So on Saturday the Albury-Wodonga Lego User Group put on "Bricktastic" in Junee.  Seemed like as good an excuse as any to head down and visit the little brother.  So Saturday morning I headed down.  It was quite foggy for much of the trip which was kinda nice.

Arrived at nearly 9:30am, and then headed to the pool and rec centre.  Instantly I confirmed what I knew would be true - it would be peaceful and uncrowded - nothing like the ridiculousness that is the Canberra Lego shows (that I stopped going to because, kids).  Had a good long wander around, it was pretty cool (it was, in fact, bricktastic!).

After we were done there we headed back to David's for a little while.

Then headed out again.  We stopped by Peter Neve's, but sadly he wasn't home (haven't seen him since Dad's funeral).  Had a quick look at the trains.

Went to the Junee Hotel for a pub lunch.

Then up to the showground to go to the circus.  This was a Lennon Brothers circus, and it had animals other than horses - I thought exotic animals had been stopped in circuses in Australia years ago.  This one had three lions, monkeys, ponies, donkeys and camels.  It was quite a fun afternoon.  They couldn't have made much profit though - there weren't many people there.  Maybe there would have been more for the evening show.  There were no photos allowed, which is fairly common for performance shows, and I would understand flashes distracting the performers, and phone screens annoying other audience members.  But.  They were selling flashing glow sticks and spinning LED lights which are far more distracting and annoying than someone taking a few photos.  I reckon the real reason they don't want you taking video/photos is in case one of them falls or gets attacked by lions and they don't want it recorded.  But the real kicker was the kid outside (who played a clown) telling us not to take photos of the animals outside (before we even went in).  Little anti-photo nazi.  That sort of attitude to photos really pisses me off, and did colour my mood for the show.  So I'm going to post the couple of photos I got anyway.  So nyer!

Stopped the IGA on the way back and picked up some stuff for dinner.  

But first we did most of a 550 piece jigsaw.

Then I cooked up some chicken (butter chicken - Chicken Tonight), rice and veggies for dinner.  And we watched half a dozen episodes of The Good Place, which was good to watch again from the beginning knowing how things go later on.

Then this morning I came home, again through fog in various places along the drive.

In a strange twist of fate, the sweetie and I were in both Australia and New Zealand on Anzac Day - had a quick hop across the ditch to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary - making the most of the last of the Singapore Airlines direct flights to Wellington - in fact our flight back was the second last one.

Since we've been back I've been meaning to blog, but I'm a slacker.  I wanted to rant about the poor customer service from Netflix, and praise the fantastic customer service from Willow.  I've been busy at work but not crazy busy, in fact had time to clean things this week which was nice.

A bunch of us ended up at Rob and Fiona's last night for chilli which was nice (and not tooo spicy!), and I inflicted them with not just our New Zealand slide show, but Japan 2009, Hong Kong 2013 and East Asia 2017.  Oops.  :)

I've processed all my New Zealand photos (renamed, resized and geotagged).  And other than food shopping that's about all I've managed to achieve this weekend.  Well that and cooking half the afternoon.  Cauliflower bake and teriyaki chicken for dinner, and cheese balls for snacks.

This is my new wallpaper - Belconnen from the air

Sunday was a pretty quiet day.  We were going to go food shopping but then the sweetie got a migraine.  In the evening David dropped in, and we went over to Scott's with various others for home made pizzas in his pizza oven.  That was a bit of fun.

Crazy busy at work at the moment.

And when I'm not busy at work I'm busy doing things like Lego sorting and photo labelling.  I've been powering through labelling our East Asia holiday photos.  

On a whim tonight I wanted to see any photos of Queen Mary 2 and Quantum of the Seas side by side to compare the height of their passenger decks above sea level (after a woman went overboard on a cruise on the Pacific Dawn the other week) and found this!

What's so exciting about that?  Well, I was there!  Look!  Can you see me? :)

(photos by delvestudio from shipspotting.com)

I was actually on our balcony watching proceedings and watching the drone buzzing around the ship and wondering if I'd ever see the footage (I looked on Youtube for ages).  And just like that I found it :)

This was the drone:

So Saturday night was our work ball.  Lots of eating, drinking and dancing.  Always a great night!

The room was blue.  Very very blue.

