Backup Tennis Racket String

Brian Butterfield is back with Martial Arts and his Sports Warehouse.

The Office: An Unexpected Journey.

Bad Kids’ Jokes.

That’s the spirit.

Impressive sleight of hand at the 2012 Beijing International Magic Convention.

John Quijada and the language he invented.

Touché promises Minority Report-style interaction with technology and... anything.

The rise and fall of HMV by an advertising exec who worked on its account for many years.

I’ve been in the country for 18 hours and I’m already tired of cured pork.

Newly discovered chameleons that fit on the head of a match.

Tasmania’s bushfire devastation from above (impressively stabilized at YouTube).

20 January 2013 · Weblog

Tasman Burning

It wasn’t just recovering from that virus and its after-effects that kept me from posting for the past week; or the usual demands of the start of semester; or the builders coming back to finish the attic conversion.

On Friday the fourth of January, my hometown of Hobart in Tasmania reached a record temperature of 41.8°C, and the state experienced its worst bushfires since the year before I was born. It was the start of a week of fires around Australia, as a heatwave in the centre recoloured temperature maps and sent blasts of scorching air to different parts of the country in turn.

On that Friday morning, my parents drove my brother and his family up to Hobart airport from their home near Nubeena on the Tasman Peninsula, not thinking much of the small fire they spotted along the way. By lunchtime, after they’d done their weekly supermarket shop, the road back home was closed by what had turned into a raging fire that destroyed hundreds of homes, particularly in the small town of Dunalley right on the highway.

Read More · 15 January 2013 · Journal

The Reckoning

Although I thoroughly abandoned my 2012 resolution to post 274 words every day to reach 100,000 words by the end of the year, it’s time for one last reckoning of how well I did.

Read More · 15 January 2013 · Site News

December 2012