Toppy

I've been enjoying my Topfield TF5000PVRt (SD digital set top with twin tuners and 250GB hard drive) for 6 months now. It's great except for some glitches where it misses a recording (we lost several episodes of the West Wing). It means that Ryan can have his fix of Bananas in Pyjamas and Thomas the Tank Engine at any time. Usually he sleeps through the afternoon when they're on.
The best thing is watching while its still recording and cutting out the interference on analogue reception from the neighbours' plasma TV, which seems to be on 24/7.
I just updated the software applications you can add functionality to Toppy with:
ProgressBarKeys (a must according to topfield.com.au forum users)
mcgCYRResumeV1.0 (for resuming play after the machine dumps you out when the recording finishes)
Archive1.0
Automove1.8
We're still working through what they've changed.

Almost 2 years

Ryan turns 2 on Easter Sunday. He has a remarkable number of clear words now - it must be close to 200. He now tells us what to do! "Mummy sit", "Daddy drive", "open fridge", "over the bridge"

It seems from some web trawling that my old boss has severed his ties with ANU. I wonder how the newer personnel are working out. Seems most of the women have left! I don't really miss that place apart from them.

I've been uploading some photos from France. It's been good to look at some of the trips and walks we did again. Pat may go to Sophia and Brest in June but I don't think I fancy flying 24 hours with Ryan.

End of NZ holiday

Yes, we're back after 5 weeks (not 4, due to a flight booking stuff up).
All went well. Did lots of camping, some tramping and some tram riding, all in the South Island between Christchurch and Nelson. Ryan enjoyed most things except going in the carrypack after the freedom of walking on his own. He is now in a bit of sleep debt and has happily gone back to long daytime naps (time for me to catch up on some Toppy recorded TV).

I think Sydney had more rain while we were away than NZ did - we had only about 6 days with some rain and only 2 days rain while tramping. My plants survived the hot days. We have to replace the jacaranda and eucalypt that the neighbours removed while we were gone. They think the jacaranda had got into the drains. Now we have a lot more hot sun in in the morning.

Tonight we're getting our monthly DSL dwonload before the end of the month ten minutes ago!

My feed looks crazy

When I look at my feed only some of the posts appear. This might be the problem with feedmap. The xml parser may be refusing some of my posts. I don't know how to test it.

In Google Reader the posts are in jumbled order (some from 2 years ago mixed in with the last few months) but they all have the current date and time so there is something screwy going on with the date/time stamps.

Further to this other people have had this problem see newsgroup
but Blogger hasn't fixed it. So my original problem is not with the code. Don't think feedmap is worth all this effort.

Off to NZ in two weeks

We are going to take our toddler overseas! At least it's only a three hour plane ride but we have elected to fly to Nelson on the same day to get to Pat's aunt and uncle's place. His Canberra-based parents have a New Zealand car garaged there which we can borrow. Jessica and Basil have grandchildren so they have camping and baby gear we can borrow.
We are going to try camping in our new 3 person Eureka tent. We tried it out in the garden and Ryan lay down between us - very cute. Now we just have to work out how to manage his naps whilst sightseeing. Probably the whale watching that I missed out on last time due to bad weather will not be toddler-friendly.

Any kid-friendly New Zealand attraction suggestions welcome.

I fixed the meta tag in xml problem tonight - forgot the end tag. Feedmap still doesn't work that well.