Monday, August 30, 2010

Hooting and Howling with the Wild Beasts

I love this song. How come I never heard of the Wild Beasts until today. Thank you BFM.

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Mid winter blues-berries

I'm writing this with the lovely smell of a blueberry cheesecake baking in the oven. Little things like that really cheer me up.

I don't know where July & August disappeared to. One moment they were there and then 'whooosh' it's almost September. I'm not complaining mind you - it means there's only a couple of weeks to go until I fly north.

I don't remember such a busy winter. First there was the International Film Festival. We saw 14 movies in 2 weeks of July, mostly documentaries. The highlights were 'Exit Through The Gift Shop' (the world's first street art disaster movie), Roman Polanski's latest 'The Ghost Writer' , 'Oil City Confidential' about the British band Dr. Feelgood and the Norwegian black comedy/drama 'A Somewhat Gentle Man'.

Then there was the Mensa AGM weekend quickly followed by the NZ Skeptics conference (both in Auckland). In between those I've been working full-time (shock horror!) albeit 2 days a week from home. The extra work is due to the need to write a functional specification that is currently running to 120 pages.

I also discovered bandit.fm - a cool site. For a small monthly fee you get to download music and you can also listen to streamed music you haven't bought in full, so you can really decide what you like, unlike iTunes where you only get a 30 second sampler. Bandit.fm is more like streaming radio where you get to select the albums to listen to.

Mostly due to the costly house re-roof we didn't have a proper holiday since Vietnam in 2008, so we are making up for it with a trip to Hong Kong, England, Greece & Poland. The weather has been mixed lately. Not too cold - 18C today. Hopefully when we get back in mid-October it will really be summer here. As usual, escapees from the wintry north will be welcome to visit.