Left home on Monday morning for the office... worked Monday and then checked into the Hilton Hotel in the city at 6pm.
By 7:30pm I was at the Enmore Theatre seeing the opening of the Sydney "Cracker Comedy" Festival courtesy of my good friend Tommy Dean. Tommy himself was the 2nd of about 20+ comics each doing a 5min routine. Show was hosted by Mickey Robbins and Steve "The Sandman" Abbott and I got to hang out with Tommy at the back stage "after party". Many thanks to Tommy for the ticket and the generousity, it was a great way to fill in a Monday night. Also got to shake hands and share a lamb cutlet with Vince Sorrenti, Garry Who and Indira Naidoo. Elle McFeast was also there as were a host of comics (ie the 20+) plus more. Excellent night.
Back to the hotel at midnight, tried to sleep, back pain kicked in and i was up earlier than i planned at 3:45am. Showered, packed, into a cab, at the airport by 5:30am for a 6am flight to Perth. (Hence the reason for me staying in town)
Landed in Perth at 8am local time, worked all day including running a 3hr training session for WA staff. Did some stuff with the WA risk people (i work in risk management if you didnt know that) and got to the airport for a 5:15pm flight to Adelaide.
Due to timezones, was scheduled to land in Adelaide 10:30 Central time (is it called that??) but due to a nation wide airport ticketing system meltdown, we were delayed in Perth an hour and a quarter.
We land in Adelaide at 11:30pm and I taxi it to this hotel in the city of Churches and I am now typing this at 1:00am local time after catching up on my sydney based emails... And we all thought emails would make us more productive.
A day here tomorrow before flying to Melbourne in the evening.
Good night!
zzzzzzzzz
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
The End of the Longest Day
Monday, March 06, 2006
Kids & Technology - What a Pain in the Back.
Am all packed today and ready to fly out tomorrow morning at 6am to Perth “for the day” and then I will finally get to a hotel on Tuesday night, 10:30. Followed by a days work in
Seems ridiculous that I couldn’t get a flight to
The weekend was a good one mostly, but I have done something to my back in a big way and am dosed up on Celebrex, Voltaren and Nurafen. Sound like 3 Demons of the Apocalypse! I have had horrendous nights as I have been waking up in pain during the night and have had to sit up in fits and starts. Saturday night was the worst as I had perhaps only 90mins sleep in 3 different sessions.
The drugs work though and I was still able to do things on the weekend including we finally fixed Dad’s PC problem of connecting to the internet. He decided to use the tactical nuclear strike approach and buy a whole new system. A Toshiba Laptop bought over the counter in the city, and he’s away. The good news is that he has given me the old PC to tinker with. I am tempted to scrap it and add a lot of components to mine and then install WinXP, but I think I will go the easy route and reformat it, install Win98SE on it and give it to the kids.
Speaking of computers and kids, Kate was sent home a notice from school asking for permission to give her access to the school computers and the Dept of Education’s “e-Learning” system which gives all kids an email address and limited access to the web. Kids will be able to surf sites approved by the Dept and even participate in “chat sessions”. All of it bar the last bit sounds ok to me… but chat sessions? IRC is unfiltered and raw content and to expose kids to that, even amongst just themselves seems odd. The sessions are moderated by a qualified teacher… Sounds not real bright to me to give this kind of technology to kids so early… given Kate has just learnt to read!
Still it is amazing to compare the use of computers in the class room compared to when I was a kid. I remember in 5th grade the school acquired 2 or 3 Apple Microbee II computers and we played “Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego” on a green screen. We thought it was amazing that a girl call Carmen Sandiego could hide from us for so many hours… all in living “green” colour.
When Kate enrolled in Kindergarten last year, I was surprised that there was one PC for every two kids and they were all kitted out with MS Office and printers and neat colour monitors…
So, we will give Kate permission I think. No reason to hold her back from this stuff, but I am wary on how they will use the technology given she’s only going on 7.
Friday, March 03, 2006
Howard's Ten Years
10 Years. John Howard has been around leading this country for 10 years and I have read a fair amount this week on the man John Howard and how amazing a feat it has been to remain at the helm of Australia for such a long time with perhaps another term achievable at the next election.
Yes, 10 years has been a feat and I do acknowledge that John Howard is a “master of politics”. The man has survived crisis after crisis throughout his tenure and has always come up smelling like roses. Even as I type this, the government is undergoing scrutiny over the AWB kickbacks and illegal payments to Saddam Hussein and it looks like if anyone was to fall over this, it will be Alexander Downer. And if anyone does, you can bet the entire budget surplus it wont be John Howard.
