Saorrento

Isn’t this what blogging is all about? At the end of the day what do social network sites, blogs and YouTube video posts bring to us? If ’self worth’ isn’t at the very top of your list than you are only kidding yourself. There should be no denial in admitting it. After all, for you bloggers, that is the number one drive in posting a article in the first place.. and for the social net workers out there; the behavioral pattern associated with you logging in 5 times in the space of an hour to see who commented on your photos or status, if that is not a pursuit of self worth than I don’t know what is.

Now I am not saying that is a bad thing, it is ’somewhat’ important for you to care about what other people think of you - but also important enough that when the going gets tough that you value you yourself high enough to carry yourself through the lows. Perhaps in someway the introduction of the Internet especially for GenY has also created a new outlet of vanity, and the desire to be noticed?

With all that said, it is time for me to boast about my own happiness and creative spurts of late, the creations I value that attribute to my own self worth.

The first of which, is an idea that has taken me by storm - the development of a touch-screen navigated home automation system. The initial intention being, a tablet that easily allows you to control music that is played through various areas of the house, with each applicable room having ceiling mounted speakers.

You simply touch the room in the house you want to toggle, select from a playlist or album and play the music. Further music navigation allows you to select tracks, adjust the volume and control music in multiple rooms from one device.

The original scope of this project has then continued to expand; most recently I have added a local 4 day weather forecast service to the application, and have further intentions to Sync Microsoft Outlook Calendar events to it for alarms and warnings.

The application is intended to be very Microsoft friendly; the play lists that the application uses and creates are compliant with Windows Media Player 12.

This is the initial display screen, simply choose a quadrant of the house to toggle music settings. In addition the current time and weather report is given. Clicking on the weather will display the four day forecast. Clicking on the time will display a calendar/organiser displaying events.

Close up preview of the Four Day Weather Forecast using XML data provided by the Bureau of Meteorology of Australia (www.bom.gov.au)

The playlists and albums contain the MP3 Info Tag data, including Album covers for convenience.

Overall the challenges with this application have been making the interaction compatible with touch devices. In the instance of the scroll bar arrows, mouse down events were required for response to a finger being pressed and held on the touch screen. In addition the overall display had to be colorful and pleasing to the eye; the MP3 Album Cover artwork has been utilized for the carousel of albums to achieve this.

The project is still under development, with the Calendar organizer yet to be implemented along with the deployment method of playing sound to various rooms from one device which prompts the yet unanswered question of, can I use a single PC with multiple sound cards to achieve the result or should I look into WCF extensions and communicate directly with individual computer nodes in each zone, or are Windows 7 stereo devices a alternative? We shall see…

That’s enough of the geek for a moment, and on a completely unrelated topic, my girlfriend’s birthday was last Friday, and this of course meant that after last years successful Garfield and Odie cake, I felt somewhat compelled to create Michelle a birthday cake for this year too. With this in mind and wanting to challenge myself with new boundaries pushed I decided upon creating a 3D cake.

Similar to last year’s birthday cake, this years was also preceded by a test case ‘Bob-omb‘ from the Nintendo gaming universe. I declared the cake itself an epic fail, but learnt enough that I was confident to do the birthday cake justice. And thankfully, I was right, may I present King Boo (also from the Nintendo gaming universe)

Happy Birthday Michelle! x

8 Cake mixes used in total, the cake of choice being Butter Cake, with butter frosting.

It was at this point I started to relax, the cake was coming together nicely.

I turned away from using icing pens on King Boo as opposed to the Garfield cakes last year. The reason being unless you have the steady hands of a surgeon you will not achieve the smooth result you set out for. Instead this time I created lines and shapes using thick icing. With a bowl of icing sugar, simply add a few teaspoons of water and color to suit and mix the icing together with your hands. Where necessary add in more icing sugar or water to achieve the right constancy similar to as if you were making scone dough, except instead of adding flour add icing sugar. Once the icing is holding well (it should be like playdough) roll out or mold the shapes as required on baking paper and set in either the fridge or freezer.

This is how I achieved the eyes, eyebrows, teeth and crown for King Boo.

A tip with the frosting, ensure the butter is at fridge temperature, not room, it may make it harder on the beaters at this temperature but a hell of a lot easier to apply to the cake!

The end result, crown and all at the Broken Hill Pub

If there is one thing that people should know about me is that I am very creative, and because of this I rarely say ‘no’ to a problem, I hold dear to me the philosophy that ‘anything is possible’ and that no matter the odds there must be a solution. This mentality translates across everything I do, from a professional level as a Software Engineer through to personal achievements including Cake Decorating.

