@ Head

I managed to spend an hour in the veggie patch this afternoon. Was pulling a lot of big weeds really easily after the rain, getting the beds ready for spring :)

And in amongst the weeds I found all these carrots which had self sown from my seed collecting last season:

And they taste great !!!  :)

The first signs of spring have sprung:

With the wild plums currently showing the most early blooms :

There’s not a lot happening in the veggie patch, just some carrots and silverbeet mainly. One of the climbers around the garden is also in bloom (you can see some silver beet that was used for seed behind it):

The wattles are in stunning bloom at present:

Blackwood beginning to bloom:

And of course the proteas are also beginning to add some colour

pink proteas:

honey proteas

young king proteas

Recently I got this email from Ted:

Hi Bill!

Love the snippet tool, it's great!

I'm curious, what tool did you use to produce the screencast for the tool? The quality is awesome!

Thanks a lot!

Kind regards,

Ted

The answer to that is I used Camtasia Studio 5. It’s really easy to use and lots of options on output formats. And it will even produce the basic html file for you with the embedded video etc.

Note: I really like Camtasia. I do also get it for free from the nice folks at TechSmith as they value the contribution MVPs make to the community, and that makes it even easier to like :)

An alternative worth looking at is Expression Encoder 3 Screen Capture which comes with Microsoft Expression 3. I’ve only given it a quick test drive and it seemed pretty good. Picking formats was a little daunting, but I got it to produce some good quality wmv files that were really good for the bandwidth (small file size). I haven’t driven it enough to find how to produce web files that embed the video; my guess is it would be more silverlight orientated. Still if you have a MSDN subscription that includes expression, it’s definitely worth a look at.

The last couple of weeks I’ve had what seems to be both a cold and the flu. In the process I learnt some things about them …

First off, they spread easily. We had a two weekend fire line leadership course,  running from Friday after work till Sunday midday both weekends.  On the first week there was one person with a cold, and another with what was probably the flu. By the following week another six members of the class of twenty three had signs of a cold or similar.

Me, I thought I had caught a cold the first week, and had the usual running nose symptoms etc. Then when I got back from the second weekend I got hit hard with a fever. That seemed to knock the cold symptoms away, but what I had left was the flu as characterised by strong fevers, complete lack of energy and muscle aches. In my particular case my thighs and calves were like they were burning really really hot.  I now know first hand the difference between cold and flu ;)

After the first night of fever I thought I was pretty much right or at least getting better for the next couple of days only to be hit by fever again. Foolishly I though that was it and was out and about again the next day. That night the real fever hit and hit hard. My temp was at 40C for hours (I think that’s 104F in old talk). Probably the scary part of that was I wasn’t really sweating. The next day it was hovering more around 39, and at times some profuse sweating which at least meant things were still working ;)  All up it knocked me out for the best part of three days.  Btu I did learn about safe temperatures.

• Above 40, it’s hospital time.
• 39 to 40: as long as it is fever it’s okay, just keep up fluids an try to reduce the temp a bit.
  NOTE: if it is heat stroke this temp is too high and must be cooled.
• 38 to 39 fever. Normally nothing to worry about
• 37 to 38.  slightly warm (above 37.5 is considered mild fever, but is more like flushed IMO)

So that’s been my fun for the last week or so.  One cool thing was I upgraded my main machine from Vista x64 to Windows 7 x64 whilst I wasn’t doing anything (more on that later).

I’m still catching up with emails, may take me a day or two more yet.