bill.journee.org

Townsville Part 2

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!

Townsville Part 1

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.

Well that was a while…

…between updates, that is. Hmm, quite a lot has happened since I last got online and typed some unread stuff, but since I’m alone and have nothing better to do, may as well do some random typing now!

So, things that have happened since last time I did a blog post. Well, I suppose I turned 21, which was pretty good. I can’t say that being 21 feels a whole lot different to being 20. Even if I were in America it wouldn’t be remarkably different, because I don’t drink anyway. So yeah, I’m 21. I’m also in Townsville, which is pretty cool. Well, not really cool at all – I have a drop of sweat running down my forehead as I type. It’s damned sticky at the moment!

Anyway, I’ll explain each thing in a little detail with nice headings after the break…

Continue reading…

Rolf Harris says what?

Not often am I truely surprised by the things which people utter in the public arena – although those who are least in the position to comment on things are sometimes publically the most vocal on the topic. However, Rolf Harris has managed to take me by surprise.

ROLF Harris regrets a racist slur in a song that carried him to fame nearly 50 years ago, but he has little sympathy for some Aborigines, who he says need to get off their “arses”.

I’m all for him apologising for the racist slur in the lyrics of his song, but perhaps he should have stopped there, because from there he dug himself a deep, deep hole. My favourite of the article is perhaps:

“The attitude is that in their original way of life they would really wreck the surrounding countryside that they lived in and they would leave all the garbage and they would go walkabout to the next place,” he said.

In one sentence he manages to effectively annul his apology and bring a new level of “racist slur” into the equation. I seem to have missed the memo where Aboriginal people “would really wreck the surrounding countryside that they lived in”, and given the fact that global warming because of all the rubbish we’ve pumped into the atmosphere I think it’s a bit rich of him to even approach the idea of Aboriginal people having traditionally ‘wrecked’ the land.

On a more general level, I may be old fashioned, but an apology – especially for something such as he was offering – should not be qualified. They especially shouldn’t be qualified by views which are at best catastrphically naieve and uninformed.

Anyway, off the soapbox.

P.S. Layout soon. Hopefully.

Woohoo!

I finished my honours application today, after being slightly scared but mostly enthused by a meeting with John Bradley about working on the Yanyuwa language for honours next year. I’ll still be working with Simon Musgrave as my supervisor, but John will be helping me by providing his data and personal insights, so it’s a team effort!

The question isn’t set in concrete (and most likely won’t be for a long while yet) but the outline is that I’ll be looking at the kinship system of the language, and looking at what is lost as the language becomes more extremely endangered. In the case of Yanyuwa, the majority of the speakers have unfortunately been lost within the past 12 months, and the language is almost certainly going to have no fluent native speakers within the next decade. I’ll be working with John Bradley and the various resources he has available on the language including other work done by a missionary linguist Jean Kirton from the 60s onwards. The long and short of all this is that there is a lot of information on the langauge, and plenty to be written on. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the kinship system in Yanyuwa is insanely complicated, even for an Australian indigenous language. What it also means is reading. Lots of reading. Actually I should probably be doing some of that now…

On top of the fun of getting honours stuff happening (I’m told there’s many-a-PhD-thesis to be had from the data in John’s collection, too!) I also got my semester results back tonight. It’s all happening today!

Anyway, HDs all ’round this semester, so no complaints there. That certainly won’t hurt my chances of getting into honours next year (not that that was ever going to be a problem, from what I’ve heard they pretty much don’t knock anybody who has grades above the cut-off point – 70% average – back).

Anyway, now that this post has made me sound lovely and egocentric, I’m going to leave it there.

Oh. And I need to make a layout for this thing. Remind me.

The home stretch

Ahoy there, hordes. Not a great deal has happened since last time I wrote a blog entry a week ago (hence the general lack of updates) but I didn’t want the blog to get stale so I felt compelled to write some kind of entry.

I’m on the home stretch with the honours application now, by which I mean I’ve done absolutely nothing since I last posted a blog entry. What is on the home stretch is the actual time I have to do the application and hand it in (it’s due on Friday). To that end, I’m going in to the uni to talk to Simon tomorrow about the questions and more broadly about the other subjects I’ll be doing in honours and such. Then I just need to figure out how I’m going to get any decent reading material either up to Townsville, or source it within Townsville itself.

I’m looking forwards to getting up to Townsville, although now that the weather’s officially been cold here for the last week or so, I’ll probably die of heat exhaustion as soon as I get there.

We’ve finally got ADSL2+ happening here, which is overall much less exciting than it sounds because something’s not working properly and it’s running at about the same speed as what we already had. Technical problems, they’re the cornerstone of a successful fantasy relationship between a hammer and a computer that comes ever closer to being a reality. At the moment, the solution is looking like a complete recable of the line from the front of the house to the router, which is something like 35-40 meters of cable, hopefully we can just pull the new cable through on the old one because last time it was done, roof access was needed and difficult to attain. I’ll keep you updated on the progress (or lack thereof) in here, although I suspect you’ll hear shortly from my good friend Mr Hammer.

On a completely different note, I’m 21 in just under two weeks, so once my honours stuff is under control I can blabber on about that for a while, and then I’ll be in Townsville. Unfortunately, until then, I have very little to actually talk about.

Slight improvement (+ bonus rant!)

Ok I can’t say I’ve changed this layout on any meaningful level, all I’ve done is change the colour of the header and do a crappy little image to replace the layout’s logo. I will do a proper layout shortly but I have other stuff to attend to. That, and where would we be without the prologue/epilogue of every post where I promise that I will eventually get around to making a layout for the blog?

