kerravonsen: Branch with leaves, a blue sky, clouds and a hint of a rainbow: Creation (Creation)
Argggh! I feel as if I have hit a creative wall with my (digital) art. Everything I have done for the past... week? ... I have looked at, felt totally indifferent to, scrapped, and started again at zero. I need something new, some new approach. Like what I did with my "Elements" series, that was a nice challenge, doing electron-shell diagrams as stained-glass windows. But I've done that now, I could do stained-glass windows in my sleep (not really), I want something new, but I don't have a clue as to what.

Help! Please, ideas? Techniques?
kerravonsen: tea, nuts and noodle soup (Food)
Work Christmas Do. At Cutler & Co (we get high-class Christmas dos at our work).
The chef was a Food Artist - and I don't mean that as a food arrangement artist, but as a taste arrangement artist. The canapés were impressive. Stuff I wouldn't have imagined together became all intriguing. That's one of the things I love about our Work Christmas dos - I get dragged outside my food "comfort zone". An adventure in food. Not that I would want to do it that often, but once a year is good.

Best thing: the dessert - violet ice cream (yes, I kid you not), chocolate ganache, raspberry sauce, raspberry crunchy things, cinnamon meringue, a sponge that looked like a sponge, and some sweet powdered substance underneath the ice-cream. Oh, the violet ice cream was awesome, very delicate in flavour with a perfumed aftertaste a bit like eating a frejoa (bad idea to take a mouthful with the chocolate because the chocolate overpowered it).

Second-best thing: cabbage and fennel salad, with just a hint of lemon - seriously, I would not normally rave about a salad, but this was such a deft mix of flavours I was very impressed.

The rest of the food was yummy too, those were just the stand-out best bits. Lamb, fish, crustaceans, sauces and tiny portions of vegetables. You know it's a high-class restaurant when you can count the pieces of carrot in a dish (there were four).

I was also very impressed with how they catered for J who needed gluten-free food. Usually the best a restaurant has done is make special variants of the main and entrée dishes for her, but (a) they brought her her own plate of canapés without the crackers underneath them (b) she got her own gluten-free bread (toasted) while the rest of us were having our bread rolls (c) she was given a menu specifically made for her. Outstanding.
kerravonsen: Three camels with riders: WISE MEN still seek Him (wise-men-seek-him)
The downside of doing my hair in a twist for the work Christmas party is that I have to re-do it in two braids before going to sleep (else it will be one big huge knot in the morning).

As ever, the food and the conversation were excellent. Our table consisted of the usual suspects, plus a couple I'd missed in the last few years, plus Talkative Support Person, plus another couple I didn't know well. Talkative Support Person held forth on many subjects, but it was interesting, and also the conversation flowed and split between and across clumps of the people at the table, so it was good (particularly as I was in the middle of one side of the table, which meant I could participate multiply).
the food )
The conversation ranged over many topics: "how preferential voting works", the meaning of "grok", Monty Python, Felix the Cat, XKCD, BOFH, Open Source, the evils of Australian Internet filtering, Google (the verbing of nouns and the dilution of trademarks), the evils of Big Business, the frustrations of tech support (People Are Stupid), transputers, restaurants in France Italy, My First Computer (When I were a Lad, we were lucky to have punched cards...), the difference between Procedural, Functional and Object-Oriented programming, the pros and cons of various computer languages (including C, C++, Perl, Python, Cobol and Forth), all in all fairly geeky. The catch-phrase of the evening was "there are two kinds of people..."

A good time was had by all, I think.
kerravonsen: 7th Doctor with an open umbrella: foresight (Doc7-foresight)
I stumbled across this while looking for svk docs (classic surfing, follow a link which looks interesting, which leads to another link which looks interesting, and so on):
How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too) (note, this is a video, not a web page)
This was a really interesting talk, and fairly relevant to anyone involved in a community, not just Open Source.

Squee!

Jan. 6th, 2006 04:31 pm
kerravonsen: (Doc9-smug)
I have made a brochure! My first. Under time pressure, what's more. I had to use MS-Word for it, but them's the breaks. I'm squeeing because it was under time pressure and therefore getting it done is a great relief and accomplishment.

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Kathryn A.

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