Well, lots of boxes still, but we made it and here's some pics of the new house, including tommy's new swing which is proving very popular.

Oh Calcutta curry on the first night, it's a tradition!

Well, technically not still on hols, but we just had a lovely weekend in Pauanui after my first week at the new job (you can see the view from the office below, going up in the world!).

Tommy in his "Big Bucket"

My swanky new office view, Level 37 Metropolis Hotel

Tommy at the Pepper Tree, Coromandel Town, those ribs!!

Tommy with Taylor and Ella at Pru and Nigel's place in Paunaui

Tommy at Te Puru beach on the Coromandel, before the tent blew away

Tommy and Annabel in Tairua Estuary

Annabel looking lovely on New Years Eve in her new dress

Tommy took great pleasure during his traditional mad half hour in running around the clothes line with a towel attached to it. Unfortunately this lead to a you've been framed quality moment when he banged his head, looks worse than it is don't worry!

We just got b ack from seeing Eagle and Shark at the open air cinema (www.openaircinema.co.nz) in Pauanui which was very funny and well written. The lovely non Tommy baby below is Freya Newbould or Freyington Freybucket III.

Some pics from Friday's trip to beach and assorted pics from rest of day..

It's not often i gush about windows software, particularly considering how utterly vista has failed to capture the imagination of the ordinary user. Included with vista was the nice Windows Photo Gallery which was really an IPhoto equivalent built into the OS.

Now, Windows Live Photo Gallery (wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_Photo_Gallery, download: http://get.live.com/photogallery/overview) is available for XP and Vista users which is essentially an upgrade to this vista application with some lovely new features that i think should make it an essential download for any blogger or user who publishes images and videos to the web on a regular basis.

First off, the name, Windows Live Media Gallery anyone?

I think MS made a mistake in calling the application Windows Live Photo Gallery, instead it should be Windows Live Media Gallery because it handles the tagging, previewing, burning, playing and publishing of video content just as gracefully as photo media. I suspect this was to avoid confusion with the Windows Media Player application. Perhaps the whole interface should be merged who knows...

Importing Media

When you import photos and videos into Windows Live Photo Gallery you get very granular control over where the files go and crucially the auto-tagging of the files. In the base version of Windows Photo Gallery on vista, you could only tag in an all or nothing way for all imported files. So, getting stuff in and organising your import is a breeze.

Tagging and Publishing Media

Creating, organising and assigning media to tags is easy, with drag and drop support throughout. Best of all, tags are retained when publishing media. A new Publish menu item appears at the top of the main interface, allowing you to publish images to MSN Spaces AND Flickr. I highly recommend Flickr and it's great to see MS support a 3rd party service out of the box like this. Tagging is preserved when publishing to Flickr and Flickr has officially announced support for Windows Live Photo Gallery.

Unfortunately, the only thing that lets down the Publish option is that for video only MSN Video is supported, although i hope YouTube support will be forthcoming perhaps in a future release. MSN Video is fine and dandy and free, but i have all my videos at YouTube and really want to publish there with full tagging integration a la Flickr support. In the meantime, i simply utilise the YouTube multi file upload interface and manually re-assign tags not a biggy as i don't have as many videos as photos.

Windows Live Writer

Whatever blog you use, you should really use Windows Live Writer as an excellent editor for publishing to your blog. It will work with almos any blog out there and is easy to set up as long as you have your blog's home page url, username and password. I find it much nicer to write up blog posts rather than having to login to my blog website each time.

It is also a highly extensible little applicaiton and already has plugins such as a Flickr Plugin to support selecting one or more images from your Flickr stream.

You can also easily insert videos you have posted to YouTube, Google Video or MSN Video.

There is a site, Windows Live Writer plugins, where you can view even more useful plugins for this essential blogging tool.

Putting together tommy's wooden garage and road system. All from the excellent Plan Toys http://www.plantoys.com/

Tommy being cute on Christmas Eve!

Tommy enjoying a bit of splish splash related activity, weather has been great over first couple of days, raining heavily at moment, but it's just gone midnight;)

Thought this was funny. calming jazz against the backdrop of a disgusting loo...

Congrats to Andy, Teresa, Chris et al at Hyro NZ for getting this up and running. Despite many obstacles this is now a New Zealand first which i've been helping Andy get up and running for months. I think this'll take off once the other channels eye ball it and i wish the team all the very best of luck with this over the coming months.

Check it out on Sky Channel 65, txts only $0.99 each!