Baggas' Blog

Check out this very clever video…

Discovered this on the blog of Robin Parry, a UK based Christian author and publisher. His blog looks like an interesting one. I’ll be keeping an eye on it from now on.

For anyone who, like me, didn’t catch the Apple event last week with Steve Jobs et al, here’s an incredible, really nice, abbreviated version where they discuss their fantastic, great products…

It’s quite possible that no-one even noticed this website was down but I’ve been busy over the last half a day. My old webhosting provider (netlogistics.com – stay away from them) was getting increasingly unreliable and their software didn’t allow me to take advantage of new features of wordpress. Finally yesterday after a week of crashes by account went offline and that was the last straw. I have now migrated succesfully to a new provider Dreamhost, who for about the same cost provide a much better level of service, or so it seems thus far. [thanks to ob1 for the recommendation]

Setting up email and transferring my domain over to the new host was very simple, as was installing the WordPress blog software which basically was a 2 minutes job. The tricky and frustrating part was importing my old blog database into the new wordpress install. I would hate to have to start from scratch and lose years of blogging history. After giving up about 1230 last night and fiddling for a little while this morning I finally got the database to import. Then I had the problem of all the permalinks to my posts not being in the right place. That took me another couple of hours of frustrating fiddling around between patients but I’ve got it sorted now so hopefully if anyone has ever linked to me the links will still work…

And now I’ve finally got the chance to try out all the wordpress plugins etc and it’s great! All the things that never worked on my old server now do, like one click automatic upgrading of plugins, and hopefully the Wordbook plugin which should hopefully cross post this to Facebook. Hello to all my Facebook friends if you’ve never discovered this blog before!

Finally, just for the purposes of testing, here’s a YouTube video I came across this morning – This is Perth. It’s a tongue in cheek documentary about our wonderful city. If you are from Perth you’ll probably think this is funny. If you don’t know Perth, you’ll probably be saying “what the?”

Mercifully this morning at work hasn’t been too busy to enable me to get all this done, but I really should go and see if any more patients have arrived…
PS – please let me know if you encounter any problems with the site…W

I posted this on the Warnbro worship blog but I love it so much I’m gonna put it here as well (plus I wanted to test that posting YouTube Videos works with my new blog install..)

The music is inspiring and I like the comments he makes at the end… Enjoy.

Ever wished there was an easy way to save YouTube clips on your iPhone or iPod, or even to have them download automatically?

Here’s a great website I’ve discovered : http://www.rsshandler.com This site allows you to enter the details of a YouTube Feed or Playlist, and then creates a URL which you can use to subscribe to a “podcast” of the clips in that feed. That might sound a bit complicated but the instructions on the site are very easy to follow. Once you’ve generated a feed URL on the website, open iTunes – go to the ‘Advanced’ menu, then ‘Subscribe to Podcast’.. copy the URL into the box that comes up and Bob’s your uncle.

It works great. You can susbcribe to YouTube’s feeds (eg Featured, Most Popular etc) or create your own playlists (for example I’ve created a Humour, Music, and Family playlist. The only drawback is it seems not all clips can be successfully converted into iTunes format, but most can.

Give it a try! If you need any advice about it send me an email and I’ll try to help.

Cheers

I don’t know if I would want to nominate my “favourite Beatle” – they are all awesome, although I’d probably if pushed lean towards the more serious ones (or the dead ones) John and George. Similarly I wouldn’t want to have to choose my favourite Beatles song, but certainly “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” would be right up there – not only is it an awesome song written by George, but Eric Clapton played guitar on the original. Few would probably immediately nominate the artist known once again as Prince in the same category of guitar heroes as Clapton, but check out his amazing, theatrical solo in this tribute to George… this man can wield a Telecaster with style!

And while we’re on the topic, here’s another great but different version of this song, from a Ukelele maestro Jake Shimabukuro. I picked up this guy’s CD while we were in Hawaii a couple of years ago – it’s amazing. I often get tired of people mistaking my mandolin for a Ukelele (it’s got twice as many strings and looks and sounds completely different people!) but if I could play half as good as this guy I wouldn’t mind so much…

Haven’t been here much lately so let’s say this blog is officially in hiatus. Between Uni and family and church and what-not blogging has just been crowded out. I’m still fairly active on facebook, so you can find me on there most days. Also Owen has his own blog now which get’s updated every week or two – www.owenrocks.com. I’m sure this blog will become busy again in the future, but for now it’s just not a season for blogging.

