photos

Improvements in photographical skill

30 August 2020virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

Back in June I blogged about the Flickr Memories functionality I’d added to my website, and finished the post off with this sentence:

I’m excited to see what forgotten gems from the past show up, and also being reminded of how terrible I was when I was first starting out taking photos.

And oh boy, has it delivered on that second part in particular! I make a point of checking both my formerly-Tumblr-posts Memories page where I post all my random iPhone photos as well as the Flickr one each day, and in August of both 2008 and 2012 we were in Boston (in 2008 it was the first time I was visiting Kristina overseas back when she was still living there, and in 2012 we went back for her birthday) and I’d posted all the trip photos to Flickr.

Looking back at the 2008 photos (and all the photos I’d taken prior to that), they’re very much just happy-snaps… there was zero processing done on them, they were awkwardly-framed and weren’t straightened — crooked horizons ahoy! — and there was no culling, I’d just post them allll. I have a collection created for that trip where you can see the full horror (check out the sheer number of photos in the Mt. Auburn Cemetery album for example… why did I need to post that many?!).

In 2009 I borrowed an old Canon EOS 400D from a co-worker at Apple for a while, which was my first exposure to a proper DSLR and properly-shallow depth of field, as well as shooting in RAW, and doing actual post-processing. I had way too much fun adding heavy vignetting to everything, but I was starting to cull my photos rather than just dumping everything online!

In 2010 we bought a Canon EOS 7D with a 35mm f/2 lens, and my photography and processing skills definitely improved (that link is every single photo I took with the 7D, in order of date posted from oldest to newest).

Going back to Boston, some sample photos from Rockport and Boston Public Library on 2012’s trip shows the improvement from 2008. For some reason I was pretty far into too-heavy-handed territory with the post processing specifically for the Boston trip photos, but you can see the greatly-improved framing and composition.

From there on my skill has been on a upwards path, and thankfully I’ve stopped doing the EVERYTHING MUST BE REALLY HIGH CONTRAST thing I was doing for a while there. 😛 For travel photos specifically, the easiest way to see the progression is the “Travel” category of posts I have set up here! Some choice examples:

A while back I’d toyed with the idea of reprocessing my older photos, in particular the 2012 Boston ones, but I realised that way lies madness and never-ending editing, and I wouldn’t have a nice historical record of my photographical endeavours like I do now.

A trip to New Zealand’s North Island (Te Ika-a-Māui)

20 February 202011 April 2020virtualwolfTravel / WordpressLeave a comment

On Monday last week we woke up at arse o’clock in the morning to catch a flight to Auckland! We’d been to Queenstown two years ago but hadn’t seen the North Island yet.

We hired a car and stayed in Parnell for the first two nights which was quite lovely (it’s also apparently one of the most expensive suburbs in New Zealand which I’d 100% believe), and the first partial day we were there just involved wandering around the neighbourhood taking some photos.

The second day we drove out to Piha to see the black sand beach which was extremely cool. I couldn’t capture it in the photos but when you look at the sand against the sun it really sparkles thanks to its volcanic origins!

We also went to the Arataki Visitor Centre and tromped through the forest on a walking track. It was very neat but the only photos were a vista from the centre and the big totem pole there as well, because the forest itself wasn’t particularly photogenic. 😛

After that we walked from our AirBnB to the CBD, and quickly decided that that was a large mistake due to the sheer amount of construction going on and blocked-off streets. It made Sydney’s construction look positively pedestrian!

There’s a pizza chain in New Zealand called Sal’s that claims to do genuine New York-style pizza, so we walked to the closest one for dinner and gave it a go, and oh my god. Kristina said it’s about 95% of the quality of the actual New York-style pizza she had when she lived in New Jersey. She’d been talking about how good it was for years, and I now finally understand it!

Day 3 we drove to Rotorua, which is about three and a half hours drive, so we broke up the trip by stopping in at Hamilton and visiting Hamilton Gardens which were absolutely fantastic. It’s divided up into a bunch of incredibly well-designed and well-maintained gardens from throughout history — plus some whimsical ones — and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

After that we continued on through to Rotorua itself and went for a lovely walk through Whakarewarewa Forest which is a forest full of massive redwood trees, then visited some work colleagues of Kristina’s — and Colin, their miniature wire-haired dachshund — who live in Rotorua and went out for a delicious dinner at Macs Steakhouse on Rotorua’s “Eat Street”.

Colin the miniature wire-haired dachshund

Unfortunately the B&B we were staying at (“Sandi’s B&B”) wasn’t good… turns out it was on a major road that has large trucks going down it extremely loudly at all hours of the night, some enough that they’d actually vibrate the bed, and it had the world’s stupidest problem where there was a pear tree that was growing over the top of the cabin we were in and the fruit was ripe enough that the pears were randomly dropping onto the roof with an extremely loud THUD. Sandi made us a full breakfast in the morning which was delicious but it didn’t make up for the ruined sleep. 😴

Rotorua is known for its geothermal springs so on day 4 we visited “Wai-O-Tapu Geothermal Wonderland” and it was very impressive. The sulphur smell was something else, especially since it came it with steam so it was both humid and smelly!

Our last full day we started with visiting a wildlife park called Paradise Valley Springs, after having another shitty night from trucks and pears thudding on the roof. We were there first thing in the morning so nobody else was around which was pretty sweet, but the farm animal section didn’t have very many animals in it and it seemed like they’d have liked some more company. We figured that it probably seems a lot more social when there are other people there.

The absolute best part of the day, however, was the visit to the Cornerstone Alpaca farm that broke up the drive from Rotorua back to Auckland! They had a whole presentation before we went out to see the alpacas, which was quite interesting, and the tour consisted just of Kristina and me. They’re so soft, and very pushy about getting food, haha.

After that, our final night was spent in a hotel in Newmarket. We wandered around and took some photos which you can see in the album above. We made a second stop at Sal’s for dinner, and afterwards were poking around the cable TV channels in the hotel to see what was on, ended up watching the first game of the T20 England versus South Africa cricket match, and Kristina ended up quite enjoying it! I was explaining the rules as we went along and she’s pretty well got the hang of it now, to the point that we’ve at least temporarily subscribed to Foxtel Now to be able to watch more T20 games, hahah.

Our flight back to Sydney on the sixth day didn’t leave until 4pm so we went to the Auckland Museum to kill time after we checked out from the hotel, and it was actually really neat. The whole ground floor is a massive Maori and Pacific Islander exhibit with all sorts of cultural artefacts and details of their history, and on the second floor was a fascinating exhibit on volcanoes.

Next time we go back to New Zealand I reckon we’ll probably be hitting up the South Island (Te Waipounamu) again, but it was definitely a good trip — sans the terrible sleep in the middle at least, anyway.

Of coding and a history of iPhone photo filter apps

26 November 2019virtualwolfWordpress2 Comments

I had last week off work, mostly due to being in desperate need of a holiday, I didn’t go anywhere but just chilled out at home. I did do a bunch of coding on my website though!

