I went to the museum for the Windows 7 launch a few days earlier, but I didn’t explore the museum itself. I just went in for the event and left afterwards, but took note that this was probably something Ed would enjoy (he is a history buff).

We went back over the weekend, and scored a few “big ticket” passes. The big ticket passes let us on board all the ships they have on display – HMAS Onslow (1968), HMAS Vampire (1959), The James Craig (1874), and The HMB Endeavor (1768). (If you have the chance, I recommend a visit.)

Does this have anything to do with software?

I was astounded by the craftsmanship, and amazing hackery that went in to these ships. Not just the ships, but everything from the sinks to the bookshelves to the plate racks. Additionally, the scale of these projects and the building upon of past knowledge was humbling. I also realised that, in general, to do great, large scale things requires great wealth – and apparently a cat of nine tails.

Standing on one of those ships and looking at the dual purpose… everything… was amazing. Everything was thought out. Everything had a purpose. Nothing appeared to be thrown in at the last minute on a whim. If something was done wrong, everyone on board could die. The shear magnitude of these projects, the number of people involved and the cross disciple input it would take to build – let alone invent – one of these ships was simply amazing.

The ones that really got me where the old ones. The 1768 wooden hull ship – the HMB Endeavor – was spectacular. This ship was built with things that mostly don’t exist, navigated with devices that are obsolete and using math that isn’t likely taught anymore.

This is an example of true engineering and hackery. A thing of beauty. And when the power goes out – it still works.

However software and computers are quite new. Designing and building system is often rushed, and the process is not respected. “Do it cheaper, do it faster” is the motto. Quality, for budgetary reasons, is an often an after thought. Yet I can’t help but think we are the ones at the beginning. We are the pre 1768 Endeavors. I wonder if these ships were designed and built with the “do it faster do it cheaper” mentality.

Ships were used to discover new lands and new routes, and software is used to discover new knowledge, understanding, human potential – and, yeah, twitter.

No one will die if web software goes bad, but it will never be as pretty or stable as a tall ship until the process is given a healthy dose of respect – and probably a few hundred years of trial and error.

All pointless rambling aside, if you get a chance, go outside to a museum. There is an amazing amount of unexpected inspiration.

I found these fun little hobby things called CubeeCraft. They make great desk toys, they are relaxing to build, and they are cheap to make – you just need a printer and some time.

I started making a few, then a few more, and then I thought it would be cool to make one of everyone I know. But it dawned on me that I am not artistic in the slightest.

However, at WebDU 2009 I got a cool little animated head that looks similar to the CubeeCraft style so I decided to make a commemorative WebDU 2009 Rob Rohan Action Figure (my narcissism knows no bounds does it). Since I can’t do everyone else, might as well do myself eh?

For reference, here is my WebDU head:

And here is a photo from the iPhone Web App talk:

Here is my Action figure in all its glory:

However, that didn’t occupy enough of my time so I decided to try to film a commercial in order to entice you into buying my Action figure (which, of course, is not really for sale).

Anyway, so here is the commercial.

Man, I am pathetic.

It was interesting trying to get the blue screen to work (I don’t have iMovie 09 so I couldn’t use that feature). In the end it worked ok.

If for some crazy reason you do want the Rob Rohan WebDU 2009 Commemorative Action Figure, you can download it by clicking the image below – some assembly required.

If you still have time to burn, you can watch some clips of the after filming party (which was really me testing out all the parts to see if I could make the commercial).

I should also probably mention that the presentation and sample code can from the talk are available here, and the audio for the talk can be downloaded here. The feed to all the WebDU 2009 sessions is here.

I think we are finally all setup! I am writing this on my own computer using our own Internet connection from our new flat in Australia. There is still some residual items from the states we have to get solved (like AT&T refusing to believe that I don’t live in the US, and a few more boxes of stuff to ship), but we are settling in now.

There are so many things to write about I am not sure where to begin – so I’ll just go all random.

Coke isn’t made with corn syrup, and it is actually drinkable. The food here is amazing, and I don’t just mean the food you get at restaurants (which is, in general, great), I mean normal grocery store food. I have seen way, way less xanthin gum, red dye number 8 and all those crazy chemicals that get pumped into US food – no bovine growth hormone. Did you know cheddar cheese is not orange? The food here is simply fantastic, we feel way less poisoned.

The tea is fantastic, and cheap. K can’t find stick deodorant. The movies theaters here are very, very nice, but the price of a movie is out of control – $15AUS per person. A night at the movies can easily be $100AUS. Thank goodness Hollywood doesn’t make very good movies anymore :).

