She has worked very hard over the last few years on her fencing, and is certainly deserving. Well done Leah!

My mother and I recently attended the Taste Otago Wine & Food Expo hosted in the Edgar Centre on Sunday, July 31st. The following is the organisers' description of the event:

Taste Otago will comprise of an integrated mix of the best taste sensations that the industry has to offer. The sky’s the limit and there are no restrictions as to what stallholders choose to offer. The event aims to be fresh, fun and vibrant and focuses on all things related to the wine and food industry.

People who love eating, drinking, cooking and entertaining should attend the event, as well as other businesses and individuals from the wine and food industry.

Sounds great no?

No. What a dreadful disappointment. We paid 30$ to enter the expo, and discovered that the fee essentially entitled us to nothing. You are expected to pay the entrance fee, and then must additionally pay for every taste of wine and nibble of cheese. I would have expected that the fee would have covered a meagre sip or two of wine.

Considering this was a food and wine expo, there was a distinct lack of food on offer. Little India, which I find somewhat overrated, provided the only dedicated food stall. The exhibitors there were in no way representative of the food industry in Otago. In fact, were I not aware of all the excellent restaurants in Dunedin, my impression would have been that Otago hasn't a food industry of any sort.

I certainly won't waste my money on this event in the future. I should have used the money to take my mother to Plato or Bell Pepper Blues for lunch.

Japanese cover art for KD2

Both IGN and Gamespot have previewed the game, and it certainly sounds promising. The biggest changes appear to be that the camera, which had a tendency to embed itself in geometry in the original, has been improved, and the addition of a new co-operative play mode.

Having had a look around the official japanese site for the game, I found some new wallpaper, and strangely, some sort of origami giraffe which supposedly should be used with a keyring. In terms of what is actually going on in these images, well, your guess is as good as mine. I've stopped trying to understand the Japanese.

Namco have a suitably confounding gameplay video that's well worthy watching on their site. The soundtrack for the game has been release as well, and can be purchased online.

My fingers, and toes, remain crossed for a PAL release - don't let us down Namco!

Despite Alan Moore publicly condemning this film, and completely disassociating himself from it, I'm still looking forward to seeing it. I sincerely doubt however, given the current political climate and recent events in London, that V will be portrayed correctly as the amoral anarchist that he is. Rich Johnston, having read the script, confirms this in his column unfortunately.

V for Vendetta is particularly relevant today as the western world slowly watches the erosion of its civil liberties in response to the war on terror. Sadly, I suspect everything that makes V for Vendetta a great graphic novel will be diluted by the Hollywood machine. Recalling that fox chief Bill Mechanic lost his job over Fight Club, it's hard to imagine Hollywood backing anything too challenging.

Electronic music, particularly trance, often suffers from being too genre bound. Shpongle however, since their 1998 debut Are You Shpongled?, have consistently challenged musical convention, schizophrenically blending elements of dub, breaks, psytrance, jazz, and world music to excellent effect. Nothing is Lost is no exception, and marks the full maturation of this fusion sound.

The album is one flowing piece which the producers say should be considered a sort of aural dream sequence. There's a lot more consistency between tracks on Nothing than earlier efforts, and themes from earlier tracks drift in and out giving you some reference points in the otherwise bewildering soupy soundscape.

Once again, Posford has chosen to introduce a number of vocal elements. While these occasionally grated on Tales of the Inexpressible, they work marvellously here. The Dead Can Dance like, Invocation, provides a nice contrast to the following techno oriented Molecular Superstructure, and the sung dialogue at the end of Periscopes of Consciousness between man and what is presumably a hyperdimensional creature is gorgeous.

Posford's composition is wonderfully baroque, building layer upon layer of chaotic blips, pads, samples, gulps, and arpeggios. The tracks have an astounding density, and it is a testament to his production skill that the music still remains punchy and clean. The instrumentation is varied, and the juxtaposition of the vocals and acoustics with the crunchier electronic elements gives the album an organic quality that most electronic music never approaches.

