For Christmas we gave Charlie (amongst other things) a Leapfrog Tag Reader which, although aimed at 4-8 year olds, Charlie definitely gets fun from interacting with the pages in the book. He’s not up to the point of actually listening to the story very much (although he did listen to all of the “Cat in the Hat” with mummies help). It’s quite difficult to get it off him as he’ll put it away and then immediately start saying “again! again!” and getting it back out of it’s carrying case.

It seems like it works really well and has been durable so far. He loves the book that comes with it titled “Ozzie and Mack” which is specifically written for the Tag system and now knows the characters names.

Hopefully it will last until he is into the suggested age range for the books (4-8) but in my opinion it really is useful from about 2-3 onwards, and Charlie is doing so well with his vocabulary and comprehension at the moment he may be a bit ahead of the curve.

The new Photo Gallery beta supports face detection to make it easier to tag photo’s with peoples names. It unfortunately doesn’t do facial recognition which would make the job a LOT faster.

Here’s an example of an already tagged photo listing the two people in the shot (with Charlie highlighted):

And in a bit of a recursive loop here’s a shot of the interface that pops up when you click on a persons face, and the photo is the screenshot I took above, so it’s detected my face again.

Very handy feature!

Microsoft have just released the beta of the Wave 3 of their Live suite of tools. This includes email, photo gallery, messenger, writer (for blogs) and finally includes calendar! This is incorporated into Windows Live Mail and synchronises with the online calendar within Hotmail. I can finally have a synchronised calendar available from home and work!

After taking Charlie to a model train exhibition a couple of weeks ago he's really shown interest in trains and Thomas the Tank Engine. We've bought him a Tomy plastic and battery powered Thomas set that he loves to watch go round and round.

I also dug out my old trains that fortunately my parents convinced me to keep. I'll have to work out what still works from the 4 engines that are there and probably get some new track as the old stuff is a bit rusty.

Well after only a week at the new job they're sending me off (at my request) to Microsoft Tech Ed 2008 which is being hosted once again at the Darling Harbour Exhibition Centre in Sydney. I'll be there for the entire first week of September attending a 2 day training course and the 3 day Tech Ed conference itself.

I went to Tech Ed in 2006 as well at the same venue and like last time Sarah will also be coming along for a "holiday" in Sydney. Of course Charlie will be coming as well and it'll be his first experience of flying. I'll be busy during the day for all 5 days that we'll be there so won't get to spend too much time with the family, but at least we have a self contained apartment while there with bedroom, lounge and kitchen.

Here's a few photo's of Charlie from our few nights away at Cradle Mountain:

Well after a bit over a year at my previous job I've moved on and today started a new job within a state government department. It'll take me a while to come up to speed with everything but it seems like it's got a lot of promise.

On the plus side I'll be heading off to Sydney for TechEd in 3 weeks time. Just trying to work out if it's feasible for Sarah and Charlie to tag along for the 5 or 6 nights.

I took a week off between jobs so we went away for 4 nights up north. Two nights at Country Club Casino and two nights at Cradle Mountain Chateau. It was good to get away and Charlie seemed to enjoy it although he took a while to get used to the long trips in the car. Basically the only one he really enjoyed was the trip home which was the longest, but he seemed to be used to it by then.

We spent the day at Mt Field yesterday and took Charlie on 3 short walks within the park. It's pretty clear from the following photo that he had a great time

I've added some more photo's from Charlies Birthday. He had a great day and didn't stop until after the last person left in the evening. We had somewhere around 50 people at the house during the day.

Charlie turned one last Friday and we're having his party today. For his present from us he got his new toy box which I've been working on over the last month. He seems to like it.

We also baked his cake yesterday. It's the first time either of us has decorated a cake so it's turned out pretty well. Actually Sarah did all the icing, I only baked the cake (from 3 packet mixes).

In an attempt to take the human element out of our backup routine I'm trying out an add-in for our Home Server called Jungle Disk. It integrates with Amazons Simple Storage Service to provide automated offsite backup for data at Amazons data storage infrastructure and offers fairly competitive pricing. You pay only for what you actually use, and it's pricing is 15c (US) per GB per month. So to store 10GB offsite each month costs $1.80 USD. There are also other charges for actually transferring the data to and from the service but these are fairly minor and in the case of data loss you probably aren't concerned about having to pay $9USD or so to download your 50GB of photo's that you lost.

While it may take a month or two for all of or critical data (ie. Photos) to transfer to the service, once that is complete it will transfer any changes each night so we can rest assured that by the following day all our data is secure if, god forbid, our house burnt down. You can set what hours of the day it should backup during (default is midnight to 6am I think) and what upload speed it should be limited to (default is 128kbit/s which is 1/3rd of our upload bandwidth) so it shouldn't effect other use of our ADSL connection. If I can get quality of service working correctly in our router with it I could leave it running 24 hours at full speed without effecting web browsing etc.

