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After a massive 72 hour week I decided to take Saturday off. The only exercise I had had all week was a 1 hour football training run on Wednesday night. So Friday night after Kitty (who works for me) and I had finished work Peter her fiancé came over. Jude went to bed early so we stayed up and played a board game called Power Grid. After Peter and Kitty went to bed I then stayed up even later playing Lara Croft Tomb Raider underworld. In the  morning, Jude went off to an all day reptile course. Grace came to baby sit the kids while Peter, Kitty and I headed off to the hills. We met Peter’s brother Greg on the way. We spent a glorious hour and a half riding in the rain forest. A massive slippery down hill – very steep, lots of technical stuff and thick with very slippery dust was a lot of fun. Kitty had a big off. This was the steepest she had ever ridden before. I actually saw her perform an over the handlebars somersault landing on her back and sliding. Surprisingly little damage to skin and only a few  tears. She is a tough brave lass! However she will be sore for a few days. Then we had a long slog up hill to get back to where we left the cars.

After Peter and Kitty left and I had a shower, I sat the kids down and we decided what to do in the afternoon. Swimming and the zoo were both requested. So I made them put their togs on under their clothes and we headed to the zoo. We spent 2 and a half hours wandering around and checking out the animals. Lots of fun and we missed lots, but we can go back – we have annual passes!

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From there we headed to the beach, and even though it was blustery, the wind and water was warm and the kids enjoyed swimming, exploring and playing. Jude came straight to the beach from her course, and we had fish and chips and ice cream at the local beach side store.

I normally don’t suffer from tech woes – but – this week has been hell!

The good news is that is hasn’t affected machines I set up for clients. I set up 2 new laptops with no issues at all and delivered one – one to be delivered boxing day. Each of them has LiveMesh running successfully. When I delivered one last night I et up live mesh on their existing XP PC and synchronised their data. I then set up an old laptop of mine and a virtual machine (running in bootcamp on a Mac) and attempted to install live mesh. No joy. Tried reinstalling Vista 3 times each machine even using different SKUs. Each time Live Mesh fails to start. I have the Microsoft Live Mesh Tech Team looking at it now.

Then to top it off this morning I awake to find my backup production machine (from which I still haven’t transferred everything over to the new machine) sitting there with a blue screen of death. After restarting it and troubleshooting discovered that the main system OS which is a striped raid running on 10,000RPM drives wouldn't boot. Reason, the raid had a failed hard drive. Being a stripe there is no recovery from this. By the way – never set up your machine using a RAID Stripe for system OS unless you never store any data on that drive. I don’t. I do this to gain speed from my system. So I took both drives out, talked to the shop about the warranty, discovered that they don’t have these drives any more, they have been replaced by the 2.5” form factor drives. I will need to get it sent away and replaced. Being Christmas, that wont happen until early January now. So I whacked a 160GB drive that was sitting on my desk into the machine, booted from the Windows Home Server restore CD, (after disabling the RAID setup in BIOS), connected to the Windows Home Server and starting restoring my system. It is telling me 1 hour and 15 minutes remaining. What a blessing Windows Home Server is!

And I am trying frantically to get work one for clients before going off for my first holiday since February 2007 when I had 2 days holiday with the family and friends down at Kingscliffe in NSW. Christmas Day I fly to New Zealand to spend 3 days with my parents and siblings for a family reunion. I don’t want to think about what I need to do when I get back!

PS that’s not me in the picture – just some random lady I found when searching for tech problems. She sums up how I feel today!

Having worked for 72 hours last week and most of the weekend so far, it was good to take a couple of breaks. Saturday I went for a bike ride with the youth through the bush near here. After losing the slow riders early on the fast bunch went hard for an hour or so. I followed that up with hanging with our kids for a bit. We had some great laughs just hanging out. Today I went to church briefly (after a few hours sleep – didn’t stop to talk sorry) and came back home to work. At 4 PM I had finished a major piece of work and decided to take the kids to the park. We went to the lake and I have that story below. I actually ended up being there for 2.5 hours and took over 400 photos while I was there. All the good ones have been uploaded into Flickr in a couple of different sets. All the photos I uploaded are in the 20081130 lakewalk set. I also uploaded large versions of the close ups, mostly of birds, but also of the girls, into the Close Ups set. There are some really nice black and white shots of the girls there.

After playing in the playground for starters, we went exploring – Mercedes was the leader today. First we went out onto the bridge over the lake and looked at ducks, turtles, fish, dragonflies and lilies. I have been teaching them the value of sitting still and looking at what you can see sometimes. It is amazing what is right under your feet!

Mercedes is mad keen on bugs.

Pretty much any time of the day you can find her with a plastic cup or container with some sort of bug on it, or an insect. moth or spider of some kind crawling on her hand while she oohs and aahs over it.

Today she has a woodroach in a container with some dry dog food. It is her pet. She is going “Oh roach” and “come here roach” and having little conversations with it. I suggested she feed it to the dragons but she indignantly exclaimed - “No its my pet!”

Photo courtesy of InsectsAway