Hehe #2

I apologise in advance to any women out there who might be reading this blog. To all the guys... well. Try not to laugh too loud within punching distance of a woman.

Hehe

Lol... Relationships are often like this, innit. :-)

Trivial Pursuit

In the first movie out of the Back to the Future Trilogy, Marty starts his trip back in time in the parking lot of "Twin Pines Mall,". Immediately arriving in 1955, he hits one of 2 pine trees. When he returns to 1985, the sign now reads "Lone Pine Mall."

In 1974, a former Sacramento air traffic controller named Fred L. Worth published The Trivia Encyclopedia, which he followed in 1977 with The Complete Unabridged Super Trivia Encyclopedia, and in 1981 with Super Trivia, vol. II. The popularity of these books (one appears as a prop in movie Almost Famous) laid the groundwork for the first edition of Trivial Pursuit in the early 1980s.

When Star Wars was a farce

In Grabowiec, a village in Poland, one of the streets was named after Obi-Wan Kenobi in April 2005.


Well that was kinda more about films than anything else... I have way too much time on my hands.

-Fin-

Learning Adventures #2

Here today ladies and gentlemen, in an easy to understand format, are a few of the secrets of the photographer. (God Bless Wikipedia) It seems that unless I'm learning stuff while trawling the internet for hours during my job, I fall asleep too quickly.

Aperture: The aperture defines the size of the opening in the lens, which in advanced cameras can be adjusted to control the amount of light reaching the film or digital sensor (CCD or CMOS). In combination with variation of the shutter speed, and variation in film speed (ISO), this will regulate the photograph's degree of exposure to light. Typically, a fast shutter speed will require a larger aperture to ensure a sufficient exposure to light, just as a slow shutter speed will typically require a smaller aperture to prevent excessive exposure to light.


The first image is taken with a low aperture and a low shutter speed, the second with high aperture and high shutter speed.


If you look at the fullsize version of this image, you'll see that the aperture is set to f/11. The depth-of-field scale (top) indicates that a subject which is anywhere between 1 and 2 meters in front of the camera will be rendered acceptably sharp. If the aperture was set to f/22 instead, everything from 0.7 meters to infinity would be in focus.

Anyway that's enough for now, I'm gonna go off and learn more.

-Fin-

Shopping!

Well... after the last post I went shopping. Ended up getting like 10 of those lean cuisine things, but I've realised that I'll probably only need to eat them about 3-4 of the days out of 7 each week so I've bought a month's worth :D

But yes... twas interesting how expensive fruit was. So here's the breakdown of the fruit, of which I intend to eat like one piece of each type of fruit (one banana, one mandarin, one apple) a day.
7 bananas = 1.748kg @ $3.63/kg = $6.35
........$0.90/banana

5 apples = 0.918kg @ $3.94/kg = $3.62
........$0.72/apple

5 mandarins = 1.303kg @ $3.63/kg = $4.73
........$0.95/mandarin

Fruit = $2.57/day, $17.99/week.

In unrelated news, I've taken another 4 hours of work a week, taking my job hours to 30.5 a week :D

Anyway, hope you enjoyed my brand of micro-management :) I enjoy crunching numbers, it makes me feel like I'm in control... but of course the actual control of this will only last a little while :D then I'll be back to junk food etc.

-Fin-

The Cost of Health

This was a note that I wrote this morning to myself.

I have no idea how to prepare healthy meals, so...

Here's the cost of buying them per week.

Dinner
At the moment Lean Cuisine's are on special in Woolworths, all going for $3.89.
7 x 3.89 = 27.23

Lunch... I've just gotta start buying fruit... :-S Keep apples, bananas and mandarins in my bag.

Spend at most per week, $22.50.

That takes total spending per week to ~ $50.

It sounds so easy in theory, doesn't it? Notice I didn't even take into account Breakfast :) Ah well, I'll get the hang of it eventually. Breakfast shouldn't cost more than Vita Brits (9 days per 1kg box, 1 box = $4), Milk (1L Longlife = 3 days = $0.99) and Canned Fruit (one 850g tin = 4/5 days = $2.89).

