Henry's 50th Birthday Party

Flew down to Canberra to chase some business and to celebrate  Henry's 50th 

Saturday 18-AUG-2018   BNE->CBR Virgin VA1220
DEP BNE 3:00PM ARR CBR 4:50PM

Wednesday 22-AUG-2018  CBR->BNE Virgin VA1217
DEP CBR 11:55AM  ARR BNR 1:35PM

I think I paid $415 return I then bid $120 for an upgrade to business class on the return trip and blow me over i got it.  The normal business fare is $800 one way.

Saturday night we went to Andrew's place.
Sunday and Monday we did a little maintenance.
Tuesday we walked to the War Memorial
Tuesday evening we had a wonderful dinner
Wednesday morning James and I cooked breakfast.

Blow me over - Andrew had a erg in the wine cellar.  The things we do to get a good glass of red.

As usual we end up working for free.

I tried to do a selfie to give an idea of height and ladders but this was the best I could manage.

Tuesday morning Clare got us all enthused to walk to the war memorial.  When we got there we had morning tea.  I had a very smooth coffee.

Dinner out - very very tasty.  We did the wine matching to meal thing.

Which spoon to use - luckily the question answered because the big one did not fit in.

The birthday boy himself

After the restaurant we went home and had a cake that Clare and Henry had made.

Wednesday morning James cooked bacon and eggs.  I helped a little turning the bacon and James worked with Henry on the eggs.

QCMF

Friday

QCMF

Brigidine performing in the QCMF.  Jemma is the tall girl close to middle back.

And Jemma has to front the judges to take the critique.

Erg

Every Tuesday and Thursday Jemma does a land session and I have been trying to do an ergo.  The results are a bit ordinary.  This morning the fog was on the river at Centenary.  This picture taken from the verandah

Erg agony

It's cold and it's dark and I'm dropping Jemma Thomson for a gym session complete with bags and school uniform. After this she's still got to find a bus to get her to school. What else could I do but to share the pain.

I was apprehensive about arresting my decline.





















Recent History:
16-AUG-2018 Thursday: 22:03
14-AUG-2018 Tuesday:  22:29
9-AUG-2018 Thursday: 21:28
7-AUG-2018 Tuesday: 21:54
1-AUG-2018 Wednesday: 21:20

So getting back towards par.


14-AUG-2018:

 

9-AUG-2018 

One Night Only Show

A last gasp of analogue video production?

I was asked to do live video to screen for Brigidine's artistic night "One Night Only".  The hall has two existing projectors with a HDMI input.  An initial reconnoiter established that it was not possible to feed it with anything other than HDMI.

First plan was to feed two analogue cameras into my PC and used VMIX.  There was a power point replay too that could be done by VMIX.  We tried this on Thursday and it had a second or two of delay - far too much!

During rehearsal it became clear that the power point needed to be on its own computer operated by the student.

I then reverted to my old analogue set-up using the AVE-5 mixer and a VGA-composite converter to get the power point in.  On the output Derek loaned me some Blackmagic boxes to convert composite to SDI and SDI to HDMI.  Derek also loaned me a comms system.

We had two cameras.  One on stage left operated by Sky (Student) and one on stage right operated by Tim (Teacher). 

In the end it worked really well.  The only technical hitches were that the output (I think) was 720P and the projectors expected 1080.  Anyway the pictures did not fill the screen.

I was lucky I could still find the bits.  The QUADs that put 4 analoge pictures on one monitor were in a cardboard box waiting for the bin.  The VDA-Composite converter was finally located at the back of the work bench and many of the Coax cables were greasy and dirty from their last use several years ago at Easterfest.

The challenge now is how to do this in the 21st century.

Gend2

A

GenD row

Test

ERG

What is there to say?
Slight improvement over 5k.

Having demonstrated to myself last time that I could do 5k and not die, this time, went out with the objective of a consistent split of 2:10 every stroke.

Last time was 23:48 minutes. This time 21:20.