Cows

While in florence, there was some sort of wierd art installation whereby people had decorated life size fiberglass cows and had placed them throughout the city. These are some of the ones that I took photos of, not necessarily because I really liked them, but because they were everywhere.

 
 
 

Back From Europe

Europe

I'm off to France and the U.K.

I have been sent by work to France and the U.K. and will be away for 6 weeks.

The Mountain Goat's Triumphant Return

Last night, Melissa, Courtenay and myself went to see The Mountain Goats at the Rosemount Hotel in North Perth. We've seen John Darnielle live before, but not with his bass player, and not since he became quite popular.

Last time, John wasn't even the headline act, and as a result, there weren't as many fans there. It had a very intimate feel to it. He played material from most of his back catalog, including my favourite, "All Hail West Texas"

This time, the venue was much larger and there were a lot more people there. John got a lot more loving from the audience, and he reflected it with a high intensity, high energy (for John) performance. He mostly played songs from his latest album, The Sunset Tree, but still managed to finish off with "The best ever death metal band in denton" which was very good. John's bass player was very good too. His playing was very minimalistic, but placed just perfectly to fatten out the sound coming from this duo. In a departure from two piece convention, he didn't play purely rhythm either, quite often playing melody lines of his own. At one point, he launched into a brief bass solo, the only one I have ever heard that didn't come from the slap bass school of bass playing.

Is this the coolest ute ever?

I saw this ute parked out on the street near my house today.

I like it! I wonder what its fuel efficiency is?

My first HTPC

I've been trying to put together a HTPC for quite a long time now, up until now with little success.

Recently, some of my workmates have started working on HTPCs of their own, which has spurred me on to try again. For a change, I succeeded, mostly through the really good MythTV distribution KnoppMyth. It takes out all of the hard work in configuring linux to work properly as a set top box, especially for obscure hardware like the VIA EPIA-M mother boards

So, I now have a working set up to record Digital TV programs.... Yay!

Here are some pictures











The hardware list:

• An old DVD-Player case (Thanks Peter!)
• Via EPIA-Me6000 Motherboard
• 60W DC-DC power supply
• 256 Mb DDR400 RAM (Thanks Mike!)
• 300Gb Segate Barracuda 7200.8 Hard Drive
• ATI RF Remote
• Logitech Di-Novo bluetooth keyboard/mouse
• Netgear WG311 802.11g PCI Card
• Hauppage Nova-T DVB tuner card

Things that are still wrong, or I need to fix:

• The Hard Drive runs too hot, and you can hear it click when it seeks. I think I will replace it with a notebook drive
• The Tuner card is too slow.
• I think the power supply is a little too weak, as sometimes it struggles to boot up. I think changing the hard drive will help a lot
• The EPIA-M boards, even with their hardware decoder, can not decode HD (1080i) signals properly. I am considering building another machine using a Pentium-M solution
• No DVD Drive, but that is just a matter of buying one and sticking it in

Yesterday (Thursday the 24th) was my birthday. We went out for a curry dinner with some mates, which was very nice. It also happened to be the date of my Brother's new band's first performance at the Rosemount Hotel here in Perth. The band is called "Dobson and Fitch". Its a two piece band, with Mark on Guitar and his mate on drums. The guitar gets fed through a laptop to give it all sorts of harmonic distortion, which gives the sound a much broader feel.

It was actually really good. This is the first time I have seen my brother perform live. The harmonics give the music a complex and free flowing feel, yet the melody still runs strongly through the music. This gives it appeal both from an experimental electronic music and a straight up rock and roll perspective.

He could do with looking up from his guitar every now and then though. He looked like cousin it for most of the performance