Finaly!!

So in the end with about 4 hours to play with I got my dog rig and managed to cram in a quick animation. Seeing it's a set camera and the dog is small it actually looks o.k, thats because it's to hard to see the horribly bad details. For the animation I have the dog walk onto the screen, pauses then swings it's head around to look at the camera. The dog then wags it's tail comes bounding towars the camera gives it a sniff then dissapears. I actually added a bit in which the dog runs into the camera but the program crashed and I lost it and didn't have time to re do it.
After class I went to have a drink with a few of the guys, nothing like going to a licenced crepe restaurant for a pint. Still it was very cool and thoes guys are such a crack up!! Actually it was Lyns idea to go but she accidentaly got left behind and she didn't know where it was so darn it all we have to do it all again tommorow :D
Also I had indian for the first time tonight YAY!!
Well it's late now so I'm off to bed.

Uh-oh!!

So I decided to check what time my flight is on Sunday because I couldn't remember if it was at 10am or I had decided to leave at 10. Wow am I glad I checked everything because I'm not actually leaving Sunday I'm leaving on Monday!! My biggest worry was had I messed my accomodation up and I was going to be short a night but luckily I just checked and it's all fine. Some where along the line I must have got my days mixed up, I guess that happens. So that gives me anouther full day to bum around which should be nice because I was planning to cram on Saturday but now I can take my time.
Just by the way that dosn't mean I messed up my arrival time and day as well, that all still good.
Also a quick update on the animation thing it's 9am and it looks like it's going to be slow to start today, I guess I'll just go with it and see how everything pans out.

DAMN IT!!

O.K so it's 7:45pm and we won't be animating today. Frenchi crapped on for the whole rest of the day recovering rigging so nothing is finished!! So it looks like we will have less than six hours to do something, unless they extend until Friday morning. I guess it's o.k really it's not like I need this peice to pass or to get into a course. I will be suprised if we end up getting anything done actually. Oh well I still learnt heaps and it's been fun.

Back again.

O.K so I'm starting to get slightly concerned because it's almost 1:30 and we still havn't received any charcters back yet. One of the guys is texture mapping the dog at the moment I hope it works o.k because it can take up to a week to do this and he only has like a couple of hours.
I think we might be using one or two pre made characters but nobody has started using them yet. Yelle is still modling something so it won't be finished for a few hours and it still has to be rigged and mapped. I also have no idea what's going on with textures either, the street has been textured up pretty well I think so if we have flat colours on the characters it's going to look crap.
Either way we are in for a really long day, I wonder what time starbucks closes. Anyway I will keep posting on our progress or lack there of.
Oh great here we go the french guy is about to drag us into some long winded lecture I think. Better go.

Last Week

I'm currently into my last week of Candian living. Unfortunatly after a full on weekend I've come down with something not sure what though mainly I'm just dead tired. I missed Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning because I was to tired to go. Actually I went back to the Y for lunch on Monday and accidentialy fell asleep and slept through the whole afternoons class, but that's O.K cause we are in project mode and I don't have that much to do at this point.
I did how ever manage to finish making the dog and then turning into a cat in the few hours I was at school and handed them across to get rigged. Hopefully they will be finished this morning and we can start animating. The whole project is due tommorow afternoon so I am expecting it to be a late night tonight.
At this point though I've gone into wind down mode I have a few things still left to see before Sunday but I think I will get it all in. I packed up all the stuff I wasn't using last Sunday night but I'm not sure yet if everything is going to fit in my pack, fingers crossed.
I can't say I'm looking forward to the flight back, but what can you do. Mainly I'm hoping I'm feeling better before I leave. Well in case I don't manage to blog again before I go I guess I will see most of you next week.
Until then.

