GenesisDreams

Newark Hall

Friends - University I've got my accommodation for the first semester next year finalised. I’ll be staying at Newark Hall, which is on the Jubilee Campus. It costs a fair bit, but looks pretty cosy, and for once I will only have a five-minute trip to class as opposed to an hour and a half one! I think I’ll have a lot of fun there ^_^. I probably will move out to a sharehouse somewhere halfway through the year, but for now the security of living on campus to start with is quite comforting. It’s one less thing to worry about, which is good, because one of my biggest aims this coming year is to minimise worry! And now for a random Lost In Translation quote, "The more you know who you are and what you want, the less you let things upset you." At the moment I’m listening to Mad World by Michael Andrews off the Donnie Darko soundtrack. Oh yeah, it's New Years Eve too; though I still don't know what I'm going to do tonight. I've been invited to a party at a beach house up the coast with some Uni friends, Wulfen is having a party over his place, Alex (whom I spent Boxing day chasing rainbows with) is going to Rainbow beach (coincidence) and asked if I wanted to come along (he headed up yesterday in fact), and then there is the mystery fourth option. I'm keeping all of my options open at the moment, and I'll see where the night takes me.

Lost In Translation

Movies Everyone wants to be found I went to see Lost In Translation tonight. Brendan recommended months ago that I see it, though it has taken a while for it to be released down here. He said it was the type of movie I’d enjoy, and he was right. We almost missed the start (and what a shapely start it was). I had been planning to go see it with Calvin for a while now, though LW popped online just as I was about to head out the door, so I raced round and picked her up as well. After a quick little dash through the valley we made it on time and sat down to enjoy the best movie I've seen all year (I haven't seen ROTK yet). If I didn’t realise I was lost before I saw this movie, I most certainly know it now. The whole thing was simply fantastic; I loved every minute of it. It was an extremely touching film, while at the same time managing to be incredibly funny in parts. Bill Murray gave a wonderful performance and Scarlett Johansson was simply gorgeous. The music in the film is terrific, so good that I’ve been listening to the soundtrack (plus the karaoke tracks and the Peaches track that aren’t included) non-stop since. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a movie that has touched me as much as this one. I think it’s going to be with me for a long while yet. Objectively, this is a great film, at its heart depicting two people wanting to be found. Subjectively I loved it all the more because it was set in Japan, for the most part in Tokyo, which brought back powerful memories for me. The nightscapes of Shibuya, the Shinkansen arriving at Kyoto, and the view over Tokyo, they were all painfully familiar. I don’t think I’ve ever missed Japan as much as I did when the last flowing street shots were shown while Jesus and Mary Chain’s ”Just Like Honey” played. Many things prompted stabs of nostalgia in me while watching this film. There was the scene in the videogame arcade, and running through the pachinko parlour, the women in kimonos, the crazy TV shows, the sushi restaurant and the karaoke, the pubs and clubs and people on the street. There was the initial overwhelming loss at not being able to understand the language, and then the gradual decrease in that being important. There were the repeated instances of being talked to for long periods of time in Japanese when it was plainly clear you don’t understand. There was the sense of isolation, while at the same time being surrounded by millions of people. I'm listening to Alone in Kyoto by Air at the moment and I want to go back to Japan. Oh yeah, I'm back from my trip away for Christmas too, in case you couldn't tell ^_^ I had a good time; we chased a few rainbows in the 4WD but didn't find any gold. I'm glad I went though.

Merry Christmas

General I'm heading up the coast in a couple of hours for Christmas and Boxing Day. I was going to write a big story about all of our family Christmas lunches over the years, and how it has changed now, and why... but I wont, becuase I'm sure it's 35 degrees C out at the moment and I'm melting in the heat. I've barely had the energy to pack and wrap presents. So to everyone, have a very Merry Christmas!

Happy Birthday Noriko!

Friends Noriko (who I'll tell everyone about when I finally get my promised "Japan Trip" page up) turns 28 today! She messaged me saying she didn't want Christmas to come this year, becuase it would mean that her birthday had also come. I personally don't think she has anything to worry about. When I first met Noriko, Sugoi asked me to guess how old she was, and I said 23! So Happy Birthday Noriko!

