Hurgh’s Blog

Hi All,

Well we are in New Zealand doing some snow boarding, and having a great time.
We have only been here 2 days so far, and only done boarding for one of those days (the first day was spent getting to NZ and Queens Town).

I have uploaded some of our first pictures for you all to look at, and there will be more to come soon.

I am happy to report that there has been no injuries yet, and we plan on keeping it that way.

Here are some of the photos that we have taken so far, and as I said before, I will be adding more later, along with another post.

The snow over here is awesome, it is the last month in their season, and they still have over 100cm of cover over the 3 mountains that we will be going to. One of these even has over 200cm cover.

The runs are longer than most on Mt Buller and Mt Hotham back in Vic, and have less people on them (could be the time of the year that we are here), and there is no cost for parking on the mountain either!!

Well that is all from me for now, I will add another post with pictures later on.

-Hurgh-

Ok, so a few of you might have already seen this, so just stay with me for a sec. I got an email the other day with a video attached. The video was of this ventriloquist on the TV show America’s Got Talent, and he did a “Real Life Godzilla” act. It was very funny and I wanted to see more, so after a bit of searching, I found the second show.

For those of you that haven’t seen it yet, here is the first one:

Real Life Godzilla Part 1

This is also a bit longer than the one that was attached to an email, so if you only saw the one from the email, go check this one out.
At the end of the first one, the Judges say that they want him to come back, so here is the 2nd part:

Real Life Godzilla Part 2

The guy is very talented, would be such a cool party trick to be able to do that sort of stuff well.

Anyway, Till next time.

-Hurgh-

It’s been a long time since I last posted, so I hope to catch up a bit here, and try (notice i said try) to keep this a bit more alive.

Probably the main reason that I have not posted in a while (over a month…) is cause I am lazy… But there has been other reasons also .

I have started a new business, actually it is my first business too, so that is a bit exciting. I will say more about it later on, but for now, the main purpose it has been started is to help some friends out with web and email hosting. When I finally get the site up and running, I will post a link and you can all go check it out, but in the mean time, if you have any questions, leave a comment and I will get back to you by email.

Working out all the different things needed to do to get the business up and running, etc, has taken up most of my time recently. It is not hard to set it all up, just takes a lot of time, patients, and a lot of waiting on the government… It has been a good experience for me though, and I have learnt a lot out of it.

Starting my own business has been a goal of mine for a long time, I have always wanted to do it, so it is awesome that it has finally worked out. For now though, it is just a little business on the side, I still work full time, and plan on doing that for a long time, as I am really enjoying what I am up to at the moment.

There is more to say but I have other things to do, so I will post again soon (this week).

-Hurgh-

Yes, I have been busy (sorta). I have been doing lots of work on a few different projects and have neglected the Blog.

My RC Chopper is nearly all back up and running. It is at least all put together, just need to do some tunning and it will be all ready for a test flight . I am sorry but I have not taken any photos of it yet. I will see what I can do about that in the next few days.

Another project I have been working on is my new Fileserver. It is now complete and is starting to store lots of my data. The server has 5×200gig HDD’s in Raid 5 (total of about 800gig) and 2×40gig drives in Raid 1. The raid 1 array is for the system files and any other little programs that I want to run on the server, and the Raid 5 array is all for storage.
I have also used LVM so I am able to add new HDD’s and extend the size of the LVM with little effort, so the 800gig can grow when I need it to, without the need to move all the data or split it.

That brings me to another project that I have now started. I purchased a Negative Scanner so that I was able to scan in my old photos and also my Wedding photos. I have now started that thanks to the Fileserver being finished. One of the driving forces behind building the fileserver was to make a place that I could store all the photo’s that I scan. The wedding photos will be scanned at the highest res which produces a 109mb TIFF file.

That is all I have for now, so till next time.

-Hurgh-

I took Friday off last weekend to be the support crew for one of the teams running the Oxfam Trailwalker. For those of you who dont know what the Oxfam Trailwalker is, it is a 100km walk from Jells Park Conference Centre in Wheelers Hill, to the summit of Mt Donna Buang. Despite the name, there is a lot of teams that actually run it, and I was supporting one of those teams.

