bill.journee.org

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So, I failed dismally at updating this blog more often. Go team Billiam!

I think the problem I have at the moment is that my life is interesting enough to tweet, but not interesting enough to expand into something longer, like a blog post. The upside of this is that you don’t need to read rambling run on sentences that make little sense and don’t lead anywhere; a bit like this one. Nectarine.

Anyway, at some point in the near future I’m going to write a couple of posts about how much I love Townsville; it’ll be thrilling.

Lamingtons.

5 Things You Probably Know About Me

Extensive statistical analysis of polling conducted over the last few weeks has revealed that I’m the only person who looks at this blog. This is good news – my readership is on the up!

It also means I can indulge in the counterpoint to Jade Craven‘s powerful and thought provoking post, 14 Things You (Probably) Don’t Know About Me, with my own post. Better still, since I’m the only person that reads this (cf. extensive statistical analysis) none of these things will come as a surprise. Happy days. Since I’m boring and don’t want to read so much about myself, I’ve also trimmed this post down to 5 points.

At this stage I would also like to point out Christopher Lane‘s response to Jade’s post, Facx Aboot Meh!, which is probably what you were after if you’re not me and stumbled on this post. Run now, while you still can.

1. There’s a cupboard in my unit that I forgot existed for over a month.

I moved to Townsville in early March, moved into a unit, and pretty much had to buy all the basics of life to fill up the unit. Who am I kidding? I had the basics of life – a computer. I just needed all that other incidental stuff that fits around the computer.

My unit has a small kitchen, and I noticed on the day I moved in that one of the cupboards smelled funny. Then I forgot about it. Not the smell, that is, I mean the cupboard. This was the 6th of March.

Fast forward to the 20th of April, I was brushing my teeth and getting ready to go to bed and suddenly thought “I think I have another cupboard in my kitchen.” So I walked to the kitchen, and sure enough, a cupboard. My question to you (me) is this: how the hell can you forget about a whole cupboard? For over a month?

2. I don’t like onion.

If you’ve known me for any length of time (as I have!) you’ll know that I have a passionate distaste for onion. I really wish this wasn’t the case, because it’s very, very problematic when it comes to…well, food.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking: “He doesn’t drink AND doesn’t eat onion? Party pooper!” (Oh wait, did I forget to mention I don’t drink either? Oh well, consider yourself warned). However, now that I’m cooking for myself the vast majority of the time, it’s not such a problem. I just don’t put onion into most things I cook (*collective gasp*). Yes, that works just fine, really. I don’t like onion, so amazingly enough removing it from meals doesn’t actually ruin them for me as most people seem to think when they first hear of this radical action.

3. I really enjoy cooking, but rarely follow recipes. So far, so good.

Since I moved to Townsville I’ve been experimenting with cooking different things. I’ve always cooked a bit, but living away from home means I’m cooking for myself most of the time and that’s no bad thing.

As Jade discovered, I make a mean cake, but I’ve been experimenting with the basics of the repertoire lately: bread, pasta and pastry. A delicious foray into the carbohydrate laden world of flour. This is definitely a work in progress, but so far so good.

4. I’m going to go back to university to do a PhD in linguistics.

I’m sure this is easy enough to guess since my language are so good. My trip to Townsville was all about taking a break, taking stock, and making sure it’s what I really wanted to do. I mean, 3 years is a long time and all, but it’s essentially a career choice too; experts in language endangerment generally don’t stray too far from the academic tree, so to speak.

So, I just need to think of a topic and/or language to do my PhD thesis on (which will be my focus next year, along with moving back to Melbourne and turning my current work into a part-time income). Easy. [Insert sniggers here]

5. Social Media Solutions is the second business I’ve been involved in founding.

The first business I founded was with my friend Matt and a graphic designer. It was called Crazy Crazy. I miss that name. I mean, Social Media Solutions has the professional appeal and the awesome branding, but Crazy Crazy had crazy. And a monkey. I’m afraid Social Media Solutions can’t compete on that front.

Anyway, there’s actually not a lot to say about that business. It was an amazing learning experience, and made me a lot more aware of how the business world operates before I got into the industry post-uni with Social Media Solutions.

