"This looks interesting....." said the Wizard

Well its been a cracker day here in the shattered remains of Christchurch. Warm North-westerly breezes, sunny, very nice.
I had a loooong night last night, teaching myself to get around in Audiotool on the laptop and getting the first couple of tracks started. Quite a learning curve but fortunately I'm familiar with most of the conventions used in DSP (Digital Sound Processing) software and this helped me to make some good progress.
Finally got to bed about 09:00am then slept for about 5 hours before going out to watch our young friend Geena play hockey. We enjoyed a couple of nice cold beers with Geena's Dad Roger at his workplace over looking a golf course. A nice place to work, you wouldn't want to go home at the end of the day.
Unexpected guests this evening, an influx of girl power which had me running off to hide in the study until I was enlisted as official story reading person. Great fun, its been a while since I read out loud with a warm sleepy child on my lap. The young ladies are all asleep in bed now and Witchy and I are sleeping in the office for the night as our beds have been allocated to M, K, M and S. Its a nice feeling being able to help out friends in need.

Alpine Valley, Inha Sosul Mountains, Inthandonia

Here's another image of mine - this one is not a photo but is one of my recent efforts using some new software - well, new to me anyway.
The terrain, which defines the shape of the land, was created in the free version of World machine and textured and populated with trees and clouds and so forth in the landscape rendering software Vue. The end result has been run through some filters and effects in Picasa and resized in Irfanview (for anyone interested in technical stuff!).


This is an example of the 3d computer art that I've been making for the past 10 or so years. I'll be using a different version of this in a future instalment of "The Chronicles of Inthandonia: The Wizard Wars".

Historical Footnote

Snow on the Avon, Winter 2003.

Any visitors to our website at www.wizitch.com will soon discover that things have not been updated there for several years - although its definitely on the To Do list! As many of my intentions for the old website did not transpire I'm planing on adding photos and story snippets from the History Of Wizitch in this blog. The idea is to provide some sort of record of things that have happened over the course of this millennium.

With that in mind here is a photograph from my collection of pictures of the Avon Otakaro River here in Christchurch. This was taken the first time I saw snow on the ground in Christchurch since I moved here at the end of the last century. Witchy and I had been living together for some time and our house (off to the left of this picture) was right across the road from the river. We spent five and a half years at this address (there will be more photos to come in future) and many happy memories were shared there. Sadly the house was severely damaged, as was this lovely riverside area in the big Quakes of 2010 and 2011. We hope that eventually this area will be reserved as a park but at the time of writing there is still much uncertainty over what will happen here.