With other plans having failed to materialise, I almost thought last night would be quiet and boring, until Bernard was kind enough to suddenly call me. We hit the South Perth foreshore and watched the fireworks at Gloucester Park, while trying to avoid the slighty-drunk mob milling around the Oyster Bar.

I didn’t realise that spending New Year’s Eve with a group of random people I mostly don’t know, assembled at the last minute, could be so much fun

Just when I was trying to focus more and reduce the number of distractions in my life, I think I may be becoming addicted to playing with 32-bit HDR images in Photoshop

There is, of course, more to be seen in my Flickr account. That said, the other photos have a fair amount of not-quite-right-ness about them, because my kit is woefully inadequate to do this HDR stuff properly. So if I continue down this path, I may run out of money as well as time. Oh dear oh dear …

So anyway, Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, a pleasant Eid ul-Adha, and a prosperous New Year to y’all

I’ve discovered High Dynamic Range photography in the last few days, primarily from seeing things on Flickr, so when I saw the cat being obligingly sleepy (and thus shootable at several exposures) I thought I’d give it a whirl.

Thus I present this slightly-higher-than-usual-DR photo as evidence of my first foray into this crazy world …

I always feel horribly deceitful when I visit other universities to steal resources, like I’m rudely intruding on someone else’s turf. Oh wait, that’s exactly what I’m doing. Anyway, yesterday’s destination was the library at ECU Joondalup.

Wandering through the CBD on the way there, I got caught up in lunch hour, and was mildly surprised by the number of Ernst & Young employees watching the construction work at Esplanade station.

I also saw window cleaners! And which crazy hack at the City of Perth thought it’d be a good idea to have the Christmas decorations up at the start of October?

Aside from recently completing their tunnelling, the merry band of construction contractors has just re-started track laying on the bits of the southern railway closest to my house. As part of this, there are crazy trackwork machines parked at random spots in the middle of the freeway — weirdo sliding gantry cranes, machines that thump the sleepers for (I’m guessing) joining purposes, and ordinary-looking goods carriages that have holes in them to drop gravel under the tracks.

And freight trains. When Murdoch Station is finished I doubt you’ll see one of these parked there on a regular basis …

I shall chalk up my lack of posting to suddenly falling ill in the last few days, and to my attempt at clawing back from a position of behind-schedule-ness (with, alas, only limited success). But while I’ve been at UWA all week, I did get a chance to pull out my camera, as a response to the constant crunching sounds of demolition equipment bringing down the old Chemistry building.

On the one hand, it’s kinda sad to see labs in which I spent so very many hours back in first-year reduced to rubble. On the other, I’m glad to see such an ugly building taken away from the campus … although I’d be far more glad if it hadn’t been replaced by an even uglier building.