jeremy.id.au

Yes I’ve been slack with updating this. It’s almost been three weeks since it was my birthday. I am yet another year older.

As a last minute effort I decided to invite a bunch of people down to a local pub for some drinks on the Friday night after. The turnout was quite good considering the short notice that I gave (less than a week!). Had friends from all over the place that came along. Though for those who didn’t show up, sorry that you missed out on a good time!

Not a great deal else has happened lately, except perhaps going out for brunch today to have pancakes and sitting around watching some old Chaser episodes/highlights.

It’s not often that you see the clock on the silo saying eleven degrees while it’s the month of May. Certainly it’s the first time I’ve seen it since they refurbished the clock. Though I wasn’t high on the hill, nor was I looking over the bridge, but I was on the train instead (and I did whiz past the MCG).

This time last year the clock was in pieces so it wasn’t displaying anything at all, let alone eleven degrees. However, I was almost wondering if it’d happen this year since a few other times when I’ve been past in the last month it’s been switched off. One other time it was displaying 60˚ (I hope it meant Fahrenheit in that instance otherwise 60˚ is damn hot!) then later that day it was also switched off. Additionally the LEDs don’t provide the same viewing angle as the previous lightbulb things. Doesn’t look as though the refurbishment has been too smooth.

Remember this song?

I get knocked down but I get up again
You’re never gonna keep me down
I get knocked down but I get up again
You’re never gonna keep me down
….
Pissing the night away

Well apparently this song is now a golden oldie! I was driving along (having dropped my sister off at work where there are a lack of Sunday buses) and while flicking through radio stations, it came on. Though the radio station was non-other than Gold FM!

Seems a little crazy when it’s not only a song that was released during my lifetime, but also was all the rage when I was in my early teens. Kinda makes me feel a little old now.

None the less, was reading a little about the band. I always assumed that they were something of a one hit wonder, though they were actually more of a political band from the 80s. So it seems that they had just signed to EMI at around the time of Tubthumping and the label was doing as large labels do by flogging them to death. So that has to explain why they suddenly became so big for such a short while.

I’m certainly no anarchist and it was their most apolitical anyway, though the song can certainly parallel in life where one sets out to bring about some form of change. Whether that’s to do with public transport, technology or something else all together.

It’s been over a week, though things are slow in the land of Jeremy’s blog at the moment. Last Thursday, while I still had the luxury of being on holidays from TAFE, me and my mate Chris took the train down to Warrnambool for the day. Mainly because I had a free V/Line voucher to use.

So first is first, I had to get up at 7am, which is remarkably early for me these days, probably the earliest I’ve been up since I had to leave for Sydney earlier this year. Though I was able to repeat this effort one day for TAFE and actually get there on time, but not for the other day of TAFE this week. None the less, I got down to yee ol’ Spencer Street station (now officially known as Southern Cross… Southern where?) at 8:30 and the train left on time at 8:49.

Was good to sit back and enjoy the trip, until we got closer to Warrnambool and found the rain was starting to set in. Just over three hours later and we were in Warrnambool at midday. So we walked around looking for lunch, dismissing various pubs and cafés until we found a pub we liked. After lunch (which for me consisted of a steak sandwich with chips and a few drinks along side it), we walked up to the visitor information centre, located conveniently a good walk out of town at the Flagstaff Hill maritime museum. We decided we’d head down and have a shot at minigolf, only to find the place submerged in water and subsequently closed. So after photographing some geese, we took a bus back into town (it just happens that we turned up at a bus stop just in time for the hourly bus).

With two and a half hours to spare we just walked around town for a while and kicked back to some pancakes which turned out to be rather good amidst all the rain and cold weather. We got back to the station well in time for the 17:40 train back to Melbourne, kicking back for another 3 and a half hours. It was mostly too dark to see anything by that stage though we had a little for dinner from the buffet car.

Got back into Spencer Street in time for the 9:38pm train to Box Hill. I was truly knackered by the time I got home though it’s good to get out of Melbourne every once in a while.

