Kats leaving

Kat had her last day at Frost* yesterday. We where invited to her leaving do.


1. Drinks and video games at Frost*














2. Lebanese restaurant with food, drinks, shisha and belly dance. All situated in a Lebanese tent.

Me & Gustav














Shisha














Kat














Belly dancer


















3. Clubbing at Ruby Rabbit

The New Zealand story

Finally arrangements have been done and booked. I will be traveling across
the island, starting my journey the 24 if April in Christchurch in the south and end in Auckland on the 6th of May. I'm not likely to bring my laptop while away, but will try to check my email every now and then. Blogging will probably wait till afterwards.

Patterns

I have experimented a bit with pattern programming. Have written a litte program that will convert a bitmap using a set of rules and a pattern. I have done 3 test patterns so far, and here are some of the results.

The following have had treatment afterwards















































Raw pattern image without any treatment afterwards, displaying my 3 test patterns.

Far east Asian Sunday

We started of with Yum Cha for lunch at Zilver. Food was good as always. We where a group of 7 people. My self, Kat, Ayumi, Thomy, Brett, Josef and Gustav.

After lunch, Brett and Thomy left. The rest of us went to the Japanese game arcade to have our photos taken, checking out the shops and laugh a lot.

Then we headed of to MCA, Sydney Museum of Contemporary art, to see the exhibition of Yayoi Kusama, a now 80 year old Japanese woman. I didnt expect much, as I often find art being pretentious. But I must admit I realy enjoyed it. Then we headed back to china town for some more exploring, tea and food.

I bought a small camera on Saturday. I have been longing for that for quite some time. The big one is good, but you realy have to plan to go photographing. This one I can bring with me all the time, and it shoots pretty good videos too. So hopefully you can look forward to more quality photos on the blog. Some on this post are still taken with my mobile camera as I ran out of battery.


Yum Cha tea lunch at Zilver




























We had to wait for almost an hour to get our table. The restaurant is very popular.
In the meantime Thomy and Ayumi tries to recall childrens clapping game.



We took the camera for a spin at the Yum Cha table



Gustav being busy decorating our photograph


















Kat, Gustav and a bit of Josef














The final result
































If you have bags under your eyes, use the left one.
If you want to clean your pores, use the right one.














The japanese phones are so much nicer than the european ones. They have unlocked many of them and you can use them in australia if you are with a certain provider.















This was a pretty small projector. Smallest in the world according to the add. 50" from something you could almost fit in your pocket is not that bad in the end.














Ayumi, Gustav, Kat & Josef














At the exhibition




















































We are inside the light and mirror room













































Ayumi










































We finally decided to try the black bread we saw the other day. It wasn't squid ink that made it black. The color comes from bamboo char coal. The bread it self tasted a bit like an ordinary bread roll, but it was topped with garlic that tasted awful.


















Some more stuff from the chinese bakery














And a bit more



We stoped by an odd tea house, this is Ayumis black sesame ice tea.
We also played a game of chinese checkers. The place was an internet cafe,
tea house, as well as full of teddies and love hears, serving nibbles and selling motherboards and harddrives for you computer.


















The evening ended at the chinese noodle restaurant, where you for about 7 dollars each have hand made noodles, dumplings and tea.

A week to wind down

Autumn is slowly closing its grip around Sydney. A jacket is required when the sun goes down and its to cold for shorts in general.

My last big contract ended last Friday, this week have been spent rounding of some job I have done on the side, sorting out some domestic necessities as well as trying to wind down. I have realized i have had all these "must do" things along side work acing in my head and time for as long as I can remember.
All of a sudden i got all this time to allocate. Off course I want to use if wisely, so what shall I pick?
start writing that book I wanted to do? Learn how to build iPhone applications? Clean and rebuild my flash code library? Picing up the electronics I started with before starting the last project? Build a generic game engine based on the old panda game? Make some new music? Learn after FX? Start the philosophy blog I have registered, so I can put all my theories into print and finaly store them? Travel? Start learning that 4th language I want to learn? Start dealing with what will happen after August when my Visa runs out?
All of a sudden there is not that much time at hand any more. None of above things can be done in an afternoon, most of them require at least weeks and some even months or eternity to full fill. Discussing the issue with one of my good friends back home, we quickly came to the conclution to scrap everything that doesn't lead to anything. Such as spending time playing video games, spending to many evenings out drinking, watching downloaded episodes of TV series, maintaining social networking web sites such as myspace, facebook, twitter, linkedin etc. Well that one was easy, as none of the things on my wish list are of this caliber. Well there are a few questionable things like making music. That is not likely to lead to anything. And travel, but traveling is different. It makes life richer and something I want to do while I'm here (well, some may consider playing video games having the same effect for instance, but sorry... not for me. Not any more anyway).