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So, that’s it. It all seems a but anticlimactic now, and it was originally meant to be 14 points, but I had two options: let this blog fester while I tried to think of 14 interesting things about myself, or post something. So, enjoy your something!

I’d also love to hear interesting things about anyone who happens to find this blog. My magic 8 ball says that’s unlikely. Don’t get me started on magic 8 balls though.

Progress Report

Well, since university is already steaming on past the middle of semester one (what the hell??) I thought now would be a good time to do a general update of what’s going on, and why I haven’t been posting all these insightful posts about linguistics I mentioned earlier in the year.

Mostly this semester has been taken up with my two coursework subjects, ‘Linguistic Theory’ and ‘Language and Identity’. The former is the compulsary fourth year honours subject in linguistics, and mostly deals with the history of linguistic thought and theory. The latter is pretty much what its name suggests, dealing mainly with the ways in which we construct our identities using language, and how language helps define those identities. The latter is also very relevant to my honous thesis (which is why I’m doing it.)

What all that means, thus far, is that I haven’t done much work on my thesis at all. I’ve been doing some general background reading into Yanyuwa, and to a lesser extent into Kriol, and language endangerment in general, but I’ve mostly been trying to get assessment stuff done for my coursework subjects (which are, after all, worth 50% of my mark this year – so sacrificing them for the good of the thesis will only screw me up anyway.)

So, in essence, that’s why I haven’t been posting any insightful posts about lingiuistics or much else for that matter. However, I can say that as I work on my next assignment for Language and Identity I’ll probably have some interesting comment to make on the Nothern Territory Intervention and the language used to sell it to the people. So that’s something you can look forward to if you so wish.

So, now that I’ve explained my lack of blog posts, I should get back to all the other stuff I have to do!

After the Fires

Today I went for lunch in Narbethong, one of the towns which was affected by the Black Saturday bushfires last month. It is beyond words to drive through the Black Spur, known for being one of the most beautiful areas in the state, much of it now blackened from the fires. It’s nothing compared to coming into what remains of Narbethong though.

There’s a few shops still standing in the town, the few including the hotel (dating from 1893) which had fire lapping at its back door. Almost no trees have been spared as far as the eye can see in places, and the vegetation is punctuated by the mangled remains of homes. The spared homes often surrounded by blackened vegetation, a reminder of how close they came to the inferno and survived.  All of this is surrounded by lush new grass growth, incongruously giving the sense that the fire spared the grass (of course, it didn’t – the grass has shot up in the five weeks since the fires, with help from the rain.)

We continued on to Buxton before returning to Narbethong for lunch, and the story is much the same for many kilometers. In the distance, the Cathedral Ranges loom eerily looking much like a patchwork quilt – some areas burned worse than others, but all burned.

The Buxton Road House was one building which didn’t survive Black Saturday, and we stopped momentarily to look at what remained. I’ve posted a few photos of it to flickr, although they really show a very small part of the devastated building, let alone the devastation which surrounds it. Not far up the road, on the opposite side, what’s left of a house sits destroyed.

Edit: This kinda reads like a newspaper opinion piece or something (and a couple of people have actually mentioned it to me.) It’s not intentional but probably because I cut it down fairly heavily after I wrote it. I’m not sure how that happened, but it happened organically so it can stay that way.

Back at uni

Well then, now that I’ve cleared out the SPAM comments bin (nice and easy, given the refreshing lack of actual comments) I can write a new – overdue – blog post.

As the title of this blog oh-so-subtly suggests I’m back at uni for a new year, which is actually pretty good. If I’m not positive now, then nobody will get to see the many stages of my decline from being happy to being a homicidal maniac through my blog, so for that purpose I must say I’m happy. =D. No, really, I’m happy being back at uni, even if it’s taking a bit to get back into the swing of things. I’m actually supposed to be working on an essay at the moment, come to think of it, but blogging for the first time in ages is more interesting than that.

