Sunday 14th April 2013, 11.05am (day 598)
In the Gardens Point library, QUT, this Sunday morning. You see, I do still hang around in libraries now and again, as do the students.
Being 42
Life, one day at a time
Category Archives: Interior
Lunch at the THETA conference
Wednesday 10th April 2013, 11.50am (day 594)
After the conference dinner last night, the conference lunch. It’s all about the free meals I tell you. But you don’t always get a table at which to sit.
Reasonably decent photo though this is, unfortunately, photography-wise, today was more effectively epitomised by the fact that first thing in the morning I dropped my camera onto the street, thus, a hard tarmac surface, and it did not come out unscathed. The lens has now got a very small, but (to me) painfully obvious, crack in it. I can conceal it to some extent by hiding it in a dark part of the photo, but it is there. On this photo it sits directly above the head of the woman in the centre of the photo, the second left person visible. That little dark, upside-down teardrop will appear on every single photo I take from this point until I get my lens repaired. Ergo, the job has to be done. I am back using an older camera as from tomorrow for at least a few days… but it’s just an instrument. I’ll get used to it again.
The conference band
Tuesday 9th April 2013, 10.00pm (day 593)
At the conference dinner of THETA 2013, the gig that has got me to Hobart. These guys also turn up, do their thing, go away again and presumably get something out of it all. There are plenty of people watching them – even if you can’t see them in this photo.
Water feature, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart
Sunday 7th April 2013, 6.15pm (day 591)
As my mother has been known to say, I ‘do get about’. This week I have come to Hobart, Tasmania, for a conference. Tonight’s reception was held in MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art: one of the world’s largest totally privately funded museums.
This water feature was an interesting element – I don’t know if it’s ‘art’, but in a purely technical sense I have never seen anything like it before – the precision needed to create clear lettering (in Helvetica font, or something similar) from dropping curtains of water is quite impressive. The words have been picked at random from today’s headlines, apparently – but I don’t know what the Philippines have done to be worth recording in raindrops today.
Rothbury Hotel foyer
Wednesday 27th March 2013, 2.05pm (day 580)
I am still in Brisbane – 14 days in a row now – but have temporarily forsaken the Kookaburra Inn for this place, the Rothbury apartment hotel on Ann Street. Nice place, but I am sure those are the kind of elevator doors that blood pours through in steaming gouts. I’ve seen The Shining.
Old Government House, QUT
Friday 22nd March 2013, 9.45 am (day 575)
This building sits within QUT’s campus. It was the first seat of government of the state, built between 1860 and 1862 and in use as the state parliament until 1910. It is now mainly used as a cafe and a nice place to take the weight off one’s feet, sit in a shady spot and check social media (or whatever). Which is a decent way to evolve as a building I guess.
And yes, though I like this photo, I know it would have been even better if I had centered the doors at the back exactly between the pillars.
Working at home, kind of
Thursday 21st March 2013, 10.35am (day 574)
It’s not exactly home, but I’m here often enough at the moment. And I was working. Honestly. All the trappings are there – Mac, cup of tea, the essentials.
Network launch, QUT
Tuesday 19th March 2013, 3.55pm (day 572)
Feel like I should feature on here some of the nice people at QUT (Queensland University of Technology) who have set up this academic visit of mine and are doing their best to make me feel at home. This is Christine, speaking at today’s launch of the HERN (Higher Education Research Network), in the atrium of one of their impressive new buildings (in fact, on the floor above the Digital Barrier Reef which featured back in early February). There are actually a couple of hundred people in this room at this point, but I like the sense of emptiness in the shot.
Incidentally, I think the following universities have featured on this blog at some point, in no particular order: Manchester, QUT, Charles Sturt, Helsinki, Otago, Alabama, Leeds, Birmingham City, Bergen, Bergen University College (these are two different institutions) and the Academy of National Economy in Moscow. The nicest campus? Er…. probably Alabama.
Gilhooley’s Pub
Sunday 17th March 2013, 11.50pm (day 570)
I was working (teaching online) until nearly 10.45pm today so it was rather late once I got to the pub, and with it being St Patrick’s Day, it was like, come into the party late but sober, or just go home and ignore it all. I went in for a drink. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. I started talking to someone only to later have her friends basically tell me to piss off, for no reason other than they were wankers. So much for the legendary hospitality of denizens of the Emerald Isle. But Brighton beat Crystal Palace 3-0, which restored my faith in the rightness of the universe.
Why this shot? Because it’s green, because it amuses me that the cardboard leprechaun behind the customer has collapsed in a state of drunkenness, because I worked for 13 hours today (on a Sunday!) and didn’t get much chance to take much else, and because this now takes the record for the latest shot yet in any given day.
Windows at the Kookaburra Inn
Friday 15th March 2013, 9.55am (day 568)
Unlike most days I didn’t take my camera with me when going out into the city tonight, for my Friday night out – so all pictures that could have been taken were taken in the Kookaburra Inn, my hostel, where I stayed all day working. I like the frosting on these open windows, and the way the light is catching them, their different colours and so on. And there’ll be plenty of chances to take photos of Brisbane at night over the next couple of weeks, I’m not going anywhere particularly.
