Bicardi Breezer - Time Lapse

A few weeks back, I blogged about how I forgot to remove a Bicardi Breezer I was chilling in the freezer. The freezer was in a bad need for defrosting anyway, so I decided to let the bottle defrost where it sat and make a time-lapse recording of it with my Nokia 6670 as I did before.

The resolution of the google video is fairly poor. There is amazing detail in the Xvid version on my machine. I included one of the 3990 frames from this video below to illustrate this (click for the full res image):



I had to remove two frames from the middle of the video as the camera suddenly jumped around for some reason. Other than that it's totally intact and displays roughly 12 hours of time, condensed into 4 minutes @ 16.5fps. Nothing much happens at the end, bar the dripping from the neck of the bottle, but I left it in as the music necessitated it.

About the music. Again its my own composition, and again its a reworking of an earlier piece I wrote. I'm not sure what the google video does to audio but its fairly mangled the mix (I had mangled it enough as was :). I think the piano part sits back far too much in the video. Not sure why this happened, it might have something to do with how they convert stereo to mono. Anyway, I might blog more about the music at a later date.



The image above shows the setup for the shoot. It's all very crude. Some sticky tape and an ironing board to act as a tripod for the camera. A lamp on a small table for lighting. Some toilet paper and correctly positioned 5 litre bottle to catch the defrosted water. Most importantly is the use of 2 stout cans of Guinness suspended from a coat hanger to keep the door freezer door open. Guinness isn't just good for you, you know :)

Some final notes. There was an amazing amount of fluff and dirt left in the freezer after the defrosting (more than on earlier occasions) and wherever the blueberry juice flowed onto, it turned it pink. I thought I had ecoli in my fridge at first lol If you get board of the video, let it load fully and you can quickly scrub along the timeline to investigate the defrosting process.

Remember: defrost your freezer regularly, it allows the thermostat work correctly :)

Moon

Again, almost POTW.

[by NoelC via Welsh View]

Boomerang

Original POTW for this week. Boomerang in flight at night. Reminds me of "Wonder" by Alex Grey.

[Popular mechanics via Make:BLOG]

'shop for Mulley

Damien Mulley wanted people to photoshop a Speed Nanny image he blogged about on Monday last. Speed Nanny is a gps device that alerts drivers to oncoming dangerous sections of the road. Aparently it also alerts the driver to common Garda speed trap areas. A silly feature really as everyone knows that the best way to defeat Traffic Corps is just to drive faster.

Richie Kavanagh at the Ploughing Championships

I made three very short clips of Richie Kavanagh while out on Thursday. I couldnt manage long clips because I kept falling into fits of laughter.

"The Irish Rebel"

He had audience members up on to sing a song if they so wished. We caught the tail end of this guy "singing" his way through some unknown rebel song. I presume it was fenian since it was littered with "fuck the Brits" and "get them fuckers out". If songs could kill, this would have wiped out Great Britain.


"The Aftermath"

At the end of it, the singer was reduced to tears. He dedicated his performance to his father and refused to let go of the mic.

"Spank the Monkey"

Richie lets two young girls fondle his mic. They got a DVD for their troubles.

Richie Kavanagh is an entertainer noted for his clown-like costume, including white gloves. If only those gloves of his could speak; surely they would scream.

Ploughing Championship - Loose Ends

Well after the post I made Thursday, at the event, saying that it wasnt that great and we'd be heading home soon, it turned out we had only seen part of it. They had all the interesting stuff hidden away at the back. I thought it unusal that they had very few stalls dealing with livestock items. I wasnt happy until I saw a stall to do with a milking machine. I saw two after the post I made. The reason for the milking machine thing dates back to the first time I went to a ploughing championships (which was also the last time). I was only young and I did nothing but collect pampflets, I had two bags full coming home with me. Everything was going fine until I entered a stall for milking machines. I saw no freestanding leaflets so I asked a man there for "any auld literature on the milking machines". The man took it all very seriously even though he was talking to an 11 year old. He said "Well what had you in mind... there are many parts to a milking machine... is there any specific part you had an interest in?" I wasnt prepared to answer a question on something I hadnt a clue about, so just ran away with my 2 pampflet laden bags swinging wildly behind me. So without seeing a milking machine, it just wouldnt be a ploughing championships.

