Just Imagine...

Thu 23 Nov 2006, 23:44 GMT

Thanksgiving 2006 at the American Book Center: the spoils

I did this last year as well, so I figure I might as well make it a tradition. Since I'm again cross-posting between the message board and the weblog, a short intro for non-messageboard people: English science fiction and fantasy books are somewhat scarce in regular bookstores in the Netherlands. Yet there is one place to go to, one place which makes up for it all. The American Book Center imports directly from both the US and the UK, and as such has a collection that many people from both the US and the UK have mentioned to be larger and more diverse than anything they know. Members of the ABC and students get a 10% discount. And every year at Thanksgiving, they add another 10% discount on top of this. (20% discount is a big deal in the Netherlands, especially with the lack of choice.) And so there's a yearly pilgrimage to stock up on all those books that everyone's been meaning to buy for a long time now...
This year the ABC in Amsterdam moved to a new store, with the grand opening being today. The redecorating of the place wasn't completely done yet - lots of sawdust and unfinished edges were still showing, but even so I can say it's become an absolutely gorgeous place, where I'll happily spend many hours hunting through the ever dwindling supply of unknown books for what next to read.

...Well ...in a couple of months at least, once I've gone through the stack of books I just picked up *g* (and the five books from last year which are still sitting there on the piles next to my desk, eyeing me meaningfully and wondering why so many later purchases got higher priority...) :)

Anyway, the spoils:
* Neal Asher - The Skinner, Line of Polity, Cowl and Brass Man. (Although not flawless, I liked his Gridlinked well enough to want to read more. But for some reason his books are more expensive than almost anything else, and he's been rather prolific, while it's unclear which of his books belong to which sub-series (or even if they're all in the same universe), so I decided to wait until Thanksgiving to start catching up and just get a batch at once.)
* Tony Ballantyne - Recursion. (I'd recently spotted a very shiny paperback cover of his Capacity, with a coverblurb that appealed quite a bit - sounding like thoroughly original science fiction. Alas, the ABC didn't have that one in stock, but they did have this one (with a far less shiny cover), which turns out to be his first novel, the previous volume in the same series as Capacity, and has a nearly as interesting premise on the coverblurb.)
* Iain M. Banks - Look to Windward. (Based on the cover blurbs, the Culture book after Excession that has most chance of appealing to me. Let's hope I won't be as wrong this time as I was with The Player of Games, which I actively disliked.)
* Fred Gallagher / Rodney Caston - Megatokyo volumes 1, 2 and 3. (I've been sitting on the fence for a long time deciding if I considered these worth getting. MegaTokyo is one of about two dozen webcomics that I actively read, but there's a lot of buts... However, in the end I decided that the combination of reread-worthiness and just wanting to support anyone who manages to successfully publish volumes like these based on a webcomic should get my support. 'course, then the ABC didn't have volume 4 in stock anymore *grumbles* :P (Now if only they would ever get Sluggy Freelance and The Order of the Stick books!))
* George R.R. Martin - A Feast for Crows. (Finally in paperback - and in a single volume at that! - and costing only €7.95 even before the 20% discount, I guess I couldn't stall with buying this any more. I'm still not particularly excited about it, but I do want to know "what happens next", so I guess here we'll go...)
* Terry Pratchett - Equal Rites, Mort, Sourcery, Wyrd Sisters, Pyramids, Guards! Guards!, Eric, Moving Pictures, Reaper Man, Witches Abroad, Lords and Ladies, Men at Arms, Soul Music, Interesting Times and Maskerade. (Aka, every single Discworld book between The Light Fantastic and Feet of Clay, excepting Small Gods. I started reading Discworld in my library days, and so these were all still missing. But now at least I have a complete collection. :) (I also bought them all now because I'd seen some re-issues using different covers, which I just abhor. Hands off of my Kirby!))
* Karl Schroeder - Lady of Mazes. (A semi-interesting hard SF coverblurb, and quotes by Baxter, Stross and Vinge. How could I resist?)
* Charles Stross - Accelerando. (Been on the list for quite a while. I have an electronic version of the book downloaded for free from Amazon, but that's just not my format, so now hopefully the dead-tree version will see me actually reading this.)
* John Updike - Marry Me. (*gasp* Shock! Horror! A non-science fiction/fantasy book. What has the world come to?! *g* The current science fiction book I'm reading was for the first time ever making me think I might need a break from the genre; that I've seen its tricks used too often, and could really use some change. So I idly wandered into the regular fiction section at the ABC (much easier to do in the new setup, with the floors almost flowing into each other), and came across this book. I know absolutely nothing about this John fellow, except that my girlfriend rolls her eyes when I call him that, and is a fan. (And I know her to have good taste in books, even if her range of interests is far wider than mine.) I just hope I didn't manage to randomly pick his one book that isn't worth bothering with or something, but I guess we'll find out.) :)
* Robert Charles Wilson - Spin. (Been on my list since I first saw its cover, and it having won the Hugo and coming highly recommended by some friends of mine made it only more of a must get. This'll probably be one of the books I'll read.)
* John C. Wright - Mists of Everness. (The previous volume, The Last Guardian of Everness, is actually one of those five books from last year which is still on the to read pile, but I figured I'd want to read the sequel anyway, so just went ahead and bought it.) :)

So, there we are... 30 books exactly, which required two of the new sturdy large ABC bags to carry out. A red one and a blue one. That's what we all do it for, of course. The books are just an added benefit. ^_^

How was your thanksgiving? Let me know...

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Thu 16 Nov 2006, 18:54 GMT

Forcing object fallback in IE

While I'm twiddling my thumbs at the new search engine for the site I'm working on to finish indexing all tables, here's the solution to a silly little problem that cost me far too much time, for the benefit of Google and all those who'll run across the same in the future.
If you have a page with objects and fallback content inside, you sometimes want to force the fallback content to show even though the plugin for showing the 'main' content is available (for instance if a user's flash player's version isn't high enough to actually show anything useful, or if the alternative content is 'just as good' and you've provided a courtesy choice for the user, or... well, fill in your own reason). In modern browsers, forcing fallback is trivial:

code:document.getElementById("myobject").data = ""; document.getElementById("myobject").type = "";(This is of course assuming a modern standards compliant way of working, with nested objects or 'flash satay' or somesuch. I assume clearing .src and .type would work for an <embed>, but I haven't tried.)
Unfortunately, if you try to do the equivalent in IE:

code:document.getElementById("myobject").classid = "";You get the following error: Can not set property at runtime.

My first thought at solving this was to then start with an object with an empty classid, and to fill it if we wanted to show content rather than fallback. (Not ideal, as it's relying far too much on JavaScript being enabled, but probably acceptable.)

code:<object classid="" id="myobject"><p>fallback content</p></object>But alas! IE has decided that if an object can't be shown, it doesn't exist. That's right - upon parsing that code, myobject is no longer part of the DOM. The paragraph has become a direct descendant of myobject's parent. And no <object> element to be found anywhere. *Poof!* Vanished as surely as IE-progress did five years ago.

I won't go into details on all the dead-ends I ran into and will even refrain from another round of cursing IE (you've heard it all before anyway - and done it yourself just as much, no doubt), but will head straight on to the solution. To force fallback in IE we have to de-instantiate the object before getting rid off the classid. We do this by taking it out of the document, then getting rid off the classid, and then placing it back into the document:

code:var myobject = document.getElementById("myobject"); if (myobject) { var placeholder = document.createElement("div"); placeholder.appendChild(myobject.cloneNode(true)); var objs = placeholder.getElementsByTagName("object"); obj = objs[0]; obj.removeAttribute("classid"); myobject.parentNode.replaceChild(placeholder.firstChild, myobject); placeholder = null; }

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Fri 15 Sep 2006, 23:17 GMT

Tripreport: 2005-07-27 - 2005-08-06: Strange critters

*taps the microphone* Echo, echo... Is this thing still on?

