Published September 12, 2006 by

In a Tif

So,

I spent 4 tedious hours today scanning in over a hundred of my slides. Every little problem I didn’t anticipate came up to bite me in the bum.

I managed to get hold of the slide template and the scanner was free. The computer was not happy with finding me on the network, I’d left my usb stick at home and had no blank cds. The template is due back tomorrow morning. I ran down to the studio and borrowed Matt’s stick. 256mb, with some stuff already on it. So I scanned some, then crashed a classroom of ‘typology showing students’ a couple of times to offload onto my drive – which was having issues also.

The usb stick went psycho and filled up with only 2.5mb spare even when I deleted the last lot, which would’ve left more than half the slides un-scanned. I had a moment of triumph when I worked out what was going on – more really that I fixed something I don’t know why the heck was happening.

I get home and spend ages getting them across from the ftp onto my computer because I want to be able to have a good look at them and put a few up. Sure, I’ve scanned them in at a mighty high resolution (as they are slides and really small and you want to get them up to beyond thumbnail size). That’s fine. I saved them as .tif to attempt to keep as much quality as I could. Anyway, now photoshop is chucking a spaz and not letting me resave them as jpgs. even when I try to ferry my way around it. I can’t help but thinking that this is something to do with the bit-depth, which I think was also very high. But why! It doesn’t make any sense!

And flickr claims to be able to read .tiff files (which I can save them as) and still doesn’t like it!

So, you’ll have to be satisfied with a screenshot for now. I can’t put them up on flickr until I work out what’s going on. Any suggestions would be marvellous.

General Life Photography

Published September 12, 2006 by

Rundown

Before the day ends, a very brief run down on the goings on of the last few days…

Friday night:
Last Youth night for the term – cooked spaghetti for the kids after nearly forgetting the frying pans. Excellent night with some good conversation and discussion. Laura ran the God spot and talked about Loving others. A personal ‘funny’ moment was explaining what ‘fly off the handle’ meant to a 12 year old… Yeah and they say the Message version is meant to be relevant!

Saturday:
Managed to avoid the mad house of getting things ready for Em’s 18th. Went under the ‘pretence’ of gardening (so claims Mum) at Geoff’s place – it threatened rain so we watched Garden State instead. Close enough. Did some gardening after the movie. Found: worms, snails, a slug, a very cool frog… and a lot of weeds.
Came back home where people had already arrived. Em had a girly/pink (ugh) party with about 20+ girls. I think Geoff was a little overwhelmed but he can probably speak for himself. I found it highly amusing and the fact that all that pink was way too much for me, I don’t want to know how Dad and Geoff were coping. I had to have a shower so left him out there with Laura LuLu to entertain him. Ate some party food and got out of there.
Got to Burkie’s 21st without getting lost. Saw a lot of gusheroodle people I haven’t seen in a long time. Belle was there!!!! Geoff got to meet Paul and Burks. Funniest speech I think I’ve ever heard. Sang Happy Birthday and made the long trek back.

Sunday:
Overslept so came 20 mins late to church. To Ana’s place afterwards with the crew for a BBQ. Few of us stayed for dinner – homeade pasta. I managed to touch Ana on the back about 3 times unintentionally, I don’t think she was impressed. On drive back from dropping G home, God whalloped me hard with something (See previous post for vague references).

Monday:
Morning. Slight Embarassing moment where I find out something my mum, no wait, make that my WHOLE family knows.
Huw (from uni) and I have a conference about course changing after I balk at the structure of BIM (Bachelor of Interactive Media) next year. I’m not keen on 3D animation let alone animation and so much of it is around that. Decide I sensibly should get out. I land on a very promising possibility at Swinburne Prahan – Communication Design. *Which I’ll link when the Swin. website is working! It’s more print, more publishing, graphic designy stuff and the ‘big picture’ elements. With some alternatives at Monash and RMIT. Need to get onto them soon and pull together some kind of folio. I almost definitely will be applying after I investigate a little further.
Dinner out with Geoff at the Pig and Whistle. Very nice.
Now. Crappy blog post. Bed

*It is now working

General Life

Published September 10, 2006 by

A New Way

“I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” – Ephesians 3:16-19

“This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.” – 1 John 3:16-20

“You’re throwing your love across
My impossible space
You’ve created me
Take me out of me into
A new way to be human” – Switchfoot lyrics (A New Way to Be Human)

I do not feel well at all. Not in the sense of sickness or tiredness. Simply in the fact that I am far too familiar with living my life out of my head. My relationship with God is much the time not much of a relationship at all. More of a knowing and getting stuck in that and not really understanding it in its fullness. I sometimes get to taste this foreign beautiful realm of feeling. It’s been a very long time. It is curious to see what it takes to crack what feels like a major block in any true authenticity. It takes too much. I am glad of a God who persists .

