MASSIVE 2006

The biggest social event on the Perth digital media calendar is fast approaching. You don’t want to miss out on MASSIVE 2006.

MASSIVE 2006

From the website:

MASSIVE is an end of year event held for all members of the Western Australian Digital Creative Industries. This one night brings together the WA Digital Community in order to celebrate another sucessful year. 2006 is the 5th year which MASSIVE has been held. Last year saw over 320 people attend so this year is set to be bigger than ever!

Details:

  • Time/Date: 6:00pm, Tuesday, 12th of December 2006
  • Location : Top floor of The Brass Monkey, Northbridge
  • Cost: Free! (But please RSVP for catering purposes)

If you are interested in formally supporting this event (by providing prizes or financial support) check out the supporter packages available. It’s a great opportunity to engage digital media professionals in Perth.

This event is being organised by SIGGRAPH Perth Chapter (disclosure: I’m a board member). Please say thanks to the team when you see them at the event; Particular thanks should go to Minh for working so hard to find a venue. I don’t think that this event would be going ahead without all of her hard work.

I’ll post more details as the event approaches. Please feel free to ask any questions in the comments section, and I’ll try to answer them in subsequent posts.

OneTwenty feed reader

I’m using planet to aggregate news headlines from various sites I think may be of interest to the OneTwenty crowd (and like-minded individuals). I use Liferea for my personal feed reading needs, but other OneTwenty members prefer to keep on top of news using their web browsers.

I quickly put something up just to see if it gets used. If so, I might work on it a bit more in future (adding categories and probably using AJAX to make the page update without requiring a manual refresh). Maybe even a login so that people can add your own feeds. No point getting ahead of myself here though!

Check it out here:

It’s fairly different to a standard planet website. I didn’t want to crowd the webpage with story details, so I went with a newspaper style 3 column layout. Rather than messing around with tables, I decided to use the CSS3 Columns extension which only seems to be supported by browsers using the Gecko rendering engine (eg. Mozilla, Firefox, and Epiphany amoung others).

Under other browsers, it all appears in a single column. You can see screenshots of the sites as viewed under other browser (Internet Explorer, Konqueror, Opera, and Safari) on browsershots.org (a very handy service!).

Please let me know if you find the new reader useful. Also feel free to suggest feeds (to be added or removed).

Wii preorder package at JB Hi-Fi

I was at JB Hi-Fi last night with spinboy and he pointed out these Wii preorder posters near the entrance. Whiile buying Singstar Legends and Clubhouse Games, I asked the woman behind the counter about the preorder:

Could you tell me about the Wii preorder deals?
The Wii…
It’s a game console…
There are posters advertising a preorder for it plastered over the entrance to this store…

At that point she said something along the lines of “Ooooh, I’ll call someone for you”. After a while, a sales guy turned up and quickly disappeared into the back room when I mentioned that I was after information on the Wii preorder. A few minutes later he emerged with a printout.

It seems that everything (I was interested in) is full-price, I would have to put $50 down, and I would get a few pretty random extras:

  • A carry case (Okay, not that random. It looked pretty good actually).
  • Wii-branded wrist and head bands (To complement the Wii Sports theme I suppose).

I’m not sure if that is enough to make me preorder. I’m not convinced that preordering will be necessary, and their service didn’t exactly instill any confidence that I would get the console and games without hassle. It would really suck to spend December 7 being messed around at JB knowing that Wiis are readily available at the Target across the road.

For a list of other preorder deals, check out Vooks’ Aussie Wii Preorder page from their Ultimate Aussie Wii Guide.

Update: I ended up preordering from my local Gametraders. I’m getting a Wii console, Wii Remote (with Wii Play), a Wii Nunchuk controller, and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for $549.8 (a very good deal IMHO).

Planet OneTwenty

Planet OneTwenty is back up! (At an easy-to-remember address to boot!)

I gave it a bit of a visual overhaul. The CSS is still really messy (and will need a serious clean-up this weekend), but I’m happy with how the page looks (although I’ve only tested it under Firefox). I didn’t want it to look like every other Planet website out there! I’ll get the hackergotchis from Jim tomorrow (so each set of posts should have a little avatar next to it).

Planet OneTwenty

For those that don’t know, Planet OneTwenty is an aggregator for posts from the individual blogs of OneTwenty members and friends. Planet, the software used to run the site, is pretty popular in the geek community.

For those that do know: how do you make Planet use local time rather than UTC?

Update: It looks pretty crappy under Internet Explorer. (Actually… I just fixed this!)

Ramady’s Michael Jackson dance lessons

Search for “Michael Jackson dance lessons” on YouTube and you can’t miss Ramady’s video tutorials. Sometimes questionable camerawork and clipping aside, this Parisian dance instructor clearly demonstrates Michael Jackson’s famous moves, breaking them down into steps and running through them slowly before performing them at full speed.

Rather than searching through his YouTube profile, it’s much better to visit his site which has links to his videos nicely arranged by level of difficulty (with a few extras at the end). Most people probably end up at his site looking for a moonwalking tutorial (which is good), but he has a lot of other content (such as his balloon pantomime)

Here’s one of my favourite videos from his site (slow motion dancing to Stranger in Moscow):

Not quite the King of Pop, but pretty close.

Update: BlackGhost pointed out that these YouTube videos were put up by tasbin (not Ramady) and that the website linked above is a tribute page only and not Ramady’s official page. Ramady’s official (French) page is Secrets of Moonwalk. Thanks BlackGhost!

1UP article on Grasshopper Manufacture Inc.

A number of weeks ago, 1UP posted a feature article on the Japanese videogame development company Grasshopper Manufacture Inc. The article mostly focusses on its president, Goichi Suda. It details how he got into the games industry and later formed the company. It also describes the critical (but mixed) reception that their games have inspired.

1up article on Grasshopper Manufacture Inc.

For those that don’t know, Goichi Suda is a vanguard of the Japanese video games industry and he will be coming to Perth next year to speak at the GO3 Expo. As I have expounded on a number of previous occassions, I’m rather excited about his coming to Perth. Killer 7 really opened my eyes to what a game could be, and I am eagerly waiting for Contact to arrive from Play-Asia.

The article is a good read and perfect for getting yourself pumped up for Goichi Suda’s talk here next year!