There’s apparently a record number of students doing honours in linguistics this year, which is good. The more people crammed into the lecturer’s office for our little weekly get-together the better! What What I do need to do is get back into reading and such a bit more diligently – which I think I need to take heed of and start working on the aforementioned essay so I’ll cut to the exciting part of the news:

Continue reading…

Note to self: Take more photos

Well, I’m back to uni on Monday. To be honest, it feels like I haven’t done much in the past however several months that I’ve not been at uni, and that’s probably because I haven’t. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, it’s just not a good thing either.

This isn’t a moan post, though. It’s what the title suggests: a note to myself in the form of a blog post. For some background, last semester I decided to take my camera with me to university to take photos, then I uploaded some of them to Flickr. It was meant to get me taking more photos, but I only ended up posting a handful of photos because something about walking around the uni with a camera in the morning felt weird. But whatever, I’m over feeling awkward walking aruond with a camera, I might even start taking an SLR with me instead of my little IXUS sometimes.

My mission, and I want to hold myself to it to some extent, is to take at least one photo that I upload to Flickr every day I’m on campus. That won’t actually end up being that many, since I’m going to be on campus probably one or two days a week, but it’s still a start.

On top of that, I’m tempted to start another PaD (photo a day), except on Flickr this time instead of my dismally failed on on pBase back in ’03. If I do that, I’ll either update this post and/or post a new post about that.

This post possibly makes it sound like I don’t actually like taking photos, which couldn’t be further from the truth, it’s just that I haven’t been doing it. It’s one of those things that I really like doing that somehow just manages to not happen for a long time, and that’s bad.

So, hold me to my promises blog readers. Damn, I’m pretty sure there are none.

Coming soon…

Between maintaining my current Twitter addiction – @mr_billiam (I’ll add a Twitter feed to WP at some point when it’s not sweltering hot outside) – starting the reading for my thesis and helping Matt with various website, I haven’t had a huge amount of time to do anything particularly exciting. The fact that many days in the past two weeks – today included – have probably been the hottest I’ve had the misfortune to experience doesn’t help.

Anyway, that’s partially why I haven’t blogged normally in a while, because I haven’t got a huge amount to blog about. This blog will probably – over time – become more like my last entry where I try and explain things, either to other people or for my own use, while I write my thesis. I actually found that trying to write a fairly succinct (although clearly insufficient) description of linguistics helped me clarify my own thoughts, so writing up some blog entries about different issues as I read and gradually construct my thesis will probably be good for me, and it’ll let people who may or may not be interested in the topics find out some information. I’ll have to do a bit of referencing sometimes, particularly when my comments are regarding a specific text, but I think I can live with that. Other than that, nobody generally reads my blog entries so it’s really sort of a waste of time if I’m not getting something out of them.

I also might post a few more software/hardware reviews or something, depending how pissed off or interested I get in certain things. We all know the world needs more people explaining why they don’t use Linux as their main operating system and about everything else they do on a computer!

In other news, Matt and I have actually (well, almost) finished a website project that we’ve been supposedly working on for almost a year not. That’s not the result of any particular difficulty, it’s just been hard to actually get it to happen. The site itself is up now, and a few finishing touches are being put on, so that’s definitely progress.

Anyway, the main purpose of this entry was to explain why I haven’t been updating my blog particularly often, and to ‘unveil’ what I’m going to probably be blogging about more often starting very shortly. Since I’ve done that, I might leave it there…

UPDATED: The über-condensed version of Linguistics

@ChristopherLane over on Twitter asks:

but I am intrigued, what do linguistics entail?

(note to self: write WP plugin to automatically link @ tags to Twitter. Or find one. Or get Matt to write it. Done: Got Matt to write it.)

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This is going to be a butchery vague summary job of an explanation of what linguistics is, but if you want detail, go to Wikipedia and spend the next 3 months reading!

Continue reading…

The Linux Experiment

I’m going to take a little departure in this post to talk about something particularly geeky but something which I wanted to talk about anyway.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been almost exclusively using Ubuntu as my primary operating system. Actually, I’ve had every intention of casting Windows off entirely as my main operating system and moving to Linux completely. I won’t be. In this post I’m going to talk about the things I think are going very well in Linux (or, more specifically, Ubuntu) and the things which I think still need work before it’s ready for prime time.

Continue reading…

Relatively busy…

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!