Whistler

After a great friday night of football I was up early and of to the station Saturday morning to catch a bus to Whistler. Wow that place is pretty awesome and I'm jelouse because it must look 100 times better when it snows!!
After I arrived I had a couple of hours to kill before my first activity so I went and booked into the hotel. O.K that is the nicest Best Western or for that matter 3 1/2 star hotel I have ever stayed in. Since I've been living in fairly modest accomodation for the last month I decide to splash out and stay somewhere decent and in the village (so wasn't in the mood for dorming it). Seeing I only played like $130 for the room I wasn't expecting that much but it was really nice, not to mention the fact that I booked a single and got two queen size beds, plus the room had a big tv with cable and a coffee brewer with fresh ground coffee and a bath *sigh*
Right so after I stopped taking photos of the room (shutup I was excited o.k) I headed down to Cougar Mountain adventures where I caughtt a bus (oh and it was one of thoes cool school buses like on tv) to Cougar Mountain where I went ATVing woo!! Oh yeah it was fun!! And oh yeah you all get to see the photo of me crashing through the water!! Not that you can tell it's me under the dusk mask, goggles and helmet but still.
But thats not all this morning I went zip lining in the temperate rain forest which was well bloody scary cause I hate heights, but also extremely cool!! So you pretty much got to go swinging on a flying fox 180 feet of the ground over a river from one tree top to anouther. Except for taking that first step which yeah the guides got abused for a bit the rest was just amazing. Plus in between scaring your pants of you got to learn about sustainabiliy and the forest eco system which was cool.
Finally to cap of the weekend I crammed in a bit of shopping and gift buying before catching the bus back. Wow class will seem boring tommorow!! :D

Friday Night Football

On Friday night I decided to take in a game of CFL, yeah I know it's supposed to be a joke.....and it kind of was but I still had a great time. OK and it's not the football that I found a joke it was just well pretty much everything else.
So it was kind of weird from the start, kick off was at 7pm and the gates opened at 5pm which even though everyone had set seats I assumed people would turn up at around 5. So anyway by the time I get my act together I got there by six and there was only like 50 people in the whole stadium!! So yeah I though it was kind of strange that the majority of people didn't turn up until 15 minutes before the game started. Secondly when the players come on, two thirds of the team come on and then the starting line up run on one at a time and are announced sepratly, and if your lucky enough to be on the home team you get to run through shooting sparkly firework things and they do the boxing calls like the BC LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLIONS!!!
Oh yeah anouther weird thing was the fans, o.k so I got an uber good seats on the 50 yards line 11 rows back on the home team side in the drinking zone. Right so you would expect to be sitting next to like hard core drunk abusive guys with there faces painted and yelling abuse at the umpire!! Nope pentioners, in fact the whole crowed was super tame in fact the only time they started booing was when they had a catch the ball comp and the ball machine broke down. Which brings me to the final weird football thing. What is with all the extra entertainment crap. No wonder people have a short attention span, heaven forbid we would have to sit there for three minutes while an injurned player was being attended to or the umpires where confering over a decision oh no not at the CFL. So anytime the game stopped for more than 30 seconds they would have entertainmen which involved things like fans dressing up as coffee cups and running an obsitical course or racing to make giant plastic subway sandwiches (this one actually held the game up, it was so funny watching the players standing there while the officials tried to round up the giant onions and capsicum) and finally the one thing I would be ashamed partake at any australian sporting even, oh yes put your hands together for a verse or two of "If your happy and you know it"!! SHAME, SHAME, SHAME!!
Still as I said the football was great to watch, probably not up to the yanks standard but there was some great plays and a couple of huge runs, plus most of the touch downs where pretty good, ones of the long passes that just look so good. Oh and the stadium is something else all I oculd think of was how kick arse it would be to play hockey in there, the pitch is about the right size to. I'm sure people would come see us if we had fireworks and obsitcal courses. :P

End of the theory.

So today formal classes finished and next week we are in to production mode. The whole class is making a group project and we have been devided up in to divisions which include, character design and modeling, set design and modeling, rigging, animating, texturing and lights and rendering. The plan is to make a stret scene with a locked camera and have some charaters walk in and do something. A fairly large task for 4 days.
I thought we had to do our own things so last night I set to work making a dog but luckly it got a place in the production, actually two spots because some how we are also going to turn it into a cat, not that it's my problem beacause I'm on the aniamtion team. I considered doing modeling but most of the class wanted to do it so I figured screw it it's not like my models arn't going to be in it anyway :P so I really go the best of both worlds. Plus even though I'm not concerned with getting animation practice it's good to play with the rigs, like most of the class I'm not real comfortable with the controls yet.
O.K well it is 4 and I have a game to go to in a couple of hours so I am out of here. I should have heaps tp report next week though as I am heading up to Whistler this weekend.
Until then

Oh I am never going to remember all of this.