In the meantime, for those who are on facebook… I think you’ll enjoy this clip that I found on Mark’s blog… 25 things I hate about facebook.

Saturday we went and hung out at the beach for a while – the kids played on the sand, played  bit of cricket, and then went and sat in a cafe for a while… very nice. Once again, another reminder of what a great place Rockingham has been to live in all these years…

It’s great watching Mia get to know and love her brothers more as she gets older. She thinks they are hilarious, as you can see in this video…

Here’s a video from yesterday of Mia and her cousin Seth, who is just a few weeks older than her. We have never seen her laugh as much as she does here – one of those moments I’m really glad to have captured on video…

Occaisionally when surfing channels I’ll wind up on the Comedy Channel watching shows like the Colbert Report. He has some interesting guests but an annoying tendency to continually interrupt them in order to get his jokes in. Anyway, here’s an interview he does with my favourite Bishop, N T Wright, about his latest (excellent) book Suprised by Hope. Good interview, funny in places, annoying in others, but in general Tom holds his own and gets his point across (sort of). Take a look…

This movie has kinda crept up on us without a lot of buzz or hype – the new CGI Star Wars movie which will be released on August 14th in Australia (one day before America). I first saw the preview in the cinema just a couple of weeks ago but before that hadn’t heard anything about it. Apparently this will be the lead in to a new series on Cartoon Network.

Here’s the preview which I just found at Hello Internet. As Ben points out it’s a bit strange seeing Lucasfilm and Star Wars with a Warner Bros intro instead of 20th century fox

Much has been made in recent years of people filling out their religion on census forms as ‘Jedi’

Well here’s what you’ve been waiting for – a documentary examining the inside workings of a Jedi church. They seem like Calvinist Jedis though, “I wish I could tell everyone they can be saved but they can’t. If you don’t have the midichlorians God doesn’t want you – it’s that simple.”

Worth a chuckle – I especially like the bit where Darth Maul goes forward for the altar call

It’s been some time since I’ve posted any videos of Mia so here’s a quick clip of her from yesterday. Also enjoy the music, which Luke created (with a little help from me) using Apple GarageBand.

I walked into the study this morning to find our two boys Owen and Luke sitting at the computer laughing their heads off. The video below, which they had discovered themselves on YouTube, was the reason. See what you think…

SO can you accurately locate Bolivia, Ivory Coast, and Turkmenistan on a world map?

If not then you have some catching up to do. Take a look at this video of a 2 year old geographical prodigy. I would bet that the vast majority of our high school students wouldn’t come close…

Came across a video similar to this one on cnn.com today and thought I’d go on The Google and see if I could find a YouTube version to post for y’all. This is not exactly the same but it’s essentially the same basic story – classic Bushims! Ain’t the internets a wonderful thing!

Well I’m back to working slightly longer days this week after doing half days for the school holidays. For the second half of the holidays it didn’t seem all that slack though as I still had babies being born almost every day which meant early mornings and late nights and other hospital visits in between. This week has been a little quieter on the baby front although I’ve got my second one on the way today (no idea what time she will deliver though) and work here in the surgery is reasonably sedate. I do have a smallish pile of paperwork to get through but rather than doing that I’ve been putting my time to us catching up with some episodes of the Amazing vlog show on YouTube. This is an almost daily video blog produced by Mr Internet and his compadres. The episodes are well produced, funny at times, and interesting. At least I found them interesting but I know most of the guys who are doing it so maybe if you have no idea who they are you might not be so enthralled.

Anyway here’s the first episode – I’ll leave it up to you to check out the rest if you want…

Here’s the latest video of our baby Mia – now nearly eight weeks old. My how she’s grown!

Just upgraded my blog software to Wordpress 2.5. I think I’ve been stuck in 2.1 for quite some time now – for some reason I never bothered to update to the versions in between. Upgrading to 2.5 was pretty quick and painless, and certainly the interface seems much nicer with more powerful editing and management features. And most of my plugins seem to work quite well.