I’d been using Tumblr to post my random snaps from 2009 to about 2016 or so and cross-posting them to Twitter, before I found that Tweetbot had custom image posting functionality where you could post images to a URL that replied with a specific format and Tweetbot would use those image URLs in its tweets. I added functionality for that on my website and had been saving tweets and images directly since 2016.

Last year, it occurred to me that I should import my posts from Tumblr to my website in order to have everything in one place. I obsessively tag my Flickr photos and as a result am able to find almost anything I’ve taken a photo of very quickly, and while I hadn’t quite gone to those same levels of tagging with Tumblr, all my posts there had at least some basic tags on them that I wanted to preserve when bringing them in to my website, so I had coded up a tags system for my Media page and a script to scrape the Tumblr API and suck the posts, images, and tags in. I also wrote a very simple little React app to be able to continue adding tags to new posts I’m making directly to my website.

The one thing that was missing was the ability to see all of the current tags, and to search by tag, so this past week I’ve been doing exactly that! I have a page that shows all the tags that exist with links to view just the posts tagged with a given tag, and on the front page the tags that a post has are clickable as well.

I realised I had mucked up the tagging on a few posts so was going through and re-tagging and updating them, and it struck me just how much I used to rely on those camera filter apps to hide how shit photos from old iPhones used to be. One of the ways I’d tagged my photos on Tumblr, and I’ve continued this even now with the new direct-posting-via-a-custom-iOS-shortcut that I’ve got set up on my iPhone, is with the name of app I used to edit the photo. Going roughly chronologically as I started using each app:

Instagram was only a very brief foray, and VSCOCam was by far my most-used app. Unfortunately it went downhill a couple of years ago and they Androidified it and now all of the icons are utterly inscrutable and you also can’t get RAW files taken from within the app back out again in anything but JPEG. Apparently there’s a thing called a VSCO Girl which I suspect is part of what happened there.

My most recent editing app prior to getting the iPhone 11 Pro has been Darkroom, it’s extremely slick and integrates directly with the regular photo library on your phone and offers a similar style of film-esque presets to VSCOCam, though fewer in number.

With the iPhone 11 Pro, however, the image quality is good enough that I don’t even feel the need to add obviously-film-looking presets to the images. I take the photo, hit the “Auto” button in Photos.app to add a bit of contrast, and usually use the “Vivid” preset to bring the colours up a bit, but otherwise they’re pretty natural-looking.

That said, I’ll probably end up heading back to Darkroom at some point as I do like my film aesthetic!

iPhone 11 Pro

20 November 2019virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

I upgraded to the iPhone 7 nearly three years ago and was very impressed with the camera, and here I am again being impressed by the camera in a new iPhone! Or more specifically, three cameras, since the iPhone 11 Pro comes with 13mm full frame-equivalent, 26mm-equivalent, and 52mm-equivalent lenses.

I absolutely love the look of the iPhone 11 Pro, especially in Midnight Green as Apple has been using for a lot of its promo shots. Someone on Ars Technica described it thus and I think they really nailed it:

It’s a touch retro, a touch cyberpunk, with a hint of bounty hunter droid (somewhere between 4-LOM and IG-88)

The cameras themselves are extremely impressive as well. Sadly there’s (currently) no way to get RAW images out of the ultrawide 13mm-equivalent lens, so you’re stuck with JPEGs, but the images direct out of the phone are still quite impressive. I’ve gone for three walks on my lunch break so far, two with the ultrawide (1, 2) and one with the regular 26mm-equivalent shooting in RAW with Halide.

That last shot was taken with the telephone lens on the way home from the train station.

I’ve also found myself sharing way more photos on Mastodon lately thanks to the combination of image quality, ease of taking photos even in dim lighting (Night Mode is extremely good), combined with our 40Mbps upstream NBN HFC connection and the custom iOS shortcut I have to post things to my website before sending them to Mastodon. It’s all very frictionless.

Another fantastic part of this whole setup is using Lightroom and my Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro to fully edit photos I’ve taken with the iPhone and then send them on to Flickr. My standard for images to go on Flickr is ones that are Proper Photography, if you will, rather than just snapping an image of something that’s happening or something that’s cute, and of good quality. The iPhone 11 Pro delivers that in spades, and not having to use a computer for Proper Photography is an absolute delight. There’s still some kinks — I obsessively tag my photos on Flickr and Lightroom Classic on my computer has a big hierarchical list of tags that all get uploaded along with the image, and sadly there’s no hierarchical tagging available at all in Lightroom Mobile or CC, so I have to manually add them all after the fact — but it’s incredibly freeing nonetheless.

The iPhone 11 Pro is just effortlessly fast, whatever I want to do just happens immediately without any sort of needing to think about it. It was an extremely worthy upgrade from my trusty old iPhone 7!

Ten years of marriage!

9 June 20199 June 2019virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

Ten years ago today, on a very cold and windy but at least sunny day at Dee Why headlands, Kristina and I got married!

TEN. YEARS.

I have no idea how it’s been ten years, it doesn’t remotely feel like it’s been that long. I’ve mentioned on this blog before, and on LiveJournal before it, that everything is so effortless, and it still remains true!

We originally knew each other from Everything2, which is still around but very much dead compared to the old days, and has been for many years now (my registration date there is May 2000). There was a bit of a mass-migration from E2 over to LiveJournal a couple of years afterwards, and I have a happy birthday wish from Kristina on one of my LJ posts from 2003! She said I was always “That guy in Australia who likes metal”, but we got to chatting more towards the end of 2007 and then on a whim decided to come visit in March of 2008, and the rest, as they say, is history!

With both of us being keen photographers we tend to be behind the camera instead of in front of it, but we’ve got a few photos together over the years!

Kristina and I — The first one of us together, in August 2008 in Boston the first time I visited (we don’t have any of the two of us from March when Kristina first visited Sydney). This was right before I trimmed my goatee entirely down because it’d started just triangulating outwards and getting all wispy.

Selfie! — This was taken in May 2014 when we bought the Fujifilm X100S. Kristina looks so hilariously unimpressed.

In the time we’ve been married we’ve been to:

And that’s not counting the day trips or single night trips of which there have been plenty.

Here’s to many more years of adventures to come! ❤️

A trip to Switzerland!

5 May 201910 June 2019virtualwolfTravelLeave a comment

Kristina and I have been married for ten years (!) come June, and we had a very small wedding and no honeymoon because we were completely broke at the time. We decided we’d do a big trip for our ten-year anniversary to make up for it, and decided on Switzerland. Kristina had been there about fifteen years ago and loved it, and was really keen to show me around and also to take photos with a proper camera and better eye for composition.