Photos online in my gallery as well as flickr.

I’m probably the person you’d least expect to take an interest in the Commonwealth Games. Hell, I hardly even took any interest at all until they were nearly here and to many extents, sold out. Still it turned out to be a somewhat interesting ten days.

Probably the first thing I noticed was that off-peak public transport was far more crowded than usual. Standing room only when ever I got on at Box Hill, only to become packed like sardines beyond Camberwell. Some of this can probably be attributed to school holidays alone, though not usually beyond the level that you wouldn’t be able to get a seat. Though I also took some time to watch the opening ceremony on TV. It wasn’t as flash as the Olympics, though there were a few impressive moments, such as the tram with whings (where did they get all the conductors from these days?).

On the first weekend of the games, I stayed the night at my brothers place and had a bit of an enjoyable time watching the games on TV, including various things as gymnastics, swimming, etc. The next morning I couldn’t pull myself away from the television as Kerryn McCann was about to win the Marathon. None the less, after that I didn’t watch any more on TV, I did turn the TV on for a moment though unlike at my brothers house, there just wasn’t the choice to watch whatever I preferred of four different events. So after that again, it was back to the crowded public transport being the only thing reminding me that the games were on.

However, on Friday night I went with some friends to an event at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl. It was the combined Army, Airforce and Navy bands and although there are many great events held in the music bowl every summer, this was part of a range of events put on during the Commonwealth Games. Perhaps not so ‘gamesish’ though the additional crowds around town and the improved public transport services were something to note.

Though the highlight the Games for me would have to have been going to the Cycling Road Race on Sunday. As spectators it involved plenty of walking as we wanted to check out the course from various locations, so needless to say with this and the 31˚C heat (not to mention the poor buggers out racing in it) we were buggered by the end of the day. Oh yes and I did grab some photos before the camera batteries went flat, they are availble in my gallery and on flickr. Still there was nothing like the sense of exhilaration as we watched Matt Hayman finish the race, winning gold.

Well that’s my wrap up of the Commonwealth Games.

Well the time came to replace mum’s 14″ CRT monitor. In actual fact she started off with a 15″ monitor though when it died we temporarily hooked up the 14″ monitor, though she had no desire to replace it. Fortunately, for the best part of the last year she was able to use my brother’s 17″ LCD monitor while he was away in Canada but once he got back he was quick to reclaim it. In the end though, it wasn’t just the monitor we replaced, it was the whole computer.

Pictured: The old 14″ monitor, PC, our networked HP Laserjet 4 (with Postscript level 2 support) and yes, you get a glimpse of the replacement system already.

So it was a Mac I decided to get, mainly because I wanted something capable of running OS X. Previously, of all things, she had been running Linux. It was probably the right decision to run Linux at the time, after all we’ve had not a single virus infestation and I was immensely put off running Windows after a spyware toolbar got into Internet Explorer within weeks and just wouldn’t go away no matter what we did. Further more, contrary to what many people believe Linux can be simplified for the end user to quite a degree meaning that no technical knowledge at all is required to run it. However, even still in my opinion KDE still has a rather clumsy GUI and the Debian system resulted in quite a fair bit more work for me. For example, when we wanted to set it up for the digital camera, it involved quite a lot of messing around with file permissions and USB before I could get it working. Compared to the Mac, I just have to plug in the digital camera and iPhoto loads up automatically (not to mention that the program for Linux that I found for organising photos was rather second rate).

For budgetary reasons it was a second hand iMac G3 "Snow" (that being the colour) that we settled for. At 500Mhz it is a fair bit more powerful than the previous 333Mhz Celeron and at 512MB it has twice the RAM. Other features include a CD-RW drive which the previous computer didn’t have, as well as a 40GB hard drive which is the same size as the previous computer.

