What the Tour Guide said about Vaucluse House

What follows will be a word dump of everything I remember of what the tour guide said and what I thought was interesting. This is more for my benefit than anyone else's, this is so interesting to me and I don't want to forget it. I wished I'd done something like this after I went to the Sydney Jewsish Museum in year 8 or 9.

I consulted the site of the Historical Houses Trust and Wikipedia during the writing of this to jog my memory and to get the upstairs rooms right, the upstairs area of the house is fairly twisty and confusing and I'm no good with building a mental picture of it when it's not really regular. When I quote the guide, that's from my memory, and it is fallible. The information I've got here may not be absolutely factual depending on my memory and the accuracy of what the guide told me.

Don't read this if you're not interested in the customs and houses of rich early colonial families. You have been warned.

Watson Bay, Vaucluse House, Double Bay ice cream

We had another one of those almost obligatory holiday family outing last Friday (6th July), and it's not the Fish Markets this time! Mum was really prepared this time, she had this old tourist book that the government prints, you know the ones that you get at the airport? She looked through one of those and she had been talking about all these locations for ages before this.


First stop: Watson Bay. Mum wanted to see The Gap, which is these two stone cliffs that you can go on and look out at sea. According to her convicts used to go and stand on those, and looking out at the ocean, it would really hit them that it's next to impossible to escape, so (you guessed it) they would commit suicide by jumping into the ocean. Apparently it still is a prime spot for people looking to commit suicide, because there's a couple of signs telling you there's hope and there's help, and there's a telephone booth with two buttons: one for emergency services, one for Lifeline.

It really is a beautiful place and my descriptions does it no justice at all.

Stumbled on a new radio station

I've just recently (by which I mean the day before yesterday) thought of using an Internet radio app with my iPod amplifiers to replace my actual, old and broken as anything radio. I like the smaller radio stations rather than the large commercial ones because there's literally no ads or segments other than music except the occasional reminder of the name of the station you're listening to.

Right now I'm listening to Light Digital, Melbourne's digital Christian station. Which, obviously, plays Christina themed songs. It's what I think is called religious pop or Christian pop or something, it's like regular pop songs, but they all have lyrics about Christianity. I really really like them. The melodies all fall squarely inside my most comfortable and familiar and most loved sort of music listening area (is there a word for this? they really fit my music tastes?) I like them much better than what most of the other stations are playing, I don't like rapping or really loud music with little to no melody. The music Light Digital is playing just sound really comfortable for me. Listening to radio is always hit and miss, but in the past hour I've only heard one song that I didn't care for (it got a bit too rock and roll with repetitive melody). That's pretty good for me, usually I don't really like one in three songs.

Some of the lyrics of the songs that the guys sing sounds like they're singing about relationships before you find out in the next verse that it's about Jesus. This says something about contemporary love songs with all their hyperbolic cliches like "eternal love" and everything. At least with the Christian songs they actually mean eternal love.

Trivia learnt in Chemistry tutoring

Learnt some fun trivia in Chemistry tutoring today:

People in poorer countries didn't jump on Coke as much as people in richer countries because they were taught to not drink anything that's not colourless. Coke, being brown, must have seemed a little suspicious. So they drink a lot of sprite and lemonade instead.

The Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland was a parody of people who suffered from mercury poisoning from the mercury used to soften beaver furs used to make felt hats, which made people go sort of loopy.

That's all folks, I will try to go to sleep now.

Exam was not as stressful as I thought

This is what I did with my time on the train. Very rough, it started with swirly patterns and turned into this. I love the thing on Sketchbook Express on the iPad where you can turn and resize the layer with two fingers.

This exam period wasn't as stressful as I expected, maybe because Chemistry and Physics were both pracs, and now I'm hoping I didn't jinx it. One more exam left, and three days (really only two, but) to study for it. I'll be doing all the past papers for maths extension 1. Then I'll be doing an essay and two assignments for English, fun!