The remainder of this post will be a bit of a test post to try and make sure some things are still working… but read on nonetheless…

To test the YouTube embedding, here’s a video clip from Nickel Creek, one of my favourite bands at the moment, and part of my ongoing journey into bluegrass…

Here’s a quote from one of the books I’m currently reading :

Our life’s dance is not painted for us in footsteps on the floor. It’s not laid out so we know where to place our next step. We simply have to judge which steps best fit the rhythms that we hear.

~ Paul Marshall Heaven is not my Home p62

And the new version has tags. I’ve never previously bothered to use tags on my blog, choosing to stick simply with categories. But since wordpress 2.5 supports it natively, and the rest of the web is going that way, I guess I’ll be tagging my blog posts from now on…

It’s taken me a little while to get around to it, but here is Mia’s first YouTube video, from her first few days in hospital. Starting with footage from minutes after she was born, then meeting her brothers, her first bath, and her impression of a frog. Enjoy.

Also added a few more photos to my flickr page, like the ones below.. what I haven’t uploaded though is the video which follows of Owen taking off driving round the house with Mia on his lap!

This Mexican duo are amazing - Rodrigo y Gabriela. And if you like this, you should definitely check out their album, which includes a version of Metallica’s Orion amongst other things. But for the meantime, enjoy Stairway to Heaven…

Much has been said about Barack Obama’s talent for inspiring lofty rhetoric – but it’s perhaps even better when set to music. Check out this video where hip-hop artist will.i.am has used Obama’s New Hampshire speech as the basis for a new song “Yes We Can” (and no – it has nothing to do with Bob the Builder).

I bet no-one could make Hillary sound this cool. 

Here’s the second part of the video from our weekend in Denmark. It really is a beautiful spot down there – lovely countryside and some great coastal scenery.

Dennis sent me this video on facebook earlier. I thought it was quite well done and I know it will appeal to the kids :

Happy New Year and all the best for 2008!

So far it’s been a nice relaxing start to the year. Spent most of the day at home taking it easy with the kids. Got a few jobs done including taking the Christmas tree down and Jen has started setting up the nursery (which has been a storeroom for the last 2 years since we’ve moved in) – needless to say there’s lots of pink stuff

Two trips out in the new Prado today – one to the hospital for the first birth of 2008, and one to Bunnings with the boys to grab a few things. Yesterday we spent the morning down at Rockingham Beach playing around on the family boat, enjoying the new SeaBiscuit tube that Kyle got. Here’s some film of it :

Well we had a great Christmas Day yesterday. Plenty of time just relaxing with family, an excellent church service, and time in the swimming pool. It was a pretty hot 40.7 degrees Celsius (that’s 105.26F) yesterday but today looks like it’s going to be even warmer 41 degrees! Might be a good day to spend inside in the air-conditioning watching the cricket, and maybe jump in the pool or take a run to the beach later in the evening. The only potential problem with that is that I am on-call for obstetrics, and already have at least one patient in labour…

Anyway, here’s a taste of our Christmas Day 2007!

EDIT : just had a newsflash while watching the cricket. Apparently Perth has it’s hottest Boxing Day on record – 44.3 degrees Celsisus (according to the BOM site) – that’s 111.174 degrees Farenheit. In fact it’s the hottest ever December day also. Yesterday was the second hottest ever Christmas day 40.7, but certainly the hottest in my lifetime since the previous was in 1968.

This video is of a stand-up comedian called “Pablo” who performed at the concert we went to in Kampala, Uganda, in October. I think it’s the sort of thing that’s more funny for locals or at the least visitors to Uganda, but take a look and see what you think. In this clip he’s discussing the genesis of various styles of music…

Another video I quickly threw together – this one is Owen and Luke playing around in London…

Back in July I posted about when Luke wanted to give some of his toys and food to a little child begging with his mother in Kampala.

Here’s some video of that, plus a general view of the traffic in Kampala as seen from our hotel.