Everyone we’ve meet so far has been really cool. I know there are bound to be jerky people here, but we haven’t run into one yet. I find that astounding. I think what I mean by that is Aussies seem far less greedy – or maybe self absorbed – they joke, and take jokes, and seem to take life in strides. They get things done, but not with the same level of undo, unwarranted, pervasive stress that I am used to from the US.

Now, of course, we’ve only been here a month so I am sure some of that is the newness of it all, but there is definitely a shocking difference.

Getting moved here was fairly uneventful. Kristin and I read a few books on how it all works, and I think that helped a lot. Kristin has done a lot of the work getting us setup whereas I started working the day after we got here. She has done an amazing job getting us “back online” so to speak. Getting us a flat, getting all the utilities on, and getting our stuff out of customs.

The only problems we’ve had were securing a flat (getting the down payment for the flat (which was quite expensive)), getting our Oz iPhones (we have no Aus credit history), and getting our stuff though customs.

We got lucky finding a flat, but getting the cash for the down payment from the US was a bit of an ordeal. If you ever are in a similar situation, western union main branches in the US, and the post office in Oz are your friends. Don’t go to the little side branch western unions – they have a rather low limit of cash they will send / pay out. (thanks Dad)

Oz customs is very strict. They even have a TV show all about customs. It’s kind of like the US show “cops”, but shows custom officers going though the mail and people stuff at the airport. It’s a hilarious show.

If you ever move to Oz and you ship a box that is valued over $1000 they’ll automatically think you are some sort of business. They will send you a huge packet of forms to fill out. Kristin diligently tried to fill out this 50 page document, but it turns out if it’s just your personal effects (and you can prove it somehow), you can write a letter to get your items.

There is no unlimited internet plans here – for anything. It’s odd at first, but then it sunk in that the internet is just another utility. While unlimited electricity, phone calls, or natural gas would be nice – it’s probably not going to happen. Why should an internet connection be any different?

I found a nice Chinese class to keep my studies going. The company is called Red Crane if you are interested. They are quite good, and the classes are fun. 周老师 and 王老师 speak excellent Mandarin, and are good teachers. Now that I have my computer, I can skype with 潘老师 too ^_^ (though the metered internet makes skype a bit more complicated).

Kristin has secured a sewing machine and will be sassying it up soon.

The company we are working for, Daemon (pronounced dee-mon), is great. We love our jobs, and are digging into them. (Since this is for friends / family) we do lots of internet mumbo jumbo, but our main open source product is called FarCry – lots more on that later.

There is so much more to talk about, but I have to get going to work now. I have a lot of FarCry type work to do, plus a lot of my open source stuff has been ignored during the move – so much to do…

Oh, one last thing – I now get up at 6:00 am every morning without trouble. I just wake up and my day starts. (If you know me, you know how absolutely crazy that is).

We’ve been trying to learn strine, and I’ve been trying find some time to learn about footy (if you have any good references, please share). I’ve also been practicing driving on the other side of the road – the police don’t seem to like that much. I think we might hold off on getting a car.

As you might imagine we’ve been busy taking care of all the crazy things one has to do when moving to another country (on top of finishing out or current gigs). If we’ve been a little slow on getting back to you / doing releases / writing letters, that’s why.

Geoff Bowers, Daemon’s Captain, has been an amazingly cool cat. I am humbled that he would go through so much paperwork to hire a couple yanks. Just so it’s on record, we owe him a yardie – or three. On top of Daemon, Geoff also does WebDU, so hopefully I’ll get to go to that next year. WebDU is awesome.

This will be the first time either of us have worked outside of the United States, and we are very excited to give it a go. My wife and I know there will be culture shock, but from what we’ve read, Oz should be a nice fit for us. Hopefully we’ll blend right in.

FarCry is written in ColdFusion, so I’ll be dusting off my cfskills. I’ve been checking out the FarCry codebase on and off in the evening for the past few weeks, and I am excited to be digging into it soon (it’s open source so you can too). I haven’t been able to get my hands dirty yet because of all the goings on, but I have been lurching on the FarCry Google groups list (developer version), and the FarCry community seem like a nice bunch.

Sydney also has a decent sized Chinese population, and a China town so I’ll hopefully get a lot of practice with my Chinese study. We might even be able to take a vacation to China someday since it’s only a 5 hour flight. Wicked.

We are totally rapt.

On one of the first trips down, I went up to a bar on the beach to get a soda. I had my line “Hola senior! Una coca cola por favor” practiced, poised, and ready.