So it's official now. I'm running more than a year behind on my trip reports. Looking back, it was April when I last prattled on about my time in Australia. (No, please, go right ahead to refresh your memory - I'll wait. It's not as if you haven't been doing the same for me.) Wow... that's been too long. I'd call my silence of the last three months inexcusable, except that I have really good excuses. You see, besides being really busy with work, taking time off to travel all through the country with my girlfriend, as well as through Germany by myself, being completely unable to do anything at all during the heat wave, and, erm, just being generally not really interested in writing, there also was... ehm... y'see, there were these aliens, y'know?! And they had mindrays? *looks around shiftily*

Ooookay, moving right on. As I was doing as well, leaving Melbourne behind me for the last time, some insanely early morning, to hop on a jetplane toward distant Cairns. I manage an hour or two of fitful sleep during the plane ride, and arrive mostly awake at Cairns, somewhere around noon. Stepping out of the plane, the we're not in Melbourne anymore, Toto-feeling hits me like a hot, humid blanket. From barely above freezing at night to 30 plus degree celsius in a few hours. Still, as I discover over the following hours, as long as there's a breeze and you don't exert yourself too much, the weather's quite bearable. The shuttle bus into town keeps weaving onto and back off the Esplanade (running past the sea) to reach the entrances to the various hotels and hostels, and as mine is way down that stretch, it seems to take a small eternity to actually arrive. Once there, I discover that reception (a counter on the street front next to a stair up into the "hostel" proper) is closed for lunch, the lounge area upstairs needs a key, and I'm stranded for an hour with a heavy backpack. I cross the street and sit underneath the palm trees by the water, enjoying the breeze and the warmth and sighing heavily at the unfairness of it all. ^_^
An hour later I've checked in (discovering that my room (a private room, for I'm "rich" now, and can afford the guarantee of not being kept awake by snoring) hasn't been cleaned yet - but although I mention this at reception, I'm not overly worried, expecting cleaning to still come through later) and am exploring the city center. Lots of tourist shops, lots of tour operators. Not quite my kind of town - too much like a mix of the worst of Paihia and Rotorua - but survivable enough.
As I haven't had much time for planning my stay here, I pick up a large stack of brochures and start going through the options for what to see. Cairns itself doesn't rate more than a day of walking around, but there's a lot of worthwhile places around - and although I'm not very enthusiastic about the idea of doing actual organized tours, sometimes it's the only way...
Somewhere in the late afternoon I return to the hostel... and discover that my room still hasn't been cleaned. Crumbs and potato chips everywhere, plus dirty sheets and a general mess. And the cleaner has of course long since gone. The girl sitting at reception (a different one, now) is not amused, but quickly shuffles me off into this huge six bed dorm with en suite bathroom - with me being the only occupant. I guess I can live with that. :)

Going out again, I visit thus huge Peter Lik gallery, and spend some happy hour wandering through. I don't like everything he does, feeling too many of his photos are way over saturated, but he does have a good eye for composition, and technically his works are absolutely flawless. The gallery definitely adds an extra dimension to it all, with the variable lighting on his Echoes of Silence (showing the Mesa Arch in Utah) being an especially nice touch to bring out the reds.
Some day I'll want a gallery like that. :)

Dinner is aussie mixed grill: kangaroo and crocodile and boring cow. I decide I like the crocodile best. It really does taste sorta kinda like chicken, albeit a really succulent chicken. Mmmm!

The following day I wake up bright and early, switch rooms, and try to book tours, only to discover that there's nothing available for the day itself anymore. I go ahead and book three tours for the three days after, and decide to spend the day usefully by, ehm... [whispers]shoe-shopping[/whispers]. *nods his head sadly* Verily, it is true. My trusty shoes on which I've hiked up and down more mountains than you can shake a stick at have finally reached the point where I can no longer in good conscience trust them to keep me safe. They just don't have any profile left, and are falling apart in multiple places. The replacements I find in Cairns (after a near-unending trek through far too many stores) are more like running shoes than hiking shoes, but they'll be good enough to see me through the last of my travels, at least.
Nothing much else to tell about this second day in Cairns, other than that I absolutely love the screeching of the birds as sunset approaches: there's so many of them that the sound is quite nearly deafening.

The third day featured the first of the tours, this one to the nearby quaint (read: touristy) mountain village of Kuranda. As per my Lonely Planet, From 10am to 3pm Kuranda is a seething mass of camera-toting tourists with more bumbags than you can poke a didgeridoo at. And now I would be one of these... Luckily the the tour wasn't very tour-y, consisting solely of a minibus to pick people up and deposit them at the entrance to the Skyrail (gondolas going up the mountain over the tops of the rainforest trees), and a pass for the train back to Cairns.
The skyrail thing has you changing gondolas at two stations on the way to Kuranda, both of which feature some short walking tracks that let you see a bit of the rainforest, and so I dutifully took many pictures of lots of green vegetation, cursing those silly tourists who kept wandering through my view, and trying to find some decent angles. I don't know... my heart wasn't really in it though: it was all too... *ponders* ...not fake (I'll happily believe this all to be real rainforest), ...but too tame. Tourists filing by in their thousands, and everyone very much constrained in what to see. Up in the gondola, hanging my camera out of the window, things were slightly better, but the views from there were surprisingly boring.
Less boring was coming over the final hilltop on the track between Red Peak Station and Barron Falls Station and seeing Barron Falls there, off in the distance. Not at this time one of the more impressive water falls I've seen (due to a stupid hydroelectric dam *shakes fist*), but one can still imagine - somewhat - what it must be like during the wet season. The views on the falls are nicer from the various viewing platforms near the station, although of course they have to be shared with the... *gulp* ...other tourists.
And then from Barron Falls Station, the gondolas take me to Kuranda, glorious tourist-infested and crappy-market-obsessed Kuranda.

Uhm, yeah. My first impression is very favourable, as I barely am two feet beyond the skyrail station before I notice these gorgeously pure bright red flowers being all tropical like, making me spend ten happy minutes getting a decent shot (it's very windy, so I have to time pressing the shutter just so), but eventually I am satisfied and go explore the town itself.
I make a quick circuit through the village and its - reportedly - famous markets, but see nothing that really appeals to me, so instead I grab something to eat for lunch and trek down to the Barron River (the same) where there's a walking path that's not entirely devoid of interest. Ambling along here I spot a Kookaburra, and generally enjoy the surroundings, but had expected / hoped for something more.

