Space Doggies!

Yesterday Matt gave me a surprise present! It's a David Lanham print of Space Doggy, which is my favourite digital creation of his. It was a really really sweet thoughtful surprise that I didn't expect! It's been my background ever since I got my Mac, and I'd been going on about how much I loved it and how I'd never get sick of it :)

I'm going to get it block mounted and hang it up above my desk in the study. I guess now maybe I'll change my background to either Shaky Love or In a Pickle. So cute! There's just something about all of them that is so eerie and cute and shiny.

The thing about Space Doggy is that he'll never get the bone! It made my dad REALLY sad - it was so funny he was like "But he can't get the... AWWW poor thing! Look how he's looking at the bone!" I like to think that off to the left of the scene there's a big rocket where he can get out of his space suit and eat all the bones he likes :) Also take a look at the animations they're really good.

This is unfortunately a pretty bad picture, in real life the print looks really vibrant and super high resolution, but you can't really tell. So thanks for that Matt! What a nice pressie!

Things that Look Like Other Things

I personally wouldn't have chosen this to be the logo for my company... and I ESPECIALLY would not have chosen to put it on a whipped cream container. Oh Mr Tatua, you got it so, so wrong.

Photo Booth!

I've really started getting used to my Mac, and I'm starting to be really productive on it. I just set it up to get wireless internet around uni so that's been fun! I'd always been jealous of the people with laptops at uni :)

I've also just been playing with Photo Booth which is really fun. There's some pretty effects like sepia, black and white, comic book, and some fun effects like (my favourite) the mirror, squeeze, and bulge. Some of the effects are REALLY creepy and I mostly stay away from them since after the funny wears off it gets a bit sickening. Take a look at some of the fanciness and silliness on my Flickr!

My Poor MacBook

I've just finished installing Windows on my MacBook and I sort of feel like I've betrayed her :( It's really not fun going back to Windows after you've used a Mac. All of a sudden my computer was telling me what to do, making stupid noises every 5 seconds, and constantly winging about security. Oh well I really do need it, so what can you do?

Putting it on was fairly easy using Boot Camp, except for a bit of drama with a system file that went missing. I ended up allocating 20GB for the Windows partition (it's a 120GB hard drive), so hopefully that'll be enough for Matlab, PSpice, Retro and all those other little programs I'm gonna need.

More importantly, it looks like Psychonauts is going to run pretty well! I've got the demo running so that's gonna be fun!

How to Make a Nurse Outfit in 4 Easy Steps

I bet it's something you've all been wondering, so this post will help put your mind at ease.

Ingredients:
* A plain white dress
* A waisted red belt
* Some white fish net stockings
* Big red buttons
* White electrical tape
* A headband
* Some white heels


Step 1. The Hat
All you need is a piece of paper and a headband. You just need to fold the paper up in the hat shape, and draw on the red border and the cross/love heart. You then make two loops (out of paper) for the head band to slide through, and sticky tape them on the back of the hat.

Step 2. The Buttons
Picked these up from a craft shop for 50cents each, and used some white electrical tape to make the little white crosses on each one.

Step 3. The Stockings
It actually took me a while to track down white fish net stockings, and I managed to find some at this little sock stall in a shopping center for $5. Sew a button on each stocking. Some suspenders might also look cute!

Step 4. The Dress
This was an old under dress I haven't used for years, so I didn't mind destroying it. It was originally flat at the top, but I gathered it up with a button to make it look a bit cuter. Sew the buttons down the front, but leave some space for a waisted red belt which helps brighten up the white.

The Final Outfit


In case you're wondering, this whole thing was for Vanessa's 21st. It was a uniform themed dress up, and she got the Party Bus which took us through Northbridge. Me and Matt ended up going as Doctor and Nurse, which surprisingly, nobody else chose.

I was expecting to not be let out of the house by my parents, but they thought the outfits were fantastic! Even my grandma complimented my handiwork with making the outfit, which was a nice surprise.

I was pretty embarrassed about going through Subiacco, but Vanessa was keen to try. We tried the Sapphire Bar and the Red Sea, but neither would let us in due to dress codes (no surprises there). So we ended up just visiting the Queens, the Hippee Club, and ended up at the Dean, where we fit in with all the other wierdos.

It turned out being extremely fun and not embarrassing at all, since everyone thought it was pretty funny and made a point of chatting to us to find out what the hell we were doing! Just a warning to anyone planning to go as a nurse; expect to hear the line "Hey baby, will you take my temperature" a couple of hundred times during the night. I find that the response "I'm not qualified, but Dr. Matt here will do it" usually does the trick.

It's Good to be (a Girl) in Engineering

I had a really bad day today. Tuesdays are usually my worst day since I have 9-5 uni with an hour break for lunch. For some reason 9-5 uni is SO MUCH WORSE than 9-5 work, probably because you can't choose the pace you're going at, and only so much information can go into your brain before you start going insane.

I had a three hour Embedded Systems lab this morning which involved translating a C program into Assembly. I would usually find that sort of thing very fun, but when you've got three hours to debug an Assembly program, it's not so good. What makes it worse is what we were actually doing. The actual program we were writing was a key-guessing game, and was being loaded onto this little robot thingy (which pretty much consists of an LCD screen, 4 buttons and most importantly, a faulty power cable for our enjoyment). Now the program plays you 3 random notes, and then you have to press the corresponding buttons to repeat the tune (higher levels involve longer sequences, but we only had to implement level 3 in assembly). So imagine about 8 groups each with one of these bloody things all making stupid noises in a small, resonant lab at 9 in the morning, while trying to figure out why your stupid stack is screwing up. GRRR! At least we (finally) got it finished in time.

Next was an awful Communication Systems lecture. The material is very interesting but unfortunately for the class, the lecturer has a thick Chinese accent accompanied by an adorable lisp, or rather, would be adorable if we didn't actually REALLY need to understand what he was saying to pass the unit. By this time my cold and flu tablet started wearing off, but on the bright side at least my cough kept me awake during the lecture.

My one hour lunch break was spent going over the Communications assignment which is due on Thursday with Adam and Lara, so that was extra fun. Then the final stretch of the day involved an Embedded Systems tute, a Circuits and Electronic Systems lecture, and an Artificial Intelligence lecture (nice light entertainment to finish the day off). I've actually really fallen behind in Circuits so those lectures could actually be in Spanish for all I know. In the AI lecture we started learning about lists in Prolog which must have taken a very unique form of insanity to invent. When the day was finally over, I was off through peak hour traffic, looking forward to relaxing at Matt's house and watching the final Prison Break, which turned out to be really annoying, (I wont say too much), but there'll now most definately be a 3rd season.

Annnyyywayyy, now to the point of all this complainin'. So I get home after an annoying day at uni, check on Morris the Mouse (c), and sit down for a nice cup of tea, and realise I have a letter from the uni. I open it up and it turns out that I am:

"the recipient of the Motorola Prize for 2006 to the value of $300. The prize is awarded by the Board of Examiners in Engineering, Computing, and Mathematics to the female student with the highest weighted average mark in the following units: Circuits and Electronic Systems 2, Electromagnetics and Electromechanics, Digital System Design, Signals and Systems 3 and four BCM major units".

Nice and specific. That letter couldn't have picked a better day to arrive on! It really made me happy, (not so much because of the money, but hey that helps!) because no matter how hard uni gets, how stressed out I feel, how far behind I fall, it reminded me that I'll always manage to catch up because that's just what you do when you're a student, and you love what you're doing. I guess the moral of the story is that when you're feeling lost, you should remember all the little signs that have proved you're on the right path, even when it feels like you can't remember the reason why you got there in the first place.