The loo.....

Well, work has begun, the builders name is Bob! and he reckons he will be done in about 10 days.

Going Solar

Yup, its the year of green, and this is the first step, solar power! This wee beaut can charge almost anything from your phone to your portable dvd player. It comes with a myriad of connectors and a really handy camera battery charging device. It charges itself via solar or you can charge it up via USB of you are in a rush. It will hold a charge for up to 3 months and will achieve full power in 3-8 hours of direct sunlight depending on weather conditions indoor/outdoor etc. Solar power is really viable over here in Oz.

More content....

There has been a few requests for me to increase the content of canine material on the blog so here are close-ups of the dogs noses.

Its back!!!!

Yup, its back. The greatest invention since beer is back at the strand. Its the same mobile loo we had for the wedding. We are getting our bathroom renovated (finally, we sort of started it a year ago....) so starting today we are gonna be living in a construction site.

How cool is this!!!!

Check out the link here. This is the begining of the next phase of mobile computing! The software takes data from the cellphone's compass and GPS coordinates to understand where you're standing and what you're looking at. A "radar view" then applies a visual information layer on top of the camera display as you pan around your environment. Its called an augmented reality browser.

Rock'n'Roll

Twas Liams 50th at the weekend and the instruments came out around 2am, here we both are in the traditional 2am rock stance with one leg ona chair and a glass of shiraz close at hand.

Weekend Roundup

We went to a fancy wine bar called Must on friday night with Magda and Martin. Great craic, food and wine was had by all.

Then on satuday it was my neighbour Liam's suprise 50th birthday party. We were all waiting in the front room as he came in, SUPRISE! Great craic.

Only three more weeks of work then holidays. This term has gone by so fast its hard to believe its been 2 months since the wedding!

The Recording......

Well, it all went great. We recorded a few pieces, mostly star wars and a few others too. Hopefully it works out well and there will be more work available!

Serenity

We finally got around to watching all the episodes and we watched the film last night. Fantastic show!

Recording this friday

Perth is a pretty quiet town. Remote and not really on the way to anywhere, which is why you never get to see those cloud-streaks left after high altitude planes as Perth is not on the flight path to anywhere WHICH is why it is quite unusual for the soundtrack for the new installment of star wars to be recorded in Perth (another link here)! It is set between episodes 3 and 4 and will focus on the minor characters and may span up to 400 eposides! So we are going in to the ABC studios on Friday to record something...details are sketchy at the moment but all going well I will finally be invloved with something star-wars-ish. May the force be with my viola sightreading!

1000th post!!!!

Well blogfans, its been a while and I never thought I would see the day, 1000 posts! It has been really enjoyable doing this blog for the last few years. I think its most practical use was the time when Feargal came on his first visit and pretty much know his way around the entire city just by recognising landmarks that had been posted on the blog. Its also been a great way to share what the craic is over here without bombarding everyone with inane emails and clogging up inbox's with photo after photo of the dogs ;). If you are ever bored and have some free time on the net, go and browse through the archive section, its great fun to see what was going on this time last year, or even 3 years ago! With an average of 400 posts per year now I can safely say that the 10,000 post will be some time in 2035. So, a big THANK YOU to everyone for reading and your positive comments and remarks. It makes it all worthwhile.

Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes 'vs' Crunchy Nut Clusters. FIGHT

 
Which one is better? I have been sampling both for the last few weeks and find the clusters to have a little more bang for your dollar, whereas the regular c-nuts are probably healthier...choices choices choices.

Finn's range...

 
Every time we take a photo of Finn, instead of smiling, he just says smile and then gets back to doing what he was doing so last night we had a photoshoot. This is teh only way to get him to smile, by saying "show me your teeth"
 
Here is his other smile. So i tried a different approach, i said "show me your happy face", and he came up with this:
 
Hilarious!
 
And this is his train playing face. What a range, watch out hollywood!

d'video

 
Martin and Magda dropped the wedding DVD around the other day, it is great. We haven't taken the time to look at all the wedding photos since everyone left so it was really great to see all the footage of the day and to relive the moment.

The garden

 
Margaret did an amazing amount of work on our garden while she was over here during the wedding, including laying down some grass seed and establishing a boarder between the flowerbed and the garden but it looks like the wind carried some of the seeds into the flower bed, which as you can see is thriving!

Woof woof

 
We won tickets to see Cesar Millan last night. He is a dog trainer who "rehabilitates dogs and trains people", so his seminar was really interesting and usefull for handling difficult dogs AND also some kids!
 
His basic message is to treat dogs like DOGS and not like humans by approaching each situation with a calm assertive demeanour.

EUREKA!!!

 
I figured it out. I use the existing tube AND elastic band the cap of the tube onto the bottom and hey presto, good posture violin hold!

Wiplmod addendum

I forgot to post the pickup atachment
 
It is a fishman V-100 pickup. Again, I had to shave a bit off the bridge legs to get it to fit and after a small dabble with cable ties, white tac and considering superglue, I went with the old classic, VELCRO!
 

The shoulder rest delima

 
Here is more of that shoulder rest. It works good but I sure could use some help figuring out how to get a shoulder rest onto its curved nether regions.....
 

Wiplstix Mod

So remember that wipplestix from a few blogs ago..... Well it arrived two days ago. It handles jsut like a regular violin but 1/4 the volume and tricky to hold as it has a curved base and rotates when you string cross SO out with the Leatherman. My plan was to replace the tail piece with a 1/16th size one with fine tuners, replace all the strings with dominants, attach a pickup, conjure up a way to attach a shoulder-rest and make the container (2" PVC pipe) look less like a bomb.

 

Here is a detail of one of the tuning pegs, which you adjust with a penny, or in this case a 1 cent euro which I have white-tac’ed to the peg-plate, so in other words, quite awkward to adjust on the fly.

 

And here is the tailpiece detail. Beautifully made, but in order to change a string you have to take the whole thing apart SO my first task was to replace that.


 

So off with everything, the bridge popped right off and the endpin (which is an A pitch pipe (genius!!)) also popped right out, luckily it didn’t pop IN or it would have been a hell of a job to retrieve it.