Around 3 I wandered to the Kuranda train station and go find myself a nice window seat near the rear of the train which will shortly start the journey back toward Cairns. Barely five minutes out of the station, the train stops at a large viewing area overlooking Barron Falls, and all the tourists files out again to take pictures. Well, who can blame... *gulp* ...us? The views from here are much nicer then from the Skyrail side, too. This is something which won't last: the scenery as seen from the train is much more spectacular than from the Skyrail, but the view from inside the train is much more limited. You forever want to step back a few paces to get a proper overview - yet there's no way you can. This gets especially frustrating at the gorgeous Stony Creek Falls. The train slows down to less than walking pace to give everyone a good view (much appreciated), and everyone rushes to the windows to point their cameras out - but the angle just doesn't work at all. Of course, given the steep mountain side, there's really no way this could've been done otherwise, and I guess I should just consider myself lucky for being able to see it at all - but somehow that argument just doesn't seem to hold much weight while looking through the lens of my camera. :)

When the train arrived back in Cairns, the mostly nice weather of the day vanished behind more and more clouds, and the breeze was actually chilly. A welcome change from the day before, but also slightly worrying, as the next day I'd head out to the Reef, and wouldn't it just be my luck if I'd get rained upon there?
Luckily it was still dry the following afternoon as the "Reef Rocket" brought me to Green Island, although it was quite cloudy and very very windy (meaning a bumpy ride, and very awesome spray). Green Island is a small coral cay right on the Great Barrier Reef (which is a large number of connected reefs). It's got some tropical rainforest growing on it, but mostly is notable for its close proximity to Cairns (meaning easy daytripping for the tourists). As far as I looked into it, the reef here isn't particularly vibrant or beautiful, but as it turned out that didn't matter much, as heavy rains from the days just before I flew over to Cairns, together with the the current windy weather, made for very low visibility. (The few colors you see in my underwater pictures here are purely attributable to Photoshop. What I saw myself was mostly shades of green-blue.)
I took two mini-"cruises" from Green Island to see the reef. The first was on a very shallow boat with a glass "bottom" through which we could see the various parts of the reef and all the fishes swimming underneath (many of the latter (as well as a few odd seagulls) being attracted by some generous helpings of food being thrown in the water). I can imagine it being really awesome on a day with clear water, but on this day it wasn't something which made me really appreciate being at the Great Barrier Reef. The following trip (after exploring the island for half an hour, walking its entire length, appreciating the green and disliking the resort in the middle of it) sitting underwater in a 'semi'-submarine and looking out at the fishes through the sides was even less exciting, as now we didn't even have a good view of the reef underneath, but only of such marine life as was being attracted to swim alongside (helped once more by a generous amount of food; one wonders if these fish even remember how to take care of themselves nowadays). (Before anyone asks: I did this trip to the Reef rather than one of the countless diving ones because I felt I'd want to concentrate on seeing, rather than not drowning. Diving is definitely something I'll want to learn someday, and if I had a week or two rather than a day or two, I'd have totally gone for it, but alas, such was not the case here...)

The following day started rainy and early, being the first to be picked up by minibus at 07:15 - *shudders* - for a daytrip to Cape Tribulation. (Yay for small mercies, such as minibuses (meaning smallish tour groups) being the largest vehicles to fit on the ferry crossing of the Daintree River.) Strangely enough, despite being by far the most tour-like of the daytrips, it's the one I appreciated most. The first stop at the "Alexandra lookout" was something of a miss (not much to see, due to it actually raining), but things got progressively better from there.
Our next stop was the Daintree Discovery Centre, which is a couple of walkways leading through that stretch of the rainforest of the Daintree National Park at various heights, so its visitors get a good idea of what things look like above eye level. After a tiny cup of not particular good tea (but I shan't complain, since any tea at all was more than welcome after the early start of the day), some guide telling forgettable things about the plants and vegetation took us up the "Canopy Tower". Given the rain from earlier, the forest looked extremely green and verdant. No wildlife whatsoever to be seen though, other than - just before we all headed down the tower again - a couple of (what google later identified to me as) fruit doves.
From the bottom of the Canopy Tower we slowly trudged over a raised walkway to the gift shop and the exit to the park.
Although what I saw was quite awesome, the pacing of the group (small though it was) shuffling through was completely wrong. If feel if I'd been able to spend only half as long by myself in there, I could've seen three times as much. Stupid tours. Still, shiny things were seen, which makes me happy, which means I'm ending up feeling pretty ambivalent about the whole experience. Maybe I shouldn't try to "feel" anything about it at all, but simply accept that it was.


Anyway, after the discovery centre we drive further north, all the way to Cape Tribulation, where the Great Barrier Reef comes right up to the rainforest (not that we could actually see this in any way). I think we had an hour or so to explore here on our own before we'd start to head back. Finally, freeeeedom! So I rush up the cape to a nearby viewpoint from which there's semi-decent views of the beach. And y'know... they were quite nice. But the weather... *shakes his head*
Things improved markedly as I was walking along the edge of the water over the beach some fifteen minutes later. The other tourists were falling back ever further with every step I took, and the clouds broke up more and more until there was not only blue sky to be seen, but real sunshine flinging itself down to earth, setting the edge of the rainforest ablaze with a green so pure that it's hard to believe how beautiful it was. It turned the whole place upside down and gave it all a wondrously deserted tropical island feel. I approve!

Lunch was waiting for us a small distance from Cape Tribulation, set in awesome rainforest scenery, served under a humongously large roof protecting us from the rain which was once more starting up. After barbecue and salads as the main part of the meal, a rather astonishingly large variety of the strangest and ickiest-looking fruits I've ever laid my eyes upon served as dessert. Chicken as I am, I only tried a few of the more common looking ones, and wasn't completely fond of half of those either, but thought it a worthwhile experience all the same.

Replacing rainforest for mud, our next destination was a crocodile spotting cruise on the Daintree River, during which time our minibus made the ferry crossing. Besides an impossible to photograph but very very shiny blue Kingfisher and an Australian Darter, we saw a grand total of three crocs lying ashore and doing nothing. Two young females and one massive old male, who deigned to twitch a leg and breathe in visibly - once - and thus was the height of the excitement. We got really close to this last croc (I suspect they feed him to keep him from attacking tourists, but maybe I'm doing them an injustice with that thought), and together with it being light enough for my zoom lens to not suck entirely, this means I got some pretty awesome shots.

After a cup of tea at a roadhouse, the final destination for the day was Mossman Gorge, another part of the Daintree National Park. We only had half an hour here, but once more being left to our own devices I not only managed to trek down to the Mossman river and marvel at the wildly green vegetation, but also to cross the swing bridge to the far side of the Mossman Gorge area (where I took a picture of this weird orange fruit which a week ago took me two fscking days to track down and identify as Pandanus monticola, just because I'm crazy like that) :) and on the way back to be absolutely stunned by the green water of a much quieter part of the river, even managing to take a picture or two before the rain started really pelting down. The rest of the group only walked down to the nearby part of the river and back to the bus, causing me to be the very last person to come back on board - but only by a second or two. *grins* I definitely enjoyed that particular exercise in speed walking. :)

Upon returning to Cairns I discovered that it'd been a very very long day, and that I was just a wee bit tired - but felt the overall experience to have been totally worth it, sheep-like tour or not. (Arnoud, if you read this: I'm curious with how this day compared with your daintree rainforest tour, which back then you warned me away from (several hours after I'd booked it). *g*)

