Wildfires in Australia

So if you haven’t heard about the massive wild fires across southern Australian you’ve probably been walking around with your head up your ass. Also, you might not know that I was in Australia 2 months and 10 days ago.
A quick recap for those with head-in-ass-syndrome: I studied in Melbourne for 5 months. These wild fires have been all across the state of Victoria. Mainly to the east and north of Melbourne. So I really had never been to any of the places which are being devastated by the fire.
That is until today when I read that Wilsons prom is also on fire. See this post for Wilson’s prom from my overseas blog. I happened to spend a weekend in this natural park, the most southern point on the Australian continent. A lightning strike set a fire Monday, and is (was) now burning down a steep valley 11 km from tidal river and 2km away from sealers cove. Which, by my estimations, is about the place where this picture was taken:While this fire is just being left to burn itself out (due to the high amount of fuel and inaccessibility (a 8km walk, and only walking track)), its weird to think a place I was at on the 26th of October at 1:20pm has been radically changed.

Wilson’s prom has other signs of wildfire damage, like the beginning of the walk up to Mount Oberon. But then again fire has always been an issue for Australia. In fact, certain Australian trees and plants only survive because of fire which allows their seeds to be dispersed and burnt open.

Back to Ba6 – Mercury Studios v6

I’m back for my excursion in Australia (read the blog, visit the site) and while ignoring my duties to finish updating the mini site I’ve been working on another new version of Mercury Studios (version 6 as far as I can count if you start from the very beginning). Yes, in what seems to becoming a yearly tradition the sixth version of Mercury Studios comes 5 years after the beginning of my life as a web and flash developer, 1 years and 3 months after the conception of Mercury Studios (what I call v4), and 1 year after Mercury Studios V5. With Version 6, I went widescreen and simplified the whole layout, giving each element its space. From what stats I caught from viewers, the majority of users had screens equal to or wider that 1024. I took advantage of this space and expanded my pages (as many others have done in recent months). Ill also be changing the way content is viewed. The news page is gone, with bloHG now taking center stage as the news and blog section. Flash was renamed to animation because, after all, interactive is also flash. Advertisements have also been incorporated in the pages other than the home page. That’s the bulk of the changes for this update, and you can see it right now on the homepage only. The other pages will follow for the beginning of 2009. If you have any comments, shoot an email to david@mercury-studios.com.
Also I was thinking of entering the Newgrounds Winter Flash-Off, but ill have to see what time this redesign takes and if I get any good ideas as well as completing my Australia Mini-site.