Itinerary
Originally uploaded by minim.

... and touch it for me, please! I've booked my ticket. It's all paid for. And finally it seems like I might actually get to Europe after four years' worth of cancellations.

Here's the current plan:
12-Jul: Sydney to Singapore
Singapore to KL and back again at some point before...
19-Jul: Singapore to London
A few days in London then off to the continent, probably to go round in a circle looking something like Cologne - Rotterdam - Antwerp - Brussels - Liege - Cologne then back to London to start work.

After that, we're making it up as we go along - yay!

So if anyone's reading this, please cross everything or hold all your thumbs (if you prefer) that nothing goes wrong this time. I'm definitely not visiting my dentist, at any rate...

... don't they? It's such a lovely, peaceful, orderly thing to watch.

Unfortunately, this defrag has been going on for 3 hours now and is the result of my poor PC crashing every 20 minutes or so, so I felt it was better to sacrifice a little study time and ensure that the hard disk wasn't about to fail or anything. But there don't seem to be any errors on the disk fortunately (and touching every bit of wood I can find) and hopefully it'll end soon.

So I amused myself by videoing the process. Nothing to Adrian Miles' vog entries, of course - and not a proper vogging according to his principles: it's just video in a blog, after all, nothing more - but a first attempt for both taking MPEG movies on my camera and using Quicktime Pro which has been sitting about here for about the past 3 years waiting to be played with. I'm finding Miles' blog a really interesting read and nearly cheered at today's entry which summed up a lot of my objections to video on the web. So many people seem to use it just for the sake of being able to say "my site's got video" (this is rife in the corporate sector) when the content could be better expressed as text, maybe with a couple of photos. I guess this objection is why I've always steered clear of video myself - until today, when my fairly trashed brain saw the defrag screen and felt a need to share it with the world...

Deleuze
Originally uploaded by minim.

Heading into the home stretch for uni now - handed in our major work for Introducing Audio Production tonight and listened through to everyone's work - wow. So many amazing things. I'm really really sad to be leaving now cos I want to do more audio subjects - I've learnt so much in AP this semester and can't wait to start playing round with it and want to learn more. But my brain is exhausted and I think the sensible thing to do is to take the Grad Dip and run. I'll certainly be keeping in touch with the dis_orientation crowd though and hope to work on something to perform when I get back from Europe. But for the first time pretty much in my life, I actually have a reason to stay - just when I'm finally getting out! Between AP, Aesthetics and the sound collective, my poor battered brain has had a real injection of creativity and is starting to spark back into life again. Oh well - I'm going to look on the next six months as a chance to give it a bit of a rest from the tedious everyday stuff and a chance to focus more on art, which it does best.

Anyway, finished the draft for my essay last week, but obviously still researching away like mad. I'd thought a while back that I should read some of Gilles Deleuze's work cos his name keeps on coming up, but had never got around to it - and lo and behold, look what turned up in the window of the Co-op Bookshop on the weekend: his "Difference and repetition" - and I have to say that this is a bloody marvellous book. So interesting, so (comparatively - for philosophy) easy and enjoyable to read. I'm really enjoying it - and picking up some good bits and pieces for my essay... although it seems that some of my "original" ideas concerning repetition were actually had by friend Gilles in the 1960s. Oh well. At least it confirms my thoughts were on the right track!

... but the new Star Wars movie is actually worse than the last two. In fact, a strong contender for the title of Worst Movie Ever Made. I mean, how is it possible to make a light sabre fight dull? and how many hands can you reasonably cut off in the course of a single movie? It was so bad, if I'd been alone, I'd have walked out after the first 30 minutes (which is something I never do); so bad that I needed to watch Diamonds are Forever when I got home to try to wipe it out of my mind...

I know there will be those who disagree with me (erm... seems like most of the people who rated this on IMDB), but I suspect they're either fans who are so obsessed by the trivial little details that they didn't notice the atrocious script and half-hearted effects, or teenage girls who think that Hayden Christensen is strong and manly rather than merely teak.

A real pity - cos the ads made it look so good, and the plot had so much potential... *sigh!*