Wii little modchip

Bit the bullet last weekend and sent in our Wii to be 'modified'. $120 seemed a little expensive but I guess it's paying for peace of mind to get a Wiikey properly installed. I'd been holding off modchips for a while to see how region free compatibility would play out but it looks like that's not going to happen until the hackers find a way to flash the machine's BIOS. Not exactly something I'm keen on doing as I'd like to play online.

Already downloaded enough games to make up the cost for the chip so I'm not bothered. Mario Strikers and Paper Mario are excellent fun. And I wouldn't normally even be able to play them as they're not available down under yet. :P

Now to wait for all the other drool worthy games to get released.

• Mario Party 8
• Metroid Prime 3
• Mario Galaxy
• Smash Brothers Brawl

Mmm... and that's just the first party ones!

Drive to the beach

Took the car and mum for another spin this weekend, this time a quick trip up to Mooloolaba to walk on the beach. Got my first opportunity to try out cruise control on the highway and I'm a convert. Now if I can just find something to work the steering wheel too. :P

I'm not one for sand and surf, especially that yucky gritty feeling you get in your toes afterwards. Playing with my camera made things a little better though. Being a sunny day with lots of water I thought this would be a perfect chance to use my new circular polariser filter.



Of course mum got her camera out to take some pictures too. Can't wait to get over to New Zealand to go snap crazy.

Mmmm... big screen

Mum's wasted no time shaking things up with the house now that she's settled in. Somehow she managed to convince us to rearrange our living room to give us more space. It was back breaking but I must say the new layout has merit, even if it will take a little while for us to get used to it. The space will certainly be useful when all the family come over in a couple of weeks.



The other new addition that mum has made to the house comes in the form of an early wedding present from the family. A quick trip to JB Hifi and some fiddling with connection cables and now we're the proud owners of a new LCD TV.



Picture quality is pretty darn sweet. It's got an inbuilt HD tuner so we can use that until I save up enough money to pick up a replacement for our SD set top box. In the mean time the screen seems to display SD pretty darn well so I'm in seventh heaven.

In sadder news, we got absolutely trashed today in the soccer grand final. Lost 5-0 to a team we actually beat earlier in the season. Can't have everything I suppose.

Welcome mum, bye bye car

Well after months and months of planning mum is finally here in Australia again. We're really in the final lengths leading up to the wedding now. I'm sure she'll keep herself busy organising the tea ceremony and booking trips to entertain the horde of Chuas flying down under.

Now that the Civic has arrived it's time to say farewell to the old Pulsar. We'll miss the poor girl, she served us well.

Come join the joy ride

Received the call we'd been waiting for earlier this week to let us know that our car would be ready for pick up on Thursday. Needless to say there was much rejoicing and planning of road trips.

I'd intended on taking off from work early to get to the dealership by train (so we could both drive back in the new car together) but it seemed as though every granny, learner driver and traffic light in Brisbane was set out to delay my journey to the station. Barely made it on to the last rush hour train and marched up to the Honda showroom a little late to see our shiny new carriage.

After an excruciating hour of form signing we were finally handed the keys.



Of course with we needed a little trip to test out our new wheels so we decided to drive down to the Gold Coast to check out a little frozen custard place I'd heard about called Jumbles. It's not too different from a McFlurry except you get a much better mix in selection. I had chocolate custard with pretzels mixed in but could have gone with bits of cheesecake, cherries, Anzac biscuits, macadamias, cookie dough, peanut brittle... well you get the idea.

The drive was pretty darn good too. Happy happy broom broom. ^_^

26 Summers

Mark another year down for me. Als organised a nice and simple day to ease this old man into gear. Had dim sum in China Town which included a surprise visit by Kath and Andrew. Always good to chow down on chicken feet with friends on your birthday. This was followed by a mini quest (read as frivolous buying spree) to find two ukuleles for us to play.

We managed to get two colourful ones in town and proceeded to deface these cheap and nasty instruments with pretty stickers.



I think we're far off shredding crazy licks like this guy but it's certainly a lot of fun. Far easier on Alsie's poor delicate fingers too than our steel six strings.



Day isn't over yet apparently as I'm going to be taken out to dinner in an hour or so. Getting older doesn't always have to be painful I guess.

Goin' Wide

Wow, I just got my notification that they finally shipped my lens two days ago so I figured it'd only get to me sometime next week. Surprise surprise, lovely wrapped package waiting for me at work!



Haven't really played around with it too much yet as it's night time and there's not much to shoot right now but I've been impressed with the view angle on this baby. Just amazing how much you can fit in when at 12mm. Will hopefully have an opportunity to use it this weekend when we head up to Toowoomba.

Called the Honda dealership and the new car should be here by the 18th if all goes well. *fingers crossed*

Still alive

Yes, yes I realise I've been the epitome of "slack ass" with regards to posting new material. It's been exactly 30 days since my last post which makes April my all new record for minimum posts in a month from the conception of this blog. It's sad, very sad.

In the beginning I was just avoiding the blog out of guilt. While I was still taking pictures for Project 365 I just didn't seem to have the time to do touch ups and post to Photoblog as often as I liked. Surely if I couldn't find the time to work on my images then writing a blog entry of meaningless drivel would be a colossal misuse of my free time. Procrastination soon lead to indifference as my daily photos degraded to a whole new level of banality. Coming back every evening to snap a shot of whatever happened to be on the kitchen counter just sucked all the joy out of photography for me, so to my eternal shame I decided to break my resolution this year and postpone it until we decide to take a year long jaunt across Europe and North America. I stopped taking pictures on the 18th of April for anyone that might have been running a pool.

Aside from that it's been a busy month so I'll just skim through some 'highlights'.

Go
I've gotten back into this wonderful boardgame in anticipation of a rematch against Cel this June before the wedding. To prepare I've joined the local Go club in Brisbane, started playing online on KGS and Dragon Go and have read a few books on strategy and tactics. Probably still end up losing but I guess you can only try.

Here's my progress so far as ranked on KGS. Cel was about 9 kyu the last time I played him so I'm still a way off.



I've also always wanted a decent Go set and Cel's been kind enough to lug this lovely piece of kit over from the states. Oh can't wait to get my hands on it.

Lens
I got my act in gear to order my a Tokina 12-24mm F4 lens from an online retailer with the hope that it'll arrive before my birthday. Unfortunately I've discovered that the lazy bastards haven't shipped it and are awaiting some "verification information" from me. Would have been helpful if they actually let me know about it a week ago. Grrrr...

Beep beep
Probably the biggest news is that Alison and I have been looking for a new car for the past few weeks and finally decided on one. It was going to be a toss up between the Mazda 3 and the Honda Civic. We liked the interior and comfort of the Civic but couldn't help but feel impressed at the driving performance of the 3. In the end luxury won out and we signed a contract last night with a local Honda dealership for a brand spanking new Civic VTI-L to be delivered in about two weeks. A black one if you must know.

One of the things Alison was worried about was if the car would even fit in our puny garage so the salesperson arranged for us to take the car home for the night to try it out. Must say I did like the look of it under our roof. Even if it was just a loan.



So it's all happening. Going to be another busy month in May I think while preparations rush ahead to get everything done by June. Hope we'll have the energy to enjoy our honeymoon in New Zealand after it's all over and done. ^_^;