Filed under: general | Tags: 1st may, bands, first may, holiday, sydney, weather, work
Not much happening here currently, except that it was raining a whole lot – almost two weeks – followed by a sunny and warm weekend (beach, finally again!) and again followed by cold temperature with sunshine.
Whoever told me before my departure it wouldn’t be could in Sydney, was apparently wrong. Or, well, it’s not as cold as in Europe (especially northern parts of Europe), but it probably just feels as cold since the houses are not isolated.
Happy first of May to everybody! Enjoy the day off. It’s not a holiday in Australia, so I had to go to work today. Whatever, I’m increasingly realizing that there’s not much time left until my return and I still have so many things to finish here. So no time for holidays anyway.
However, I did get to see some local bands recently (balance is important!), and if you’re interested, here are the better ones (and all from very different genres too).
Cloud Control
Folk, prepared in a very indie-fashion-like style
http://www.myspace.com/cloudcontrol
Yves Klein Blue
Brag magazine described them as a mix of Libertines and The Strokes
http://www.myspace.com/yveskleinbluemusic
Cassette Kids
“summoning the likes of Bjork, The Klaxons and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs into a mixtape akin to a well dressed Berlin Wall coming down in a New York Basement”
http://www.myspace.com/cassettekids
Grafton Primary
“Drawing on a wealth of musical knowledge from classical to new romance, synth-wave and electro, Grafton Primary craft tunes that are designed to score well on the test of time.”
http://www.myspace.com/graftonprimary
Since the incident with the deadly flower stuck to the outside of an envelope, I must be on Australian quarantine office’s blacklist: every parcel that I receive from overseas is decorated with a sticker saying “Opened by Australia Post for Inspection by Quarantine”…
Filed under: traveling | Tags: australia, melbourne, national parks, road trip, uluru, vacation
Sorry for the silence, I was on a road trip and got sick immediately before that, which didn’t allow me to post anything before taking a break from the online world.
A uni friend from Austria was visiting and I met him in Melbourne from where we started our road trip back to Sydney, passing the Great Ocean road, two national parks (one of them being one of Austrlia’s few skiing resorts), Bendigo, Canberra and the east coast.
The trip was super-efficient, I don’t remember seeing so many different places in such a short time (5 days) since my Interrail times. The highlight of efficiency was Bendigo – a city that emerged during the gold rush – we arrived 10pm, checked in at a hotel built in gone-with-the-wind style, had dinner, a beer in a pub, starting the next day with breakfast in a local café, followed by a visit at the Central Deborah Goldmine, and leaving town again before 11am.
The gold mine was also one of the highlights on our trip. Another almost scary highlight was our trip through a national park after sunset, with lots of kangaroos on the streets, one of them was as big as a man and obviously not afraid of our car.
The Google map shows the places where we had breakfast, lunch and dinner, starting the day we left Melbourne. The highlight of meal diversity is best demonstrated by our third day: breakfast in the gold rush town Bendigo, lunch at a Winery, dinner in the dozy ski resort town Jindabyne and breakfast in the modern capital of Australia, Canberra.
After three days in Sydney (mainly because I had to work), we took a flight to Uluru, spending two days in the center of Australia, to experience the taste of desert and the aboriginal culture, which coins the whole area. Although it’s a very touristic place nowadays. As a side note: the Uluru national park area was only handed back to the Aborigines in 1985.
You can find more pictures from both trips on Flickr.
Looking into the fridge today, made me feel a bit like being inside Wong Kar Wei’s movie Chungking Express. (If you watched that movie you should know what I mean)
This pool is about 2 minutes from my University building, where I work. I’m trying to get there at least two times a week, to have a break from work and then go back to the office. Refreshing and relaxing. I was never a big fan of swimming, but I’m getting into it. It also almost seems to be more popular here than running. Probably because they’ve got so many pools spread throughout the city.
