technonaturalist

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Back in Perth now and this post is going to be a long one.

The holiday has been great because I was home and crap because in the second week, I got a swollen gland or lymph node that pressed onto the nerve of one of my back teeth and caused a LOT of pain and made eating difficult, and the kids got sick. In the third week the kids recovered and I got sick (two days completely out of action and just general misery, persistent headache and neverending mucous production for the rest of the week and continuing as I type). I am feeling slightly bitter about it and thinking it’s brutally unfair but at least I stayed there the entire time unlike a certain Christmas where I got medevac’d.

I’d told the 4yo to go and rest up prior to a planned outing as he’d power chucked from the dining table to the back door at lunch time and we wanted to make sure he was okay for the trip (which didn’t eventuate as he was still coughing in a manner that had us paranoid that he might do it again).

I heard screaming matches between him and the 8yo and walked in, found the 4yo lying on the bed looking sleepy and upset and the 8yo playing his DS. Told off the 8yo for antagonising the 4yo (he protested, but he has been antagoising his siblings for the past couple of days). After giving the 8yo a serve I again told the 4yo to lie there and rest up and as I was walking out he smiled and said “Ahhh nothing is sweeter than victory.”

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My suspected real life Crazy Dog House on the Cliff allegedly contains a museum these days. For various reasons we’ve never quite manged to get to it. Apparently neither have my parents, but as it turns out the opening hours are really awkward and you need to either be a tourist or taking time off work to go to it within the very short opening hours (Thursday and Friday 10-3).

I got stuck in “after I finish this bit” loop again when I thought about taking screenshots.

Repairing the twists in the horns (following the spline guides mostly worked though near the top some of the twist is wrong and is being corrected) and rounding out some bits that are too thin (and that I couldn’t see as a problem when I was doing the spline guides because there were a billion guides, and only noticed as I was edging upwards). Also making the ridges and whatnot more prominent and varied so it looks more organic (hopefully) and less plastic. I was originally intending on making the horn ridges bump maps rather than geometry, and will have to see how I go on the other characters but I have a feeling it’s going to look better as geometry so will just bite the render time seeing as I’m not making a game :)

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It’s been mostly overcast with bouts of rain so the last week has been kind of slack and kind of relaxed. We’ve been three times to two different beaches (though I didn’t take photos of the second beach partially because it was late when we went and I wasn’t sure how good the photos would turn out in that light, and mostly because I was going to be swimming as well, could have given it to my dad though), one loopy nature trail (which was slightly longer than I thought but a decent walk nonetheless, and we didn’t go to the lookout because it was probably too long a hike for the kids) and a few epic Minecraft sessions. I haven’t got as much art done as I was hoping but bits and pieces are getting done. The kids have been watching a LOT of Pokemon, a couple of other movies and reading books borrowed from the library (independently during the day in the case of the bigs; they each have a book on dinosaurs and 8yo has one on space and 6yo has a cookbook in addition to books selected for bedtime stories) as well as playing outside on the play equipment Nanny and Granddad are spoiling them rotten with, and looking at the fish in the pond.

It was slightly overcast and we almost didn’t go thanks to a (relatively) minor allergic reaction I had to lunch, but we got there and it was good.

This is what my weather widget claimed the temperature was when I woke up my computer (and after all the bits and bobs had caught up) at 7:30something in the morning.

Get stuffed this is Perth >_<

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

Erm…note: these are actually notes for me so I only have to do other similar systems once (hopefully), not a fyn’s guide. If they come in useful for someone else to follow great, no guarantees blah blah blah.

System:

Horize Clevo W110ER from Logical Blue One (on sale at time of writing) AU$919 with 3 year warranty

Specs

• display: 11.6" matte 1366x768
• cpu: Intel Core i5-3380m 2.9Ghz - 3.6Ghz
• ram: 4Gb
• 750Gb hdd
• nVidia GeForce GT650M 2Gb

A little pricier than I was intending but specs for that price made me pretty happy. They are VERY snappy little machines that almost match my mid-2011 iMac for specs, quite light, very solid feeling, and with this weird texture on the lid and under the keyboard that I quite like. The keys are titchy (good size for little fingers, anyone bigger than me might complain, took me a bit of getting used to the placement of the right shift key). I find them slightly clunky not so much in size (expected with the amount of stuff packed in there) but in the opening and shutting. I’m used to MacBooks which feel quite smooth and easy to open and shut (or at least mine did) and “locked” with a button thing on my Powerbook and magnet on my white MacBook. The Clevos appear to rely on hinge tightness to stay shut so opening them is a two-handed job (one hand opens the lid, the other keeps the base down) and they THUNK when you close them. So far the only issue I’m having is that the two that I ordered arrived separately which caused some friction between the recipients. I have yet to have one on my lap when it’s doing something intensive, otherwise it seems to deal with heat quite well.

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Right up at the beginning of the week we spent half a day out. Morning was pretty cruisy, and then fell over a bit as we ran late to get to Nanna’s and then slightly later again as the road I usually take was unexpectedly closed and I don’t know my way around the area well enough to reliably navigate around the roadblock (pulled in at a medical centre and utilised the trusty GPS). While I was in the meeting (which ran unexpectedly long) the kids played down by the river and made some new friends, 6yo with a pair of sisters aged 6.5yo and 4.5yo and 8yo with a gaggle of boys who were a few years older but they all played Minecraft so everything was cool (he apparently invited them over for a Minecraft party, I told him their parents would probably not want to drive out so far). Back at the grandparents’ they didn’t want to leave immediately so we waited out rush hour and Pop let them play with his walkie talkies for a bit.

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Had to temporarily drop theAbysmal dates as I got completely and utterly lost. Stupid Gregorian calendar and it’s shifting days ;) I’ll try to pick it up again next week.

Week before this one we trialled out the new weekly schedule. It went pretty well I think, and 6yo in particular has been enjoying checking it each day to find out what we’re up to that day, and to see what’s coming up. The new boxes have been working out quite well too, though after I’d sorted the books into the boxes I realised that there are only maths, English and science books (or more accurately 8yo has a science book, the other two don’t). I’m waiting on the two laptops to get here so I can set them up and I think the last two days will be Khan Academy (expanding and consolidating existing skills as well as learning new ones or just exploring random subject areas), Reading Eggs/Maths Seeds (mostly consolidation, only 4yo is really learning anything new from them) and general art shenanigans. I’m having a very hard time squeezing other languages in there, we’re still doing a very confusing and random mix of Lojban and Malay with no logic whatsoever behind it.