It turned out to be excellent anyway, and the weather stayed clear, if somewhat cold. I nearly got to see Joe Duffy but we got to the RTE tent too early for Live Line. There were a lot of farmers there with vicious looking scars. A lot of girls attended, a lot of girls playing in the mud too :) Of course there was also the pub tents, which were completely thronged! Richie Kavanagh had his own tent, and my final post on the day will be dedicated to this, later.

We left at about 7:30 and the traffic flow was fantastic. Fair play to the organisers, there wasn't a problem either arriving or leaving. Things were so quite on the roads to it that we thought we had taken a wrong turn. Its a pity the organisers couldnt run the country though. We met the "Celtic Tiger" again on the way back from Port Laois, and boy was he pissed. We were stuck in a 10 mile backlog of cars, delaying us for over an hour. We found out eventually that it was because of a funeral in one of those famous little villages dotted along the Cork Dublin Road... you know the main, national, primary, express road of Ireland. Jesus how I wished it was that Bertie Cunt in the coffin getting buried. He needs to do this country a favor and choke on a big fat daddy cock. With all the money and power and all that other shite thought we had for the last few years, you think they could have built some sort of road between the two major cities of Ireland. This country is fucked!

4 Ploughing Championship Images

I didn't take many images, I should have I guess, but I didnt.

Old Tractor

Well, this is what its all about

New Generator

Use's a gallon of diesel every hour

Show Me Your Wellies

Eddie Hobbs was there. Telling us the country's fucked, but we should still invest in his schemes

Image for Carrigaline

Carrigaline wanted an image of the ploughing championships off me on Thursday. Well here you go, a porta-loo at the entrance! There was a smell of mastitis out of it.

Picture of the Week

No POTW last week and then this week I have to choose between 3 images, its always the same. The image speaks for itself; it's exactly the type of photography I like.

[by Notley Hawkins via A Welsh View]

Bertie should be shot

On the way to the championships, total gridlock in abbyleix. It was only 10am and it turned out that none of it was going to the ploughing. Fucking obscene,
bertie wasted all the road money shite.

Anyway the weather is fairly good. Although the clouds are getting dark.

Lots of farmers with scars around. Its a pretty poor championships. Seems to be nothing but cars for sale.There was just an announcement for Eddie Hobbs and
sunglasses or something. Should be heading home soon.

At the ploughing championships

Ill be at the ploughing championships tomorrow. I might do some mobile blogging and then again maybe not. If you see me there say hello, cos if you do, youll see my "very-shocked" expression :)

"I'll slash your tits open!"

That was the last line I heard someone shout on the street this morning. A lovely lad by all accounts! I just it was a fairly excellent night out. I was astounded at how popular I was. It was amazing since I hadnt planned to go out at all tonight. I felt fat, I hadnt even washed in 4 weeks, my thinning hair was all over the place, my clothes were wrinkled and mismatched, I just couldnt give a fuck, and yet I was the main attraction. WTF is that about? I guess "The Game" is true then, "He who doesnt care, wins!". Unfortunately, therein lies the paradoxical problem; I just didnt care :) Other nights I'd have all my shit together and I'd go home crying.



The music is "I've seen that face before" by Grace Jones. A wonderful version of Libertango from a fabulous 80's album. The choice is a bit convoluted. I was with my friend, standing on Washington Street, when I asked him if we were going to a late bar, or going "Nightclubbing". It struck me that Nightclubbing was an unusual term to use, then I realised that it was the title to a 1981 Grace Jones album, and the Libertango popped into my head. I then said to myself that that would be the Music of the Night, which in turn, invoked the Andrew Lloyd Webber tune to play between my ears. Thankfully I stopped the musical permutations there :)

There was one girl I thought I might get off my arse to go and talk to. I was suddenly reintroduced to an old friend of mine, the theory that: "He who dares, gets rejected!". One of these days I'm going to grow a spine, but no doubt when I do, I'll get a right dose of myeloma and that will be the end of me lol Until then, I'll stick to not caring ;)

Adventures In ActionScript 3.0

I came across an interesting method today: the perlinNoise( ) method of the BitmapData class. With it you can create all kinds of organic random imagery. Not much use to me at the minute but certainly it has its uses, and can be very pretty :) CPU intensive though, especially for animations.

