Ok, enough of that. It’s COLD! For SA, anyway. There was frost on the car this morning. FROST!! In SOUTH AFRICA! IN OUR GARDEN! It was awesome. It’s bloody freezing here though. Jaco developed a cold (man flu, oh noes!) last Thursday and after being freezing in bed most of Sunday night I started getting the symptoms yesterday; this morning, my throat’s a bit sore and swollen and my nose, to its credit, is putting up a good fight against the snotmonsters.

What have we been up to? Not much. Playing games! \o/ We play a French MMO called Dofus (the game’s also in English but the developing company is French and it’s the biggest/most popular MMO in that neck of the woods, hehe); they’re beta-testing another MMO set in the same universe called Wakfu and Jaco’s Dofus account has beta access so I’ve been playing on that too. It’s mostly in French because they haven’t translated much of it yet, but that’s half the fun – clicking a button and not knowing what the hell it’ll do, hehe. They’re also running the occasional contest where entrants get beta access on their accounts so I’ll be entering one this month; they’ve provided a graphics pack and a grid and the contest is to use the images to make a beach map, and the best beach will be put into the game. It’s fun, albeit rather tedious – yesterday I got the base down; it’s a relatively small grid, 1204 x 989px, and with the size of their tiles I ended up putting down over 700 layers of beach and ocean! Needless to say, Photoshop was a bit laggy towards the end, hehe. Today I’ll work on building the terrain of the beach some, and then all that’ll be left is to pepper it with scenery (they’ve provided things like flora, stones, seashells, etc.).

We went to the mall on the weekend. Picked up a big bottle of Hazelnut flavour coffee syrup (my mum got us a selection of small Monin syrup bottles for christmas and there’s only a teeny bit left in two of the bottles, the rest are empty, and we’re hooked now so we had to get more nommy flavours!). We also found a few good DVDs – Ghost Town, with Ricky Gervais (I streamed it and watched back when I was living in the UK but Jaco hasn’t seen it and it was a good movie); and four disks with episodes of the Clone Wars series on ‘em. Possibly the complete first season, I’m not sure how many there were; they were selling the disks separately with 4-6 episodes per disk. We saw the movie, which was the pilot for the TV show, a few weeks back and we’ve heard that the show itself is better than the movie, which we enjoyed.

Speaking of the mall – it was raining heavily when we went there on Saturday and as such everybody and his dog chose to use the paid underground parking for cover rather than the free up-top parking, because SA people are lazy and will circle the car park for hours waiting for a spot near to the entrance to the mall instead of taking one of the several million free spots a few rows back so obviously they didn’t want to run the several meters from their car into the mall through the rain (including us ). We found a spot, but some jerk with a big mercedes had parked in such a stupid, obnoxious way that he’d left half of his spot open and was taking up some of the spot next to him. Fortunately, we have a small car;

We expected to come back to find our tires let down, window smashed, or some other form of rage enacted upon our little blue Taz for preventing him easy access to his driver seat, but found it unscathed. I guess (hope) the guy realised what an idiot he’d been and drove away shame-faced and humiliated. Plonker.

Last night, May 1st, my partner and I went to the last screening (10:45pm) of Iron Man 2. It was, I believe, the second day of release in SA so I assume that the movie had been playing, most likely on the same screen (#1), for two days.

I have to ask myself why Ster Kinekor would show one of the biggest blockbusters of the year in a cinema with a faulty main speaker that flicked on and off every few minutes, its absence leaving us with naught but a bassy mumbling, with a blurry circle about a third of the size of the screen right in the middle of the picture, and with the whole picture being misaligned enough to leave a bright line across the bottom of the screen beneath the black aspect ratio strip.

When we went to complain after the movie, there was not a staff member in sight. We knocked on doors, poked our heads into staff areas – nobody. Sure, it was the last showing – but surely there should have been some member of staff about. Were they hiding, fully aware that they were going to get complaints?

This is atrocious service. In the past year I have yet to see a movie in Ster Kinekor that didn’t have a projection or sound problem. You call yourselves a cinema?

Had a call from the manager at our local Ster Kinekor the next day assuring us that the speaker was being fixed and that they were aware of the projection problem. Had a follow-up email from him:

As per our telephonic discussion, please accept my sincere apologies for the poor sound quality experienced while watching Iron Man2.