I’m gradually working my way through some of my video footage from the last 6 months, so expect to see more of these YouTube clips over the next few weeks. Working with iMovie on my Mac makes it so easy to produce these – it literally took only about 5-10 minutes to put this clip together, whilst watching a DVD with the kids. Otherwise life is way too busy at the moment. Work is getting fairly hectic, lots of other functions on, plus we have Owen’s surgery this week. Tomorrow is our church’s big Aqua Carols event at the local aquatic center -  swimming, eating, and just generally having fun whilst our church music team provides the entertainment. I’m playing and singing in about three different bands – rock, acoustic, and country style! Should be a good day

Continuing to work with my Mac – now starting to deal with connectivity to various devices. Firstly I was pleased to find that I could get my Windows Mobile 6 PDA phone to sync with my MacBook without too much difficulty. All it took was a download of a beta version of a program called Missing Sync and within minutes I was able to use Bluetooth to synchronise my calendar, contacts, to-do list and more with the relevant applications on my Mac. Changes were reflected accurately in both directions. It also enables you to sync a whole lot of other items including photos, videos, call and sms logs etc, but I haven’t really explored that. But being able to get this working so quickly was a bit of a bonus. I hadn’t expected it to be so painless.

A different story with my Digitech GNX4 guitar effects board. For many months I have had problems with this since Digitech were extremely slow in releasing drivers for it to work with Vista (they finally have within the last few weeks). And now it seems I can’t get it working with my Mac. Not sure if this is a problem relating to the new Leopard version of OSX or what but it’s quite frustrating. Not only can I not install the X-edit software for editing my effect presets on the GNX4, but I cannot even use it as a recording input via USB. It shows up in audio preferences and I can even “see” the sound when I play guitar on the little input meter – but when I load up recording software like GarageBand or Audacity it complains of MIDI driver clashes and refuses to work. Very frustrating – mostly I blame Digitech for this – releasing a product and not providing adequate software support to ensure it works on all platforms. I’m still exploring the forums and hoping for a way around this but I’m not holding my breath.

Finally I’ll just mention the cool iSight camera that is built in to the MacBook Pro. Very handy for recording little video clips like in the intro to the video below of Luke playing piano. The picture quality is very good and it’s quick and easy to use. The iChat software for video chat seems pretty cool, with some fun background and picture effects the kids enjoyed playing around with. Sadly it is not compatible with MSN which is where my few chat contacts hang out – but I’ll see if there’s a workaround for that. I’m not a heavy duty chat user anyway, but this camera may well come in handy for other things.

In the meantime, enjoy Maestro Luke…

One of the news stories that has been sadly neglected in the midst  of our current Australian election campaign is the Commonwealth Heads Of Government Meeting (CHOGM) which is taking place in Kampala, Uganda, at the moment. I was hoping to see reports of our Prime Minister attending and some news coverage of Kampala, but sadly John Howard has more pressing issues on his mind. At present the Queen, Gordon Brown, Canadian PM Stephen Harper and a host of other world leaders are descending on Kampala. To date I’ve seen one story in the Australian media, who are understandably pre-occupied with our own election tomorrow. Might have to check out BBC news later to see if they have any stories. Anyway, here’s a view of Kampala that the Queen and other CHOGM delegates will most likely never see – the view from the back of a boda-boda motorcycle taxi. These are the quickest and easiest way of getting around Kampala and weaving through the often chaotic traffic. Although on this video, filmed by Watoto team member and lab guru Dennis and myself, the traffic is pretty mild. You will get to see some of Kampala’s nicest streets in the CBD, cleaned up “getting ready for CHOGM”

This is my first video edited on my MacBook Pro in iMovie (is it just me, or does Apple seem to have copyright on the letter i ?) Took me a little while to get the hang of it, but I’m pleased to say there was not a single crash or even a significant delay in the whole process, which is a huge contrast to my efforts with Windows Movie Maker a couple of weeks ago on my Vista PC. I’ll be playing around with the video capabilities of my Mac more over the next week or so as I upload more of my Uganda videos. 

