A picnic, a fabulous weekend and organising the appleTV

For my b'day festivus last weekend we planned on going for a picnic, with the weather we had to cancel (not bad thing still had a fantastic party at home) but today we had the picnic over again.

It was brilliant, a beautiful day (although a little too much sun judging by my arms) and super relaxing. We went for brunch and stayed until about 10:30...

Picnic in the Park (April 09)

There was only a small (but hilarious FAIL) with the butter the whole day. It really was the perfect way to finish a fabulous weekend. The source of it's fabulousness was that I managed to achieve exactly nothing. Saturday I pottered around, caught up with some friends and progressed a little further through GTA:CTW (if you own a DS you should really pick up this game if you're after a more adult experience than the 4000th revision of Pokemon). Today was a wander along the river, then one to New Farm Park for a picnic and then home. I had started a whole list of jobs to get done this weekend and unsurprisingly that list is still standing... just the way the weekend should be.

The only thing that can partially be labelled acheivement is some organisation of my itunes  and iphoto library. Having the AppleTV has meant that I'm seeing a lot more photos while I've got music playing so I've been sorting through albums both old and new trying to get a good selection of photos. I've also discovered that I lot of CDs I own haven't made it to the itunes library so I've been moving the CDs over to the iMac while I've been sorting through the photos. As a result I've also got some more photos to upload so in no specific order here are few more albums

Holiday on the Beach (April 09)

Zachary and his cousins

Zach's first ferry trip

Misc Zachary Shots

Tasmania: By Photos

Now I'm back to some real internet it's time for the photos. A trip away was the perfect time to tryout the new camera so there are quite a few shots.

Hobart Trip - Jan 09

Targa Tasmania

Hasting Caves

Macro

Tasmania: Gluten Free goodness, Spelunking and the Targa

The trip to Tasmania has come with some good surprises. Last night we stumbled across a floating fish and chip store in Huonville that was a haven of gluten free goodness. They did almost everything gluten free, there was so much choice I ended up having 2 dinners. Ness ordered me a hamburger and crumbed fish AND crumbed calimari all gluten free. There was even a selection of gluten free desserts. The food was fantastic, some of best Fish and Chips ever. 

Today we set out for some spelunking at the Hastings caves. There wasn't much warning with regards to how cold it was on the brochure. To start with it was actually a cold day (as compared to to the hottest day on record we had yesterday), the 9 degrees in the cave though was a bit of a different story. I think something more than shorts and a tshirt would have been a good start. Fortunately Zach had plenty of clothes so he was rugged up (beenie and all) ready for spelunking. The caves were great and the Gorillapod came through with some great cave shots, not to mention the Pentax's performance (unfortunately I'm still on GPRS so the photos will have to wait until I come back).

On the way home, we managed to join a (non competition) stage of the Targa and weaved our way home between some 911s and WRXs. The stage went past our B&B so I took the Pentax out for some more shots. Fortunately there were still quite a few cars behind us so I got a couple of nice photos.

Tonight we were down to the last of the recommended restuarants in town, the local pub. I was pretty suprised at the meal (to start with it was HUGE) and it was a really good steak as well. They had some pretty impressive desserts as well, but I'm still holding out for another slice of GF Cheesecake from the Huon House Boat Fish and chips store.

It's been a really good weekend away and the Watson's B&B in Huonville has been outstanding, I would recommend it to anyone wanting to stay just outside Hobart.

I think I'm going to end the night with some Port and Cheesecake, while the others are playing cards.

Feel the Ebay Love

Yesterday a few (4 to be exact) packages made it to our house, 1 for Zach, 1 for Ness and 2 for me. Both of the big ebay purchase had arrived at the same day. First off, I picked up a set of speakers for the TV, I decided to go for something powered so I didn't have to mess around with multizone on the Sony (which confuses my harmony no end) or add another amp to my already overcrowded media cabinet. After a bit of searching I decided on the Cygnett Unison i-X5 or the Wharfedale Pro 8.1. Fortunately I found the i-X5 on ebay for less that half price (more than $250 off RRP). When they arrived yesterday, I was amazed to see them sealed in the original box with all the original (and unopened) packaging.