One Month To Go!

Friends - Personal - Travel - University On January 21st, 2004, at 8:30 PM I'll fly out from Brisbane International Airport, on my way to the UK. Ostensibly I'm going becuase I'm enrolled in University over there and I need to finish off my Business degree. Of course I could have just as easily stayed here to finish off my degree (in fact that would have been the easier option by far, the amount of paperwork I've been doing recently is crazy!). So why am I really going? ... Yes that's a very good question. ... To be completely honest I don't really know. I think I've had lots of reasons over the past two years or so I've been planning this. I can't remember what first triggered the idea, but ever since I got the urge to leave, I've never really looked back. Things came up from time to time that provide some reason to stay, and these reasons seem to by multiplying of late. I'm resolute though, deep down I know I've always been, that nothing short of my Mum dying would stop me going. But I still don't know why I want to go. There is the desire for change, and that's a big one for me, but that alone isn't it. I want to broaden my horizons, become well travelled and worldly, that's not it either. I want to be educated at a truly world-class university, but study is well down on my list of priorities for next year. I want to meet new people and at the same time part of me wants to escape from the people I already know. I'm going to miss terribly everyone I leave behind, but overall I think it will be good for me. As sappy as it sounds... I think I go to grow. Maybe that's a cop-out answer. In fact I'm pretty sure it is, however it's the only think I can come up with right now. Next time I'm totally in tune with my feelings and emotions I'll write an entry explaining them in full. Expect it sometime around 8282 AD. So I don't know why I'm going, but I don't really care right night. It was a long process and it's almost over. Well the leaving part is almost over, the living on exchange part has almost begun, and this next month is going to kill me with anticipation. I hope that in a years time, when I've got some perspective, and my exchange is almost over, I can look back, read over this, and laugh to myself about how in the dark I was. I hope I'll understand it then, and I doubly hope that the manner in which I gain that understanding over the next year is most enjoyable ^_^ This entry was written while listening to Art of Noise - Dreaming in Colour over and over again.

Dance Freaks

Friends - Games My arms are sore. I've discovered the fun that is Dance Freaks. It's a DDR'esq game where you use your hands to trigger IR sensors instead of dancing on pads. Tonight, after a tortuous run on DDR where I took on Max300 and MaxUnlimited in one game, I played some serious DF, and I had a great time. It involves a totally different set of movements to DDR, but the concept of keeping the beat and moving in time with it stays the same. The biggest problem though is that I'm too tall for the machine, which means whenever I need to do one of the low "steps" I must bend down. This means that I'm bobbing all over the place during a difficult song. It's great fun though, and I'll probably play it a lot more now in the future. I also gave Virtual Cop 3 a go, though I tried something different and played with the two guns. I put credits in for two players, and then played two handed. It was tricky to get used to (and I came to realise who bloody unrealistic it is when they do it in movies), but I almost got through the entire first level on my initial credits. I tended to favour my right hand, but a couple of times I did some awesome shots where two bad guys would appear on the screen and the same time, and I would shoot both straight away, one with my right hand, the other with my left. I must have looked pretty silly, but it was late, and only my friends were around so I didn't really care. It was a lot of fun. After that ads, nash, fragma, Wulfen and I went back to fragma's place to watch some southpark, snooker, nakednews and family guy (not necessarily in that order), we had a few drinks, coughed our lungs out (we are all sick at the moment) and generally spread our illnesses everywhere. Like most things tonight it was also a lot of fun! Now I'm home, I haven't even started writing the conference paper I talked about a couple of weeks ago (*gasp*) and I think I shall go to bed.

Drinks

Friends I went out with my friends for drinks tonight. We've been doing a lot more frequently of late. I'm happy, becuase it means I get to spend a lot of time with them, which I'm trying to make the most of now, becuase in a months time I'm not going to be able to anymore. I was going to write something long and insightful, however Channel 7 is replaying the first seasons of "24", at 11:30 PM every night. We are up to about 9am at the moment and it's as great as I remember, so I'm off to watch that!

