A stunning image from ESA’s Mars Express.

Google Moon. Cute.

It wasn’t until I arrived at university this morning that I realised I’d forgotten my trousers. See, normally I wear trousers when I’m cycling into the city. But the forecast this morning was for showers, and I’ve learnt that in Auckland “showers” can mean sudden unpredictable bursts of torrential rain, so on these occasions I like to carry my trousers in a backpack and wear shorts. And when I say shorts, I mean of course “old baggy swimming togs”. These are good to cycle in, but not so good to wear all day in the middle of winter.

Fortunately, I had twenty minutes to spare, which was just enough time to cycle at speed down to Queen Street and explain to the clerk at Hallensteins that I would be requiring trousers at speed. I chose some that were basically the same as what I already have, handed my credit card round the changing room curtain to the clerk, and cycled back up the hill to Uni, arriving just in time for the tutorial.

Which would have been all very well if I hadn’t then wasted another twenty minutes trying to find something called the BLT (it turns out this is the Biology Lecture Theatre) before discovering that this was a typo in our lecture notes, and that I was supposed to be in the BTL (Basement Teaching Laboratory). This is indicative of the way things usually work at the University of Auckland, and given its Brazil-like bureaucracy I think it only appropriate that BTL be pronounced “Buttle”. I wanted to check just now whether the university perhaps has something called TTL to be pronounced “Tuttle”, but it seems that the entire auckland.ac.nz domain is unavailable at the moment. Presumably it has been blown up by “terrorists”.

Having completed the requisite stage two courses last semester, I am now a stage three student again. I have a paper in web development, which will provide me with six months of feeling ambivalent about the C# programming language, but otherwise looks like containing lots of good stuff that I went back to university for in the first place. The other is in Human-Computer Interaction, and this will involve a nice big project. I was a little disturbed to see that one of the examples we were shown of student work that did well last year included an extremely annoying Microsoft Bob style character who popped up intermittently to tell you deeply unfunny jokes and couldn’t be turned off. But the application was supposed to be used by six-year-olds, and perhaps they like that sort of thing. Happily, our project will be aimed at octogenerians, and I believe I should be able to convince the other members of my group that old people don’t like being interrupted.

Here’s the little textbook I made for the jam comics workshop at Small Print 2005.

Such a fine zinefest that was, indeed.

It all started with a beginning, which occurred on the steps outside the Grey Lynn library hall while we early people waited for someone with a key-card to arrive and let us in. Then it continued to occur outside after someone did arrive with a card, but the lock turned out to be on a sort of timer. The helpful people from the Grey Lynn library said that that happens sometimes. Fortunately it was a pleasant sunny day and everybody was happy and a hippy guy was playing the guitar (he was good) so we had a jovial outdoor time. Bob arrived from Christchurch with Ragh the FunTime Dinosaur, so we assembled him and guarded him from the gentle zephyrs that kept knocking him over. Eventually the inexplicably non-opening lock opened inexplicably, and we went inside to set up tables.

Once this was complete, we got down to the serious business of buying stuff from each other. I now have many fine comics and zines I didn’t have before, and a goodly number of people have FunTimes. There were plenty of punks and geeks and vegans and anarchists and all the other sorts of people who make zines.

I ran my workshop on Jam Comics, which didn’t really finish but instead spilled over into lots of people passing around pages and filling in panels. It was most gratifying to see people carrying the pages back and forth and seeking out new people to add to them. I distributed free copies of my little textbook liberally around the venue.

Later I had another fine dinner with Annette and JSR. This time we made it to Tanuki’s Yakitori Grotto, where we ate many excellent varieties of meat-on-a-stick. They also took me on a whirlwind tour of the World of Warcraft, which was fun.

From there, I proceeded to the Zinefest After Party, where I was highly impressed by the air-metal vampire stylings of the Invasion of the Mutant Space Bats of Doom. They rock.