Month: December 2007

Site Upgrade! Total Doom! Not Doom Now!

Eveything is fine! TextDrive/Joyent are awesome.

~~Awesomes!~~

I moved my DNS from the folks I have my domain registered with to the folks who host my website so that subdomains would work properly.

Which caused my email to stop working (If you need to get in touch, christine.davis at gmail.com is a good choice of email). You may have received a bounce message d:

Alas, changing my DNS back hasn’t made any difference to my email (and subdomains don’t work any more); and you might see a domain holding page (well, you won’t. Other, less fortunate souls might).

~~This is all terribly frustrating; what with being at step -1, where it’s more broken than when I started.~~

Site Upgrade! Fun!

Everything is probably broken and funny looking. I know this (: When I think that it’s not broken and funny looking, I’ll probably post something to that effect, then you can tell me about the fifty broken and funny looking things I’ve forgotten.

But at least I’m using a modern-era version of WordPress, now!

Unrecipe: Rhubarb and Strawberries

I had rhubarb in my fridge, and I had strawberries a little past their prime in my fridge; so I made rhubarb and strawberries!

The unrecipe is to chop rhubarb (about 5 stalks, in my case) into bits and put at the bottom of a saucepan and give it a sprinkling with a couple of tablespoons caster sugar (Normal sugar would probably work just as well; but I perceive the colour of rhubarb being nicer when I use caster sugar). Add just a little bit of water – a couple millimeters deep, so that the rhubarb has a chance to let go of it’s juice before burning becomes a problem.

In unrecipe land, I put quartered strawberries on top; and everything worked out fine.

In hindsight land, give the rhubarb a head start (over medium heat) before adding quartered strawberries.

In either case, cook the fruit over a medium heat until it’s pretty and pink; and the rhubarb has softened up.

Yum yum yum.

More Quartz!

Next project in Quartz! Playing with video and noise.

More Visual Noise from Christine on Vimeo.

[This was an iSight being fed into a sprite as the main image; and into a variable length queue for the echo’ed image; along with noise being fed in using a chaos factor of 0.25. Chaos factor? What’s a Chaos factor, you might ask? It pretty much determines the level of noise. Too much noise looks a bit something. A little bit of noise looks interesting. A bit something is a totally valid way to describe it.]

Adventures into the Land of Quartz

When I was in Melbourne, I ended up hanging out with the lovely dpwolf. Some of the stuff he knows about things I don’t, leaked out. And now I know enough to be dangerous. Muahaha.

One of the things that leaked out, was the existence of Quartz Composer. Which I have been abusing at length trying to get it to jump through the hoops I want using some experimental MIDI interfaces that the infinitely patient Chris Wright of Kineme cobbled together (for me? Maybe <:). There comes a point where you put toy which is making the bad words come out down, and pick up different toys instead.

So I’ve been playing with rendering stuff! Without MIDI (: These are two closely related animations. On the left is Jelly; ’cause there’s a little patch where it looks like jellyfish tentacles, sortof, and I’m fond of jellyfish (but I wouldn’t want to give one a hug). On the right is Points. Because it’s pointy <:

I have no idea if they will display properly (or at all..) if you’re not using a mac. Sorry (: They might also go verrryslooooowly if you’re using much less than a core 2 duo processor. On the other hand, if you have all the grunt in the world; clicking on the movies will take you to a 720p version.

Now that we’re grown ups…

Although I don’t have a house filled with playpen balls

Vue De Monde, Melbourne

When I was in Melbourne, I managed to get along to Vue De Monde for lunch. It was really great (:

	First, there was bread and butter..
	Amuse Bouche! warm Ham consommÃ© with a ball of melon (which, I’ll have you know, explodes in your mouth with a burst of deliciousness in a way which makes it impossible to not smile); topped with a wafer and greenery-puree
	Cubes of terrine / ox tongue / foie gras; served with dinky bread circles, along with a fruity jam and little piles of spices (which you can’t see). This was on absurdly wide plates which caused the wait-people to dance about shuffling everything around on the table so they’d fit (:
	Seared Wagyu on top of a sweetcorn puree, with salady greens. The noodly thing on the right is made of soy, and apparently made in rubber tubing(!)
Science! It’s what’s for lunch.
	Pork and Apples. Whee! There’s belly pork, a galette (I think? – kinda a pate of pork with pastry) and the interestingly textured porkstrands; On the apple front, there’s a thing with peel, a lil apple filled with tasty, and the green sauce was a green apple sauce (as opposed to something vegetably). There’s also a glaze type sauce hanging out that was brought to the table in individual test tubes, and poured over the plates by wait-people. Which was, another interesting little dance.
	This was the course betwixt the savoury and sweet – kinda frozen melon in a fruit jelly of some description.
	This was the first dessert – strawberry soufflÃ©, with a frozen-strawberry-thing on top, with a strawberry powder, which was delicious.
	The second dessert was like a tube of cakey-biscuity, filled with molten chocolate ganache. So tasty.
Last of all, petit fours.

I’d totally go again; although maybe for dinner next time. Although that will probably involve making dinner reservations before booking flights (: