Following on from the success of the AuroraCMS training videos, we have filmed and launched a set of screencasts that highlight Raven Communicator's features and usage.

To view them you will require the Quicktime player which is a free download from Apple.

I was talking to someone the other day about the DeLorean, the car featured as a time machine in Back to the Future. This must have put the car in my conscious because last night I had a dream about it. I remember saying in my dream "let's see if these bastards can do 90" which is a quote from the film, and actually gets Marty travelling back in time when he hits 88 miles per hour. But I digress... I woke this morning to check my usual websites and saw this article. Maybe my desire to own one some day will come true?

Possibly, considering their availablity online. Sure, most of these sales will be in the US so shipping would be a serious consideration, but it's not entirely unthinkable.

For the first time, a Google search has returned results that confirm Chopper Squad was not a figment of my childhood imagination.

It was so good - better than the A-Team! Yeah, you heard right. It's a shame that Channel 10 lost the rights back in 1995.

I've been annoyed with our vacuum cleaner recently so it was time to buy a new one. My folks have always had a Vax and after about 15 years it's still going strong.

I went to Rick Hart in Vic Park and their range was dismal so I carried on down the road to Harvey Norman in Cannington. I bought this:

The machine is a Vax VZ-801 Zero VX. Say that three times fast. It was ticketed at $599 and the salesman knocked it down to $499 without any strong-arming. They couldn't fit it into the box so he brought it down by a further $25. Still, $475 for a vacuum cleaner is a fair whack, but after its first run over the living room carpet it was clear where our money went.

This machine sucks. Really, really well. Considering that Jacob had vacuumed the floor only a few hours previously I wasn't expecting great results but that was not to be. It's a cyclonic cleaner which means you see the dust flying around so you know it's doing something. Out of the living room alone I extracted about 3-4 cups of dust balls. Yeah, that's a lot. Because it's a standup cleaner it also has this rotating bar which tears up the carpet and pulls the shit out at the base.

Lastly, there's a frickin' LED spotlight on the front so you can vacuum in the dark, or at the discotheque.

This evening Maggie and I hit the gym for a quick workout. I got to use the Nike + Sports pack for the first (real) time and I'm impressed.

On Thursday I picked up a Switch Easy RunAway which allows me to use the Nike + accelerometer on any pair of shoes. It cost $20 from NextByte in Carousel and was exactly what I was chasing.

My problems previously were centred around the fact that I not only had the sensor tucked into my show precariously, but it was upside down. I later found that this was a major problem :) This time the device was accurate to within 30m over the 4km distance which is pretty damn good. I first calibrated it over a 400m run, which explains this accuracy, though it was pretty good "out of the box".

In interesting news, Rasmus Lerdorf also has one and he's written a PHP5 class that you can use to interact with your run data. This would be more useful if Nike didn't provide such a great Flash application already, but as they do, I can't think of any really useful purpose I have for the class... yet.

Judging by Rasmus' running pace I've got a lot of work ahead of me. He runs a mile in the same time it takes me to do a kilometre!