Footsteps in the sand

The "I" who stares back at me from further along the road of my life, what do you see? What mistakes will I make? These footsteps in the sand you leave behind, should I fit my shoes into them, or step out a new path?

Pottermore

Things I like about Pottermore:

• The art is lovely
• Attention to detail in the art and animation is fantastic: the car wiper starts when the mouse passes over it, cat tails swing, candles blow out and light when clicked on, the sausage sizzles when clicked on. Really good. My favourite is the scene inside Hogwarts Express: the animation shows the carriage bouncing on the tracks! (but it made the fans on my laptop go crazy)

• The two layer idea is very clever. Allows for a lot more exploring and story telling, such as in the 4th chapter (I think) in the moment with flying letters where going into the second layer shows you the door nailed shut.
• The eyes in the wand selection questions is so pretty~~

• The wand selection quiz is much much better than the random ones you find on the internet and it's much better than I expected. I got Ash with Dragon core, 12 and a half inches, unyielding. I like it!
• Ditto for the Sorting Hat. Good questions and really well drawn cards. I got sorted into Ravenclaw! I'm with you Helena! I don't really get the Wizard's Duel game though *shrugs* I'll figure it out. I realised after going back and forth a few times that the questions I got were different very time I went back. I got back the question I first had after the third refresh. That's fairly impressive.

Things that annoy me about Pottermore:

• No real choice of usernames: they give you a list that you can choose from, and there wasn't even a convient refresh button that I could see. And the names sound like they came from a magic themed name generator (you know the ones where you can tell they have a list of words that fit the theme and they choose two at random and put it together? That's exactly what the Pottermore naming system looks like to me) with some ridiculously large number attached to the end. The choices are fairly ... I'll just say not as good as I had hoped (there are gems like MahoganyMidnight, UnicornWil, RoseWild etc.) Those could not have sounded more "My Immortal" style bad fanfic Mary Sue to the extreme if they tried. The lack of choice actually put me off enough that I abandoned the registration at that screen. It was only when Helena said that she'd add me that I went back and continued it and actually got an account. So it's all thanks to Helena, first for reminding me that the website existed so I went on it and encouraging me (though she hadn't realised it) to actually sign on. The option to give your friends a nickname is good because it helps me not lose track of my real life friends in that page.
• So much clicking around blindly hoping it triggers something, incredibly annoying
• Opening an account in Gringotts: how was I supposed to know that I'm supposed to dragged the key into the lock when all the controls before then was triggered solely by clicking and using the arrow keys?
• Our pet will be our avatar? Again, very limited choice, no option to upload our own avatar.
• Potions is glitchy and fairly hard to control, problems I ran into: you can not see the wand at first glance, or the second, or the third. It's a pale line that's easily mistaken with the other pale lines on the table (the porcupine spikes) and it almost completely obscured by the bags of ingredients. The mortar is hard to use, and I keep picking up the crushed ingredients instead. Turns out you have to click on the pestel (the bat shaped thing) to crush, missing and clicking on the mortar will only pick up the ingredients. The thing is, the pestel bounces, so it moves every time I click on it.
• Not a lot of interaction possible between users, no chat, only comments and games.

Looking back, the complaints I have about the lack of choice can go both ways. It's annoying to have no control, but at the same time I understand that by not letting users have so much choice they can give a far more uniform and controlled experience. I can imagine all manners of weird and may-be-inappropriate usernames (I think the original purpose of that was to keep young children anonymous? Presumably they may be young enough to think that their real names are a good idea). It will be pretty cool to see all the avatars as strictly Harry Potter themed, which I'm sure wouldn't have been the case if user uploaded avatars were allowed. In the end it comes down to young children may use this and all else falls to second place behind ensuring their online safety.

Looking at the house points, I was thinking, wouldn't the house with the most students be at an unfair advantage? From that I extrapolated to the book, wouldn't that be the same for the real Hogwarts (for a given value of "real")