I took this HDR picture of Miami the other night. It's a few pictures taken at different exposures slapped together with photoshop. I ended up forgetting that each photo taken for a HDR really should be one-stop different from its 'neighbour', and the highest exposure photo wasn't nearly enough to bring out the reflection in the water. Also, I was in the sort of spot where I didn't feel completely safe, so I didn't hang around for too long.
Is that enough excuses yet?
Note this is a very small snippet of the Miami skyline. It's a lot larger than this and is due to get a *lot* larger than it is now. Count the number of cranes in this picture. I think there are something like ten of them.
I am a massive, massive fan of the BBC car show "Top Gear". The trio of presenters work just so well together and make it absolutely hilarious to watch. Frosty (who at one time maintained his blog!) used to have screenings during work back in Adelaide, something I always looked forward to.
Richard Hammond, one of the presenters, was recently in a car crash while trying to beat the British land speed record. I'm not surprised at that, I'm surprised he actually got injured (and pretty badly too). Here's hoping he recovers soon!
I've really, really been getting into the Spanish/hispanic thing lately. I've started listening to a lot of the music, local bands like Minimal and now branching out to some other groups like the superstar Mexican group Cafe Tacuba. My fav song from them so far: Eres. Even if you don't know a lick of Spanish, it still sounds damn good.
One of my best friends over here in the US, Omar, and his wife, Jessie (who is also a best friend), just informed me that they are six weeks pregnant. I was informed of this via a text message today that said:
(news)We're pregnant, talk soon!"
It took me a little while to recover from falling off the floor. Awesome, awesome news. Congratulations again Omar and Jessie! I know you never read my blog but what the hell I just had to write this down anyway!
This adds to the list of friends over here and back in Oz who are pregnant or who have had kids recently:
Plugger and Kate K9 and Debbie Cepi and Arlene Javi and Glenda Todd and Heidi Susan and Rick
Americans like having discussions while occupying the toilet. It's a fascinating if slightly disturbing habit. Americans also like guns. Also fascinating, also slightly disturbing. Now that I've got those major generalisations out of the way, let's combine them: talking about guns while in the toilet. Today there was a three way conversation about guns going on. One guy was talking to a fellow gun-toting dude over his phone, some other guy recognised his voice and love of guns and decided to join in. "have you bought your gun yet? ... all I need is a .45 and my collection will be filled out..."
Nice.
It's obviously too quiet in toilets around here, so people feel the need to occupy the silence with their important conversations. I say that massive speaker systems should be installed in the toilets, with fully sick subwoofers, and volume knobs that go to eleven. If they could wire those speaker systems into Radio One, that'd be pretty awesome. Problem solved!
So I went to Nicaragua, again, "to see what I missed out on last time". The photo set I recently uploaded to Flickr is here. The set consists more of people shots than anything else. It's not complete (the sets never are, it seems. There are many pictures where I think "hmmm, that needs to be edited a bit..." or "ok, I have to turn this into a panorama"), but it's a start.
I'm currently chillin' in Miami airport waiting for my flight to Managua, so thought I'd upload a video of a recent night out at "the fifth". It's a very SoBe sort of club. Very expensive too (da, that's SoBe as well). The music was a bit dodgy earlier on, but once the DJs decided to do away with the "hey, we're a club, let's play hip hop" cliche and actually play some decent dance music, then things got a little better.
I'm lying here on my bed (no work today due to the storm) listening to Hybrid's latest studio album, "I choose noise", which got released today. In a word, it's fan-friggen-tastic. It's everything I hoped for in an album of this genre (think a symphony having a head-on collision with break beats). Listening to it is like diving into a massive pavlova and finding Tim Tams at the bottom. It's available for download in a "quite unlike iTunes" non-restrictive audio format, called MP3, from their label, distinct'ive records.
Not only that, but BT is also releasing his new album today, "This Binary Universe". I had to order the album the old fashioned way and wait for it to be delivered. I couldn't find a digital download (a.k.a.: torrent) to appease the consumer-whore in me that can't wait for delivery by the postman. The really cool thing about this album - apart from the fact that I know it's going to be cool because BT is the ultimate in his field - is the fact that one of the discs is recorded in full DTS surround sound! It makes me want to fly back to Oz and give it a listen on my old faithful sound system. I wonder if my subwoofer is still doing a decent job back in Adelaide... ahh yes, I can feel it now.
It's amazing what one can accomplish when one chooses to not sleep.
Here are some videos from Ultrafest 2006. I've been meaning to put these up for months and months. You'll just love how the little microphone on my camera has no clue what to do with all the bass that's hitting it.
I can't remember the name of this band, but the lead singer kept saying that one of their songs was on iTunes' top 100. Apart from that, he sang a lot about how weed would solve all the world's problems.
Eric Morillo, with cruise ship visible to the right. Ultrafest on a cruise ship would be pretty awesome.
Carl Cox dance tent. I didn't want to put up the actual video of Carl Cox DJing. Anyone who has "Carl Cox" spinning on the display behind them while they DJ won't get any space in my blog. Unless, of course, they have "PK" spinning on the display, then that's cool.
Drum and Bass set.
Pendulum - look out for the dude wearing the flashing glasses, it's sort of surreal as he walks past. I felt like shooting the MC with my mind bullets during the Pendulum set, he was annoying the fcuk out of me. Oh, the reason why I was so far back? My feet were hurting like hell from jumping up and down all day, so I decided to go barefoot for a while. Those of you who have seen people dancing to DnB know that your feet would not be safe even if they're protected by steelcaps! The Prodigy cover that Pendulum ends on in this video leads into...