This was due to a technical malfunction and is currently being repaired.

I would like to invite you and your partner back to Ster Kinekor to watch a movie of your choice at our cost.

The complimentary tickets can be picked up from management at any time.

Emailed him back tonight:

Dear Sir,

Thank you for your attention in this matter and for contacting me promptly with a reply. It is appreciated.

You’ll notice that I am emailing you rather late – my partner and I are just back from seeing Robin Hood, the 8:15pm showing in Cinema 1 at Somerset Mall – the same screen on which we saw Iron Man 2 two weeks ago.

It seems that the speaker problem is still not fixed; although somewhat better than when we saw Iron Man 2, the faulty speaker still appears to be intermittently on and off. Of course I understand the nature of technical malfunctions and it is entirely possible that whoever you contracted to fix the speaker did rather a shoddy job. These things happen.

What I can’t understand, however, is why your projectionist apparently vanished before checking whether or not the reel was playing properly – nor why any of your projectionists, for the past year that I have been (regrettably) seeing movies at Somerset West Mall, seem to stick around after loading the reel. Do you, perhaps, hire your projectionists from the nearby Monkey sanctuary? That would explain the problem. To exemplify, this evening’s showing of Robin Hood played, from the very absolute beginning of the movie, at a slight misalignment which resulted in a bright strip being visible across the bottom of the screen throughout. Second to that, and rather more annoying, was the appearance of a black and otherwise unidentifiable object on the left hand side of the screen half way through the film that remained until the end. What I am about to confess to you is no word of a lie – I have NEVER seen a movie at any Ster Kinekor that didn’t have a problem; misaligned, out of focus, sideways, upside-down, devoid of sound, incorrect aspect ratio… Perhaps at this point you are wondering (as am I) why I bother going back. If it wasn’t for e-bucks and ‘free’ movie tickets I would be far more acquainted with the staff at the nearest Nu Metro, I can assure you.

People pay money to see movies at Ster Kinekor. They do so because, at present though perhaps not for very much longer, the experience of seeing a movie at the cinema on a big screen outweighs the experience of home viewing. I am sure that The Powers That Be at Ster Kinekor realise that they are competing with the home cinema experience which, with the ever decreasing price and availability of larger screens and more rewarding sound systems, is fast growing to provide some real competition. Why, then, do you provide such a shoddy viewing experience? Surely it is in Ster Kinekor’s best interests to ensure that the people who pay money to see movies at their theatres will have such a flawless experience that they will return time and again? Broken speakers won’t do this. Hiring a monkey for a projectionist certainly won’t do this.

Please, I implore you; if you do nothing else then at least make sure that your reels are loaded properly, are projecting properly, and continue to project properly for the length of the movie. In short, consider hiring people who actually care about the movie industry and the service they are providing, rather than sitting in a sanctuary eating bits of fruit and peeing on the tourists.

Kind regards, I live in hope…

I DO live in hope. Can’t wait for the reply… Sigh. Otherwise, Robin Hood was a good movie. Very entertaining. Ah, my dearest Russell, if only you new the travesty I had to sit through to watch you…

As mentioned over on my photography blog (link’s on the right) recently, I just picked up a book that’s been teaching me a few photoshop tricks; stuff on how to process your digital photographs to bring them to life. Just things like fixing exposure, colours, shadows and highlights, etc. to bring out the best in a photo. I thought I’d try out some of the stuff I’d learned on the old Barcelona photos, and I’m very pleased with the results. Some of the pics now look just like I’d imagined the scene in my head when originally taking the photographs.

Before and after shots, click to view large:

[View with PicLens]

I especially like the last two. I’m very excited with these – I have a bazillion unprocessed photos on my hard drive that I’ve just lost interest in because the perfectionist in me didn’t think they were good enough. Time to dig them out and ‘make them pop’, heh.

After merging your images, you ‘tone map’ them – from Wiki;

Tone mapping reduces the dynamic range, or contrast ratio, of the entire image, while retaining localized contrast (between neighboring pixels), tapping into research on how the human eye and visual cortex perceive a scene, trying to represent the whole dynamic range while retaining realistic color and contrast.