Once it's complete the cost will probably be about $7 USD a month for all our photos and other documents to be backed up. Of course we should go through the photos and delete all those bad shots we've been meaning to for quite some time. Perhaps I'll get Sarah onto that job over the next few weeks. That could reduce the monthly cost by a dollar or two.

Yesterday I started building a Toy Box for Charlies birthday which is coming up next month. As usual he wanted to help me out :-)

He's been building up to it for the last month, but today he's actually walking halfway across rooms just fine!

Well tonight I noticed issues with the picture coming out of our Xbox 360. I could see lots of colour banding within the MCE interface. It wasn't as noticeable in live TV, but it was still there. I decided to switch off the console and back on again, still there. Tried another couple of times then I couldn't get a picture. So I disconnected it from the AV amp and connected it directly to the TV, still no picture. I could still get sound fine.

I tried composite rather than component, no picture. I hooked it up to the other TV via composite, briefly had a picture, moved it back to the other TV but no picture. I haven't been able to get a picture on it on either TV since. I first was concerned that it was our TV but ruled that out with the laptop and the video camera that worked fine through it (it's worth more than the 360 so was my first concern).

So after a little searching I discovered that it had been reported quite a bit lately. It has to be repaired by Microsoft. Since my 360 is almost 2 years old I didn't think it would be covered for normal repairs other than the RRoD issue. However when I got it repaired last July they told me it'd be covered for another 12 months! Since then they have refunded the repair cost due to their extended RRoD warranty however the extra 12 month warranty on my consol still stands.

I logged into https://service.xbox.com/ and entered my serial number and it's still under warranty until July 2 2008 which is almost 2.5 years after I purchased it.

Hopefully I'll try it tomorrow night with another cable just to rule out that the cable is the issue and if it's still not working I'll be sending it off to Microsoft again for another repair for free.

Up until tonight I'd been using Vista's built in photo import wizard which works quite nicely. It detects what photos are new and prompts you to set tags to name the photos. Unfortunately it treats them all as a single group so they all get set with the same tag.

So tonight I noticed that amongst the many options there is one to import using Windows Live Photo Gallery. Since it seems to do everything else pretty well I thought I'd give importing photos a go.

Boy am I glad I did! It gives you quite a few more options and flexibility when you import. It dynamically groups photo's by date taken. There's a slider in the bottom right hand corner that allows you to adjust the grouping by how much time between the groups. It defaults to 4 hours so if you take some photo's in the morning and then more in the afternoon it will display them as two separate groups.

You can view the photos in each group by clicking on the stack of photos. You can then name the group and add tags to them to allow you to more easily find photo's in the future. Depending on what options you've set it will then import the into individual folders tagged by date or name or both.

It makes it much easier when importing a week or mores worth of photo's and encourages you to organise them straight away.

Jeff Atwood has an interesting (but very techy) blog called Coding Horror that I read regularly. His latest post is a discussion about backup strategies. It's well worth a read.

One of the last lines in the post is very true:

One thing's for sure: until you have a backup strategy of some kind, you're screwed, you just don't know it yet. If backing up your data sounds like a hassle, that's because it is.

Jeff Atwood, Coding Horror

Backups were one thing I was always nervous about until I started using Windows Home Server because yes it was a hassle to either burn all your data to CD/DVD regularly or some other form of backup and yes I didn't do it anywhere near often enough (sometimes less than once a year!). And I have had hard drives fail on me in the past (fortunately I didn't lose any irreplaceable files) and know people that lost all their digital photo's when it happened to them. I'm sure if I had lost photo's or documents that I couldn't live without when drives have failed I would have had a proper backup mechanism in place long before now!

Now I feel more relaxed that our data is backed up and kept on at least two physical drives, and with a small extra script we also have the vital data (photo's and documents) on two extra drives, one kept offsite and the other kept near the front door, in the case of a major failure like our house burning down or a destructive virus infection (not that our machines have ever had a virus).

Now there is still a small manual step involved in updating the offsite drive but the comfort in knowing that everything else happens automatically and I can even get back a photo or document that I deleted 6 or more months ago is somehow re-assuring.

Yesterday we went shopping to have a look at what sort of barbeques were available at the moment. We checked out Bunnings Hardware and Barbeques Galore (as those were two places that we could get some gift cards for). While BBQ Galore definitely had the largest range they were significantly more expensive for the same features. There were a couple on special at Bunnings that were pretty much what we wanted and so we ended up going for the Jumbuck 4 burner with a wooden trolley for $249. It definitely seems pretty solid and has plenty of space for reasonable size entertaining.

The weird thing is that in the two boxes supplied you actually get two trolleys(???). Every piece of wood you can see in the photo we have 2 of. The 2nd set appears to be an improved design as it has metal reinforcement at the base of the legs where the wheels attach. Perhaps they had to update the design due to weaknesses in the old trolley and couldn't justify repackaging all the current stock to remove the extra trolley pieces.

Fortunately the newer trolley is a nicer colour anyway. It's a bit more cherry coloured than the other trolley. It's good to know that if the trolley ever gets too weathered we can always replace it with the one in storage under the garage.