I do not do ordinary cakes, the cakes I usually involve myself in push my personal creative boundaries usually more often than not on a design front. This all stemmed from shopping about for a birthday cake in 2009 with a Garfield theme. The expedition results showed that for around $90 one could get a perfectly ordinary round cake, with a Garfield plaque frosted or frost printed over the top.

This blew me away.. $90 for a stock standard circular or rectangular cake with a bit of unique design work at the top. No matter which side of the global financial crisis you sit on a butter cake packet mixture only costs $4, so surely even using half a dozen of these, and the accessories required such as icing, I wouldn’t come close to the $90 barrier, and even if I did, the design would kick-arse over a stock standard shape.. So in the infamous words of Jeremy Clarkson “How hard can it be” I got to work.

As a result, I limit myself to two cakes per year, one being the ‘experimental’ beta cake which is usually pushing on new frontiers of cake making and decorating (well for myself at least) and the second being the real deal, or in MasterChef terms; the first is the Invention Test and the second is the Elimination Test.

Well it was another weekend of experimentation in the kitchen, another half-dozen cakes baked and iced. The experimental variable in this masterpiece was developing a sphere cake, and incorporating it into a design. For this, I themed the cake on Bob-omb, a character from the Nintendo Universe.

Although the end icing result resembled that of a two year old getting hold of a bunch of crayons and failing miserably to stay within the lines, I feel that this challenge was a huge success - the learning curve was HUGE.

Again, referring to MasterChef slang, the primary pressure point for me with this ‘dish’ was creating a ’sphere cake’ using a half sphere baking tin. Having never used a semi-sphere tin before I was not sure how much mixture was required for a cake to completely fill the semi-sphere shaped tin. It was obvious that a single packet mixture would not achieve the height required, so I traded by MasterChef apron for my Big Bang Theory lab coat and began experimenting using not one, but two cake mixtures in the half sphere tin.

The big problem with this arose with cooking duration, and this was further compounded by the fact that the tin provided a large cooking surface area (being half a spheres worth) with a dense area in the middle. The problem with this being the outside cooked faster than the inside. The other problem was the cake mixture being used. Knowing that I was going to be shaping and rendering the cake afterward I naturally went for a dense cake, Chocolate Mud Cake. Combining two cake mixtures for the one tin meant the cake was going to be denser than usual and therefore affected the cooking duration.

The cake took two hours to cook through. In some respects the cake could of cooked for longer as the center was rather dense, however as it was the two hours had taken its toll with the outer shell of the cake being dry.

From this, I have concluded that no matter the desired result, use only a single cake mixture in the sphere tin. If additional height is required to produce a half-sphere layer an ordinary circle cake on top to achieve the required height.

The second pressure point with this dish, given the nature that it is a 3D cake, was obviously going to be icing it. This can be overcome by carefully choosing the icing you intend to use. The two variables with cake icing are (a) How easy is the icing to apply to the cake and (b) what is the desired result, are we going for a gloss or matte/textured finish?

Dumbing it down we have essentially two options, a water icing or a butter icing. As the names suggest, water icing is simply a mixture of icing sugar and water, where butter icing is a mixture of butter and icing sugar. Water icing is more difficult to apply and provides a glossy finish whereas butter icing is very easy to apply and results in a matte/textured finish.

Having used butter icing for the Odie cake I decided to see how well I could tame water icing on a 3D surface. The short answer.. it was bloody difficult! It is near impossible to decorate a 3D cake with water icing.. make it too thin and it will run everywhere, make it too thick and it wont spread enough and further more attempting to spread thick icing is that the icing is rather stubborn, and more often than not you will start to peel back the top layer of cake the more you force the icing to spread.

The solution: Butter Icing. As I experienced during Odie’s creation, butter icing spreads with ease, will mold into the cakes crevasses, for all purposes it is as if you were buttering bread, it just spreads so easily. The only problem comes with if you specifically wanted white icing, as butter icing will produce an off-white/light yellow color. One way to combat this, or to lessen the impact would be to dust/sift icing sugar over the top once completed.