But all this praise over the man makes me sick because being a “master of politics” does not make you a “Great Prime Minister” and I would have to say that this country has taken huge backward steps on a number of social and international issues as a direct result of Howards “vision”. The country is now racially intolerant, is disrespectful to our Asian neighbours, is highly taxed with the funds of those taxes going into non-social projects. We have an ever increasing reduction in medical services, Medicare is heading south and the Government would like nothing more than scrap it and let the rich pay for it and let the poor have none. We have record employment levels, yet we are facing a reduction in services to the elderly and reductions and future abolishment of old age pensions that will mean we will have to work longer. Howard sees nothing wrong with making people work into their 70’s even though the population growth will see jobs to people ratio reducing.
Housing is becoming scarcer and the ability to own ones own home is becoming virtually impossible. I have a mortgage, I can’t see myself ever getting ahead of it as the cost of living rises and the requirement to refinance and use home equity to fund lifestyle items (pools, cars and holidays for example) become the norm. The nation is addicted to credit and this is principally driven by the fact we have less disposable income due to tax rates.
Yes, we are a country of indebted racists with a prospect of working to pay the bills (and more taxes) until we retire from our menial jobs feet first on a stretcher in our 70’s. Well done John. Glad you’ve enjoyed your time as PM. Was it worth it??
Listening: Queens of the Stone Age: “R”
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Why am I saying this now? Well there is the April Leviathan Tournament at Quakers Hill, Sydney. I will be playing and am happy to give anyone interested some lessons / games in the lead up and maybe you'd like to play? Tournament is the weekend after Easter, Saturday and Sunday.
Been sooooo busy...
Work has been very busy and it gets even busier next week when I do a three day road trip around the southern Australian states next week. Got my itinerary yesterday and because of flight timetables, flights already booked and the fact my work will only fly with Qantas and won’t consider Virgin, I have a particularly hellish itinerary.
I have to be in Perth on Tuesday morning 9am Perth time and I wanted to fly out the night before and get into Perth Monday evening… but all flights to Perth are booked and I have to fly out 6:00am Tuesday morning, so therefore I am going to stay in Sydney overnight on Monday after work and get to the airport early and fly out.
I land in
Work the day in
It then gets a bit more reasonable as I work the Wednesday in Adelaide and fly from Adelaide to Melbourne in the late afternoon to touchdown at Melbourne 6:30pm. Hopefully will catch up with the SWL guys in Melbourne for a beer Wednesday night and then work the day Thursday and land back in Sydney 5:30pm Thursday. Thursday though is my little Brookie’s 5th birthday, so I will miss the morning of her birthday, but will try to make up for it in the evening (if I can stay awake!).
Then its back to work in the office Friday….
So, you can look forward to some eclectic postings from me on my travels around the southern parts of
I am going to
Listening: U2’s “War” from my U2 Albums of the 1980’s collection…
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Windows ME - Help ME!
Round 3 of installing Dad’s ADSL service took place last night and unfortunately I am a long way behind on points. After sitting at his desk until quarter to one in the morning, we were still unable to connect his PC to ADSL.
What we did do was install the third modem that Internode sent to us (a Billion) and that went very smoothly and all seemed to be in good working order. The only problem was that we couldn’t ping any external IP address and we couldn’t load any web page. Seemed to be a settings issue and we tried and tried again.
With no luck whatsoever, a call to Internode help desk rendered assistance after waiting an hour and a quarter (!!) and we were able to establish that the modem was working, that the line was good (we tested the modem on my laptop with 100% success) and that the PC was able to connect to the modem via pinging the gateway. The only issue was we couldn’t ping the Internode IP address.
However, the Help Desk guy could see us on his screen. We were on the Internode network and the Billion configuration panel was telling us we had an established connection. All lights on the modem that were supposed to be lit were lit and there seemed to be no impediment to why we couldn’t connect to a web page.
So after engaging and disengaging the Billion fire wall and after playing around with auto detect DNS and hard coding the appropriate DNS’ we still couldn’t get the net up (or email). The Internode tech guy asked me to look at the “NAT Sessions” screen and he was surprised that there were no NAT sessions recorded (I don’t know what a NAT Session is) and this seemed to stump him. Essentially modem worked, Ethernet card worked, line worked, yet no net. Only missing piece was something with the PC itself which runs WindowsME.
As we all know WinME is not the best (probably worst) Microsoft OS and the techie suggested that we reinstall ME as whilst it has its flaws it should still be possible to connect to the net. I did this last night and we took 30 mins to reload WinME but no luck.
So I called it quits and drove home and am stumped as to what the issue is. Anyone got any ideas!?!?
[edit] - a Whirlpool forum topic can be found here, so if you can assist, please post either here on Lime Kettles or on the Whirlpool board. Thanks!