The case of the Phantom Chicken Drumstick

Before I get in to the subject of this post, I'd like to note that my last post was my 200th on this blog. One day, I shall print them all out and have them bound into a book. Why? I don't know. For kicks. OK, on with the post.

So I'm on my lunchbreak. When I'm working from home, my lunch break is usually 80/20 lunch and break. That is, I spend most of my time making and then eating my lunch. The remainder is usually then spent waiting for my lunchbreak to end. However, today I'd already spent most of my lunch break writing an enoumous rant on a gaming forum, only to decide it wasn't worth trying to argue with what are most likely 16 year old boys on the finer points of politics and it's implications for those whose primary use of the internet isn't trying to get around the porn filter their parents have installed. So I deleted my massive rant that took me half an hour to craft, and went to find some relatively quick food.
What I found was a box full of roast chicken portions in the fridge. Yum-mee. I'm quite the fan of anything roasted, and roast chicken sounded just about perfect. So I pick up a drumstick, and start to munch away at it.
While I'm doing this, I notice a courier van pull up out the front. As the guy gets out and starts walking toward the house I think to myselft "Hmm - I'm going to need to do something with this chicken." And here is where things get dodgy.
You see, one of the following two things happened:

1. I quickly finished off the remaining chicken, and hoiked the bone in the bin.
2. I saw a place that looked like it would temporarily be a good place to leave a half eaten chicken leg, and carefully placed it there.

The problem is, I don't know which it was. I checked the bin, but there didn't seem to be any sign of the bone (to be fair, I didn't search too hard), and I've searched the house for convinent places one might put a half-eaten chicken bone, but I can't see it anywhere. It appears, for all intents and purposes, to have completely vanished. Gone. Like a phantom. Did it ever really exist at all? We may never know.

Jake the Pirate

Just so the boy doesn't feel neglected, here's some photos just about Jake. He was at the Kuyper open day on Saturday and had his face painted as a pirate. Very cute, so I thought I'd share some photos.





With this last photo, I decided to do some very quick tweaking. I've upped the contrast and saturation quite a bit, and also the brightness and colour temprature ever so slightly. I would have liked to have done it in something that gives me control over saturation for each of the R/G/B colour chanels, but I was just doing it quickly and didn't have that option, so the reds are a little strong. What do you think? I think it looks good for a first attempt.

Campbell's life in pictures continues...

The social networking thing...

So just last week, I've gotten into this whole myspace/facebook thing. I've had a myspace profile for a while, thanks to receiving a rather cryptic email that required me to sign up before I could find out it was meaningless porn-spam, but I never did anything with it after that. Primarily because all the myspace profiles I came across contained eye-destroyingly bad colours, animated backgrounds and generally looked like they belonged to 15 year old girls who were increadibly bored - which, in fact, most of them did. I did want to link an example of said horror, but it appears you can no longer see pages of the youngn's if you're not a young'n. At least, I don't seem to stumble across 15/16 year olds pages anymore, and one would imagine they're the largest userbase. Anyway, trust me they were ugly, meaningless and definately didn't encourage me to get into myspace.

Anyway, one of my friends signed up for myspace and set himself up with a profile and what not, and made mention of it on his blog. Because I remembered I had a profile, I thought I'd just add myself as a friend to his. Then I decided to enter some details about me, and while I was there upload a photo or two. Nothing to rope me in thus far. Then I did a search for people who were in my year at school, and I turn up 6 people who I haven't seen in 10 years. I'm a bit of a sucker for nostalgia, so I send them all messages, and over the next couple of days I got some back. So now I'm hooked. Hunting out people I know and have known and seeing how they're doing is awesome. I'm big on family, so I love seeing that people have gotten married and have families of their own. It's really nice.

Anyway - so I do myspace now. And facebook too. Feel free to stop by.

Children and Hospitals

So last night, I'm spending a bit of time with my new 3 week old son, and I notice he looks like he might have a bit of an infection. "Hmm" I think, "I wonder how soon we need someone to look at that?"

My eldest son had some infection issues when he was born and had to be in special care for a bit, so I'm well aware that infection and newborns is bad shenanigans. However, I'd really prefer not to have my already sleep deprived wife heading out to the doctors at 9pm on a Thursday (It would be her going, because she's the one with the feeding apparatus - I really am not much use with the new bubba for any extended period of time) if it's just me being paranoid, so I decide to give KidsNet a call at the Westmead Children's Hospital to see what they think. We've learnt from experience that there's a multitude of help available for parents of young kiddies, and KidsNet is one of the most handy for medical issues.