Not sure if this causes a runtime error, it doesnt on my machine but I think older browser plugins might throw an exception. I need a new title for these posts! :)

Adventures in ActionScript 3.0

18.09.07

Alright, I finally got it to work as i wanted it to. I found the AS3 live docs on the Adobe site (very like Sun's Java Docs) and it's proven very insightful. Turns out the Timer class doesnt have a setDelay() method as I thought. Rather instead you simply set the Timer objects "delay" property to whatever you want, in my case:

timer.delay = getSpeed();

I've made a little swf that alters the speed of an animation. Nothing fancy, brutally hacked together, but its honest programming :)



[AS and FLA files for the aboveTimer Class Demo]

Adventures in ActionSrcipt 3.0

10.09.07

Arrrgghhhh!!! I've struggled with the Timer Event class in actionscript for hours! And wouldnt you know, I was just being an idiot with it all. I was mixing up the example of using the 'deferredMethod' with the one where you call your own method. They two have subtle method call differences. Plus, when you add the EventListener to the timer object you pass a method call as an argument but you dont include the parentices:

timer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, playAnimation); i.e. its "playAnimation" and not "playAnimation();"

I took a few hours off my life I tell you! Now I'm sure this would have been obvious if I just sat down and read through the book in a linear fashion, but I'm far too dynamic for all that (Hyperdimensional, after all :)

Tip of the day: when recycling EventListeners, say for buttons, you get the buttons name by using "event.target.name". That gives you the name of the object that was just evented :)

Anyways, that shit is over so, onward my brave hawkmen! The basic architecture of ActionScript is making a lot more sense now. All I've ever used were Frame scripts, whereas i now realise theres an overall Document Class you should be using. This makes life so much easier as this remains constant throughout the runtime of the animation. You can place all your methods, variables and other funky shit in there and call them from frame scripts.

I'm not exactly flying through the stuff, but I'm happy at the staying power im showing.

Feedburner Update

Woo... 21 subscribers! Or at least, 21 pings today. Its a lot more than I expected, I was expecting only one, myself! I do have one subscriber to the comments feed, which I believe to be me. Interesting stuff anyway!

Signed up to Feedburner

I decided to give feedburner a lash, just to keep track of any subscribers I may or may not have. I myself started subscribing to a load of blogs and sites over a year ago, after google Introduced Google Reader, and it really does make online life a lot easier, plus it allows me to keep track of places I would have otherwise forgotten about. Feeds give obscure blogs a chance.

I included both the main blog feed and also the global comment feed, as blogger doesnt have a nice way to allow people keep track of comment replies. Each post has its own comment feed but a global feed seems more usful.

At the bottom it has the little feedburner widget telling you how many people have subscribed to your feed. At the minute mine shows zero lol but since I've already subscribed to my blog feed, I'm sure this is at the very least, off by one :)

I'm not sure how current subscribtions will work with the switchover, so this post will also act as a test.

Picture of the Week

Since Donncha asked me so nicely, I decided to whore, err... promote his entry in this years Mallow Camera Club annual exhibition, currently showing in Mallow Town Library. Now, I can't say I'm a big fan of this image at all, to be honest, its all a bit disgusting (outside ashtray, small cigar, Brendan O'Carroll!), but when has me not liking an image stopped me from making it POTW. POTW isn't about images I like, oh no! It's a sneaky method of getting glicky with important people on the internet :)

Seriously though, the image is quite interesting; theres quite a lot going on. An outsider on first glance wouldnt know what to make of it. You have this strong focus on his eyes but everything else is a bit of a mystery. I guess the most talked about aspect of this image will be "what the hell is strapped to his head". Sure, we all know its a microphone, but I think you could spin an interesting story around it.

[The only critical consideration I would put on the image is whether another tighter crop was considered, removing the dark area from the left which may draw the eye away too much] I have read Donncha's post again and I now realise that the actual image on display is cropped tighter.