This online article from the Sydney Morning Herald made my day: Inside the clash of the teen subcultures
The scene kids movement is obviously the next to-be-part-of teen subculture according to this article. Only if you’re a teenager, that is. And they’re not emos, in fact emos don’t like them:
Crystal McKenna, a 17-year-old emo from Warrnambool, south of Melbourne, is not a fan of Scene kids.
“They are like wannabe emos. It is more the fact that they change just to be in with everything that is going on at the time,” she said.
To me it actually sounds strange that anybody would say about him or herself to be an emo (according to the recent definition of emos, I’m not talking about the emo movement that started in the 80s). But well, I never totally understood that movement. Signs of growing old, I guess.
Why do I blog this? Because I found the article hilarious and I guess some of you might share my opinion. Also to let you know, just in case you might meet one of them on the streets of your home town sometime. It’s always good to be informed!
It’s been colder the last week here in Sydney and you can already feel autumn settling down and preparing the town for winter. The sunset seems to be different at this time of the year and it’s pretty early, civil twilight currently ends at 7:18pm, although it’s still quite warm at that time, compared to autumn in Austria that is. But after a rainy easter weekend we finally had sun and blue sky during the day this weekend – perfect weather for the beach! Only the water was much colder than it used to be.
Here’s the local forecast for this week, according to my Apple weather widget. It’s still really warm during the day, although it gets fresh in the nights.
Now that I’m finished with writing papers for the time being, I finally had time this week to focus on my research project at Sydney University. The first and most important next step was to install the displays I’m working with (see my previous blog post on that matter) at a spot, where people would pass them on a daily basis. It was a bit of an effort to bring them upstairs from the workshop, where they had been collecting dust and to do the cable installations and stuff. But after all, everything was done within two days. The main challenge was to bring together all the people, who were in charge of different things (building manager, IT guys, etc). Shortly before going on air the server machine (a new impressive Mac Pro) died and I had to install the server software on my MacBook Pro to drive the displays.
The display is now facing the yard in front of the Architecture building and immediately got attention from students hanging around in the yard, once we turned them on. It’s pretty impressive. I especially like its hexagonal pixelated character.
We also got an eyebox2 with the SmartSlabs, a device for tracking the number of people looking at the display. The downside is that I’ve this great piece of hardware, worth a 1.000 Dollars, at my disposal and can’t use it, since it only runs on Windows. I’ll have to give Parallels a try.
PS: I guess I should start a research blog for this kind of stuff, cause it might not be that interesting for some of you…
On Saturday I went to Ikea together with one of my flatmates. We rented a car to drive there. Public transport in Sydney sucks. So does traffic in general. I basically had to buy a chair for my room, and ended up buying lots of cookies and chocolate from the swedish food store.
Things I noticed at the local Ikea:
- The store concept is the same as in any other Ikea
- The “swedish” food at the restaurant was quite bad, not the same as in Sweden or even Austria
- There were more pregnant women than I ever saw in any European Ikea, which could either mean (1) that more women are pregnant in Sydney or (2) that more pregnant women are buying stuff at Ikea
- There were no elk soft toys at the kids department, instead they had plush sea animals
I also got a new table last week (for free from the University, since they were throwing out a lot of stuff), which I painted white on Sunday. That means that I can work even longer and more, now that I’ve got a table! (Thinking about this I’ve to say that maybe it would be better not having one…)
Too much work currently, again with a paper submission for this conference, and no time for blogging. The semester also started with the beginning of march, which keeps me busy as well, since I’ve to tutor. Tutoring is much more demanding here then it is at the TU Vienna. It’s also only done by PhD students and involves teaching, writing assignments, marking etc. At least the paycheck is better too. But still: it’s 4 hours per week according to the official contract, but in fact it’s more than 10 hours of work each week…
Here are two pics from this week’s tutorials:
The course is all about information visualization and their first task was to visualize their path from home to university, using different techniques to encode various parameters, such as noise level, smells, colors, travel speed, steps etc. See here for last year’s website and student projects. This year we’re using a customized social online network to make it more interactive and web 2.0-ish.