O.K so yesterday we threw ourselves into rigging and also touched on texture mapping. First up we rigged a cylinder to have a spine and learnt correct rigging techniques so we wouldn't run into trouble down the track. One of thoes things where they go yeah you could rig it the simple way and you may never ever have any trouble in your whole life but then again you might so lets learn to do it the hard way. O.K so it didn't turn out to be so bad after we got the hang of it but having as much knowlage as the next person about these things they started with:
Right your going to need to create a few locators. Name them as follows:
Cylinder Full
Cylinder Geometry
Cylinder Rigid
Cylinder Skin
Cylinder Rig Static
Cylinder Rig Animate
Now all you need to do is place them correctly in the heirarchy and parent and objects skins and joints in the right category. No worries.....wait no, what the hell is a locator???
Anyway we got through and thankfully most charcter rigs will only include these 6 maybe only even 5 locators so there was great sigh of relife on hearing that!!
It did cross my mind though that we have covered an aweful lot of stuff in the last couple of weeks and personly I have taken about 30 pages of incoherant notes with hot keys and button pathways but I have noticed I am only one of about 5 who take any notes. Now once you get the grasp of these things it seems o.k but I really don't trust myself to remember things like freezing transofrmations on all my objects and joints before skinning them or for that matter where the damn button is in the multitude of menus. I just can't see how they can expect to remember all this stuff I mean we have just been cramming this stuff and we usualy only run things over for a day and then move on and there is hundreds of keys and scarier still is we have hit alot of them!!
Oh well, to each there own I guess.

Emergency overkill.

So tonight I headed down to Pacific Station to check out the bus time to Whistler for this weeked. As I got of the Skytrain I saw an abulance flying down the street, once I made down to street level the ambulance pulled up right in front of me. There was some guy lying on the cross walk in the intersection and had either been hit by a car or a bike. I'm pretty sure it was bike because cyclist was given disinfectant for a minor cut and the dude on the ground was not completly splattered. Anyway so the guy on the ground was being attended to and a cop that was already there was controling the traffic. Situation under control, right?? No way next thing I know more sirens, anouther ambulance!!! There is only one patient what do they need anouther abul.....oh wait look here comes the fire department as well!! HOORAY!!
I couldn't belive it so for this one guy we had a squad car, two ambulances each with two ambos and a fully manned fire truck!! O.K these people obviously don't have enough to do, so to do my bit for the community before I leave I'm taking it upon my self to light more fires, throw some bricks through some shop fronts and hospitalize a few people. I figure it's really the least I can do :D

Back to the grind.

Monday morning has been the first time that I really didn't want to go to class. I have been so into it for the last two weeks it's been awesome.... well until this weekend which was just to sunny and great that I would have enjoyed anouther day. I guess it didn't help that I left on Friday totaly confused about creating character sets and I didn't reallt want to ask the lecturer cause it's the French guy and I wouldn't have understood him anyway.
Thankfully after a little persistance I managed to figure out where I was going wrong and I think I have a better understanding for it. I wasn't to concerned with the rest of the day because we where looking at animation again, even though I'm listening to what this guy has to say and taking it all in just in case there happens to be a pearl of wisdom I can't say he's got me covinced. He showed us his work last week and I didn't think it was to crash hot (not that I can do better...yet) listening to his theories on keyframing I'm doubtful that his methods will lead to the production of great animation, so for the time being I focusing on the other aspects of Maya and I will leave the animation until my AM starts in 4 weeks. Ohhh sooo close now!! :D Oh yeah and did I say my stuff wasn't better than his well my jumping egg was. It was supposed to have character in his words "make it think like a person". Well no person in there right mind would jump in the air and then streach out their body straight on the way down, that is a damn good way to bust your knees!! So he went for the stretch and I went for the squash on the way back down, I guess we will have to agree to disagree on that one.

