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.
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