After a much too short night, I woke up at a much too early hour to catch a near endless bus ride through the rain (through near endless fields of sugar cane) to Townsville's utterly boring bus terminal, followed by a near endless wait there for a bus to the ferry terminal (I later learned that if the bus driver had managed to be intelligible with pointing out where the bus to the ferry would leave from I could've connected immediately, but that unfortunately did not happen), followed by a short ferry ride to Magnetic Island, where a next bus finally deposited me at the YHA at Horseshoe Bay. It was dark when I arrived, but the brightly lit open air (roofed over against the still unending rain) reception/bar/restaurant area drew the group of wet stragglers arriving with that bus toward itself like moths to a flame. I discovered that my single room wasn't just a single room, but an entire hut for myself, consisting of one big room under a high very pointy roof, looking like nothing so much as a capital A. This entire bungalow-park/YHA fit in very well with its surroundings, and made the sweltering humid circumstances seem not just bearable, but downright pleasant. (I still regret not taking some pictures of my hut and the reception area, although in my defense, the never abating rain didn't give me much chance.) Dinner was pizza, followed by a dessert of Caramel Cheesecake with icecream and chocolate sauce. Mmmmm. (Did I already mention that I was feeling rich at this point? *g* Plus the day's journeying definitely made me feel like I'd deserved something extra. And hey, I'll never give up a chance of good cheesecake!) ^_^
The following day consisted of rain, rain and more rain, effectively killing my plans of doing some serious hiking and tracking down the small kangaroos that live on Magnetic Island, thus killing my last good chance of seeing any kangaroos at all. Yes, that's right: I went to Australia for a year and didn't see a single kangaroo. :/ Personally I no longer believe in the existence of these things at all, but think they're a myth designed to lure tourists. (Unlike dropbears, which are terrifyingly real! (And don't even get me started on hoopsnakes...)) Instead I spent the short lulls in the (at times) torrential rain tracking back and forth to the beach area, where I would sit at the restaurant area of a hotel and eat scrumptious meals and drink tea while reading a book. Such a hard life I was leading... ^_^
There was a longer dry period just before sunset though, during which time I explored the immediate surroundings for a bit, and came upon a flock of rainbow lorikeets being fed. I've seen these critters everywhere throughout Australia, making many futile attempts at photographing them at Melbourne where they would swoop down on me in great swarms around dusk (these critters are fast), but this was the first time that I managed to take a few actually decent pictures of them. Yay!


The next day I already had to leave behind my lazy lifestyle at Magnetic Island and bussed, ferried, bussed and airplaned off to distant Mackay. Why Mackay? Well, it had good connections by plane on the right days, and looked (on my map) to be near the Whitsundays and my Lonely Planet not only listed it in the "Whitsunday Coast" section, but even mumbled something about a marina, so I added 1 and 1 and got 42 and thought I could do a Whitsundays cruise from there. Alas, as I was to learn the next day after walking for over an hour and a half to finally reach the Marina, there were no cruises to be found here, only lots of shiny private sailboats.
I did see half a dozen huge coalships waiting far off at the horizon (I'm sure you'll all be thrilled to learn that the largest coal export facility in the Southern Hemisphere is located right near Mackay; I know I was!). Anyway, not wanting to trudge the whole boring distance back, I waited around near the marina for half an hour or so for one of the two daily buses to come by (yes, I timed things that way on purpose; I might be overly optimistic, but I'm not crazy) and spent the rest of the day writing on a tripreport (back then I still did silly things like that semi-regularly). ;)

On the third and final day of my stay in Mackay I took part in the platypus safari that the people at the YHA hostel were pushing quite unrelenting (but that's okay, since it was the other main purpose for coming to Mackay). Picked up not too-early in the morning, a group of about ten people set off in a very ramshackle minibus with a tourguide nattering on about the sugarcane fields and any- and everything else which caught his interest. Initially this bothered me quite a bit, but he turned out to be a genuine character, and his enthusiasm and simple joy and interest in what he was describing thus became much more tolerable over time. Our first stop was at Finch Hatton Gorge, right on the edge of Eungella National Park, where we walked a short trail through some pretty forest to the Araluen Falls, which formed a perfect spot for lunch. Not the most impressive of waterfalls, this, but I've seen much more disappointing ones, too, and whenever the sun broke through and filtered through the vegetation, the whole scene took on an otherworldly glow.
Winding our way up the hills, we next ended up at the "Sky Window", which gave us a view down the valley we'd driven up at from Mackay, with the ocean barely visible all the way in the distance. (Reportedly, on clear days you can even see the coal barges that I'd spotted from the Mackay Marina from here.) As views over forested hills go, this was one of the nicer ones, and the sun definitely did its part in making the whole landscape shine. Still, all this was merely a futile attempt to take our minds off the rapidly approaching confrontation that lay ahead of us.

...

Yes, at last the time has come to relate the tales of hair-raising terror about my encounters with the mythical Platypus.

I can tell you with complete honesty that it exists, and is even more fearsome than you might been led to believe.
From the moment the little minibus pulled in at the Broken River parking place (Why is the river broken, I ask you? Could this be anything else than yet another example of the fearsome strength of the platypus, breaking rivers in half as easily as you or I might a small twig?), we heard its fearsome cry, echoing around us. Suuuuure, it cast its voice, pretending that it were those lovely birds, the sulphur-crested cockatoos, who cried out thusly, but the true Platypus hunter is not fooled that easily. We *knew*...
And so we came to this age-old spiritual place, the viewing platform, from which the Hunters of Old were wont to look the Platypus in the eye for the first time, before engaging in their titanic struggles. We lined up there, and showed off our instruments of war, glimmering in the sunshine, making fearsome snapping and shutting noises. We felt so strong and proud and certain of ourselves, then... Yet little were we prepared for the answer of the Platypus. Rather than for this initial confrontation sending one or more of their smaller (do not let their deceptive size fool you, for they are vicious) 30cm long females, off in the distance we became aware of the tremendous ripples. Ripples which, we knew, could only be formed by an adversary as mighty as the 50cm long male Platypus. Beyond its other weapons, the male Platypus traditionally wields a long and vicious venomous spike on its hind leg/flipper/claw/paw, the merest scratch of which is said to be lethal to even the most arduous platypus hunter.
Closer and closer came the ripples. A palpable tension ran through our brave band of warriors.
Although violence is forbidden during this first ritual encounter, we all clutched our war-instruments closer, aiming them at the ripples. The Platypus dove under, and easily demolished a small football field worth of river-bottom, before once more resurfacing and stately swimming ever closer. A shudder ran through us as we witnessed this show of strength. Thrice more did it then repeat this exercise, showing off not only its own tremendous power, but also its complete lack of concern for such combined strength as our once-brave band had brought to bear.
Then, after the last time, it dove up out of the water, straight from under us, and in turn looked each of us in the eye.

I am not afraid to admit that I froze in abject terror under this monster's scrutiny, and I know that I was not alone in this reaction.
Unconcernedly the Platypus swum on. It knew, as we all did then, that this was a battle it would not have to fight, for it had already won.

We retreated to the information center then, to read the tales of the ranks of heroes who were lost facing the Platypus. We consoled ourselves, eating some Cornettos, that at least we had survived to be able to warn our loved ones. The Platypus is real, and more fearsome than we could ever have imagined. Do not thwart it, for it will swat you out of existence, barely having to raise its leg/flipper/claw/paw to do so.
We returned later to the viewing platform to perform the ritual leavetaking, there being ridiculed by three or four of the smaller females, while yet other Platypuses didn't even deem us worthy to come close at all, and haughtily rippled us away from afar. We rattled our saber-equivalents in response, but our heart was not in it, and quickly we slunk back to our mini-van, to rush back to the safety of our base at Mackay.

Aye, laddies and lassies... 'tis a blood-curling tale to be sure, and it can not even begin to come close to the real truth, but I hope I have at least managed to convey the essence of the danger that I have faced. ^_^

The following day I managed to run ever further from this terror, taking flight to far off Brisbane to take shelter with good friends. That will have to be a tale for some other day though, for it involves photos which still have to be edited. *g* I hope to at least have made up slightly for my long absence with this, my longest single tripreport entry ever. (What is that you say? ...Quality over quantity? Paah, nonsense!) :D

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Sun 21 May 2006, 17:50 GMT

End of XTech and Beginning of BarCamp Amsterdam II

Some more notes on techy gatherings.

