Posts by Joe Wylie
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Thanks for the opportunity to play with the examples Jackson. The initial impression is a bit like Quicktime VR - once you're over the novelty, only the likelihood of some special interest is sufficient to click into an environment with its own rather arcane rules of navigation.
Like most of those commenting here, I'm interested to see whether Lytro is able to deliver beyond a proprietary format. There's a shy hope, or possibly a nagging suspicion, that the technology is capable of more than is currently constrained by its present packaging.
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Hard News: Briefing, blaming, backing down, in reply to merc,
Magic Man solution
Fitzgerald's not the only example. The NSW Wood Commission into police corruption was arguably as significant. I'm kind of hoping that we find a better home-grown option than eventually begging for Australian statehood as a way out of the hole our banana republican overlords & useful idiot ladies seem bent on plunging us into. Because really, the latter is starting to look pretty good.
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While Parata cops the flak the head of WINZ has resigned with stuff-all media attention, apparently after failing to come to terms with the realisation that her role was to act as window dressing while Paula Rebstock ran the show from the shadows. Then there's Nick Smith who, despite being sin-binned, talks up totalitarianism while his nominal successor as Local Government Minister does zilch.
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Maybe Roughan was worth reading once, but this killed him for me.
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Capture: Two Tales of a City, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
and a bit like trilobites as well...
I guess we'll never know if trilobites tasted good. Here they are as party food from my brother Jim's 80s artwork for the Oz powerpop Trilobites.
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Capture: Two Tales of a City, in reply to JacksonP,
A close up of those rippled forms makes them look a bit like giant chitons.
Incidentally, it took me some time to work out what these were called. Maybe it’s common knowledge, but not a word I have used a lot, if ever.
Don't they just, now that you mention it. Fascinating critters, and along with limpets pretty common on underwater hard surfaces around Sumner. Not to be confused with the other kind of chiton that features in the historical romances of Mary Renault:
"Unnoticed, fingers slipped under the wide neck of the prince's chiton to press against the jutting collarbone ..." -
Capture: Two Tales of a City, in reply to Hebe,
but I didn't think that happened on the beach itself?
Me neither, but there's a similar distribution to those Sumner beach shapes. I guess the rippled edges is a tidal thing.
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Capture: Two Tales of a City, in reply to Hebe,
Wonder what causes these round pools.
An older Ms Goodie pic, the estuary a few days after the June 2011 shake. Worth a click for full size. Interesting characteristic ripple fx. Surprising how long they seem to persist through repeated tidal movement.
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Capture: Going Walkabout in Sydney, in reply to Julie Cross,
Many thanks for that Julie. Until 2003 I lived ten years in a top floor unit high on the North Sydney side of Anderson Park in Neutral Bay. The enormous variety of birdlife there was some compensation for the lack of garden space.
Butcherbirds would turn up occasionally and stay around for a week or two. Their song wasn't dissimilar from that gorgeous soundfile you've linked to. When they sing there's no mistaking them for anything else. From the best look I got at one I guessed it to be a grey butcherbird. Like a smaller magpie crossed with a kingfisher when seen perching.
Unlike those phenomenal rarities like the flock of black cockatoos that once wheeled over the harbour, or the pair of peregrine falcons that moved into the area for a couple of weeks, the butcherbirds' visits didn't appear to be connected with anything like bushfires. They just seemed to show up as it suited them.
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Speaker: The Voyage: On Interpreting and…, in reply to Mr Magoo,
The arguments around the Crafar deal - we need them more than they need us, overriding the "xenophobia" of "misinformed" popular opinion - are reminiscent of the bizarre pie-in-the-swamp Multifunction Polis that was proposed for the Gold Coast, and eventually South Australia, in the late 80s.
The concept was still being half-heartedly flogged long after the Japanese economic bubble that was supposed to fund the high-tech "colony" had well and truly burst. Anyone who dared to raise the question of why Australia wouldn't be building a reciprocal colony on Japanese soil was treated like the kid who'd pointed out that he could see the Emperor's arsehole.