So if we twist and turn the problem a bit. What would be the maxim outcome of the time spent?
As we already started talking about video games, lets compare life to one. Referring to the previous post where life is divided into segments. Lets say the largest scale of segment is like a level in a video game. Each new level you enter you gain new skills and wisdom. Its a challenge to beat the obstacles in the beginning but after a while you get the hang of it and its not to bad with your brand new weaponry. Finally you have to find the door to the next level and secondary you have to find a way to get through it. As a real life example from my life, we could take Hyper Island, that was the door. As soon as I found out about the door, I just had to find the key. But it was a bit easier once I knew what I was looking for.
Any how, I feel like I have been stuck at this god damn level for ages now. Moving to Sydney wasn't qute the answer, even though it brought a lot of the comforts I had been longing for. Well, I knew that a location change wouldn't be sufficient to enter a new level on its own. In other words. Maximum outcome would be reaching a new level. Going freelance was one of the best things I have ever done, stepping backwards and becoming an employee again is hard to consider. But I'm honestly sick of being the "carpenter" I have become, assembling other peoples dreams.
I never liked programming it self. I was always more interested in the end result rather than the work getting there. I guess that's how I started learning it in the first place. Because there was stuff I wanted to do. Like in my teens, I didn't give a darn about programming, I just wanted to make games. To make games, programming was a necessity. A higher position in the website assembly line wouldn't solve the problem either I'm afraid. Just cant put my finger on what I'm after, but I would love to do something a lot more meaning full. Something more intelligent than make some company's product sell to the masses. On top of that I would love to have time on the side of work where I can spend time on things such as making music, draw doing cooking classes withouth having a bad conscious.
I could go on ranting till the end of time. After writing all this, I cant say I have found an answer. The door remains hidden but I have come to the conclusion that I wont take on work on the side anymore unless for a particular reason. Most things on my list above are more likely to buy me time and less likely to be the answer. Many of them require to much time to investigate to be a considerable option. What ever I do its a gamble, and I wish I find a path I haven't noticed before, maybe your eyes can help me find the door. I just don't have a clue where to start. And I don't feel I have any good options that I can investigate under a graspable amount of time.

There are stuff that makes me tick, even though I cant say why. But more of that in later posts. I feel this will go on forever otherwise.

One thing is for sure though, I want to go on holiday day. The sooner the better. I was very upset yesterday when I was making my New Zealand arrangements. The options where to many and none was what I wanted or not available at the moment or for the right price. I finally found a company who will help me put together my arrangement according to the stuff I'm interested in. I hope I will get a reply from them early next week so I can depart as soon as possible, Its a shame this holiday got delayed.

An evening out in China Town

I think calling it China town is wrong. Its massive, and include all far east Asia.


Korean Dinner
















































Big Paws to put on your arms





























Chinese Bakery















Fashion for the cool crowd

Back again

Imagine life being divided into segments, and each segment has its sub segments. I guess its only up to you how fine you wish your grid to be, and how many levels of sub segments you wish to divide your life into. One thing is for sure, a fairly big chunk of segment came to an end last Friday.
After a long build up it ended in a crescendo like no other. Everything just stopped for a moment, became very beautyfull and calm. Shortly after I fell a sleep and it felt like I slept for most of the weekend. Had a lot of sleep to catch up on. It has been busy times, and that was not the least reflected on the blog, as I guess you might have noticed the absence of posts.

The very last days at the farm was a fully fledged competition between me and fellow worker Earle who also ended his contract on friday. The company had decided to split the office into two teams, Team Earle, and Team Phil. The rules where simple, and based on what me and Earle have in common. As they have never seen stranger emails and heard stranger music since we both arrived. We where given a blog each to fill with the weirdest stuff possible till the end of last Friday, and we where also given 30 minutes each to play the stranges music we could possibly find. The competition was fun fierce and stressful as we had alot of work to finish. Sadly our team members perception of strange didn't stretch that far some times. And humor under the belt seems like the easies way out. Tried to keep that to a minimum though. And some of the stuff me and Earle brought up we didnt bother posting as it seemed a bit to random for our team members. The blogs are still up there

http://philthefarmer.blogspot.com/
http://earlethefarmer.blogspot.com/

I feel that if I dont cut this short, this post is going to go on forever. I will instead post some photos of what has been going on lately. And then after that I will talk a little about the future.

Chat Thai, one of my favorite Thai places in Sydney. Its very popular, and you always have to cue up to get a table. The food is excelent and for a very good price too.














Kat introduced me to this place. Its called Chinese Noodle Restaurant. Its very simple and extremely cheap. But the food is very good. They make their noodles by hand and you get to see them doing it. We payed about 7 dollars each for dinner with tea, which is somewhere around 35 Swedish kronor or about £2.70.




































For the last couple of weeks me and Kat have been doing breakfast before work. Nothing we do everyday, but maybe once every or at least every two weeks. It's a great start of the day.
Here we are having a bowl of porridge.


















Had have had to work on a PC during my last major project, and I must admit I have turned into a Mac person. I forgot how sluggish PC's get in the afternoon and how they crash. Every time my computer crashed I made a little drawing on a post-it while waiting for it to restart. Happy to be back on my Mac. Had it for over a year now, and still love it.














Morning meeting at work. The grass was wet so we decided to sit on the pavement.
.



























The last lunch on Friday we had at El Bulli, a Spanish tapas place. We had a few to many sangrias but it was great fun





































Getting to this point, I have decided not to talk about the future just yet. Might keep you posted on this one.

Bye for now.