jayneandmarty.com

Another slideshow. One day I’ll get back to writing about things but sometimes it’s much easier to put heaps of photos up!

And the link to the album.

Here’s the slideshow …..

….. and the link to the album for the larger size shots.

Should be a busy couple of days down here in Geelong … we’re hosting Jayne’s side of the family: Me, Jayne, Peter, Christine, Jayne’s brother Greg, his partner Donna, their kids Nick and Ashlee, Donna’s Dad Dennis, Jayne’s other brother Paul, his wife Catherine and their kids Georgia and Lindsay. And Max, of course. We’re having a big roast lunch, then if anyone has the energy and inclination we might drive to the beach for a hit of cricket.

Watching Nick and Ashlee open their presents this morning was hilarious. Ashlee gets a bit carried away and more than once started ripping open presents for other people. Santa left a trail of red crepe paper through the house and clearly it was snowing at the North Pole as he left snow all over the place like last year. I’ll post some photos later today or tomorrow.

Jayne and I opened our presents last night and I have to mention the cool Nike+iPod system I bought her. You slip a sensor into a special hole in your runners, attach a receiver to your iPod Nano, then go running. It tracks your workout stats: time, distance, average speed and calories burned, and a voice speaks to you through the headphones when you’ve covered 1km, 2km etc. Then when you next plug the iPod into your computer the data is sent to the Nike+ web site, which graphs it all up nicely. It’ll be a really good motivational tool – I want one too (!) but it’s Nano only at the moment.

More soon.

I’ve just implemented a Wordpress plugin that serves up a mobile version of jayneandmarty.com if you visit the site on a mobile device. You won’t see it if you’re on a desktop, but you should see it if you’re on your Blackberry (Rob), iPod Touch, or mobile phone browser.

No special URL (despite what it shows in that screenshot) – just point your mobile device to jayneandmarty.com

Cool huh?! Give it a try and tell me if it works. Just make sure you’re on a plan that doesn’t charge you a fortune for data transfer.

I’ll do martinjy.com shortly.

Spiderman, Spiderman, does whatever a spidey can.

First day of holidays yesterday and I’m into the gunky jobs. Cleaned out the moss- and leaf-filled gutters and fixed the busted downpipe at the other end of the house. Tried not to think about the two-storey drop while I was up there.

A solid days’ work by Jayne, Peter and Christine yesterday saw all the slats go up. Hooray! They even worked through the rain!

There was some debate over how to space the slats, i.e. perfectly spaced across the entire 10m width, or just 90mm apart. In the end we figured that using the 90mm method would be much faster, would enable us to use one of the decking boards as a spacer (you can see it in the first photo), and if one or two slats didn’t match up perfectly to the vertical posts it wouldn’t matter. We were right, it looks perfect anyway so it would have been a big waste of time if we’d tried to mark out slat position by dividing 10m by however many slats we wanted.

The slats themselves are 42 x 42 and the top and bottom rails are 120 x 42. We chose the dressed & primed pine over lasered pine despite the extra 25% cost. Zero knots in the wood and no need to hand-prime was worth the extra money, in our opinion. We still have to paint it but because it’s all pre-primed we don’t have to get to that for a few weeks.

We’re very pleased with the result, and also with our decision to stay faithful to the 80s style. You sometimes see houses with this style that don’t quite look right – we reckon it’s because the owners tried to cut costs by using bigger spacing or smaller timber, so we tried hard to ensure that it looks solid (but not too chunky) when you’re next to it and equally solid from a distance. I reckon we got it right!

I’ve updated the Picasa album but here are a few shots for the blog. I’ll take more when it’s nice and sunny.

The top and bottom rails are in and it’s all ready for the slats tomorrow and Thursday.

I’ve added a few photos to the Picasa album.

P.S. The last photo is #2193 since we bought the camera in late May. 2,193 photos in 7 months!!!!! If we were still using standard film that’s about 82 rolls of film, which is definitely more than $1,000 including printing. Love those digital cameras.

OK, so that headline’s a bit over the top. But in this, the age of cheap computer memory, where you can pick up a 2gb USB stick for $29, I reckon it’s OUTRAGEOUS for Sony to charge $40 for an 8mb card. Am I missing something? Is it a “special” sort of memory? I doubt it.

Our stick’s corrupted, so if we want to save anything when we’re playing games I guess we’ll have to fork over the cash.

RORT!

Hopefully there’ll be a lot more of this in the coming months – last night I picked Jayne up from the station and we went straight to the beach for a swim with Max.

Max loves those waves. He launches himself at them but for some reason has taken to opening his mouth on the way through. Not a good look an hour later when he brings it all back up walking down Hitchcock Avenue in Barwon Heads!

We dried off as the sun went down and stopped in at Barwon Orange for a takeaway pizza for dinner. Great way to finish off the week.