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Sydney to Gong ride 2010

First ride with my new bike. Finished in 3hrs and 9 minutes. Better than last year but not as good as 2008 (3:05). Didn't do as much training leading up to this one but still felt good and new bike went very well. Ride technique was good. Less back pain probably due to better sized bike. Had a light breakfast and a goo after 1hr and then another after the second hour. Lots of stops at traffic lights slowed me down a bit. Got off to an early start at 6:10. Rob didn't ride this year - left it too late to start training. Weather was perfect. Not to hot, rain overnight so the air was fresh and no wind. Good to be alive!

iRecorder - Published!!!

I finally got around to self publishing my first book online.

Clika da pikta to order a copy from www.lulu.com

Disclaimer

This blog is mostly for ill considered mind dumps of random thoughts. Anything that may seem personal or deep was probably considered for a microsecond before committing to type. Thoughts flow from one to the other without much consideration for the truth nor adequate sentence construction. Good writing this is not... 'tis just a place to dump thoughts.

ATekky Holiday

Looking back over the last two 'n 'alf weeks of holidays, I'd have to put most of it down to being a tekky dad and catching up with a whole lot of new tekky things. In the first few days I finished off the Christmas lights, keeping up with the rest of the street and warding off the harsh criticisms of my girls who claimed to be ashamed of my mediocre display and deeply embarrassed by the squiggly red zigzag on the roof. A new bank of icicle lights, straightened up squiggle, some new LED lights and blue stars on a stick that the girls actually bought themselves, brought the house back to respectability adjacent to stiff competition.

After the lights, I spent days fiddling with the new Windows 7 config on all the PC's to get the free antivirus, MS Essentials and a daily backup using Synctoy to the 1TB USB drive on the rumpus pc. This all seemed to work until I discovered that Rumpus PC was only staying on for a minute or two after it woke up for it's scheduled backup. Googled it and found that a different timer setting is used when the PC is woken on schedule. Changed the registry key and all seems to be working ok.

Boxing day involved setting up Julie's Wii. That was easy enough and lots of fun to play.

Andrea decided she was going to have friends over for New Years Eve... all well and good but the stereo in the rumpus room sucks and there were no outside speakers. Off to JB at Miranda to research Amps and speakers. After an hour of checking input jacks to make sure that all 7 of the inputs downstairs could be set up and not getting any service from the mostly under 12 staff, I decided to head to the Good Guys at Taren Point. Service was the exact opposite, before I even found the Amps I was beating the salesmen off with the 'just looking.... fck off' grunt that seemed to work well for a while. Eventually after repeated approaches, the manager and another salesman helped me to pick a Yamaha AMP with 2 zones that looked the goods along with a nice set of Accusound speakers. Rigged the surround speakers as the zone 2 speakers and drilled a hole through the wall to run the speaker cables. Hooked everything up but didn't have enough RCA inputs to put the CD or VCR in. Bought a composite video cable but that didn't work.

Sound through the speakers from the PC was excellent. Tim noticed the subwoofer was not working. A new cable fixed that.

New Years Eve party was a big success. Kids stayed up till 5am and no complaints from neighbours.

Fireworks over Sydney Harbour were the most spectacular I have seen... they claim they will be better next year so it may be worth a visit to the harbour to see them first hand.

Missed Jodie a lot, she went on hols to Berrara on the south coast with b.f. Lok's family from boxing day and didn't come back until Sunday 3rd. Monday 4th I left with Jodie and Georgia for Fisho. Boat in tow, tightened up the cable brakes and had to stop a few times to fix the wobbly bimini. Put the boat in the water as soon as we got there for a twilight cruise... obviously did this a bit too quickly as I realised after putting the boat in the water that I had not put the bloody plug in. Fortunately I hadn't taken the car off the ramp yet and Jodie was just tying it up. I called to her to untie it and throw me the rope ... like now. Managed to get the boat back on the trailer and hoisted it out of the water. Water ran out of the back of it for at least 15 minutes... we were very lucky not to have started the holiday at fisho with a sunken boat. Put the plug in and we were good.

