Category Archives: Photos

McGooHQ Performance

25Mb file speed test, transferring at over 1MB/sOver the weekend, I was doing a little spring cleaning of files on my home computer and servers. Whilst in the mood, I thought I would also move some older data from my website hosted with McGooHQ to my home computer.

Since moving to McGooHQ, I’ve been nothing but impressed with the speed of their network and servers. Clicking through the site and browsing through FTP feels as though it is being done over LAN it is that fast. This LAN like speed is happening over ADSL though, which for me at home is limited to approximately 160Kb/s. So, I thought I’d give the server a little higher speed test from work, muuhaha.

What you’ll see above is me pulling down a 25,000,000 byte file from my site onto my work computer at just over 1MB/s. You might be thinking, 1MB/s to download a file isn’t that fast – maybe their servers and bandwidth isn’t that good at all; you’re wrong. To download a single file, using FTP in a single thread at over 1MB/s is absolutely hammering – most of the time you’d find you’d be limited to 400-600Kb/s.

Go McGooHQ, Go!

In case you were interested in seeing what everyone, not just myself are impressed about – I’ve made a 5Mb file for you to test the network speed on. Please don’t drill it, I do have a finite amount to data per month.

Gold Coast Zorbing

Alistair Lattimore Zorbing at Pimpama, Gold CoastAfter we went zorbing at Pimpama (Gold Coast), I asked Dave if he could chase up the photos of our experience. It has taken a couple days for them to filter down the chain, however they have arrived and I think they came out really well!

  • Myself in the Zorb (90k)
  • The Zorbing Course (88k)
    This image you can see the main course that I rolled down. It might not look it in the picture, however the hill you are rolling down is about 120m or 130m long and probably about 20 to 30 degrees in angle as well. You’ll probably notice, on the right hand side of the image, a curved path. This is apparently one of, if not the only slalom Zorbing path in the world. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to go down it as it was too windy. The bloke informed us that with the breeze blowing on our day, we’d either leave the path all together or end up in a damn right past the bottom of the hill.
  • Up close and personal with a Zorb (125k)
    This shot shows one of the Zorbs up close and you can see the guy wires I referred to in my original post.
  • The starting platform (130k)
    A zoomed in shot of the starting platform. The Zorbs are floating in a pool of water at the top to make life easier on the Zorb instructor and the Zorbanaut. It also gives a little bit better idea of how steep the hill is.

A Moranbah Moonrise

A beautiful Moranbah MoonrriseWhilst Claire and I were on our recent Moranbah Road Trip to see Wayne & Rosie, we came across a spectacular evening. It was about 6.30pm and the sun was setting. Due to the time of year and where we were (Central North Queensland), we happened to see the moon rise through the beautiful blues and pinks on the opposite horizon to the sun.

Couldn’t help myself, had to pull over and take a quick picture of it. It isn’t the most fantastic quality, low light and a very portable digital camera, however it gives you a pretty reasonable idea of what we were seeing at the time.

iPod Mini

Claire's Birthday Present, A Blue iPod Mini!Yesterday was Claire’s birthday, so after considering a few different things that I knew she’d love; I ended up getting her a blue iPod Mini. Today, she took it for her first outing to the gym; she was most impressed with it!

I have to throw some thanks out to Ian at work for helping me out. I needed a way to pay for it without Claire noticing it on our bank statement(s) or in our netbank interface. I asked Ian and he was more than happy to help out, thanks mate – it made Claire’s day when I gave it to her as a total surprise! I had teed it up with Liam about 4-6 weeks earlier, however he just paid bond. I asked Conrad, however like always, he likes shares and girls far too much ;)-

Sunburn, Stage 3

Alistair Lattimore's Sunburnt Legs, Stage 3As you have probably guessed, I got sunburnt while go karting with one of my older brothers and some friends about 2 weeks ago. Well after considerable pain initially, utilising gallons of aloe vera and moisturiser, I am very happy they have recovered to a semi normal state.

In the last two weeks, I have gone from white to a bright red, to tiny blisters and then pealing. The pealing has just about finished now. It now doesn’t hurt to walk back to my car of in the afternoon sun, yippee! The colour in my legs now is my normal ‘white tan’, on top of my ‘pink’ skin. Some people just weren’t meant to have a tan – I’m one of them.

Lets hope it doesn’t happen again any time soon.