Nothing Lasts is available from Twisted Records. Friends of self dribbling bejeweled machine elves, and really anyone that loves electronic music should not be without it.

As they say, put that in your pipe and smoke it.

While we aren't likely to be jacking in any time soon, I'll keep my Fuchi corporation CDT-1000 cyberdeck on standby.

Playstation 4? :)

Pacman was released to the world 25 years ago to this day, and marked a significant milestone in the development of video games.

Despite having some flaws, which would later be addressed in the sequel Ms. Pacman, Pacman was a large evolutionary leap from its predecessors Space Invaders and Pong.

From a CNN article covering the anniversary:

"Pac Man changed the psychological profile of the average person," explains Twin Galaxies' Walter Day.

"Suddenly old and young, male and female, doctors, dentists, lawyers and housewives found it acceptable to be playing a video game. And Pac Man opened that door for them. Despite the fact that it was technologically advanced, it was as simple as playing a card game for them."

Here are a few things to check out:

and of course the obligatory quote:

"Computer games don't affect kids, I mean if Pac Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive music."
-- Marcus Brigstocke

I've extended Richard's script to support a cascading load of multiple images, which suited my purposes better. Hopefully someone out there finds this useful. Thanks for the help with this Ryan! You can also replace the window.setTimeout with window.setInterval for a somewhat interesting/amusing/useless stuttery effect.

Update: Nick provided a nice update to the code which removed the necessity to specify the number of images in the array. Thanks!

"...we believe that spot WTI crude oil prices will remain over $50 per barrel, despite the bearish signal of the super contango," ...

"Going forward, we expect global oil demand growth to decelerate modestly in line with a slowing global economy, but higher long-dated prices and infrastructure bottlenecks will likely combine to support spot crude oil prices"

If you watch the market regularly, as I have started to in a somewhat ghoulish manner, it becomes difficult to put current prices in perspective. Most sites seem to carry short term charts (typically monthly and daily), which I suppose suit investors, but don't give you much of a sense of our current situation. I managed to find the following chart on Oilnergy (does anyone else find that domain name amusing?)

Scoop are running a press release from Co-leader of the Maori Party, Tariana Turia, acknowledging the Maori Party's commitment to peak oil issues and giving an overview of their policy.

No revelations here, but it's good to see a party other than the Greens taking an active interest in preparing for the coming energy crisis. Hopefully this will stimulate more debate in parliament.

Labour, despite recognising the need to make immediate changes, have been far too quiet. I suspect they aren't willing to broach the subject this close to an election, fearing that it will hurt them at the polls... which is cowardly, and sadly, not surprising.

Viva Zapata!

Fortunately my family have all become very fond of Mexican food, and the kids don't even complain much about grinding up rice in the morter and pestle for horchata. My wife, being the excellent cook that she is, makes the best damned flan I've had anywhere (sorry Mom, yours is a very close second, and you've got a bit of an edge with your pecan pie).

Naturally, we were very excited to discover that a new Mexican restaurant, Viva Zapata, had recently opened and we rushed there for lunch today.

The decor was bright, cheerful, and appropriately Mexican with Diego Rivera prints and arts & crafts nicknacks on the walls. We were the only customers for lunch, which suits me fine, but our waitress did mention that it gets livelier in the evenings.

The menu was a little disappointing, with fairly predictable offerings and a lot of what I would consider snack foods (quesadillas, tacos) available as mains. I ordered the chicken mole which appeared to be the only plato fuerta, and my wife had the chicken enchiladas.

We started the meal with a bowl of tortilla chips, guacamole, bean dip, and red salsa. The chips were excellent - I haven't had real tortilla chips since moving to New Zealand and it was a treat. The dips were all fine, but a little uninspired. The salsa was fresh, but very mild and lacking character. In fact, mildness seemed to characterise the whole meal unfortunately. I would like to have been able to specify the amount of chilli in my meal. I'll post my favourite salsa recipe later - orange, tomatillio, and habanero salsa.. it's a blinder.

