Who’s got two thumbs and is headed out for her first volunteer shift at the Easter Show? This one!
-
Dinner tonight
Butternut squash soup with ginger prawns and Lebanese bread. (Recipe here.) As soon as we go off Daylight Savings, I always get a craving for hearty soups and stews!
-
“Good God, it was fun!”
LOVED this piece where Vulture got some of the legends of Broadway to dress up and revisit some of their famous characters. Patti, Liza, Mandy, Bebe, Joel, Lin… and so many more.
Relatedly, I’m trying to justify flying to Brisbane to see Bernadette Peters in October. I want to minimise air travel these days, but when am I going to get the chance to see this legend again?!
Updated to add: I bought the tickets. Maybe we’ll take the train??
-
An outing to Manly
I had a simple outing planned for the day – take the ferry to Manly and meet up with my former AWS colleague Mani. Sydney Transport, however, had other ideas…
Drat. So a couple of bus rides later, I finally made it to meet up with Mani. You know how there are people that you think, yes, we should be friends but we’re both super busy so it’s just not happening? That was us, but thankfully we’re finally able to connect. Mani led the AWS APAC Space & Satellite business, and now she’s taking a year off with her first child. We had a great visit, and she left me really inspired and confident that I’m on the right track with some of the board opportunities I’m pursuing. And she’s really fun! It was well worth the effort of getting there.
And hey, by the time I left the ferries were operating again! I caught the Fast Ferry back to Circular Quay and discovered that knitting as you cross the Heads (with some serious swell!) is quite a challenge… 😂🧶
-
Bobbles
I don’t normally knit bobbles… and now I’m remembering why.
It’s giving “nipples,” isn’t it. 🙃
-
Hay St. Market, Sydney
Mr. Snook needed to go to Chinatown to pick up some component for his next brewing experiment, so we popped into the new Hay St. Market today to check it out. This is meant to be a “vibrant new food and beverage hub that captures the spirit and heritage of the iconic Paddy’s Market.” It claims to be open, but from what I could tell, many of the stalls are still being fitted out. Not many of the outlets were open on a Monday afternoon, though I managed to get a scoop of ice cream. It definitely looks like they’re going for more of a European style market vibe than an actual hawker center, especially once you take the prices into consideration. (Rodd kept muttering incredulously, “$19 for a sandwich!”) And it’s definitely more of a food court than anything – there are only a couple fresh food stalls. Still, it’s early days…
-
Precarious situation 🧑🚀🚀
Starliner’s flight to the space station was far wilder than most of us thought – DAMN! Astronauts are the absolute coolest, smartest, bravest human beings. I also love the respect they have for the folks in Mission Control:
“Thankfully, these folks are heroes. And please print this. What do heroes look like? Well, heroes put their tank on and they run into a fiery building and pull people out of it. That’s a hero. Heroes also sit in their cubicle for decades studying their systems, and knowing their systems front and back. And when there is no time to assess a situation and go and talk to people and ask, ‘What do you think?’ they know their system so well they come up with a plan on the fly. That is a hero. And there are several of them in Mission Control.”
Link courtesy of Metafilter…
-
Highlights from the w-g archives
- in 2017 I attended a Google Women Techmakers event and played around with TensorFlow and Style Transfer, arguably the first time I ever encountered “generative AI.” It was a simpler time, and I didn’t think to question whether the artists whose styles we were applying had consented (mostly because they were all obviously public domain).
- in 2012 I won Second Prize in the Knitted Socks category at the Sydney Royal Easter Show competitions, finally breaking out of the Highly Commended ghetto. They did me dirty with that display, though.
- in 2009 I won Highly Commended for my Na Craga cabled sweater at the Easter Show, and I was Not Happy about it.
- in 2003 I was still a newbie knitter and kicked ass at an intermediate knitting class, which eventually led to my introduction to Albert and the Morris family, and later me chucking my tech career to go work at Morris & Sons (then called Tapestry Craft).
- in 2001 I ordered groceries off the Internet for the first time ever!
-
An email from a ZX Spectrum game developer!
Remember my post where I shared some of Rodd’s old ZX Spectrum games? Yesterday I received an email from Professor Paul X. McCarthy who was one of the original developers of the “Famous People Play Poker” game. He shared some more details and kindly agreed to let me post them on the site for posterity.
I stumbled upon your blog tonight and wanted to thank you for making the post about old ZX Spectrum cassettes. My close friend Kieran Sharp and I were responsible for creating the Famous People Play Poker game you featured while we were at school together and over the years have lost all copies since. That was our first company Jolly Good Software.
We were offered a distribution contract to Spain and other European countries by Ozisoft but turned it down as we thought the contract was too restrictive (ridiculous i know!) So this is one of the few copies that were sold probably through David Reid Electronics in Sydney where I worked as a part time computer sales assistant while at school.
It brings back very fond memories of working long hours for almost a year on this game and being immersed in the then very nascent development and publishing scene – mostly of course in the UK.
And to answer your question, who were the famous people you got to play poker against? From memory there was a progression based on how well you did through these characters each with its own 8 bit soundtrack and pixel art we painstakingly created by hand.
1. The Statue of Liberty
2. Mona Lisa
3. Mad Hatter
4. Beethoven
5. Clive SinclairThanks for sending them on to ACMI. That’s brilliant! I’ve some friends there too, so delighted to hear they and the others are in good hands.
I replied to Prof. McCarthy thanking him for getting in touch, and apologising for slamming their cover art (I called it “crappy” 😬) in the original post. He said:
No worries! It was retro chic before its time 😊 and not printed using conventional processes.
Artwork typography done by hand printed on a ZX Printer on heat sensitive silver paper (no laser printers readily available then) and printed with yellow background on Sydney’s first generation colour photocopiers that Canon researchers in Sydney later built the global postscript rendering engine for at CSIR[O] in Ryde.
Very cool! That means I’ve now spoken to developers of TWO of the different games featured (including Veronika Megler from The Hobbit). I’m hoping some more might come out of the woodwork…
-
Dinner tonight
Lebanese Lemon Garlic Chicken and Fattoush Salad from RecipeTinEats. The salad was a lot of chopping, and I had to specially seek out sumac for the dressing. (We already had pomegranate molasses since we’re annoying foodies.) Worth it though! 😋
Woot, my knee-jerk don’t-overthink-it pub-quiz answer was Iran which seems to be [✓]. I ‘knew’ it was more populous than…