Anyway, after some discussion the nurse on the end of the phone is about to tell us just to monitor him overnight and see a GP tomorrow, when she asks where we live, and then changes her mind. There's a GP clinic near us at the hospital, open until 10pm, and she advises we should take him there, just to be safe. She also says she didn't really want to suggest we take him to emergency, because it's relatively likely he'll pick something up in the waiting room. Thus begins a night of poor coincidence.

When my wife arrives at the GP clinic, it's about half past nine. They advise that up in emergency, there's only 4 people waiting, so they are going to send her up there to see someone for convenience sake. When she gets there, there is about 10 people waiting. However, in the first hour they get through everyone except for her. The nurses take a look at our boy, and decide that he's OK to go home. However, a nearby doctor calls out that they need to have the doctor on emergency review him, and so my wife is told she'll need to wait to see the doctor. This is at about 10pm. At this point, a series of ambulances begins to arrive, and suddenly the single doctor on emergency becomes incredibly busy.

It's 1am before they get any further information. She's told they're next in line, and she should "give them another half an hour". At 2:00am, the waiting room is empty except for her, and still no doctor, and no further information on how long she might have to wait.

Finally, at about 2:45am, the doctor calls her in. He quickly reviews the situation, and concludes that my son is fine. This takes less then 10 minutes. Meanwhile, my 3 week old son has spent over 5 hours in the emergency waiting room that has had sick people coming in and out and coughing, sneezing and vomiting everywhere, just so he can get a 10 minute review that we really didn't want from the emergency department in the first place. The KidsNet nurse I'd spoken to way back at the beginning was keen for us not to wind up in emergency for this very reason, but because she'd told us to take him to the GP clinic, we'd wound up there anyway.

So - the end of this story is that I've had 4 hours sleep, my poor wife has had about 3, and we have to just keep going on with the business of the day. Work for me, and for her looking after our 2 boys. Good times. And I mean that in the slightly sarcastic way.

Did I mention I'm just a bit tired?

Australian PS3 $999 bundle getting the axe

So at E3, there was a bunch of shenanigans about the price of the Playstation 3. The US got a nice $100US price cut on the 60Gb, and the introduction of an 80Gb unit at the original price. Then Sony Europe announced European territories were not getting a price cut but instead were getting a bundle for the same price - but that's OK because the US were being lied to: their price drop was really just a clearance sale on the 60Gb units. Eventually, Sony confirmed this was true, but reminded people that they might drop the price of the 80Gb unit in the future, and everyone eventually settled down and was happy with the fact that only a completely clueless company would increase the going price of their console, and right now US PS3's were $100 cheaper.

Meanwhile, Australia being a part of Europe as we are, got the "bundle for the same price" setup, where $999 no longer just got you a console and one controller, but instead got you the console, 2 controllers and 2 of the launch games. The increased value of this is not really debatable, but it's still a lot of money for most people.
Anyway - now to the interesting bit. If you follow the link from the post title, you'll see that Sony are canceling the bundle in Australia from the end of August. Now, one way to really make people unhappy is to charge them the same price for less product, so I find it hard to believe that they're reverting to selling non-bundled PS3s for the same price as always. There are only really two options here - Sony will be releasing the 80Gb PS3 unit here, and charging $999 for it, or they'll be dropping the price. And personally, I think the price drop will be where it's at. Sony are doing fairly well here, and cementing Australia as a predominantly PS3 territory would be well worth their while as far as making shareholders a little less concerned.

Anyway - just was interested and thought I'd blog. If anyone was considering buying a PS3, right now might *not* be the time to do it. Leipzig Gaming Conference is at the end of this month, and there's a suggestion that price cuts for the "European" territories will be announced there. There's also a suggestion that the rumoured rumbling controller will be confirmed/shown/release date announced. And that in itself is worth waiting for.

OK - all done. Have a great day all.

Campbell @ Home

If this is your first visit here today, there's another post below this one that has a bunch of new photos I posted a couple of hours ago. If you've already seen them, well - HERE'S SOME MORE!!!

More Campbell Pictures!

Sorry for the delay - there should hopefully be two posts here in short succession with new photos of our little joybundle. As a sidenote, I should trademark "Joybundle" and start up a kids clothing line... ;)