See full post (and LOTS of photos)

Knights Ridge “eco retreat”

17 September 20189 February 2019virtualwolfTravel / Wordpress

We went for a weekend away up to a place in the Hunter Valley billing itself as an “eco retreat” and it was pretty great! We were able to bring Beanie along too, which he loved. Kristina had the great idea to get one of those extendo-leads so he was able to roam up to five metres away and smell all the smells while still remaining technically on his lead.

The whole place is entirely off-grid: electricity comes from solar plus battery storage (though they also included instructions for how to start up the backup generator in case anything happened), the toilet is a composting one, and water is all captured from the rain and stored. They did have a somewhat anaemic ADSL2 connection though, so I don’t know if you count that as still being entirely off-grid. 😛 There was zero mobile phone signal though, the whole time we were there our phones said “No service”.

The place was decorated in quite the rustic style, with all sorts of old bits and bobs around, but it was all totally clean and dust-free.

There was no electric kettle, only an old stovetop one, and you don’t realise how spoiled you are until you remember just how damn long it takes for a kettle to come to a boil on a gas stovetop!

The whole place was completely and totally silent in terms of any sort of human noise, the only sounds were from the trees and birds, and it was absolutely delightful. Sunset down the shallow valley that we were in was quite nice too.

At dusk we saw a couple of wombats, though Beanie had to bark at them probably because they were low and had four legs and so looked somewhat dog-shaped, but we also saw some kangaroos! Beanie was absolutely fascinated by the kangaroos, we were watching from a goodly distance and he was sitting there absolutely laser-focused on them.

A distant kangaroo! — The kangaroo is the little tiny spec right in the middle where the field starts turning into the side of the valley.

My only complaint with the place is the number of bugs that manage to come in at night! Only about half the windows have flyscreens on them, so we had to run around and mostly close the place up once dusk arrived. All in all it was extremely relaxing, though. A++ would relax again.

The full album of photos is on Flickr.

The spiritual successor to SimCity, Cities: Skylines

26 August 201826 August 2018virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

I first played the original SimCity Classic back in the early 1990s on our old Macintosh LC II, and absolutely loved it. Laying out a city and watching it grow was extremely satisfying, and the sequel, SimCity 2000 was even more detailed. I played a bit of SimCity 4, which came out in 2003, but the latest entry in the series, titled just “SimCity“, by all accounts sucked. The maps were significantly smaller in size, and it required an internet connection and was multiplayer to boot.

It’s actually possible to play SimCity 2000 on modern machines and I definitely got stuck into it a few years ago. This is a screenshot of my most recent city!

Screenshot of SimCity 2000, zoomed out and showing as much of my city as possible.

If you’re wanting a proper modern SimCity 2000-esque experience though, Cities: Skylines is what you’re after. It came out in March of 2015 on desktop, and was ported to Xbox One in April of 2017 and they did a damned good job of it, the controls are all perfectly suited to playing on a controller as opposed to with a mouse and keyboard.

The level of detail of the simulation is fantastic, you can zoom all the way in and follow individual people (called “cims”, as opposed to SimCity’s “sims”) or vehicles and see where they’re going. There’s a robust public transport system and you can put in train lines (and buses, and trams, and a subway, and in the most recent expansion called Mass Transit, even monorails, blimps, and ferries!) and see the cims going to and from work, and how many are waiting at each station and so on.

We recently upgraded to the Xbox One X and a shiny new OLED 4K TV (quite the upgrade from our nine year-old 37″ giant-bezeled LCD TV!), and it makes for some very nice screenshots. These are from my largest city called Springdale, currently home to ~140k people!

A trip to Queenstown

28 April 201817 September 2018virtualwolfTravel / WordpressLeave a comment

Last week we finally got around to visiting New Zealand! We’d been meaning to go for a good couple of years now, but never actually did it. We started small and visited just Queenstown and surrounds, and were only there for three full days.

We flew in at night on Saturday night, and the descent in was rather long and bumpy which I guess is to be somewhat expected when it’s surrounded by mountains. We went into Queenstown for dinner first, and had one of the best burgers I’ve ever had at The World Bar.

The place we were staying was about 15 minutes drive from Queenstown, but because it was night time all we could see was brilliant yellow leaves on the trees at the side of the road where the headlights were lighting them up. We woke up the next morning, and holy crap, the view!

We went up the Skyline Gondola which has a hell of a view over Queenstown itself.

Next we drive up to Glenorchy, which is about an hour away. Lunch was surprisingly delicious beef noodle soup from a Chinese restaurant there (there are a lot of Chinese tourists around).

We spent the afternoon wandering around Queenstown Gardens and Queenstown itself. This was definitely a fantastic time to visit, the air was cool and crisp and all the leaves were changing and everything was bright yellow.

Dinner was whole baked flounder with shaved fennel and orange from Public Kitchen and it was absolutely magnificent, cooked to total perfection. The “whole fish” bit was slightly off-putting because it’s literally that, a entire fish, eyeballs and all, sitting on your plate staring up at you but I pretty quickly got over it. 😛

The morning view the next morning was even better than before.

We paid a brief visit to Arrowtown, though there wasn’t a whole lot there and it was mostly tourist shops.

We then drove up to Wanaka and took the obligatory photo of the tree there.

The drive itself had some great scenery along the way too.

Dinner was at the Pig & Whistle pub, I got the dry-rubbed steak with veggies and red wine jus and Kristina had chicken and mushroom pasta, and they were both absolutely incredible.

The final full day we were there, we drove two and a half hours up to Lake Pukaki. As before, the drive itself was quite scenic too.

The lake itself is amazing, it’s this crazy neon-blue colour. The first two photos don’t really do it justice, but the third one is exactly how it looked even in person.

We drove a little further north along the western edge of the lake to get a bit closer to Looking towards Aoraki / Mount Cook, which was looking very dramatic with its peaks covered in clouds.

Overall it was a fantastic trip, we definitely want to go back again but we’re thinking we’ll fly into Christchurch next time and drive around further in the north of the South Island.

The full photosets are here:

More miniatures: Warhammer 40,000 edition

15 April 2018virtualwolfWordpress2 Comments

Warhammer 40,000 used to be quite the complicated affair, lots of rules and looking things up on different tables to check what dice roll you needed for different effects, and needing many hours to finish a game. The 8th Edition of the game came out last year, and was apparently extremely streamlined and simplified and seems to have been received very well. Since I’d been doing well with Shadespire, I decided to get the 8th Edition core box set as well, and had almost exactly enough in Amazon gift card balance for it! It comes with Space Marines, as always, but the opposing side is Chaos this time. 7 Plague Marines, a few characters, a big vehicle, and about 20 undead daemon things. I decided to alternate between painting a handful of each side at once, so as not to get bored, and have gone with Space Wolves (big surprise, I know) as the paint scheme for the Imperial side.

There’s another five of these Space Marines but they’re all identical apart from the poses so I didn’t take photos of all of them.

The Plague Marines are all unique though, so I’ve been taking photos of each of them, my first batch was four of them.

