Shot this weekend, during a barbecue:
A lot has happened lately, hence the lack of updates. Work’s been busy, been flying around Australia a lot. It’s a nice week when I’m at home for the full week. Still, can’t complain too much - at least all my travel’s only been domestic, and while I’ve done three states within a week, it isn’t as bad as some of the people I work with. One guy’s already made Platinum with QANTAS - so far this year, he’s made 33 single leg flights. Many international. Mad bastard.To make the flights a little more bearable, I picked up a 30 gig Creative Zen Vision W. Since doing so, I’ve become very interested in podcasts. I know I’m late to the party, but there’s some seriously good stuff out there! Stuff I’m currently listening to:
- Betty in the Sky with a Suitcase: Interviews by a flight attendant, covering the weird experiences pilots, stewards, and passengers have had while travelling.
- PodAsia Travel: Matthew Holden, a BDM with SAP, covers travel to countries throughout Asia and the world. Nothing too in-depth, but interesting for a business traveller. Plus, he’s an interesting man.
- Escape Pod: Regular Sci-Fi stories, read by the authors and other people. Fun stuff, and good stories.
- Pseudopod: Same as the above, but horror. Affiliated with the same company.
- Good Game: A vodcast off the ABC covering games and gameplay. Cheesy, but good fun. It’s also less cheesy than G4TV, which can only be a good thing. Olivia Munn, I’m looking at you.
The weekend’s been … OK. Good and bad. I’ve had no end of trouble with the new computer, but not for the reason you might expect. The computer itself is great - dual core E6600, 8800GTS, 2 gig RAM, RAID 0, and so on. Great fun. However, it hasn’t been without problems. We go geocaching and own a Garmin ETREX GPSr. Unfortunately, it’s a serial GPSr, as USB GPSrs were relatively expensive when we got it. Serial ports are now relatively rare - my new motherboard supports serial ports, but doesn’t come with one - it only has a riser socket for it, not the port itself. I tried to track one down briefly, but gave up when it didn’t turn out to be easy.
So, I did the next best logical thing - I bought a USB to Serial Port adaptor. Not so smart. Apparently, there are varying levels of quality. Mine’s a Huge Pine based chipset. For what it’s worth, apparently it’s almost the cheapest. It’s a piece of crap, to be blunt - every time GSAK tries to download my waypoints from the GPSr, my computer bluescreens. Not very impressed, to say the least. About the only bright side is that I can upload waypoints, which at least means I can still go geocacheing. Which leads me into my next point …
I’ve finally updated the caches we found about a year ago. Now that the house is finished, we’re planning on starting to go geocacheing on a regular basis again. I’m also thinking of finally getting a decent camera - my old reliable Canon A70, while having been good, is starting to date a little. That and the lens shutter is dying. So, at this point, I’m looking at either an EOS 400D or a Nikon D80. I’m up for a flight to the US half-way through this year (assuming things don’t change), so it’d be an ideal time to claim back the GST.
I’ve also been busy writing for a commercial games site. I was offered a staff position about a month ago, and between writing news articles, reviews, and generally learning the ropes, time’s been somewhat lacking. Still, I’m gradually getting on top of (and ahead) of everything. At some stage, I need to make a trip out to the State Library to grab a bunch of books I’ve been meaning to read.
So, this weekend I’ve:
- Finished doing the internal renovations we were planning. Thank god.
- Put on two homebrews - an Indian Pale Ale, complete with home-boiled hops, and a fairly stock Cerveza.
- Sat in the sun for too long. Slightly burned, but feeling good.
- Had a barbecue with some friends and met their baby properly. The dogs were most interested.
Stuff I’d like to get through over the next few weeks:
- Write a followup to my experiences in Japan and some more about the theory of gaming.
- Complete the review of Spellforce 2: Dragon Wars.
- Write up my opinions of Masters of Doom.