Categories

Metaposts Well I've just finished going back through all of the posts I made while on Blogger putting them in different categories. Every post now had one or more categories which broadly define what it is about. You can get a list of all the posts of a certain category by either clicking on any of the category types listed in the menu bar on the side, or on any of category names dispalyed at the top of a post. This post for instance is a member of the "Metaposts" category, meaning it is a post about posting. Clicking on the Metapost link above will take you to a page containing a list of all the metaposts on my blog.

Comments

Metaposts I like receiving comments. Particularly when they are supportive, or interesting, or just plain funny. So I’m now in the process of manually exporting all the BackBlog comments over into this system. It shouldn't take too long, the only main problem being that the timestamps for all of the comments will be today, tonight, rather than when they were actually made. This isn't a big deal though. I've also cleaned up the overall layout a little, changed the style a bit, put my favourite banner back up the top, and overall everything is almost done.

MoveableType

Metaposts Thanks to my good friend Nash, GenesisDreams has been remodled using the MoveableType publishing system. Now it's bigger and better than ever before. I've ported all my old blogger posts over to it, and I'm looking into duplicating the comments too (unlike blogger, MT has embedded comment features). The actual site design will also get a going over, amd I'll finalise that in the next couple of days. Once I get all that done I'll try to get back to posting every couple of days. Sorry for being silent for the past week.

EUSIPCO-2004

Travel - University 12th European Signal Processing Conference September 7-10, 2004 Vienna, Austria

"The 2004 European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO-2004) is the twelfth biennial conference promoted by EURASIP, the European Association for Signal, Speech, and Image Processing (www.eurasip.org), and organized by the Institute of Communications and Radio-Frequency Engineering at Vienna University of Technology (www.nt.tuwien.ac.at) and the ftw. Telecommunications Research Center Vienna (www.ftw.at). EUSIPCO-2004 aims to cover all aspects of signal processing theory and applications. Sessions will include invited presentations with review character in addition to presentations of new research results. An extensive technical exhibition will also be organized."

I'm currently in the process of writing a conference paper based upon my thesis work for submission to the 2004 EUSIPCO conference. If it's accepted, my thesis supervisor said that he could probably arrange with UQ to fund my registration, travel and accomodation expenses to go to Vienna in September and present the paper. Awesome! I haven't talked about the the final results achieved by my thesis project here yet, and I'm not going to do it now, but I will get to it soon. If this paper is accepted, then it will be published in the proceedings of the conference, and maybe in some academic journals later on. It's exciting to think that other people will read my work and possibly quote it, and build upon it. But enough about that, I've got to write the damn thing first!

Sander Kleinberg kicks my ass

Guest Entry Hey guys, this is Calvin here. I'm writing a special guest blog on Mike's site cuz, well, I convinced him that I'd be able to write something really interesting. I've also found an mp3 of Tatu's 'All The Things She Said' on Mike's hard drive, and I've so far played it three times. Tatu!. The idea of eastern European lesbians is kind of turning me on right now. I'm thinking now that eastern European lesbians might feature prominently in my next novel. I'm meant to talk about interesting stuff here, so I'm thinking back over last weekend and what I got up to. I did a reading from Sushi Central at the Straight Outta Brisbane festival on Friday night, which was different to say the least. Pretty good fun though. It was in this tiny little space just off Brunswick street in the valley - the place was full of weird bohemian types and the dude before me read out a short story about a cute little fox who drove a train and spent his nights searching for porn on the internet. I was drinking these Skyy vodka things and had too many but did a good reading anyway. Afterwards, I went to Bowery, on Ann, with some of the other writers. Kept drinking, bummed a lot of cigarettes and spent a long time talking to Craig about what we're going to do for our second novels. The rest of the night is kind of a blur, but I remember meeting up with Miranda and Jamie, dancing, bumming more cigarettes, and I might or might not have gone home with a group of Russian sailors. Saturday was kind of dull by comparison. I was meant to go to a party that night but I fell asleep instead. Hung out with Nicole on Sunday, watched some sex In The City, tried to do some writing that night but hung out aimlessly on the net instead, watched Donnie Darko for the twelfth or thirteenth time and, um…. That kind of brings us up to date. My novel is still kind of selling pretty well, but I'm having kind of an artistic crisis at the moment. The other day, I scored Sander Kleinberg's 'Everybody - It's A Renaissance! The best mix album in the history of the universe!', and it has inspired me to give up being a writer and become a DJ instead. I can't mix and I don't own a turntable but I'm not letting this hold me back. Spent most of today thinking about what tracks to put on my first mix. All I know is it's going to include Miss Kittin's 'Rippin Kittin' ("Daddy, can I go out and hunt tonight like you do on Sunday mornings?") Well. This whole thing has been kindof retarded, so I guess I'm heading off now. I'll keep working on my mix album - I'll let you all know how it goes. Nice. Or as Diane von Furstenburg would say, Nass. Note: This was written entirely by Calvin. Ignore the "Posted by Wigs comment below.

