Barossa Valley

Visit the Barossa Valley today, it's about a 40 minute ride from Adelaide. It's the home of many many wineries, but it lacks sufficient amount of Houdini to make me love it. J/k!

Click here for pics!

Cold...

It's bloody freezing this morning, so cold, I didn't even get out of bed to make breakfast! Weather reports like the lows are about 10 degrees C, so erm. Not good. Breath was condensing just by exhaling (outdoors only thankfully).

I recently got a soft shell (from Mountain Hardware!) for use during home-work-home wear, it's doing really great, no need to wear more than a t-shirt under. It's at work my fingers are freezing off! Damned fingers. Time to hunt for gloves.

Alvin

Indy 4 and Ironman

Just watched Indy 4 oh.. half an hour ago. It was a blast; no complaints. Catch Ironman if you get the chance; it's a full out hour of laughs!

VirtualBox on Ubuntu

Only a few apps left on Windows that I absolute want to use - my mp3 player's incredibly useless transfer program, and Eve Mon, one of the tools I use when playing eve online. Hence, the dual booting. This ensure of course, max performance and compatibility, but rebooting sucks.... especially since you can't have your mp3s playing whilst rebooting. Anyways...

My vfx super was using VMWare to run H on his Mac Book Pro, which works very well, with a minor hit to the screen redraws. So thought I'd give virtualization a go. My last fling with VM Ware wasn't too exciting. Virtual Box OTOH is just so simple to install and setup. All I had to do was create a virtual disk, and then create a new box that used the disk. XP was installed in under 15 minutes, and by installing some "Guest Tools", I had access to my graphics card setup in minutes. What's best, sound works on both XP and Linux at the same time, so Eve mon will be able to beep me when training events occur, and I'm still got my MP3 active.

Happy happy! Now, if only I had the resources to get a nice, fast lappy hehe :)

New Houdini Videos!

Been doing LOTS of Houdini in and out of work; every wednesday is Houdini day at RSP, where a number of peeps interested in Houdini hang out during lunch time to listen to presentations of H. Which is usually like, me, my fx super, my fx lead, and one other comper using H. Which is cool. Especially the last session which utilized some CHOPs. My fx super was demonstrating using chops to create camera moves from the mouse, and I had this really nifty demo of turning Houdini into a real time shooter game. A lame ass game really, but it showed the flexibility of H.

I'm also teaching Houdini classes on Mondays, so long as my work schedule isn't crazy (soon to be, I hear). I was quite surprised at the interest.

Oh yeah, H = Houdini, M == Maya.

In anycase, this post is about some of the new videos I got on my YouTube channel:



Some of my stuff is not rendered, so I'll upload once I get 'em.

Cleland Wildlife Park

Visited the Cleland Wildlife Park after a great breakkie at Serves You Right along Unley Road. My colleague and I didn't know there was a public bus up to the park (only runs 3 times on weekends though), so we took one from the central bus station.

Unfortunately it only gave us a short stay at the park, about an hour and a half? Not enough to soak up the park. Only managed to visit the Kangaroo areas, and skimmed through the other parts. We really wanted to take pictures of Koalas, but no luck finding them in the time we had left :( I'm probably coming back again.

Here be the pics! They're quite special to me, so I'm putting 'em into their own folder.

There is another Zoo, Monarto Zoo like 70km away, I'm going to try to go there soon. In there though, are like African Safari type critters, so I'm thinking of getting a long lens :( 55-200 VR? Sigh.

I have got to get the nice ones up into Flickr... gah...

More photos!

Forgot about my "everyday" camera, the crap sub-vga res pixel grabber on my phone. Got a whole bunch of pics from LNS peeps to Adelaide snaps at http://picasaweb.google.com/GallenWolf/IphonePhotos

More soon! Hoping to visit the Monarto Zoo this weekend. That's like a Safari or so I hear :)

Alvin

Dun dun dun! An update!!

Erm yeah. Been awhile. Work is going well, nothing to report.

Highlight of this post would be the new album I've created on Picasa Web for my pics in South Australia. Visit this linky:

http://picasaweb.google.com/GallenWolf/SouthAustraliaPics

Other news... tried to install Ubuntu 8.04... and failing miserably. Updates do not work, and installing from the DVD gives me a Grub Error 15. (?!!!?) In anycase, 7.10's been pretty ok. Mic's not working (hate linux sometimes...) - but I've got my XP well and running! Eve is installed, so all is good :)