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Thanks to all for your support for the ShadyJames appeal!

With over $820 of smasher support we managed to build him a much needed new gaming rig.  Last night Mastercyl, SlapperJoe and myself went over to the de Vries household to deliver the new rig.

Shady was in good spirits!  He now has a long road of recovery ahead to rebuild his Six-pack-of doom.

In other news the scares left from the surgery are big enough to make any girl appreciate them!

All that’s missing from the machine is an official LanSmash case badge!  We’ll be placing one on the machine come SantaSmash in December.  For those that donated to the machine we’ll be offering people to sign his case as well.

Shady was very appreciative and wanted to send out a message of thanks to everyone who’s been wishing him well.  Although now he won’t be able to blame his gaming rig on his TF2 performance.

(JB and ShadyJames – just before JB pulled a knife out to stab him spy style)

And for those that care about the tech, here’s what we managed to cobble together.

- XFX Radeon HD5770 graphics card 1gig 
- Corsair 4GB DDR3 RAM 
- AMD Phenom II X4 965
- Gigabyte GA-880GM-USB3 motherboard 
- 500GB hdd
- Antec 300 Case
- Thermaltake 600W PSU
- Samsung DVDRW drive

and… 1 x official Windows 7 64bit Home Premium that LanSmash kicked in another $120 for bringing the total cost to $971.

Thanks to our generous donators to make this happen.

Contributed smashers:
- Blade
- Misscara 
- pcmattman
-Sensator
- Slapper Joe
- Wilko
- MasterCy
- Stackboy
- RatboyXL
- Lexi
- Plastic
- BunBun
- Scythe
- stoOds
- Pandan
- Yang
- dohzer
- chris actworth
- Graham Reynolds

Travelling back from Melbourne via Airplane I thought it would be a good opportunity to catch up on my ‘paper-work’ and update my timesheet’s.

The harddrive gods however had other plans.

As I was moving documents around my Macbook Pro the system gave me the ‘Spinning Wheel of Death’ and after much waiting I discovered in the console that I was receiving I/O errors.

Oh dear, so when I got home I thought I might try a disk repair to see if it was filesystem related instead of disk drive.

Disk drive failure! I didn’t have the AppleCare disk scanning tools to confirm it but was 99% sure. So I checked it in to a AppleCare repair shop near my house.

I wasn’t too concerned with my work, as majority of my work related files are on the cloud. I use Google Documents for office related documents, I use DropBox for everything else. E-mail is with Gmail, and my contacts/calendar are sync’d as well. A few other bits and pieces were on my iPhone.

Then thought to myself in horror that the all my personal photo’s/documents/movies are stored on one place, my Macbook Pro.

I do have a daily time machine backup run that backups up to an external USB disk drive.

Crazily, my life’s ‘stuff’ was now sitting on one signal disk drive and I just had to hope it had backed up things correctly.

Luckily it had, and the restore did work (quite easily with Time Machine). Now I’m going to look in investing in something like a Drobo to have at least some type of secondary redundancy in case the backup drive dies in the future.

Friends of mine will always hear me preach “Harddrive’s suck, backup your data”. Redundancy is not a backup either. You got to have multiple copies. It’s not a question of if, but when your harddrive will fail. Plan accordingly.

So now I have my precious irreplaceable data back, such as this shot from Wilko from a trip in 2004.

Or this shot with MasterCyl and our LanSmash bulk buy of Battlefield 1942 back in 2003.

Or this shot of Dan helping me assemble a Mini-ITX chassis from scratch with aluminium.

Or this shot of myself and my brother going to StarWars Episode 2 launch in the Brisbane cinema back in 2003.

you get the drift.

My person YouTube page has quite a lot of hits for various silly videos. The number one video that just doesn’t want to die though is my Solo Molten Core attunement HowTo.

Youtube Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-2u48dD2EI

Way back in August 2006 I wanted to play in a MoltenCore raid with my then friend Cara. I had about an hour or so to jump in the raid, and I wasn’t ‘attuned’ for the quest.

The process is simple, you have to touch a rock at the end of an instance. Problem is that I didn’t have the time to assemble a team of 5 to do the run before the raid. So I scoured the web and founds some forum posts of players who had been able to do it as a Druid using invisibility stealth and tough bear resilience.

I thought hrmph, maybe I could use an invisibility potion instead of stealth and give it a shot.

At the time though, I had never actually even -finished- that instance ever before. So I was going in kind of blind! I had no time though, so all I had was some forum posts and guild chat to get me through.

Turns out it was a success, and to document my travels I Fraps’d it. After the (failed mind you) Molten Core run that night I quickly cut together something simple on my Powerbook and uploaded it to youtube to show my guildies.

Since then, it’s had over 35,000 views, and to my knowledge one of the first Molten Core Solo attunement run videos. It’s not even titled right, as I used ‘MC’ instead of ‘Molten Core’, so I guess it’s mainly people linking it to each other.

People still comment on it today, mainly people with level 80/70 characters that breeze through it.

One day it will die and become irrelevant, but until then it’s nice to know that some gamers are still being helped out by my hack video.

After waving off to Mykono’s we set sail to our next and final Greek Island, the stunning Santarini. Santarini is supposedly one of my most naturally beautiful Greek Island and is a little bit unstable as it surrounds and underwater volcano that last went off over 4,000 years ago that blew up the island so high that chunks of it have been found as far as Greenland.