My mobile painting table has been a great success, but after the first batch of Space Marines I realised I was getting a sore neck and back from hunching over towards the miniatures as I was painting them because everything was too low. Another trip to Bunnings, and lo and behold…

Problem solved!

I also realised the other day why I was enjoying painting my miniatures a lot more now than I used to… it’s thanks to being able to combine my hobbies of painting and also photography. 😛 I can paint the miniatures and be happy with my work, but then also take professional-looking photos of them and share them with the world!

Finally, some actual miniature painting

3 January 2018virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

So despite having gotten the back room set up for miniature painting over three and a half years ago, I hadn’t actually done any of it since then. 😛 I also realised I hadn’t actually taken a photo of the setup.

I bought Games Workshop’s latest game Shadespire early last month, it does have miniatures to paint but only eight in the core set, and it’s a board game where the games last about half an hour or so versus the multi-hour affairs that are traditional Warhammer/Warhammer 40,000 games. I figured that with the holidays around and time to kill, and not having the prospect of endless amounts of miniatures to paint, I’d give it a go. I’m pleased to say that I clearly still have the painting skills!

I’ve finished five of them so far, so only three to go, and took some proper photos of them with the full external flash/umbrella setup.

(I’ll admit that I cheated slightly and didn’t actually paint any of these in the back room, however… during the week and a bit that I was doing them, the weather was really hot and the dinky little air conditioning unit in the back room wasn’t remotely up to keeping things cool, so I ended up bringing all the paints and bits inside and did them at the dining table).

The game Shadespire itself is really neat as well. I’ve only played a handful of games, but rather than just “Kill the other team” you also have specific objectives to accomplish as well. Have a read of Ars Technica’s review of it, they’re a lot more thorough and eloquent than I could be. 😛

Christmas 2017

29 December 2017virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

Christmas and Boxing Day this year were pretty great. My sister and her husband and kids were able to make it up from Nowra again, so we had the family Christmas at my parents’ place with everyone. My niece Arya, now three and a half, is GODDAMN ADORABLE. She’s totally happy to just go off and play by herself, and there wasn’t a single tantrum the whole time we were there either. Lily and Scarlett were happy to hang out with each too and got along very well.

It was interesting to see that Scarlett’s reading is definitely not at the same level as Lily’s was at the same age… Lily was eight when I posted this but she was absolutely tearing through pretty much everything, whereas Scarlett was struggling a little to read the jokes inside the Christmas crackers.

Beanie was terrific, he mostly just wandered around keeping an eye on what everyone was doing and didn’t bark once. Arya was a afraid of him to begin with, because he was so excited to see someone vaguely at his height that he kept jumping up on her and trying to lick her face! My sister’s dog at home isn’t one for jumping, so Arya wasn’t used to that. She got over it eventually, though, and was able to sit down and give him scritches.

I’ve been a bit stuck for what to get for Christmas and birthdays of late, so I’ve asked for mostly just books. This year’s haul:

So that should certainly keep me occupied for a while!

We went back over on Boxing Day for mum’s birthday, and went down to Collaroy Beach in the afternoon. It was completely overcast but the weather was otherwise glorious… temperature in the mid-20s and a lovely breeze. There were more photos, of course, and I gave the 135mm lens a good workout for once!

A holiday in Perth

24 September 201717 September 2018virtualwolfTravel / WordpressLeave a comment

We went to Perth for a week last week, and it was damned lovely! A friend of mine, Mat, who I’ve known for over fifteen years and originally met through the now-mostly-defunct Everything2, lives over there and was able to offer some advice on places to eat at and suburbs to stay in.

We arrived on Saturday and stayed in a house in Highgate, which is about a 10-15 minute walk from the city itself. Less than a block away is Hyde Park, which is lovely, and so green (Perth has had like a month or two straight of rain, versus the next-to-none that Sydney’s had).

There’s a bunch of street art all around the place as well, and lots of interesting buildings to take photos of (full album is here).

On Sunday we visited Fremantle, to check out the markets there and hopefully get a view of a sunset over the ocean (something we’ve never seen given both Kristina and I grew up on the east coasts of our respective countries). It was indeed getting very nice, but sadly the clouds moved in right as the sun was getting low to the horizon.

Fremantle is the main cargo port for Perth, so there were the giant cargo cranes there and also a massive submarine in dry-dock (have a look to the right of the second photo)!

Monday was spent first at the Western Australian Botanic Garden and then wandering Northbridge and the CBD itself.

The Garden is massive although there’s a lot of just regular bushland as well as flower beds.

Northbridge was neat, there’s a lot of laneways and little alleys, and most of them have art on the walls, often on a very large scale.

Those last two would have been probably four stories high!

We wandered through the CBD itself as well, had dinner at Durty Nelly’s Irish pub (highly recommended, the food was incredible), then continued wandering after night had fallen.

On Tuesday we visited Rottnest Island! We made the mistake of taking a bus tour, which was filled with loud, obnoxious, racist boomers, and we only stopped to actually get off the bus twice. Otherwise we were driving past all this wonderful terrain and the occasional quokka, and everyone was snapping shitty photos out of the bus windows.

Thankfully that only lasted an hour and a half, and we were able to go visit a colony of quokkas that were all of about ten minutes from the main buildings on the island, and OH MY GOD they are adorable! They have no natural predators on the island so they were pretty well unafraid of people and we were able get up super-close to them.

The water around the island is crystal clear.

Tuesday night, we had dinner in Northbridge at a Mexican restaurant called La Cholita, and holy crap if you’re in Perth you need to visit it. The food is amazing.

Afterwards we went for another wander around the area and snapped some photos.

Wednesday was spent briefly at the Araluen Botanic Park (briefly, because Kristina’s legs were massively hurting from crouching down and getting up constantly on Tuesday while we were visiting the quokkas and the Botanic Park was filled with lots of hills), and then a leisurely wander through East Perth.

The weather starting turning a bit crap on Thursday, so we visited Mat’s sister and her boyfriend on their rural property and just hung out there with their horse Archie and hilariously uncoordinated Maremma sheep dog Iorek, then went back and played some Diablo III.

I can’t believe how well-timed the trip was, we booked it back in July and the week before the trip was almost non-stop rain and it’s now back to raining again for the next week! There would have been so much we wouldn’t have been able to see if the weather had been awful.

A photographical upgrade

22 August 201723 August 2017virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

Last Wednesday, we upgraded from our trusty Canon EOS 7D to a brand-new Canon EOS 5D Mark IV! It’s a hell of an upgrade in terms of basically every single aspect… the 7D originally came out in 2009 and the 5D4 was only last year and is full-frame to boot, 18 megapixels versus 30, and the 5D4 also has the insanely awesome autofocus system from Canon’s flagship ~$8k-for-the-body-alone EOS 1DX.

I fairly obsessively tag my photos on Flickr so it’s easy to find things, and the final tally for photos taken with the 7D is 2641!

