The wedding day! (20th September)
First off, my birthday was the day before Colin and Claudia's wedding. My parents and my sister Josje and her husband Jeroen were all invited to the wedding also, and had booked a motel thingee just across the dutch border of where the wedding was being held. This was a pretty unique occasion for the whole of my family to be together for anything, let alone my birthday, since Josje and Mum live in Steenbergen, and Dad and I live in New Zealand.
(let me just add that I am writing this from New Zealand, where I am relaxing with my feet up on my lazy boy armchair, with my new university laptop plugged into the TV, with wireless keyboard and mouse. Technology at its finest)
Colin was also with us for my birthday, which made it extra cool. We celebrated with Jagermeister, and drawing up big cards for the wedding, which I will explain shortly.
I like wearing suits. Therefore, I like all occasions that require me to wear a suit. I felt I looked quite dashing with my lime green shirt and light blue tie, and black with blue pinstripe suit (hmmm, it actually sounds hideous, but I assure you, my Mum said I looked great!).
I’m not sure about all continental European countries, but it’s true of at least Holland and Germany, marriages don’t have best men or bridesmaids. Instead they have designated people as ‘Witnesses’, whose job it is to sign their name on the official marriage documents. I was Colin’s witness. The ceremony was quite different from what we have in NZ, be it a church or a garden location – in Germany it was all done in a room that felt like a conference centre inside the town hall. I can testify, that as far as I know, Colin and Claudia did indeed get married, and I can only assume many kind words were spoken by the state official guy. I can’t really be sure, because everything was in German that I couldn’t understand. I dutifully signed on the dotted line when I was asked – and I hope that I haven’t inadvertently signed away my liver or kidneys.
The wedding party then moved to Claudia’s parents’ house where the reception was being held. The weather for the day was turning out absolutely perfect – lots of sunshine, hardly any wind, but not too hot. We were being served lunch and later on, dinner, in a big tent set up in the back yard, and Claire and I had the privilege of sitting at the top table with Colin and Claudia, their parents, and the other witness (also called Claudia) and her partner.
One feature of the reception that I thought was particularly cool was a canvas that had been set up with a grid of rectangles on it. These cool watercolour pencil/painting things were provided for the guests to draw little things in the rectangles, kind of like a guest book of small paintings.
During dinner there were many speeches from pretty much all of the important people. I was semi prepared, having some thoughts stored away in my memory, but nowhere near as prepared as everyone else. Claudia gave a powerpoint presentation of their romance, with lots of photos from their time in Brisbane, and then more recently in Heitel with Sophia (their daughter, for those not in the know) (I should also mention that this is the same Colin, Claudia and Sophia we have a link to on the right hand side of our blog).
After much discussion and stress about what languages the speeches should be in (English, Dutch and German were all represented), Colin had a solution. While he was presenting his speech in English, Claire and I were standing either side of him with huge pages of subtitles in Dutch and German. Colin is well known over there for his rugged understanding of the German language, so it was quite comical. Big thanks to Josje, Jeroen and Mum for the dutch translation and their tidy handwriting.
Each of Colin’s and Claudia’s mothers gave powerpoint presentations about their children growing up, etc. Many cute baby photos were shown, and it was particularly interesting drawing parallels between some of Colin and Claudia’s baby moments and those of Sophia.
I was pretty much last to say anything, and while it was brief, it was heart felt enough to get Claire in tears, but that’s hardly an achievement. =P
All in all, an excellent day. Well worth a trip around the world.
Congratulations Colin and Claudia!
Showing posts with label travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label travel. Show all posts
4 October 2008
31 July 2008
My Research
Hello.
I haven't blogged in a while. Ages really. I check it every day for whimsical comments - but most days I am disappointed. My actual reason is for the handy links on our page to all the we comics I like to read.
I occassionally get people asking me what it is that I'm working on for my PhD. Even Claire still seems unsure. I recently wrote a paper for a conference in Taiwan, which was good for me because it forced me to make sure that I understand my stuff so well that I can explain it to other people. I still haven't heard from the organisers of that conference yet - I hope they don't leave to late because it will make it hard to organise my flights.
Speaking of organising flights - I had a trip to Melbourne recently for a Machine Vision training. My flights were really quite expensive for that one since I wasn't confirmed to be attending it until 2 weeks before it started. It didn't really matter to me though, since scholarship was paying for it. Basically the training was all about how to set up a machine vision application: with lighting, and cameras connecting directly to PCs running special software. It was more targeted at production line quality control kind of stuff, so it wasn't all relevant to me. Especially the software, which I will never ever used, yet it occupied half of the training.
