Beddysblog.com
My personal site about life, friends & family, lliving in Australia and a fair bit on cars too :)

A recent photo from friend Ian’s wedding.

Remember don’t smoke kids, its bad for you, as you can see from my face!!

Not the most flattering photo in the world but it captured
the moment just after Sanna said Yes

Hi all, I am sure everybody in my friends and family knows this news now, but just to be sure, and to stop all the 100’s of women that approach me every day, Sanna and I are engaged!

I proposed to Sanna in Tokyo on the way over to England to my sisters wedding, the exact place was right at the top of the Odaiba ferris wheel in the Palette town region of Tokyo. The wheel was so massive, one of the biggest in the world, that on the way up to the top I heard a bit of creaking and wind rushing by, my hands were sweating and I was so nervous. After I proposed at the top Sanna though I was nervous from proposing, no, it was actually the bloody height of the wheel!

Odaiba ferris wheel in the Palette town region of Tokyo

Our plans at the moment are to get married at the end of the next Australian summer so around February 2013 so about 16 months time, that’ll give us plenty of time to get it organised. Our thoughts at the moment are for it to take place over a weekend away in the Hunter valley wine region at a vineyard just North of Sydney for our family and friends to enjoy the wedding and to get away for a weekend in the Australian countryside.

Happy  Birthday to my best mate Brendon! 29 on Friday! We surprised him at a friends recording studio Tommirock in Newcastle. We all hid in the studio with the lights out and jumped out, he didn’t have a clue, well done to Easton for organising the surprise and not letting it on to him.

Brendon’s Birthday–blowing out the candles

Happy Birthday Captain Sunnies

Cake portion control out of control

Easton’s portion was just totally out of control

Music studio webcams, good job Brendon didn’t
know about these before we surprised him

We were in a music studio so we had to record a amazing live version of the Nyan Cat song haha I was rocking out at the piano at the back in the pink sunnies.

Brendon’s birthday music video

Hi family and friends, we have been back in Australia for one week now and I’m over my jet lag (it took 4 days this time) so I’ll post some photos and even some video of our lovely trip here on my blog.

Japan

We really didn’t get too many photos of our 6 day trip to Japan as we seemed to be filming everything on the video camera and leave the digital camera behind in the hotel room, but here are some.

On the way to the hotel in Tokyo from the airport Sanna posed to make a joke of the lady behind her on the bus.

All Tokyo toilets are either a hole in the floor style or the majority super electric ones like this that wash your bits after your done. Click on the photo to zoom in and read the label too as the English is so bad its funny.

We went out to a great restaurant on the first night and got talking to a few people in the restaurant and made some new friends. Some spoke alright English and some not much at all. It was fun comparing Japan culture to Australian/English culture. The guy to the right bought me some Sake’s when I was already a bit drunk and got me really drunk, they were all so friendly. The next day I had a Sake hangover.

A selection of small Japanese drinks we got in the local convenience store. We worked out by tasting them 3 were alcoholic and 1 was an energy drink. We were not sure what was floating in 2 of them, they looked like large olives or cows balls, we think they were apricots maybe.

England

England the main reason for the Trip to Europe for 2011 was for my sister Nicki’s wedding at my families local church with the wedding reception at my parents barn and land.

We organised a local tractor and trailer to ferry the wedding guests from the church to the reception at my parents, it was a unique and fun way to move everyone around and a good idea.

The wedding in the tiny St Mary’s village church in our village of Barnham.

Here is the wedding reception guests in the large marquee that was put up on my families land, this photo was taken during the speeches.

Here is the top table during my dad’s speech, this was taken from my view off to the side where I was doing the wedding MC’ duties on the microphone through the evening.

My sister in her wedding dress on the bucking bronco, other games for everyone to have fun on also were, bungee run, coconut shy, horse shoe throwing, bouncy castle (jumping castle for the Aussie readers) and tug of war (which we forgot to do).

I made a short video slideshow made up of photos of me and Nicki growing up and Michael her husband growing up and lastly photos made up of the wedding day. I showed this video at around 10pm at the wedding reception and it was received well by the crowd.

