The first week away in such a long time....

This week has been a pretty big change from the norm of the last few
months. I've spent this week in Toowoomba working for a couple of
different customers. While that used to be the everyday thing as far
as my work was concerned it's been quite a while since I've had to
spend this much time away from work. I'm quite out of practice as it
turns out. I discovered this morning that I'd managed to short pack
myself and had to pick up a few supplies to get myself through the
rest of the week. Toowoomba has it's advantages as far as away from
home work locations go. It has a whole range of restaurants and cafe's
that cater for gluten free eaters so I don't have any issue finding
something to eat every night. I also stayed in a B&B this time instead
of a hotel and they have been very accommodating when my breakfast
order rolls around.

I've missed being away from home this time more than I remember. I
don't know if it was Vanessa spending a couple of nights here earlier
in the week or if I'm just really out of practice.

It's almost at the end (being Thursday night and all) but I have
secured myself some more work up here so I'll have to work myself into
the away from home frame of mind sooner rather than later.

The change to the B&B has been great. The level of service and
hospitality have been well above anything I've had in a hotel whist on
Business (with the possible exception of the Merchant Court in
Sydney). It will definitely be my first choice of accommodation for my
next Toowoomba trip.

On a side note a bit of social commentary, there is a very awkward
dinner going on at the table across from me. A couple of kids out with
their dad, everyone is staring daggers at each other arms crossed and
perfectly silent... Doesn't look like any of them really want to be
there...

Ok... and back to my dinner musings...

As you can probably tell I'm just passing the time with this post... I
should probably be doing some work trying to help out one of the new
consultants at my work but I'm lacking in motivation so I'm
procrastinating with this blog post over dinner.

I've manage to make some serious inroads into Spectrobes. I've put a
lot more time into than I probably planned (although not quite the 80
hours the game reports). It was a little bit of a impulse when I
pre-ordered after having a few dollars spare on a trading spree but
it's turned out to be a great pick up and play title. There are quite
a few aspects to the game and despite putting a good 20 hours into the
game I'm definitely some way to mastering every aspect. For example
the game came with trading cards that I haven't even unlocked the
system for. It's been done well to the formula of unlock to play to
unlock. As you progress you discover more abilities and features of
the game which then utilise to unlock more features. The level of
achievement for unlock is efficiently weighted to never leave you
without a new feature for long. The fighting mechanics (and to a large
extent the overall game play) follows the pokemon formula. You
unlock/capture/find/befriend/awaken (find and awaken in Spectrobes
case) you allies that you use to fight the battles for you. Your
weapons to precious little against any of the opponents so they are
really your only fighting mechanism. You gain these allies by digging
for fossils. It is one of my favourite aspects (and one of the best
uses of the DS control in the game, and definitely up there with the
all DS titles) is the extracting fossils. You use you stylus to
control various archaeological tools to drill and extract your fossils
that you then awaken by singing to them (honestly they make it sound
plausible) but never the less it's an excellent use of the stylus
(even if it's tied with a gimmicky use of the mic). You're bonused
for how carefully you can drill around your fossil before you extract
it. You use this technique not only to find and extract allies but
also for food and unlocks in the game. One of the greatest differences
to this other games in this genre is that you don't discover you new
allies through endless random battles but rather by searching the
various worlds for the treasures buried below. In fact if you're
careful enough you can avoid just about every random battle that comes
your way. As I get further through the game I'll put up some more
comments but for the moment it's quite enjoyable and certainly passes
the time in Toowoomba (or on the bus).
Actually one last point before I leave the spectrobes... one problem
with the use of the mic is you can't really awaken any of your
extracted fossils unless you're at home. Ok bug bear done...

I've watch/bought a few DVDs while I've been away... mainly because
the TVs in the rooms have been smaller than my laptop screen and
because there hasn't been much on TV to watch... (apart from heroes
which I'm avoiding because I'm behind and I have the rest of the
series on the PVR). I watched Layer Cake last night. It was a pretty
good movie... only if you like Snatch or Lock Stock though. Was pretty
good value at $6 though... I'm not sure I'm convinced on the lead
(who's name escapes me at the moment and I'm so apathetic I can't be
bothered looking it up... he's the new James Bond though) he was ok as
a bond but I'm still not sold.

So that's about it for this post.... I've done all the procrastinating
I can in this post...