Graduate

University I am no longer a graduand; I am now officially a graduate! My graduation ceremony was pretty low-key. It didn't actually start until 3pm, and so I met Littlewing (we made up) in the city around midday and then we made our way to UQ. We went and picked up my academic robes, and then made our way down to the UQ Centre hall. I kept bumping into friends of mine, other people I knew who were graduating. I did a lot of hand shaking, congratulating, photo taking. It was fun. We met up with my Mum. She was the only of in my family coming. I didn't think it was such a big deal, and I told my brothers not to worry about it. Mum and LW get on well, so they kept each other company while I went to the pre-ceremony briefing, and was prep'ed for the big event. They gave us each a number, and arranged us in order from PhD graduands, to Masters, to Engineering Class I and down from there. We were also ordered alphabetically in our groups, I was number 76 overall. There was a program with all the award details in it, and in my free time I ran some stats on it. There were 153 people graduating at that ceremony from their Bachelor of Engineering. Of these 113 were Electrical Engineers, 11 were Computer Systems Engineers and 29 were Software Engineers. It's really strange to think that back in first year, in our first semester, there were more than 550 starting engineers. At the end of four years, only 153 are left. Less than one in three made it through to the end. I remember hearing in my first lecture, "Look to your left, look to your right, those people wont be here when you graduate", but I didn't really think that much of it until now. I got through, I'm finished, I made it, I'm done. Now I've only got to finish one more year of Uni… but that's another story. So after our briefing we all lined up and were led into the hall. There was clapping, and lots of people taking photos, and video cameras transmitting our images onto these big screens at the front of the hall. Mum had asked earlier that day if I was nervous, and I wasn't, I didn't think much of it, and even walking in then, with everyone's attention on us, I still didn't feel much of an effect. We got to our seats, the academic procession entered the hall, the chancellor made a little speech, and the presentation of the awards began. It was my turn to go on stage, I walked out, shook the Chancellors hand, heard LW and Mum yelling out loudly from somewhere in the hall, along with a bunch of my friends up the front who were also graduating, and then I walked off and it was over. I got my certificate, I returned to my seat, and I watched the others get their awards. About halfway through it came time for the valedictorian speech. I didn't know it before hand, but my friend Ruth, whom I had spent a bit of time with during one of our team projects, was valedictorian. She spoke well, making some good points, and I'm glad she was the one to do it. Then the award presentations continued. While sitting through the rest of the ceremony, I saw someone standing in line that I hadn't seen for more than three years. I knew instantly who it was, even before her name was called out, she had changed little since I last saw her. Miss A looked as good as ever. I met her in Multivariate Calculus and Linear Algebra during my first year at Uni. She sat next to me during the first lecture, and I couldn't help but talk to her. The math was easy, we had both done similar stuff before, and so we chatted the hour away. She was smart, and funny, she liked Sonic Animation and Evangelion, and I liked her straight away. We went out for coffee after the lecture, and after the next lecture too. Eventually we started going out properly, and I was having a lot of fun. To cut a long story short, I got scared of how perfect she was, and I ran away. I told her some inane story, and quoted the last line of Fight Club. In other words it didn't end well. Seeing her on stage was a shock, and it brought back all those memories from three years ago. I didn't know she was graduating at the same time I was (though if I had bothered to think about it I would have realised it made sense) and I hadn't seen her in all the time we spent before the ceremony getting ready. After that though I saw her everywhere; as we were filing out of the hall, as we having refreshments afterwards, as we were walking back up towards the great court, and right at the end as I was returning my academic robes. I had managed to avoid her almost completely for the past three years, and now I couldn't get away from her. I actually bumped into her while getting a drink, but said only a few perfunctory congratulations and then made my escape. It was a strange experience, and seeing Miss A again really made the four years I've been at Uni weight down upon me. It seemed like everything had come full circle. A lot has happened since I finished highschool, and though this isn't the end of my University career, it does mark a turning point of sorts. Anyway, so after the ceremony I didn't want to hang around, and there were no real plans for everyone to get together, so I headed off with Mum and LW to this little place near Ascot. We had some coffee and food, and talked and then came home. Right now Calvin is over, normal Monday night schedule, and we are going to watch some TV and play some DDR. I'm writing this while we are watching TV, and he just offered to write a guest Blog, so the next thing you will read will be from him. Note: I revised and expanded much of this after Calvin went home. While doing so I've been listening to Massive Attack - Angel.