Pictured: Mum’s new computer; iMac G3 "Snow"

So how about the performance? The G3 is two generations back for the PowerPC platform, yet now three generations for the Mac platform as a whole. Still the first thing I noticed when I turned it on was the incredible boot up time. If you’re used to making a cup of coffee while you wait for your computer to boot up, you’ll probably find that it is booted up and is ready before you even had the chance to turn the kettle on. I know some people achieve the same thing by installing old versions of Windows on their computer, though this is Tiger, the latest version of OS X. Okay though my iBook probably boots in the same time or slightly quicker, while the new Intel Macs are said to boot in 20 seconds. Still, boot up time isn’t all there is to performance.

Overall, performance wise the system is very usable. Instead of running slow, Apple tends to cut back on the eye candy. For example, the famous Exposé feature works though isn’t as smooth as it is on say a G4 mac. At times it may not be as responsive as a new system but it’s not painfully slow either. So overall I’m not disappointed with performance. Even still, the aim was to give mum a taste of the mac and in a few years time when she’s retiring she may well get a new one.

With one feature of Macs that is really nice, I was able to do an install using my OS X Tiger DVD using the DVD-ROM drive on my iBook using FireWire Target Disk Mode. Took my a while to migrate all the data. Can’t wait until next time it’s just another mac we’re upgrading to as I’ll simply be able to use Migration Assistant.

The verdict, well mum is pleased and she’s finding Mac OS X easy to use. The style of macs is also something great and as you can see from the photos, the form factor is much improved.

Yes, I’m posting this a bit late. None the less, last Saturday we had quite a significant downpour. First of all, I took the train out to Camberwell and noticed I was heading into dark storm clouds, it was just obvious that a storm was going to breakout though I didn’t realise how soon. Received an sms from a friend I was meeting saying the weather is terrible, yet got off the train and didn’t feel like the storm was going to hit all that soon. None the less, it hit when I was as far from shelter as possible. Well okay that wasn’t really much more than 50 metres or so but it was raining heavily enough that it was enough to get drenched. I caught some shelter then dashed for the Burke Road shops. I probably choose the worst time to cross Burke Road and that is when I got drenched the most as the wind was blowing the rain horizontally and the rain was at it’s heaviest. Even still, it was warm enough that it didn’t take long dry out.

On the way back, heading down Canterbury Rd in the car, the road was just about flooded in places, with streams of water either side and anywhere that the road was low there was water right across it, being sprayed into the air as cars went past. Closer to home the the stream the side of the road was so massive that there were just about some little mini cascades in places and the water was brown from picking up clay and silt. Fortunately, when we got to the front of my house it appeared as though the drainage was a little better and the road wasn’t flooded. Though again I must have chosen the worst time to dash for the house. As I stepped over the gutter it had become a raging current, while just inside the gate the footpath was all flooded with no way around it.

Fortunately with the way the land lines, our property doesn’t flood too much. Though due to some design issues with the house, a little bit of water does seep in through the pit (seating area with fireplace). A little bit also came in near the kitchen window. This is essentially because a massive amount of water flows off a valley in the roof and then the excess water that doesn’t make it into the down-pipe flows under the house.

Though the worst of it became apparent until a day or two later. On Sunday the phone line had become a little crackly and by Monday it wasn’t working at all. Strangely enough the ADSL was still working while the phone was completely dead, rather ironic when Telstra makes you have an active phone line for ADSL, yet it doesn’t even need to be working for the ADSL to work. So Telstra came out to test the line, finding that the fault was probably on our premises. In the one hour that I was actually out of the house on Wednesday they came and left a note to say we had missed them. Fortunately mum had called up our phone provider (AAPT) to see if it had been fixed and arranged for another Telstra tech to come the next day. Turns out it was the extension going to the kitchen that was causing problems, possibly dangling in the mud. The tech disconnected it until we can get someone out to run a new cable. Fortunately it wasn’t much to relocate the cordless phone to the first socket on the line.

So that’s that, by around midday Thursday, we finally had a working phone line.

I’ve gone a whole month since my last blogging. Yes it’s the new year and we’ve had Christmas too. It’s been a busy time too, with a trip down to Ocean Grove though most exciting of all, to Sydney.