The very first photo taken was of this flower at my parents’ place, when I got our original 35mm f/2 lens for my birthday in 2010 (the camera and lens are not mine alone, both Kristina and I share it equally, but getting the lens for my birthday was a handy way to not have pay the entire cost of it ourselves :P).

It’s difficult to pull only a handful of favourite photos out of twenty-six hundred, but these would definitely be amongst them, in many cases more for the memory than any particular quality of the photograph…

Kristina being nibbled by a horse on our first wedding anniversary—

Meerkats warming themselves at Taronga Zoo—

Dan looking right at a well-placed “Look right” sign—

Kristina looking stunning with our ring-flash—

Lily writing her name—

The train tunnels at Wynyard—

Lily feeding the lorikeets—

A toothy grin—

Christmas excitement—

The first photo taken in our new house—

Kristina being extremely nudged by a calf at Featherdale—

My very first photo of Beanie when we got him—

Nanny at Christmas hugging one of Lily’s presents—

Beanie in the office—

One of the several actresses we got in at work one Halloween, who were done up as zombies and CREEPY AS FUCK—

Kristina cracking up at how ridiculous Beanie is—

Lily and Scarlett’s matching bears at Christmas—

Family photo—

The fantastically creepy decorations and lighting for the latest Halloween at work—

Playing around with coloured gels on our flashes with Adam and Stacey—

Beanie playing with his best friend Leo—

The extraordinarily epic storm aftermath we had—

A photo walk we did at work one lunch where we had some volunteers to do a pseudo-modelling shoot—

Leo and Beanie zooming down the hall—

Wandering around Barangaroo before going to the Maritime Museum—

We sold the 7D to friends, so it’s definitely going to continue on in a good home. It was an absolute workhorse, I didn’t think to check the shutter count before we sold it but it never once gave any sort of trouble whatsoever. Meanwhile, we’ve already started taking new memories with the 5D Mark IV and I’d say we ought to get at least 10 years out of it if not more.

Back to Tasmania

15 April 201717 September 2018virtualwolfTravel / WordpressLeave a comment

We went back to Tasmania again last week, and it was pretty great!

Where last time we stayed in Hobart for the whole trip, this time we drove up to Bicheno first, which is about a two and a half hour drive north of Hobart. The accomodation itself (the “Diamond Island Retreat”) was not great, the house was built in probably the 1970s and had clearly had next to nothing done with it since. The kitchen was terrible and the two frying pans were both quite burnt and scratched up, and there was zero internet access (at least in terms of wifi, thankfully there was plenty of 4G reception). It was completely clean and tidy, at least.

That being said, the location was amazing. This was the view from the back deck –

You could walk down the paddock and down to the beach, which had some of the whitest sand I’ve seen. The first sunset was pretty epic as well.

They do “penguin tours” right near where we were staying, there’s a whole section of land that’s restricted to the public and they get lots of penguins living and breeding there. We went during the decidedly off-season and so only saw a couple of penguins, but one of them waddled its way up the beach and right past us to its burrow! The other penguins we could only see in the distance down on the rocks near the beach. The tours are done after the sun has set and the guides have special torches that emit really yellow light so as not to hurt the penguins’ eyes. During the breeding season you can apparently see upwards of a hundred penguins all coming ashore to feed their chicks.

There’s a few other things to do around Bicheno as well, one is Freycinet National Park which has some epic hiking trails through it (neither Kristina nor I are hikers so we opted to just go by what we could reach by car).

Then right up the road from where we were staying is Douglas-Apsley National Park, which is the same deal as Freycinet with the hiking, and requires a good couple of kilometres of dirt road to get to the carpark.

(There’s a few more photos from each in the photoset).

The last bit of Bicheno we saw was East Coast Natureworld, a big wildlife sanctuary and conservation area.

Don’t ask me why there was an ostrich there, I don’t know. 😛 The baby wombat at the top is named Esther, and she was just sitting there in the keeper’s arms dozing while the keeper was talking. They also do conservation and breeding for Tasmanian devils there, and we got to see one of them being fed which was pretty neat!

After that, we drove back down to Hobart and spent the rest of the trip just wandering around some more.

The huge orange ship is an icebreaker –

Aurora Australis is an Australian icebreaker. Built by Carrington Slipways and launched in 1989, the vessel is owned by P&O Maritime Services, but is regularly chartered by the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) for research cruises in Antarctic waters and to support Australian bases in Antarctica.

And it’s quite an impressive sight in person!

We also went up to Mount Nelson, which is the next-highest mountain in Hobart, but unfortunately they were doing hazard-reduction burns (basically controlled bushfires) so it was really smokey and you mostly couldn’t see anything. 🙁

Despite that, all in all it was an excellent trip.

iPhoneography

26 February 201722 July 2017virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

Both Kristina and I upgraded to the iPhone 7 last month, I’d heard the camera was good but I took it out for a spin last week when I went on a lunchtime photo walk with some co-workers, and man. I can see why the point-and-shoot market is dying! I processed all these photos in Lightroom on my iMac so it wasn’t solely done on the iPhone, but even so, I’m incredibly impressed.

It’s not going to replace a full DSLR setup in low-light or shallow depth-of-field situations, but where I’d be wandering around during the day taking photos at f/8 anyway…

Final enkitchening, and concert

15 October 20163 February 2018virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

We had the tiler out this morning to put the backsplash in, and the kitchen is basically finished now. The bits above the cupboards still need painting, but in terms of every day use, it’s done, and looks brilliant! The plumbing and electrics were all hooked up yesterday, and you have no idea how delightful it is to actually have a dishwasher now after three-and-a-half years of not having one.

We’ve not used the new induction cooktop properly in anger yet, but we made pasta last night, I put the “Boost” mode on, and it took the water from cold to a roiling boil in five minutes flat. I also seasoned the stainless steel frying pans that we bought from IKEA and had written off as being useless because they stick (apparently seasoning is essential) though they’ve not been put to the test yet. The only casualty in the change to induction is the wok, which despite having a fridge magnet stick to the bottom of it, isn’t sensed by the cooktop. Kristina did a bunch of reading and the best type to get is a carbon steel one, so we’ve got one on the way.

I also saw Lacuna Coil live last night, for the first time in seven years (due to them not having toured here in that long), and they absolutely ruled. They played all the songs I was hoping for. ? I saw them back in 2007 as well, and was a fair bit closer then but with a significantly crappier phone camera (and also a far far higher tolerance for shitty photos, evidently). 😛 Irritatingly, I had to leave half-way through the last song or I was going to miss the last train home due to there being trackwork this weekend. I’m currently running on about five hours of sleep because I didn’t get home until just before 1:30am, and woke up at 6:40am because the tiler was coming. Note to self, don’t schedule things early on a Saturday morning in future.

The Enkitchening, Part 3

13 October 20163 February 2018virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

The benchtops were installed today, and the sink and cooktop put into place, though neither were hooked up.

