Wednesday 22 April 2020

Hello all,

It’s been a little longer between writings than usual. Mainly that’s because I just couldn’t be arsed sitting down to do this of late, but now we are recharged with some better-than-average nights of sleep, therefore I’m invincible*!

Easter Feaster

I trust your Easters were full of chocolate and, if you’re so inclined, a peaceful moment of reflection on the True Meaning of the Season etc. We managed to get on FaceTime to conduct a ‘virtual’ egg hunt with Tony, Julie, Mike and Keisha. Once Archer had searched Nanna’s house for eggs, I arranged with Nanna to ‘teleport’ the chocolate bounty to our house. View the magic below…

While it didn't get super super cold over the Easter weekend, it did get 'cold' enough to justify having our first open fire of the year. Of course, this was only for the the purposes of toasting marshmallows, but it was worth it. Archer's an old hand at open fires, but this was Finn's first one and was a little bit wary of the whole thing. Not surprising, really! But he soon warmed to it (heh...geddit?)

What a great Ikea...

Do you know what an Ikea hack is? It's one of the wonders of the internet, whereby people use Ikea parts and products to transform them into new items. Sometimes, it's borne out of a lack of something — an Ikea product that does 80% of what you want it to do, but you need an extra shelf, or you need it wall mountable etc. Other times it's taking completely non-related Ikea products and transforming them into something new. That's what I've done:

I'm spending much more time at my desk at home. It's a rather large desk, so I have space for all the bits and bobs I need, including a pair of Mission speakers which are far-and-away much better than the tinny little things that come built into most computers nowadays. But, I am also tall which means the speakers can't just sit on the desk, they need to be elevated, otherwise my elbows end up hearing really good sound, but my ears do not (this is basically what happens whenever anyone talks to me — they seem to talk to my elbow and wonder why I can't hear them very well).

My solution up to this point has been to mount them on old 35mm Kodak film tins. Not glamorous, but they've done the job. Importantly, they're all the same height which means both speakers end up at equal height. Unfortunately, they weren't quite high enough and I was out of film tins.

I went searching for 'desktop speaker stands', but there's surprisingly precious little out there. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, given the work from home rush of people to Officeworks to buy what I thought were normal things you had at home — a desk, a monitor, mouse etc. If people don't have desks at home, they sure as heck don't have monitor speakers to place on their non-existent desks, hence hardly a booming market for desktop speaker stands. The options that were available were quite ugly and/or very expensive. Then I stumbled across this: a guy had taken a couple of Ikea chopping boards and turned them into speaker stands.

So off I trundled to Ikea, found a similar chopping board, got the legs, got home, got a pencil, marked the holes, drilled pilot holes and voilà:  desktop speaker stands! Not bad for $60 — the legs were $25 per set, a bit pricey in my book, but orders of magnitude cheaper than any other commercial stand options. Now the speakers sound even better and they don't look bad, either!

Parish the Thought…

Last week, I attempted to help St. Peter’s sound a bit better when broadcasting their services via the YouTubes. Really it’s all about making sure we can hear the organ because the organist there wants to be heard for some reason! I thought my Blue Yeti microphone would help, and while it did help somewhat, the organ still devolved into a sonic algorithmic mush.

Through trial and error, I’ve worked out what the issue is and hopefully this Sunday will be a bit better. You can tune in here from 9.25am to find out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc0bUf8s4nY 

A church service in the time of coronavirus is quite something...

American Idiot(s)

Anyone else glad we don’t live in the United States? Aside from a few choice nuffies in Australia (see the Tweets from Victorian state Liberal MP Tim Smith below), the political and economic response to coronavirus in Australia has been largely unified and decisive. I’m an unabashed supporter of our federal structure (a national federal government; state governments; and local governments [though local governments aren’t strictly included in the federal structure, but I digress]) as it means the level of government with the knowledge and expertise to run the stuff closest to us does so. This has allowed states to tailor their responses to the pandemic in a manner that suits them. This crisis (and the bushfires that preceded it) have reinforced my faith in federalism...

Apparently a career 'management consultant' knows more about public health than the Victorian Chief Health Officer. As one person pointed out, while elected officials in New York are digging the trenches for mass graves, the Member for Kew is bitching he's not able to dig his ball out of a sand trap.

I’ve been working through some more film scans from the past AGE...like months and months...and here are some of the results. Pls tap or click to embiggen. There are pictures here from our trip to Ballarat last year, Finn's first birthday, Archer's 4th birthday and even Easter last year!!

Well, the end of another period of time. However long it is. We've been confirmed as working from home until at least the middle of May, so we'll see how we fare and whether the restrictions are continued.