Archive for June 2007
The book selling business is going slowly. We’ve now sold three military history books to a collector in the US for US$150 – plus a whopping US$65 in postage. Oh, and a copy of the Australasian Girl’s Annual of 1917 to a friend in Wellington.
We’re getting the books from my father who runs “Ohope’s Famous Bookshop on the Lawn” as recently seen on TV’s Close-Up show. You can watch the video here, click on “Leaves on the Lawn”. He goes through many, many books each year and picks out stuff that he thinks is rare or otherwise interesting to collectors.
We’ve got a few auctions up at Ebay and Trademe. My favourite is the 1919 copy of the Treaty at Versailles.
The odd thing is that I don’t really understand the book collectors. I see the point of owning books you wish to read or refer to, but owning books just for the sake of it doesn’t make sense to me.
Even weirder is the whole idea of valuing first editions over a later edition. To me the value of a book is in the words and ideas recorded in it, not the thing itself, especially for mass-produced items like books. I’m looking forward to Google scanning all the books in the world and making them available over the internet.
I’ve seen a lot of articles telling you what to do and take when travelling, but I thought it might be worthwhile writing one about our experiences with what we did take and how well it worked out for us.
Kim and I recently did our big trip around Central America (Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama) and southern Mexico (Yucatan Peninsula, Oaxaca, Mexico City). Most of the time we were backpacking so were deliberately travelling quite light – I allowed myself one medium size backpack and one shoulder satchel.
Continue Reading “Backpacking Geeks in Central America” »
I just read an article asking “What game turned you into a gamer?” and I realised that I have been one as long as I can remember.
When I was a very young child in the 70s I used to be terribly excited to go to the airport. While I liked aeroplanes as much as the next boy the real attraction was the that they had a game arcade. I always made a bee-line for it (I can still rememeber exactly where it was!) – but only after begging for money from my parents.
This was pretty early on in gaming history and most of the games they had there weren’t actually video games. Instead they were electro-mechanical devices with gears and pulleys and little models on rails. One of my favourites was where you used a gun to shoot tanks and it used a red bulb to light up an explosion graphic whenever you got a hit. They did have some early video games too, such as Sea Wolf and Pong.
Then my local dairy (corner store for you damn foreigners) got Space Invaders and that was the end of any plans for saving my pocket money. If we didn’t have any 20c pieces we’d just stand around and watch others play, trying to learn the firing patterns to get 300 points when you shot the UFO.
Next up was Thru-the-Wall (aka Breakout) followed by Galaxian, Pleiades, Galaga and others. Sadly I never got the hang of the controls in Defender and I still struggle with games with too many buttons to press (yes GTA, I’m looking at you).
One of my favourites was Time Pilot and I must admit that this was partly because it was one of the few games I was actually good at. I also liked Phoenix and would play it with a friend hovering their finger over the shield button for last minute saves – and the inevitable arguments when they pressed it too late.
I wouldn’t really call myself a gamer these days. To me the term now implies that you’re part of the online role playing movement or heavily into killing your friends with first person shooters. I still play the occasional video game, mainly concentrating on the best car driving simulation I can afford which is currently Forza on the Xbox. Thanks to the generosity of Homagenz I’m also going to give Morrowind a try too.
Kim has finally launched her new food blog, What Kim Ate. It’s all about food and will have recipes and photos and other such things. Best of all, it’s New Zealand focused and will therefore have winter foods when it’s winter in the southern hemisphere (I’m sick of reading about the people in the northern hemisphere who are currently enjoying fresh asparagus).
I’ll be doing the occasional guest post as Kim isn’t the only blogging cook in our household.
Life in Whangamata is going well. We’re enjoying ourselves, living healthily, and getting some useful work done on our projects. It’s been great to have a few people to stay (my father and his wife, and everyone who came up/down to celebrate the Queen’s birthday) and Kim’s parents will be the next visitors. However, this can’t go on forever and we’re starting to do more planning for the next phase of our lives.
Stage 1 from August onwards is getting some IT contracts to bring in some money. I’ll concentrate mainly on the fields of system administration and technical writing as short term contracts are often available. If there’s any gaps between contracts we might do some part-time work in exchange for board through Help Exchange.
So far I’m already booked to spend September in Wellington working as a relieving Windows sysadmin/troubleshooter. We’ll be in Wellington for Kim’s birthday!
Stage 2 is going to more of the settling down stage. We’re both keen on getting a house + dog and it looks as though moving to Dunedin might be a good option for that. It also has a university for further study and would allow us to explore the South Island. We’re still not sure on this one yet and it will require more thought.
Oh, and I’m thinking of buying a people-mover style van (Toyota Previa/Estima style). Anyone got one for sale?
…to Thomas Beagle version 3.0 (or 4.0, or something).
I’ve created this site to:
- Showcase my art projects and photography.
- Publish my occasional writings.
- Give you some idea about who I am.
More content will be added as I get to it!