I am not just behind on posting photos from the year of the missing hillsidelounge but I am also behind on posting photos from the recent holiday season. We’ve been pretty busy over the last month or two with events, parties, and trips not to mention Xmas and New Year. So here goes the recap:
Christmas Day 2007 Christmas 2007 was Jacob’s first Xmas and we had a full house for the occasion. My mother was there, Christina’s Parents, Christina, Jacob, Ghazala, and myself all made it around the Xmas dinner table. Jacob had a great time with ripping the paper and playing with all the new toys. An excellent first family Xmas.
A Very Grundy New Years Eve
New Years Eve was spent over at the Grundys house will all the friends who picked Singapore as their Holiday destination and imported the extended family. Friends and their parents from the UK, AU, and US all having a good time with a fair amount of Brewerkz beer on tap.
Mullanes for New Year’s Day
New Year’s Day was a good bbq up at the Mullanes. Conor was giving rides in his new jeep, Jacob and I were playing football, while Ian and Paul fought over who got to destroy my Xmas Helicopter the fastest. To be fair I destroyed Ian’s roof so he owed me one. Not sure what I had done to Paul. Sandy had ordered up enough food to feed the Island and we all had a great day on the Mullane lawn.
Joy and Torch Wedding
The first week of January was Joy and Torch’s wedding at horseshoe point outside Pattaya, Thailand. It had everything you’d expect from a posh wedding in Thailand. A great welcome party, a stunning wedding, a vodka luge at the reception, and of course Polo for Sunday brunch. It was an excellent occasion made even better from the reunion of friends who have left Singapore recently. Especially the big swedes.
Jacob at the Zoo
It was Jacobs first trip to the Zoo. We only live 10 minutes away and he got a family zoo membership for Xmas so he brought Grandma, Mom, and Dad on his first trip. He enjoyed the Zoo quite a bit but had more fun watching the people that the animals most of the time. I think he assumed that since he had a year left on the membership that he would wait and appreciate the animals later.
Black Tie Fight Night
Ian has been involved in running the White Collar Boxing Events in Singapore and the Black Tie Fight Night was on during November. This time it involved a friend of mine Dez Corkhill boxing. The basic premise is to challenge yourself physically and mentally to train for 6 month to participate in a 3 round fight in front of your friends and colleagues for charity. The boxers get a great experience, money is raised for good causes, and the crowd has a great time at the event. Always a great night.
Brit Cham Ball
The British Chamber ball was on in December and Christina and I went for a big night out. This is charity auction, holiday festivities, and drinking a few pints english style. There is a Welsh, Scottish, American, Australian ,etc, etc, version of this event each holiday season in Singapore. Not too many photos as we were having too much fun.
Trip to Egypt
Last but not least I had a work trip to Egypt for a 7 minute meeting. That’s right I flew 24 hours over a period of 4 days for a 7 minute meeting. It was a good meeting and a good excuse to see the Pyramids once again.
So it happened, I completely destroyed my iTunes library. First I was messing with library folder setting to trying to share one library across two accounts. I have tried many times and failed but I was in there doing it anyway. This time I was careless with a music folder setting and iTunes started copying music around. I tried to fix that and got doubles of songs in the same folders. I [begin shrek pinocchio voice] semi-managed to sort of not really rebuild it back the way it wasn’t in the first place [end shrek pinocchio voice] to find I also lost my album artwork. Brutal.All hope seemed lost with hours of manual amazon album cover image surfing in my future. Then I remembered Time Machine. I also remembered that my firewire drives were daisy chained, that the Time Machine drive had disappeared from the desktop recently, and that I was meaning to fix that. Doh!! “Please, Please, let the last back up be useful to recover this mess!!” I was yelling at the machine suffering from user error. I unraveled the linked drive cords and plugged the Time Machine drive into the single direct firewire port on the mac mini and alive it was.You guessed it the other firewire drive holds the iTunes Library. I connected it to the Cinema Display port and fired the thing up. Why does it work connected to the back of the Cinema Display but not daisy chained together anymore? Who cares, it does!!! Wahoo!! Time to try the Time Machine Magic. 
Magic it was. I renamed my screwed up iTunes Folder quick and went back to a week or two ago and hit restore. 20 minutes, 22GB, a beer, and half a TV show later it was exactly as it should be. Of course I immediately screwed it up again but as I only had to restore the library xml file it took seconds to restore.Yes I have done this before and no I never got it back to the way it was. There was always a bit of “Starting Over” involved with a seldom backed up and half tagged group of music files from another drive. Time Machine wasn’t perfect. However I did actually use it, which is a first for me on automatic back up solutions. It was simple and relatively fast to recover the files I screwed up and saved me days of being irritated that I screwed up my music collection, again. 
It was bound to happen. Jacob sent his first letter to Santa which was passed to me via email. I was a bit wary of the authenticity since Jacob can’t sit up yet unassisted but I will assume he used his cunning “I’m so cute, aren’t I?” trick on Mom and got her to type it for him.
December has rolled around once again in Singapore and the rain has been relentless. For the last couple weeks it’s been near impossible to go 
out and do much without getting soaked. Being inside so much Jacob was getting bored of his standard toys so we went out for a little early Xmas shopping for the big man. We dropped him into the Evenflo Exersaucer and he started going bananas in an attempt to rip the thing apart. Jacob doesn’t play, he attempts to destroy and he enjoyed trying to rip this thing to pieces more than anything I’ve seen him attack. To be fair it is a bit like disneyland in a chair even though it’s about the same cost as a actual theme park. 
This thing has about 13 million different parts and takes 9 batteries, welcome to
being a dad at Xmas. 1.5 hours of putting it together plus 20 minutes of figuring out where the extra parts were supposed and how to get them on post-production was all it took. Jacob was long since in bed so I have to wait until the morning to test it’s ability to withstand the Jacob man attack sequence. I am certain he was up all night plotting how he was going to destroy it . I will have to get a video of him in it before he succeeds. 