Here catching up with old mates Dom and Leo in a Chichester pub, Rich Earnshaw was out of town DJ’ing in North America but I caught up with Mark Akky, Claire With’s and Rich Wright also, good times Lovely to see you all.

Leo is now also finally a official stuntman now for Hollywood films. He’s been training for some 6-8 years by memory now and he’s now officially paid to hang out with famous stars and jump off very large buildings with explosions going off. He’s in the latest ‘Pirates of the Caribbean film’ with a short speaking part during a chase down some stairs with Johnny Depp, check his part out in this video.

Portugal

Sanna and I escaped England for 6 days to the south coast Algarve region of Portugal for some beach time and exploring the countryside in our hire car.

The Algarve region, Portugal

Beautiful Sea of the Algarve, beautiful colour

Sagres beer along with Super Bock are the two national beers of Portugal, I preferred Sagres.

Typical beach of the Algarve with the warm setting sun.

This was taken playing around with a 3 second exposure on the camera and Sanna walking slowly across the frame

Sanna having fun in the Hotel Delfin’s pool

Exploring the inland areas of the Algarve we found these MASSIVE wind turbines, the base was wider than a typical small car.

On top of the tallest mountain in the Algarve region we found this mountain goats hanging around a watering hole.

We got shipwrecked on this lake and had to try and build a raft

A restaurant and bar that was 3 levels built into the rock face on the beach, we had a lovely meal here on our last evening in Portugal

Thanks for reading, speak soon, Mark.

Step 1, buy all the parts of course!

Getting stuck into the video editing of my video show Supercar Spin every month has become a real patience test and a half in recent months. The trouble is, as we are getting a little bit better and better with more HD footage and more videos of the cars we feature and the show creeps each episode a little bit longer, my old laptop is really starting to grind. I thought about it for a minute, all the times I press ‘play’ to preview a change I’ve made, if you add all those up through the video editing complete process, they work out to be close to hours wasted.

The solution was to spec out and build a fast video editing workstation specifically designed to power through the video editing process  from beginning to end, to give me more time being creative and less time waiting for the laptop to play catch-up.

After a few evenings of research on the internet to find out what the best ‘bang for yer buck’ parts were for a ‘video editing workstation’ I learnt it is (warning this gets real geeky now):

• as fast a CPU as you can afford – so I bought a Intel i7 960 quad core CPU
• a SSD (Solid State Drive) – for Windows and all programs for ultra fast random read/writes
• 2 x ‘Raptor’ drives in RAID 0 configuration – for all video content to be written to/read from
• NVidia GTX470 video card – compatible with Adobe Premiere Pro hardware acceleration
• 8Gb of RAM minimum – RAM is so cheap nowadays so I opted for 12Gb
• A 64bit operating system – So I went with Windows 7 64bit
• A good backup solution – so I got a 2Tb USB 3 external hard disk that gets locked in the safe after every monthly backup

I haven’t built a PC at home for about 10 years now, but I’ve been building servers in the day job in that time so how hard could it be? Driving all around Sydney to get all the parts for the cheapest prices around from dodgy hard to find Asian suburbs was the hardest thing to do!

Driving all the way round bloody Sydney just to get the cheapest parts

Actually building the workstation wasn’t too hard. Firstly you go buy all the parts as mentioned above and you can see in the first photo at the top of this blog post. Next is to get all the parts out of their over packaged boxes and start prodding expensive shiny looking parts with your fingers showing excitement, I did this part when Sanna was out so she didn’t get jealous of my excitement

Lay all the expensive bits out on a table to poke at

Now we build the complete computer on the kitchen table and power it up and start to install Windows. You don’t have to build the whole computer on the kitchen table but it does look quite cool doing so, it also does provide good opportunities for short-circuiting stuff so its not really advisable, but it looks cool!

Turn the kitchen table into a electrical hazard

Now you have to get your new computers case and strip out all the wires and install the power supply usually at the bottom at the back. If your a cashed up teenager, this is usually when you install silly things like water cooling and neon lights in the computer, because we all know neon lights make your computer more powerful! just like stripes on a car make it go faster!

