Fairy Park with Donna and Tahlia

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Well the first post in “2010 Family Day Trips” is neither a day trip nor strangely enough quite a family trip.

Donna had suggested we head down to the Fairy Park during the School holidays some months back, funnily enough I had never heard of it before, but it was opened in 1959 and is Australia’s oldest theme park. With it located in a town called Anakie about a 2 to 2-5 hour drive from home




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Jamie and Sarahs Wedding

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All 2100 pictures of Jamie and Sarah's Wedding at the Old Cheese Factory in Berwick.


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Anzac Day Weekend in the High Country

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4 days spent in the High Country with Stevo in a Disco 1, Trevor in a Rangie and Darren in a Cruiser.

Travelling on my own and driving pretty close to the extent of my abilities most of the time there aren’t many pictures on this trip, with the majority taken whilst stationary. The few pictures I tried to take whilst on the move either came out blurry or ended up being of the dash, steering wheel or similar.

Stevo prepared a Google Earth KMZ file of the weekend which can be downloaded from here. The 4x4 section begins at waypoint “69-track” You really need to rotate your view to get a sense of the topography of the land though.
 

Discovery 2 wired Aux/Mp3 audio input.

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The issue for me has been how to connect an Mp3 player to the Disco Stereo.

I tried the FM transmitters but the dynamic range was poor and the constant retuning for a clear frequency drove me insane.

I tried the tape adaptor which was better but sound quality was still dodgy, I'm not sure if its just a crap tape deck or if my heads are dodgy and I presume because its not grounded the mobile phone cased interference.

The solution I have had in my mind for sometime was to use the CD inputs as the Mp3 input, but I searched the Internet for someone who had done this before but i came up blank. I did find a few adaptors available but all were $$$$.

The stumbling block for this project has been trying to find the CD audio wires, I searched the electrical diagrams on the RAVE CD and couldn’t make head not tail of them and then by pure chance looking for something else I found the pin outs of the connectors on the stereo.

There are a few limitations with this install
It can only be used if you have the CD stacker installed, if you don’t have the CD stacker then you cannot select “CD” as an input on the head unit.

It isn’t a separate input, it just uses the CD audio input and the head unit thinks its playing a CD and will continue going through playing the CD’s in the stacker.

3x different scenarios for doing this
1. Disconnect the CD audio inputs and wire directly to MP3.
2. Wire a switch ( 4 Pole Double Throw) to select input from CD and MP3
3. Or use a switched head phone socket that will switch to the Mp3 when the plug is inserted.

I used the 3rd option but now I think I should have taken the 2nd option?

Easter at  Warwick's house in Mallacoota for 4 days.

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Leaving after work on Wednesday afternoon we had a relatively good run up and arrived a little after 10pm that evening. On the return leg home on Monday we encountered some of the worst traffic I have ever seen with one section taking over an hour to travel a little over 20kms from Rosedale to Traralgon.

Fiona, Wendy and Warwick were also staying in Mallacoota for the Easter weekend and arrived at Warwick’s house a few hours before us after spending a few days exploring Canberra.

Having explored and photographed Mallacoota and the surrounding area on our numerous visits and battling the Flu the motivation to take photos was low, so a large portion of the pictures on this trip are taken by Fiona, Catherine and Caitlin.


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Website Changes = Broken Links

Due to the website growing to an extraordinary 61GB in size and the maximum size of a Lotus Notes Database being 64GB I have had to split the website into multiple sites.

This has caused the majority of links on the website and in Google to be invalid, so over the next few days I will work my way through the internal links but Google and other external websites I have no control over.

The site used to just be Pics.nsf (61GB) but is now broken into Home (5GB), People (15GB), Places (16GB), Holidays (21GB) and Occasions (7GB).

Update: After i decommissioned Pics.nsf i soon tired of the 1000-1500 invalid links requests per day, so have commissioned it again as purely an archive.

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It is now our third visit to Marlo on the Victorian coast

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The caravan will be at Marlo for a little over a month, with us staying for 12 days and then Malcolm and Puk staying for a fortnight before we return again for a few days and to pick the van up.



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The 2009 Xmas parties....

I think that this year is the first year we haven't actually hosted any of the Xmas parties.


12 December 2009 - The School and Kinder Group Xmas



Everyone had a great day with Karyn and Scott playing host for the Xmas party.
The jumping castle was a winner with the kids having a great time playing in it, which left the adults to relax and eat yummy food.
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19 December 2009 - The Lay Family Xmas



The Lay Family Xmas hosted by Cheryl and Leigh.
With everyone bringing a plate and presents kept to a minimum it made for a no stress relaxed evening.
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24 December 2009 - The Herman Family Xmas



The Herman Family Xmas at Peter and Anna's house included all the Herman's except Wendy who was still in QLD and Morna's brother Tony from WA came as well.
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25 December 2009 - Xmas morning at home



Xmas morning at home with the girls opening there presents.
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25 December 2009 - The Arber Family Xmas



The Arber Family Xmas at Gaynor and Peter's new house with all the Arber's including Jamie and Sarah.
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