Therefore.... Vita Brits = 44c/day, Milk = 33c/day, Canned fruit = 72c/day, = $1.49/day, x 7 = $10.43/week.

Sorry, there's still a businessman inside of me.

-Fin-

Japanese Birthdays

In response to a question I asked one of my friends in Japan, she went and asked her students about what Japanese people did for their birthdays.

Here's what was discovered:

It seems that a Japanese birthday celebration has the same essentials as an Aussie one.

There is usually a family celebration dinner. Often the mother will cook a meal requested by the person having the birthday. Following dinner there is the birthday cake. Apparently, you are able to buy chocolate name plates to put ontop the birthday cake but I'm yet to see one. The only unusual thing about the cake is the candles. Instead of having one candle for each year, the Japanese, in their usual style of ingenuity, have one big candle to represent 10 years and the little candles to represent one year. That way if someone is 40 years old, you need only four large candles instead of 40 tiny ones.

They sing the same 'Happy Birthday' song as us however they don't do the "hip hip hoorays!" afterwards and they don't make a wish as the candles are blown out. They were also very amused to hear about the tradition of kissing the nearest boy/girl if the knife touches the bottom of the cake. I don't think they do birthday punches either.

One of my younger students said that young Japanese also have a second party for friends after the family party.

I told them about games that are played at children's birthday parties, like running with an egg in a spoon, bobbing for apples, musical chairs, pass the parcel and smacking a pinata. They don't play any of those games at children's parties here, but they do put candy on a table in a small pile of flour. Children have to try to get the candy out without their hands so they end up with flour all over their faces. They also play a game called mama and baby bird where you have to use suction on to pick up a peanut on the end of a straw to drop it in the open mouth of your partner.

As far as party food goes, I think Japanese kids are being ripped off. They don't get goodies the likes of butterfly cakes, fairy bread, chocolate crackles or traffic lights sandwhiches. Instead they get sushi, oshizushi (pressed sushi), cherios, red rice or some strange dish with layers of tuna, rice and fish amongst other things.

The red rice was interesting. It is made from a particular type of rice (they are really particular about types of rice here in Japan) which is boiled in water with red beans. The red beans cause the water to go red and thereby the rice to go pink. This is, according to one of my students, a celebration dish that is served not only at birthdays but also other important milestones in a person's life such as starting school and graduation. Her mother used to serve this dish at every birthday along with a sea-bream fish with the head still attached.

In Australia, our special birthdays are celebrated at ages 18, 21 and 50. Here in Japan, it is at age 20 and 60. Twenty is the age at which Japanese become adults. This is when they can vote, drive a car, smoke, drink, gamble and get married without parental consent. Sixty is considered an important age because this is when the twelve years of the chinese zodiac has cycled five times. This is like returning to the age of 0.... at least that's the understanding I got from the conversation with my student.

-Fin-

Charlie Kaufman is one strange pickle...

Watched Adaptation last night.

Now I know way too many people have said this already, and that saying it makes me sound like a little fanboy, but damn, Charlie Kaufman is a genius.

This film twists and convolutes around itself like an Escher, leaving you slightly creeped out in the end, but breathless from a movie about a screenwriter writing a movie about a lady writing a book about a guy who steals orchids.

A little while back myself and aaron (my housemate) were talking about how interesting itd be to create a documentary that wasn't actually true, but then convince everyone that it was. The Blair Witch project basically did that... and Adaptation did it for me. By the end of it, I was already on the internet trying to find if there really was a book of the same name as the one in the movie,(there is) if Charlie Kaufman has a twin brother and if LaRoche really was an orchid poacher. This film just has so many real-life tie-ins that it was really creepy to be watching the film...

Crazy stuff, all in all. Just crazy. Like this.

But yeah. Apart from that, I haven't done anything crazy. But something that all the people reading this blog need to know is that this friday and saturday, a couple of friends (Aaron my housemate and Bindi from my church) are having birthdays, so we're going to do something on Saturday to celebrate their bday. Send an email to l2.harrisATqut.edu.au to find out what's going on, and make sure you don't tell Aaron or Bindi. Just substitute the AT with an @, I write it like that to avoid spam.

Coolies - have fun this week.

-Fin-