My Home Theaters...

...Let me show you them.

So yeah, our main TV blew up a week and a half ago. That's the top of it you can see in the bottom-right corner of the photo, sulking on the floor in shame. All attempts to revive it have thus far failed. I'm not sure what's wrong with it - when powered up it will go into standby mode, and the little red light on the front will glow, but it won't actually go from that to turning on and being a useful TV.

So, until we can afford a new one, we scavenged the above replacement from Trev & Kelli's place, where it was performing the admirable duty of taking up space in the top of a cupboard in the spare room. Of course, I know what TV I'd like to replace it with, but unless someone gives me $2500 that they happen to find laying around, then this one will have to do for now. Luckily we still have the nice baby 26" LCD TV out in the living area. We were going to shuffle it out into the lounge room, and then put the little one out the front, but that ended up being too much mucking around.

Oh well - I guess we'll just have to see if we can up our credit limit on the ol' AGC card, and wait till someone has a "no deposit, no interest, no repayments" sale!!! Hooray for broken things!

PS - finally feeling better, after copious quantities of painkillers, a week of being in bed, a trip to the doctor, and a course of antibiotics.

Camping stuff - New shower tent

Ugh - still a bit sick from the flu that flattened me over the weekend. So no new exciting news. But I figured it had been too long since I'd put something up, so enjoy the following:

A couple of weeks back BCF was doing a special on shower packages. They bundled a shower tent with a solar shower and some foam floor tiles, and gave a little discount off the package price. Not a great deal of savings, but enough to make it worthwhile. A hot shower whilst out in the bush is a little luxury that we've been missing when we've been out, especially when you go camping with others who have various hot water shower setups, and you need to beg them for a go.

I'm not a huge fan of the solar showers, since you need a reasonable amount of sun to get the water warm, and you've got to remember to put the bag out early in the day, and so forth. But I figured that we would most probably use the shower bag with hot water that we had cooked up on the gas stove, so we just needed a way to hold the water up high, and a shower rose. We were originally looking at something along these lines: Camp Showers , but for $9, we couldn't go past the solar shower bag. Plus at least if it's a sunny day we can use the solar shower as it was originally intended.

But the exciting part of it (if you can get excited about any of this) is the shower tent. I didn't want a pop-up one, as they're annoying to pack up at the best of times, and because there's no rigid structure, there's no place to hang the solar shower. So you then need to set up either under a tree, or come up with some other solution to the problem. Luckily, the shower tent that came in the package was the exact one I've had my eye on - an OzTrail tent with a rigid external frame. It makes putting up/packing up a bit longer, but means we can suspend the solar shower bag from the top of the frame, and it will be strong enough to hold it.

We set it up in the backyard to test it all out, make sure we had received all the bits and pieces, and figure out the best way to put it up. So here's some photos. Best part is it all packs down to a really quite tiny bag, which will go up on the roofracks no problem at all. So all in all, I think it'll work out very well for us. Now, to get a free weekend where we can get away and try it out!

Leather jacket

So, yeah. Despite not riding the bike more than once a month at the moment, I bought myself a new leather jacket. Jess is overjoyed.

I like it, anyway. When I was down in Bris in early August, I happened to be walking past Team Moto near Jamie's place just as they were getting ready to close for the afternoon. After wandering around the bikes, I headed inside just to see what they had on offer. And what would you know - they had products displayed in such a way as to catch my eye and remove money from my wallet!

This particular jacket is a Joe Rocket, and was originally priced at (apparently) $599. Being a Joe Rocket, I'd believe that. I'd also believe that it was originally a bit more than that again, actually. These were on special for $350, and you know how I do love a bargain.

At any rate, I managed not to buy one right then and there, and spent the next 2 weeks cursing that decision. So, when we were back in Bris, I made a point of heading over there especially to pick one up. Luckily they still had a couple left. The silver & black jacket was a size too big, but the only ones that fit me snugly were a bright red, which I wasn't too fussed on. Beggars can't be choosers, and I was happy to get one at all at that price.

