Use of Weapons

Lollipop exchange scheme

Nerf!

Hmmmm....

Check out those shoes!

Goopy Beard

The last of it...

The last bit of snow in the park...

B. A. N. A. N. A. S.

She sang this for the entire 30 minute walk into town the other day.

Normal Service will resume shortly

Yes.

Yes, I know!!

Be patient...there's a couple of blog posts coming this month.

Honest.

In the meantime...

Shopping 1, oh...one!

Flo and I went shopping today. Ostensibly we were buying a few books and getting some "furry prawn" sushi...but we ended up stopping for "a snack", a pair of ill-fitting "pink cloppy shoes", some other things, and a bratwurst in a roll...Then we came home.

Snack!

We were there early enough for ALL the oddballs: crutch-man, cowboy-hat-dude and even sleeping-homeless woman!

Then...in a heartless, sushi vs shoewear showdown...

Then we spent the afternoon rockin out on some trikes!

Bah!

ZOMG!! Twitter is down....where can I rant?!?!!!11!!one

Feeeeeeeessssshhhhhh!!!

Today Ian and I took the kids to the heinously expensive Blue Reef Aquarium that opened a few weeks ago in place of the old "Wild Walk"....I say it was heinous, but to be honest I thought it was brilliant, though typically the girls weren't as impressed...well not all the time.






Still, I found it a thoroughly entertaining way to spend a good 2-3 hours, and the best bit was watching Flo interact with the 3D IMAX film about whales and dolphins and that....reaching out to stroke them, recoiling from huge whale flippers and trying to catch pieces of floating seaweed. It was awesome.


Esmae took her 3D glasses off because it was too scary.

All of Ian's pictures are bound to be better.

Testing the "rock" ;-)

In other news, my brother just asked (via email, because he's either in Sumatra, Russia, or (last I heard from him South Korea (for a day!))) if I thought a 1.4GHz laptop processor was slow/crap....the 1st 'laptop' I ever had (15 years ago) had an ~50 MEGA HERTZ processor!!

guh guh guh GEEK!

I've been running an extreme beta of Google's Chromium OS on my Acer Aspire One [aao] for the last day or two, and I have to say apart from a few niggles it's actually pretty decent...

You see, I bought this netbook for 3 reasons: web stuff while sat on the sofa, light tinkering with USB connected things (arduino, beagle, etc) and light media stuff...It's been great at all of these things, except the arduino thing since the upgrade to Ubuntu Karmic (of course, I have workarounds)...but...The main thing I use it for is web stuff...for this, Chromium seems ideal!

Booting off a 4Gb USB drive takes about 10 seconds, time to desktop is about 3 more...The Atheros wifi worked OOB (Broadcom doesn't apparently), it's uber simple (a chromium start page and time/date, network manager, power indicator and options icons up top)...annoyingly it's set my keyboard layout to US, has Hulu & Pandora (only work in US) on the home page and no way to customise that page...but I've not really gone under-the-hood yet....that's what I'm about to do....

Anyway. The current plan is to partition the SSD into 2 4gigish partitions, stick this on one and rethink my linux install on the other....hmmm.

Oh yea, didn't get killed by piglung....all is cool...

[EDIT] Oh yeah...HIBERNATE WORKED OOB!!! This is a new one on me!

Oink!

Yeah. Not so cool...turns out it is H1N1...

It's like having human flu but the gubmint say I shouldn't leave the house. So Rosie (and Flo) very kindly picked up some drugs for me, viz:

Typhoid Mary

Despite a head full of snot and a throat full of barbed wire I had a considerable amount of fun today.

Once Flo had it in her head that I wasn't speaking all that often, she pretty much entertained herself for the morning...doing jigsaws, pretending to be a cake seller to "The Silent Prince" (my crowning role), and taking turns using the laser pointer to annoy Moshi. We almost didn't notice the rain.