The third lesson learned came to me when I was doing Bob-ombs eyes. Initially i had intended to make some standard white icing and try to pour it in place and go crazy with the knife trying to fight gravity long enough for the icing to set. The second thought to tackle it was to simply draw it on using an icing pen. When it came to actually doing the eyes, it occurred to me that i could just mix in water + icing sugar to the consistency of dough and roll it in my hands, and then press it onto the cake. The result was fantastic. This method can also be extended for doing eye brows, or crowns.

So, although the end result was not as precise and to quality as I would of preferred, I have managed to solve all of the short comings of Bob-omb for cake #2.

The first stone was just tried in the spirit of experimentation. The opening of the stone was far more interesting than the drawing that I had done on it.
– Andy Goldsworthy

I am not sure whether its due to the lull at work I am presently experiencing, or if this is normal behavior when I find something I am passionate about, but my creative juices are once again starting to stir.

Its been a pretty creative week already, but the climax of which wont hit until later this weekend, when I attempt another cake. Like my first Odie cake which was an experimental run for the Birthday cake that followed, this too will be experimental in nature with the birthday cake featuring a 3D circle. Should the experiment be successful, a post dedicated to its creation will surely follow.

Other than cake decorating, in an attempt to further distract myself from the work lull I have been focusing on our house. Presently, the designs have been submitted to the drafting department where we will get detailed plans drawn up. So now we are currently waiting for Pre-Start, the often fun yet stressful part of building a home where you get to choose everything from door knobs through to the final color of your render and colorbond roof. As a matter of fact, I have started on the latter; having knocked together a simple, yet very useful House Renderer using components I created for Symmetry Renderer. Having scanned in and added 100 colors for the wall rendering and a further 20 colors for the colorbond roof sheeting (the very colors we have to choose from in our building folio I might add) we can now play with various color schemes and have them rendered onto an accurate (well as accurate as a humble Software Engineer can depict with an obvious lacking Drafting Degree) portrayal of our house on our block in New Haven.

So without further delay, here is a screenshot from my House Renderer program depicting what our home will look like with just one of many color combinations

Although there is still a tonne of paper work ahead, I have to say something! Almost three months ago now, my girlfriend and I started toying with the idea of entering into the property game. We figured, why not? we’re both financially viable, it will be a great investment and perhaps a stepping stone to larger future investments and most importantly saves us pissing money up against the wall renting, or aka paying someone elses mortgage.

Since that time Michelle’s parents have been generous enough to allow me stay with them playing happy families, rather than renting whilst saving (or repaying debt) in preparation of taking out a mortgage - this has been a huge relief and I’ll forever be grateful.

So with the financing plan in play, we ventured out into the property market to get a general idea of what to expect. Sadly we very quickly realized that our expectations of the market were those of yester-year.. or more like yester-century. Prior to now, my experience in the property market came from the experiences gathered through Mum and Dad, mostly through the eyes of a teenager.. so they were already a bit skewed. From those days, I recall things going at a much more peaceful pace, first we go looking at blocks - all the blocks were well prepared and ready, we’d spend hours standing on the blocks from various perspectives seeing how a house could potentially sit. If you liked the block, you would go in and buy it. Fast forward to today, the biggest shock to both Michelle and I were that in most cases we were looking at blocks off the estate-plan, for in reality, the land had not even been cleared yet, let alone streets and fence lines been established.

There were a few estates which we fancied, but that was mainly going on the name of the estate alone and the geographic location. Bonus points were awarded to the estates that contained park land and more importantly lots large enough to fit out house. Oh, I hadn’t mentioned that had I, yes, mistake number 1, not only had we been through a few dozen or so display homes looking at houses but we had also settled for a builder and had designed the perfect house.. now all we needed was the perfect block!

The only problem with this approach, hence why it is marked as a ‘mistake’, is that we became severely limited on block type before we had even started looking, nay before we even knew what was available in the market! Instantly we were looking for land around 500 square meters in size, with 17 meters frontage. If we had wanted to build out in the country that would not of been a problem, but searching for land that size within the Perth city metro area was almost impossible, with blocks commonly coming in at 350 square meters with sometimes as little as 10 meters of frontage. With one decision we had just excluded 85% of the land currently available.

Determined that we were, we accepted the loss and pioneered forwards finally discovering three estates around the Canning Vale area that took our interest. So there we were, finance on the standby, ready to jump in… alas, there was no land for sale. Despite the estates boasting lots that were perfect for us, they were not at release stage yet, and it wasn’t til two months on, that the opportunity presented itself to buy within New Haven.

