For those of you who keep up with Simone’s EnjoyPerth blog, you would’ve seen a post regarding one Fremantle Festival starting this Saturday.

One thing I believe I should append to this post, as a public service if you will, being that if you’re walking past the Dome cafe around 6pm on Sunday you should be extra vigilant. Why you ask? Because I’ll be demonstrating, I believe, the Sword Form from Kung-Fu. This being my first time demonstrating in the public-eye you just never know how sweaty my palms will get and how fast a sword can travel when released.

In seriousness though, I’ll be demonstrating alongside many of the other talented folk from the school, so if you’re planning on heading down to the festival and are light on your feet feel free to come along and check it out, heckle if you like, but I’ll be in the possession of a pointy metal object. Forewarning was provided

Speaking of pointy things, I was looking forward to Assassins Creed coming out today. I’ve been reading on the intertubes though that is has been delayed in Australia because of manufacturing difficulties! So we will have to wait another week, or so, before we, or at least I, can get our(my) clamy nerd hands on it.

In the meantime I’ve been checking out some videos and they have released some music for everyone to download and enjoy. Check it out over at Gamertag radio.

Go figure. I’ve heard a few Aussies tell me about the high pricing of Adobe’s CS3 package. I haven’t had the honour of purchasing it myself. Thought that this was an interesting read over on Flashmagazine about the markup for different regions.

Anyway, have a read of their post.

Speaking of highly paid sales staff, I’ll be at the Adobe CS3 roadshow which I posted about earlier in the week. Anyone else going along?

Whilst going through my RSS feeds last night I stumbled across the ideas generator post on Creativebits.

The Ideas Generator is a fun little web app which gives you three random words. The purpose of said words is to maybe spark different ideas for you and come up with something you normally wouldn’t have.

I can’t say I’ve found anything useful out of it yet, but Mr Haimes and myself were having a bit of fun with the random words that were coming out of it.

For example:

• magnetic - shrinking - hotel
• oversized - edible - garden
• luxurious - levitating - exercise machine

Happy idea hunting.

Adobe are putting on a CS3 Roadshow called Create + Assemble + Deliver. You can find some more information on the web site, Adobe CS3 Roadshow.

It’s going to be held at the Parmelia Hilton on Tuesday 11 September. 9:00 - 17:00.

This is the schedule for the event;

9.00-10.30am - CREATE
During the opening session our team of Adobe creative guru’s will show you how they tackle the design issue. Highlighting the features of the creative tools in CS3 such as Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects to answer the needs of the client brief. The Adobe Design team will create the look and feel for a new sporting brand across multiple design mediums including motion graphics.

1.00-12.30pm - ASSEMBLE
The client wants to take their new sporting brand out to their customer across multiple mediums. Using the new features of CS3 in Dreamweaver, InDesign, Acrobat and Premier what will the Adobe Design team do? Well rise to the challenge of course by producing a mix media campaign including print and web, with a smattering of video. Now the projects are all underway you will see them engage again with the client during the review process for final amends, making sure that the project is kept to deadline.

1.30-3.00pm - DELIVER
So the design and media have been approved, now it’s time to deliver the final results. Here under the weight of the looming deadline the Adobe Design gurus will show you how to deliver the job. Whether it is to DVD, Web, Print or even Mobile, the Adobe team will show you how CS3 has an answer for it all. You will see how Encore, Premier, Flash, Acrobat and Device Central can deliver the final product that YOUR customers will love.

3.30-5.00pm -TOP FEATURES COUNT DOWN & ASK THE EXPERTS
Quick fire round – this is where the Adobe team will show you what they love about the new products. This a quick glimpse at the features they love and they think you will love.
This is rounded of by your chance to ask them ‘how to’. An Adobe panel of experts will answer YOUR questions that you can submit during the day.

This Sunday Rebecca, her mum and I took a trip to the Art Gallery of Western Australia. It was the second week in the Egyptian antiquities from the Louvre: journey to the Afterlife.

The last time we went to the museum was to see Raised by Wolves, part of the Perth International Arts festival. When we went to see this we were just about the only people in the gallery, apart from the throng of security guards. This time around however we had to line up to just get into the exhibition and it was shoulder to shoulder the whole way through.

The whole exhibition is about the journey to the afterlife, as the title says. So there were lots of what looked like headstones, statues symbolising the gods, Canopic jars (which hold your innards) and even some Sarcophagus for good measure. I’m no historian so I won’t embarrass myself with trying to name these various artefacts. But it was very interesting to see and learn about these objects and what their purpose/meaning was to the Egyptian people.

Craftsman ship in all of these objects is also amazing. The fact that they’ve survived this long is testament enough for that. But also the fact that thousands of years ago they could make those various statues out of granite, limestone etc and they are as smooth and intricate as anything our modern tools could do. Then there was also the paintings on each object. Although I’m sure the colour has faded over time you can still see the amount of detail and probably time that went into it.

If you’re interested though I’d definitely go and have a look. It was vary busy when we went, which would be the only downside, but otherwise well worth it. Its $20 for adults and something like $15 for concession. There are probably prices for families and children too but I was there with neither. You also aren’t allowed any cameras, so you have to just keep it in your memories, or buy the book.

Links

Art Gallery of Western Australia
Egyptian antiquities from the Louvre: journey to the Afterlife
Official Egyptian Antiquities website
Enjoy Perth Blog

Was going to write about the new Qantas kangaroo but ate something funny and have been rather ill since then. Feeling up to being on the interwebs again though.