After lunch we headed off for Esmae's party where I adopted the role of Science Professor and the assorted kids made various machines, models and other contrivances....I should have taken photographs (I will next time I do it), but here's a small highlight of what was constructed with apologies where I've forgotten names:

• A bird like structure complete with eyes, beak, teeth, arms, hat and antenna [Felix? Small, sweet boy. Maybe his name began with R]

• A brainwave detection device which could tell what someone was thinking (yay for a microphone glued to a wire then to some headphones!)...which doubled as a Karaoke machine [DeeDee...not the Ramone...but she was punk, that's for sure. Awesome!]

• A Hamster Run (2 flashing RGB LEDs glued to some circuit boards attached by wire, and a plastic box) [Also DeeDee]

• A rocket [Flo]

• A robot brain. This was a truly awesome mini construction, with a big switch a flashing flight and a weird arrangement of magnets and wires... [Isaac]
  

• "A real computer" (broken graphics card with a button and a light attached [Gracie & Flo]

• An MP3 player (a mobile glued to a headset, and an RGB LED) [Mathew]

• A robot in a jacuzzi (various resistors, caps, etc wired together into a doll, in a plastic bowl) [Scarlet]

There were a few other things, but my nose is running on the keyboard now....hang on a sec...

Anyway, it was great! I always forget how creative kids can be when you say "here's a load of stuff, let's make something"....some of them have a problem not being told what to make, but eventually they all get really into it.

If only I had 4 pairs of hands, and 3 glue guns (thanks for the loan Rosie!)...Not sure Esmae was impressed with the book of greek & roman myths I got her this year as she was with the netbook last year ;-)

Was too fucked to carry the 6 boxes of bits back, so am now horizontal on the sofa in front of the fire hoping I this isn't manbirdpig flu and that whatever it is it fucks off soon...before Wednesday anyway.

Redux

I appear to have a small, very annoying, ulcer just on the inside of my top lip...On the other hand The Annoybours (tm) took in a parcel that turned out to be the NatGeo Dinosaur Encyclomapedia thing I ordered for an as yet undesignated recipient, and announced they are moving!!

They said they're having problems with "the toilet".

We all know the real reason...Moshi loves metal!

Neighbours!

Everybody needs good neighbours....with a little understanding, you can find the perfect plaaannn!!!!

I found the perfect fucking plan!

Some of you may know that my neighbour can be seriously annoying. I think the clincher is the fact that one of them screams like a girl when he's arguing, and they argue a lot....anyway:

Over the weekend and on Monday night there appeared to be some kind of screaming/swearing match going on every couple of hours. I think it was something to do with a game on the PS3 because intermittently there were the screams, cries and stuttering gunfire of war (and no cops turned up outside)...all at stupid hours....mostly during the night.

This really harshed my work day out, so I decided to have some fun while I was out of the house and they were presumably sleeping off their slanging match.

Before I left for work in the morning, with very bleary eyes, I accidentally turned the amp on and slipped while turning the volume...Apparently I mistakenly set the volume to 8*.

I spent the day occasionally connecting to the media machine and making it play music I thought they might appreciate: Nirvana, Living Colour, Rage Against The Machine, Aphex Twin, Goto80, (1 song on repeat for 2 hours :)....AC/DC...Sabbat!

They left me an awesome note.

I blamed the cat.



* I never put it to 8. 7 makes the windows rattle upstairs....4 is for rockin' it up...3 more usual

Today

I spent the day cycling in the rain, sorting computers out, eating chicken, drinking guiness and lazing on sofas...you?

A blog you say?

Novel idea...been ages since I posted. Soz.

I've been busy, and to be honest nothing of any major importance has happened...except I've found a new improved method of annoying/entertaining Moshi, viz:

The other reason I've not been posting is that I've been on a bit of a mission sorting out free recycled computers for a few people, planning my FOSS assault on "Buy Nothing Day" and upgrading the home network, about which I'll have a geek-out post soon (promise).