After the training I had allowed myself most of a day of free time for sightseeing. I have to say, I didn't really enjoy it. Sure, Melbourne is pretty cool, and the free cable car going around the city centre is useful, but doing it by myself was just kind of lame. I didn't have any plan for what I wanted to see, so kind of just wandered round fairly aimlessly. In fact, highest on my thoughts was "where can I find a nice place for lunch, and then keep the receipt to claim the cost back with my scholarship". I settled on a pretty average pasta place - and forgot to ask for the receipt! The other day there was someone on TV in Melbourne city centre - I think it was Hughesy (Huuuuughesy!) from Rove - and it did feel kind of cool that I recognised where he was.
Lately I've been working with Dale (my superviser) to put together a list of things we need to buy to build our own ranged imaging system down here at Victoria Uni. Did I even mention that that's what my research is in - full-field ranged imaging. The basic components are a camera - usually a very special one that can shutter super fast; a light source - in our case red and infra red laser diodes; and control hardware for creating the timing signals between them, and other general control stuff. My task has been to source the camera, camera lenses, and lens filters (for blocking colours of light that we aren't interested in).
What basically happens is that we light up the scene with our laser diodes, and the light bounces back and into the camera. With a lot of cleverness and details that I am omitting here for simplicity, we can measure the time it takes the light to travel from our light source to the object and back again. Since light travels at a constant speed, finding the distance is just a matter of d = vt. What's more, we do this for every pixel of the camera. So rather than having an image where the data is representing the colour of the pixel, we now have pixels that give us the distance to the object in that pixel. It's pretty fun stuff. Once we have our system set up here at Victoria I invite everyone to have a look - and we can take a 3D photo of you :)
I'll leave you now with a video I made a few months back of me playing around in front of the prototype system we have running at Waikato University. The colours represent depth by the way - I'm not normally quite that psychedelic.
I haven't blogged in a while. Ages really. I check it every day for whimsical comments - but most days I am disappointed. My actual reason is for the handy links on our page to all the we comics I like to read.
I occassionally get people asking me what it is that I'm working on for my PhD. Even Claire still seems unsure. I recently wrote a paper for a conference in Taiwan, which was good for me because it forced me to make sure that I understand my stuff so well that I can explain it to other people. I still haven't heard from the organisers of that conference yet - I hope they don't leave to late because it will make it hard to organise my flights.
Speaking of organising flights - I had a trip to Melbourne recently for a Machine Vision training. My flights were really quite expensive for that one since I wasn't confirmed to be attending it until 2 weeks before it started. It didn't really matter to me though, since scholarship was paying for it. Basically the training was all about how to set up a machine vision application: with lighting, and cameras connecting directly to PCs running special software. It was more targeted at production line quality control kind of stuff, so it wasn't all relevant to me. Especially the software, which I will never ever used, yet it occupied half of the training.
After the training I had allowed myself most of a day of free time for sightseeing. I have to say, I didn't really enjoy it. Sure, Melbourne is pretty cool, and the free cable car going around the city centre is useful, but doing it by myself was just kind of lame. I didn't have any plan for what I wanted to see, so kind of just wandered round fairly aimlessly. In fact, highest on my thoughts was "where can I find a nice place for lunch, and then keep the receipt to claim the cost back with my scholarship". I settled on a pretty average pasta place - and forgot to ask for the receipt! The other day there was someone on TV in Melbourne city centre - I think it was Hughesy (Huuuuughesy!) from Rove - and it did feel kind of cool that I recognised where he was.
Lately I've been working with Dale (my superviser) to put together a list of things we need to buy to build our own ranged imaging system down here at Victoria Uni. Did I even mention that that's what my research is in - full-field ranged imaging. The basic components are a camera - usually a very special one that can shutter super fast; a light source - in our case red and infra red laser diodes; and control hardware for creating the timing signals between them, and other general control stuff. My task has been to source the camera, camera lenses, and lens filters (for blocking colours of light that we aren't interested in).
What basically happens is that we light up the scene with our laser diodes, and the light bounces back and into the camera. With a lot of cleverness and details that I am omitting here for simplicity, we can measure the time it takes the light to travel from our light source to the object and back again. Since light travels at a constant speed, finding the distance is just a matter of d = vt. What's more, we do this for every pixel of the camera. So rather than having an image where the data is representing the colour of the pixel, we now have pixels that give us the distance to the object in that pixel. It's pretty fun stuff. Once we have our system set up here at Victoria I invite everyone to have a look - and we can take a 3D photo of you :)
I'll leave you now with a video I made a few months back of me playing around in front of the prototype system we have running at Waikato University. The colours represent depth by the way - I'm not normally quite that psychedelic.
26 June 2007
Everywhere you go...
Always take the weather with you!
Unless you are going from miserably cold Wellington to normally sunny Brisbane. I'm blogging from Colin's laptop at the moment, and don't have long since we need to catch a ferry to go out for dinner soon. I just thought I'd mention my semi-miserable day.