I think Rosemary made a good blog post about it though and Qantas didn’t do a great job of keeping it a secret anyway.

Not a great deal has changed with the logo, but when your logo is so iconic it’s hard to re-brand. The official press release from Qantas can be found on their web site newsroom.

Personally I think it is looking good, the feet maybe a little excessive but they say it’s to fit in with the tail of the new A380’s so who am I to question it.

If you are interested in checking out the company who made the new logo you can go to the Hulsbosch Communications web site. The Qantas info is on the first page at the moment, gives you a look at how the different planes will look and also how the print material looks. You’ll notice a few big names in their portfolio, and a few kangaroo logos. No wonder Qantas choose them!

Meet the newest member of the family, the 8 - 10 month old, <insert name>.

She is unnamed as yet, but Rebecca is pretty keen on Biscuit. We got this little one from Cat Haven in Shenton Park. Who could really use a new web site.

The story behind this little girl is that she was stuck between a wall for around three days, someone found her and called the police who told her to just leave it and not feed it. Therefore it will loose weight and be able to get out. Good advice there… Luckily the lady also called Cat Haven and they came out and rescued her. The rest is history as they say.

Picked her up today after work and unfortunately some woman reversed into my car when she was leaving. Damage isn’t too bad, but will need a little bit of touch up paint. The woman was freaking out about it but I was in a good mood about the cat so I didn’t really care.

So she is now sleeping on the couch, with stitches from being desexed today, but she has been exploring and sleeping. She is looking very thin, not sure if that’s because she had parts removed today, but we will need to plump her up a bit and the she should be great.

So, who out there has some name suggestions?

Three months had come and gone since my last trip to the Red Cross Blood Services in Perth. So today I went along for my second donation. All of it went very smoothly but I learnt a lesson not to make sarcastic comments to nurses.

After my donation (which took a minute longer then last time, I mustn’t be flowing well) was finished the nurse was asking if I felt funny, my reply of well off course you just took blood out of me was taking seriously so then I ended up in the ‘emergency’ position of the blood donor chair with a fan on me for 10 minutes or so. Oops, lesson learnt.

After that I was given some nice food, including a sausage roll, some orange juice, biscuits and chocolate.

So if you haven’t donated you should also go down, it doesn’t take long (as long as you keep the sarcastic comments to yourself), I only ended up being there about an hour including travel time and you could save three lives, not too shabby.

Red Cross Blood Services

So Saturday (30th June 2007) was the first Perth BarCamp held at Central TAFE in East Perth.

You can get a full list of the topics and what not from the official BarCamp web site. I imagine from looking around the room at times there are a million twits and just as many blog posts for the event.

Then there is also the BarCamp wiki which will probably be your best place for information on the event.

Hijax

The first presentation of the day for me was Hijax by Mr Myles Eftos. All of the slides and information can be seen at http://myles.eftos.id.au/presentations/crazy_hijax/.

As the slide says, Hijax is about linking HTML and JavaScript, using a similar style to what we are all familiar with CSS. This makes editing easier and all of that good stuff. Interesting presentation, have a read of the slides to get a better understanding.

Silverlight

Next up was Scott Barnes from Microsoft talking about Silverlight. This is one that I was really interested in because of what we do here at WestOne.

I was hoping for a little bit more of a product demo though. We got more of an outline about how the web has come along in terms of rich internet applications and how Microsoft was entering this market. Which was interesting but I was just hoping for more of a look at Silverlight itself.

Scott said that he would be doing a more in-depth presentation later, but I didn’t see it on the list and had to leave early. Apart from that I think the quote of the day definately goes to Scott for saying that Transformers the movie was "A religious experience"

Second Life in Education

Next up was What’s the use of Second Life in Education presented by Kathryn Greenhill. I was interested in this because of the Education work I’ve been doing at the moment and the demo Kathryn gave was certainly interesting prospect for Second Life.

You can have a look at Kathryn’s presentation on the wiki. There are some nice videos from universities in the United States that have used Second Life in libraries and mini versions of their campus grounds.

Mobile Web

Nick Cowie was up next with Problems with the Mobile Web. This one almost started into an iPhone lover’s vs iPhone haters’ war but we just managed to keep on track.

This was an interesting presentation which brought about a lot of discussion from the attendees even after the mini iPhone war and Nick did a good job of showing some of the things about the mobile web, screen sizes, resolution, interfaces and just standards compliance.

Again more details can be found on the wiki and this has a link to the PDF of Nick’s presentation.

Lunch!

I think everyone enjoyed this presentation…

Have a look at this photo from Miles and you’ll see why.

There were also the providers of energy:
Red Bull
Coffee

There were also various fizzy beverages throughout the day which helped keep everyone going.

The WordPress Loop

If you ever wanted to know what a database and a php script talking sounded like, then this was a pretty interesting presentation given by Gary.

This was a great and comical talk about how you can customise your wordpress themes and make all sorts of crazy happen and how it all comes together in ‘the loop’. As mentioned earlier the amount of people all sitting on twitter and wordpress admin pages would’ve been taking notes.

As usual the slide information can be found on the BarCamp wiki

This was the last one I saw but I definitely have to give Gary points for his expression and voice work during this presentation.

So, that was about where I left due to prior commitments. Overall the day was great, I got myself a couple of t-shirts which can be seen here and here. There were a lot of Macs at the event, thought that was funny given the flack they seem to cop.

Have a look at the BarCamp Wiki for most of the information I’ve spoken about, there is also a Flickr Group and a heap of blogs listed on the wiki where you can read more about the day.