You guys, it’s starting to look like we have a real kitchen now!

The cooktop was about the same size as our previous one, perhaps slightly narrower due to not needing the control knobs on the side, but it looks hilariously smaller since the benches are so much larger.

Partial enkitchening

28 September 20163 February 2018virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

The kitchen people were finished with the cabinetry today so we’re back at home!

And OH MY GOD, they have done an unbelievably good job. The kitchen looks amazing and they haven’t even put the benchtops on yet, nor done any of the tiling for the splashback (the blue and purple stripes in the picture are tape that they haven’t taken off yet).

It really shows up how shitty the old kitchen was (compare how this unfinished kitchen looks to the old one in my last post), and how utterly wasteful with space it was. There’s a bit less floor space than the old one, but so much more storage!

31 August 201622 July 2017virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

On a lark I did a Google search for “virtualwolf”, and once I got past the first handful of pages (links to main things like my Twitter, Flickr, etc.) I was fascinated to discover just how many of my photos were being used in news articles and the like. I’ve always obsessively tagged my photos so they’re pretty easy to search, but a couple of years ago I went and changed the licensing on most of them to the Creative Commons “ShareAlike” license. The thought process was mostly, I’m never going to earn any money from my photography and have no desire to anyway, so why not! Flickr has the ability to search for images with specific licenses, so I suspect that contributed a lot as well.

There’s quite the range of subjects—

It’s pretty gratifying, really.

Hunter Valley farm stay

5 April 201617 September 2018virtualwolfTravel / WordpressLeave a comment

Kristina and I went up to the Hunter Valley for a long weekend last weekend. We stayed at a place called Hunter Hideaway Farm, and it was mostly nice but… a bit odd.

We arrived at about 2pm on Saturday, and there’s a long dirt road leading to the house that winds through fairly dense trees and bush. The lady that runs the place with her husband does ceramic sculptures and had put some of them on the trees and along the side of the dirt road as you start to get closer to the house. I understand the effect she was going for but it ended up just coming off as really creepy… a distinct “Someone who is insane and is going to kill you lives here” sort of vibe. It was even worse coming home after dinner when it was pitch black.

After that weirdness, we had just gotten inside when we heard a dog barking. We looked out the front door and there was a fairly sizeable dog barking loudly and in a very unfriendly manner at us. The husband rushed up and grabbed a hold of the dog’s collar, saying that the dog isn’t friendly and they weren’t expecting us yet (despite check-in being at 2, and why on earth would you have an unfriendly dog on a place that constantly has new people in it?!). After that he hauled the dog off into their house, but all of this was a slightly off-putting start to the vacation. The place had a kitchen in it, but it also had a sign saying that you needed to wash and clean and put away everything or there’d be a charge. I can understand not wanting people to leave the place as a complete mess but the sign was worded very passive-aggressively and really rubbed both of us the wrong way.

The view from the second story was pretty nice though.

The farm itself is an actual working farm, they breed Angus cows and have some horses and a couple of ponies as well. One of the horses was very derpy, which was great, but the ponies were completely uninterested in people and apparently were also prone to biting.

Neither of us drink wine, so we were mostly interested in the food of the area, but the first night’s dinner was underwhelming. It was at the Royal Oak Hotel and was recommended by the farm stay people but mine just wasn’t hugely flavourful and none of the flavours that were in Kristina’s dinner went together. The sheer distance that everything was from everything else was a bit annoying as well, not that that was entirely unexpected.

Saturday night’s weather was totally clear and a new moon as well, so the view of the stars was incredible; standing outside looking up at the Milky Way is always humbling.

The second day was spent doing some more wandering of the property in the morning (during which time that angry dog was out again and came running at us, but we just stood still and the wife came out and apologised and called him back, saying that he’s normally tied up—so maybe keep him tied up then), going out and buying lots of really nice cheese and chocolates, then relaxing and reading books in the afternoon. There was another, much friendlier, dog there that seems to have been a neighbour’s dog, and she was wandering around with us but mostly just running everywhere at full speed. There’s also an extremely picturesque lake that the cows enjoying sitting in and drinking from.

Sunset brought some really nice light and some great photos. The switch out of daylight savings was perfectly timed because we could admire the sunset and then go out to dinner, as opposed to all the gloriousness occurring while we were out.

Sunday night’s dinner was amazing. We went to an Italian restaurant called Lillino’s, and it was one of those meals where just everything was perfect and it needed absolutely nothing—no extra salt, no extra parmesan, nothing. If you’re in the Hunter Valley you really need to go eat there.

It was definitely nice to get away from everything and spend some time relaxing and taking photos, but overall we’re not going to bother going back to the Hunter Valley, it’s not really our thing (and the farm stay was weird).

A comfy Bean

5 April 201622 July 2017virtualwolfWordpress2 Comments

Well, Beanie is certainly snuggly today. Some might say somewhat too snuggly. It’s slightly hard to computer like this.

Tasmania, and LiveJournal to WordPress

7 December 201517 September 2018virtualwolfTravel / WordpressLeave a comment

So I’ve finally ditched LiveJournal and migrated it all over to my own WordPress site. I wanted to keep blogging things, but where people might actually read them. 😛

We decided to scale down our ambitions with the five-year anniversary trip, as Kristina is currently contracting and so would be losing out on quite a lot of money, and so went to Tasmania for five days instead. We’d heard great things but had never actually been before.

We stayed in the Hobart Art House, which was fantastically close to everything. We rented a car from Budget, and specified “Suzuki Swift or similar”. A Swift would have been fine, but instead we got a 1.2-litre Nissan Micra. It’s the most gutless car I’ve ever driven, and to get up the hill to where we were staying I had to put my foot all the way down to the firewall, and even then it still struggled.

Day 1 was wandering around the Salamanca Markets, burgers for lunch at Jack Greene (their beef and blue cheese burger is amazing), then some more wandering until dinner at Monty’s on Montpelier. Their website says “fine dining” and my god, if anything that’s underselling it. The food there is absolutely incredible.

Day 2 started with a three-hour boat ride around the south-eastern coast with Pennicott Wilderness Journeys. According to the tour guide it was one of the calmest days they’d seen this year, but unfortunately that didn’t help because about half-way through the trip I got horribly sea-sick, though thankfully (barely) not to the point of throwing up, but it meant I was mostly sitting there feeling absolutely miserable and not even being able to look at any of the scenery. Kristina was suffering as well, so in hindsight the whole boat trip was a terrible idea. It redeemed itself with lunch at Port Arthur Lavender (again, incredible food), then dinner at Rockwall. One of their specials was a coffee-rubbed wagyu, and it was definitely the best steak I’ve ever had. It was pretty much falling apart in my mouth, it was so tender.