The real Prodigy! Awesome, awesome, awesome. We couldn't get any closer though, no matter how much we tried. You might see some wafts of smoke in the foreground during this set. That's not any special effect, that's something that causes special effects. I swear I was passively getting high during this set.
Van de Graaff generator. Check out how something wrong starts to happen. I was waiting for it to explode, but you do get to see some little sparks fly off the shaft.
BT. This was such an awesome set, and was by far my favourite of Ultrafest 2006. Fan-bloody-tastic, BT!
This is a video I took of some cloud moving over the top of Volcano Concepcion on the island of Ometepe in Nicaragua. The speed has been increased by a factor of eight.
Today I am just in the worst, most depressed mood ever. I don't even know what to blame it on . . . many things I guess. No, I'll blame it on distance and the fact that work is sucking right now.
But anyway, for some reason I am inspired to take pictures of bugs and maybe a Miami skyline at night. I'll see how I go with that this weekend.
UPDATE: In the last 1/2 hour of my working Friday, everything seemed to fall into place. Ummmm, yay!
I'm not one of the special people who can do the switch to the new version of blogger yet, but a new funky layout could just be what this site needs. Of course, 'funky' is completely in the eye of the beholder. Some people around here are still convinced that wearing brown belts with white sneakers is totally funky.
My holiday in Nicaragua was quite simply the most eye-opening, amazing trip I've ever been on. I've never seen such extremes in my life. I went to the upper class club "Hipa Hipa" in Managua and then drank Toña in a bar made of sheet iron on the island of Ometepe. I've never lived in such extremes, from the very nice Holiday Inn in Managua to sleeping at a place that only had a fan and no hot water on Ometepe (when there was water at all). It was just amazing to experience the two extremes.
What was the most amazing thing about Nicaragua? Well, apart from the people, it was that damn Volcano Concepcion on the island of Ometepe in Lake Nicaragua. It's still active, and every now and then spews out some ash and rumbles. It didn't do any of that while I was on the island, though. It's an amazing sight to behold (it's only half the height of Mt Fuji, however) and you see it everywhere you travel on Ometepe. It arrogantly stands there in stark contrast to the peaceful life of the people living there.
Click on the image below to get to the Flickr set, which I'm still working on. About 1/2 the photos are online.
I was going to complete what happened on the rest of the roadtrip... but screw it. One of the highlights was when a girl I was chatting to at some bar in Asheville, North Carolina, basically proposed to me. If it weren't for the 5 pints of Guinness I'd had already, I might have even considered the offer. I don't even know how that makes sense. All I'm really trying to say is that a fair chunk of the pictures from the trip are online here.
I have been extremely busy lately with a lot of stuff, most of it work, unfortunately. I've just been damn tired the last week. Not to worry though - tomorrow I head off on another road trip! But it's not going to be in the US. I'm heading off with a friend for 8 days of exploring in Nicaragua. I speak very little Spanish (very, very little). That should not be too much of a problem though, as my friend speaks Spanish quite well and he's actually from Nicaragua. Convenient, no?
Whilst there, we'll be visiting the capital Managua (which, even with a population of over a million, is the only city I know of that has no street names... queue the U2). Also we're visiting the coastal town of San Juan Del Sur, Granada, the volcanic island of Ometepe, Leon, Selva Negra... the list goes on. I'm pretty damn excited about this. My camera trigger finger is going to get RSI.
It almost seemed like we were never going to get on the road the Friday night of the road trip. I had left my camera tripod at Tobacco Road from doing photos the night before, and thinking that I might need to use it (I never did end up using it), I drove all the way to Miami to pick it up after work. Eventually my partner in crime Eddie and I left my place at 9pm ... that's a bloody late when we were intending to make it to Jacksonville that night (about a 6 hour drive, sticking to the speed limit).
Make it to Jacksonville we did, and then some. Eddie played the DS Lite (I love my DS... it kicks arse) quite a bit until he got road sick. I occupied myself by playing Muse over and over and then singing stupid songs in my head. We ended up stopping past Jacksonville at the last exit before Georgia. Here's the map.
This is where I'd like to say a big "Fsuk YOU!" to Days Inn. We were starting to get tired and were looking for some reasonable places to stop at. Someplace where we didn't feel like there was the danger of getting mugged, getting the car stolen, somewhere we could rest comfortably without fear of anything. Unfortunately this was difficult as a lot of the places were booked because of the Daytona 500. Yay for watching cars go round and round till your head falls off from boredom.
We eventually found a place, a Days Inn that was the only accommodation at that particular exit. By that stage we were tired and didn't really care about anything else. We paid $80 for the worst accommodation ever. I swear there was a frog in the room somewhere. Eddie thought it was in the air conditioner and was kicking it during the night to stop its croaking. My bed was like sleeping in a pile of moss. The room stank like ... something I can't even describe.
Thankfully we were both alive in the morning and still had our limbs and body organs. We promptly exited that abomination of a place and gave the Days Inn a big "up yours!!!". This act of affection was to be repeated throughout the road trip.
Believe it or not, I'm still alive. The last couple of weeks have been especially hectic, with me finishing up part of a music course and work being insane. Oh, and fit a supermassive road trip up through South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia in with all that on the past July 4 weekend. I've again been updating Flickr with pics from the trip so if you click on the badge to the right you'll get to them. I have some weird arse stories to share from that trip...
But aside from all that, today's surreal moment had to belong to the France vs Italy world cup final. I'm sitting there watching with a bunch of friends, Corona in hand, and then all of a sudden I see Zidane, who I always thought was cool, calm and collected, head-butt one of the Italian players. WTF?