Empty case, boring and doesn’t let you edit too many videos

Lastly we bung all of the parts you saw on the table before into the case as neatly as possible. Would you believe it, after not building a computer for myself in 10 years it all worked first time, no troubleshooting! and boy is it miles faster than my old SONY  VAIO laptop.

Fully built video editing workstation, does let you edit videos in blistering speed

So I set out with the aim to research and build a purpose built workstation for video editing and rendering HD videos for supercar spin and yes it delivers well, its bloody fast! The only way I could prove this to myself was to run up Adobe Premiere Pro and set it on a versus rendering faceoff between the old laptop and the new workstation in the video below.

Ok ‘geekyness’ over with, time to return to normal life and make another episode of Supercar Spin.

Sanna and I took  a weekend trip to the Australian Alps to climb Mt Kosciusko which is Australia’s highest mainland mountain at 2228 metres (7310 ft) above sea level. We drove to the area which is a 5 hour drive from Sydney, 3 hours to Canberra, 2 hours further to the Alpine region.

We stayed at the Red Bank lodge which is a members lodge but guests can stay there too and is very cheap to stay right on the mountain. I’ve been there 3 times now and I’d really recommend it if your looking to stay in Thredbo.

The view of the mountain from the Red Bank Lodge at its base

On Saturday we set out to climb the mountain, you take a chairlift to the top of the ski runs and then walk the 6.4km to the summit. Conditions from looking at the weather station report were bad but we had 3 types of GPS with us, 2 iPhones with Motionx GPS running on it and an old friends borrowed GPS unit and a topographical map and compass for real backup. We packed lots of food and we were very well clothed for the extremes of the mountain top so we decided to at least set out and see how it was.

Map of the walk, the Orange chairlift from the base then the Blue walk to the summit

The first stage of the walk was pretty windy with gusts up to 100kph coming from the West carrying with it ice particles. After a while the gusts died down for a part of the walk where we took this photo.

The start of the climb to the summit is at just under 2000m from sea level

Then for the remainder it started getting much heavier and visibility started getting worse all the way towards the top. There was a metal path showing in parts but most of the snow and ice had covered it. When we lost our way the GPS put us back on course and it was showing a accuracy of 30m even through the snow and ice above us which gave me confidence.

Part of a metal path just showing through the snow and ice

3/4 of the way up Mt Kosciusko, big ice build-up from here onwards

When we were just 300 metres from the summit and we walked up the last steep bit to the very top, the wind coming over the peak was just so fast, 100km+ gusts again and visibility was down to around 5 metres only. We just wanted to get a photo to prove we made the top in the middle of winter and get back down again because in truth it was bit scary.

Reaching the summit of Mt Kosciusko, we lasted just enough time for a photo

For comparison, this is what the summit looks like on a normal summers day

Of course the walk down was a lot easier and faster than the walk up, and by the hallway down point the sun started to break through and we felt comfortable again. It was good to get back to the top of the main chairlift where we had 2 Gluvine’s and a goulash soup to warm us up.

The next day we took it easy and walked around the Thredbo ski resort village and did  a short walk around the valley where we tried to see how far we could skate small rocks and branches across a frozen lake and crossed a freezing cold stream without just about falling in.

Safe and sound back down at the base

Sanna on the rocks crossing a cold stream

On the drive home to Sydney we went and looked at a old historic hut called Bullocks hut built in 1934 as a fishing lodge. It is situated next to the Thredbo River near the Skitube train.

Walking on the way to Bullocks with a O hut

Driving back to Sydney took 5 hours again, the Audi RS4 averaged 9.8 litres per 100km over the 496km back. Cruising at between 110-120kph all the way back that impressed me to get under 10 litres per 100km for a high-performance large car.

A lovely weekend away to the snow, thanks for reading.

Driving on the way back to Sydney

This week my mum popped over to visit us at dinner time, how lovely for her to pop by and join us

How good is Skype!