At the late hour of a Saturday afternoon, the very Saturday the photo above was taken, we met with the land owners and signed up a contract agreeing to purchase the property; we had finally begun our long road of paper-trails to build our own house!

Since that date we have progressed further still, having signed an agreement to arrange pre-start for the house design by our chosen builder we moved onto finance, and took the initial step to arrange to take out a mortgage on the lot of land.

WOOT!

I feel privileged in the fact that I have a job that I both love and loath and challenges me on a daily basis. Metaphorically, I wear so many various hats throughout the day I would warrant my own hat stand. I am a marketing designer, project manager and first and foremost a software engineer, who spends better parts of the day inventing engineering feats that often come to mind during my morning slumber through peak hour traffic each day to work. Today was no different.

If I was to sacrifice all dignety that the title Software Engineer brings by using high-level development suites such as Visual Basic than this post wouldn’t exist, and the problems that I am challenged with on a daily basis would only be momentarily trivial, solved within moments with a frolic on Google. My daily work takes me to the depths of the Windows world, the world of the Win32 API using C/C++, a world that is now shrouded by fancy Frameworks and Foundation Classes.

Where Google may provide solutions a plenty for higher level programming delemas, when it comes to Win32 API in C, even the Microsoft MSDN library becomes vague with suggestions, and the majority of reliable documentation comes from software development books published back in 1995.

This does more often than not lead to frustration, and in fact is responsible for my embrace of the C# language; the simplicity of Visual Basic, but so much more powerful and integral than its Visual counterpart. No matter how voluptuous C# may seem at times, in a Software security sense, it doesn’t stand a chance against C, which is why no matter how tough times may seem, I power on in my dimly lit world.

When things go right, it is just as Hugh Jackman portrayed in Swordfish, and no, I am not referring to the scene where a hot blonde was going down on him whilst he was attempting to hack into the Military of Defense systems, rather the adrenaline rush you experience discovering you have solved a day or two long problem, doing a little victory dance to the beat of the music playing in the background and toasting your brilliance with a glass of wine or in my case tonight, Jack Daniels.

My day ended with the epifany: It is such hard work getting fancy results from a C application… I feel like I work in the boiler room of some steam ship, covered in Microsoft legacy crap, when all the squeaky framework apps like C# sit in first class with their tea and bickie!

To which a friend queried ‘Then where does Visual Basic stand?’

A smug grin formed across my face as I replied ‘in the form of the large duplo lego bricks that toddlers play with.’

Well its now 12.49am, having just arrived home from a very long overdue boys night in consisting of pizza, beer and B-grade flicks of a particular genre; the film title ‘ Lesbian Vampire Killers’ pretty much says it all – a blokes night in just isn’t the same without hot scantily dressed vampire babes wreaking havoc in some remote English hamlet. Stumbling through the darkness as I made my way for the side gate I was distracted by the intense display of stellar phenomena above. I paused, letting out a sigh, one of both awe and disappointment; the light pollution of Perth had conditioned me. I could quite easily spend countless hours lost in thought just looking up into the night sky. Until this moment, I had forgotten how much I missed the country night sky.

While Michelle is off exploring the oriental culture of Hong Kong, I escaped the city to spend some much overdue quality time with my family, and also to get in touch with my inner child in the form of late nights of booze, tv and computer gaming.

This past week I have reconnected with my inner gaming self, having re-played through the entire Command and Conquer Red Alert 3 Campagin, mostly between the hours of 11pm and 5am. There was something so right about sitting in the theatre room with a bottle of Jacks, taking to the battlefield, obliterating Soviet and Empire of the Rising Sun forces with the leadership of the Allied Blonde-Bombshell Commander Lt Eva McKenna all splayed on 50 inches of high-definition plasma goodness.

Rather than expressing my creativity through software development, for yes, even whilst on leave I am guilty of dabbling, I instead composed and sent off for printing to AlbumWorks a photo album of my previous trip around the world, aptly titled ‘Long Way to Russia’. The ever quick Melbourne based printing group had the 50 page album completed and flown over with a week. Overall I am really impressed with the end result, and after a few grammatical corrections and one or two photo adjustments I am now ready to do a re-print. The album itself started as more of a photo expo-say of the trip, with a few sentences here and there. The further I got into the trip the sentences became paragraph exerts from my travel blog, the end result being half travel blog, half album. Although the end result is fantastic, I am now contemplating a new print with my complete travel blog. Perhaps I should then make one for Vietnam too?

I am so looking forward to Germany next year; exploration runs in my blood.