This week they did all the Harry Potter movies (go to the site to see higher resolution images):

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001)

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:Part 2 (2011)

Edit: they just did the whole series!!

I was pretty sure it was an Aussie character actor, been in a heap of Aussie movies, but I couldn't find him.

Then I showed the sweetie and he was all.. oh he was in "The Dish"...

*bling* 

Well fricken duhhhh... because that screenshot above was taken at The Dish a week ago!!  I was just watching all the videos I'd taken that day.  Mostly of the dish moving around.  But there was a quick grab of the VIPs who were all standing right near me at one point, so I turned around and took a very quick shot of them all on the video.  And that's when I saw that dude!!  I never even realised it when I was there, I just saw it on the video.

So yeah.  Roy Billing.  He played the mayor in The Dish.  Which is pretty funny, because in the video, he actually puts his hand on the current mayor of Parkes :)

As it turns out, I shoulda known - it was on the program and everything hehe.

It took us fifty minutes to make our way along the queue and into the room they'd setup (which was a bigger room than last time).  There was a lot more Lego there this year, looks like a lot of SydLUG people had brought Lego down as well.

They didn't have the Hogwarts Castle this time, but there was a super awesome Space Lego setup (probably my favourite thing of the day) and an amazing western scene.

Last year when I went my camera was exactly one day old.  This year it was exactly one year old.  !!  To the day!  Since changing the focus mode in Japan last year I've been a lot happier with the results out of the camera, and generally this year's photos were better than last year's.

There were lots and lots of town/city scenes and lots of trains..

Bridges..

Towers..

Cool things from movies..

A delorean and train from Back to the Future





Wall-E and Eve




Lots of Star Wars stuff








The Blacktron vs Classic Space diorama

A big minifig


Snoopy!


A cool mountain scene


Parliament House

Another space type scene

But some of the most fun was in the detail people put into the dioramas.  You really need to look closely to see everything that's going on.  So much fun!

Fishing a skeleton out of the water

Geisha and sailors inside a very large building, that had stuff going on on all the floors

Chickens in the western scene

A bicyclist hit by a car

Quite enjoyed it actually.  

For the most part it was very dark, with a few little bits of humour to lighten it slightly.  (Which is always a good reason for seeing a movie in 2D - you don't make the dark scenes even darker by wearing sunglasses!).  It's amazing how different all of the movies have been.

Some gorgeous special effects.  And I think I saw the bit of the set that I saw last year in the back lot of Leavesdon Studios.

Not much in the way of character development outside the few main characters.  Most of the other characters barely get a line or two each.  Neville and McGonagall had pretty cool roles though.

A few differences to the book, but pretty happy with the interpretation (although maybe if I'd only just read the book I'd think differently heh).

It finished up the same as the book - that is skipping ahead and seeing where a few people ended up, but not answering any of the questions of what the heck happened to everyone.  Interviews I read online when the book came out filled in some of the gaps, but might have been nice to include some of them in the movie.

So yeah, pretty good all up.  We got the DVD of part 1 tonight too, might have to watch it soon :)

I haven't done one of these things in forever.  And I'm *that* far behind in reading my news feeds that I only just got to this the other day (sorry Dave2, I'm usually a lot better with yours!)

Warning: complete boring obsessive-compulsive post.

Sounds easy, no?

Well with the right tools, the bulk of it is.  Point an application such as Renamemaster at a directory of files and you're done.

Well that only works on the days that all files are in the same timezone.  As soon as you start throwing flights into the mix, the problem becomes how to deal with files in different timezones.  Especially problematic when you're going back in time - you can end up with overlapping files if you do it wrong :/

The first challenge as always was to figure out exactly what time (local time) photos were taken to see which ones need offsetting.  That took ages.  Especially with photos from three still cameras, two phones and a video camera to sort out.  All with different behaviours.  The still cameras were fairly easy cause the time is set manually.  They just worked.  Phones automatically pick up the new times when you change timezones so they were also easy enough, except for some of the iPhone pics which didn't have a date modified timestamp on them that Renamemaster could find - weird! The video camera was a bit painful because it was set by changing the timezone on it.  For some reason the still photos it takes and the videos were different by an hour. Yay.  

I used Exif Date Changer on some of the files (the ones where I was going forward in time and wanted to update them to local time after I'd changed timezones). 

The movies taken by the still cameras I renamed manually cause there weren't that many of them.  But when I got to the video camera and they all needed adjusting by an hour I used Bulk Rename Utility.  Its interface is a bit scary, and by accident I actually modified the original modified date (possibly that will be a problem when we're not in Daylight Saving anymore..) but then also managed to rename them as well.  

So anyways.  It took around eleven hours *groan* but got everything sorted and renamed and the blog posts updated with the stats.

