Perth Royal Show 2008

The Perth Royal Show comes around once a year. It's kind of a big fete with all sorts of things to see and do. When I was younger I went every year, but since it's usually around the end of the uni semester (which is a very busy time), I've been missing it the last couple of years.

This year I went with a couple of my girl friends and spent the day feeling young again. I decided to do some fun makeup, but I didn't wear my traditional "show hat" (which is a jesters hat fully equipped with bells) which was a good thing since the crowd seems to have matured a bit.

We saw the baby animal farm where I patted some piglets, the dog and cat shows, and a variety of other animals including one giant animal (in the bottom pic) that I don't know the name of (please do tell if you know what it is). It really was huge; they must have had him sedated because he could have done some damage with even just a tail flick!

I went on a couple of rides (the GeeWizz and the Orbitron) but they're so expensive now days ($10/ride!) that we drew the line at two. I bought heaps of lollies and chocolate, and also some dark red bed sheets which I've been wanting for ages, so that was really awesome. It was really fun to take a break from uni and have a nice relaxing day at the show. Actually I've been taking it easy lately, and will be next weekend too with the Spring in the Valley wine festival, a b'day, and a movie night. I think it's my attitude of "it's final year, I'll just enjoy it instead of stressing"!

TV Forecast is in stores NOW!

Matt has just released TV Forecast as an iPhone application at the App Store! Check out Matt's site for details and links to get it.

There's been some awesome reviews already - it's really cool to see people enjoy all the hard work that's gone into it. Keep an eye out for the Countdown view (in horizontal mode) which was my personal contribution to the project ;)

It's going for US$2.99 and AU$3.99 so check it out. And don't be shy, give Matt a review :)

Metameter

After a cease and desist email from IGN Entertainment, and much to the dismay of his fans, Matt was forced to take the Tomatometer widget down. Luckily, we've ported the functionality to the new and shiny Metameter, which uses Metacritic in place of Rotten Tomatoes. 

So check out Metacritic (available from Matt's website) for some movie rating widget goodness!

Food Tip #2

I recently discovered the joys of dipping food in chocolate when we finally used the fondu set my cousin bought for us in Switzerland. Although, this brought up the dilemma of what foods can in fact be dipped in chocolate (of course anything can be dipped in chocolate, but whether it will be tasty is another story). Some stuff is obvious (e.g. strawberries) but other stuff isn't that clear (e.g. pineapple).

So I've come up with a rule: If you can prefix the food in question with the word "milk", and it still sounds appetising, then it will taste good dipped in chocolate. 

This makes the choice a lot easier - how gross does pineapple milk sound!

Food Tip #1

Living out of home sort of forces you to optimise your life. I thought it'd be nice to share my findings as I... well, find them. Here's the first of my tips for food!

A mini liquor bottle makes an awesome container for holding salad dressing. Despite the strange looks you'll get when you pour that "vodka" on your lunch, it's much handier than having soggy lettuce by lunch time. Sure you can buy a dressing bottle and leave that at work, but I much prefer using salt, pepper, oil, and wine/balsamic vinegar than the salad dressings you buy.

Just because it's Yellow doesn't mean it tastes like Lemon

For my birthday I decided to make some cupcakes in lieu of a cake, and thought it would be cute to make them colourful. So I split up the icing mixture into 5 separate cups and added some food colouring to make some purple, green, orange, yellow and pink icing.

The funny thing is, some people managed to taste flavours that weren't there - the pink ones tasted like strawberry, and the yellow ones like lemon! I didn't get any feedback on the purple flavour, maybe because everyone avoided them because they looked grey in the outdoor light. Possibly they would taste like something grey... maybe dust?

Fancy?

I was on my way out of Malaga Markets the other week after doing our weekly fruit 'n veg shopping, when I decided to take a look in the pet shop. I thought it might be nice to get a new pet mouse (RIP Penny the mouse), so I made my way to the back of the shop where the small cages are kept.

