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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 below.

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!

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

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

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

Name: Jen Myers
Screen Name/s: deliberatepixel, antiheroine
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