Month: June 2006

After returning from Sydney, Heidi and I visited Australia’s only monastic town, New Norcia. It was founded over 150 years ago as a Spanish Benedictine Catholic mission and it’s heritage listed for its architecture and historical significance.

Seriously, would you ever expect to see something like the Abbey Church out in the middle of the rural Western Australia?:

Our trip was fairly routine; We went on a walking tour of the town, peroused the art gallery (a weird mix of old painting and donated modern works), attended Vespas (evening prayer with the monks), stayed overnight at the hotel, walked a bit of the heritage trail, and made sure to pick up some famous New Norcia Bread before heading home.

Overall, the entire trip was very relaxing. The thing that struck me was that it’s just so much quieter out there than in Perth (which itself is an order of magnitude quieter than Sydney).

Continue reading for a few more notes and couple more scenic photos.

Continue reading “New Norcia Visit”

At some point between living in Sydney last year and living in Perth now, Heidi and I have unwittingly shed a few DVDs.

We’re not sure if we lent them to someone (which I strongly suspect), if we simply lost them (which we’d both be surprised by), or if something untoward has occured (which heidi suspects).

If anyone has the following, or knows where they may be, please let me know:

• Grave of the Fireflys
• My Neighbours the Yamadas
• Kiki’s Delivery Service
• Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
• Laputa: Castle in the Sky
• Porco Rosso
• Pom Poko
• Futurama: Season 1
• Futurama: Season 2
• Futurama: Season 3
• Futurama: Season 4 (?)

Comments are still disabled for non-members, but you can e-mail me at gamefreedom `at` gmail.com.

A couple of weeks ago I went to Sydney to accompany Heidi at her graduation and the following graduation ball. It was also a good opportunity to catch up with my former workmates and students at ViSLAB.

Images and details after the jump.

Continue reading “Trip to Sydney”

I’ve been on holiday for the last two weeks, and I’ve managed to avoid using a personal computer for at least 12 consecutive days over that time.

It was good; very good. However, I’m getting back into things here in Perth and that includes blogging from now on. Look forward to photos from Sydney and New Norcia, as well as a few delayed video game reviews.

I was reading a recent interview with Michael Berg. He’s the father of Nicholas Berg, an American businessman beheaded in 2004 by a man believed to be al-Zarqawi, the recently killed al Quaeda leader.

Here’s a blurb from the interview:

O’BRIEN: No, no. And we have spoken before, and I’m well aware of that. But at some point, one would think, is there a moment when you say, ‘I’m glad he’s dead, the man who killed my son’?

BERG: No. How can a human being be glad that another human being is dead?

The complete transcript of the interview is available on the CNN website.