We had a BBQ sunday arvo to get everyone together and exchange some monkeys. Good turn out, but a cold sunday afternoon isn’t the best time to entertain, but everyone ate and drank, and all was good. I am looking forward to hopefully getting a new laptop in the next few weeks. My laptop is now 6 years old and can barely run Fedora. Sometimes I have to wait 5 minutes for the keys I have typed to popup on the screen, very annoying. Anyway Dell’s 640M with a Dual Core chip looks like the one i’ll be getting. 14 inch screen, DVD writer, all for about $1500. I am thinking about upgrading my desktop computer as well, 2Ghz doesn’t seem to kick it like it used too. Maybe I’ll go for a Dual Core Pentium D. Apparantly the Pentium D 805 is an anomaly similar to my trusty Celeron 300A, which can be over-clocked stable at 150% the speed at what it’s supposed to run. So maybe I’ll get one of those. Currently I think this is one of the fastest CPUs available (when overclocked), and it only costs $200. 7 years on, my Celeron 300A is still running at 450. I am looking forward to some speed, especially since I’ve started playing with Kino and Aqsis the Renderman. mmm, speed.

Thank you to Glen for fixing my 4 inch LCD screen that I broke two years ago whilst trying to build a home-made projector. I’m just testing it now. Its NTSC, so I am trying to configure my Hollywood Plus MPEG decoder card to output an NTSC signal. Its nearly working, there are some weird options I need to pass to the kernel module to get it to work properly.I’m playing back the Pussy Cat Dolls film clip but they are looking a bit pink and green. Ahh well, I’ll get it working eventually I guess. I also discovered a sweet video editing program for linux, called Kino, that rivals Premiere in functionality. Looks like it is pretty powerful, unfortunately I dont have enough footage of anything to make a decent movie. Look forward to playing with that a little bit more in the future; maybe I can edit together all the footage of Steve and Dani’s wedding with some music so I can’t here my stupid drunken voice. Fishie also returned last Sunday from the UK, which was 4 days earlier than I expected. Welcome back Fishie.

My condolences go to Devo, whom I have now helped break bones on 3 occasions. Firstly it was his rib when he face-planted into some brown snow at Mt Buller a few years ago. About 2 years ago I helped him break his Sternum by leading him down the side of Mt Macedon on a mountain bike, and yesterday, again on Mt Macedon, Devo smashed two of his teeth and broke his arm after a high-speed collision with a rock. Justin ferried him to the hospital, after Burgers had helped him to the road, while Justin and I fetched the cars. I think Burgers was in nearly as much shock as Devo, being the only witness, and first on the scene, as Justin and I were a little further down the mountain. I have now been banned by my wife and mother from ever riding down that mountain again. Best wishes Devo.

Well Danielle is gone, hence my 3 second tribute video below. Danielle is leaving to find love in Ireland and Mel will miss her very much. We said goodbye to her on Sunday (she leaves Wednesday) after we ripped some CDs for her so that she could get some songs on her new dodgey Dodo-Melbourne Grand Prix MP3 player. We went over to her house in Bacchus Marsh where some of her family had attended a small going-away gathering. I ate lots of party-pies and rum balls. Mel and I also drove past the hills that I had walked through the monday night before, which brought back adrenalin filled and painful memories… To more disappointing news: my super new video camera that I bought on Ebay doesn’t include an external source capturing, which is one of the key reasons I brought it. The NTSC version does have it, but not the PAL version. Panasonic didn’t include it in the PAL version because it would have had to pay more taxes to sell it in Europe as a Video Recording Device rather than just a Camcorder. So that pissed me off a bit. I emailed Panasonic to see if they had any firmware to turn the camera into an NTSC version. Hopefully they can deliver something, but I doubt they will. I might have to buy an NTSC version off ebay. Booo.

See video here