Not a world changing event, but a nice addition to my day – ourbrisbane opted to feature one of my Riverfire photographs from 2008 in its latest newsletter.

OurBrisbane Feature Photograph

Here is the original image:

50 mile by 50 mile area photograph of a sunspot on the Sun's surface

This is a highly detailed photograph of a sunspot on the Sun’s surface taken at the Big Bear Solar Observatory, California.

It’s currently the most detailed photograph of the Sun ever captured using visible light.

I picked up some new daylight black and white film development kit and chemicals last Saturday, so decided to head out Sunday and get some 4×5 sheets shot to try some taco development in the new tank.

I didn’t venture far – just down the road to the Walter Taylor Bridge that links Indooroopilly and Chelmer.

This was taken at the Chelmer end, below the bridge where some maintenance is underway on the small residence in the pylon.

This is from the Northern end, featuring the cable supporting the pylons.  The cable was originally support cable linking the two halves of the Sydney  Harbour bridge together when it was being built.  After the Sydney Harbour Bridge was completed in 1932, the cable was brought up for use in the Walter Taylor bridge, which was completed in 1936.

Playing around with a stitched panorama today led to some sort of otherworldly apocalypse.

Side dishes

Tonight Michelle and I tried out a new dining venue at Bardon – Mundo Churrasco.

Self-served plate with sausage

Mundo promises a feast of Brazilian cuisine centred around South American style BBQ (the Churrasco), and they deliver in spades.   After we were seated, we were each presented with wooden cubes, painted red and green on opposing ends.  This was a signifier that things are done a little differently here.  Mundo is staffed by carver waiters, who continually emerge from the kitchen carrying racks of barbecued meat – beef, chicken or pork – vegetables and fruit.  Turning the green end of the cube up signifies that you would like to be offered a serving of whatever the waiter is carrying, and red signifies that, for the moment, you are satisfied.

The meal started with Brazilian-style cheese bread and then stepped up a notch as flavoursome side dishes were served in individual bowls – salads, rice, toasted manioc (Cassava) flour with spiced beef, and Cassava chips.  We turned our cubes green-side-up and waited, and within a minute or two we had some of the best tasting beef sausage I’ve ever experienced waiting on our plates, and things only got  better from there.

Papaya Creme with Cassis Liqueur

Coconut Creme Broule with Plum Sauce

The standard Churrasco at Mundo is all-you-can eat ($30 / head for dinner, a little less for lunch but there is less variety being served), and we ate a lot.  Barbecued joints of beef and pork, sausages of the same, barbecued pineapple dusted with cinnamon – all the while our side dishes and water being dutifully replenished by the friendly wait staff.

After we were sated with the Churrasco, we decided to treat ourselves to dessert, and this was another highlight in itself.  Mundo offers desserts I have never seen before.  I ordered Papaya Creme with Cassis Liqueur, and Michelle a Coconut Creme Broule with Plum Sauce.  Both were without fault and brought us from the point of satisfied to  bursting at the seams.

Definitely going again.

Recentish stuff …

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Seen

• Micmacs – interesting, quirky
• Welcome – depressing, no punches pulled
• Agora – underrated and underexposed, a little loose in its historic portrayal
• Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky – intense, lavish and introspective
• 2012 – lol
• Iron Man 2 – hell yeah
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – brutal, great cinematography, intriguing, too many endings?

Dined

• Thai Country, Holland Park – awesome food (pumpkin curry, thai green curry with king prawns), average service, food makes it all worthwhile
• Treacle, The Grange – always a pleasure
• Asian Fusion, Fortitude Valley – red curry, a bit salty
• Wah, City – great food (thin-sliced pork & kim chi, kim chi pancakes), a little stuffy, service is ok
• Hien Vuong, Sunnybank – hellz yea – crispy skin chicken in glass noodle soup, combination spring rolls, pork & chicken with rice vermicelli – can get a bit crowded, service without a smile

Cooked

• Signature Roast Pumpkin & Salad with baby spinach, green olives and fetta-stuffed peppers
• Some concoction with kim chi, chicken dumplings and rice vermicelli stir-fried in sesame oil.  Needs refinement.

I’m not a huge fan of Translink’s Journey Planner.  While functional, it is engineered in a way that requires a new form to be filled in every time you want to get info about the next trip from your location. It’s tedious!

So, I’ve built a utility that acts as a layer on top of the Translink website called MyTripTime.  What it does is builds a “search profile” and associates that with a short link, then uses the search profile as the basis to perform dynamic searches with minimal input required from the end user.

There are a few other nifty features like addons to the saved url (eg. day:sun to pull up times for next Sunday and time:first to get the first service of the day), and it provides output in different formats – html by default, xml and json.

The design is primarily oriented toward mobile devices such as Android OS phones and iPhone, so it probably looks a bit minimal on a desktop browser window.  I may get around to putting together a desktop design for it, if I can muster the motivation.

So, without further ado, I present … mytriptime.info!

Image by Za Rodinu via Flickr

Stuff I thought was interesting from April 14th through April 19th:

• Tea Party Financiers Owe Their Fortune to Josef Stalin – The Tea Party movement’s dirty little secret is that its chief financial backers owe their family fortune to the granddaddy of all their hatred: Stalin’s godless empire of the USSR.
• Cultivated Play: Farmville | MediaCommons – The most important thing to recognize here is that, whether we like it or not, seventy-three million people are playing Farmville: a boring, repetitive, and potentially dangerous activity that barely qualifies as a game. Seventy-three million people are obligated to a company that holds no reciprocal ethical obligation toward those people.
• Daily Kos: State of the Nation – When a President is all Heart – Yesterday, after ordering hospital visits rights to the partners of gay men and lesbians, president Obama called Janice Langbehn, a woman from Florida who in 2007 lost her partner for 18 years, Lisa Pond. Apparently, the president read the story last year. So last night he called Langbehn from Air Force One to tell her about the new policy.
• Internet Filter Not Needed, Says US Ambassador to Australia – The US ambassador to Australia Jeff Bleich has criticised the Rudd government’s plan to filter the internet, saying the same goals can be achieved without censorship.
• House season finale shot with Canon 5D Mk II – For those doubters of having a “sub-standard” video mode in DSLRs, you might want to wait for the season finale of House (featuring the superbly sarcastic Hugh Laurie) to see what can be done with a video-capable DSLR

It’s nice to make a redbubble sale every now and again. This time it was another print sale of Sunburnt City

Sunburnt City on RedBubble