I was going to post about the picture and exhibition earlier, but it's running till the 29th so I decided to let Donncha sweat it out a bit first :) Anyway, nice work, good tonal range!

Craig Hilton Taylor hates Humans

Craig Hilton Taylor, whoever he is, was on the radio talking to Derek Mooney yesterday at about 3:20pm. They were discussing the extinction of endangered species of animals and plants. A few minutes into the conversation, Eanna ní Lamhna, pipes up about no fear of humans becomming extinct, when this Taylor guy comes out with the oddest responce. Listen very carefully to the following:



Did you hear it? Here's the transcript:

Eanna: ...but theres one species that isn't threatened with extinction, and thats humans!

Craig: Thats right! unfortunately...

Eanna: and we have one and a half billion humans in 1900...

"Unfortunately!?" Huh? Well its a good thing I had burgers for dinner, yep good old panda burgers. With essence of Peta supporter!

David Guetta - Love Is Gone

The best dance track around at the minute (not that I'm exactly up to date on these things though)! Unfortunately its a painfully obvious carbon copy of his earlier tune "Love dont let me go". Or should I say, a carbon copy of his earlier song mashup with The Egg's "Walking Away", which actually takes up 90% of the mash-up (see my take on Fedde le Grand). Things must be bad when you are copying mixes of other peoples songs lol



The "Love don't let me go" mashup will always be known to me as the Golf GT music, as someone used it on a youtube video showing off their own GT. Just a bit of background information there for you, you can do what you like with it (as my old geography teacher used to say).

William Shatner & Conan O'Brien Remix

This has been sitting in my starred folder of Google Reader since May, and I'm now giving it a good clean out. I couldn't just throw it out because it's extremely fantastic, so I put a post with it here!

[via WFMU]

Fruit + Circuit Bending + Downblouse =

Squeeze me plums!

[via Make:BLOG]

Joe Zawinul 1932 -2007

The great jazz keyboardist, Joe Zawinul, has died of cancer today, in his native city of Vienna, aged 75. Famous for his band, Weather Report, famous for his stint with Miles Davis, famous for being Joe Zawinul.

"Joe Zawinul was born on July 7, 1932 in earth time, and on September 11, 2007 in eternal time. He lives on," APA quoted his son Erich as saying.

[Reuters Story via usemycomputer.com]

Picture of the Week

I'm a bit late with this one, ironically I planned it last week. Recent guest blogger on Damien Mulley's blog, Lili Forberg, is the owner of this weeks Picture of the Week. Seeing as it was a bit of a Monica Loughman week (by post dates only) I thought I'd include this one now.

Every so often I have a look around Lilly's blog to see what she's been upto. She's a wonderful fashion and band photographer. I noticed her blog first when looking through ballet-tagged posts on irishblogs.ie earlier this year. That one in particular is the second last picture included here.

She included two more pictures in a post a month later, one of which is the above POTW and the other is the last one below. She was kind enough to make a 1600 x 1050 version of it avilable for download (which I have mirrored below).

Oops!

Another fine night of innocent shenanigans was had by all. So festive were our frolics that I forgot to remove the bottle of Bicardi Breezer that I was quick-chilling in the freezer. Thus inventing the Freezer-Breezer! As you can see, that box is in need of a good defrosting anyway.


There is evidence of some truly powerful stuff going on in that freezer box over night. The cap was blasted off into the corner, no doubt after ricocheting around the box a few times. I counted 7 frozen Breezer-Bullets in the box, which can bee seen to the right of the above picture. It must have been one of these high powered gargle-blasters that shifted the bottle from its original pouring position (the free standing blue stalagmite to the left) to where in now currently rests. Upon opening the freezer I was greeted with a wonderful smell of Mr. Freeze. I sampled some of the Breezer-Bullets and they indeed, did taste of Mr. Freeze also. Such a wonderful surprise to happen upon, on a hot day in Cork.

iPhone Now $200 cheaper...

... and yet, still too expensive! Some are miffed, others don't care, hey its an Apple product after all!