After my 10km run on Sunday I think my immune system packed up and left, so I picked up a hideous head cold. Flying with a head cold is no fun at all, and then it ended up taking 30 minutes longer than it needed to because of bad weather at Brisbane airport. The flight was bumpy 90% of the time, and the seatbelt signs were on too. Normally not a problem, but my miserable self wanted cups of water to make my head feel better, and I wasn't allowed to go to the toilet. Grr!
Then customs etc. at Brisbane took about an hour, which isn't too extreme, but my patience meter was very low. And it's been raining outside all day.
It's not all bad though. It's good to see Colin again (my best man), and after my nap this morning we visited the Modern Art Gallery which was pretty interesting.
Tonight we're going to the Breakfast Creek Hotel for dinner, which is supposed to be top rate. Tomorrow we're hiring a car and will keep driving north till the weather improves. I'll keep you posted.
Unless you are going from miserably cold Wellington to normally sunny Brisbane. I'm blogging from Colin's laptop at the moment, and don't have long since we need to catch a ferry to go out for dinner soon. I just thought I'd mention my semi-miserable day.
After my 10km run on Sunday I think my immune system packed up and left, so I picked up a hideous head cold. Flying with a head cold is no fun at all, and then it ended up taking 30 minutes longer than it needed to because of bad weather at Brisbane airport. The flight was bumpy 90% of the time, and the seatbelt signs were on too. Normally not a problem, but my miserable self wanted cups of water to make my head feel better, and I wasn't allowed to go to the toilet. Grr!
Then customs etc. at Brisbane took about an hour, which isn't too extreme, but my patience meter was very low. And it's been raining outside all day.
It's not all bad though. It's good to see Colin again (my best man), and after my nap this morning we visited the Modern Art Gallery which was pretty interesting.
Tonight we're going to the Breakfast Creek Hotel for dinner, which is supposed to be top rate. Tomorrow we're hiring a car and will keep driving north till the weather improves. I'll keep you posted.
16 April 2007
Cruisin' baby yeah!
We love comments on our blog. If you're reading our blog for the first time, please make a comment. This first bit is in response to Anna Bananna allegedly not knowing what Balderdash is.
Last week we picked up three new board games, two of which were just newer versions of ones we already have: Monopoly "Here and Now" edition, and a travel version of Scrabble. The other was Balderdash, where you're given some sort of strange word, acronym, or whatever and try to guess what it is. But that's not the fun part, because 99% of the time noones gets even close to the right answer. The aim of the game is to come up with something that sounds just crazy enough to be true, and fool the other players into believing it. Much hilarity ensues. Of course, we were introduced to the game by none other than Anna Bananna herself.
The new monopoly is great fun, especially if you're the banker. They've done away with paper money, instead there is this "banking unit" that keeps track of everyones cash, and everyone hangs onto their own debit card. Tres cool. I especially like the beeping sounds as money gets moved, even with an extra dramatically long series of beeps if your account gets cleaned out.
<rant>So, dealing with a travel agent is kinda frustrating. We got some good ideas off them on Thursday about taking a cruise, but the prices they're quoting us are just whack. I mean, sure I expect them to take a commission, but charging us an extra $800 per person compared to the prices I've found on the internet is a bit much for me. Perhaps if they were a bit more up-front about what they are charging us, rather than pretending they're giving us a good deal I might be more willing to stick with them. At this stage I want to use them as little as possible, if only just to make use of their bridal registry service. </rant>
The agent was very helpful though, and I almost feel bad that I went to the extra effort of finding things out online. Is there still a place for the travel agent these days?
Last week we picked up three new board games, two of which were just newer versions of ones we already have: Monopoly "Here and Now" edition, and a travel version of Scrabble. The other was Balderdash, where you're given some sort of strange word, acronym, or whatever and try to guess what it is. But that's not the fun part, because 99% of the time noones gets even close to the right answer. The aim of the game is to come up with something that sounds just crazy enough to be true, and fool the other players into believing it. Much hilarity ensues. Of course, we were introduced to the game by none other than Anna Bananna herself.
The new monopoly is great fun, especially if you're the banker. They've done away with paper money, instead there is this "banking unit" that keeps track of everyones cash, and everyone hangs onto their own debit card. Tres cool. I especially like the beeping sounds as money gets moved, even with an extra dramatically long series of beeps if your account gets cleaned out.
<rant>So, dealing with a travel agent is kinda frustrating. We got some good ideas off them on Thursday about taking a cruise, but the prices they're quoting us are just whack. I mean, sure I expect them to take a commission, but charging us an extra $800 per person compared to the prices I've found on the internet is a bit much for me. Perhaps if they were a bit more up-front about what they are charging us, rather than pretending they're giving us a good deal I might be more willing to stick with them. At this stage I want to use them as little as possible, if only just to make use of their bridal registry service. </rant>
The agent was very helpful though, and I almost feel bad that I went to the extra effort of finding things out online. Is there still a place for the travel agent these days?
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