The main reason I wanted one is because of this:


There are zip-off side panels that run from the cuff up the inside of your arm, then back down to the waist of the jacket. Zip them off, and there's airflow mesh exposed underneath. So when it's hot (IE, all the time up here), you can simply zip the side panels off and enjoy fresh cooling air. You would have to be trying VERY hard to land on any exposed bits of mesh during a crash though, which is great.

I had to ride the bike in for a service the other day, and wore the jacket. It was absolutely freezing! It was also raining at the time, but we'll leave the discussion about the sensibilities of riding to work in the rain, in an air-flow mesh jacket to another time, OK? So I have high expectations for this jacket, and hope to get a lot of use out of it. I'll probably still use my mesh RallyX jacket through summer, since NOTHING beats the airflow you get with it, but for anything cooler, this will now be my main riding jacket.

I had been looking for a leather jacket with good ventilation for some time, but no one seems to make such a thing. One of the bike shops here had a couple of jackets made with perforated leather front and back, but once they sold out they didn't get any more stock. I almost bought one when I first saw them, but at $500 they were just too expensive. However, since they disappeared, this is the first jacket I've found that was predominantly leather, yet had good ventilation as well.

Now, to find a decent matt-black open face helmet that won't break the bank... :)

Microsoft TechEd08 - Sydney

Microsoft's annual TechEd conference was held this year in Sydney, and Jeremy and myself from Shine were able to attend. As far as nerd-fests go, this is about as big as they get in Australia. And there were some big nerds here too - let me tell you that!

The conference itself was held over 3-4 days at the Darling Harbour Convention Centre, which is not what you'd call a terrible venue to have to turn up at every morning!



As part of the registration, everyone received a TechEd-branded Targus laptop bag. And they were everywhere. It's actually a really good bag, and would be quite expensive to buy new, so I'm guilty of now using it as my main laptop bag back home!!!



The conference itself was very, very good - much better than I was expecting. You are exposed to such a wide range of technology over the course of the 3 days, and it's great to be able to see the systems actually working. Most of the sessions I attended were showing how certain platforms are being used inside Microsoft itself, and the majority of the demos were conducted using the main Microsoft servers that were running the rest of the organisation. For instance, in a Unified Communications demo, the presenter was logged into the regional communications server in Singapore, and had joined a web conference running on a server in Redmond, with participants in both Aus and the US. To see things such as this running in real-life scenarios, warts and all, really hammers home the fact that you could implement this gear in your own firm right now, and get similar results.

As you might expect, Jeremy and I came back with a much clearer picture about a lot of technology, and how it could be incorporated into our business here to give an instant boost in both capability and productivity. Now all we need to do is try to find some money to let us implement the things we'd like! I dare say we won't be the only ones in such a situation though!



I can't wait to go next year. It really was a very worthwhile time, and most enjoyable too boot (despite the "party", which we shall never speak of again. Pinball machines and Xboxes, but no live music or anything enjoyable - do they HAVE to try so hard to live up to their stereotypes???).

Sydney

After the emotional last week in Toowoomba, Jess and I headed off to Sydney late on Friday night. We had an extra long weekend planned before Jess had to fly home, and I had to attend a conference. Having never been to Sydney before, I excited to finally get the chance.

We stayed at Rydges World Square, which was a little expensive, but was very very nice. It's nice to pretend that you're rich, every now and then! The hotel is located a 10 min walk from the city centre, and is on the border between the city and Chinatown, so there's lots to see and do within close walking distance.

We had spectacular weather for the weekend, with clear skies and warm temps (hitting around 20 degrees most days). During the day we did a lot of walking, visiting as many of the touristy places as we could. Down to the Opera House, across the Bridge to Kiribilly and Luna Park, through The Rocks, and around Darling Harbour. One of the highlights was on Saturday night, as we had tickets to see The Phantom of the Opera at the Lyric Theatre at Star City casino. It is meant to be Anthony Warlow's last season, and it was absolutely spectacular.

The short story is we had a great time. There's plenty of photos in our Picasa album here 2008-09-06, Sydney & TechEd 08. Here's brief selection of some favourites.