Christianity General Life

Published September 9, 2006 by

Why I hope I do what I do

Tally-ho, it’s late but this one can be posted now and the other one brewing (that is a post – and expanding in my brain at an ever increasing rate) can wait until tomorrow if there is time.

I am beginning to think that I must look like a very approachable kind of person. Not that this is a bad thing, but when you start attracting those trying to convert you to xyz – it’s a bit of a worry. I guess I’m a ‘safe target’.

So I was sitting having a rather good chai latte while I was waiting for the train (in to uni today to hand in an assignment) and this old lady is dragging her pale green old-lady shopping cart around. I moved my chair slightly to let her pass and she stopped.

“I just have some magazines in my cart”

I gave her a quizzical look while my mind was running through the reasons why she would be telling me that. She pulls out two thin magazines – rather shonkily designed, if I can say so. Very, very Jehovah’s Witness looking publications, by that I mean it said so on the cover.

“I just want to give you these”

Out flew any reason and smart alec responses from my mind and I politely said I didn’t really need them. She persisted.

“I can take them, but I don’t think I’ll be reading them”

“It’d make me happy if you read them”

“Um… I already believe in God (etc…)”

“No, this is different, it’ll be quite different to what you’ve heard before this tells you the right kingdom way. You can just read one a night. ”

“Uh…well… I’ll take them, but I wont be reading them”

I took them out of her hands and said a very aimicable goodbye and as soon as she was out of sight went over and dropped them in the bin.

Afterwards I was sitting thinking through further what was going on in my head at the time – the rather desperate, “Okay, what do I know about JW’s and such” and about how it’s really quite sad that they are so caught up in (hope I’ve got the right ‘religion’ here) earning their salvation. It’s like being part of an impossible footy tipping competition. You never quite get things right. You just have to keep trying and trying.

To steal a quote from Christina’s blog,

“It may take us a lifetime of fishing to realise that there is a figure waiting on our shoreline, waiting for us to recognise who he really is. Waiting for us to turn from ‘earning’ to ‘accepting’. We can choose to look away, humiliated by our inadequacy; we can refuse his identity, preferring to retreat into our own concepts of how God should deal with us; we can bury our hope in activity. But that will never change who he is, what he has done and what he expects of us.” – Geoff Bullock

Frankly, I really like the whole concept of grace. I have definitely been caught up in legalism banter before and played a pretty decent role in probably misconstruing quite a few things down that alley. I am so thankful that my reasons (when I truly consider them) for trying to live my life the way I think God want’s me to live are not based upon earning his favor. They don’t need to be.

“Teach me to do your will, for you are my God; may your good Spirit lead me on level ground.”- Psalm 143:10

Christianity General Life

Published September 7, 2006 by

How black my outlook

So you haven’t heard recently of those picking on my poor car.

I’m not sure if I mentioned the vegemite squashed onto my windscreen?

Last night was by far the worst. We were cooking some meals with the rest of the crew (these meals go out to the community and it was what we decided to run with for this weeks young ad’s thing). I did end up getting a face full of flour and wasn’t happy at all about it – having contacts in. I did think that was the end of it.

By the end of the evening my car (and Geoff’s car – I guess you get targetted by association) had flour all over it. The cars were wet, due to this rare phenomeon we call rain. I was not impressed. It took a while going over with buckets of water to simply clear the windscreens enough to drive home.

I am even less impressed now. I’ve just spent almost an hour with the hose, hot water and other stuff scraping this mucky pastey crap off pretty much everywhere. This hour could’ve been a lot better spent.

I don’t usually believe in retalliation but I’ve been seriously considering bending the rules this once. Not happy.

Any idea’s would be welcome, his name is Daniel if you would like to deal with him in person.

General Life