Coming into port at Santarini, you can get an idea of scale of this island…

Those white dots on the top is not snow but a bustling town of white houses, and that 10 story cruise liner is about a kilometre from the coast line.

We soon docked and jumped on to the bustling port and set to find our ride.
Can you spot the sign for “Smith & Williams”… It’s there somewhere…

Jumping on the bus I sucked in my stomach as we drove on the tight windy roads up the mountain. I’m not sure what possessed the original inhabitants to build up such a high mountain and carve out an existence here. I think it has to do with the islands surrounding in such a way to make a perfect port about 2000 years ago, but the Volcano has caused earthquakes sinking parts so it’s not so perfect now-days.

In any case, Santarini is simply breathtaking!

The weather has taken a turn for the worse and settled in for a very miserable, windy, cold and wet two days. The girls didn’t want to leave the warm and cosy Hotel Charisi, so Ben and I set on an adventure to explore as much as we could come rain hail or shine!

Unfortunately I don’t have very many photo’s to detail the exploration as we spent the day mostly on scooters. I did take a couple of movies holding the camera with on hand and driving with the other, however these will have to wait until I return to Australia to be youtube-a-rized.   

Have a guess which way is correct with this sign?

If you said right, you’d be wrong! It does take you to a ‘look out’ to see Super Paradise beach but doesn’t actually take you to the beach itself. No matter we just wanted to see what it looked like, but it was quite fun to see other tourists drive by, stop, scratch their heads and then roll the dice to decide which way they’d drive.

Feral cats are everywhere on the island. I saw one during lunch walk past with a lizard tail wiggling widely out of its mouth. The locals seem to love these feral cats which does worry me somewhat. If this were Australia it would be shotgun season to try and protect the local environment. I guess in some way the cats are kind of ‘native’ if you consider they’ve probably been here for over 1000 or so years like humans have. But it’s a bit strange none-the-less.

Ben and I travelled around 90 kilometers and when you consider the island’s edges is 119 kilometers we saw quite a bit of it! At the top of the island there is a beach that is kind of a basin for all wash up, and with not a soul around we decided to explore as best we can from the comfort of our scooter seats.

You’ll have to wait for various antics on youtube of us testing the bikes off-road capabilities when I get back to the land of Oz.

Unfortunately the weather was so bad and the water so choppy that the day we were due to head out to our next island our boat was cancelled. This was a pain, but Ben and I were ready to brave the wind and rain to bring the girls back pizza and watch some movies on my laptop.

Again the hotel we stayed at was very homey and accommodating handing us plates, cutlery, and cups every time we had a meal in the open area there. It was great to relax and recharge our batteries as the wind howled outside bashing on the windows.

Of course I would have preferred sun-shine and less wind, but we did had an awesome time anyhow!

Waking up to a bright and sunny Mykonos we took advantage of the beautiful weather and decided to explore the island as best we can. First order of business was to teach Ben how to operate a scooter, and convince the hire shop that his Australian Motorcycle Learner’s would qualify him to ride one… Good news is, Ben is a quick study and we were on the road!

Of course, the only problem is to figure out exactly -how- to get where you want to go. The Map we had was fairly useless as it was designed for kids with colouring in pencils and had no detail whatsoever. No mater, we couldn’t get -that- lost and luckily our hotel was close to the main town.

The problem with Mykono’s streets is that most of them are dead ends. You may think you’ll be able to reach your intended destination if you head in the right direction and indeed you’ll be damn close and see it but encounter rocky mountains or man-made walls.   

It mattered not though as we had so much fun exploring the old tight roads and weaving through traffic.

The girls were a little concerned riding on these old noisy scooters. It is the way to travel on this island though as many lanes are two way but are only big enough for a single car. So unless you’re a local and know the tricks I think scooters are the way to go. Plus the top speed on the island is officially 60km/h, but you wouldn’t know it looking at the traffic.

I’m not sure if there is any official police presence on the island, as it seems everyone does what they want to do. Our guide warned us to wear our helmets or face $350euro fine. To be honest, I think our heads our worth more then any damn fine and I find it silly for so many cyclist riding around without the right gear.
The whole island has a feeling of a bit of the ‘wild-west’ in terms of lack of law and order. Nothing serious, indeed it’s a great feeling laid-back carelessness that’s just what we need to kick back and relax.

In the evening we decided to head up to the lighthouse which we’re told has the best view of Sunsets on the islands. Unfortunately for us we never quite made it to the light-house. We got to about 200-meters of it from the wrong road, but it was breath-taking view none-the-less.   

Here’s three of us looking at the various wonders from the top of the mountain with Cara taking the happy snap. Speaking for my beautiful wife here she is with me as the Sun as finally settling.

You can tell the weather is a little bit cold. It’s nice and warm when the Sun is out but a bit chilly and very windy otherwise. I loved running around on the Scooters exploring this island with Cara sitting behind as a pillion rider.

I’ve always favoured visiting new places on two wheels instead of four. You can see more, feel more, smell more, and if you want to stop you can park virtually anywhere. To be honest we took these little scooters father and on far more steep and rocky roads then they were originally intended. There were a few moments with two people on a single scooter simply didn’t work as we ascended some very steep peaks.

So naturally the girls had to jump off as Ben and I raced up to see if the view was worth it!