Archive for January, 2009

13
Jan

Relatively busy…

By Bill Journee 0 Comments
Categories: Uncategorized

Well, I’ve been back from Townsville for a week and a half now, and as usual for such things it feels like I never left (other than the lingering desire to be in Townsville or anywhere that’s not Melbourne, Victoria. That won’t be gone for a long while though).

I’ve actually been busy since I got back, which is slightly unusual but probably good since if I wasn’t busy I’d be going out of my mind. I did some photography this week, which was a fairly stark departure to all the pretty macro work I’ve been doing (some of which I intend to get printed and framed for potential commercial gain, maybe.) – pretty much some stock standard outdoor product shots. Not the most interesting job in terms of photography obviously, but it was good and I got to do some fun Photoshopping to create a product which exists in concept only at this point for a brochure.

As much as it was all good, I have to say that my 20D chose the wrong time to screw up – the night before the shoot. My shutter button seems to officially be on the way out, which is bad, but hopefully a nice little e-book I’ve found which details the process of replacing it (plus a replacement shutter en route from Canon) will have that all better soon. I ended up using my backup body (300D) to take the actual photos because the 20D shutter only works when I give the whole camera a death grip and force the shutter button down. When I got the 20D everyone seemed so confused as to why I wanted to keep my 300D since I only ever complained about it being slow and such, but I’m now happy I did since I ended up needing it as a backup. The moral of the story is that you can never have too many camera bodies.

I haven’t taken my new macro lens out and explored much yet due to the 20D being screwed, but once the weather moderates a bit (it’s roughly thirty five degrees centigrade outside at the moment and I’m being a sloth) I might stick it on my 300D and learn all over again why I found that body so frustrating – happy times.

To change direction completely for a moment, I’m also finding being back in Melbourne frustrating for another reason which is going to piss me off for a while: the almost total lack of mobile reception around this damned house. Optus is meant to be installing a new mobile tower some time in March which should fix the problem, but March is a long way away so far as I’m concerned and until then I’ve pretty much turned my shiny new iPhone off as not to kill its battery when I can’t even do anything with it. Even though I’m trying to be nice to it, it’s frustrating the crap out of me – Mt Evelyn isn’t the place to be if you want any of the comforts most people in normal cities or regional towns take for granted. Yay for progress.

Now that I’ve dug up some of the things pissing me off at the moment, I might leave the blog there before it turns into one long whinge. Oh, and I really will do a layout for this site soon, since my relative busy-ness will run out soon unless something changes in the near future. Adios!

07
Jan

Townsville Part 2

By Bill Journee 0 Comments
Categories: Uncategorized

Wow was it already all the way back on the 1st of Jan that I posted my last blog entry. I think I forgot to mention something relatively important in that blog post: Happy new year! That said, I’m likely saying that to nobody, but if anyone stumbles on it then I’ve insured myself against accusations of not knowing that the new year started seven days ago.

I’m back in ye olde Melbourne now, which is good and bad. It’s good because I can start getting stuck into some constructive stuff before uni starts again (although much of the constructive stuff mentioned will pertain to uni). It’s bad because every time I come back to Melbourne I realise how much it actually sucks and how much I’d really like to move to a smaller city, especially a northern one. What’s with regional universities and their total lack of a linguistics department? Admittedly I’ve only checked two universities: Charles Darwin University, and James Cook University. Maybe it’s something to do with universities which are named after the full names of individuals (Monash escapes the clause, because it’s not the Sir John Monash University). In any case, the universities which service the cities I wouldn’t mind moving to – Townsville, Darwin and possibly Cairns – have no linguistics department to speak of, besides Townsville having some form of speech pathology course. Certainly no avenues for PhD study. Damned small cities. It’s also frustrating from an academic standpoint because the Northern Territory and Far North QLD are the areas that are most at risk from language endangerment so some facilities to conduct research up north would be much appreciated!

