Several updates in one

A couple of weeks ago I went to see HDU in concert. I'd never heard of them before I bought the tickets but I was in an experimental mood. My opinion of them now: their instrumental work is amazing but their vocals are awful. I'm not saying they have no talent... If I had a whole lot of just their backing music I could listen to it all day but I spent a fair bit of the concert wishing the singer would shut his mouth.
The girl that opened for them was a lot better. If I knew who she was I'd buy her CD.
I've been spending some of my spare time learning Vala. It's a very easy language to get your head around but at this stage it's linux only and the closest any IDE comes to supporting it is letting me switch to c# style code highlighting. In fact, it seems to implement all the fancy features I liked about c# but without the need for a VM: vala files are used to generate c files, automagically implementing all the object-oriented things like class polymorphism, memory management, and all kinds of other things that normally distract c programmers from what their code is actually doing.
On the topic of programming: that's all I did at work last week. Earlier this year I wrote something in Java to automatically package games for Telecom. (Java being the language everyone else in the office knew, not necessarily the best for technical reasons but it does the job). I've been adding a whole lot more error checking and made it generate a quick summary when it's finished everything.
Today I bought a new digital camera. It's a Fujifilm A900. Funnily enough I often use a Samsung A900 at work and that's something completely different. The Fujifilm one takes pictures at 9 megapixels and unlike my previous camera it doesn't have a broken screen. I also got a protective case.
Next weekend I'm going to see my parents and sister. My sister has requested that Ubuntu Linux be installed on her laptop (hearing her reasons I don't think she wants me to leave any traces of XP) and my parents don't have the installation CD.
The weekend following I expect to get a yellow belt in seido juku karate.

Food prices going up: food quality going down

Last night I went to a green party public meeting at the Southern Cross Restaurant & Bar function room. I was greeted by an old friend from college who works there and was glad to be able to listen in while working.
The main talk was by Sue Kedgley. She outlined how and why food is becoming more expensive around the world, and why. "Free trade" as endorsed by the IMF and world bank has a lot to do with it. Countries are no longer producing enough food on their own and are instead focusing on cash crops for export. This means not only reduced overall supply but increased cost of delivery as food which could be produced domestically is instead produced in distant parts of the world and transported using ever more expensive fossil fuels.
New Zealand, although not starving, is also following this pattern with our mass conversion of wheat, sheep, and vegetable farmland into dairy farms. Unfortunately conventional methods of dairy farming are very wasteful but that's a whole lot of detail I won't go into today.
Fortunately, we don't need to be in positions of power to make a difference in all this. We can buy from farmers' markets rather than supermarkets (I need to find out where the nearest one of those to my house is). There are also community gardens, and most people are able to grow vegetables where they live.
All in all, it was a very interesting evening. Unfortunately no-one stayed very long afterwards so I didn't get much chance to get to know anyone but I did have a nice conversation with Sue Kedgley about joining the green party.

Push-ups

With the day before yesterday being the first Wednesday of the month, I went to the once-a-month open class at karate where most of the people there have black belts and we learn interesting stuff that on one hand isn't too hard but on the other hand isn't actually in the 7th kyu syllabus.
This time around we started off with 25 push-ups. Then later we did taikyoku sono ichi kata with a varying number of push-ups after each move: one after the first, two, after the second, up to four, then four again, back down to one, then one again, etc. A total of 40 push-ups for the exercise which makes a total of 65.
Now, after an interval of nearly two days: my triceps are still really stiff! So: does this mean that I shouldn't have done 65 push-ups?, or does it mean I should be doing 65 push-ups every day so when I have to do that many in karate it doesn't cause so much inconvenience!? I think I'll go for the latter! It would be good for my fitness.

Grandma's birthday

Yesterday my grandmother turned 101. She celebrated not only on the day in conjunction with Tongan White Sunday but the day before with a party at my parents' house.
I took many photos on the Saturday party, which was fortunately much smaller than last year's one as the weather was unpleasant and everyone stayed inside for the most part. Unfortunately I was using my parents' camera so I won't be posting any of the photos until I get copies. (I did use my own camera to photograph the injured swamp harrier which my parents are looking after and will post him tonight).
My sister and I visited Grandma's church on her actual birthday and there was a great feast afterwards. I hope I get such a big cake when I turn 101! My sister went home shortly afterwards but I stayed the afternoon at Grandma's place and we had a lot of visitors, some of whom were people I hadn't seen for a long time and was glad to catch up with, and of course Grandma was glad to see everyone.