Our meals arrived shortly after, accompanied by kidney beans and red rice. A typical mole is stew like, and tends to have a somewhat viscous soupy quality, but mine was a bit dry and pasty. It was tasty despite this, and my wife's enchilada in adobo sauce was good too. We were both a bit disappointed that the enchiladas were made with flour tortillas; they really are better with corn.

All in all, we had a great time at Viva Zapata. The staff were friendly, and the meals were large and reasonably priced. We'll certainly return, and it would be a good place to take children for lunch. There's a lot of room for improvement however, and I'd like to see a bit more variation and creativity in their menu. Well done Viva Zapata for bringing my favourite cuisine to wee Dun'edin.

If you played and enjoyed Final Fantasy VI, chances are that you will find this animation very amusing.

The site is in Japanese, but there's an English version of the animation available. Thanks to Tim Nixon at Straylight Studios for pointing me towards this.

Beveling this edge to create a chamfer with the Maya bevel tool would mangle this geometry.

Instead, we'll use the Omtoolbox Split Around Edge tool.

Unfortunately this technique requires a bit of cleanup, and you'll need to select your old internal edges.

Make sure you select those bottom edges too.
Now delete the edges using Edit Polygons | Delete Edge (hitting delete will leave verticies behind).

Yay! A nice clean beveled edgeloop :)

To adjust the offset, tweak the Slide parameter in the SplitAroundEdges node attribute editor.

If anyone has any suggestions for streamlining this rather nasty process (other than using a sensible program like Silo or Wings), please leave a comment! :)

McShane's argument is essentially that the market will provide, and technological solutions will avert any difficulty dwindling supplies may create. There are a number of flaws in his argument that I would like to address.

Oil companies have never stopped investing in exploration which has been in steady decline since 1962 (see chart). We are very good at finding oil now using 3d seismic imaging techniques. No amount of technological improvement or further investment of funds is going to create more oil.

Oil Discovery: (3 Year Average, Past and Projected)

"World population collapse is just around the corner - let’s say 2050. This coupling of population decline with increased efficiency will compensate for increases in energy use."

The IEA predicts that global peak production will occur around 2030. It should be noted that this is an optimistic forecast, and a number of well respected geologists suggest that the peak will come between 2005 and 2012. Given both the best and worse case scenario, a theoretical population decline around 2050 seems irrelevant.

Once we have reached peak oil, production will drop by 3-6% per year, every year. Mr. McShane should be reminded that it only took a 5% drop in supply to cause the 1970s oil crisis. The situation in the 70s was the result of an artificial shortage. The permanent price increases and inevitable shortages to come unfortunately are out of our hands and are the result of resource constraints, not politics.

"Oil is only one source of energy. If it gets truly expensive, the future will still be awash with energy because so many new sources are waiting in the wings for oil to get more expensive. New energy sources are all around us."

I would be very interested to know what those alternative sources of energy are, because as it stands at the moment, nothing has the EROEI of oil. We have no alternative technology capable of replacing oil. Hydrogen, bio-diesel, ethanol are all net-losers, requiring a greater initial input of energy than they return.

It should also be considered that none of these technologies are truly independent of oil. It takes large amounts of oil and other scarce resources to locate, mine and transport the raw materials necessary to build solar panels, windmills, and nuclear power plants. Furthermore, if peak oil is imminent, we do not have the infrastructure to support an alternative fuel, and it could take decades to establish one.

"The Alberta oil sands contain the equivalent of 1.6 trillion barrels of oil, more than all of the world oil reserves combined. A higher price will turn this resource into a reserve."

The EROEI for oil is 30 to 1, whereas oil sands are around 1.5 to 1.

Furthermore, oil sands are projected to only produce 2.2 million barrels per day by 2015. We currently need 83.5 million barrels per day, and are projected to need 120 million barrels per day by 2020.

Your utopian vision of the future sounds lovely Mr. McShane, and I would so like to visit. The reality of the situation is considerably bleaker, and we and doing practically nothing to address it.

The Saudis are of course denying this.