Graduand

University M D Wigs Having fulfilled the conditions prescribed by the University is this day admitted to the degree of BACHELOR OF ENGINEERING (SOFTWARE ENGINEERING) WITH HONOURS CLASS I GIVEN UNDER THE COMMON SEAL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND THE EIGHT DAY OF DECEMBER, 2003

Stats

University Well it's summer, and for once I'm not working, and I'm bored, so I ran some stats on the data presented on this page. There will be 161 people graduating from their BE on December 8th, of these there are 56 First Class Honours, 49 Second Class A Honours, 23 Second Class B Honours and 33 without honours. I think that it is interesting that more than one third of us are graduating with first class honours, meaning that we maintained a GPA of around 6 or more. Engineers are a smart bunch of people, and I think this reflects that. It takes a lot of hard work to complete a BE; it's exponentially more difficult that anything I've ever done in Business, both in the complexity and conceptual difficulty of the work, as well as the level of effort that the teachers expect you to put into your work. My business GPA is far higher than my engineering one, even despite the fact that I do a fraction of the work in business compared to engineering. So basically I'm saying that I'm proud to be an Engineer. It's a tough course, which attracts a lot of really intelligent people who I'm proud to have worked with over the last four years, and overall I think we all did a great job.

Anonymous

Friends - Metaposts When I started writing this blog I told all my friends about it. Its raison d'etre was, originally, to provide everyone with a constant stream of updates on my life when I'm half a world away. All my friends and family could just check GenesisDreams, see what I've been up to, add some comments, and be on their way. Then the blog went down for a number of months, and becuase I wasn't updating anymore, nobody was checking the site. I've been back for a little more than a week now, but still nobody I know is reading my blog. The thing that is interesting is that I'm beginning to like it. I find that I am censoring myself less, knowing that my friends and family aren't reading this. But now they are; and that's probably a good thing. I never intended for this blog to be a journey of self-discovery or any of that pretentious crap. I'm not trying to produce great writing to influence people, I don't comment on world events or politics to any great extent, this is simply a blog about me, for people who know me to read. There are some things I wont talk about here because I don't want the world to know about it, there are some things I wont talk about here because I don't want specific people to know about it. That's just the way it is. As always I'll write what I feel like talking about, I'll write what I think other people would be interested to read, and baring any unforseen events like my FTP going down and not being able to update, I'll continue writing for some time yet.

Judgement

University My university results were released today. I did really well overall, but the best news my results contained was the 7 for my thesis project. For those who aren't familiar with the way the grading works down here, a 7 is the highest mark you can get, a High Distinction, it then works its way down from there, 6 is a Distinction, 5 is a Credit, 4 is a Pass... actually I don't really know what they call the grades under that. Anyway basically it means I did as well in my thesis as I could do. So I'm pretty damn happy right now. Not that I was in any real danger of missing out, but my marks for this semester confirm that I'll get First Class Honours when I graduate a week and a bit. My GPA isn't fantastic, but it's high enough to get first class honours, so that's all I'm really worried about right now. I'm not even a part of the graduate recruiting scene this year (which is really the only place where your GPA and honours class actually matter, when you are competing for the few positions available at the top companies); I don't have to worry about looking good for potential employers until the end of next year. So that's it, I didn't fail anything, I don't have anything else I need to do in order to graduate, and so one week today I'll graduate! Yay me!