Day 3, we went to Bruny Island. The “attractions” there were rather over-hyped, but the scenery is absolutely stunning. It’s like a tropical island in places, the clarity of the water is unbelievable. The afternoon was spent walking around the streets around where we were staying and checking out all the old houses, then dinner was at Mures. Mine was quite tasty, but Kristina’s risotto was crunchy, and even after she sent it back and got a new one, it wasn’t brilliant. She got a cold seafood tasting platter afterwards though, which was REALLY good.

Day 4, the last full day we had, we wandered around the botanical gardens, had lunch at Blue Eye (in keeping with everything else, the food was excellent), then went for a drive up to Mount Wellington. On the drive up, there was someone in a van who was doing 40km/h in a 70km/h zone and kept drifting over entirely into the other lane. It was terrifying! Thankfully there was a solid section of broken line on the road where I could overtake them, and the little Micra managed it surprisingly well. Mount Wellington itself was absolutely incredible, I’ve never been up a mountain where there’s alpine foliage before, and it felt like an entirely different world. Dinner was at Don Camillo, which was quite tasty but not on the level of some of the other restaurants.

On the last day we walked around Salamanca Place again, and had lunch back at Rockwall before heading to the airport. Our own car is only a 1.8-litre 2000 Corolla, but it was pretty funny feeling like it had a whole lot of grunt driving back from Sydney airport after having spent five days driving the Micra around. 😛

All in all, Tasmania was excellent and we’ll definitely be back!

Woah

4 May 201322 July 2017virtualwolfLiveJournal6 Comments

Today is Lily’s sixth birthday! That’s crazy!

This weekend isn’t our weekend with her, so we’re going to do a birthday thing next Saturday and will then go over to mum and dad’s for a birthday dinner on Sunday. Should be good!

I took this photo of Lily last weekend.

Speaking of photos, Lily’s been running around with our old point-and-shoot camera, I’d gone through all the photos and picked out the good ones, and we sat down last weekend and actually edited them together, and here they are! Quite funny. 🙂

Merry Christmas!

25 December 201222 July 2017virtualwolfLiveJournalLeave a comment

For the first time in I’m not sure how many years, I actually have the period between Christmas and New Year’s Day off work! We don’t get very many issues logged at work so we only need one person on, and one of the guys on my team offered to work over that period, so huzzah!

I picked up Lily at midday for our regular Christmas lunch, and dropped her back at around 5pm. Christmas itself was very nice, I took a few photos and am seriously happy with them. kungfupolarbear bought me Halo 4, which is by all accounts a brilliant game, and my parents bought me a Paul C. Buff Extreme Silver PLM — basically a very fancy reflector umbrella that you shoot a flash into and it produces really amazing quality light. I’ve not given it a proper go yet, but I’m very much looking forward to it!

In other news, we got the unit in Waterloo that we were looking at on the 15th! We go in to sign the lease on the 2nd of January, and have removalists booked for the 12th. Walking to work is going to be SO GOOD. \o/

And with that, my photos!

Full set is here.

How things change

24 November 201222 July 2017virtualwolfLiveJournal1 Comment

So I took Lily to her swimming lessons this morning (long story, the short version being her mother is back to be being flaky and Lily’s grandmother asked if I could bring her to swimming as they were going to be away), and while I was there I saw one of the guys I went to high school with. He was one of the “cool” kids, always smoked, acted all tough, just generally a jock (obviously I had nothing to do with him even in high school).

Now he has two daughters that he brings to swimming and is driving a Kia mini-van. If he’s happy with his life, more power to him, but the contrast between him in school and now is just highly amusing to me.

Our saga with the car is finally over, thank christ. Though unfortunately we didn’t get up getting any money, the insurance dropped the claims due to the lack of evidence either way, which is pretty much what I was expecting when the useless fucking witness never actually showed up. We just need to get rid of the old car and get the old plates swapped over to the new one, and it’ll be bloody well done.

In other news, we had our Melbourne Cup shindig at work at the start of this month (the 6th, specifically), and I’ve been borrowing a colleague’s Canon EF 135mm f/2L lens (for the non-photographers: it’s a very well-regarded and high-quality lens, and is especially good for portraits). I brought that along to the do, and got some photos that I’m really happy with. I’ve had three or four people at work use my photos as their Twitter avatar or the avatar on our internal wiki! 😀 The photos are here.

I had a heap of people complimenting me on them after I blogged about it at work, then had someone ask me if I wanted to take photos for the last Atlassian User Group (I couldn’t, due to already being busy that night), and someone else ask if I could take photos for our next ShipIt, which is at the end of this coming week! (I’m going to do that one, since it’s during the day).

We’re going to buy one ourselves, though not until after we’ve moved. We’re looking at trying to find somewhere around Waterloo, and if we don’t have any luck there, the lower north shore (St Leonards or thereabouts, and further south). Turramurra (where we are now) is a pretty useless suburb, my commute to the city isn’t bad but kungfupolarbear has an extra five minutes on the train and then another fifteen minute walk to get to her work.

And lastly, I was mucking around with DSLR Remote today, and got two photos that I’m really pleased with!

\o/

Boston!

28 August 20129 June 2019virtualwolfLiveJournal / Travel7 Comments

kungfupolarbear and I spent the last two weeks in Boston, for her 30th birthday!

The flight there was horrific though… from Sydney to San Francisco there was a toddler who spent almost the whole flight screaming (and then proceeded to scream the whole way through customs too), so we got basically no sleep. United had kept bumping our connecting flight up, so we ended up with a two-hour layover, customs took bloody forever to get me through and then the TSA were a bunch of cunts and decided to take forever as well. We were literally running to the gate at the end and made it with about five minutes to spare. kungfupolarbear‘s friend Jen picked us up from the airport and we started our trip at midnight with a cheese steak from a greasy diner nearby (we stayed with Jen for the first two nights and for the last one) which may have been the greatest food ever. In fact, it’s making me hungry just typing this. 😛

The very first day we went shopping and bought a heap of stuff for extremely cheap (compared to what we could get them for in Australia). The next day Jen dropped us off at the place we were staying, which unfortunately turned out to be shit. We’d rented a room through AirBnB, and the woman who was living there was a weirdo. It had good reviews, but I have no idea how or why. The bed was broken in such a manner that unless both of us were lying in it, both sides were sitting at an angle and you’d almost roll out of it. Also kungfupolarbear had a weird reaction to the food or all the high fructose corn syrup in everything or something on the second day, and spent the night throwing up. 🙁 Fortunately there was a 24 hour pharmacy five minutes up the road, so I made a couple of trips there and she was pretty well recovered by the next night.

Despite the shitness of the place we stayed in, it was in a really good location. It was about half-way between Davis Square and Porter Square, both of which have a bunch of coffee shops and restaurants and such. They’re also on the train line, and it was all of about five stops from Porter to get into the actual city of Boston. I wish there was somewhere affordable in Sydney that was similar to that area. Newtown area is probably closest, but without the “affordable” part (also without the cleanliness, heh). There’s a coffee shop in Davis Square called Diesel Cafe, and we’d often go there at night just to sit around and be out of the house.