The band - Something Like this

Obligatory food photos...

For entree I had the pork belly which was pretty awesome.  The sweetie had the cured salmon and crab but I didn't try any of that.

For mains the sweetie and I both had the stuffed chicken.  I found mine to be a tad dry and wasn't much of a fan of the polenta cake.  I tried a mouthful of Lachie's lamb and that was pretty nice.

We also both ended up with the lemon meringue tart, which suited Lachie and Sarah as they both wanted the chocolate lava cake.

This morning I labelled all the photos I took of all the stuff Mike is going to try and sell.  Still need to get them to him..

After that alternated between sorting Lego and working on the trivia night.  Although sorting became a problem because I had to make an emergency emptying of some of the cardboard boxes it came in due to flooding in our garage (which hasn't happened since we got our guttering fixed).  I knew it rained on and off during the night last night but I had no idea how heavy it was.  We got a couple of streams coming through the garage but fortunately no other damage.  Even late this afternoon the creek at the bottom of the hill was still in full flood.  Amazing, considering how low the lake has been after several weeks of no rain.  Typical of Australia though - droughts and flooding rains.

So yeah, also got three rounds done for the trivia night (only another seven to go..).

This afternoon did some food shopping.  Watched Enterprise over dinner then went back to Lego sorting.

And in other stories of life and death.. Chrissie hasn't popped yet.  And just found out that kid killed in Palmerston the other night was the son of someone I know :(:(

Had a pretty productive day today.  It's amazing what you can get done when people leave you alone to just get your work done!!

Did you know traffic around all of Dickson is *terrible* at 6pm at night?

I was scanning photos of the Olympics in Sydney in 2000 the other day and remembered the photo that went round the interwebs at the time of a guy doing a handstand in front of the Olympic Flame at Sydney Olympic Park at Homebush.  I had a quick Google but couldn't find it.  But I did find it in my small collection of "humour" pictures.

Finished watching that special Dad had on the bicentennary.  Some of it had the feel of a commercial video, some live news footage.  I don't know whether Dad had spliced stuff together or what.  

Mum had a few photos from the day.  I suspect Dad would have more on slides.  I also need to find the print I have of the *massive* firework that I watched going up and up and up and up like a rocket, before finally exploding in the biggest firework I've ever seen.  Part of it is seen in this photo..

I'm up to July 2000 in scanning Mum's photos.  Only about seven years to go before she went digital :)

I've really got nothing at all to blog about tonight (I can't even do simple stuff like manipulate date formats in perl).

So here's a couple of photos of signs regarding chickens crossing roads..  

Had a bit of a poke around the interwebs for something to get the Date Taken entry out of my photos.  Think I'll probably give Image::ExifTool (perl module) a go.  Did a hello world type script that gives me the correct time on a file that has an incorrect modify date.  Won't take too much effort to scriptify something to hopefully do what I want..

So here's a fun Apple/Windows bug I've had for quite some time.

I have a php script which looks at the Date Modified field on a file and renames the file to have the date in it.  I like to have the date in the file name of all my photos.

But I've noticed in the past year or so (perhaps longer!!!) that the script has been getting it wrong with random iPhone photos.  I had a closer look tonight, and found that indeed many of the photos copied to my computer have an incorrect Date Modified.

See the highlighted five photos?  All of them show they were modified at 7:42am on 14 January, but you can see their date taken were all on 13 January.  That means all five files got renamed incorrectly with my script.

I thought it might have been Instagram, or sending photos by SMS, but it's affecting photos that I've never done anything with.  And one photo I saw with the incorrect Date Modified was modified when I would have been asleep!

The date of the photo on the phone seems to be correct.  And all I do is a manual file system copy from my phone to my D: drive.  I don't do anything fancy like import them with anything.

RenameMaster seems to get it right for files that have Date Taken in them, but sometimes photos don't, and screenshots certainly don't. It freaks out if it doesn't have the field and you get filenames with ? marks all through them because it can't deal.

I think the only way to get this to work is change the script so it will try and use Date Taken, but if that is not available then use Date Modified.

And just for fun, Gorillacam saves its movies in UTC or something (and a day in the future!!), because this movie was clearly taken on the 9th between other photos, yet it shows the date as the next morning!