It's a very simple hookup, I'm letting the TV do all the audio switching and I'm simply taking the output from the headphone jack and plugging it into the Line in on the i-X5, that way the TV still controls the volume and audio selection.

From Sigma Zoom

I'm really impressed with the sound, even at high volumes very clear and tight. A little on the bass heavy side (as most of the reviews say) but that's quite good for most TV applications.

Onto the second toy for the day a new lens. The big thing that I'd missed coming to the Pentax from my Fuji Bridge camera was the Zoom. After not very much searching I stumbled across 28-200 Sigma Zoom on ebay. First impressions are very good. It gives me the lens convinence back (even with some macro capability) and the shots are still great.

From Sigma Zoom

Shot of the speakers at full zoom, taken from the same location as the shot above.

From Sigma Zoom

Macro shot of my Nokia 6110 Nav

I'm going to take the camera out with me today and take some shots in the afternoon, I'll post up some more then.

Zach and the new Camera

As you're all aware for various reasons  we now have a new camera. A Pentax K200D and I'm very happy with it. It's still very new so there is still a lot of playing to be done, but I tried taking some photos of Zach with it and I was pretty happy with how they turned out.

Zach Portraits

This photo is by far my favourite out of all of them....

From Zach Portraits

Oh a little late as well but we also took it for a quick trial run up to Mount Cootha when we got the camera.

Pentax K200D

Shopping for a new camera.

Last weekend Ness announced that she liked the sound that a Digital SLR made when she took a photo. As a result I've been having a bit of a look around for a new camera. For the last few years I've been using a Fuji SuperZoom, the S9500, for a while (2 in fact after I lost the first one). I've always picked one of these type over an SLR because I'm not a big fan of having to carry around a bag full of lenses. I like taking photos but I'm not very serious about so picking which DSLR to go for is a bit hard. I thought I'd try and stick with a budget similar to that of the S100fs, Fuji's replacement for the camera I use at the moment, for body and lenses.

So far I've been looking at the Pentax K200D, Sony A200, Nikon D60 , Olympus E-520 and the Canon 1000D.

It's a hard decision to make, I'm tending towards the Pentax K200D for a few of reasons. First of all there is the price, the body is on sale for about $569 which is almost $200 cheaper than 1000D. Another attraction is the performance in the reviews while not being top of the class it's certainly no slouch and considering the cost difference it's hard to ignore. It hasn't passed the sound test so all could change.

The next big thing is to decide what sort of lens to get. I'd really like to get a lens similar to what I'm used to but the cost seems a bit prohibitive at the moment. $1200 for a lens when the camera is only 569 seems a little wrong. I like the zoom I have now but I might have to go for something a bit more conservative. So many decisions....

And where was my real camera

Monday and back to the grind

We had a great weekend this weekend. After a long time coming I finally got around to watching Ironman. While it's a better than average comic hero conversion movie, the transfer to bluray is STUNNING and just looked fabulous in Studio 54 GoldClass. It was almost as cold as the real gold class as well with the new industrial strenght aircon.

The weekend was filled with a fair bit of work for me with the occasional outing (as Ness has put so beautifully) for some Chrismas Shopping. It was pretty hot out in the markets but we managed to keep Zach out of the sun despite his protests about wearing the hat.

The weekend went really quickly and I feel somewhat down on sleep, but hopefully this week will be a bit quieter and I might get some longer sleeps as Zach is staying asleep a bit longer (probably with the combination of the aircon and moving Zach to his own room)

And after a few weeks of searching I finally found my DS again, which is perfect timing as Andrew and I are going to brave the worlds longest sushi queue in the City today, We'll need something to entertain us!

Wish I could think of a title.

