42 in the shade

It's Fecking hot today.
42 degrees in the shade, and not a lot cooler inside the house.
I had to go back into work this morning - it was 30 degrees at 9am. Bit clearer today, but the fire alarm was still going nuts. The VESDA system was off the scale.

Eli was still a bit sick today. I think he's like me and just can't stomach the heat.

Got some more boxes packed, but not as much as I would like.

Melbourne central covered by smoke.

We Woke this morning to a thick blanket of smoke covering the city. I went back into work today to set up some additional equipment for DSE. We had been advised that two of the sites, Mt Useful and The pinnacles were likely to be burnt this weekend. With no spares, I had to strip out most of my test system to get enough kit for two sites. That's going to make it awkward to test any new software in a hurry. We'd only been at work less than an hour when the VESDA system started to alarm. It was picking up smoke inside the building. Another half hour or so then the main alarm went off, you could actually smell the smoke inside the exchange now.
Eli Come into work with me and was really good. He played a couple of games, watched a movie, and helped me with the radio tests. He got a bit worried when the Fire Alarms went off, but Chris took him outside to see the firemen. On the way home we called into Jaycar to get some connectors and stuff when Eli said he wasn't feeling too good. It was pretty hot - high 30's at least, probably hotter in the car.
We got home and he just wanted to lie down in his room. Then, about 7pm, just as I was cooking Shelleys dinner, he come out and power chucked all down the hall in up to the kitchen. I couldn't believe that so much stuff could fit in his tiny stomach.
Shelley got home just as I had finished cleaning up the chuck, but the house still stunk of it. Then I realised that the cat wasn't anywhere to be found. Eventually I found her under the house, She'd slipped through a gap in the boxes I'd piled up in the door way so that the door could be open to let soom cool air in. She didn't want to come out and I ended up having to tease her out with some food. Know better next time - fill in the gaps!

Just over a week to go 'till we move house

Our house is a mess at the moment with boxes everywhere. I was going to take next week off to do all the packing in one hit while Shelley was at work and Eli at Kinda, but doesn't look like that is going to happen now.
We've got a new kitten, "Princess Ralph the 3rd", she gets on really well with Boots, so that's a relief. Very tiny, but house trained already.
Last week I went out for dinner with some of the big bosses. We went to Fortyone at Railto, nice view (This is looking up the Yarra towards the Dandedongs in the distance. The MCG can be seen in the middle of the photo), nice company, but food wasn't anything great. Next time were planning to go to Jamie Oliver's Fifteen resturant. Bookings are available now for March, which is when everyone will next be down in Melbourne.

Cup Day

Melbourne Cup day today - the day that stops a nation.
Typically today is a day spent at the races, sipping glasses of champane in the sun, and generally getting pretty happy.
Unfortuntally todat was a little tooo cold for sipping champane on the lawn.
Eli and I headed off to the Melbourne Musuem for the day, while Shelley did her last minute study before tomorrows law exam. The Musuem was holding a best hat parade, so we had a go at making at hat. Eli is getting ready to go onto the catwalk to model his "Ant-Tenna" hat.

36 Deg

It was the hottest October day in Melbourne for 92 years yesterday.
Hot dry weather means that I can't do much work, as the total fire bans mean no work on DSE sites.
On the plus side, this has meant a good opportunity to work on the customer reports and get some long outstanding work finished.

Tomorrow I am helping out at Eli's Kinda's 30th birthday celebrations. I'm doing the bouncy castle - which should work out good for Eli as well.
Shelley has arranged for Eli to play at Emilio's place afterwards, which Eli has been looking forward too for a long time.

Eli In the Newspaper

Eli's Kinda's 30th birthday seems to have been a great day.
Eli managed to get his photo taken hovering around the cake.

New House

At last we've found a house that both Shelley and I agree on, and that is within Eli's school zone.
Our offer has been acepted, but we don't move in until December. The process of buying a house here is a little different to what I expected. Not to mention the stamp duties and everything else that eats away at your deposit.

Happy Birthday

It was Eli's Birthday today.
5 Years Old!!!
We had quite a good turn out for his party, 15 screaming kids in all, not bad.
Shelley was stuffed when we got home and had a wee sleep while Eli and I watched a sponge bob DVD that one of his friend got him.

We had his party at Kidz Play, which is an indoor playground. No stress, no fuss and the kids got to go wild.

It must be the month for birthdays. Eli had one to go to last week (Mitchell), and one next week (Sam) with Emilio's the week after.

Wild Thing

Eli and I went to the "Where the Wild Things Are" at the Jewish Museme. I didn't even know that there was a Jewish Museme in Melbourne!
The place was packed with heaps of 30 something parents and their kids trying on Max's wolf suit, and jumping into a bowl of chicken soup.
Eli loved it - He knows the book well and often reads along with me when I read it to him at night.