I might get off my arse and modify this layout heaps in lieu of having something that’s not WP to replace this with (which will also be when I make a proper site, rather than only having a rambling blog talking about the fact that I can’t be bothered making a layout for my own site.) If you’re intending to get a website designed by me, I actually do make layouts, and I’m not generally this lazy. My lack of enthusiasm for this stems more from its lack of use, rather than anything material in terms of layout-ness.

On the honours front, not much has happened since my last blog entry. I’m waiting in Simon to get back to me on a new meeting date (I think he’s trying to coordinate a meeting with a few people to discuss the potential of having shared honours supervision between a few different people in the linguistics and possibly the anthropology departments.) The next step beyond that will be filling in the application and getting it to Anna in time (the last Friday of this month). I’m doing some reading to try and get my head around the question I want to look at, and get an idea of what’s already been done before. So far as I can see, my question isn’t as original as I thought it was, but I think most people who start properly looking into an honours question would find that there’s things which come awfully close to what they want to look at yet aren’t quite the same.

Speaking of linguistics… Continue reading…

3 days later…

Since I promised to make a new blog post 3 days ago, I’ll make one now.

I had that meeting, and I’m back to my first idea for an honours topic. That’s a good thing, because the reason I decided not to do it was because the person who head(ed) the endangered language program at Monash wasn’t available for honours supervision. When I actually have the wording for my topic, I’ll post it on here, but as yet I still don’t have it.

Other than that I can’t say I’ve done a huge amount since my last blog post. After 2 weeks of insanity-inducing lag brought about by my use of a (relatively new) 8400GS graphics card in this computer which somehow lacked the ability to run Windows Vista, I’ve got a new graphics card. Hooray, stuff works again. I blame Matt for having used the 8400 at all, ’cause everything was fine before that came on the scene.

I’m thinking of sticking another pre-made layout on the blog, because this one’s getting on my nerves, and I can’t be bothered writing one from scratch. This time, though, I’ll choose one which I can update a little more easily with some graphics and stuff so it’s a little more ‘mine’ even though it won’t be ‘mine’. I’m sort of off coding for WP at the moment. Actually sort of off coding more generally…but specifically WP.

Anyway, I need to deal with some red tape at Centrelink now, so I might write some more useful stuff later after I *headdesk* the morning away.

Well that was a while

I know it’s been a while – ages in fact. I just logged on to find a 1000 word draft-tirade I wrote back when the world economic crisis just began. Strangely enough there were no snide comments about Sarah Palin – I must have been feeling particularly focused at the time.

I haven’t forgotten about this blog, but basically I’ve been insanely busy, then I’ve been so un-busy that I haven’t wanted to do anything as cerebral as write in this blog. That said, a layout is coming. One day. I blame Matt at this point, ’cause back in the day he was working on some kind of CMS or something for me because I’m a lazy lazy person.

I have a meeting with my (potential, and very likely) honours supervisor tomorrow to figure out a question and generally figure out what’s happening with honours. That should actually be interesting, because I’ll actually have to put my idea into some kind of coherent sensible wording which works with what Simon specialises in. I’ll say exactly what that is once it’s known – hopefully tomorrow afternoon (“Two updates in two days!” I hear you say, dropping to the floor with euphoric excitement and just a little boredom.)

There was actually a reason I came in here to type a blog entry, but with all the general stuff – and the excitement of re-reading my theories on climate change and economic viability which I won’t bore you with now – I’ve forgotten just what that was. Never mind, I’m sure it’ll come to me at some point.

Part of it was something to do with wanting to take more photos, which will become somewhat more easy once I’m in Townsville and have some awesome stuff to take photos of. I have a week in Townsville on my own (or at least I should be on my own) so I’ll:

1. Get some preliminary studying done for honours, which I’ve been told needs to happen over the summer break, and a week all on my own in a strange town with nobody around is probably the best chance I’ll get at this for the break
2. Break out the camera and get some interesting photos of places around Townsville. This’ll be easier when nobody else is around, because otherwise me wanting to take photos of things which I find interesting becomes a drag for everyone else. Random house-sitting FTW.

Now, I might get back to the photoshopping I’m meant to be doing, haven’t started, and can’t remember my idea for. I’ll (hopefully) be back tomorrow with more riveting news.

Still coming. No, really.

Well if we could live off good intentions wouldn’t the world be a better place. By which, clearly, I mean that I (obviously) haven’t done a new layout for the blog yet. It will happen, I swear, I just didn’t realise how much stuff I needed to do for uni in the last/next week or so. That and there’s no point trying to delude myself into believing that people actually read this blog, so it wouldn’t be the end of the world if I just went ahead and deleted the CSS file and let the blog go without…but I digress. A new layout will be up soon.

Moving on from there, I’m slowly moving forwards with the honours stuff. Not to the point that I can say anything useful about what I intend to do for honours, but forwards.

Other than that I’ve been enjoying the quality journalism this afternoon from The Age, whose journalists (along with most of the journalists at Fairfax) have been on strike since mid-afternoon. Interestingly the quality of the paper isn’t going to be affected. Which is good, because apparently the world stopped turning at 3:30, other than to post that one paragraph piece of journalistic gold. I’m just glad that strikes of the entire journalistic staff don’t affect the workings of the newspaper.

That’s about all I can be bothered typing for the minute, I just thought I’d post something on here in lieu of totally forgetting about the blog for another two months…