Anthony Malloy

Andrew was talking about watching the telly and it made me think about how much has changed so quickly. When I first met Rae we were still using VHS tapes, torrenting wasn’t around and DVDs of television shows were just taking off. When we were married we put some of our gift money towards buying a Sony HD recorder, which was pretty shmick at the time. We bypassed DVD only recorders but this model had a DVD recorder as well the hard drive. It has a single analogue tuner in it so we plugged in a set top box to record digital broadcasts.

Now 40 or so months later that seems almost prehistoric.

We’ve added an LCD telly with built in HD tuner. To that we’ve connected a silent PC with a television card. We can record HD telly on that using Windows Media Centre, one of the many stellar reasons to update to Windows 7. As we’ve got Windows 7 on my main PC and the laptops things get really interesting – you can watch your recorded shows on any PC connected to the network so if we want to watch something in the evening we can just flick on a laptop in bed and stream it over the wireless network. Off on a trip? No problem, make a copy of the show on your laptop by clicking ‘Copy’ and there you go. As I’ve got a card in my main PC we can record there as well.

Now all we need is a media server and a blu-ray drive for the PC and perhaps a better video card….and I had better stop now as I can see Rae shaking her head and pointing to the bank balance when she eventually reads this.

It’s amazing how far we’ve come, makes your head spin when you wonder where we’ll be in a few more years.

We’ve been going to the South Melbourne Market for years now, although I’ve been a regular since ‘89, and one thing we do every week is to grab a coffee from James at the pizza place. It has to be one of the best coffees in Melbourne and you can tell it’s because James really cares about what he’s doing, he has both passion and skill.

Over the years we’ve got to chat and find out a bit about him, including the fact that he lives just around the corner from us, has the same number of kids and moved in a week shy of when we did. However it was only this weekend that I found out we are not only similar in those regards but that he and I had mirror image job paths. Back in ‘97 when I was making coffees for a living he was studying web design (he asked me if I used Java or Pearl) then slowly over the years our jobs changed and now I’m developing web sites (classic asp, php & .net) while he gets to stand behind the machine producing cup after perfect cup.

Am I the only person who has problem books? These are books that I want to read, that I have started many times but never ever finish. Every time I pick up one of my Problem Books I power on but deep down know I’ll probably run in to problems again. I have two in particular that I should make a super human effort on. The surprising thing is these are both books I really, really want to read.

The first is the final Harry Potter. Yes, the very same book I went and sat in line for the morning it was released. I’ve never made it past the fourth chapter in four tries. The other is the final Rebus novel, five attempts at that one and no further than the third chapter. And just to prove it’s not only ‘final’ books there’s one Iain Banks novel, Dead Air, that I just can’t get in to and I’ve tried his, as Iain M Banks, Player Of Games umpteen millions of times.

I’m currently waiting on a few books from the UK (oddly enough, one is by iain Banks and another by Ian Rankin) and have a week or so window until the first should arrive. So, tell me, what should I read?

Deathly Hallows, Exit Music or Dead Air? Leave your votes in the comments, I’ll start it on the weekend.

It’s council hard rubbish collection morning this morning. All weekend piles of refuse have been appearing on nature strips, huge numbers of unwanted fridges, lawn mower and even the odd elliptical trainer have parked themselves waiting for the truck.

Lying in bed last night we heard a truck pull up and begin idling. Okay, a little odd at 10:00pm. Then there was the banging and thumping so I hopped up to investigate. It was a bloke, complete with fluro safety top, lugging Joseph’s old fridge on to the back of an already bulging truck. He finally finished this and added Ange’s lawn mower before pulling around to load up our neighbours lawn mower as well.

This is when she came running out and yelled “what the hell are you doing?”.

Now here’s the question that kept Rae and I chatting away. Did he have the right to go and help himself to other peoples junk, presumably to make a profit on further down the track.

Is he a civic minded, recycler of unwanted goods or a thieving parasite making money and not sharing the proceeds with the owners of what he took?

What do you think? And bonus points if you can guess which one of us was on which side of the argument.

The Tigers played their final home game for 2009 last night and all I can say is thank god that season is over. I got no joy at all from the footy this year and if it hadn’t have been for my reserved seat I probably wouldn’t have gone to many games. As it is I didn’t see one win this year and the toll of turning up knowing we didn’t have a chance was just too much. I sat and shivered through the embarrassment that was our loss to Hawthorn but left at three quarter time. I used the excuse I wanted to beat the freeway closure but in all honesty I spent more time checking my phone than watching my team last night.

Given we can’t replace the entire team in one go there’s more years of this ahead. It’s going to be hard but I’ll keep my seat, renew my membership and hope that before too long going to a game will be something to look forward to, not something to endure.

No, I’m not fiddling with the blog again. It’s OS update time. Two Vista, one Ubuntu and two Windows 7 RC installs are about to be upgraded to Windows 7.

This could go either way. I could be a very happy boy this evening, at least until I head off to the footy, or you’ll hear the cries of anguish from wherever you are in the world.

First up is Rae’s laptop, here we go….

I wish you could take photos of wind. I was just caught outside in the most amazing wind gust, it literally took my breath away – I couldn’t breath. It’s toppled heavy recycling bins and the empty garbage bins have all been blown in to a pile at the bottom of the street. I grabbed ours just as it took off and waited a second for the neighbour’s bin to glide to a halt at my feet, they’re both tucked away out of the wind now.

I was too late to move the recycling, I watched as two weeks worth of news papers blew to god only knows where, every other bin in the street is on its side, contents blown away.

Just lost power for a second too – everything flickered and my UPS kicked in.

Mother Nature sure ain’t a happy gal today.

It seems I’ve actually done the right thing by Bert and Kennedy.

Bert appeared in our room last night asking if he could sleep in our bed. He’s never done this before so it had us off guard right from the start but then it got really strange. When asked why he said “The toilet has voices and sometimes they scare me.”.