A gorgeous winter day.

I've landed in Sydney this morning to a picture perfect winters day. I'm here for the rest of the week doing various bits and pieces. I'm very glad that I packed the coat I bought in Melbourne. I think i'm going to need it.

A new site to let the time pass

After a bit of pestering from Amy, I finally signed up for Twitter. I must admit she was right it is just the perfect amount of blogging space...

You can check out my few twittererers.... what is the plural on that? here....

I haven't integrated it into my blogger yet... we'll see how well it holds up first.

In other news I finally got around to getting a new stylus for my old Beogram 4002 turntable. I was mostly spurred on by our trip to the design market in Melbourne and discovering that it's actually in the Museum of Modern art in NYC. Thought it might be worth restoring rather than just throwing in the bin. Of course that now means that I have 2 turntables, well I don't remember anyone saying you couldn't have 2 stereo rigs?

A new post from my phone.

I promise a more in depth post about our weekend vm melbourne but I've just reconfigured blogging from my phone so I figured now was as good a time as any. The weekend was great a bit cold, which was a great excuse to buy a new jacket, but relaxing. Here's what we got up to:
Art Deco exhibition
Design expo
Design markets
Shopping at bridge road and chapel st
More than enough chocolate to last a lifetime. (on that note San Churro has the best hot chocolate!)

At the airport.... in a good way!

Ness and I are off to Melbourne for a long weekend. Lots of sleeping in, shopping and general enjoyment are planned. We're in the VB lounge... but it's nothing like the normal rush for the morning (although I am planning on doing some work).

We're on a pretty late flight but with nothing to do tomorrow there really isn't much to worry about. We did discover that you can't have an exit row if you're pregnant though...

Green Fail!

This week I caught a post on Apartment Therapy about simple ways to go green, specifically Go veggie for one day a week. Not being a person with the smallest carbon footprint around I thought I'd try and start a Green Day each week. The plan was to A. Go Veggie and B. Limit Tech Use.
Yesterday was the first run at it and it was a partial success. While the Veggie option went pretty well and I managed to avoid meat all day the tech fell down a little. Mandy and Tom dropped in unexpectedly and the chance at a few rounds of Smash Bros with real opponents was too good to pass up.

All is not lost though, we're transferring the anti tech aspect onto today and although it's not a lot it's at least a start.

Cute (geeky) Baby things....

All your milk...

BABY TAGS

Fully Charged

Some Real Good Chairs

We had a bit of a spontaneous furniture purchase today and decided to replace our dining room chairs.

Some Real Good Chairs

They are Real Good Chairs from Blu Dot. Even though they look like they have pretty harsh angles they are really comfortable. We picked up 6 in total, 4 red and 2 black (I hate to say it but I think the still fall into the "Sim House Furniture" category). They come flat packed and require a bit of assembly but they are no harder than anything Ikea puts out. The flat packed was a big selling point with the ability for us to take them home today!
The best thing about them though is they come with a link to a pretty funny instructional video on the assembly...

Chalk up another Premium Upgrade

I’m flying back to Sydney today and I’ve been lucky enough to get another upgrade to Premium which will be nice to get a bit of shut eye and miss all the school holiday kids on their way home... The big thing with the Red Seats is not so much the leg room but the extra arm room which makes using the laptop an option without having to dig my elbows into my next door neighbour.

It’s been a fairly quiet week, but it’s been great to be home (for what seems like an eternity but really only a bit over a week). I’ve caught up with a bit of gaming and some recorded TV. The big gaming addition for the week was Super Smash Brothers Brawl, which is just like the Game Cube version but better. It’s definitely not everyone’s cup of tea (even if you are a fan of the fighting genre). It’s currently up there alternating with Mario Kart as my no1 Wii game (although I am trying to put in some Wii fit time every day, except today). Mandy and I put in a few tracks online last night with mostly favourable results... My online rating is slowly climbing towards 7000. It’s a brilliant concept having dual screen play online, human players are always more fun to take on than the AI and it’s often you’ve only got one other player around...

We’re slowly moving towards being ready for the new arrival. We’ve order a few more bits of furniture and started clearing out a lot of the stuff we don’t use. It’s getting close to serious with the stereo wiring with hopefully a few quotes rolling in next week. I think we’ve decided on colours for painting so hopefully that won’t be too far away either.

The Tivoli setup has got a surprising amount of use. I’ve found myself just flicking it on in the mornings when I get up or at night when I get home rather than firing up the projector. Tom lent me a phono stage to do some testing with the Project turntable and it’s the best sound I’ve got out of it since I’ve had it. The DAFT PUNK LP kicked out really well and even when the bass kicked in it still held its own, it’s never going to shake the room (well not before I add the sub at least) but the low frequency don’t cause the unit to sweat too much. Most of its work, though, has been on the radio and I must admit a fair amount of that has been a classical channel. I think because the system just shines on classical music.

On less exciting topics though my laptop is starting to cause me a bit of grief, Vista is crashing on all too regular intervals. Its favourite trick at the moment is to crash and reboot every time it goes to standby. It failed completely earlier in the week and ran an automatic system restore which removed most of the applications that I’d installed since I got it, apparently this was the last “Stable” restore point... Of course it’s only after this that it won’t go to standby anymore.... *sigh*. I’m seriously considering the “upgrade to a more familiar experience” at the moment.

I’m off to Melbourne next week but it’s not actually for work. I’ve cashed in one of the public holidays that I’ve had to work; Ness and I are going to fly down Thursday night for a long weekend away.

That’s about it for this flight to Sydney, it’s time for me to try and claw back a few minutes of sleep...

Foxtel one month in.... and on the go....

So we've had Foxtel and the iQ2 for about a month now and I've recently discovered a feature that would have been enough to make me buy it on it's on.... Remote access!


Not only can I access the iQ2 and add programs to record from the pretty intuitive web interface I can also download an app for my phone (which of course I've done) and add programs to record on the go... anywhere... now that is useful.

The Project gets some companions

Since the upgrade/move/rearrange of the home theater and stereo the poor project turntable has been neglected and relegated to the corner with no speakers for quite a while.

I've been looking for something to complement it and had semi decided on a Tivoli since we bought one as a present at Christmas and I was amazed by the sound.

Today (using the last of my birthday money) I picked up a Model 2 and Model CD to sit along side the Project and finally give it some music making capability once again.

Even though they are particularly small, they are incredibly capable speakers and even show the poor Jamo's THX setup a few tricks here and there.

Tivoli Stereo Setup

Sometimes I have really good flight experiences.... and then

Sometimes they suck... So for my flight back to Brisbane:

• Rude Check in staff.
  
• I'm checked into an earlier flight but it's delayed so much it's landing 45 mins after my original flight because of high winds
• They MADE me check in my carry on because it was 600g over the weight limit (with my laptop in it)
• I accidentally left everything (phone, iPod, DS, earphones) in my bag so all I've got is my laptop (with no charger) and my wallet
• I have a middle isle seat
• The lounge is so full I can't get a seat...

Guess that's pay back for the all the free Premium Economy upgrades