Under the mistaken impression that BarCamp would start immediately after XTech ended, I made my way back to Amsterdam last Friday to go and catch the two keynote presentations that ended the conference. Jeff Barr started with a presentation about Amazon Web Services, focusing specifically on the "Mechanical Turk" (the name is based on a hoax about a mechanical chess player, which really had a human inside), which is a web service where you can easily create tasks that will then be completed by humans (used a lot for geting subjective ratings, and transcribing spoken word - things that are just far easier to have humans do than it'd be to have them solved by a computer). The programmer in me immediately saw a host of options you'd get from something like this (and the geek in me recognized how close this will bring us to the world in Kevin O'Donnell's "Ora:cle"), but most of me sided with the audience, which after the talk didn't ask any questions about the technical side of things, but only about how they made certain there was no child labour going on (for which Jeff only had a weak answer about creditcards), how they made certain they were complying with minimum wages, and more such questions focusing on the social implications of this. And truly, the amount of money offered for most of those questions is quite pitiful (pennies, mostly).

The second and final keynote was by Brendan Eich (the father of JavaScript) on JavaScript 2 and the Future of the Web (slides here).
Several really big changes (such as the type system, which will have repercussions on all parts of the language), and lots of really really good little "bugfixes", cleaning up of mistakes and generally making things easier (one of the little tidbits that got me really excited was the possibility of having a ...rest argument for functions, which'll be an array of trailing arguments (that'll make it _so_much easier to extend functions!)). I'm really looking forward to being able to use the entire array of techniques once they'll be available (Firefox 2 / SeaMonkey 1.1 will already have many of them under the name of JavaScript 1.7, and a near complete implementation should be available in those browsers, as well as Opera and hopefully Safari around the first half of 2007). The estimate is that it'll be 2010 before you can use them on the web without worrying about outdated IE versions, but there's work on a JS2 to JS translator, so we might be able to use this effectively a lot earlier than that.

And then it was 15:30, XTech was over, and I found out that BarCamp wouldn't start until 20:00. Four idle hours in Amsterdam is quite a lot, and not even the ABC can change that, but luckily I remembered vaguely about being a backpacker and exploring cities (which I'd never really done for Amsterdam), and so I started wandering. I do have to admit to spending a decent amount of time at the PlaatBoef (renamed to Velvet) as well (and walking away with three CDs there), but mostly I just followed the canals and came to the conclusion that Amsterdam really is a pretty nice city. :) I even went so far as to take some touristy pictures of the houseboats in the canals. (I forget where exactly these were taken; Prinsengracht or Keizersgracht, I think, at the side near Central Station.)

And then it was eight, and I wandered over to the mediamatic building, where about a dozen geeks were already gathered, sitting on plastic garden chairs and catching up with each other.

It might be me, but I liked the atmosphere at BarCamp much better than that at XTech. There wasn't much of anything (other than three fridges filled with beer (and some other drinks)), but there were lots of bright interested and interesting people, and the mission to socialize and learn from each other, and the lack of props meant that it was much easier for conversations to start (although this got decidedly less when all the laptops came out). No presentations this first evening, alas (those would only be on Saturday and Sunday, which I didn't manage to make it over for), but good fun all the same. I talked to Mozilla people, to various photography geeks (besides all the point 'n shoots, there were surprisingly many decent cameras around), to random weirdoes who'd walked in as they'd seen something about a "bar", and who were obviously utterly confused by all the laptops and people talking english, to just random geeks who were there, and to this girl from the UK who'd been travelling through New Zealand as well for a couple of months, and so was good to compare notes with.

Besides annoying everyone by taking pictures (quite a few of which turned out very well, despite the bad light - I seem to be getting the hang of this new camera, and that 50mm f/1.4 lens is just gorgeously sharp), I also contributed usefully to the evening by harassing organisatorial people until I managed to find the one who could get Josh some medicines (he'd gotten off the plane the day before and immediately fallen ill; which, youch, must've sucked tremendously), but by 23:00 or thereabouts I felt myself starting to zombiefy (not nearly enough sleep the night before; so many things to do always, and so little time), and so I decided that I really should make my way home. From what I've seen, that means I missed a couple of interesting people who showed up later, but alas, such is life...

Tomorrow (Monday) I'll fly off to Dublin to catch a concert by Bic Runga and generally look around there. Hopefully not too many weeks after that I'll get around to finishing the next tripreport about my time in Australia.

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Wed 17 May 2006, 02:29 GMT

XTech 2006: Ajax Developers' Day

Warning, this one's full of techy stuff. (Note to self: implement categories. For real this time.)

It all started yesterday, assuming for the moment that we believe in the fable of today still being today, instead of tomorrow as the clock has been claiming for the last several hours. I was just innocently lurking in #developers when Hannibal (Gijs) started trying to talk more people into hanging out for a pre-XTech gathering at some random cafe in Amsterdam.
Actually, backtrack a year and a bit to when I first found out about XTech. Big conference in Amsterdam about XML, XUL and other such really interesting things. In marketing talk: XTech 2006 is the premier European conference for developers, information designers and managers working with web and standards-based technologies. XTech brings together the worlds of web development, open source, semantic web and web standards. Especially appealing to me was that it was heavily attended by a host of Mozilla developers. (For the past many years I've been hanging out in Mozilla related IRC channels, sniffing up atmosphere, doing some minor QA, doing some end user support, even writing a bare handful of patches. Giving back for this awesome browser that they abandoned in favour of Firefox, basically, helping out as best as I knew how to, given the limitations of time and space. And the thing I like best about the Mozilla community are the people. These people have so much fun shaping the world, and there's such awesome atmosphere.) But alas and alack, at the time I was 'stuck' (if you want to call it that) having the adventure of a lifetime in the strange land of Oz, and so I could do naught but to watch jealously from afar as blog report after blog report piled in on the cool things that were done.
So, roll on this year. I'm barely back from abroad, and I learn about XTech again. Unfortunately, one look at the prices is all I need to know - there's no way I'm going to be able to afford this. (For reference, the non-member fee for the full reference is $1445.) I pretty much resign myself to a repeat from the previous year's experience, albeit this time from an excruciatingly close vantage point.
Enter Hannibal, yesterday, Monday afternoon, taking away my lame protestations of yeah, but I wouldn't know anyone, and ... and telling me to just show up. So I did, and although I didn't have much to contribute to most of the discussions (and where I did, I often was too slow to, still trying to get my bearings, as my terminally introverted self is likely to do in such situations), I absolutely and thoroughly enjoyed following the discussions, seeing this energy that the Mozilla people there brought to bear, having this geek talk shooting back and forth. Axel Hecht (Pike) in particular was on a roll with a near-monologue that left with tons of new impressions and background knowledge on Firefox and extensions and such. Also there, Andy Smith (termie) proved to be a really cool guy, who together with his (girl?)friend Nadya Peek pretty much talked me into coming to BarCamp on Friday. (I'd name the other people there as well, but I suck with names.)

Now, arriving back home after that thoroughly energizing evening, I go and look at the XTech website some more, seeing what all I'll be missing (spurred perhaps by some remarks of Andy about the ease with which one could sneak into such a conference), and so I learn about Ajax Developers' Day, being the first day before the "real" conference, parallel to various tutorials, lasting a very long day filled with talks on Ajaxy goodness, with a cost equivalent to only a half-day tutorial. The $225 for that is still a lot, but with its focus on Ajax, the unfortunate buzzword for the technologies which I've been using quite extensively in various projects over the last year, I judge this is a cost which'll be a worthwhile investment for Have Skill.

And so this morning, at the indecently early hour of 07:20 (and here I started freelancing so I wouldn't have to be up that early all the time!), I hop on my bike and ride to the train station and thence find my way to XTech. The people at the registration desk, though quite friendly, are also obviously not prepared for on-site registrations by dutch people, not only having no PIN (easy debit card payments), but also not knowing how many euros the registration fee would translate to, and needing quit a few trips back and forth to figure this out. Worse, first they claim that the price we pay includes BTW (VAT), and will give us receipts in the afternoon (since for some reason they have to be processed in the USA), but when at the end of the conference we (and when I say we, I mean a group of maybe ten people) come to collect these, most of those receipts aren't ready, none include any information about the BTW (which would be needed to reclaim this from the tax agency), and we also find out that they charged us 75 euro extra (instead of 75 dollars) for on-site registration, and it takes nearly 30 minutes to have this all sorted out. Joy!