Anyway, enough of the boring preamble. We went out to grab food today, had the tripod and the camera in the car and the late afternoon light was kinda nice so we quickly found a somewhat appropriate place and I jumped out of the car to take some snaps. It was very windy, so even with the tripod the shots weren’t perfectly still, and there’s even some angle of rotation difference between some of the photos so they’re not the crispest, heh. But for my first attempt, knowing what to shoot and getting used to what the HDR processing software can do, I’m pleased.

First attempt. Details are very fuzzy in this one, but the light balance is right; the tree in the foreground, the trees in the background and the sky are all reasonably properly exposed. That white floofy cloud on the right was moving at a fair pace, hehe, hence the weird outline it has here.

Foreground’s better in this but again the clouds were moving very fast, hehe.

This is the same shot as the previous one, rendered with a different HDR algorithm for a slightly different result.

My second most favouritest one. The clouds were behaving more. Trees are a bit blurry because of the wind, but the colours came out well.

My mostest favouritest one. Great colours, exposure’s good, sky is nice. ^.^

These were all done with between five and nine photographs with the shutter speed ranging from around 200 to 1000, at f8.6. It’s possible to accomplish the same effect with one RAW photograph since a RAW image contains all of the camera’s data without the camera doing any processing of it, so I’ll try that next time too.

The software I used is called qtpfsgui (or Cutie Puffs Gui as I call it, hehe) on Linux. Very simple to use; you ‘load’ your series of photographs, it shows you a nice mask layer of each one and lets you move the photographs to align them, then loads it as a HDR image. Then you click the ‘tone mapping’ button and it loads some seven algorithms with various settings for you to play around with, preview and save.

http://al.chemy.org/

From their website;

Alchemy is an open drawing project aimed at exploring how we can sketch, draw, and create on computers in new ways. Alchemy isn’t software for creating finished artwork, but rather a sketching environment that focuses on the absolute initial stage of the creation process. Experimental in nature, Alchemy lets you brainstorm visually to explore an expanded range of ideas and possibilities in a serendipitous way.

And then for colouring, there’s MyPaint -

http://mypaint.intilinux.com/

A simple but powerful painting program with a bazillion brushes and a very minimalistic environment. Works fantastic with a graphics tablet.

Both are open source, free,  and available for Windows as well as Linux.

Some works in progress (I know my artistic skill is questionable ):

[View with PicLens]

I’ve included a ‘before and after’ of one of the sketches to demonstrate where it came from in Alchemy (random shapes drawn over a very roughly sketched figure and then ‘tidied’ to keep and refine the shapes I wanted, then coloured quickly in GIMP to get the hues down, and then imported into MyPaint where I’ve started detailing with the skin on the face).

“I found a kitten on the highway on the way to work. I stopped and picked it up but now it’s vanished under the dashboard.”

Eek!
Long story short, took the car to the garage, they removed some paneling (for free), got the tikken out, he’s fine. Took him to the vets – they didn’t have anybody free to see him but gave us some free kitten food and one of the helpers had a quick look over the little guy. He’s fine – got a couple of fleas and a bit of car grease on his fur but otherwise he’s in good health.

We haven’t named him yet. So far we’ve thought of Taz (the model of the car) or Toyo (the car’s a Toyota) because he got stuck in the car, or Scamp, or Freebie (since we got the garage to get him out for free and the free stuff from the vets) or Thrall (the Warchief, from WoW).

We’ll have to ponder on this!

1) Find toy shop, look for silly toys:

“Vibrate / Give You Infinite Pleasure / Special Design / High Quality Toy / As Good As A Play”. Yeah, that one’s going on Engrish.

2) Buy supplies.

Colouring book, colouring pencils, a make-a-glider kit thingy and some modeling clay.

3) Find a nice spot (a quiet table in the food court) and start playing!

Jaco couldn’t make the butterfly-glider-thing without glue, so we played with the clay instead.

Click to view big with narration:

[View with PicLens]

We got to the mall at 5:10pm and Ninja Assassin was starting at 5:15. We rushed over to the cinema, gawked at the queues at the ticket line and hurried to the fast-pay machines that were empty. Picked our movie, swiped the card. ‘Printing Tickets’, it said, and then returned to the start screen.

