Commentary: February 2011 Archives

But it was just the spire that fell.  So long as there aren't too many severe aftershocks, the thing could probably be restored.

Much sadder are the other scenes - entire office buildings that have collapsed, crushed cars, crushed buses, homes missing walls.  Probably won't know the final death toll for weeks.  Sad sad sad.

Hang in there Christchurch....

It's a pretty nifty little camera - feels nice and solid, has fantastic macro functionality and performs well in low light.  Unfortunately it has some saturation issues (I was mostly using it on "Intelligent Auto" mode) and the colour balance with the flash is a bit off.

These are some macro shots I took with it at drinks last week.

And some more I took on the walk to the shops on Saturday.

So a pretty awesome shot of the mushroom, but you can see how saturated the green is.

Here's a couple I took in close succession - the first one got the saturation all wrong, but the second one is ok (I don't think I changed any settings).

And a few more shots just for fun :)

Aside:

Does anyone wanna go see Weird Al with me on March 12?

I started off looking for a template/net for this sphere - 

I made that sphere in second year uni (1993) when I was off sick for two weeks with pneumonia.  I was too tired to concentrate on uni work, and this was technical but mindless, so provided a nice distraction from feeling pretty blah.  It's made from curved strips of paper folded into little triangles (5x12 for the pentagons and 6x12 for the hexagons).  The little triangles are all stuck together into the pentagons and hexagons, and then those building blocks are stuck together to make a nifty little geodesic sphere.  Quite simple really.  But of course I can't find the templates to make the strips of paper anywhere on the internet.  I could always create my own, but it's so much easier if someone's already created templates!  The closest I came to even finding anything like this on the web was this site but no templates there.

So meandered on from there and went looking for instructions for Jack Skillman's Jackstone.  This has been discussed previously on this blog here, here and here.  Still no closer to finding any decent instructions on the net though :(

So a pretty unsuccessful night all up.  But did look at *lots* of geometric origami pages so will probably do something from one of them soon.

Here's what I have decorating my desk at work now..

And now for something completely different..

Former Tropical Cyclone Yasi is still going.  It's made its way all the way across Queensland and is now raining all over the Northern Territory.

This picture, taken from Channel 9, stood out for me.  Even though the roof has been blown off this house in Tully, everything in the kitchen, from water bottles to eggs, is all just sitting there as if nothing had happened!  Freaky!!

Change came through Canberra tonight which brought relief in temperatures. 

But poor fricken Queensland.  No sooner do they get past the worst of the floods when they get hit with cyclone Yasi!  At least they're about to be .. it's still off the coast at the moment..

But that image gives you no idea of the scale of this thing.  Check it out if it was superimposed on other parts of the world:

Gah!

Hold on tight Queensland!  We're thinking of you..