I'm sure my brother will tell me I'm doing it wrong.  But at least now all ~13000 files are done.

Hurrah.

So not a bad year all up :)

Let's see.  Where to begin.

The year started with me away from the sweetie - I was visiting old Sydney friends.  First year since we met that we weren't together on New Years, which was a bit sad.

Did a fair bit of other travelling during the year.  

The big trip of course was to Japan and the UK in September.  It wasn't the best holiday I've ever been on.  Japan was 34C for five days in a row, and I didn't have shorts.  And the UK was grey and/or raining for a good chunk of the time we were there, plus we missed out on going to Legoland which was pretty devastating for me.  But on the plus side, everything "worked" in terms of bookings.  We didn't get robbed.  We didn't crash the car.  We didn't miss any planes or trains.  We did see heaps of cool stuff.  So really I can't complain too much heh.

Had quite a few smaller trips as well.  Spent a couple of days in January at the coast with all of Stu's family.  Would have been better if I'd brought stuff to entertain myself with heh.  Went to Mogo Zoo then.  There was a quick trip to Sydney for my parents' 40th wedding anniversary.  Went down the coast to DaveC's house three times in March, August over my birthday and October where we had a great whale sighting.  Went to Melbourne over the Easter weekend to see Cats with Nat&Andrew.  That was a cool weekend, we'd love to go back and do more Melbourney things.  In July we went to Queensland for a long weekend to visit Chay and David.  Decided that July/August is definitely the time to go to Brisbane, so will probably do that again this year.  And another quick visit to Sydney on Boxing Day. 

Had a very busy year at work.  Rolled out new proxies at the beginning of the year, but they were fraught with problems from the start and it was very stressful.  After several patches during the year, they finally settled down, only to have the upstream proxies start playing up.  Blah!   

Semi work-related were a ball in March where I managed to squeeze into a ten year old dress, but only just barely!   I also made a slightly drunken bet that I'd wear a dress to a Melbourne Cup lunch if all the boys wore suits.  Our director unfortunately decided to take it seriously and made all the boys wear suits.  Reluctantly I had to go buy a dress and wear it.  We also ran a trivia night that I think went really well.  And attended work drinks pretty much every week I was in the country ;)

One of the big projects at work took several months and was so stressful I'm sure it led to a high blood pressure reading in July.  I've been working on relaxing at work (and at home) and subsequent readings have been a lot more normal.

Otherwise healthwise I had a great year - just a cold early in the year but nothing else.

Spent a lot of time with Nat and Andrew during the year.  Those guys are always so much fun to be around, we really enjoy their company.  Also did a few Singstar nights with Windy and DaveO and saw Damien and Amanda a few times as well.  JamesC came to visit a few times, and the whole family stayed with us a couple of weeks ago.  The Hokins clan came to visit, as did the parents a couple of times and the little brother a few times.  We've spent a lot more time with DaveC in the second half of this year.  Seems I get on with him a whole lot better now that we're not working together heh.  

Had another heat wave early in the year which meant us putting quite a bit of ice into the four foot tank to try and keep the temperature down.  Seemed to work and we didn't lose any fish from it.  I'd moved the danios downstairs so they wouldn't overheat, and found a couple of months later some baby danios that had been surviving quite happily unattented.  When I later moved the danios back upstairs, there were more babies in the downstairs tank.  Win!  Stu got a colony of duboisis for the four foot, which are great fun, and will follow you around when you go to look at them in hopes that you'll feed them!  Stu's also gotten back into killifish and has been diligent at looking after his fish again.  We're back up to fourteen habitated fish tanks now!

On the opposite end of the weather spectrum, we had a very cold winter.  This year the pool froze over probably a dozen times (it only froze over twice last year).  One of the days the ice was a full 3mm thick in places!  We even had snow in October.  Go figure!

On the Lego front, a whole stack of Toy Story Lego was released so had to get all of that.  And six new Harry Potter sets as well, although really only one of those is "new".  There's a few other cool sets I want to get too.  Went to BrickExpo in August which was very cool, and made me wonder if I should put anything in one of these years.

Other toys included an iPhone for me, a Blackberry for Stu, a video camera for Stu, a Canon 500D for me and a PS3.  

So I've had the 500D for four and a bit months and have already taken 15000 photos on it!  The majority of those in the UK of course ;)  I still haven't sorted my UK photos *at all*.  I did however manage to sort enough of our Japan 2009 and Europe 2008 photos to get the highlights into the blog entries.  One of my next projects will be making photo books of those trips.  I did make a photo book of our wedding as a Christmas present for parents.  Having seen the finished result (which I was stoked with) there's a few little changes I want to make and need to fix up some of the images before we get our copy printed.

Around the house, we bought a whole stack of bookshelves for the downstairs room and set those up.  So that room is quite well setup now.  The garden has gone slightly feral though, especially with all the rain we've had recently.