First of in Sydney, I did the usual. I walked down through the Sydney Royal Botanical Gardens to the Opera House, also where I could see the Harbour Bridge. I then took a ferry under the Harbour Bridge to Darling Harbour, though via Balmain. I got some great shots on my digital camera, only to realise that I had it set to the lowest resolution! On Saturday night I caught up with a friend and her friends to see the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the Domain. On Sunday I checked out Bondi Beach with a few other people.

Probably the most exciting thing I did was on Monday when I took a train up to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains. I did a walk down the Furber Stairs from the Katoomba Cascades then took the Scenic Railway back up. I then did a walk from Honeymoon Lookout to Echo Point where the Three Sisters are. I was a little disappointed by the over development around Katoomba since the last time I was there 14 years ago. For example, Echo Point is more or less a bus terminal now. The train trip up there was interesting in its own right as well, especially where the train enters the mountains. You see some very nice bush and the train goes through these deep yet narrow cuttings. You also see Glenbrook station which happens to be the station used in Spellbinder. Once up in the mountains you get some spectacular valley views though it does seem fairly suburbanised again after this point though not necessarily all bad.

On the last day I took the ferry over to Manly, though the weather wasn’t that great. Still it was a fairly nice trip to make before heading home to Melbourne.

On returning home I discovered that the storms had killed the hard disk in my mail/www/jabber server. I wasn’t too keen to fix it for the first day or so, however, after a few days I did a new install and miraculously the hard disk started working for long enough to recover my data.

Last night I was bored and flicking through channels on the television, a few Christmas movies were on, most of them not worth watching. Though fairly late in the evening, Crackers came on.

It’s not the first time I’ve watched it, certainly it has even been on TV a few times before now, yet after all these years it is still hilarious. The story is about a dysfunctional family at Christmas time and it certainly has a number of intense moments. I’d have to say that the best thing though, is the way it portrays Australian culture, almost putting it in the same boat as The Castle. Nearly everything about it is Australian, there is even one point where Joey is eating Barbecue Shapes! The local aspect certainly makes it easier to relate to and it is certainly a film with moments that can be related to. Even some of the intense moments I can relate to my own childhood, of course, not to mention our family at Christmas as well. Because let’s face it, not everything is perfect on Christmas day, though it still usually ends up being a good day and one of the few times when we have most of the family under one roof.

Although filmed in Melbourne, there aren’t many recognisable landmarks, although a few scenes around Port Phillip Bay. So most of the familiarity is in the culture. Definitely a classic that has to be seen, I may even get it on DVD sometime if ever released.

Some other reviews:

• SBS: The Movie Show
• In Film Australia

The year is finally coming to an end. A week and a half ago I finally had my last class for tafe, though in the days after I had fun finishing off some of the work that I hadn’t completed in time. I had even more fun trying to track down the teacher, two phone calls, a few emails and then finally I went in on Tuesday and there was no one around. The place was completely dead though eventually someone from ITS let me into a lab so I could print my final work. I left all the work except for the final task which I wasn’t sure how to do, so hopefully they either won’t notice or they’ll let me finish it next year!

Yesterday I went to the fourth Christmas function this year. Fortunately I don’t have anything else planned for the silly season, except for family stuff on Christmas day of course. I haven’t done any Christmas shopping but fortunately I haven’t got a lot to do and who knows, the elves may do it for me again this year.

Today I cleaned up my room. For the first time in 3+ years I don’t have piles of junk and bits of paper staggered around on the floor. Though it was this time last year when I rediscovered carpet for the first time in roughly 2 years, possibly more. While earlier this year I was cleaning out the top drawer of my desk, to find notices dating back from 5 years when I was at high school. Among them was a notice about starting year 11 in early 2001 which is so long ago, it seems like an eternity. I’ve pretty much got through all the mess, though could do with cleaning out some of the large drawers and getting rid of some of the ancient computer gear lying around.

Among other things, went to see The Lion King broadway musical during the week. Mum wanted to take us and it was quite an amazing production.