Aaaaanyway, moving right on. The talks themselves:

First up is Yahoo!'s Simon Willison, who also chairs the day (and doing a tremendous job of it, I might add; pretty unobtrusive, but just there when one of the speakers needed a laptop on which the WiFi did work, or needed this or that item sorted out). He talks about the Yahoo! User Interface Library, giving a semi-thorough overview of the various utilities and a less-thorough rundown of the controls built on top of these utilities. I don't know what it is in his talk that affects me so, but despite my longlived no-frameworks policy, he manages to make me think that this framework in particular might be a worth getting further acquainted with. (Maybe it was the mention of thorough and excellent documentation?)

Next up is the aforementioned Andy Smith, giving the talk that Alex Russell of the Dojo Foundation was actually supposed to give, but couldn't due to plane flight mishaps. I don't know Alex, so don't know how good a job Andy did of "channeling" him, but it was a pretty impressive talk nonetheless, the more so due to the difficulties of short notice and having to give someone else's talk. A lot of the talk focused on defining what Ajax is or isn't (several other speakers during the day briefly mentioned their views on this subject as well, all acknowledging that there really isn't much agreement on it), with only a short bit at the end talking about Dojo. Thus, I can't really say much about Dojo, except that is has the reputation of being very heavyweight and even more overkill for most uses than most other frameworks already are. (On the other hand, on my google quests trying to solve the really hard problems I come across, often the only answers I find are in the dojo mailinglists, which has definitely predisposed me to Dojo as something cool to play with at some point.)

The third talk (after a brief intermission with tea and cookies) is by Max Carlson of Open Laszlo. I think Max assumed at the start of the talk that his audience knew what Open Laszlo was (something which I didn't, although I'd heard the name), but it became clear from context pretty swiftly. Basically it's a development platform (new declarative language) which abstracts away the underlying technology. It started out using Flash as a base, but its upcoming release aims for 'DHTML' equivalence for all functionality (if with some missing bells and whistles, while the goal is to have it exactly equal at the end of the year).
Even knowing that admitting knowledge of the following is a sure way to destroy my geek-cred, I feel I do have to make the comparison of Open Laszlo to ColdFusion (there, I said it; yes, I admit it, I know ColdFusion; in my defense, I also know PHP, ASP, Perl, Python, Java and C, and think all of them have various features which suck, yet can still be used effectively in the hands of a skilled programmer), particularly the not-quite HTML-equivalent syntax, complex form widgets and problems with comparison operators in script blocks. (ColdFusion makes you use "LT" for "<", "GTE" for ">=", etc, while it sounded like OpenLaszlo has you escape these as < and >)
The thing I liked least about Open Laszlo is that it (as far as I could judge) throws up quite a few barriers to separating content from layout, and perversely makes it far too easy to mix the two. I asked Max about this (due to some bgcolor attributes pervasively present in the example code), and he agreed that that really shouldn't be done in that way, but that (paraphrasing), the guy who implemented that really didn't know what he was doing. (He had a pretty cool attitude about it; definitely impressed me.)

Fourth was Jeremy Keith, who talked about "Hijax", a term he is pushing to describe the concept of building Ajax interactions as "hijacking" the already established links and buttons for a regular old-world website. That is, he says that just like we separate content from layout and practice unobtrusive javascript (actually, I often have my reasons to stick with inline event handlers, but that's still mostly right), we always should build websites as we would for a non-ajax world, and then unobtrusively add Ajax to it (but of course still design the initial app to take into account that ajax will be added).
Since that's already what I do, I couldn't help but to fully agree with him. :)

Lunch was held in the gorgeous Winter Garden room. Could've been better organized, as there was a long line due to most people not seeing that the buffet had two sides. Good service otherwise though, and that room was just very very beautiful. I took a few pictures, but since I'd only brought the 50mm lens, I couldn't really do it justice. *wonders when Nikon will release a superzoom with the same optical quality and speed as his 50mm*

After lunch, talks continued with Sebastian Schürmann's "Developing Enterprise Applications with Ajax and XUL". Basically, the company he works for (Mayflower), has built a XUL app living in a very resource constrained server-side computing environment, to interface with legacy COBOL apps and present much nicer interfaces to the users. This was utterly non-applicable to anything I ever do, but really cool all the same.
It was fun to see him mentioning the lack in XUL of a datagrid "widget", and them thus having to develop one of their own - and the Mozilla people pouncing on him at the end of the talk asking if they were interested in contributing that code back to Mozilla.

Ben Watson of Adobe gave a talk about Adobe/Macromedia Flex. Despite this mostly feeling like a product demo, there were some interesting remarks made. One that particularly gave me hope was something about needing to educate the Flash developer community (wrt the bad reputation Flash has), and another about moving away from the movie metaphor.
Still, despite all the really cool things you can do with Flex, you pretty much need Flash 8 (or really 9) to use it, and that's where it just doesn't get very interesting for me.

Kurt Cagle then was supposed to give a talk about "Combining E4X and Ajax", which was something that really interested me (not knowing nearly enough about E4X yet; just that I need to look into it) - but alas, Kurt Cagle was nowhere to be found. (I really hope that if he prepared slides or anything, that these will eventually appear online anywhere.)

So, moving up one timeslot, Menno van Slooten (filling in for Mark Schiefelbein, who also had some kind of plane flight problems, I think) then gave a talk about Backbase (heh, now there's an interesting one... that site doesn't work for my SeaMonkey 1.1a; I wonder if it's really because I've disallowed access to window.onunload (at least, that's the only script warning I see in my javascript console)), and the benefit of declarative languages over imperative languages in general. Although the talk was really good, he didn't really manage to convince me of his main point. I guess I as a javascript coder imperatively building these beautifully crafted bits of functionality, just don't like the idea of moving to a workflow where I'm stuck stacking declarative blocks on top of each other. (But maybe that's just my ColdFusion experience talking.)
I was quite impressed by the fact that Backbase apparently includes a complete custom XPath interpreter for IE e.a., just so they can actually use XPath. I think I'd have to go and see their claims that this doesn't adversely affect performance too much before I'll believe it, but that sounds like the job for a rainy sunday afternoon somewhere, since you can download their code.

Since Kurt still was nowhere to be found, the eMessenger people then upgraded their lightning talk to a full-fledged one. Another product demo, alas, but with some interesting mentions of their RAD "framework" bringing together widgets from various other frameworks.

Then there were nine lightning talks of five minutes each. I'm not going to list them all, but highlights for me were Jeremy's remark (referencing an earlier mention of 134 ajax frameworks and counting) of the solution to "how to choose" being "write it yourself", Rocco Georgi's "CarCulatr", which is a mobile app for finding prices of used cars (particularly his "loading" indicator in the form of moving window wipers was a big hit) and Ian Davis's "Library 2.0", mixing up a book database with various web services like Amazon covers or library holdings.