… No tickets. Hmm. Jaco didn’t get an SMS confirmation of his card having been used, so we assumed the machine was broken and tried another. Picked our movie, swiped the card. ‘Printing Tickets’, it said – and still no tickets when it returned to the start screen, but this time we could see the tickets HAD printed and were stuck behind the loose front panel of the machine. So we called the attendant over, aware that our movie was about to start any minute, and just as I managed to get our second lot of tickets free by prodding at them with an emery board, he had freed our initial pair of tickets from the first machine we tried. We explained to him our double-booking scenario and he assured us that we could get a refund if we took the tickets to the front desk after our movie. Fantastic.

Hurried in to the cinema, found our seats, sat through an inordinate amount of trailers, and our movie started. For those of you who don’t know or haven’t seen Ninja Assassin, it’s one of those movies that has no small supply of blood and gore and gratuitous violence. I mean, it’s about a ninja assassin – what did you expect, right? Even the poster kinda hints that the movie will contain a tad more than a small modicum of blood (see below). One of the very first scenes is a guy getting his head sliced in two horizontally, with lots of brain goo spattering about.

I have come to notice, since moving to SA, that South African movie-goers are rather more… vocal, shall we say, than their UK variants. They don’t seem to realise that being in a movie theatre is akin to being in a library, and TALKING in a movie theatre during the movie is worse than tempting the wrath of any bespectacled, power-bun-haired librarian. It’s just something you don’t do. Ever. But since Ninja Assassin wasn’t a ‘serious’ film that we were expecting to ‘get into’, we weren’t too bothered at the prospect of hearing some mumbling around the theater.

But at that first scene of the guy getting his head sliced in two, the outbursts from behind us were a tad more than just ‘cinema mumbling’. There were two young couples sitting behind us, and I don’t know what kind of movie they were expecting from Ninja Assassin, but what they were seeing in front of them clearly wasn’t it. The boys managed to get a grip of themselves and rediscover their apparently tiny scrotums after the first few limbs went flying around the screen, small kudos to them, but the girls were something else. All through the movie we were assaulted with ‘Eeeee!’ and ‘Aaaaargh!’ and ‘Ewwwwww!” and ‘Ohhhhh!’ and ‘Uuuuughhh!’ and ‘Yuuuck!’, couple with disgruntled elbow-nudging and muttering of one telling the other to shut up, and the boys ‘Ssssshhh!’ ing their weak-bellied girlfriends at every outburst. It was kinda amusing. They’re only lucky Ninja Assassin wasn’t taking itself too seriously, and so neither were we, or they’d have had severe talkings to from me.

At the end of the movie when the credits rolled, we stood up to leave and I was on the verge of informing the two girls that perhaps in future they should stick to choosing whatever Disney movie was showing, but as I turned to look at them, the fantastically, stupendously large afros they were both sporting stopped me in my tracks with a moment of gaping silence. They were both typically thin, flat-chested, skin-on-bones female girls who’s necks really shouldn’t have been able to take such a weight, but there they were with two spectacularly oversized afros cocooning their craniums. I could but stare at the marvel, and so they exited free of my snark.

Aaaaaanyway. Jaco dug the two ‘spare’ tickets from his pocket and we wandered on up to the ticket sales counter and explained the situation to the ticket lady.

You know you’re in trouble when you ask for a refund and the sales person replies with ‘Oh sweet Jesus…’. She mumbled something about having to check with the manager, exited stage left and we were twiddling our thumbs (or at least, I was – Jaco was looking for things to throw for biggest scene-making impact when she inevitably returned with a ‘no-go’ from the manager) for a good ten minutes before she reappeared. Not quite a no-go; the manager would need proof that we had been charged twice, and the attendant really seemed like she was trying to brush us off. Eventually we were escorted to the manager’s office where we stated our case against their broken machines and the manager spent all of 10 seconds tapping the first four digits of Jaco’s card number into her computer where she found that yes, he had been charged twice. We got our refund. Jaco thinks there’s some situation whereby they have to pay about R250 for every refund they issue, and considering that our tickets were R39 each, you can understand their reluctance – but hey, fix your ticket machines and you won’t have a problem, y’know?

Then we went and had coffee and spent money on stuff like a PSP game and a picnic blanket ready for the impending family visit next week, and all was well with the world.

Amen.

The song played out, and the DJ announced, ‘Well, there you go, that was the Jonas Brothers…’

I guess we can sense bullshit a mile off.  \o/