The kids and Santa

Yes it's that time of year again - Christmas.

This year will be a little different for us as Santa will have an extra little person to bring gifts for, so we took Karla and the boys to Fountain Gate to meet with Santa...

Remake of "V"

This re-make of the 80's mini series "V" looks like it could be pretty good. Premiered in US this week, hopefully will be on Oz tv soon.

Photo a day from planet earth

Last week I blogged about taking Brad down to Tooradin to watch the bikes heading to Phillip Island for the Grand Prix. 
One of my photos from that morning have been used on the photo blog site "A photo a day from planet Earth".

iPhone blogging

Testing out a new iPone app for posting blogs from my phone.

I can even add photos direct from the phone.
This is Brad and Karla as seen from my spot on the couch.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Motorbikes run to Phillip Island

The last few years at Phillip Island MotoGP time, we've gone to Cranbourne to see hundreds of Harleys, and every other make of motorcycle, get waved off on their way down to Phillip Island for the Grand Prix.

The trouble with this is that everyone else has the same idea.

This year, I took Bradley to Tooradin, which is only about 15 minutes out of Cranbourne, to beat the crowd.  We just pulled up in the service lane of the Main Street and watched the hundreds of bikes roar through under police escort.











These photos, and more, along with others from the last few years, can be found on our flickr.com set.

Toy Story 3

Toy Story 3 Preview...

iPhone

It might sound geeky, but Mandy and I have just upgraded out mobiles to the Apple iPhone 3GS.


We're still finding, and experimenting with all the apps available on iTunes, and learning how to drive the phones them selves, but overall we reckon the iPhone is pretty cool.

Even though I was tipping St Kilda to win today's AFL Grandfinal, I was glad to see a close game and Geelong were deserved winners.

I've even written a couple of blog posts over at simonsweblinks.com

Blog Imports

I've been able to import entries from my earlier Blogger site to this one, so any entries prior to August 2009 originally appeared on simonyeo70.blogspot.com

At this stage I haven't been able to import my much older posts at Wordpress.

Below are some of my favourite blog entries from my old Wordpress blog, hopefull I'll be able to import them here at a later date.

Baby Karla,  Ultrasound,  Josh the photographer 

New photos on Flickr

I've just uploaded a heap of new photos to Flickr, mostly of Baby Karla as she grows so quick!

"Web Links" blog

I've just started a "Web Links" blog, with the intention of posting regular links to interesting stuff on the World Wide Web.

Check it out... www.simonsweblinks.com

“Shine” TV Commercials partly shot at kids school

The YouTube clips below are TV commercials partly shot at our kid’s school

Windows Live Writer

This is just a quick post to check out Windows Live Writer to post blogs rather than the blogger web site.

Bradley's first trip to the MCG

Sometimes kids go to the football and have had enough by quarter time. This wasn't going to be an issue when I took Bradley for his first live AFL match at the MCG. Why not? Well, due to some car parking issues (no spots = long walk) we didn't make it to our seats until quarter time!

The three quarters of the round 22 Essendon V Hawthorn match were very exciting and Bradley certainly didn't loose interest. We were both rapt to see the Bombers come from behind and beat Hawthorn for a spot in the finals.


Check out more photos on flickr.

Ashes almost lost

The Aussies are looking very ordinary in the 5th and final cricket test match in England. At the time of writing the Australia first innings score card is 7 out for 117, with only two batsmen making double figures so far. What's going on??!!!

Blogger Adds

Even though I've decided to use Blogger from Google for my blog, sometimes it can be frustrating. A few of the reasons for choosing Blogger are; free hosting with custom domain and AdSense to maybe make a couple of dollars as well, but regardless of changes I make in "Edit Layout" the adds remain big and square instead of long and skinny.

UPDATE 22 SEPT 2009 - I've finally worked out how to change the ad banner inbetween posts.

Windows 7 RC installed on old laptop

I've just installed the Windows 7 Release Candidate onto a friend's son's old Dell Latitude D600 laptop. The only problem was no DVD drive on this old hardware (CD only). Once I worked out how to boot from a USB thumb drive, installation was easy. It's amazing how well Windows 7 runs on old, low spec hardware. You wouldn't have a chance getting Vista to run on the same machine.

Nightshift #2

You really know you're working the nightshift when the power goes out for a couple of hours, leaving only the dim security lighting and forklift headlights to work by.

Nightshift

Sunday night is the hardest when you're on nightshift, because it's so hard to take a "Nana Nap" on Sunday afternoon. By the time the shift is finished and you get to bed Monday morning, you've been awake for over 24 hours.
Zzzzz
........ zzzzzzzzzzzzzz
................................ zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

School trivia night

We had the fund raiser trivia night at the boys school last night, which was a lot of fun as we racked our brain to answer some tough questions. The highlight was winning a bottle of bourbon by landing a $2 coin closer to the bottle than anyone else from around 5 metres away.

New Blog

Well here we are with my new "SimonSays" blog.

I've always liked the concept of blogs, allowing anyone to publish their ramblings to the world. I experimented a while back using both Wordpress and Google's Blogger (blogspot.com). Even though I usually didn't have too much too say, using Wordpress and then Blogger allowed me to learn about blogging and to choose a platform.

Recently I switched my primary email to Gmail, but signed up with Google apps to use a custom domain (www.smjbk.com) rather than gmail.com . Having the new domain available, has now motivated me to start this new blog. I'm sticking with Blogger (mainly to keep as much of my online stuff within my Google account), but am obviously making a fresh start and not importing my old posts. Links to my old blogs are below.

http://simonsaysblog.wordpress.com/ http://simonyeo70.blogspot.com/

Cheers!
Simon.

UPDATE 26 SEPTEMBER 2009: I've imported my old blog entries, so anything appearing below this post was originally posted on my earlier blog.

Canon SX1IS digital camea

I've had my Canon SX1IS digital camera since February and have been experimenting with producing high quality photos and video.

The camera's first outing was to the Melbourne Motor Show, where of course I took hundreds of pictures of some really nice cars. Yahoo Autos saw fit to link my flickr.com shots of the Melbourne Motor Show on their website, producing thousands "views".

A recent trip to Mum & Dad's saw the opportunity for some great shots (mostly macro) of their roses, below are some of those photos.







I have also been experimenting with the HD video capability of this camera too, below is an example.

Google Chrome video - HD blocks

This video from Google promoting their "Chrome" web browser looks great when watched in HD full screen.

flickr views skyrocket thanks to Yahoo! Autos

I used to be chuffed if one of my flickr pictures achieved 100 views. To my amazement though, a recent review of the Geneva Autoshow on Yahoo! Autos linked to some of my pics from this years Melbourne Motor Show, resulting in view counts in the thousands.

This picture of the new Nissan 370Z is still receiving thousands of views per day and the totol count is currently over 61,000. That is amazing!

Here are some more of the most popular pictures I took at the Melbourne Motor Show and posted on flickr.com

Experimenting with my "Blogger" blog

Ok, my first blog post on Blogger.com is online. Something else I'd like to try is embedding a picture from my flickr.com site.

This picture is of my newborn baby girl. I've embedded HTML from flickr for it to show here.

My new blog

Ok, I've been blogging (on and off) for a few months now on my Wordpress site, and I'm wondering about my next step in the blog universe so I thought I'd check out the competition here at Blogger to see if this might be a better option for me. I will make a few general blog posts and then decide where to go and what to do after that.