Brian Hoover's Blog

That’s not how you do the Bobsleigh! Those runners go on the ice!

I met Miranda Kerr today. Woo hoo! She was at David Jones signing autographs.

This is gonna be so cool. Maybe Canada will even win a gold this time around. Canada will win the men’s hockey, it’s just a matter of who they’re gonna play. But those Russians look awfully strong.

The opening was great; the First Nation peoples looked fantastic in their traditional costumes. The guy popping out of the screen was a surprise. The welcome poles looked brilliant.

Killer whales!

Trees!

Tapdancing leather clad scots!

Quite a funny ditty. Well done.

During the middle of last week I revisited a site I haven’t browsed to in a while. Heavens-above.com can be used to, among other things, determine when the International Space Station is visible in your part of the world. You plug in your lat and long (or choose your city from a menu) and the site will tell you when you can see the ISS float by with tables showing the time, the direction, the azimuth etc. I used to do this more often a few years ago; I’d grab Suzanne and we’d rush outside and watch this bright dot go overhead. I’d marvel, and Suzanne would pretend to be interested. It was more interesting to watch it magically appear or disappear in the middle of the sky as it came out of or went into the Earths shadow. I also used this site to predict Iridium flares which are awesome. Should do this again sometime…

Anyhow, this week I saw that on Friday night it’d be visible for a good 10 minutes going from horizon to horizon with a maximum altitude of 60-odd degrees (not too bad on the neck muscles) and an amazing magnitude of -3.2. Very bright indeed.

So, when I got home Friday night I had about an hour to give Jett and Ashton a quick lesson in orbital mechanics and an even quicker history on the construction of the ISS. I’m pretty sure they got the gist of it all; that the ISS goes around the Earth, it’s a joint project between the Russian, American and European space agencies, that it needs to be around dawn or dusk if you want to see it etc.

So, with that in mind I thought we’d bring up NASAs own tracking map so we could see exactly where it was, and so we could run outside at the right time, but unfortunately that map is turned out to be hopelessly inaccurate at the time. Not sure why, maybe it misread the time/timezone from my system clock but it seemed to be way out. So we made do with the map at Heavens-Above.com which was fine. We saw that it was flying right over London, England and its path would bring it over Perth via India all in about 35 minutes. Pretty fast!

So, at the appointed time which turned out to be about 5 past 8 we wandered outside and turned it into a competition to find the space station first. It wasn’t hard. We all knew it was coming from the north-east. When it came it was easily the brightest thing in the sky besides the moon. Ashton asked me if I was really serious about Sirius being the brightest star. Haw Haw.

So, yeah we watched it for a few minutes. A silent, bright light floating by. I think Ashton lost interest pretty quickly but Jett stayed the whole time.

The thing is, for the rest of the night and for most of the next day Jett would ask, “Dad, where is the space station now?” and he’d demand to get back into the computer to use the “space map” to find it. This would happen about every half hour. Once he found out where it was, he’d run around the house and give status updates to Suzanne and Ashton. “Mum, it’s over Japan now!” He asked me to find pictures and the names of the current crew too. I wonder why this has captured his imagination so much? And I wonder how long it will last.

Next weekend I plan on breaking out the old telescope and pointing it at Mars which is currently close to opposition. Moons’s a bit bright now, so we’ll wait a week.

This is awesome.

I’ve always loved Hummers, especially the first 1992 civilian release of the original military model. It was big, boofy, chunky and said “Don’t mess with me”. I’m not that much of a fan of the H2, and the H3 not cool at all; I would rather push my Toyota than drive an H3. I’ve bought a small collection of Hot Wheels Hummer which Jett has taken over, and I realise that this is the closest I will ever get to owning the real thing.

From the first time I saw it I thought that it’d make a killer limousine. I started seeing them on TV in around 1995, and I thought that if I could get one out here to Perth it’d make a great business and make me oodles of money. Unfortunately I was never in a position to get the idea off the ground. Still I think it took to about 2004 before I first saw a stretch Hummer limo on Perth roads.

