Digital*Impulse » Canberra

December/January Round-up

DigitalCHET — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 11:45:09 +0000

Well, it’s been a while since I made a proper post. I’ve sat on this for all this time so I could get some good pics to go with it, especially of my car and PC, but here it is at last.

It’s simply a good round-up of the happenings and events around here since I last posted.

My Civic Duties

First and foremost, I guess the most exciting news is that I bought a car. Yup, I finally got all my hard-earned pennies and cents together and dove into the world of automobile ownership.

Midway through November I had asked Gerry (my bro-in-law) to keep an eye out for me for a good deal on a decent car, since he works at a dealership and knows a great deal about cars. After a couple of decent but overpriced offerings from a couple of his sources, he came through and found a great ‘95 Honda Civic VTi for me at a reasonable price.

It’s a burgundy coloured, gray-trimmed, 1.6, 4 cylinder automatic 4 door sedan fully equipped with power windows/mirrors/steering, driver’s-side airbag, but alas, no CD player. But I’ll end up getting one soon enough.

So I’m finding out about all the joys and wonders of owning a car… like having to fork out precious cash to renew the registration this week, buy accessories, keep up regular maintenance and fuel costs. But I guess that’s all part of the fun.

Pics below.

[singlepic id="152" w="230" h="153" mode="" float="" ]

Overtly PC

The other big news item is my latest new PC. In my search for the latest and greatest performance package at a reasonable price, I’ve gone and gotten the rest of my monies and built a custom PC. Of course, if you’d been keeping up with my previous posts and other pages on my site you’d know that I’d had mentioned most of the parts for it on my wishlist

It’s a Core2Quad Q6600 CPU on a Gigabyte EP45-DS3L motherboard, sporting a C orsair QUAD2X4096-8500C5DF 4GB RAM kit (soon to be 8GB), a Sapphire HD4870X2 2GB video card, Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Pro sound card, a XigmaTek Red Scorpion S1283 HDT CPU fan, DVD writer, card reader, all running inside an Antec P182 case and powered by the fantastic Zalman ZM850 HP power supply. I currently have it running Windows Vista Ultimate, but will be setting up a separate partition to try out Windows 7 Beta, hopefully after I grab the install CDs from work sometime this week.

As you can see, it’s no lightweight system I’ve built myself, but I built it to last me a few years, and to perform well at that. So far it has been a pleasure to use. Here’s a pic of the final product:

Take a look at the gallery for more pics.

Putting it together was as fun as I can remember with my old systems, which is to say I enjoyed the challenge but could have done without the frustration. Getting everything to fit in the case was a bit of a challenge considering the power supply took more room than the case was really designed for but I managed to get it worked out thanks to a work buddy who came over and helped me hack it one night (thanks Stuart ).

The best part of it all is that even after buying a car and a building a whole new PC, I still seem to have cash left over. There’s something to this whole saving business.

Christmas Fare

Well, Christmas came and went without a hitch really. Had my sister, brother-in-law, my nephew and niece down from Mt. Isa and my younger brother Juan up from Melbourne and we had a several good family gatherings at which much good food and beverages were consumed, not the least of which were alcoholic. :-“

The Christmas Day bounty was great, but certainly not as much as what the kiddies hauled home. As I’ve mentioned before, our family does the Secret Santa thing, where each person only needs to acquire gifts for a random family member drawn out of a hat (not including kiddies, of course) and spend big on them.
I was special enough to receive the Mario Kart for Wii pack which comes with a really nice looking Wii steering wheel, a funky alarm clock that doubles up as a mirror of sorts, a book, and a Wii-‘mote-shaped lollies dispenser.

It was a good haul. I’m currently devouring the book and hardly able to put it down. The lollies I enjoy only now and then, as I’m not such a huge fan as I was in my childhood. I much prefer and enjoy giving them out to my nephews and nieces.
The alarm clock wakes me every morning with functions, sound and tune I’m still trying to get used to. It’s weird after having spent over half my life with the same old alarm clock (which I also can’t bear to part with just yet ).
The game has been the most fun really. We all enjoyed racing and competing against each other throughout the holidays.
That’s why you gotta love a Wii; it’s group gaming abilities can’t be matched by any of the other consoles.

