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...

Reflections - Piano Improv - Mid-Winter

I was trying to free up some space on my phone over the weekend when I stumbled across the following recording I'd made of myself thumping a piano back in July (probably in the depths of trying to complete a never-ending writeup of a previous experiment). Unfortunately, the timestamp info got clobbered during the file transfer process, so I can't remember when exactly this was. Nevertheless, listening to this again, I'm quite pleased with how it turned out - it almost sounds like I actually know how to play the piano (TBH, I don't! ;)

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.