Flickermap

Garmin GPS

I've been watching with interest a yahoo group on using GPS with Macs (macmap@yahoogroups.com). I brought a Garmin GPS over a year ago, and at the time the sales assistant assured me that.
A) Mapsource would work fine in Virtual PC
B) Garmin were soon to release a Mac version of Mapsource, and my maps would be compatable.

I didn't really believe that the PC maps would be compatable with any mac software, but hey I needed the GPS and figured that by time the software was actually released the maps would probably need updating anyway.

So I installed Mapsource onto my Mac, running windows XP under virtural PC. Mapsource ran ok, I could register the software, load the maps, but it just wouldn't see the GPS.
I read somewhere that it was probably a problem with XP - which I find easy to belive, so I trashed XP and installed Windows 98. Windows 98 is my favorite of the windows OSs (if I can say such a thing) and is by far the fastest for what I want to use it for.
Still no joy.
Futher reading pointed me to new USB dirvers, problems with USB on virtural PC and whole host of other issues. So I gave up and brought a windows PC which is soley used for Mapsource, and a couple of games that Eli plays. It doesn't have a screen, or keyboard - we just connect to it using Remote Desktop, but it shows just how far you sometimes have to go to get something to work. All up, this software has cost me a few grand (the orginal Mapsource software, the Ozzie map set, Virtual PC with windows XP, and finally a PC) and I still can't upload maps in the field.

Now I'm looking at a GPS for Shelley. Part of me says go with Garmin - I've already brought the maps (and spent the money to get the software to work), the GPS I have is really easy to use and Shelley has no problems with it. But there are other "Mac Friendly" products available. So what do you do? Continue to support a company that promises Mac support, but never delivers? or go out and buy a new product from someone else.

I now have basic GPS support for my Mac. I can load all the waypoints into Google Earth but the one thing that I can't do is upload maps - that is the only thing I thought that the mapsource software would be usefull for. (The GPS doesn't have enough room to store all the maps I need to cover the places I need to go to for work). So along comes this new company offering the "Holy Grail" of Mac Mapping software - but with no map support? What is it that they do? They can import your waypoints into google earth! Something that Google Earth can do quite happly by itself thank you very much!!!

Anyway, that's my rant for today. I feel much better now :)

Field trip

Had a nice class outing today to celebrate 100 years since the Marconi company compleated their first radio broadcast across water.
We all made the trip down to Queenscliff for our regular Friday morning meeting (today being Wednesday) then meandered across to Point Lonsdale to watch the re-enactment. All very swish!
The local ham club had a spark gap transmitter, just like the type use 100 years ago, although they used a more moden HF transmitter for the re-enactment. A message was sent by morse to Devenport, folowed by the local MP, and her Tassie counterpart having the usual "were a better state than you" banter.

Nothing New

Had Level "0" training a Eli's AusKick today - basically its a way to take all the parents and make them look as silly trying to kick a ball around as the kids.
I found out that I'm not too bad at handballing, which surprised me since I grew up playing soccer, no touching the ball allowed. I also managed to take a few good marks as well - even more of a surprise. But my kicking is still crap. I can't get the hang of dropping the ball on to my foot. If it was on the ground then that would be fine! Although it's not really the right shape for sitting on the ground properly.

Eli had a hearing test this week. One of his gromets has finally fallen out, and the other is not far behind. His hearing is great - so we're really pleased. His speech is comming along good now as well. Today we were working on the /k/ sound, playing a few games and stuff when I nodded off on the couch. For some reason I'm just absolutely buggered this week. I've had about 3 early starts, with dropping Shelley off at Uni for exams and stuff, so I guess thats whats done it.

I was going to be working this weekend, but I've managed to put that work off till Monday. Next week is bound to be a bit stressfull, more early starts as Shells has another exam on Thursday and new equipment to cutover.

Famous

My company did a feature on me for our quartly newsletter. I new that it was coming out soon, but I didn't know when. I got a rark up at a weekly meeting today when just about everyone had been sent a copy, except me. The photo is pretty crappy, given that I don't really take many photos of myself. This one was taken in Singapore for some reason - can't remember why now.

The newsletter is on our web site

No Snow

No Snow today, but it was bloody cold!
We didn't get to either Buller or Hotham, but had quite a good day at Healsville Santurary instead.
Got to see a mother koala with her joey, which is quite rear apparently.

That's it realy, a quite Queens Birthday weeked.

This comming week is going to be pretty busy. Shelley has exams, and I have a live cutover at work in the weekend, so I have to make sure that all my side of things is good and ready. A bit hard to test at the moment though.