The bartender asked the guy in front of me what he would like, and the man replied “Get me a beer.” I thought that was pretty rude, but then he followed up with “extr-o lime-o please-o.”

At that point I thought, “I will never, ever act like that, ever.” Seriously, I couldn’t even fathom what the guy could possibly be thinking, and I was about 13.

When I travel now I do research on where I am going, and try to dress, act, and speak (as best I can) like the people of that country. Because it’s someone else’s country.

“Someone else’s country”, I’ve come to discover over the years, is a lost concept on a good portion of Americans (let alone languages other than English American). I find it very sad when I see Americans who just can’t grasp that they are not “at home”. I hope I get better marks than the usual traveler, and I try to do my part to kill off that stereotype.

So when I almost insulted my teacher over the use of a Chinese dragon image, I wanted to punch myself.

I am making a board game to help practice Chinese – it’s kind of like candy land meets trivial pursuit. For the main path for the game, the part where the pieces advance, I used a Chinese dragon.

It turns out that the Chinese dragon has some meanings and specific symbology. For example, 5 toed dragons where traditionally only used by the Emperor and if a commoner use the image it was considered treason punishable by death (wikipeida) – of course, I drew the dragon with 5 toes.

I also used the character 完 for the finish position (it’s the only word I currently know for “finish”), and I put that position on the dragons head. 完 can also mean “to die” and the dragons head is closely linked to China – so basically it said “die China” – man…

Also each part of the Chinese dragon has a point to it. The horns, the feet, the scales – some of which I just didn’t draw because I didn’t feel like it – thereby somewhat desecrating the image.

The whole thing was an utter disaster, but at least everyone involved knew me and knew I didn’t mean any harm. I just didn’t understand or look into it. I accidentally became “that guy”.

extr-o lime-o please-o.

If you’ve ever been to Capitola you’ll know there should be a beach in this shot:

but, alas the beach is gone. Here is a gallery of our quick walk: Gallery

It’s stopped raining, and I hope those waves subside, but it still has a ways to go to cause any real damage. Fingers crossed.

The class is being taught by Pan lǎoshī (潘老师), and he stresses the use of pinyin and hitting the proper tones (as I am sure most teachers do). The tones are key to speaking Chinese well, he says.

So I needed to find a way to type pinyin with the correct tone marks (so I can print stuff out, and to get used to placing them properly). Openvanilla.org (which is fantastic at typing pinyin to get the simplified characters) doesn’t support typing accent marks on romanized characters, but after a bit of digging I found that Mac OS X does it out of the box (why am I not surprised).

You simply have to enable the U.S. Extended keyboard instead of the standard U.S. one (assuming you are using a U.S. setup that is).

To enable it go into System Preferences then International then click on the Input Method tab. Scroll all the way down and enable the U.S. Extended keyboard set (as seen in the following image)

Once you have the U.S. Extended keyboard enabled you can use the following key strokes to do the accent marks:

• Alt+a for the first tone – ā
• Alt+e for the second tone – á
• Alt+v for the third tone – ǎ
• Alt+` for the forth tone – à
• To type ü, type Alt+u then u
• To type ü with tone marks, use the same Alt+[aev`] from above for the tone, then type v. For example, to type ǚ, type Alt+v then v – ǜ is Alt+` then v

If you find these hard to remember, you can open the keyboard viewer for a while until you get used to it. When you hit the Alt key you can see which accents will stick to the next character you type. Here is a picture of the Keyboard viewer open while I am holding down the alt (aka option) key:

OpenVanilla.org lets you type pinyin (Chinese in English style characters) like shù (it even works with just shu), and then it creates Chinese characters – 树.

At first I thought it wasn’t quite what I wanted, but I’ve been using it for a few days now, and I find it fantastic. It’s helped me match sounds to characters better than I thought it would. And I can print out the characters for object and tape them to stuff (and it’s legible).

While I do want to learn how to write the characters by hand, I figured learning to write Chinese properly might be better tackled after I can actually read the characters.

Short movie on how OpenVanilla.org works / how to set it up:

This application has helped me out tremendously. So far I’ve been doing self study, but I start a proper Chinese class this Friday. Wish me luck.

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p>(If you’re curious about the self study bit, ChinesePod is a good resource (you can get the pod cast in iTunes), and a Chinese => English => Chinese dictionary is a tool you can’t live with outshouldn’t be without.(There is a wonderful widget that does Chinese to English and English to Chinese available on apple.com). I bought a simple Barnes & Noble one.)