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December 26, 2009
Christmas Dinner
Busy starling parents in the bird box above the deck outside Evie's bedroom.
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| Come on, where are you? | Ouch, mind your feet! | Mmmmmm | That’s better! |
Posted by conor at 8:26 PM
December 22, 2009
Christmas excess!
This is from Christmas 2005, but it’s a priceless photo! Who would have thought a 9 month old could look so stuffed…
Posted by conor at 9:32 AM
December 17, 2009
More sailing fun
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Posted by conor at 12:14 PM
December 15, 2009
Awesome 3D Virtual helicopter tour of Chamonix/Mont Blanc
http://www.aiguilles-chamonix.com/3d/
This totally interactive tour uses the Google Earth browser plugin, and lets you take an awesome trip around the Mont Blanc massif, fantastic for those who’ve hiked/climbed in the area.
Posted by conor at 12:27 PM
December 10, 2009
Sailing on Reliance II
Cap'n Trev, via Second Mate Trev, was generous enough to let my dad and I tag along for a Twilight race on Reliance II, a Thomson 38 last night. What a beautiful boat. Nice night to be out on the water, only marred slightly by the mainsail splitting itself during one of the gybes. Still got a 3rd place on handicap! With a crew of 9 onboard, there was a bit of time for taking a few photos.
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Posted by conor at 9:39 AM
December 7, 2009
Star Trail stacking
Last night up at Castle Hill turned out to be as calm as could be, and I’ve been wanting to practise stacking star trail images (see here for a tutorial and some stunning sample images), so it was a good opportunity to take a few and try it out. Each of these is 5 x 300 second exposures stacked together with another 300 second dark frame to minimise the noise. If you look closely at the full-size image, you can also make out a satellite crossing the frame in the right-hand of the two images below. They’re not particularly interesting as is, but it was good to practise the stacking technique, and I’ll look forward to trying some more interesting ones in the future. It was a beautiful night to be out; I could hear morepork calls in the forest up behind the village.
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Posted by conor at 4:34 PM
Skivving off school
What could be more educational than watching concrete trucks in action? We dragged the kids out of school/kindy for the day and headed up to Castle Hill to be there at 8am when the first of the four truck loads of concrete was finally being poured for the slab. Very interesting to watch, and not surprisingly, the whole thing looks markedly different now. The concrete placers made it look very easy. And as Mark says, with the amount of concrete & steel in this slab, this particular house ain’t going anywhere.
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Posted by conor at 2:52 PM
December 1, 2009
One well insulated slab on it’s way, and we’re onto the second row of logs
Graeme is on to the second row of logs in his yard in Geraldine, and Mark is getting closer to pouring the slab concrete. It will be a very well insulated slab with 75mm of extruded polystyrene insulation (XPS) under the slab, and 30mm of XPS both inside and outside the block foundations. Also visible are some of the foundation “thickenings” that will contain bolt-down points for the hurricane rods through the log walls. The big blue coil is a future-proofing option of putting in water-circulating heating pipes through the slab so that in the future, we could choose to connect a heat-pump to the pipes for heating the house via the slab.
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Posted by conor at 11:28 AM