Last night, being the first night it was available to see, Justine and I went to Knox with a triumphant return to the gigantic VMAX cinema (and was charged extra for the privilege; bastards).

The session was due to start at 9:30; we arrived a couple of minutes before and picked up our pre-booked tickets. The girl behind the counter managed to guess which movie we were seeing — I wonder how she did that? Oh yeah, probably because the 600 or so seats were almost completely sold out. Proceeding to the cinema entrance we weren’t lined up like the others — I’m not sure how many people in the line, I couldn’t see the end of it — we were instead asked to just mill around the foyer. Erm, OK.

Once the cinema doors were opened, the people in the line were ushered in; and then everyone else standing around just entered too — why wait when we can all fit… mostly. Proceeding to our decent seats, I counted no less than twenty people wearing “S” shirts (i.e. the shirt with the Superman logo), but only three or four wearing the black and silver logo. Least I didn’t see any capes…

Shortly after, the familiar open credits and theme song were ringing in our ears. Singer’s Superman is, at the very least, a loving tribute to Donner’s Superman, and at best a good modern attempt at bringing Superman back onto the silver screen.

By the end of the film, I was surprised that I hadn’t actually seen the black and silver logo surface on-screen (that’s a spoiler for all the Super-nerds who haven’t yet seen the film), and was thankfully happy that I hadn’t had to sit and watch a Lex Luthor CIA agent who was an alien also from Krypton (before Bryan Singer got hold of the film, this was one of the possible plots).

Finally getting out of the cinema after midnight, we retreated back to our Fortress of Solitude (aka home) and I went straight to bed, with Williams’ theme still running through my head.

If you liked the X-Men movies (the third one doesn’t count) or the original Superman movies (the third and fourth one don’t count — this one is a sequel to the second which pretends 3/4 never existed) then you’ll enjoy this. It does run long though, which seems to be an annoying recent trend.

Having nothing better to do Friday evening, I decided it might be a good idea to venture into the city to take some photos; I seem to be going off and trundling around the place a bit more often now, but mostly at night when I have free time.

I enjoy taking night photos; for one, you don’t get strange looks, the colours are often interesting — especially compared with boring, overcast days — and seeing once bustling areas devoid of activity brings a new dimension to everyday locations. Lastly, since you need a tripod and the exposures are long, I feel encouraged to take my time and plan shots out more than I would normally.

I made my way down to South Yarra, and parked right a minute or two walk away from the river itself. In just over an hour I walked from the Chapel St bridge to a bit past the Punt Road bridge, just opposite the Royal Botanic Gardens.

In that time, I photographed bridges, the historic Nylex sign, swans eating grass on the banks of the Yarra, a tree with a metallic letter ‘M’ drilled onto it, and more.

One of the benefits of shooting in RAW mode, is that you have post-process all of the photos in one way or another to see them. I think this gives you better understanding of the photos you’ve taken, as well as taking more time to manipulate them.

I wonder if I can roll the counter over before the one-year anniversary of having my camera. I’m currently sitting on just under five-and-a-half-thousand shots.

For what I think is the first time this year, Justine and I saw a movie at the cinemas! There’s not really been many films we’ve been interested enough to lay down $40 to see up until this point.

The movie we decided to see was Pixar’s latest, Cars. We caught a 6:55 session which, unfortunately, wasn’t in the great VMAX cinema. Instead, it was in the second-last cinema at the back, so most likely one of the smallest in the complex. I was surprised to see that Village are now charging adults an extra fifty cents to see a movie in VMAX; of course, there are no discounts for seeing films in this shit cinemas at the back, are there? The price of food has increased yet again, making me wonder if it’s really worth bothering with. For fifty cents less than before, I got a smaller drink and no chocolate bar.

The cinema was tiny, with about 10 rows. The screen was small but adequate, except that the right-side was blurry throughout the whole cinema. Justine didn’t notice it until I pointed it out during the end credits, so maybe I’m just overly picky.

As for the film: well, it’s a Pixar film, what do you want me to say? I could’ve watched the “outing” scene where the two lead… “actors” … “drove” (?) around the town’s outskirts for two hours straight and be satisfied. It really is that beautiful.

The story was a pretty generic DIsney/Pixar story, so no surprises, but it was still an enjoyable film with all the usual in-jokes and sly humour that make Pixar films stand head and shoulders over the rest.

After the film ended, we decided to check out the Krispy Kreme store at Fountain Gate, since today was the grand opening (well, yesterday now, since it’s after midnight and the firewall computer died and needed reinstallation).

My God, the people! When we eventually locateed the store, we saw the line of cars proceeding ever so slowly towards the store, so decided to park and walk over. Mulling around the store were fifty or sixty people outside, and almost no one inside. Two weedy guys were standing guard. “What’s the deal?” I asked. They explained that the store was no longer able to sell product with the exception of drive through. I suspect it was because of the time we arrived.