Birthday list and General Update from T'ba

Thought I'd start with a post this morning as I sip my coffee
from Jilly's cafe. Ness got on the bus early this morning (6:50) and
is on her way home as I type... I think she's at Goodna at the moment.

We had a nice dinner out at the Angel cafe last night... The best GF
bruchetta I've ever had... The bread was almost and inch thick!

Not much else to report apart from getting the 3rd Season of Family Guy..

I've started a Birthday list below... it's not much but I promise I'll
think about it more tonight...

Geek Presents
Digital Photo Frame
Season 4 and/or 5 of Family Guy
Season 7, 8, 9 of The Simpsons
Season 1 or 2 of Battle Star Galactica
Apple TV (ok so I don't expect one of these)
JamPaks for Apple's Garage Band

Gluten Free Presents
Gluten Free Beer,
General gluten free yummy things

Gaming Presents
Paper Mario,
Mario Party 8,
Children of Mana (DS)
Diddy Kong Racking (DS)

Misc Presents
Wind trainer for my Road Bike.
New Cycling Jersey and Niks…
Some more Vinyl disks, Things like Jamiroquai albums etc…

A weekend of Concerts, Sandbanks and B&Bs…

It’s been yet another big weekend. First of all was a concert at the Cathedral on Saturday night. Saturday was our anniversary so unfortunately most of the anniversary plans had to go on hold for the concert. The concert was a combined event with the Qld Choir and St John’s Cathedral Choir. It’s the first concert where I’ve ever had billing and the first billing since a Musical theatre number. I had to perform Canticle II: Abraham and Isaac for alto (or countertenor), tenor, and piano by Benjamin Britten. I was really happy with how it went. I think it’s the proudest I’ve ever been of a public performance. It went almost exactly as I’d hope (or been able to do in rehearsals). I managed to keep any nerves at bay and only stumbled with one or two mistakes I’m not sure any one noticed which I thought was pretty good for a 15-20min work. It was great that so many of my friends could make it to see the show… (I think a lot of thanks has to go to Vanessa for pimping the concert out so much). All in all I’m just glad the whole concert went off well for my first big show!

Today we went out boating on my Dad’s and my Uncle’s boats. It was my Dad’s boat’s second outing in the water in its 3 year history. Its lack of sea time has earned it the affectionate name “Dry Dock”. We weren’t treated to the best weather so we had to call the trip off a bit early… My Uncle tried for a short cut on the way back to the mooring in his bay cruiser “Raven” but landed himself on a sand bank. I ferried a few of the stranded passengers back to dry land as the storm rain moved in. The water was pretty choppy and canopy didn’t stop much of the rain so it was a little unpleasant on the way back to help out on the beached cruiser. After a bit of rocking on the bow we rocked it off the sand and all headed back in safe and sound… The wind made coming along side a tricky task as I haven’t piloted a boat for about 10 years… It was a nice little outing to the water though… The “Raven” is a great cruiser, made me a little envious and ignited a passion for my own little sailor…

I’m working in Toowoomba this week so we postponed our Anniversary until this evening and booked ourselves into a lovely B&B. I would highly recommend Lauriston House if you need a quiet relaxing time. I only have a half day tomorrow and I think Ness is going to relax through some shopping and some reading.

An exciting day

I disabled the System Beeps in my Virtual Machines!!! This has been annoying me for ages but never enough for me to actually search for it... Today I found the solution...
From a command prompt:
net stop beep
Seems pretty simple now it's done.
Of course this will only work for that boot of the server. To stop it permanently:
sc config beep start= disabled

I'll probably post this on my other site as well but it was worth putting here... Now I can listen to stuff of iTunes without the fear of the deafening system beep!

Trivia... So Close

Tonight was Grand Final night at Trivia and there was $1000 up for grabs for the winner. We started the night well with a perfect score but it went downhill fast after that. We lost a few points in Music and in general knowledge. The real killer was the puzzle round where we were the only team that didn't get a perfect score. We powered home winning the final round and getting all the bonus questions but it was going to be tight to see if we made the top 5.

The top 5 were read out and with 3 teams left after 4th was read out it was a nail biting count down. There was a tie for 5th and 6th was only 1 point behind.

6th! The 4 points we lost in the puzzle round cost us dearly. All was not lost however...

There was a wild card entry and..... We made it!