The weather was brilliant, it was humid as hell the first night we arrived, but after that it was a great temperature and not humid for the rest of the trip. We had a couple of occasions where there was about five minutes of light rain before it blew over, and that was it. We timed the visit really well, as everyone was saying that the weather had been utter crap for weeks beforehand, and the university students were only just starting to move in while we were there (the 1st of September is the big move-in date), so all the coffee shops and such generally had plenty of space available. It’s funny how compact Boston is compared to Sydney. We’d put together a list of things we wanted to see over the two weeks, and got it all done within the first week!

Second day we wandered around Harvard Square and the surrounds, and then the day after we went into some of the older parts of the city. The full photoset is here, there are some of my favourites.

On the first Friday we went into the North End, which is basically the Italian part of the city. It’s absolutely filled with Italian restaurants, and all the streets are narrow and windy. We picked a restaurant almost at random, and HOLY SHIT the food was mind-blowingly awesome! Got some good photos too.

For kungfupolarbear‘s birthday we had brunch with one group of friends, then dinner at Red Bones with another group followed by bowling. It was a pretty awesome day all up!

On Sunday we went to Rockport. We’ve been there each of the three times I visited Boston, and I love it! We had amazingly delicious crabcakes and stuffed clams from a shop that actually does the fishing of them out of the water too, and got a bunch of photos. It’s just such a photogenic place!

We also revisited the Boston Public Library on the last Tuesday we were there, and got some vastly-improved pictures compared to last time. After we were done with the library we walked down to the Charles River Esplanade and just sat in a shady spot enjoying the weather. A++, would relax there again.

Wednesday we went to the MIT Museum, and man, it was so cool. There was an exhibit of Arthur Ganson’s “kinetic sculptures” that did all sorts of interesting things. They made for some good photos too! After that we wandered back up to Harvard via Massachusetts Ave before meeting up with tattooankh for dinner.

Thursday was two of the Boston Harbour Islands, Georges Island and Spectacle Island. kungfupolarbear hadn’t ever been to them even while she was living in Boston, so it was new to both of us! Georges Island was definitely the more interesting of the two. There was a big military fort, Fort Warren, that had been built there in the mid-1800s for the defence of Boston Harbour, subsequently used as a prison during the Civil War, and finally sold by the military after World War II. You can walk through almost all of it, and there were a number of tunnels through it that were totally pitch black where I had to use the light on my phone to see where we were going.

Spectacle Island was less interesting, though there were some good views. It was basically a big park on an island. After that we had a wander through Downtown Crossing again, then met up with friends for drinks and pool.

And then finally on Friday we wandered some more through Downtown Crossing and hit up Quincy Market!

We stayed back at Jen’s on Friday night so she could drop us off at the airport on Saturday. We had breakfast on Saturday at the same diner that we started with the night we arrived. Bookended by diner!

All in all it was a really great trip despite the initial sickness and the awfulness of the place we stayed. I love Boston, and we’re going to try to go back again sooner than three and a half years! We’re also going to try to go in October so we can get some autumn weather in, and also so we don’t have to worry about finding a place to stay that has air conditioning.

Oops

4 December 201122 July 2017virtualwolfLiveJournal4 Comments

Nearly two months without an update! D’oh. I’ve completely forgotten to even look at my friends page for the past few weeks. 🙁

Work has been going very well. At the end of October we launched a whole new platform for our hosted offerings, called OnDemand, and it’s been very well received by everyone. There’s been a massive uptake of it, but our support load hasn’t exploded.
The three of us in Hosted Support are currently sitting next to the other two hosted platform teams, which is really nice. We can just turn around and ask questions, or we know immediately if something’s going funny.

Speaking of work, we had an awesome Melbourne Cup Day lunch last month. Everyone dressed up and we left work at 11am and went to this really nice venue on the harbour. We had absolutely delicious food, plenty of beer and wine, and it was all paid for by work! I brought the camera and gave it a good workout, and got a bunch of great photos. In fact, this particular one was used as a presentation slide by one of the CEOs in the last all-hands meeting we had! 😀 (It was the “Questions?” screen, so nothing major, but I was pretty chuffed).

We’re currently twelve days away from moving house. We were wanting to stay in our current place until we saved up enough money to buy a unit, but it turns out the owners want to move back in. They had a baby and had just moved closer to the city while she was pregnant, but the douchebag real estate agent neglected to mention any of this when we signed the lease originally, and assured us that it’d be fine to renew the lease when the time came.
The new place is in Turramurra, about ten minutes closer to the city than where we are now. It’s a bit bigger than our current place, and it’s actually an investment property. The owners wanted to make sure we were going to be staying a goodly while before they agreed to get flyscreens installed (there aren’t any right now), so that’s a good sign.
We’ve done a reasonable amount of packing already, and not having to de-mould every goddamn thing in the place is making it so much faster.

I completely forgot to mention that we went down to Melbourne for the weekend on the 9th/10th/11th of September, and it was great! We stayed in a really nice hotel on St Kilda Rd so were able to just wander up to Flinders St and get to wherever. And oh, the food! Man, both kungfupolarbear and I would be SO FAT if we lived in Melbourne.
I’d been there once before to visit Xenex but that was many years ago now, and I don’t even recall what we did. 😛 It was so different to Sydney and I can’t wait to go back. Naturally, I took heap of photos. 😉

A friend of Kristina’s came over from the US and stayed with us for a week. The ENTIRE TIME, the weather was absolute rubbish. 🙁 We went up to the Blue Mountains and literally couldn’t see anything. I’ve never seen fog anything like it.
The shitty weather has pretty much continued since then, and it’s feeling more like we’re going from autumn into winter, rather than already being in summer. Supposedly it’s meant to be a cool wet summer, so I’m not holding out any hope of the weather improving. 🙁

Lily starts school in about two months! 😮 And she’s turning five in May. Holy shit. I have no idea where that time went, it’s crazy. She’s doing really well with her letters, she knows the whole alphabet, and I set her up with WriteRoom and my old iBook G4, so she can spell words from her books and see them right on the screen. She actually asks me if she can “do letters”, which is good! I just looked, and my Lily set on Flickr has 226 photos in it. 😀 It’s fun looking through all the old photos and seeing her getting steadily older.

New shiny!

4 September 201122 July 2017virtualwolfLiveJournalLeave a comment

I bought a ring flash from DIY Lighting Kits, which arrived on Friday. I put it together yesterday, and am very pleased with the results!

The family. Also, photos.

13 August 201122 July 2017virtualwolfLiveJournalLeave a comment

We went over to my parents’ place last night for dinner, and my sister and her boyfriend and their adorable little girl were there. I certainly gave the new lens a good workout, and got some really good photos. It was really nice to hang out with the family (my sister lives down in Nowra, which is a good three hours drive away, so we don’t see her very often).