Grouse Mountain

On Sunday I decided to make my up to Grouse Mountain wich is on the other side of the bay in Northern Vancouver. I think it took about an hour to get to the bottom of the mountain which included a ride on the sky train the sea bus and the regular bus. Like Capilano I though it was a bit pricy to get in ($40CAD) but it was still fun. It takes about 6 minutes on the gondala to get to the top, and the mountain high enough to make your ears pop as you go up. On the top you have some pretty specatacular views but I'm glad I took the recommendation to go up on a clear day because if it had been at all cloudy you wouldn't have been able to see anything. While I was up there I took in a birds in flight show. Unfortunatly it had to be scaled back a bit because they where having there annual paraglide off the mountain weekend and it freaks the birds right out. In the show they pulled out a bald eagle which was just amazing. I mean this thing was just HUGE (some where in the vacinity of 3 - 3 1/2 ft), I didn't know what it was for a minute because it was younger one which meant it didn't have the white head and tail yet, still it was very cool!!
The other bird we got to see was the Peregrine falcon which as most of you probably know is the fastest bird in the world. They gave a demonstration where they swing this peice of meat round in the air and it swoops after it and they pull it away at the last second and boy does that thing come in fast and low. It was interesting that they said this bird had been chased of the mountain by anouther falcon the week before and this lady spent hours trekking around the mountain looking for it and finally after about six hours she gave up and went back to her cabin where she found it sitting on her porch lol.
I also took in a lumberjack show which was good and checked out the bears and wolves they have, the bears where asleep some where but I got a pretty good look at one of the wolves. So pretty much is was a great day, well except for the fact that I forgot to take sunscreen and it was like 30 degrees so I had to cough up $20 for a little bottle. But other than that very nice.

Chapters

Also while wandering on sunny Saturday I found myself in Chapters which is a huge 4 story book store and decided to go hunting for some animation books because well lets just say the range in Bendigo is a little lacking. Exactly how I ended up in the cartoon section I'm sure I don't know but I decided while I was there to expand my Calvin and Hobbes selection : D I also managed to score a nice little book on animal anatomy, anouther called drawing with the right side of the brain and a book on charcter modeling and rigging for Maya.
When I got back to the Y I was having a flick through the drawing with the right side of your brain book and I read something very interesting. The author was saying that alot of artists and creative people have alot of trouble starting there work because the left side of the brain tries to over ride actions and thoughts to persue something creative because it requires less imput from the left side. I'm not sure if that is true but that would make sense if it does because I have huge amounts of trouble starting drawing or something similar. Anyway she goes on to say that you can trick the left side by telling it you will only draw for two minutes which it deems acceptiable but once you start you loose track of time and can continue to draw. I don't know if thats true although I don't think you can trick half your brain into thinking your only going to do somthing for 2 minutes. It seemed more probably to me that it accepts the terms that you have givin yourself permission to stop at anytime, because it's true that thinking of sitting down and drawing for 2 or 3 hours is plenty enough to put people off.

Ah the weekend.

It was anouther early Saturday morning for me this weekend. Once again I had planed for a nice sleep in and once again was robbed by the bathroom share. Yep anouther early weekend riser both Saturday and Sunday with 6:30 showers to kick my day into existance. Unfortunatly I had planned to come into school but we found out late Friday that is was closing so with no plans I set to wandering the streets. I soon decide to head across town to my little internet shop and book my trip to Whistler next weekend. It was the one thing I had really set myself on doing and with next weekend my last chance to go I though I better stop stuffing around or I might miss out. So I managed to book my accomodation plus 2 activaties for the weekend. First I decided to go with a 3 hour ATV ride cause that just sounded like to much fun to miss and secondly is a eco zip line tour, and yes you can laugh. Me 200ft of the ground on a flying fox thingy apparently going up to speeds of 80kms an hour and an immense dislike of heights. Oh well it sounded fun, and hey exactly what are these people getting paid for if not to be abused by acrophobic tourists wanting to know the saftey regulations and standards for zip lining.
Also while I was bashing my bank acount I managed to score a seat to next weeks grition game which should be fun. I got a great seat right on the 50 line about 11 rows back, now all I have to do is learn the rules before Friday :P No worries, thats what googles for after all.

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday

O.K so the rest of the school week went well, I continued modeling my person which has been taknig an insane amount of time considering that it still has no hands, feet or a head. I had planned to come in on the weekend and really kick it along but they closed the school because all the graduate students where leaving and they had to overall hall the security passes. Damn them forcing me to have fun in the sun all weekend : P Other than that we did a drawing class where youu had to do this way hard technique where you have to draw the outline of a scull while not looking at the paper and your supposed to end up where you started. Wow that was hard but I did o.k got pretty close about 50/50.

