Was at a friend’s place over the weekend for dinner. Her aunt had made chicken rice for the lot of us and it was really tasty. It’s subtle how the flavours meld together and don’t seem to overwhelm you. I just find that the generation before me seem to make food taste good without over complicating it while the current lot of us tend to over season things.

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It’s been raining non stop for the last 36 hours. It’s still raining quite hard as I’m typing this. A storm hit Melbourne on Saturday afternoon, pelting giant hailstones. Was at Jerome’s place and feared for my car while all the commotion was going on but fortunately nothing broke. Came home and found the carpet to the facing the back courtyard all wet. Looked out back and saw that it was all flooded.

Waded through ankle deep water to clear the small drainage hole at the centre of the courtyard of leaves and other bits. It rained so hard it was like carnage, with lots of tree branches and leaves on the floor, and this blocked the escape route of the water. Heh, you could hear the gurgling sound of a bathtub drying out as you saw the whirlpool of water slowly going down into the pipes.

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Finally finished playing Dragon Age: Origins. Took a few reloads to finish off the dragon at the end of the game and after going through the epilogue, can finally put the game to rest. There are multiple scenarios to how the game ends, but you rely on other people who have played through the game and recorded everything. Since everything is documented, you can sort of read about what else would have happened had you chosen a different path.

I just wanted to see out the game as I started it probably in mid November. Heh, have started lots of things these past few years and haven’t seemed to have completed most things. Still love taking pictures, but I don’t know how much aspiration I have for turning it into a business. Feeling a little jaded, and would just like a bit of spark to get me all excited with things again. We get too comfortable with things and it’s in adverse conditions that we pull out all stops to get things done. Would just like to shuffle things up a bit so that I can get the ball rolling.

Heh, I guess it’s good penning things down on a blog, at least you actively think about it so you’d review how you are progressing through life.

Was at a Pottery Expo in Warrandyte and while Vyanne and her friend looked at pottery pieces I was busy taking photos of the river just next to the expo. I keep my Slik tripod in the car and this is one of the few instances where having a tripod is absolutely necessary. Needed to get as long a shutter speed as possible, so I dropped the ISO below the D300′s sensor base to ISO100 and turned the aperture ring on my 28mm f/2.8 all the way to f/22 (I was fortunate that it was an overcast and rainy day, helping to bring the amount of light down). Added EV compensation of 0.7 (since I shoot RAW, that was as much as I thought I could get away with) and that gave me a shutter speed of 2 seconds. I’d just like to try different stuff at times and I wanted the silky flow of water.

The results aren’t too bad but ideally I’d have liked a 10 to 15 second shutter speed. I don’t have a neutral density filter for the thread size of my 28mm so this is the best I can do at the moment.

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Jerome’s back from Malaysia, and went for a quick run with him on Thursday. The guy runs like the wind and while I’ve been practicing, I’ve been rather slack and it’s good to follow behind him as he sets the pace. My body is capable of pushing it but I rarely do so. Managed to keep up with him for about 20 minutes before I threw in the towel. Have only a couple of weeks left to train for the Run For Kids event, so will be running every 2 or 3 days just to get my stamina up. Having done this before, the body has a mental image or memory of it, and physically I feel more belief that I can pull it off compared to previously.

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Gradually easing into the study routine as well. After a few false starts with my CPA notes, I’m starting to get the hang of registering the information in my brain.

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On a tech note, testing out Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. Have had no hiccups trying to install it, so hopefully it fairs better than 9.10. Heh, just wiped the Arch Linux install on the SD card (after spending 8 hours trying to figure it out) as I didn’t really have anything else I wanted to test on it. I’ve also tried out KDE (K Desktop Environment) on my Atom PC and it has some rather nice touches like transparencies and widgets but performance is what I’m more interested in at the moment.

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It’s going to be a busy month ahead.