millsdavid

Easter in San Francisco

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:01:35 +1000

Easter in San Francisco

Icy: Rideau Falls after the dynamiting.

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 14:25:10 +1100

Icy: Rideau Falls after the dynamiting.

Maybe a bus pass would be easier?

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:07:27 +1100

Maybe a bus pass would be easier?

White Christmas in Ottawa.

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 00:48:44 +1100

White Christmas in Ottawa.

Great ‘Cake Wrecks’ cupcakes by Geek Sweets

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 05:28:35 +1100

Great ‘Cake Wrecks’ cupcakes by Geek Sweets

Autumn morning by the locks

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 12:38:03 +1100

Autumn morning by the locks

Hello-Bonjour

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 04:51:13 +1100

Hello-Bonjour

Madness: They sell milk in bags here.

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 11:43:19 +1000

Madness: They sell milk in bags here.

Sometimes you buy a bit more than you were planning…

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 06:12:07 +1000

Sometimes you buy a bit more than you were planning…

Marathon on the canal

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 00:57:12 +1000

Marathon on the canal

Stop/Arrêt

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 05:29:37 +1000

Stop/Arrêt

Impressive claim

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 21:01:38 +1000

Impressive claim

Wow. Amazing time-lapse photography of Ottawa by Ryan Emond.

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 20:43:28 +1000

Wow. Amazing time-lapse photography of Ottawa by Ryan Emond.

3 beautiful Gazelles in Canberra.

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 12:22:30 +1000

3 beautiful Gazelles in Canberra.

Koko Black’s winter spoil

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 19:45:41 +1000

Koko Black’s winter spoil

ABC News ACT (without sport)

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 18:51:10 +1000

ABC News ACT (without sport):

RSS feed for ABC News for the ACT but with all the sport news stripped out.

I like to follow local news but I really don’t care what the Raiders and Brumbies are up to.

Impressions of Isla Dorada

Mon, 30 May 2011 18:53:00 +1000

I have been looking forward to playing Bruno Faidutti’s magnum opus for quite some time. There were six of us recently to play a board game, and it just so happens that Isla Dorada is one of the rare games in my collection that manages six players; it had to be the game we played.

Bruno goes into the history of the game in detail on his website, but the short history is that it’s a sort of major redevelopment of Alan Moon’s Elfenland, a game I’ve played and enjoyed it but found that is lacked excitement. The two games share many similar mechanics, but the biggest difference is that in Isla Dorada the players share a single pawn and must bid each round to decide which way to explore the island. It’s a huge difference and turns what was a race game into a bidding and bluffing game (a Faidutti speciality).

The game rules are really quite simple - each turn everyone bids, and then we all draw a card (or possibly two cards) - but everyone struggled with them. Perhaps it was just my explanations but everyone seemed overwhelmed. Part of the problem I think is that there are quite a few different cards and rather than print explanations on the cards everybody gets a player guide; it makes everything seem much more complicated than it needs to be.

Nobody wanted to take the more vicious cards like the Panda and Samedi. We’re obviously too friendly a group to be interested in using such confrontational cards (or possibly nobody wanted to create an excuse for others to use these cards on them). By playing like that we probably missed some of the intended interaction in the game.

Those minor quibbles aside, I found the game to be engaging to play through the entire 16 turns (which fly by very quickly once everybody understood what was going on). It will no doubt be even more enjoyable in a group where there is some more experience of the game, and I look forward to trying it again soon.

Incendies

Sun, 01 May 2011 11:29:40 +1000

“You’re looking for your father, but you don’t even know who your mother is.”

Incendies was a tough film to watch, but it was definitely worth it. The film begins with the reading of a mother’s will in Québec, in which she asks her son and daughter to deliver letters to their father (who they believed was dead) and their brother (who they didn’t know existed). To fulfil her wishes they travel back to their mother’s homeland in the middle-east, where they discover their mother’s story and where they came from.

As the mother’s story in this film is set in war there’s a lot of brutality, physical and emotional - horrifying scenes. I was moved by the thought of a woman protecting her children from their history for their entire lives. They had no idea of what she went through, her son thought she was crazy or absent. Discovering who they are is a tough burden.

It’s currently on in Manuka and I recommend seeing it while it’s on.

Dog on the canal

Sat, 30 Apr 2011 22:06:07 +1000

Dog on the canal

Designing Graceful, Gracious Interfaces for iPad

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 13:11:50 +1000

Designing Graceful, Gracious Interfaces for iPad:

Surprisingly, Omnifocus is one of my favourite apps on the iPad. It’s so useful on the desktop and on the iPhone it was pretty much a given that I would buy the iPad version too. The surprise is how much of a pleasure it is to use. After watching this video and seeing how much thought has gone into the Omnigroup’s apps I’m no longer surprised.

Incidentally, another of my favourite apps is a French dictionary called Antidote Ardoise. You can use their iPhone dictionary on your iPad which does what all the other dictionary apps I’ve seen in any language do: Pretty much just fill up the rest of the space as though it was a big iPhone. Their ‘Ardoise’ (tablet) version re-imagines what is possible and rethinks the layout completely. Again, it’s another app that’s a pleasure to use.

(Via inessential)