Wings3D and Starbucks Conspiracy

O.K so on Tuesday we where introduced to this great and free 3D software program called wings 3D. The program is great for organic modeling which is something I havn't really done much of but enough to know this program is super easy to use. Well except for the fact it took me half an hour just to bring up the starting cube :P Other than that it has some great features including, apparently a much easier UV texturing tool (I'm sure you will all remember we moaning about this last week) which makes me very happy. Anyway we threw ourselves into modeling a full scale person which even with refrence photos loaded onto the background is really difficult. I did however come back after class to have a go at modeling a dogs head which was in my sketch book and so far so good I think, especially for a first go.
Actually that was kind of funny for thoes who kept asking me why I was still working at 10:30 last night. Yesterday morning I kept nodding off in class cause I was so tired so in my lunch break I went and got my self a Starbucks grande latte (which may I say a huge and there only the medium size) Yum!! But anyway I totally figured out the consipracy to suck you in to being a coffee drinker. O.K so I don't drink alot of coffee in fact I havn't had a cup since I left so after that huge coffee I couldn't sleep even though it was over 11 hours later. I was lying there at midnight unable to sleep and with my brain in overdrive........so having not got much sleep last night I required yet anouther of thoes tasty bevrages this morning just to stay awake. So thats it you get your first cup of coffee which is such a shock to the system that it keeps you up all night which means you need anouther damn fix in the morning. You all lied saying you drink it cause you like the taste!! LIARS!!! Thankfully I got a small today and got it in before lunch so hopefully I can break the cycle before it becomes an addiction. And don't any of you preech you can stop anytime you want crap, cause I know first hand from the guys in the office that once your hooked, your hooked. If they go the morning without there coffee they get shakes and headaches and start blowing up motherboards to give me RA's just to spite me cause I don't drink the stuff!!

Bouncing balls.

O.K so we spent the whole of Monday fiddling with our bouncing ball, yes I mean thats all we did for 6 hours and I'm disturb to say I found it fun......frustrating, but fun. After we finished the text book version we got to fiddle around with the graph editor tweaking the curves, timing ect. Wow may I say the graph editor is very useful but it can also be increadibly confusing. In simplest terms the graph editor measures time over attribute variation (the three attributes being position, scale and rotation) and then for each of these you have 3 different graphs represeting the translation across each axis leaving you with a total of nine graphs. Where it all falls down for me is that I tend to be one of thoes people who turns a map upside down to read. So if I can't read a map up the right way you can assume I have trouble reading 9 graphs which tend all to look the same even though they are representing diffrent things, I think the hardest for me is definatly rotation. So after that description you can safley assume I was very happy to expand my understanding of this tool.

ARRGGGG!!! Again

O.K so now I am really annoyed with the personI am sharing a bathroom with, I'm pretty sure it's a guy. Anyway I was all looking forward to a nice sleep in this morning except the guy next door was having none of it. I guess before I go on I should say that the rooms are pretty small and well it's pretty easy to hear when people are in the bathroom and when they going to the bathroom becuase the doors have heavy locks. Anyway 6:30 this morning and this guy needs to go to the bathroom. In fact he has had to go to the bathroom around 6:30 since he moved in about 5 days ago. O.K thats forgivable cause he might be a set in his ways but not only did he go to the bathroom at 6:30 he also went at 6:55, 7:15, 7:30 followed by a shower and anouther toilet stop at 7:45. I guess your wondering why I took such good notice of this, well it might have something to do with the fact that this is how my Saturday sleep in was ruined as well. Although I'm afraid I don't have the statistics for that morning.
O.K so not only does this guy need to pee at alarming fequency he also leaves the fan on which is noisy, he just turns it on and leaves. Mind you he never turns it on when he funks up the bathroom with that funky smell, oh no that would be asking for a bit to much. I must say this is the first bathroom share who has annoyed me and boy do I hope he is leaving soon!!

ARGGGGGG!!

O.K so the third day of class really got on my nervs. We where doing this thing called UV texturing or something and it was really annoying. It's where you have to select all the polygons and do a UV map so that you can take a 2D picture of a 3D object so then you can take it in to Photoshop to paint it. Anyway it's really fiddly and really annoying cause you can just select everything at once. You have to pick thing which are on the same axis and that are joined together or that make some sort of sense to connect and it's just a real bitch!! O.K so definatly not a texture artist in the making here!! Other than that the day was fairly uneventful althoug I must say I was a little suprised when I went out about 7pm that night to go get tea that the second football match since I got here was on. What was suprising is that last time I was up in my room mand had no idea what was going on. They have live music and they block of the whole street and everything, I mean this is right across the street from the hotel how did I not hear any of this last time!? Anyway there is one game on before I go so hopefully I will be able to get a ticket and go see what all the fuss is about.

....and of to school we go.