Suzanne made me  insanely jealous a few weeks ago when her school-mum friends got together as a going-away party night activity when ours and another family left our old suburb. She lauded it over me, too. “Guess where I am?” she texted. And every time we’d see a Hummer on the road after that she’d casually mention “I’ve ridden in one of those, you know”.

But, this ride of hers planted the seed of an idea in her mind. This would make a great 40th birthday present for me. I have an aversion to parties and such, especially those in my honour, so this would be a good low-key affair. It took a few weeks of meticulous planning in secret to pull this off without me knowing. And I am so impressed that neither of our kids divulged the secret. I knew something was up about a week ago, but Suzanne made me promise not to pump them for information. I’m pretty sure I could have made them crack, but I was a good sport and didn’t really apply myself.

So we turned up at her parents place and I find a bunch of family there too. OK, good. I knew this much already. Actually, a few things were going through my mind on the way there… perhaps it was a bungy jump; I even thought she might have somehow gotten me onto the show “Wipeout“, but they probably don’t film in Perth.

Anyhow, the limo pulled up and I must say I was really surprised and happy we drove around Fremantle and Perth eating sushi and listening to cheesy rock music videos. See the photos below

… or why Avatar seemed so familiar to me, a follow-up to a post I made after I saw it.

Rather than a bunch of smaller presents each, Santa bought us one big “family present” for Christmas. He got us an extra set of controllers with Nun-Chucks, and set of Wii Remote Plus. He even managed to slip in the Wii Fit Plus package which he must have known Suzanne really desired.

After opening the boxes on Christmas morning we fired it up to test it out. I did a quick RTFM, but in the end I didn’t really need to. The system is easy to set up and configure. All I really needed to know were some technical details like the range of the controllers so that we didn’t stand too far back.

We were presented with the Wii menu. From here we could play a game, connect to a network for updates and internet browsing, or adjust the settings like date/time and location. These configurations were all easily found, changed and saved. Connecting to the WiFi network was as easy as supplying the passphrase. We don’t intend to do a lot of web browsing on this, but hey… it’s handy for system updates and adding Wii “channels”.

We found navigating with the Wii Remotes to be an easy learning curve; simple and intuitive. I’ve never owned any other form of Nintendo game so I thought it might be a chore to learn the buttons but it wasn’t difficult at all.

So after familiarising ourselves with the controls we thought we’d put it to use and play some games. First up was Wii Sports, the default game included in the packaging which is a collection of 6-8 games like Tennis, Bowling, Boxing and a few others. It took us a few minutes each to learn each game, but that’s to be expected from something completely new.

The next game was Wii Sports Resort, which is a collection of about 20 mini-games plus a plug-in to the Wii Controller which makes the controller more sensitive and precise. This sensitivity is needed for almost all the games like Golf, Frisbee, Sword Fighting, Basketball and Archery. You eventually learn that you get rated on each performance with points. Once you reach 1000 points you become a “Pro”. There’s also a handful of “stamps”, another form of reward for “achievements”. So far I’m a pro on Sword Fighting and Archery.

The Wii-Fit bundle includes the Wii-Fit Board which enhances the Wii-Fit game. It’s a balance board which is remarkably sensitive to the slightest shift in weight. Using the Yoga section of Wii-Fit showed me that I have absolutely no balance. The Wii-Fit Board can also be used with other games such as Raving Rabbids, which my mum had coincidentally given to us as a Christmas gift. It opens up new possibilities in the game such as sitting down on the board and using it as a sled, or standing on it sideways to use it as an interplanetary surf board. It’s great fun.

I have found, however, that we have been putting in more time on the Wii that I would like. Sure it’s Christmas, it’s school holidays and it’s the new novelty but I was surprised to find that we had logged an average of more than 6 hours a day on it, actively playing games. This week we had our first Wii-free day and we intend to ration out trigger time from now on. I think the kids can play as much Wii-fit as they want as that will help with balance, strength and general fitness. But other games should be doled out in small amounts. Hopefully the novelty will wear off, but not too much. It’s a fun system, and some games like Wii-Fit can be a great benefit if used properly.

This is one movie release I’m desperately anticipating. Enjoy this 2997 x 1163 wallpaper for your dual screens.