Shows seen this year:

Movies seen this year:

Books read this year:

And a few other bits and pieces:

Phewf.  Yup, busy year :)  I'm actually amazed I got this thing written *before* the end of the year - that never happens!! :)

Six hours to go.  Have a great 2011 peoples!  Happy New Year!!

Not bad.  Not hugely great, but decent.

What I did really like about it was that it was fairly faithful to the book.  The movies haven't been this faithful to the books since the first couple of movies.

Of course that meant it dragged on while they're wandering round the forest.  Which was a major complaint in the book. 

No explanation offered as to how the Burrow was magically rebuilt since the last movie.  No pun intended ;)

The ridiculous "coincidence" scene was thankfully dropped (where they *just happen* to be around some people they know and get some useful information).

Anyways..

Six months or so to go...

It was pretty awesome!!

Although it was pretty easy to tell the bad guy the minute he came on screen heh.

We decided not to see it in 3D.  None of us are that convinced by it.  Stu gets a headache.  I think it dulls down the picture too much.  Really, we're so used to 2D that 3D doesn't really add that much.

It's pretty cool that the kid who played Andy was the same kid, all grown up.  The original Toy Story was fifteen years ago!!!  Not even Daemon was born when the first one came out heh.

There was even a Totoro!

Pixar have certainly done it again with this movie, well done!

Almost TUA (Totally Unrelated Aside):

There's a line in one of the movies (I can't actually remember which, I think it was 2) that has a character (Stinky Pete?) questioning Woody about whether he would be still there when Andy grew up - would he be taken on Andy's honeymoon?  The tragic thing is, if I'd actually remembered (I was kicking myself that I forgot) I would actually have taken my favourite childhood toy on my honeymoon.  I did take her to Japan last year.  She's on the packing list for the next trip hehe.

Just putting a placeholder here cause MT is pretty crap at back dating across months.

..

So. 2009.  

Certainly not as *big* a year as 2008.

We've been in our house over a year now, but it's still not really "settled".  We did buy a nice big dining table, but that's about it.  We still haven't fully organised the rumpus room (although shelves are finally on order!!), and so "my" hobby room has been held up because of that (and because I've been too lazy to try and Freecycle all the crap that's been dumped in there).  We've only put hooks in the wall for one thing (my big Lego mosaic) so most of our pictures are still waiting for somewhere to go.  The spare bedroom has continued to be really really useful, and we've had a steady stream of people staying the night (mostly my brother heh).  The pool has been *brilliant*.  Mostly got the hang of taking care of it, so hopefully we don't get any algal blooms this year.

Work has been variable again this year.  The first half of the year feels like a bit of a blur.  I got a couple of big projects completed mostly on schedule.  The second half of the year was mostly working on the one thing, which we tried but failed to get into production by Christmas.  All through the year it was just insanely busy.  Not as insane as Stu's work though.  He was essentially doing three people's work and the stress of it all was taking a toll on his health.  So when an ex colleague had a positition advertised, she said he should apply.  Which he did, and he got it.  So a new year and a new job for the sweetie.

Our big holiday of the year was a trip to Japan for two weeks.  It was a significant challenge to try and organise because we went with a total of six people.  In the end Nat and I did the majority of the planning which worked reasonably well.  The holiday was *fantastic*!! - had a really great time.  Wish we could have stayed longer - at least twice as long would have been the bare minimum I think.

Went to Sydney a few times - in January over the long weekend while Stu played in Cancon - just caught up with lots of my friends and family.  Also in October for a primarily touristy weekend - even stayed in a hotel!  And then for Christmas and again for New Years.  Went down to Malua Bay with DC three times in March, April and October.  Mostly just us and him, but we did get Neil down for the October weekend.  And to Kangaroo Valley for Chris B's 50th which was a lot of fun.

Our fish tank numbers remained stable at seven.  We did lose a huge number of fish in the heatwave in February (where we had three consecutive 40C days with no cooling down at night).  All the julis, all but one of the adult multis, and all the tetras and the other little fish died.  The young multies and my angel were the only upstairs survivors.  I replaced the tetties with some leopard danios.  The multis grew up and have been breeding like rabbits.  Stu brought home the three julis he had at work and got some leleupies too.  The kribs downstairs I think need to have their tank rearranged, as they just sit there and do *nothing* all day.  Guppy breeding has slowed down dramatically too, not sure what's going on there, maybe needs some new genes..

Fairly quiet Lego year.  Made a nice big mosaic of Australia, and now my mosaics have a hanging place in the spare room.  I dug out and sold a bunch of Space Lego which cleared a little space - but have a long way to go!  And over Christmas built the Star Destroyer and Millennium Falcon to have them on display together.