The team that I was supporting was called “Team DWAC” (representing the Southport Health Club). They did really well, finishing 5th in the Mixed Teams (listing here), and 22nd overall. The final time was 17 hrs : 21 min.

It was a bit disappointing as when the team made it to Checkpoint 7 (the last checkpoint before the finish), they were told that the conditions up the side of the mountain were too bad, and that they were not allowed to continue. This was really hard for them considering they had just run for 88km and were told that they were unable to complete the run. The track was re-opened the next morning, so they were able to finish the last stage of the race, but it was not the same as they had to stop for a night in-between.

Whatever the case, I think they did a great job and I know I would not have been able to do as well as they did.

It was a great day, had a lot of fun, and I will probably do it again next year (probably supporting my wife who wants to run in it next year ).

-Hurgh-

Sorry it has taken a few days, but I have some of the photo’s I took form the 84th floor of the Eureka Tower.

You can look at them here. Please excuse the reflections from the window, it was hard to hold the camera still and cover the lens to stop reflections, so these are the better shots.

I know some of you are wondering how I was able to get up there. Well I am lucky enough to have a friend that was doing some work for channel 10, and as some of you might know, they were broadcasting some sections of Sports tonight from the 84th floor of the Eureka Tower .. Well suffice to say, my friend got me a pass up, and I was able to look around the whole floor, and also take some pictures.

They had 2 microwave links for the Sports Tonight broadcast, one main one pointing at Mt Dandenong, and the second pointing to a building on Collins street, and it was funny because the person that setup the Collins street link, said that it was the first time he had ever had to tilt the transmitter/receiver down to get the signal. That is how high we were

I will be posting a few more processed shots to my website soon, you will be able to see them in the Photography section of my photo album.

Till next time.

-Hurgh-

The Commonwealth Games are now over. Sunday night was the closing ceremony, we went down to the Yarra River and sat with some friends. They did not have any screens along the banks, which made it hard to know what was happening, but every now and again, there was a burst of fireworks from the MCG.

At about 10:20pm the whole thing came to an end, there was a huge fireworks display, from the MCG, the Fish on the river, and from some of the buildings in the city. It was really loud.

Another highlight of the night was that I got to go to the 84th floor of the Eureka Tower here in Melbourne. I went up before we got to the Yarra (on the way) and it was amazing. The lift was really quick, much faster than i thought it would be considering how many floors it had to go up. The floor has 360 degree views of Melbourne. It was night when I went up, so I could not see very far, but the view was great all the same. I have a few photo’s that I took while up there, I will be posting them up later.

When I have uploaded the photo’s from the Closing Ceremony and from the 84th floor, I will add some links to a new post.

-Hurgh-

I finished uploading the Marathon photo’s to my photo album early yesterday morning, but I didnt post here, sorry about that.

Anyway, they are there now, I havent processed any of them yet but I am getting there (other things to do atm).

I will post something more interesting thisafternoon.

-Hurgh-

Not much to say today. I have been busy at work with a new customer coming on today.

The athletics last night was great. We had very good seats, they were 3 rows from the track, and on the finish line, so was able to get some good photo’s and see some good finishes.

I have managed to upload the photo’s from the athletics, so you can go and check them out here on the photo album.

The pics are straight from the camera, and have only been re-sized, I will be going through them over the next few days and processing some of the better shots, and they will be put in my Photography photo album. I will put a post up when I upload them.

I will also be uploading the un-porcessed Marathon photos soon (after the athletics are all up), so check back for a post.

-Hurgh-

I was luckey enough to score some A class tickets to the Athletics tonight! Got them a bit cheaper than what they were sold for, the person I got them off, had to go overseas quickly for some reason, so was unable to use them.

It should be good, these are the events that we get to see:

Had to go out and buy some binoculars because I didnt have any, and sitting in the MCG I doubt that we would see much that was happening on the other side of the ground.

I will be taking my camera with the 75-300 zoom, you are only ment to take a max of a 200 zoom in, but I dont think they will be able to tell the difference, it is not very big (the lense) and not one of the white pro lenses.

I will pe putting up some pictures from the marathon that I went to on Sunday, and will probably put up some of the pics I take tonight if there are any good ones.

-Hurgh-