On that note, I might move on and continue my synopsis of what I did in Townsville and what I thought, although from what I’ve written so far you probably gather that I did like Townsville a lot. Personally I’m not sure what it is, me liking Townsville or hating Melbourne…

Townsville Part 2

So, as I said in my last post, I had my week of house-sitting which was probably my most active time in terms of doing what I would love to do a lot more in the tropics, which is take photos. I’d probably choose a less obvious environment than the botanical gardens if I lived up there, but you take what you can get when you’re on holidays!

Over 5 days the house filled up pretty quickly. First, my brother’s partner and my niece arrived back in Townsville from Darwin, which was fine – that just brought us back to normal. A couple of days after that, my brother arrived back from work in Karratha (and attempted to sleep most of the day, thwarted by my niece). The next day, my sister arrived (on Monday the 22nd) and then the Christmas rush began.

Although I don’t drink, much alcohol was imbibed in by all those over 18 on both Christmas and New Years (the intervening time was much less interesting than busy, although we did visit Paluma whicwnsvillerh was good, albeit raining torrentially). The nightmare of my sister’s knee (more details: Twitter) began on the morning of New Year’s day and continues still, although the possibility of it needing surgery is passed.

I know I’ve said very little about what I actually did in Townsville, and that’s because on the whole it wasn’t really that much. Mostly, catching up with family and hanging out enjoying the weather. I’ve never been one for holidays with itineraries which run as long as your arm, so that works for me. The best thing on a holiday is good company. A nice venue like Townsville doesn’t hurt either!

01
Jan

Townsville Part 1

By Bill Journee 0 Comments
Categories: Uncategorized

Once again, I haven’t blogged in a while, this time because I’ve been too busy in Townsville (although I have reserved the time to Twitter copiously). I’m going to talk about some of the stuff I’ve been up to here now, because my sister’s mangled her knee so we’re pretty much housebound today at least.

Now that I’ve been in Townsville a little longer than the 2 days I’d been here last time I blogged, I’ve had more time to reflect upon the city and how it works. I’m still not excessively impressed with the CBD itself – compared to Darwin (or Melbourne, but that’s a given) the centre of the city seems very dead. There’s quite a number of buildings around the CBD itself that are empty, and seem to have been so for some time. Once you get out of the city, though, the impression improves a lot. There’s lots of walking tracks and gardens around, and although my opinion of Queensland’s road design department doesn’t have a lot of positive aspects getting around isn’t too bad, if only because the city’s small enough.

My week of housesitting was fairly uneventful, mostly taking some photos (some of which are on my flickr account) and exploring Townsville on my own. I went to my brother’s for dinner on all but one night and even managed to find a shortcut to their place that nobody else had figured out yet! On my photo trips, I visited all three of the botanical gardens in Townsville (in what ended up being the reverse order of preference) – Anderson Park, Queens Gardens and the Palmetum. I haven’t fully explored any of them (least of them Anderson Park, so it would probably grow on me if I visited it more extensively) but from what I’ve seen of them and the area around Townsville more generally the whole thing is a photographer’s dream.

If you look at the gallery you’ll probably notice that I’ve been very preoccupied with leaves since I’ve been up here, and that the vast majority of the photos are just leaves. It wasn’t an intentional thing, it just sort of happened when I visited the Queens Gardens the first time and noticed how amazing the interaction between tropical leaves and the sunlight is up here. So much more than the plants in Melbourne, the light shines through in interesting ways revealing textures and patterns which you can’t properly see without the light. The government decided to give me $1000 (well, lots of people $1000) so I saw that as a sign – an invisible voice said “Go and buy a macro lens” so that’s what I did, so then I took a whole lot of macro shots of the back of leaves. Anyway, not much of an excuse, but I’ve really enjoyed looking at the leaves of Townsville, so I don’t need to make excuses. That said, I’m going to have to look more carefully in Melbourne to find some of this stuff happening because it makes for some pretty amazing photos if I say so myself (even if I haven’t quite mastered the new lens.)

After my week of relative solitude, things got busy and more packed quickly. I’ll talk about Xmas and New Year a bit more in my next blog post, but I just thought I should check in and say that I am still alive. If you want further proof, follow my twitter feed, which I actually update semi-regularly.