKTrip13 - Inside the MTR

One of the things that impressed me the most on my previous visits to Hong Kong was the MTR system.

Whether it was the grand scale of the architecture, the novelty of the facilities (i.e. trains behind automated barrier doors, standing-room only transport, an interconnected underground network for getting from nearly one place to another without having to face the wind and the rain), or the brutal efficiency of the whole system as hordes of people are carted off in waves up and down escalators, on and off carriages, and in and out of the city in general. I also lamented at the time not really getting any shots of any of it - partly out of being unsure whether photography was allowed down there, but also since the speed that the crowds moved at made hauling a camera out slightly hazardous. Not this time though!

HKTrip13 - Sunrises

One of the best parts of staying at the Harbour Grand Kowloon (weather permitting) was getting to watch the sun rising in the east (though in my southern-hemisphere worldview, it always seemed to be rising in the west and setting in the east XD). And not just once... but 3 times!