Our first run in the finals, we didn't win... knocked out with "What was Madonna's first hit single", but it was a lot of fun... in the end we were very lucky to be there at all. It was a pretty good season 3 bottles of wine and $80 in bar tabs. The $1000 would have been nice but there is always next season.... So long "Schrödinger's Cat is/is not dead"! it was a good season.... I'm still voting for "We're blogging this" as our next team name...

New DVD site...

I logged into DVDtracker the other day to update my list of DVDs and noticed there was a sign across the login saying it will shut down at the end of the year... Not happy Jan!!! So as a result I've resorted to Google to get me out of the bind and I've published up a spreadsheet with all the DVD details.

From now on the DVD list will be here.

It's not a perfect solution but it's certainly much easier to update...

Bus Blogging....

It's been a while since I've blogged on the bus... The continued lost posts and sitting in draft mode has really slowed up my blogging enthusiasm. Missing two buses on the way in this morning though left me will little else to do. The buses were supposed to leave 5 mins apart so if I missed the first (which I saw driving away as I turned the corner) I thought i was fine for the second which then I saw drive up the hill :(

So here we are blogging... First of all some Wii updates... I got Excite Truck on Friday and it has all the hallmarks of having the Burnout level of fun. I've been playing it pretty hard since I got it and there is an impressive level of content. They have stuck to the formula well with the wins leading to more upgrades which then spur you on for more wins. They have an interesting take on car upgrades though with either S Level (the top ranking) wins or number of races unlocking the upgrade for the car. Typically it's 10 races or 3 S level wins giving you the car upgrade.
The sense of speed is great and although there is a lack of the spectacular bullet time crash scenes that make burnout so much fun the huge jumps and air go a long way towards it.
Again just like burnout there is the star rating for the tricks/special moves in the game. Drift, Jumps, Air, Crashes, Tree Runs etc etc. all add up to give you your score at the end and ultimately your ranking.
One aspect that is completely different to any other racing game of this type is the Terrain changing. There are "power ups" littered around the track that allow you to morph the terrain to unlock bigger jumps etc etc. These just enhance the frantic pace of the game with huge mountains rising up in front of you, arguably the best aspect of this is being able to throw your opponents to their doom...
The bottom line is.... It's a fun game... it's never going to be a deep gaming experience but with the Rankings, Trophies and unlockables combined with the fast paced racing results in the "just one more race aspect". The only aspect which is a bit of a let down is the multiplayer. It's only split screen 2 player and there are no computer opponents. Online would have been nice but online wii games are a fair way off yet... maybe it will have to wait for Excite truck 2....

A Glut of Heroes...

Continuing the lazy Saturday I started watching Heroes today. I had it setup on the PVR from the first screening but I hadn't managed to start watching it. Most people who've already Bit Torrented it told me not to watch the the show until I had at least two episodes up my sleeve. I really took that to the extreme today with what can only be described as a glut. I had all 5 episodes of the series and cleared the whole lot today.

I think Heroes series would make a good movie, unfortunately someone already came up with that idea and called it X-men. They have taken the one hour format to a whole new level though... you learn less about the story per episode than Desperate Housewives. In reality with all the the re-hashing of the previous episodes and the ad breaks it's really only a 30 minute program. And true to the one hour format every episode ends with a cliff hanger of some sort. Channel 7 don't make it easy to PVR either... every episode has started 10 mins late... is it really that hard... I'm sure the ratings for prison break aren't that bad or that crash investigation viewers are bolstering the numbers.

All in all it's not a bad show and given by the glut today it's got me hooked. I'm just not sure it's everything it's hyped to be or it could be.

ZAZZMania!!

Today has been the laziest Saturday that I can remember. It started off energetic with both of us juming out tof bed at 6am and going for a walk. After that however it's pretty much been a couch day after that. It's probably for the best. I tried my hand at tidying up earlier and it just ended in disaster. I managed to spill the mop bucket on the wood floor... Twice!! So we now have a "slightly" ripply floor at the end of the kitchen... Think I might be calling the floor people on Monday.

Most of this laziness has been partly due to Zazzmania today. I've discovered that the Wii is the ultimate Zazzmania accessory. I've had the Wii Browser trained on the Zazz site and just watched the products roll by... We've tried for a couple of things but have missed out just before they were sold.

Before the Zazz browsing on the Wii I had a nostalgic gaming session with Streets of Rage which was released yesterday. The only complaint I had with it was all the button mashing required in this side scrolling beat 'em up gave me a hand cramp! (Must be out of condition)