Family Monopoly

Marcus, Chris, Dan & Jemma.  Playing monopoly.  I was fearful that this would result in a fight and people storming off in a huff.

Christmas Day 2018

Bit of an emotional time for me.  First Christmas since the demise of the marriage.  I guess I am a bit conservative and things like Christmas remind me of what 'should have been'.

8-9:15 - Church.  Blog

After church, my duty was to get the baked vegies on.  Marcus, Dan & Jemma all pitched in to peel Potatoes, Sweet potatoes, onions, carrots and pumpkin.
10:00am the potatoes were put in the oven.  Fan forced at 180C.
Marcus was keen to spice them up and had Jemma sprinkle some salt over them and then they cut some coriander.
11:00am and the tray with the onions, pumpkin, sweet potato went in.
After a while we decided the potatoes were cooked and took them out for a while.

In hindsight I think potatoes should only go on half an hour before.

Megan had a beautiful roast beef in the slow cooker.
I had bought prawns.
Jemma produced some beautiful cheese and biscuit platters.

Chris had been riding and Ian and Fay arrived and we all sat down to over eat.

After entree and main course was done we decamped for the lounge. 


We had been engaged to do "secret Santa" presents.  The theme was "recycled or home made".  To me this was great as it allowed the non artisans to engage in their familiar Christmas habits and buy something [recycled] It also meant we were right in there with the politically correct themes of the day.

We sat in a circle with the presents appropriately arranged, per tradition, under the tree.  Someone was designated as santas helper and retrieved the first present and handed it to it's addressee.  The recipient opened their present and we all marveled at it.  Then they took on the elf mantle and selected the next present.

I was a bit stressed by the whole thing.  It would have been much easier to just buy a $30 piece of junk.  I ended up made a photo book for Dan using photos mainly from this blog. details here. I was a bit concerned because it was the smallest present.  However it went across well. 

Anyone think this looks like Henry.

It's actually Dan :)

Christmas Church

Church was organised by Megan, Loraine and ...
I found it quite stressful but I don't know how much of that thinking was emotion associated with the demise of the marriage.

Dan and I watched as the young girl filled the cup between her and the boy in red with white glue.  I was figuring it would soon be knocked over but this was not to be.

Making a Photo Story with PowerPoint

We did the Secret Santa thing this year and The rules were
Second hand or Home Made.

I decided to make a book of photos for Dan

I went through my blog and a few other hard drives looking for pictures containing Dan.

Then I thought about how to combine them.  I tried GIMP but that was just too fiddly.  You cant easily resize and crop the way you can in word.

I tried power point and discovered you can save your slide show as a set of JPEGs.  Great!.

But now how to select resolution.

One is supposed to be able to set slide size in this dialog.

It does not seem to be consistent.

This web site says that PP operates at 96dpi
I wanted to do 6 x 4 inch photos because I could do them quickly.
Wanted to do 600 dpi output because Harvey Norman advised their photo printer was that resolution.
So I figured 6 x 600 = 3600.
The web site above indicated I could enter px as a unit.
So I tried to enter 3600px and that automatically changed to 76.2cm when I clicked out of the box.  I set the Y resolution the same way and exported some slides only to find they were 2880 x 1920 which is 480 dpi.

I tried a few other numbers and it did not seem consistent.  I was not even sure it was linear.  Gave up on trying to hit 600dpi and just took jpegs that looked reasonable and printed them and made up the book.

Then decided should try and work out the formula.
At this stage I was not even sure it was linear.  If Microsoft had made it, in my view, illogical in and inconsistent, then there was no guarantee it was even linear.
I took to just entering a size in cm and exporting the jpegs and looking at the size.
Plotted a graph

Interesting that the y intercept calculates to be negative.









Anyway then knowing m and C rearranged for X as a function of Y (the dpi) and entered those numbers and got the desired result.

  

Marcus trip up for Christmas

Monday morning (Christmas eve) drove out to the airport to collect Marcus.  I was a bit early having misjudged the time.  Thought He'd given me NSW times.  Bought a coffee at maccas while I waited.  Looked at Flight Radar and was somewhat concerned to see them turn back.  Turned out just a loop to kill time.  Brisbane looked a bit busy.

First row in a single

First tentative row in a single.

My personal challenge for this Christmas is to row a single scull.

Fear of tipping over and becoming a hazard to shipping motivated me to ask Peter Hays to shadow me in the tinnie. Melissa ably carried the boat hook. My fear isn't of tipping over but a very poor strength for weight ratio may mean a tip over degenerates to an exhausting and soul destroying swim if I fail to be be able to get back in.

The tip over is inevitable and will occur deliberately soon but I figured I'd like to get a few strokes in first.

I learned an interesting thing. After relaxing and getting going Peter suggested to try to row straight. I observed that if I watched the very back of the boat that as I rowed it would kick from side to side through the stroke. So even though my average course was straight it was made up of lots of little zigzags. Gotta slow the boat. I'm assuming I pull harder on one oar than the other at certain parts of the stroke or lean a bit. Anyway it was interesting to observe and a good focus point to try to rectify.

Good bye Water Rocket

Given to Lee who has a 7yo.

I think the O rings were 17x1.6mm

Schroeder valve from supercheap.
Conduit from bunnings.

Note the bit the Schroeder valve goes into comes from bunnings ready to go.