One day to go before the election, and here’s a cool you tube clip I found. Admittedly it’s a bit biased, casting the Howard government in the role of the Empire defending against Rudd and his band of rebels, but I still found it pretty funny, and well done. Don’t know if it was intended or not, but the father vs son parallels here are interesting. Apparently if you get tired of (or depressed by…) the election coverage Channel 10 is just showing Star Wars so it’s something to keep in mind…

In other election related news, I just read The Australian’s final editorial, which ultimately in a close decision between two “worthy opponents” advocates a vote for Mr Rudd. This is surprising from The Australian, which usually sticks to a relatively conservative line in contrast to leftist media like the Melbourne Age. What is even more surprising is that they advocate a change to Rudd without any compelling reason why. The discuss the many similarities and minor differences between the parties, highlight the key difference on IR and mention some of the potential economic dangers in Labor’s IR policies, yet choose to put their trust in him nonetheless in what is almost a leap of blind faith. Seems like the editors at The Australian have fallen under the spell (or force) of Labor’s messiah, Kevin Rudd. Seems like he’s pulling off some kind of immense Jedi mind trick on the whole country…

These aren’t the droids you’re looking for…

EDIT : ok a little more browsing YouTube and it’s full of these kind of things. Here’s another one – Kevin 007 – The man with the golden jaw. I also found a Kevin Almighty clip, but the execution is not a clever as the idea. Anyway, enjoy Kevin 007…

Awesome song, by Brooke Fraser. I had this on regular rotation on my iPod during my recent trip to Uganda

“Now that I have seen, I am responsible. Faith without deeds is dead…”

Urban nominated for best album – Music – Entertainment – theage.com.au

Here’s something to keep an eye out for – the annual Country Music Awards happens tonight in Nashville (hopefully it’ll be broadcast on the Country Music Channel). Aussie Keith Urban is up for best album with his Love, Pain, and the Whole Crazy Thing, which is an excellent country/pop/rock album with some great tracks. I had the misfortune of hearing a Phil Collins version of the Leo Sayer classic “Can’t stop loving you” whilst driving around Johannesburg and was horrified at the anaemic 80s sound. Keith does a far superior version on this album. “Stupid Boy” is another of my favourite tracks from this CD.

Another contender for best album mentioned in the article above is These Days, a four disc opus from Vince Gill. I haven’t come across this album before but looking at the names of some of his colloborators it’s definitely one I want to check out. Might be perfect for my drive down to Busselton this weekend with the boys if I can find it by then. I may have to source it on iTunes though, since our music stores here in Western Australia generally have a pitifully small country music section.

Anyway, speaking of Keith Urban, here’s a video I posted on my facebook yesterday of him performing with Australian roots band The John Butler Trio, originally from Perth. They are another of my favourite bands so seeing John Butler and Keith Urban performing together is a real treat. Anyone who doubts Keith’s ability on the guitar just check this out…

As promised, here is the first YouTube video from my recent Uganda trip. It’s a demonstration we had when we visited the equator – water really does go down the drain in opposite directions in the northern and southern hemispheres!

More videos coming soon. This one was made using Windows Movie Maker, and although the quality is not too bad it crashed about 11 times in the process. I don’t think it handles the Quicktime files that my camera produces very well. Can’t wait til I get my MacBook and see how good that is…

Fairly quiet day at work thus far. No babies being born and plenty of gaps between patients. Which has given me plenty of time to catch up on some internet jobs – paid a few bills and started tidying up my Flickr photos. I’ve now given titles to all the photos in my Africa 2007 and Africa 2006 sets. As promised I also have a bunch of short video clips taken on my camera which I will upload to YouTube soon. These include videos of the lions in Johannesburg, kids in Uganda, church at KPC, riding a boda-boda motorcycle through town, and from the concert we visited. Because they are all in Quicktime MOV format, I’m just waiting til I get my new MacBook in a week or so because I think that will be easier to do than on a PC. But I promise to get them up ASAP. Watch this space.

Yesterday was the first match of the season for Owen’s soccer team. We won’t worry about the scoreline, but they had a lot of fun as you can see in this clip…

This is awesome. I found it this morning via Phil Baker.net and immediately thought of my mate Joel from our band at church, who’s a bit of a Pachelbel fan. I must say though, the music/mix just seems a little bit too good to be just some dude playing along in his bedroom, but then again there are just enough wrong notes to make it seem authentic … anyway enjoy…

EDIT : after browsing YouTube a bit more it seems this guy (“FunTwo” aka Lim Jyong-Hyun from South Korea) is a bit of a phenomenon. There’s quite a few videos of him playing on there as well as a CNN story about his rise to fame. Inspiration for bedroom guitarists everywhere!

Saturday was a perfect day, and we spent it at the Perth zoo with our friends and their kids. As you can see in this clip, it was a lot of fun…