August 2008

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jethro's picture

Toowoomba - in the Suzuki Swift Sport

I am in Toowoomba now. I am currently in a motel room (pictures below) using very fast ADSL2 Internet service provided free by the motel via wireless network.

I got here the fun way.

When I wrote my motorbike off a couple of years ago I waited for some time before replacing it and eventually replaced it with the Suzuki Swift Sport. Since then I have done 18000 km but no real good driving – just city and highway work. Today I got the opportunity to really go driving with it.

The videos are on YouTube. They are all filmed on public roads using a camera held in my hand while driving and holding the wheel. So the image quality and stability is sacrificed for safety. Additionally I didn’t push the car beyond the speed limit. However the roads are so twisty that was not necessary to obtain some great footage.

jethro's picture

Mountain biking in glass house mountains

Sunday afternoon I went mountain biking. This had been planned for 2 weeks with 3 other mates – however they all piked on me – one at the last minute the girl! No matter I went by myself. I went to reconnoitre an old cycling haunt that I hadn’t been to for about 3 or 4 years to see if the tracks were still all rideable. The area I went to was the glasshouse mountains lookout. See the map imagebelow.

The track starts at the top pf the hill where there is a lookout. Going along a dirt road there are plenty of little tracks on the side of the road to ride on for a bit more fun. Finding the right down hill was tricky. There were several and I went down 2 wrong ones before finding the right one. From there I zigzagged through the bottom of the valley and then up onto the next ridge, Going down into the next valley again was fun and very technical. Lots of opportunities for air but I was very careful not to get too much as the other side of the bumps was always unpredictable. Motor bikes have been chewing these tracks up though they are not allowed in the state forest.. From here it was a long hard slog back to the top of the hill and the road from where it was just a hard fast ride back to the starting point.

The boys missed out!

jethro's picture

Mission: build a HiFi media centre PC

Objective - build a Media Centre PC that out put HD sound and video utilising the HDMI digital format. Must be able to record 2 channels simultaneously (the Olympics is coming up!)

Budget - there wasn’t one – though there's only so much you can spend doing this.

Parts

  • Zalman HD160XT Plus Home Theatre Case Black
  • Zalman 500W Noiseless Power Supply with Heatpipe
  • Zalman CNPS9500 LED CPU Heatsink
  • Intel S775 Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16GHz CPU
  • ASUS S775 P5Q Core 2 Motherboard
  • Integrated HD Sound Card
  • Integrated Gigabit Network Connection
  • DDR2 4GB Geil 800MHz Dual Channel DDR2 Kit
  • 1TB Seagate 7200rpm 32M Serial ATA HDD
  • 1TB Seagate 7200rpm 32M Serial ATA HDD
  • Pioneer BDC-S02BK Blu-Ray Reader/DVD Writer Combo
  • ASUS ATI 3850 256M PCIe HDMI Video Card
  • Hauppauge HVR-2200 Dual HDTV + Analog Tuner PCIe
  • Microsoft Media Centre Keyboard and Remote
  • Logitech Cordless Mouse
  • Powerware 5110/500VA Line Interactive UPS
  • Vista Ultimate 32 bit

Construction

jethro's picture

Cool clouds

These cool clouds were in the sky when we got home yesterday afternoon

had to get a photo and ended up taking a few

these are stitched together to make a panoramic picture

20080805 clouds panoramic

amanda's picture

Geek Girl Blogger - Jen Myers


This weeks GGB is Jen Myers from the US of A… her survey is below.

Name: Jen Myers
Screen Name/s: deliberatepixel, antiheroine
jmyers Personal Blog/s: deliberatepixel.com; I'm also one of the bloggers behind skepchick.org, a community of bloggers interested in rational and critical thinking with a feminist slant.
Social Networks: I think I'm on virtually every social network out there, but I use Twitter and Facebook the most.
Current Employment:  Web Designer
Location/country: Columbus, OH, US

jethro's picture

was going to blog

but i didn’t - tough luck

nite

jethro's picture

Scobleizer is following me!

Wow. I have been part of the alpha trial of socialmedian for a while. Today they moved to Beta.

Today Robert Scoble followed me on socialmedian. Cool!

Here is my spyjournal socialmedian news site, and here is Roberts.

 

socialmedianSo what is socialmedian?

socialmedian is social news network that connects people with personalized news and information. socialmedian enables you to easily keep up-to-date on the news that matters to you and to people who share your interests. (from the FAQ)

Basically you can create news streams of relevant information to a news topic or category of information. So in my case I have created numerous channels including Drupal, Excel, Microsoft Office and Windows Home Server. As I and other people find news articles or websites relevant to these topics we can add their RSS feeds or the individual page or article to the stream. This can be done as simply as clicking a link on a tool bar. In addition, socialmedian will also recommend sources for you to add based on the topics you have entered for your News Network.