Swansea Heritage Week

I've just updated the Schouten House website with a news section, since we have some events coming up next week. Swansea is hosting a Heritage Week, and Jodie and I are very excited to be a part of it all. The programme is linked from the news page, but you can find it here too.

A snip from the news page to let you know what we'll be up to:

• Cameron will be playing bagpipes during the opening ceremony at 2pm on Saturday 21st April at the Jubilee Beach amphitheatre.
• Grannie Rhodes will be performing at Schouten House at 6pm on Anzac Day. Our guests on that night are invited to attend as part of their accomodation package. Drinks and nibbles will be provided.
• On Friday 27th April, a history walk culminates with an afternoon tea at Schouten House.

If you'd like to know more about Grannie Rhodes, head over to Miriam's Mulberry Cottage website.

As always, I would love it if the tech savvy of you could give the site a browser compatibility test and let me know about any issues.

Busy Easter

We are having a busy Easter, with the house full of guests. This morning, we broke the record for most cooked breakfasts! With a full house of twelve people, we finally had everyone opt for a full cooked breakfast. I have to thank Jodie for this record... firstly, because it was her turn to cook, but she let me do it for a shot at the record. Secondly, because she was wonderful to work with - keeping all the guests happy, and still having time to help out with beating eggs, and expert toasting duties.

Here are some stats for this morning's effort:

• Start cooking at 0815, and finish cooking before 0915 [that's me just plating up the last breakfast in the picture]. That's one breakfast every five minutes.
  
• 31 eggs used [lots of people opted for scrambled eggs]
• 8 serves of mushrooms
• 7 serves of tomato
• [only] 14 rashes of bacon [I think it's usually a higher percentage]
• 6 sausages [a good effort there]
• no baked beans, pancakes, smoked salmon

We've got a full house tonight as well, so we'll see if Jodie gets as many orders. I think now that it's getting into winter, the full cooked breakfasts are getting more popular. In summer, we had people cleaning up our fresh fruit salad instead.

After Easter, things will wind down a little as we get towards the end of the peak season for Tasmanian tourism. The year, Swansea is running a program for Heritage week, and we are hoping to attract some people for that, including a couple of events at Schouten House... stay tuned for more details soon [and on the Schouten House website].

PC Reinstall

Today, I finally got around to formatting and reinstalling my PC, after much backing up. I think a windows update had its way with the registry, and it wasn't the same afterwards.

I was looking forward to getting RAID 0 working... but even though I managed to get the drivers loaded, the partitions formatted, it wouldn't even make it all the way through a windows XP install. I wrote some haikus that might tell the story.

Nvidia shame
Asus let me down again
Raid not working now

After the initial jubilation [getting the drivers loaded, formatting neat partitions] and then frustration, I gave up... but it had its own set of problems.

Master boot record
Raid setup molested you
Windows never loads

At some point further along...

Haiku Therapy
Anxiety fades away
Stupid computer

Now it's all said and done, with most of the business critical applications loaded and tested...

Mug of camomile
I am getting sleepy now
Windows still loading

There's nothing quite like a clean install. It feels stable. It goes faster. I will enjoy it all the more after some sleep!

Tsunami warning

Yesterday, it was a little surreal to get a Tsunami warning after having a rare sleep in. It was mostly surreal because I checked my inbox at about the time it was supposed to hit...

We certainly couldn't see any activity on the water, and the Flotilla Commander of our Volunteer Coast Guard didn't seem to be too worried... so we relaxed a little bit. That didn't stop us, however, from Skyping into Victoria to tell Andrew and Mel the news [which by that stage was old].

I've posted the alert here... just for interest's sake. I particularly like the article about why you can't surf a Tsunami, since that was my very first thought.