[via - usemycomputer.com]

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy on RTÉ

I had to laugh at the add RTE have for the 'Hitchhikers Guide', which they will be showing next Thursday. The voice over starts with "Earth: God's greatest creation!"... I can hear Douglas Adams spinning in his grave.

Monica Loughman Interview

RTE finally made this available on their website. It's a short, extremely cringeworthy, interview with Monica Loughman, but an interview nonetheless. It comes directly after the TJ &TJ sketch I posted about earlier. Laura Woods, my dear, you wouldn't have class even if they tattooed "Cl" over your arse!

[Taken from this episode of The Café on RTE 2]

The Irish Ballerina - Monica Loughman

I finally finished reading "The Irish Ballerina" a few weeks back. I say finally because its been sitting on my bedside locker since when I bought it at Christmas. Its quite a short book, disappointingly so, and I finished reading it in two nights, two nights two weeks apart mind you. I don't really feel like giving it a full-on review, instead I'll just lash out a few notes I made along the way.

The book details both her early life at school and her professional career upto 2004. Her school life in Russia was pretty brutal. Living conditions were awful, the food consisted of cabbage and stink burgers, and she got bullied a lot, even by teachers who would tell her to "Fuck back to England!" She's a devout Catholic, and explained how she said a few prayers to get her through the hard times. Between the misery and the praying, I was beginning to think that this was the Angela Ashes of ballet.

A few other Little random points I remember. She took up smoking to keep herself thin. Although with all the gastric problems she began having at she needn't have bothered. She started off as a thin child and every second page she seemed to be ill and loosing weight, I'm surprised there was anything left of her by the end! At one stage all she could stomach were cups of tea and porridge. To liven things up she used to add some lemon juice to the tea. If she really felt like splurging, she'd have a tomato! Her black hair is a big dye job! I was so disappointed when I read about this. Snowflakes from The Nutcracker is really really hard apparently, and she was prone to murderous thoughts if the conductor played it slow.

She details a few boyfriends she had down the years, but none can compare to "lovely" Gavin. Now I'm not jealous or anything, honest, but it seriously got a bit vomity at times. Poor old Alan Foley must have been kicking himself when he found out. After taking her under his wing in the 90's, paying for her flights and accommodation in to and from Cork, this Gavin guy just waltzes into her life. He must have been livid with jealousy, or possibly not?* :)

Anyway, she deserves all the success shes gotten and more. There is no way to begrudge her. She spent the early years of her life is absolute poverty and dank but made it through all that on her love for ballet alone. She made practically no money from dancing and indeed would have been happy living in squaller if it meant she could continue as a ballerina. This is a refreshing outlook on employment from an Irish person. Nowadays people only seem to be able to answer a question like "Whats your job like?" with "Oh, about €50,000". She did eventually accept a sponsorship deal from Allienz Insurance.

I have only one real complaint with the book, and that is that its too short! I remember Monica being interviewed on Radio 1 a few years back, and she was describing all the difficulties she had with her feet. In the book, that only took up a few lines. This type of abridgement seemed to appear all over the place. Perhaps the books ghostwriter, Jean Harrington, felt that the casual reader would have grown weary if too much detail was given, but personally I think they would have gobbled it up. The only other thing it could do with is an update, a lot of things have happened in three years. Thats what happens when you write an autobiography in the middle of your career I guess.

To round it off, I've included a short video clip from her (and Alan Foleys) DVD, "The magic of Ballet", which I mentioned in a post back in 2005. I'm not sure if this is still available or not, but its deffinately worth a purchase if you come accross it :)



* Taken from a 2006 Sunday Tribune article:

"We [Monica and Alan] quite often play lovers on stage, and it is not difficult to convey the emotion needed, because I love the bones of Alan as a friend and have the utmost respect for him, even though we don't fancy each other.

My partner Gavin is absolutely brilliant and has no problem with it because he knows it's just a performance. The thing is that even though you may be gazing lovingly into someone's eyes on stage, in your head you're calculating the next moves you have to perform."

