Anthony Malloy

They drag you back in….

After careful analysis of the fixture for next year, remembering just how freaking cold it is sitting at the ‘G on a cold winter’s afternoon, being well and truly jack of Channel 7’s treatment of the average footy fan and Rae receiving a bonus at work we’ve bitten the bullet and Foxtel is coming back in to our home.

It’s been about seven years since we unplugged Foxtel and we haven’t missed it all, except for the football. We just don’t watch television that much any more and having an extra 20 or so channels on the basic package only gave us more stuff not to watch. When they dropped the AFL channel that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Now that Foxtel will be broadcasting every game live it has become a much more appealing proposition. We love our footy and being able to see both of our teams no matter when or where they are was just too appealing. I had a quick look at the channels on the basic package that we had to take to get the sports and most seem very similar to the extra channels on free to air. We’ve gone HD too, even though there’s an extra cost (which is ridiculous) but there’s not much point in having a nice telly if you’re not going to use it.

So next week there’ll be an extra box and an extra remote. We’ll probably fire it up every now and then over the next couple of months but come late March it will give the media PC a run for its money. I’m just waiting for some geek on the forums to overcome Foxtel’s latest update and let us run the pay channels through the media PC.

Foxtel on my media PC. Now that would be heaven.

Thanks to mum, for the first time in many, many years the whole lot of us were all in the one place at the one time yesterday. She had organised a lunch at Plunkett Fowles winery and afterwards the opportunity to have a family photo taken was too good to pass up. So, with many thanks to the random stranger plucked from his lunch table to take it, here is the Malloy extended family portrait.

Thanks for all the work put in to getting us together mum. It was a great day.

4 bags of Oddfellows!

And no, mum, they’re all mine!

Lately Rae has been out or away a little and I’ve found myself changing my night time habits. I would once have put on a movie or plonked on the couch and watched telly once the kids are in bed but increasingly now I find I’m turning the telly off and switching on the radio. I’ve always thought of the radio as a morning and day time thing and never really listened at night until now but I’ve found having music playing so much more relaxing.

Maybe it’s having the DAB+ or media centre set up for music that makes the difference. Is it just me who has favourite night time albums? Some that spring to mind are The The’s Beaten Generation, Sinead O’Connor’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got or Paul Kelly’s Nothing But A Dream. Tonight I have Koffee playing which is perfect for this time of night.

Update

The The The album is Mind Bomb, not The Beaten Generation, which is a track from the album.

We’re just back from an information night at the kinder the kids will be attending next year. It was a good evening apart from the fact they all really need to go to a course on how to give a presentation (here’s a hint : don’t put paragraphs of text on the slide and stand there reading them. And also, your corporate philosophy isn’t really more important to us than what we need to bring on kinder days so maybe spend more time on later and nix the former).

The kids got to see their room for next year and the amazing outside space. Mr Henry didn’t want to leave my side until he saw the huge construction set and then he was off. Their teacher said hi and asked their names. When she asked Kennedy “and what’s your name?” Miss K stood tall and said “Moo Moo”. Looks like she’ll be Moo for life. Henry can’t wait to get back now and I know that every day he’ll be asking how long until they start.

Argh, the problem of physical media is raising it’s head again.

It’s been many years since I converted all of my CDs to MP3s and the boxes of discs still sit in the garage until we can decide what to do with them. Like a mate is doing I may just leave them there until it becomes some body else’s problem. There’s way too much sentimentality attached involved for me to be able to just turf them all. I was forced to buy a CD a couple of weeks ago, the first in years, as it was significantly cheaper to have it shipped from the UK than to buy it on iTunes. The first thing I did was rip it to my hard drive and now I’m left with a disc and packaging that I no longer want.

Rae and I love our movies and we don’t go out much (thank you lovely children) so we had invested quite a deal in our movie collection which was at last count over 450 DVDs. That was fine when we had space and watched movies on a dvd player but things have changed.

First off we changed our room around and removed all of the shelving. We can now fit in two lovely comfortable couches but there’s nowhere to store the discs. This isn’t so much of a problem though as we no longer have a standalone DVD player; we watch everything through a PC. Windows Media Centre allows us to play our music, view photos, listen to the radio (local and internet), record/watch television and have our movie collection all run through a dedicated media computer. For us it’s fantastic as television shows and movies live on a server that we can access them from anywhere in the house, but now we have 450 movies sitting in boxes next to the CDs.

These should be easier to throw away than the CDs but the big problem is back up. The movies take up significantly more space and even though they are backed up on two different servers/machines in the house a back up isn’t a backup unless it’s automated and off site. I have two back up services that I use to back up files and photos but the backing up over the net all of those movies just isn’t practical yet so I’m stuck. I’d love to move to an all digital environment but need the physical discs, just in case.

I know it’s very much a first world problem, and one we’re incredibly lucky to have, but that won’t stop me from having a moan.