Next tech challenge was the iPhone that I got from work to test over the hols. Downloaded a bunch of free and cheap apps that are just brilliant. Mostly location aware information apps. Google mobile is brill. Pick it up and say the search argument - how easy is that, takes your current location into account to order the results based on proximity. Another app to tell me the weather and tide charts for the area along with the radar cloud view. Configured the tethered modem feature to save swapping the sim in and out of the modem. That worked a treat - the speed is good enough to watch iView (ABC news) according to their website it was receiving at 1.8Mbps.

Other tekky fun these hols included setting up Andrea's Tom Tom GPS, almost setting up the old study PC at Fisho (forgot to bring a VGA cable and the Windows 7 disk).

Back to work tomorrow... another week up here would be better.

New Years day 2010 - Off the Train

2010 already!
GTF outta here. Can't be.
As contributions to life go, 2009 had a lot to offer, on reflection but it just went by so damn fast.
I'm going to blame it all on maintenance. Whether it's friends, children, machines, toys or spouse, there is always something in need of attention that just fills up the time between the significant moments. Sometimes of course, the maintenance moments become significant moments but for the most part, there is just too much distraction.
For a brief moment on New Years day 2010, when the party troup had left, cleaning up was done and I was left alone downstairs for nearly 4 hours, I was maintenance free... trouble was, it felt like I was just waisting time. Relaxing and doing nothing but read or watch the birds fly by just didn't sit right. Constant nagging thoughts of stuff I thought I would get done over the break, including writing just wouldn't go away. In all that free time I only managed to read about 30 pages of my book. Can't escape the dogma of being acheivement driven. Everything is measured by achievement. It's bothering me to think that if I had more days with spare time, what would I do with them.
2009 was a great year for getting a lot of 'me' things done. My first school reunion in 29 years was a real blast. Organising it on Facebook was also special since I've spent most of my working and personal life trying to apply technology to improving standard of living.
The 'Mancation' in May which got me back on a trail bike for the first time in over 20 years was another revelation of missed opportunity. On reflection, maturing as husband and father involved way too many situations where 'good fun' was assimilated with immaturity.

The combination of my first school reunion in the same year that Andrea finished high school produced some interesting angles of thought for me this year. Reliving those tumultuous times between school and university, between adolescence and responsibility through Andy's experiences then seeing faces from my personal experiences of the era was so reflective, it was like being in a time machine most of the year.

The retrospection brought me back to revisiting things that were important but somehow dropped off my agenda as life's responsibilities between age 25-45 took over. In hindsight, those twenty years were like being on a train. I set the tracks in a certain direction, then just got onboard for the ride. Speed and distance were the only important factors for all that time.

2009 feels like the year that I got off the train. I spent some time looking back at where I have been, I contrasted that to my children and spoke to a number of old friends to compare journeys. As I sit contemplating if 4 hours on new years day were wasted, it occurs that I don't want to get back on the train for the next 20 years. I want flexibility and the ability to change direction. To adjust to this, I need to change a lot of things. Starting with my measure of achievement. On the train, there was no need to spend time thinking about direction so choosing a direction was never an achievement. Off the train, choosing a direction comes first, velocity and distance are secondary. I need to find value in time spent considering different options / directions that were never present on the train.

At this point, I hope to find a lot more value in experiences and sponteneity and worry a whole lot less about achievement. Fact is, I've achieved most of what I set out to. Savouring the moments is now more important than finding more things to achieve.

The Salmon Route - Sunday October 25, 2009

Took the Maxum out for the first time today since May. Forecast was for rain in the afternoon. Got out at 7am from Oatley. Water was perfectly flat, no wind and no rain to start with. Went out across the bay heading for ocean. Swell was reasonable so went out a bit further than previous. On the way back, stopped in the middle of a maelstrom of fish flopping about, presumably feeding. Big buggers too. Got the rods out and had a bash.. lots of bites but nothing on hook. Followed the pack of what turned out to be salmon. The bubbling water where they fed was overseen by seagulls and pretty soon a small armada of fishing boats surrounded us and began following the pack. All around us people were pulling in fish after fish... big uns, mostly 60cm some as big as 90cm.. but still nada on the good ship Maxum. Luckily a passing fisherman took pity on us, offered some of his lures and some advice on how to bag em. Followed that, got bites but promptly lost hooks and snapped lines in the process of pulling them in. Eventually the same boat came back, admitted they had caught more than they could carry and offered us 2 of theirs.. So all was not lost. Came home with 2 60cm red salmon.. at least I think that's what it is...