BadTomatoes

One last entry for our recent Taupo trip: here’s a short (3 minute) video (33MB, or there’s a 19MB version) of Sam at the playground and having a swim in the resort pool.

The quality’s not great - the video is all taken with the still camera, which takes nice still photos, but pretty terrible video. We took the video camera with us, but taking both out just for a playground trip leads to pretty bulky bags. I have nearly an hour of short clips of Sam playing at home (over the last year) taken with the video camera, which I’ll try to make some short videos from at some point.

The book catalogue software we use (Delicious Library, very highly recommended, but Mac only) just released version 2.0. There are many improvements that will be of no interest to most of you, but two possibly are:

• The scripting support is much stronger. This means that I should be able to re-do my query-by-txt tool so that it is quicker and more reliable.
• It has built-in web publishing. This means that instead of the old dull (but functional) list of books, there’s now a very pretty interface you can use to browse our library. This is using the default template at the moment; I might play around with different ones. There’s also support for browsing friends libraries (assuming they also use Delicious Library), which would actually be really neat if I knew anyone that also had this setup (speak up if you do!).

We had a week-long holiday in Taupo a couple of weeks ago - a Christmas present from (Great) Aunty Beryl. We stayed at Taupo Ika Nui, which was quite nice (certainly very conveniently located, right across the road from the lake, and a very short walk to the shops). The start had a bit of a hiccup - we planned the date for the holiday months ago, but it ended up clashing anyway - Olyvia did a duathlon on Mother’s Day in Mangere, which was two days into hour week-long stay. We ended up deciding that Samuel and I would go to Taupo on Friday as scheduled, and then come back Saturday night, watch Olyvia finish the race, have a mother’s day lunch, and then all go back to Taupo Sunday afternoon.

This worked out reasonably well, except that Samuel and I couldn’t find our way through Mangere (most of the roads we needed to go down were closed; some sort of “spectators this way” signs would have been nice) so missed Olyvia finishing. Then the post-event stuff took forever, and so lunch was very, very late, and so we got back to Taupo later than we would have liked.

The rest of the week was great - we didn’t really do that much: a visit to Craters of the Moon and Huka Falls were about all the tourist-y things we did. We did a little shopping, quite a bit of walking, and Samuel spent a great amount of time at the playground. There was a heated pool (and two spas) where we stayed, so we also spent a reasonable amount of time in the water, despite the time of year.

Unfortunately, for some reason Samuel woke up around 5:30am each morning we were there (he normally sleeps until about 7:15am), and didn’t sleep for that long during the day (and didn’t eat that well either), so we came home rather exhausted rather than refreshed. Thankfully, once we got home his habits reverted to normal, so we’ve recovered (and I’m nearly caught up with work) somewhat now.

Photos from the trip are on Flickr (some were taken with my phone, and some with Olyvia’s phone, so they aren’t as good as ones taken with the camera). There’s also a short (~4 minute) Animoto video (18MB mp4) of the photos (view directly from Animoto).

Here’s a short (~ 2 minutes) summary of Sam in the first quarter of 2008 (or here’s a more relaxed version, if you prefer).

These are somewhat large (17.4MB and 21.4MB) - if anyone wants to see them and doesn’t have that much bandwidth free then let me know and I’ll put up some smaller versions.

(The videos were made with Animoto (”welcome to the end of slideshows”), and the non-classical track features music from The Clintons. Check them both out!)

Update: if you want to sign up for Animoto’s unlimited pass (as many videos as you want to make for a year for US$30) rather than just make 30 second ’shorts’, you can use my code lshxyboj to get US$5 off (and give me 3 months free).

I’ve (obviously, unless you’re reading this through the feed) got far enough with the redesign that I’ve decided to switch over. The tunetest link at the bottom of the page doesn’t work yet, and the “notes” section (click “more” below) doesn’t quite look right, and there are a few other minor bits and pieces, but in general I think it’s good enough to go live.

Please let me know (add a comment or via email) if anything is broken (I haven’t tried this at all in Internet Explorer, for example), or if there’s something you think doesn’t work as well as before, and I’ll try and make some more edits to the theme.

Apart from just having something fresh, it’s nice to have a little more colour in the page, 4 more photos, more than one post on the front page, and a few other things like that. Hopefully you find it an improvement, too!