I should be able to think of a title but here we are posting and without a title. It's been a busy few days. I had a whirlwind trip to Sydney for Dev's wedding. Unfortunately we were told that Zach shouldn't be flying so we changed the travel plans and I flew down alone. I made it to one of the Ceremony's but had to fly home early and missed the others. It also ment I had to miss out on catching up with people while I was there.

From What's in a Name?

The ceremony was great and the bride and groom looked fabulous. It was a great ceremony (even though I didn't really understand any of it). Apologies to everyone I had to cut short on in Sydney.

It's really starting to get humid up here at home and I'm very looking forward to the Air Con install this week. It's been a hot few days but it hasn't got much over 27 in the house but the humidity has been up over 70% most days (even now at 7am it's 70%) Zach doesn't seem to much of a fan of the humidity either.

We went out for our usual morning walk this morning, but amazingly we weren't the only one with a STOKKE stroller out on the river walk. There is another white one that passed me this morning, while we complimented each other on a great pram choice.

The little Zach is really starting to grow, I'm not sure how much longer he's going to be fitting his 0000 clothes, he does look cute in a hat though.

more photos of zachary

The next few days are going to be busy as we have to clean out the study for the A/C install. I'm not looking forward to moving that desk bed that is for sure.

There has been little movement on the technology front for a while, although I am keeping my eye on a pair of speakers that match my Jamo THX ones, which would give me 7.1. The A/C budget does tend to slow the progress of the tech fund a little. I did pick up a copy of Iron Man on blu ray, which I think will be on the top of the watch list for the first post A/C movie night. With no A/C and our windows the only source of cooling it's a little hard to close half of them off to lower the screen and then turn on the heat pump (also known as the projector). We did fire up the gear for Vantage point last week on Foxtel HD. Not a bad movie (certainly not a great one) but didn't try to be too much, and it was short.

That's about it for this post, I'm sure there is more I should put in here....

San Francisco, Day 2

It's another beautiful day here, I think I'm going to try and hit the shops today (at least in the middle part). The Sunburn from yesterday won't be much fun if I repeat it today. I didn't bring any sunscreen with me and so far haven't found one I'm not allergic to.

I really wanted to get to Alcatraz today, but the labor day holiday has foiled my plans with tickets really hard to come by. I did have some successful shopping yesterday, highlighted by a trip to BabyGap for some stuff for Paris.

(Un)Fortunately I've only brought small bags and they are pretty packed already so there won't be much room for any really big shopping sprees...

This is my last day in San Francisco proper, tonight (and for the rest of the week) I'm staying out at Pleasanton. Yesterday was fantastic (apart from the sunburn, which is more embarrassing than anything) got to see lots of great sights and pack in quite a few different things yesterday. My favourite though has to be the cable car ride at night. Hanging off the front of the through the lit streets was great.

Ness is keeping me up to date with everything that is going on back home... which is fantastic.

A few SF Photos...

Just back for a quick camera upload and a snack before I'm off to hit the shops...

Here are some of the snaps... hopefully I'll get a couple of night shots tonight

San Francisco

The wedding photos are up!

I had a bit of time this morning after I got in from Townsville and I've put the rest of the photos from Andrew's and Kat's Wedding up.

They aren't all captioned yet but that might be a job for tonight! Here's a quick sample though

Europe Photos, some more

I've started uploading the photos I took on my real camera while we were overseas.

Holiday Post Cards

I've called the album Postcards from Europe and I'm including all the big attraction photos of the trip. One of the best things about the upload is there is a new feature from Blogger allowing you to put the photos in a slideshow in the blog (I'm going to leave all the camera phone photos up as well). As a result I've done a bit of a redesign of the layout of the blog... There's still a bit of work to do but I figure there will be a bit of time to play around while I'm in Townsville this week. I don't have many more photos but there will probably be some more changes to the blog.

Speaking of Townsville, for dinner tonight we went to the Watermark Restaurant on the The Stand and they had the most fantastic Orange and Chocolate Brulee for desert. If you're in Townsville it's worth a look.