After these talks, I spent the aforementioned half hour sorting out my receipt, and then moved up to the Mozilla reception. Definitely not my kind of gathering, at least not when knowing hardly anyone. I hung around Gijs talking with Shaver and Andy and some other mozilla people for a bit (did not do any fangirl screams upon seeing hixie or dbaron, on account of not recognizing either anywhere in the crowd) ;) - learning really interesting things about plans for javascript 2, and experiencing a painful moment when Shaver started introducing everybody in the group to someone who came wandering by, and then came to me and was all uhm, and although the name is familiar, I have no idea who Sander here is. *resolves to go and make one big meaningful contribution to Mozilla before next year, rather than countless small meaningless ones*

That did make me realize that, interesting though all the Mozilla talk was, I'd feel much more at place somewhere else, so when everyone was finally scared out of the foyer by the staff turning up the lights and opening the curtains and went off in search of food, I wandered with the group that included Jeremy and Peter-Paul Koch (xs4all seems to have messed up at the time of writing, but I assume that that link will be back soon) and two other people whose names I must shamefacedly admit to already having forgotten again. (edit: But which due to helpful tagging by Jeremy I now remember as Brian Suda and Bobby van der Sluis.) A wise decision indeed, as this led to an evening of pretty decent food, and really interesting talk about client side development (apparently I'm unusual in being both a skilled server-side developer, and caring about the client-side) and a host of other related and not-so-related subjects which I could probably recall better if the time right now wasn't 04:11.

For more on most of the Ajax talks, David Humphrey put up some pretty extensive notes on devmo. Lack of pictures is mostly because this really wasn't a picture-taking event. (Did take a lot on Monday evening, but even ISO 1000 wasn't enough to get decently sharp shots, and combined with the graininess, I'm not even going to bother with them.)

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Mon 8 May 2006, 03:40 GMT

Conreport: 2006-04-22 - 2006-04-24: Elf Fantasy Fair

Stepping away from the tripreports about my time down under for a moment, I've decided to spend some time editing the photographs and telling the tale of an event which lies a mere two weeks in the past, figuring that people who were there would have a lot more interest in reading about it now then they would have nine months in the future. *g* So, herewith a short account of the Elf Fantasy Fair, accompanied by a sizable amount of photographs.
Speaking of the latter, this will be the first batch of pictures edited on my old CRT monitor rather than my laptop screen. Keeping in mind that you're more likely to notice these things because I'm mentioning this, I'd be interested if to hear if anyone notices anything different in the color quality of the images. (Of course, this is also the first batch of shots you guys will see which were taken by my D200, and the first and only batch which were taken by my brother's 18-200mm VR lens (which made a truly awesome walkaround lens, and will be bought by me as soon as possible - although the quite heavy purple fringing at the wide end will also mean I'll have to buy the 12-24mm lens as well for landscapes - woe is me! (or rather, woe is my wallet! *g*)), so plenty of possible causes for differences.)

Anyway, the Elf Fantasy Fair. A yearly cross between a renaissance fair and a science fiction and fantasy convention (albeit there's very little science fiction outside of the trekkies, which I think is quite a shame, although understandable given the context), organized by the Elf Fantasy stores. It started back in 2001 at the Archeon, moved to Castle de Haar in Haarzuilens the following year, and has been there ever since, not counting the one year that they tried Castle Keukenhof. I've missed the last two Fairs on account of my travels, but have been there every single day of the other years. It's my kind of event: thousands upon thousands of book geeks, fantasy freaks, goths, general weirdoes and friends (with lots of them falling within three or four of those categories at once) wandering around in an idyllic setting, discussing mutual interest, having fun, being themselves, partaking of interesting discussions with famous authors, buying books and clothing and statuettes of dragons and elves, listening to celtic music, LARPing, and having more fun. You'll see more girls wearing dresses each minute there than you'll see during the rest of the year combined. At least every other person is wearing elf ears or a medieval cloak, and every tenth person is wearing a costume that'll have taken weeks, if not months, to assemble. The Fair is a place for having a really good time, and seeing really amusing things.

Having woken up at some insanely early hour, I was barely finished eating breakfast when Roald and Martijn, two uni (and before that highschool) friends who'd accompany me to the Fair. Despite it having been three years since I last drove it, the route to Haarzuilens was still familiar. Being wise to the ways of the Fair, we parked the car in Vleuten, a short 20 minute walk away from the Castle - only to discover that for once there seemed to have been enough parking space right next to the Castle. Oh well, at least the weather was nice-ish (if cloudy, and perhaps a degree or two on the chilly side). After bypassing the (surprisingly short) lines for buying tickets, we shortly wandered around the Fair grounds, seeing what all was there and sniffing up atmosphere.

The famous author guest this year was Tad Williams, aka the Dogly One, aka that guy I run into every few months somewhere on this small planet. Having joined his Shadowmarch message board back when it started (when Shadowmarch was still an ambitious online project, rather than the first published book of his latest trilogy), I've gotten to know Tad and numerous other members of that awesome community quite well, and so this was the perfect opportunity to all go and hang out again.
So, after having wandered around for a short while, we headed on to the tent where Tad would be reading. Being the first there, we sat ourselves down upon the front row, and reserved a few seats for whichever other smarchers would wander along shortly. Not everyone would be there both days, but at least some people would come drop by, right? Right??!
Wrong... That was a pretty miserable showing of the smarch force, with me feeling really guilty for reserving those seats for no one (at least the tent wasn't completely filled, so people weren't desperate for seating space, but still).

Anyway, Tad was in fine form, introducing himself and explaining some back history of Shadowmarch (since the dutch translation of the first book was only that month being published, a lot of people there hadn't read it yet), before reading a few pages from Shadowplay, the next volume in the trilogy, which he has just more or less finished writing. The pages he read dealt with Vansen and Barrick behind the shadowline, finding a large number of killed faeryfolk, as well as one badly wounded one. Vansen wants to kill this "thing", but Barrick won't allow it, stating that the protection of his "mistress" is upon this being. Much confusion on Vansen's part ensues.
After the reading, Tad answered various audience questions in his usual expansive and expressive style. (As an aside on this latter: I know Tad. I've seen him talk lots of times, and I love the way he uses his entire body, arms and hands foremost, to tell his stories. Still, when I opened 32 photographs of him that I'd taken, and then closed them again all at once, the exaggerated routine of his arms flying all over the screen that I saw made me spontaneously burst out laughing.)

After the reading I went to stand in line for Tad's signing (still having a select few of his books unsigned), which, praise be to the Elf, was this year in a separate tent, and thus for once did not hamper, and was not hampered by, other activities! There, I also finally spotted Sahi, who admitted to having forgotten the time and thus not having been at the reading. Standing in line, I started taking pictures of the more elaborate and noteworthy costumes (as well as various atmospheric shots, like the little boy practicing his archery here, or the utterly adorable dragon doggy that I posted above). I have a veritable flood of these images, which'll have very little relation to the narrative, so I'm just going to near-randomly insert them, and you can take them as mostly scenery, or probably as a guide to the most interesting part of this whole Conreport, since I'm definitely more skilled in photography than in writing. :) (I'll continue writing all the same, as rereading these reports has already proven a definite boost to my memory on where I've been and what I've done.)