O.K so I started my course yesterday, had to make the big hike down from the Y all the way to the next block : ) I arrived at 8:45 to find that most of the class was already there which was a good sign. There are about 20 people in the class and I am one of three girls which actually isn't to bad. To kick things of we did a meet and great and got to know who every one and where they where from and some back ground information. I must say I felt heaps better when everone said they had no experience although I think some of them lied slightly cause they where a bit good after one day. Anyway the class is very diverse with people from Mexico, Belgium the UK and other places plus anouther guy from down under but he's from Sydney and had no idea where Bendigo was. After a couple of hours of theory on vertex's, primatives, NURBS and so on we jumped into a mini assignment. I was with Jelle who is from Belgium and from best I can tell his name is pronounced some where is between yellow and jello. So anyway for our assignment we had to make some leggo blocks and text and then texture and light the scene and animate the camera and then render the movie. We got most of it done yesterday without to much trouble although there was some things wrong and our render fudged it. Unfortunatly we both speak bad english and I was having difficulties explaining my theory on the problem and ol'yellas solution was "ya, that will do". So I decided to come in a few minutes early this morning and fix the problem and finish the project. I'm not sure why he was having so much trouble because he said he knew how to use the software.

Today was also good we had a character and background designer give us a lecture this morning (she used to work for Disney) and after 2 hours of her work history we finally got to do a character drawing, we only had an hour left so we only did a 3/4 view. I managed to get my finshed in the hour and we handed them in to get assested which should be interesting. It was good actually when she was walking around she looked at mine and said that it was obviouse from my wonderful drawn feet that I had taken many life drawing classes, which of course I havn't ever been to one which was pretty funny, so I told her cause I couldn't help myself, oh yeah and that reminds me we get to do a couple of life drawing lessons yay!! Also we have our first animation lesson next monday which should be interesting. Oh and finally this afternoon we did anouther theory session on polygon, NERB and subdivisional modeling (have I freaked you at yet?)
Anyway that it for now and do my washing so I don't smell extra bad tommorow!!

Capilano

Today I went to the Capilano suspension bridge which was fun, although I thought it was a bit crap paying $27 to get to see a bridge and walk around some rain forest and it was major touristy but for good reason I guess. The suspension bridge itself is either the biggest in North America or the world not sure but it's big and pretty high up as well!! Now I'm not keen on heights and yeah we where high up and the bridge swings but geez a few people where getting awfully wound up about the ordeal!! Still the views where great and I thought it was fun. Once you cross the bridge you end up in the rain forest which is awesome and there are proper tracks and lookouts and even a walkway through the trees which was cool. So you just wandered around the tracks and even though there where heaps of people it was big enough so it felt like there where only a few people wondering around.Also I should mention on Saturday I finally made it to the Chinese garden as well as the space center and the museum. All where fun but not really worth there own entry. Oh and annwen I'm not sure but I think I might have been in kemp :P

Weird!!

O.K so I was watching some show called 20/20 the other night which I guess is kind of like 60 minutes and they had this weird story on. Apparently the kids in the US play this game where they strangle each other until they just pass out which gives them a huge high when they come back round again. Anyhow some of these kids have decided to play by themselves at home and have accidentally strangled themselves to death with belts and dog leashes and stuff. So they where talking to this one family and the father of the girl who hung herself said that kids used to play it when he was at school!! I'm thinking what the hell is this whacked out stuff?! So my question is has any one heard or has played this game back? I have never heard of it and though it's probably just those wacky yanks doing weird stuff but hey I could be wrong maybe this happens everywhere.

Ben and Jerry's

O.K for all of you have heard me go on about how much I love Ben and Jerry’s and how it was like the first thing I was going to eat when I got here and now we are 10 days in and I'm yet to mention it. O.K so yes I have had some B&J's although I am very sad to say I haven’t found any One Sweet Whirled which is the best by far (ask Fiona). The first time I got New York Fudge which was nice and having not have eaten most of the day I ate the whole carton :P On Friday I was ecstatic to locate some Chunky Monkey which is banana ice cream with choc fudge and walnuts in it. As I was being good I only ate 1/4 of the tub this time (just so you know a tub is about 1/2ltr) unfortunately when I went to have some the next day I found my freezer isn't actually colder than the fridge so I had banana milk with nuts in it!! : ( So that means I have to eat the whole carton if I want some cause I have no where else to put it so that has kind of put me off a bit, not to much though I'm sure.