Adventures in ActionScript 3.0

I said I'd give Flash a lash... again. I've used it quite a bit before, well the Flash part at least, I've never gone too deep into ActionScript. First thing to say about ActionScript 3.0 is: wow, they've made everything so much harder to implement! It's really begining to look like a proper programming language now. Event handling now looks a lot more like Java. With Actionscript 2.0 and below, adding an event handler to a button was as simple as selecting the button and adding:

on (release)
{
//do some stuff
}

You cant add actionscript to the object itself anymore, now you add it to a class. It needs its own event handler:

function eventResponse(event:MouseEvent):void
{
//do some stuff
}

myButton.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, eventResponse);

It certainly makes code recycling a lot easier, but I have to admit, I was a big fan of the simple event handling before.

Second thing I need to say is: What the hell is Flex and what has it done to Flash? Flex is for manley men, not those artsy fartsy n00bs who like drawing pictures in Flash. You want a circle in Flex, well then you just type the damn thing up, none of that drawing tool bollocks. But since I'm not a manly man, I'll stick to flash thanks :)

The initiallisation of variables is changed also. Now you need to give each variable a type e.g.

var someNumber:Number = 12.5;
var firstName:String = "George";

I have a bit of a dilemma on my hands. I want to learn the version 3.0, not to get left behind but I'm more interested in developing small flash applications for mobile devices, which at the moment can only handle ActionScript v 2.0. I think I'll stick with 3.0, since hacking some code together in 2.0 is easier if I ever needed to.

Gardai Sketch

I was doing some looking around the RTÉ website when I found this from an episode of the cafe. It's by some duo known as TJ & TJ or something. It has its moments.

Stop The Press!

America Ferrara sweats! Yeah, the Daily Mail have the scoop of the Century, Ugly Betty Star, Ferrara, has sweat glands. Holy shit Batman! I guess this must mean she's human after all!? How is this news, even showbiz news?



Somebody help America Ferarra quick, I think it could be fatal!

Picture of the Week

It's more of a video of the week really, but the picture is pretty cool too. NASA are testing out a new fart rocket, I mean, liquid methane propulsion system. A snippet from the Wired review:

"NASA is firing up the 5M15, which runs on compressed liquid methane. The odorless substance has multiple advantages over conventional rocket propellants: It's cheaper, it requires much less insulation, and it exists on several planets NASA hopes to travel to — Mars, here we come. That means astronauts could collect their own fuel for the trip home. Bonus rocket science: Those glowing figure eights in the blast stream are called Mach disks, after the guy who lent his name to the speed of sound."

The picture makes me want to bolt two pistol grips onto it and turn it into the ultimate anti-cretin device. The video of it in action is the business though. It sounds amazing, even when it's cooling down. Listen out for the boom when it ignites...



I can't stop watching it!

[via - usemycomputer.com]

Psy Trance + dodgy 1980's aerobic video =

Ron Harris's ":20 Minute Workout" meant nothing to me a few months back, it still doesn't really. I found the link to the full version of the 1982 pilot without a proper description of what it was and thought it was pretty weird, but in a good way :)

So its a psedo soft porn kind of thing that burns calories. Sounds great! The music's by Shiva and is pretty good (if you like 80's) but if you add the magic of some psychedelic trance to the mix, it becomes positively cosmic! It develops an entirely hypnoptic nature which is almost ethnogenic. The mono google video version doesnt quite have the same effect though.

I chose music by Hallucinogen, because its decent well respected psy (plus theres the Shpongle connection). Theres no time stretching or frame rate adjustments, and I only keyed the music in at one point. It's pretty well matched considering; not perfect, but pretty well matched.

Hallucinogen Tracklisting:

Snarling Black Mabe - Twisted
Fluoro Neuro Sponge - Twisted
Solstice - Twisted
Demention - The Lone Deranger
Shakey Shaker - The Lone Deranger



If you cant stomach the full 20 minute version, then I urge you to give the 2 minute version a lash, if only for a laugh. It gives you an idea of the themes. I used Windows Movie Maker for this edit. It's not a very accurate video editor and it messed up some of the transition timings when I did the final render. Ah well...



If this one proves popular, I'll do the same with Jade Goody's work out videos :D

[Get the original version at the aerobicise website]