After having my book signed, I wandered off with Martijn and Roald, making a big loop of the Fair grounds, seeing the crazy undertaker, watching some LARPing, marvelling at how green the grass was, complaining about the cold (hey, we're dutch, and complaining about the weather is the official national pastime) and generally having a good time. People watching, is what we did, and it was much fun. :)
One scene in particular that stood out was between a guy in a big gorilla-like suit (albeit a purple and blue gorilla), with hard plastic covering his bottom (think the Spaceballs uniform) and a girl who had apparently touched this part of his costume, causing him to give chase, shouting loudly "she touched my butt, she touched my butt", while she squeaked in fear all the way. Crazy people. :) (Okay, so you should've been there...) ;)

Having circled around once, Martijn went off to see if he could meet up with some other friends of his who were wandering around there, while Roald and I looped further on to go and see Anois perform. (Anois is a dutch celtic band making music based on the lyrics from the Lord of the Rings (and recently also from the Brontë Sisters) who I became a fan of during the second Fantasy Fair.) Having been unable to soundcheck earlier in the morning, they were still doing that when we arrived. The sound quality during this first show wasn't perfect, but it wasn't all bad either, and I definitely enjoyed hearing all the familiar songs again.
Also very fun to do during this time was to extend the lens of my camera to maximum zoom and pick out faces from the crowd. So many interesting people present to watch, so many smiles and so much fun, with great music accompanying it all.
As the Anois concert progressed, the crowd started to contain ever more of the really elaborate costumes, until it dawned upon me that this was because after the Anois concert, the costume contest would start on the same stage. Where the crowd made picking out faces easy, it also made it really hard to photograph complete costumes, but I could watch them and marvel all the same. (And not just me either...) :)

After Anois finished playing, I went to talk with Ignace (their sound guy) for a while, and then started watching the costume contest together with Roald, planning on leaving that behind after 20 minutes or so to go back to the Tad tent, where Tad would be just about done reading (they'd planned him during the same timeslots as Anois, so I had to make difficult decisions on which of the two to attend) and surely the entire group of smarchers would come out of the tent together for us to meet up with.

Moving to the side of the stage hoping to get some better shots of the various costumes, I discovered that I could very easily walk around the stage, where I ended up in a small enclosed area that held every single contestant for the costume contest, as well as half a dozen photographers with professional looking cameras. Happily joining them, I was in photography-heaven for quite a while, only belatedly realizing that Roald probably wouldn't be able to find me there. Of course, it's expected at these events to continuously loose touch with various friends and then meet up with them again later, and indeed, I met up with him again at the Tad tent when I finally decided I'd taken enough backstage pictures for the day. :)

Of course, a whole three minutes later I'd lost him again (as I was trying to find out where the non-existent crowd of smarchers was located), but shortly after that Libra came introduce herself, and we talked photography for a bit while wandering. Then she went off to the costume contest to see if her other photography friends were there backstage as well (I want to bet that they were), while I went to buy myself some lunch (it now being 15:30, and me having forgotten to actually bring the lunch which I'd carefully prepared the evening before). Having eaten lunch, I went to see if Tad was done with his second round of signings already, intending to ask him if he knew where Deborah was off to, since I hadn't had a chance to say hi to her yet. He was still busy entertaining the last few stragglers, so I sat myself down on one of the few chairs to watch and wait, during which the answers came to me, followed shortly by Deborah herself. After talking with the both of them for a short bit, they had to go and do an interview, so I once more wandered past the various stands, looking at shiny things, taking more pictures of impressive costumes, trying some archery (I almost hit the target on my third try, too! *beams proudly*) and watching a very short bit of the 400-man LARPing battle that was one of the highlights of the Fair. Alas, the five rows of people who'd beaten me to watching it meant even my length didn't give me a very good view of the battleground, so I left again after not too much time, but it was fun to watch all the same. I particularly liked one short sequence I saw where this big troll-like creature hit the ground, and a ring of elves around him fell outward to the ground, all neatly choreographed. Very cool indeed.

I'd been hoping all day long for the sun to break through the clouds and lead the way to a blue sky as the backdrop for some castle pictures, but alas, it was not to be, so at this point I decided to finally go and shoot some pictures of that. Where an overcast but bright sky like we had on that day is really good for people photography (no hard shadows covering people's faces, nor any squinting into the sun), it's definitely not all that useful for landscapes. Still, I think I did okay.

Once more randomly meeting up with Martijn and Roald, we made our way to the last performance by Anois for the day (sounding noticeably better with an extra soundcheck behind them), before finally making our way back to the car and home.

Once there, I had to do some mad scrambling to free up compact flash card space for the next day, as I'd filled the entire 3GB available to me, and couldn't just transfer the pictures to my laptop as I'd usually do, on account of said laptop being in the process of grinding itself apart. So it took me till deep into the night to work that out, which caused me to not be able to wake quite as early the next day as I'd have liked to.

Although this meant I didn't get to attend Tad's reading in the morning, I did get to hear Anois playing for a bit while walking the long way around the castle grounds to the entrance. On the plus side, at least this time arriving at the Tad tent just as the reading ended, I did get to see a decent group of people I knew, as both Sahi and her brother Frank were there, as well as Isabel and her friend Nienke. Hanging out after having my book signed (Sahi wanted to ask Tad to be part of her Paljas project, while Isabel wanted a picture with him, and I'd recommended to her to wait till after he was done with signing, as the light inside the tent was really bad), we were mean to Frank by taking pictures of him juggling, and talked about random stuff.

These tasks completed, Sahi and Frank wandered off in search of an audience, while Isabel and me went to find ourselves some place to eat lunch, and subsequently did more wandering, with many photographs once more being taken of the various shiny costumes and other things that attracted my interest. There's so much to see and experience at these Fairs, so much creativity being expressed: it's always truly amazing.

After having wandered for an hour or so, we briefly met up with Relayquin, and then wandered on shortly to once more hang out with Tad, Sahi and Frank, until it became time for Tad to be off to somewhere else again, and we started making our way to the reading tent.
When Tad finally appeared there as well, he decided to skip the Shadowplay reading, since the introduction to this took up so much time, and instead do an hour long Q&A. I asked my infamous what questions do you think we should be asking, but aren't question, and after some Tad, can I give you some money? answers, he surprised me by saying that he'd like it if people asked detailed questions about his stories, why he did things one way, and was it intended that...? Made me feel kinda guilty, as usually it's me asking those kind of questions, and here I'd been doing just like everyone else and asking more general ones. I really should go and do some in depth reading of Shadowmarch one of these days, see what kind of little things he's hidden everywhere to grill him about. :)

Halfway through this Q&A hour, the sky finally broke its promise of nice weather and blue skies coming real soon now, honest and let loose rain which continued falling for the rest of the day. This was a good thing though, as it caused me to remain in the tent instead of rushing off immediately to do more backstage costume contest shooting, and thus I got to catch up for a bit with Iwitness, an old Book Forum friend who'd found out that I was in the crowd because of Tad saying my name), and later on sit through Stan Nicholls being interviewed by his wife, which was something I wouldn't have taken the time for otherwise, but which proved to be quite interesting. (Stan is the author of the Orcs trilogy, as well as having been the first manager of the Forbidden Planet.)
When this was over, I left the tent with the expectation of the rain making the rest of the Fair a pretty miserable affair - but that's when I discovered that the cloak I was wearing (a really cheap Halloween "medieval cloak" costume bought in the USA the day after Halloween) actually usefully functioned as a cloak - that it, I could wrap it around myself, and put up the cap, and be reasonably warm and completely dry, and remain so for the several hours that I subsequently walked around in it through the rain. (Admittedly it was a very light rain, but I was impressed by it all the same.)

The highlight of these last few hours was the final Anois performance of the day, attended by a few score diehard fans, who collectively even got themselves an encore. Veronica's voice had given out, alas, but Ieteke's voice isn't all that bad either, and it definitely was a very special show. I'm glad I stuck around for it.

One more event to very swiftly mention: with Tad in the country, the following day we had an actual honest to Bela Smarchmeet, hanging out with a whopping seven Smarchers in this little Uruguayan Steakhouse in Amsterdam that Sahi, Gigi and me found back when, and the visiting of which has become a Smarch tradition. I was a bit worried that it wouldn't live up to my memories, but no, the steaks were decent as ever, and the company did the rest. Was a great time, even if Tad and Deborah were noticeably tired after a long week here. Not much left of my original idea of in some small way repaying the awesome hospitality the two of them have always shown me, but good all the same.

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