That’s pretty much about it for now. I’m sure a lot more things happened but they’re the major highlights of the last couple of months.

Tags: Canberra, Christmas, Family, Hardware

Cycling Half of Canberra

DigitalCHET — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 05:27:11 +0000

So yesterday I didn’t really have much to do, and I was supposed to go see my little brother, Lucas, as it was his birthday.
Since I was on my own for the weekend and the bus service in this city is atrocious on weekends (it’s little better on weekdays, but not by much), I decided it might be a good idea to jump on my bike and ride there.
I’d been meaning to take a good long bike ride for a while now, since I’ve been considering starting to ride to work. So I saw this as a good opportunity to kill two birds with one stone —I get to check my overall fitness, and visit family at the same time.

So I checked my Giant XTC mountain bike over to make sure all was in good working order, packed some essentials (repair kit, water, energy bars, digital camera, etc.) in a backpack, donned my cleat shoes, helmet and gloves and headed out.

The weather was great for riding; it was sunny with a good spattering of clouds to break up the heat of the sun. The only thing that made things a bit harder was the fact that I didn’t have any sunglasses. I broke my pair a week or so ago and haven’t gotten around to buying any. But apart from that, everything went pretty smoothly.

Check out the route I took here.

It was approximately 25km (17km as the crow flies) and it took me a couple of hours with a couple of rest stops and slight detours and stops at the more scenic sites, but the map really doesn’t show the kind of terrains I endured. Since I was pretty much ‘winging’ the route, picking my way through alleyways, suburban streets, paddocks, construction sites, horse trails, main roads and proper bike paths, the ride was pretty exhausting and grueling, especially for someone who hasn’t done something that monumentous in a long time.
I must say that the downhill horse trails were probably the most fun. They’re rough and dangerous which is always the most exciting fun.

The other exciting part of my trip, which occurred a little earlier on, happened as I was riding down a path next to a main road. The path sits behind a bunch of houses and they all have fences with trees and shrubs and bushes growing on them. As I was approaching this one bush hanging over the fence, I saw this huge mass of “something” hovering around it. I thought it might be regular house flies or fruit flies, since you’ll often find them around plum and fruit trees that are popular around here.
But as I got closer to the bush, I could see they weren’t small enough to be fruit flies and not the right colour for regular house flies. Then it dawned on me that they might be bees or wasps. A huge swarm of possibly rabid, bloodthirsty, ravenous, stinging insects thousands-strong stood in my way and I could not slow down or stop in time to go around them, so my only choice was to speed up and ride straight through them and hope they were too confused and dazed to give chase.
I put my head down so I didn’t get any of them on my face and plowed straight through them. I could hear and feel them bouncing off my helmet and clothing but I just kept going. I didn’t want to stop anywhere near them so I just kept pedalling and made a cursory check of my clothing to see if I’d picked up any unwanted passengers. Sure enough one little passenger got stuck to my sleeve and sure enough, it was a fat not-so-little honeybee. I flicked him off and kept pedalling, all the while trying to sense and spy out any other stow-aways as I rode. I fully expected a sting somewhere in my helmet or t-shirt, but luckily, that must’ve been the only one I picked up. I kept going without stopping.

Anyways, one of the more scenic locations on my ride at which I managed to snap some quick shots was Scrivener Dam. I took several shots and composited them all together to create a panorama image. Take a look:

Pretty, isn’t it? The view from there is awesome. Right next to the bridge, over the dam (to the left and behind of the location where I took the photo) is where the Canberra Zoo & Aquarium is located. I still haven’t been there but I’ll go one day.

I really should have taken more photos along the way, but I didn’t want the ride to take too long. I was in a bit of a hurry. I’ll probably do a more relaxed ride where I can stop and enjoy the sites a little more next time. We’ll see.
I also need to install the bike computer I bought some months ago on the bike. That will allow me to track distances and speeds and what-not. Actually, I think I’ll go do that now while I have the time.

Later…

Tags: Canberra, Cycling, Fitness, Photography