Amongst the usual rodents such as guinea pigs and rats, there was a cage marked "Fancy Mouse", which housed a very large mountain of newspaper, but no visible mouse (fancy or otherwise). Curious as to what sort of pet a fancy mouse was (and why they were charging $2 extra for him), I asked the shop keep to tell me. She said that she didn't actually know but was also interested to find out, so she started to dig through the newspaper mountain for the tenant of the cage.

After a bit of rustling, she managed to catch what appeared to be a regular mouse, a bit on the old and mangey side, but with no tail. From the strange bump on it's backside I'm guessing that this mouse was born with a tail, but had parted ways with it at some point during it's long life.

What did I learn from this experience? That you can take a damaged, inferior, or dated item, prefix the word "fancy" to it's description, charge a few extra dollars, and sucker people like me in.

eBay

I was recently looking for a gold bangle, but quickly decided that they were a bit too expensive, even for the hollow kind. I decided to take a look on eBay and found this store that sells jewelry with bids starting at 99c. That means that if not many people bid on an item you can end up getting it really cheap. 

I ended up bidding on a few items, and won two items; a 4mm bangle, and 3x2mm bangles. They're gold filled (not solid gold, but thicker than gold plating), but they're just as shiny! I managed to get each item for $20, which is a lot better than a price in the hundreds for a solid bangle from a jewelry store. Sure they might not last forever, but I'll probably get sick of them by then anyway!

Gardening Galore

Matt and I have been on a gardening rampage lately since the garden refuse truck thing is coming around this week. We've managed to completely destroy our front yard (in a good way), and even got rid of our giant tree out the front!

Well OK we payed someone to do it, but it's gone none the less. I have mixed feelings about that tree - the guy told me it was over 20 years old, so it's very sad to see it taken down, but at the same time I'm so relieved we won't have to clean our gutters anymore!

We can't wait to start planting stuff, and getting our garden looking like a garden instead of a jungle. It's still a long way off though, since the next step is to get the ground leveled out the front, but we're slllloooowwwlly getting there!

My Final Year Project Trial

I thought I'd finally post a little bit about my final year project for those of you who are interested in one of the reasons why I'm always so stressed out :)

I'm currently in my final year at uni, finishing off my engineering degree. Part of this is completing a final year project, which is how UWA (university of Western Australia) decides whether or not you graduate with honours.

My final year project is an industry partnered one, which means that I'm doing it for the uni, but also for L-3 Nautronix. It's still very research based, but has a practical component to it as well.

L-3 Nautronix does a lot of through water communications, and the problem I'm tackling is that of noisy platforms. The idea of the project is to investigate a noise cancellation system to get rid of the noise introduced by a noisy platform at the receiving end of a communication system. When a signal comes in to a Nautronix receiver (which is a big heavy ball thing usually hanging off the end of a boat) a lot of noise is introduced by the platform (such as a noisy boat motor). After some investigation, we chose to use a signal processing approach involving adaptive interference cancellation.

It's actually very easy to describe the gist of whats going on. Imagine putting a microphone at the receiver, and one at the boat motor. One of the microphones would give you a pure boat noise signal, and the other microphone would give you the incoming information signal plus some boat motor noise too. If we subtract one from the other, we're left with the information signal only! Of course it's not that simple due to things like a time varying underwater channel between the motor and receiver etc. but it's very doable, and the adaptive algorithms take care of most of the mess.

Last Friday I went out on trial to do the physical version of the microphone analogy. I went out with the HAIL team on their trial, and did my recordings after they had finished. It was actually a really fun day! I saw a dolphin, some little flying fish thingies, and I went on a boat which was very exciting.

I haven't had a chance to look at all the data I've recorded yet due to my weekend being EXTREMELY busy, but I'm confident that I've got a fair bit to work with! I'm interested to see how strong the effects of the channel were, since I have no idea what to expect. I'm a bit worried that the two "microphones" I used were too different (in terms of response), so hopefully that's OK for what I need.

So there's a short summary of what I've been doing, feel free to ask any questions about the subject :)