I have been busy working and doing stuff. Mel and I have been renovating, Mel has been painting the ceiling today. The weekend was wet and cold, so nothing to exciting happened. I was hoping to go climbing with Fishie before he heads off on Tuesday, but alas no. Too much hail, rain and wind. I did manage to get out on the bike for about an hour on sunday morning. I trekked up to the top of Mt Holden, so I could come flying down the track on the top, except I was buggered when I got to the top, and couldn’t be bothered pedalling. I think I fell off the bike about twice on the way down; it was slippery and my brakes weren’t working the best. But I did manage to get some head cam footage and a nice GPS dataset.



I have been now trying to render the bikes speed over the top of the head cam footage. How the hell do you do that, you ask? Well I’m still working on it. I have had to convert the GPS dataset from Degrees-Minutes-Seconds Longitude and Latitude to Northings and Eastings, which took a while to do. When in Northings and Eastings (which is metres North and East) , I could then calculate distance travelled over time and work out the speed. I now just need to interpolate the data to fill in the gaps and then render the current speed over the video, whcih has now been converted into 33000 JPEG stills. Well, It’ll probably be a few days before I have anything to show.




Fishie is off to Canada tomorrow. See you Fishie.

Mark and I did the gauntlet run from the top of Mount Macedon this afternoon. It only took us about 45 minutes to get down, and that was with a puncture. I thought we were going to have some awesome head-cam footage, but the camera was angled a little too low, and the footage consists of about 20 minutes of mostly dirt track, it would have been so much better if the camera was angled up just a few more degrees. I’ll upload it to Google-Video anyway, but don’t get to excited. Unfortuately everyone is scared about going to Macedon to bike ride; sure we’ve lost a few teeth, broken a few bones, but hey, they can always use the brakes. Unfortunately I managed to smash my 2 gigabyte SD card to pieces, by letting it bounce round in my backpack. I only realised that I had smashed it to bits about 30 minutes before I went to the snow 3 weeks ago. I had to go and buy 1 gigabyte SD card from Big W had the weighty price of $66. The card that I broke was a “Magu” brand, and the plastic casing seems to be thinner than the Sandisk cards I have. So from now on I am only getting Sandisk brand; I have a 2 gigabyte card on the way in the mail. Last night, being Saturday night, we went out to farewell Fishie off, before he leaves for Canada next week. Nice evening out, even though Mel and I pike pretty early these days. Paulius was going on about “the drought”, as he always does when he’s pissed. He can’t wait for the drought to end. Soon Paulius, soon.

Welcome to Spring. Winter was quick and mediocre. Where was the snow?.. apparantly in the northern hemisphere.. Mel and I are slowly renovating our spare rooms. We need to plaster, paint and recarpet. I can see it being a long and painful process. We will see. Something cool: Jake2. I read about it on SlashDot a while back. These dudes in .de have recoded the entire Quake 2 engine in Java. That probably doesn’t excite you too much, but its pretty cool. Something else that may or may not be cool is Steorn. They think they have created an over-unity device, which generates more energy than what is put into it.. which defies the basic laws of thermodynamics. Hopefully they can prove the basic laws of thermodynamics wrong – I don’t really want to pay for electricity or petrol anymore. Time will tell. I’m done Blogging… Pork-Lotto.