I’ve neglected this blog in the last few months. Simply, I haven’t felt like sitting down to write posts and share stuff – it takes time and my attention has been on other things. The wonders of modern technology may change that.
My new iPhone 3GS shoots video as well as photos, and the clever people at the various web services I use (i.e. Flickr, Wordpress, Picasa etc) offer all sorts of ways to use them together.
The iPhone video app includes basic editing functionality (simple trimming of the start and finish of your clip, not cut and paste editing), and because I can email that clip to Flickr, which is set to autopost to this blog, the process from my end has changed significantly.
No longer do I have to shoot the video on our “real” video camera, go home, connect the camera to the laptop, edit the footage, export it and upload it to YouTube. To share simple video updates with you I can shoot the video on the iPhone, trim it, email it to Flickr, and Flickr will autopost it here. Straight away. Pretty cool.
The video in the previous post is the level of visual and aural quality you can expect. What do you think?
I’ve almost finished editing the video of Georgia and Lindsay’s first day ever at the snow (but can’t finish yet as there’s another 15 minutes of footage on a tape somewhere … can’t find it). It’s pretty good so far but it ends abruptly (!).
I wasn’t going to put it on YouTube as it’s 23 minutes long, but if enough of you want to see it then I will. Otherwise I’ll just cut a DVD for Paul and Catherine.
Over to you guys…….do you want it on YouTube or not?
I’ve been slack with the jayneandmarty.com posts over the last few weeks. No excuse other than I was on holidays and didn’t really feel like sitting in front of the computer. But I’m back now, so here’s a round up of what we’ve been up to.
Wakeboarding day trip to Eildon, 29 Dec 07
On Sat 29th Jayne, me, Jon B and Iao went to Eildon for a day’s wakeboarding. Jayne and I left Geelong at 6.30am with Georgia and Lindsay, who had stayed an extra night with us. Paul and Catherine (and Nicki) were at Eildon for the day too, so the plan was to drive the girls up there and hand them back to their owners before meeting up with Jon and Iao and heading for the water. The drive up took us just under 3 hours (we went the Princes Freeway/Ring Road/Hume Freeway/Seymour/Yea/Alexandra route, which was smooth and easy) and after a bit of stuffing around at the Eildon shops and a wait at the busy Jerusalem Creek boat ramp we were on the water by 11am.
The lake’s at about 23%, which is around 20m below full, but there’s still plenty of water there. We tooled out of the Jerusalem Creek inlet at the obligatory 5 knots and headed right towards the Big River arm looking for some flat water. There were heaps of boats out on the water (understandable, as it was at least 35 degrees, Christmas week and a Saturday) but we managed to find a reasonably sheltered bay and shared it with only three or four other boats, one of which was a Pride Cheetah like ours called Herbie.
On Jon’s second run he had a big stack and ripped his boardies up the side. The rip got progressively worse as the day went on and by 3pm we were keeping an eye out for the water cops in case they busted him for indecent exposure. You can see the rip in the photo just before the “I’m the King of the World” one in the slideshow. At about 3pm we met up with Paul and Catherine. I had a go on their biscuit behind Nicki’s boat and Lindsay had a board behind our boat (video below). We finally pulled the boat out at about 4.30, all of us stuffed. After a quick feed from the Eildon bakery we cruised home, arriving just before 9pm.
It was a big day, and I’d do it like that again, but even better would be staying up there for the night. It was a bit like driving to the snow for the day – by 5pm all you want to do is relax in the pub and talk about the day over a beer or two. The last thing on your mind is driving home.
Picasa slideshow
Lindsay’s wakeboarding video
Golf with Peter and Christine
On Jan 2 Peter and I went for a hit of golf at Queenscliff, and Christine came too to drive the cart. Apparently she’d never been to a golf course before, let alone driven a cart, so it’s no wonder that she was VERY cautious on the throttle for the first three holes. By the fourth, though, she’d got the hang of it and was tearing around like a veteran with a big smile on her face (witness Peter holding on for dear life in the last two pics).
More wakeboarding
On Saturday we went for another board, this time on Corio Bay with Iao, Jed and Gita. The wind was up a bit but we zoomed over to the northern part of the bay to look for shelter and managed to find some reasonably flat water. Jayne won’t go in the bay (sharks) and Gita was just along for the ride but Iao, Jed and I all had a crack. It was Jed’s first time and he (a) managed to get out of the water first go, and (b) looked very comfortable on both edges. He was all smiles whenever he pulled off a decent carve.
Unfortunately I hurt myself on my second run – I caught the front edge, overstretched and then faceplanted. Before my face had even hit the water I knew I’d ripped one of the muscles in my abdomen but I also must have smacked my head around a bit because for the rest of the day and through Sunday I was nauseous and dizzy. This morning I went to the doctor and she confirmed a muscle tear and some ear trauma. Nothing too serious though so I’ll be at work tomorrow.
All in all it was a great couple of weeks off. Having Greg and Donna with us meant that the house was full and busy most of the time (sometimes a bit too busy!) but we all managed to find our own space.