This wouldn’t usually be a problem, except that the wait for donuts was two hours in the drive through line. I kid you not. There must have been 150 cars in the line waiting, and more joining the line every second. There were even police around to keep the whole thing in check.

Madness! I’m surprised there wasn’t a riot, when some people could get no donuts but we saw others walking around with 16 boxes (containing a dozen donuts each) between two people.

When Australia played Uruguay in November, I watched the last 20 minutes. It ended up being the most exciting 20 minutes to watch, if one were to catch a 20 minute span of the soccer. A mere qualification is cause for Australian soccer to celebrate, since we’re hardly a world player at soccer.

When Australia played Japan on the 12th I, watched the whole thing, and expected Australia would lose to the superior Japanese team. Obviously I was wrong.

When Australia played Brazil on Sunday, I slept. It was probably a good thing too, because we’re crap and Brazil aren’t. Did anyone really think Australia — who hadn’t even been in a World Cup for 32 years — stood a chance against five-time champions Brazil?

I’m getting to the point, hang on.

What’s interesting is that the whole country seems caught up in the whole thing. Well, maybe not the whole country, but a lot of people are flying Australian flags on their cars, or talking about soccer, or wearing green and gold… things.

I wonder why, though. People didn’t seem to be as caught up with Australian-ness during the recent Commonwealth Games (yes, I realise the image in that linked post is missing; no, I can’t be bothered to fix it), or the Olympic Games, though they were obviously enamoured with the event as a whole.

It doesn’t happen for, say, the Ashes. So why are people so excited about the World Cup? Is it because Australia’s been so crap for so long people are suddenly interested? Surely not, Australia doesn’t stand a chance. Or is it because because there are hundreds of thousands of closet soccer fans? Hardly; people I speak to think the game is boring.

Nevertheless, I will be following Australia’s progress, as long as their matches are on at a reasonable time. Why the organisers put their matches on when it’s not convenient for me is baffling. Why wasn’t I consulted?

This afternoon, I popped down to Chadstone to see what the Nintendo DS Connection Tour ‘06 was like, and to enter the New Super Mario Bros competition to win a new DS Lite.

I took our DS along and was able to download some content for Animal Crossing — Justine got a “fire bar” (one of those spinning rows of fire from Mario that appear mostly in castle levels) and I got a “Star man”, the bouncing stars that give you invincibility.

I also took Nintendogs and met Shigeru Miyamoto’s puppy (probably his “public relations” puppy, and not his own one), who gave me a gift of some sort and a message which I couldn’t really hear as it was too loud. I’m pretty sure it was in English, though.

I discovered that I was too late to enter the competition, as all 256 (the number was fitting, perhaps) entries at the Chadstone competition. I watched a few rounds and then went home.

Ages ago — just before we went to Sydney — I made a WAP site so I could post from almost anywhere, but it never really worked properly.  This was due to the site being on a non-standard port (due to Optus’ awful policy of blocking port 80).

As I was clearing out a bunch of old files and things from the site, I noticed the WAP site.  I hit "delete" but then realised that I could actually use it!  I went back to an old backup and restored, then fixed up the WAP site and am now happy to say that it’s available at:

http://wap.bludger.org/

So, if you have a mobile phone (I’d say most of the readers do), point it to that address and you’ll see an extremely-stripped down version of the site.  I haven’t yet been able to get the login form to work yet so I can’t actually post, but if you just can’t wait for your bludger.org fix (I know how hard it must be for some of you), you can get it from almost anywhere.

Since I’ve moved a lot of things around with the site, the RSS feeds for both bludger.org and Juzzyweb have moved.  The locations for the feeds are now:

bludger.org - http://bludger.org/blog/feed.rss
Juzzyweb - http://justine.bludger.org/justine/feed.rss

I’ve also gone and made those cool URLs that you see on Wikipedia and Flickr, most of the pages and links on the site now utilise them so you can bask in the knowledge that bludger.org is as hip as the rest of them.

I’ve been so busy over the last week or two, what with my birthday, Justine’s birthday, and the site dying that I forgot to discuss my light cone and it’s enveloping Zeta Tucanae.

A (future) light cone is the boundary of the causal future of a point and the past light cone is the boundary of its causal past. Basically, it’s space that I could have influenced just by existing. Of course, it’s a load of hogwash but it’s interesting to thing how far theoretical light created at the time of my birth could have travelled.

In another three months, my light cone will envelop Chi-1 Orionis which just happens to be in the Orion constellation and includes Orion’s Belt, which I’m sure everyone has heard of, even if they’re not interested in astronomy (like I’m not).

If you’d like to see what your own light cone has enveloped, you will need something capable of reading RSS (or knowing how to decipher XML) and then you’ll have to bookmark the RSS feed.