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Following great traditions, Nigel and I went on another of our spur of the moment Kmart shopping sprees, far out on the Burwood Highway.


We decided it was high time for another visit halfway home from seeing the (not so) spectacular "The Brothers Grim" at Hoytts at Melbourne Central with Andrew, Nigel, Carlo and yours truly.

Click any images to enjoy their full versions.






ALSO IN THIS POST
I've been enjoying teaching English to Hyeonah and Inhwa from South Korea the past two weeks. In our discussions I've come across a couple of interesting things.

Boring Alert.

1. Another reason we live in 'The lucky country':
Australian students not only get treated with Christmas (and for some of us Birthdays) and a great NYE bash over the longest break of the year, it's also SUMMER for that break. IN ADDITION, we also have NO HOMEWORK to finish over the break, since the school year is already done! Compare this to our friends in the northern hemisphere: A measly few weeks over Christmas and NYE, and their apparently illustrious summer 'vacation' is plopped right in the middle of the school year. BUMMER!
Indeed. 'White Christmas' with 'Hot Pudding' - A trifling sacrifice to pay!

Where a Northern Hemisphere student might say at the start of a summer break 'What subjects are you thinking of taking next semester?'

An Aussie would reply 'Who cares! It's too far away to really think about it!!'

(The above doesn't really make any practical sense though, but it illustrates my point!)

2. In Korea they count everyone's age from Jan 1st. You still keep and celebrate your own birthdays, but for general public purposes, everyone born in, for example, 1984 is 22. Which means that even if you're born at the end of December, and really only 19, you're still considered as old as your friend born in January and who is really 20, so you can legally go out for drinks with them!

[1]

More photos on Flickr.

After biting nails for weeks, finally my Sony Librié has arrived.
I've wanted one of these since I heard about them back in '04. It's [almost] like the iPod for books.

I gasped at the screen resolution and so far the device has proven that reading digital text can be as comfortable as reading on pulp. In fact, I'm reading on ePaper, from eInk.

It only uses power to turn pages, so the AAA batteries should last for months (the batteries had Astro Boy on them :). You can liken it to a high-res electronic etch-a-sketch.

I downloaded some free books in Librié format from manybooks.net. They're old, but it's sometimes nice to enjoy some culture that existed before 1992.

There's an unofficial OS X app called Libriate that loads and makes books for the Librié, it's a little buggy and I fired an email off to the developer to ask if I could have a look at the source. He said that should be ok!

Anyway, I look forward to many hours of reading with it! After all I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of being Earnest.

[1] Incidentally normally the English text is closer together. These are The Brontë Sister's poems, and thus are spaced so.

This Feed is great. Ftrain.com.

Go from Followup/Distraction

Take a look at this tower EnviroMission was planning to build just outside Mildura.

I think the whole damn thing just might have worked, if it wasn't going to fall over. I mean it's really big.


Via BLDGBLOG where there are more details. Also take a look at EnviroMission's website for the video the above screen shots are from.

Looks like they've scaled down the project to 50MW power stations rather than the one whopping 200MW station. I'll say I'm a little dissapointed!

Less that 12 hours and I'll be on summer holidays. Finally, to put Uni behind me for the year and get on with what I really want to do!

But alas for the next hour at least I'm doing this: Chinese Translations.

256kb 3gp video (right click and save (maybe))

Not altogether un-fun though. I like writing Chinese characters. I wrote some tips on learning them back at the start of semester.

I like the way the video shows the Chinese being filled in the blanks from this perspective. A sign of the times?

Kind of ironic that the translations are like "暑假里你打算去哪儿旅行?" Which means "Where do you plan to go for a holiday this summer?"

Well.