Last year Bron and I went to see the Picasso exhibition at the NGV International. I didn’t know much about Picasso, but the exhibition was pretty interesting. A large part of it was actually about Picasso’s muse Dora Maar. They even had ipods with an audio guide available for hire.
Here’s a couple of pictures I took that night.
Update:Full-size versions of these photos are now available for purchase!
A few weeks ago I saw this boxer sitting in the sun on the front porch of a house.
She was quite content to ignore me as I stopped, took the photo, and went on my way laughing 
My MacBook finally arrived last weekend. It’s small and white, so I’ve named it ととろ (Totoro)
A few quick notes:
Obligatory unpacking photos follow…
I had to wait 4 weeks for the white 2.0GHz MacBook stock to arrive. I was considering paying the extra $200 for the black because I was sick of waiting. They look nice, like the old pismo powerbook, but also a lot like a normal pc laptop, and it just doesn’t seem like it’s worth the extra just for the color (although something less prone to scratching might be nice).
Now I have to install the 120G drive in it and get everything transferred across!
So the spammers finally found my blog.
I’ll be trying a few things to stop it until I can upgrade wordpress (yes, it’s long overdue).
On Sunday my family ran in the 2006 Mothers Day Classic in Melbourne.
Last year we all entered the 4km run (except Dad, who was away). This year I entered the 8km run, mainly because I thought there would be less people in that event, but also because Dad was running 8km, and I couldn’t let him run twice as far as me!
It turned out that 17,000 people entered the event in one form or another, and even in the 8km run was very crowded. The first few hundred metres were barely a more than walking pace, and most of the first kilometer was a slow jog. Definitely not an event to really test your times unless you can grab a spot right at the front of the start-line. But it was probably a good thing in the end, since my “training” (yeah, right!) didn’t go so great because of a cold 2 weeks before the event. I ended up keeping a steady pace up till the 6km mark, at which point I was still feeling really good, and pushed the last 2km quite hard. So my time wasn’t great, but I was happy with how it turned out, especially considering it was the first time I’ve run 8km.
Overall it was a good event, we all managed to finish okay and had a bit of fun
Today was Bron’s birthday, so we went to lunch at a Cambodian restaurant Bopha Devi in the docklands, took a ride on a ferris wheel in Fed Square, and went to the NGV.
Happy Birthday Bron, I hope you had as much fun as I did.
Last night I went to see Cory Doctorow speaking at ACMI for a fireside chat with cory doctorow.
Cory talked about culture, copyright, and DRM. Specifically, he talked about some of the crazy things the entertainment industry are doing, and how this indicates their business models aren’t in very good shape.
Some signs your business model is crap:
Cory’s an excellent speaker, and he’s obviously passionate about the topic. His published books are also available under the Creative Commons license, and he has worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, among other things. If you get a chance to see him speak, I’d thoroughly recommend it.
But the best bit about the night? M1K3¥ and Cory had met at conjure, so I got to tag along and have a drink and a chat with Cory and his girlfriend after the lecture!
Bron and I decided to go for a bushwalk to Mount St. Gwinear for Easter Sunday. It’s about 120km from Melbourne, in the Baw Baw National Park. The walk is 6km, and the guide (pdf) estimates it at about 3 hours.
We arrived to find about 6 inches of snow, and two police officers waiting for a search party who were bringing down a walker who’d spent an unplanned (and rather cold) night out in the snow!
Despite not being prepared for the snow (we had raincoats, but not really suitable footwear), we decided to give the walk to Mt. St. Gwinear a go. It turned out to be a fairly easy walk even in the snow, in the dry it would probably only take about an hour.
The view from the top was pretty good, we had a bit of lunch, and then made a snowman, which Bron dubbed ‘Claire’.
We didn’t have any gloves, so Claire was pretty small…
And, of course, the odd snowball got thrown…
Luckily the weather stayed fine, in fact it warmed up quite a bit and the snow began to melt making it hard to keep our feet dry.
It turned out to be a really nice walk, even with the wet feet on the way back.