interesting read

well first off i have not been posting on here nearly enough lately. got swamped with school and just never got back into it. hoping to make some changes to the site and stuff over the next while so will likely start getting more regular posts.

the actual reason i’m writing is because i was just looking through American Photo’s Editor’s Choice 2007 and it was an interesting read. i will have to admit i never really gave sony much respect but i think i will have to have a bit closer look now after reading a bit about their offerings. thats it really thought someone might like to have a look through and see some cool photography stuff that i want and can’t afford.

arrrrrgh

ok so i in no way support or even think that piracy is in anyway good or anything like that at all… but well the picture on the following was really cute…

following the picture the article goes on to tell you how to pirate stuff i think… i am not interested in that kind of thing at all but if you want to see the source of the dog picture go on over to their site…

internet here

well i think i have mentioned before that the internet connection here isn’t that great, though much better than what i had on res at UC. if you are curious how fast your connection is go have a look at this site

oh and i found out about it because i read this article

UPDATE: sorry i just saw how bad that picture looks on here, i will get a better version of it up sometime here. basically its slower than a DSL connection… about halfway between DSL and dial up…

boxing

well i had a chance on friday to go to my first ever live boxing match. it was pretty interesting, and there were a lot of people jammed into a pretty small hall. it was a combination of kickboxing and boxing matches with the main event being a former kickboxer’s first boxing match and as the local paper said:

The home-town hero, the bar-working brawler who just “loves to fight”
smashed infamous rugby league star turn boxer John Hopoate in just 1min
29sec at the Erindale Auditorium on Friday night.

UPDATE: ok so i wanted to add the video that we took of one fight too but they are too big right now so i will get that sorted and maybe get around to putting them up later…

balloons

well there was a balloon festival going on in canberra this weekend, i didn’t really get a chance to see too much of it. saw a bunch flying around on saturday morning and then today (monday) we had a whole bunch fly over the house which was pretty cool.

there were some other activities that they put on too but i didn’t make it to them.  i’ll post some pictures i took later but just thought i would post this to remind me to do it.

road trip

well spent good friday on a little road trip south to the snowy mountains. it was fun i hadn’t ever been there so we loaded up the car and went off. wasn’t the best weather in the world for it but it only rained at the start of the drive for a couple minutes and was just cloudy for the rest. took a bunch of pictures along the way too, which you can go look at on flickr. in the snowy mountains there is the kosciuszko national park…

which in it contains a few ski hills and most importantly the tallest mountain in australia… mount kosciuszko.

something i learned and which is really so great you need to read it yourself is this:

Various measurements of the peak originally called by that name showed it to be slightly lower than its neighbour, Mount Townsend, and the names were thereupon transposed by the New South Wales Lands Department, so that Mount Kosciusko still remains the highest peak of Australia, and Mount Townsend ranks as second. The picture by Eugene von Guerard hanging in the National Gallery of Australia titled “Northeast view from the northern top of Mount Kosciusko” is actually from Mt Townsend.

ya so they were too lazy to change the record books so they just swapped the names of the mountains. good old aussie logic.

new toy

ok so i got myself an early birthday present today and i wanted to share… it started with me going up to bunnings to buy a single bolt to make a tripod on the cheap… turns out you only can buy packs of bolts there and well that stops being as cheap so i had to revise my plan… went with a buddy to the mall and wandered around and found the above in a photo shop… and i had looked at it online before and thought it was really cool so decided to walk out of the store with it (after buying it). i haven’t had too much chance to play with it yet but i know it is going to come in handy along the way. its great cuz you can wrap it around things to get a steady shot or just use it like a normal tripod. the only thing i have noticed that is going to be a bit of an annoyance is the ‘quick release’ part of it which is supposed to stay on the camera actually blocks the access to the battery and memory so i will have to take that off to change those but really thats not too big of deal i don’t think. so right now pretty happy about finding it, i think it will work out great.

300

so just went and saw 300… and while i expected that when you get together people who made sin city, dawn of the dead and i’m sure a bunch of other great movies that you are going to have something cool to watch i really didn’t expect it to be so gripping. i love when stories are actually told with the visuals, with the emotions coming from actors voices and you aren’t lead through these complicated tales to get to something unsatisfying at the end. sometimes it is just great to get a movie that you know is just what it is… a story portraying a culture’s heroes and doing it well…. i could have probably done without having to look at that creepy hunchback but everything else was pretty powerful…

on the topic of movies, i keep being reminded how much later movies come out over in australia and to me that is so pointless… its not like they can’t physically get them here on time they just seem to do it as some weird marketing ploy, yet they wonder why people are tempted to grab movies off of the internet to watch. it is annoying when a business pretends that it is a privilege to partake in their service or offering and forgets that its really the other way around.

wandering

went for a walk tonight and took a few random pictures. everytime i think how great it would be to have a tripod. my brother sent me a method of how to make one on the cheap the other day and i think i may have to do that. i never really thought i would get into photography that much it…

but i think maybe i have realized that there are a lot of different ways to take pictures and i really do enjoy just random scenery or buildings and things like that… not 4000 pictures of people sitting in a hot tub (not that i’m referring to anyone, and if i was thats fine we all can use the hobby how it suits us best). its also made me realize that down the road (quite a ways down the road) i would really like to learn how to do a bit more with photography… maybe take a class or something in it just to get better and to understand how it all works better.

rugby league

i thought i would mention i went and watched a couple games of rugby league the other weekend. it was a local junior team (well two teams, i think one was 16 and the other was 18yr olds) playing some team from sydney. they didn’t do that well but it was pretty good to watch… they have a few steps to go before they make it to the pro’s but i’m sure some of them will make it (trust me i have no idea who…. they all seem to just run around out there, i’m not sure what they all do).