Jayne and I spent plenty of time with each other at the beach, on the boat, with friends and family and just enjoying the hot weather … summer’s great!
You can’t wipe the smile off my face today. My lovely amazing wife bought me an iPod Touch for my birthday (and gave it to me early). I have no idea where she got the money from – maybe she won it on a horse ‘cos there’s certainly four-fifths of nothing in our bank account. Maybe we’re not eating for a fortnight or something.
Anyway, back to the toy. It’s gorgeous. We tried to take some photos but they don’t do it justice. In fact no photo taken by anyone will probably do it justice because the killer feature of this thing is the user interface, i.e. the touch screen. But here are two of me using it anyway. I’m checking my gmail.
It is soooooo slick to use. I love it! I’ve loaded 100 albums onto it and 10 podcasts (just under 5gb), 180 of my favourite photos (116mb), an episode of Summer Heights High (100mb), and four video podcasts (44mb). I tend to keep podcasts that I’ve watched or listened to rather than deleting them but won’t store them on the Touch, that’s what my external HDD is for. I’ll use iTunes to automatically download and sync up new podcasts when they’re published. It’s covered in fingerprints already but I don’t care about that. They wipe off easily enough.
Can’t believe I haven’t heard about this previously, but Rob put me onto the Filipino Prison Thriller video tonight. 6.3 million views so far and 17,000+ comments (although half of them are paying out on Michael Jackson). Awesome.
A few pics from our weekend with John, Bec, Iao, Kate, Damian and special guest star Matty D at Mulwala in late March.
We stayed at Shoreline with the cockies, boarded the lake on Friday arvo and the river on Saturday, and had a couple of lazy nights at the campsite. Good fun.
Right. I’m getting this done. Three weekends ago we had a great time in Apollo Bay/Marengo and I haven’t written about it. Time has conspired against me – I knew that writing about it would take a while. Well now I have half an hour (Desperate Housewives is on and although I used to watch it I don’t anymore), so here we go.
After a lazy breakfast in Anglesea we took our time we along the Great Ocean Road. We’ve driven it plenty of times before but not in the last couple of years, so it was nice doing it again. The traffic wasn’t too bad (we left home early to beat the tour buses) and the weather was clear, so we could see forever.
We were camping at Marengo, which is about 5kms past Apollo Bay, and after setting up our tent on a great site overlooking the ocean we went back into Apollo Bay to stock up with some food for our walk that afternoon.
The weekend is our engagement anniversary weekend, which we prefer to celebrate instead of Valentines Day (means nothing to us and we don’t even bother with cards). In past years we’ve ridden the Murray to the Mountains Rail Trail (twice), ridden our own cycling tour of Rutherglen’s wine region, and sold a house.
This year we thought about doing the rail trail again but our bikes are in disrepair so Jayne suggested walking part of the recently-opened Great Ocean Walk, which runs 90kms from Apollo Bay to a homestead right around the other side of Cape Otway. We had two sections of the walk planned for Saturday and Sunday.
Saturday’s walk started with a 30km drive towards Cape Otway lighthouse and a left turn just before it onto a dirt road towards Blanket Bay. Our walk took us south through the trees and along the clifftops towards Parker River and back, about 9km in total. The weather was clear and fine, a little bit hot and steamy actually, and after an hour and a half of walking we emerged from the trees to the small secluded beach where Parker River meets the ocean.
Jayne, bless her, had brought our swimming togs, so we quickly donned them and cooled off in Bass Strait. After we’d toweled off we started to make our way back along the same route, but there were some surprises waiting for us along the way: the fattest echidna we’ve ever seen (it could have been a wombat), and a nasty-looking tiger snake.
I was walking in front of Jayne when I saw the snake maybe three metres in front of me, just off the track. I stopped walking, said “whoah”, and Jayne was already running in the opposite direction before she even knew why I’d stopped. I had no idea what sort of snake it was, although now I realise I should have picked it as a tiger – watch the video. I just sort of stood there hoping it would go away. Eventually it did, but it had a good look at us first. The video footage isn’t great (but at least I had the presence of mind to flick the camera on), but you can sort of see how it has its head and neck all bunched up. Ready to strike at our juicy-looking legs, probably.
Anyway, we finished the walk in one piece and made it back to Apollo Bay and Wayne’s Craypot Bistro for tea. No cray on the menu, mind you, but Jayne had a nice steak, I had some chook and we washed them both down with some local Otway Ranges vino.
The next day we had planned to walk another section of the Great Ocean Walk, but we were feeling lazy so a fun drive up the Beech Forest Road took us to the Otway Fly walk instead.
Worth going if you get the chance. Apparently it’s the highest treetop walk in the southern hemisphere. It was as good as the one in the Huon Valley that we visited in 2005 but was more of an effort to walk around. It’d almost be too tough if you were unfit. Luckily there’s a golf cart to take you back up the hill to the visitor centre.
We had pizza and beer that night then drove home the inland way. Yet another great weekend.
Tomorrow I’ll write about this weekend, which we spent wakeboarding up at Mulwala and Bundalong with friends. We’re lucky to live in such a State with such diverse landscapes and activities and so few crowds.