The Ski Season has started

Today is the offical start to the ski season, unfortunataly, nether Hotham or Mt Buller seem to have any snow. Well not that can be seen from the cameras anyway. Eli and I had planned to go up for a play in the snow this weekend. Shelley has exams next week, so we thought it would be good to get away for a couple of days and leave Shelley to the books. I think we might be a bit optimistic, we'll see what the weather is like in the morning.

Nuclear Power

There has been a lot of buzz in the news here this week about Nuclear Power. Australia has finally decided that they need to generate more power, and so is looking to build some Nuclear power plants, 5 in fact. Unfortunatally its a classic case of "Not in my back yard mate!". Now this is quite funny because a shit load of the worlds uranium actually gets dug up out of the Ozzie outback. The Government even proposed taking back some of the old uranium to store it in the outback.

When I first came to Australia I thought that they had nuclear power already, but apart from a small test reactor in Sydney, the whole place is powered by coal or gas. The funny thing is that we came from New Zealand, where most of the electricity is generated by Hydro, (clean & cheep) but our power bill here is less than a 3rd of what it was in NZ.
Anyway, back to the nuclear stuff. How stuff works has a neat artical that explains how nuclear power plants work. It also has a link to a BBC program on the Chenobal explosion.

Phillip Island

Had a great day at Phillip Island. Eli and I went down this morning and walked arround looking at Koalas, then had lunch at on the beach before watching the penguin parade this evening. A real nice day, good weather as well

1 year today

It was one year ago today that I started my new job. I had kind of expected that things would have dropped of by now, and that I would be working from home.
Unfortunatally that's not the case. I'm still doing long hours and it doesn't look any better. :(

We went out for dinner tonight. There is this resturant just down the road from our place that is always packed, so we thought we would give it a try.
What a dissapointment - Both Shelley's and my meals were crap! We ended up going to Mac'ers for a desert and coffee, but there wasn't any cheese cake, so it ended up being just coffee.
A disapointing end to an even more disapointing day.

On the plus side, I had a hearing test yesterday. After years of my ipod blasting loud music into my ears it was good to find that the damage was minimal and hadn't got any worse over the last year. Time to turn the volume up ;)

World Pinhole Camera Day

On the subject of cameras, it was world pinhole camera day on the 30th April. Some very good photos to be seen at www.pinholeday.org .
If you want to have a go at making your own pin hole camera - I found these instructions on how to create a flash looking jobbie (see right -->).
Since I have a bit of 35mm film laying around, I think Eli and I might have a go at this in the weekend.

Say Cheese!

One of the first things I brought when I left school was a Pentax P30N SLR camera. It was this great camera that took great photos, and went with me everywhere to capture every moment of my life. That, unfortunatally was its downfall. One day, while out in my 4WD I managed to get stuck in a rather deep hole in a river. Everything floated out the door of the Subaru, except my camera. As I scurried down stream after my check book and NOW! Cassette tapes, my camera was sitting behind the passengers seat soaking up the river water.
I learnt my lessons from that, and so when I finally managed to save up an replace my camera (with another P30) I didn't take it to quite as many places. The sad thing was that it meant that now I was not taking anywhere near as many photos. Instead of a roll or two a week, it was now a roll every month or two.
Eventually, that would drop right off, so a roll of film could last almost a year. But it sure was exciting to get the film back, you really didn't know what was going to be on it.
When Eli was born, I brought Shelley a new Pentax M50 SLR. This one had two things that my P30 didn't. A built in Flash, and Auto Focus. Now we were taking photos of the new baby doing everything. Eventually, Shelley complained that the camera was too big to take everywhere so it got left behind when we went out. Then, for Shelley's birthday the first year we were in Singapore, I got her a digital camera. They had just come down to an "acceptable" price. I got her a 3 megapixal Ricoh for just under $800 (A Bargin!) Now this camera was small enough to fit in her handbag, So it started to go everywhere with us and it wasn't long before Shelley had over 1000 photos in her iPhoto library. But before long that camera too would be too big - Shelley didn't take a bag with her anymore, so a new camera would have to be got. One that could fit into her jeans pocket. So, we got a 4 MP Casio. Quite a bit cheaper than the Ricoh, but a good camera none the less.
Now, its time for another camera. This time with a phone attached. Which brings me to the orginal reason for this post anyway. I also have a phone with a camera (try finding one that doesn't) and when I was looking for a new phone I was certain that I wouldn't get a phone with a camera. They were just a waste of space as far as I was concerned. But after having it for a couple of months now, I've come to realise that they are good for one thing. Capturing the moment - and that is exactly what I brought my expensive Pentax P30 for 20 years ago!

So long already

I can't believe how fast this week has flown!!! AFL today, followed by lunch and coffee (Decaf!) at a local mall. The we went to have a look at some new phones for Shelley. I want to get her a Nokia, 'cause the other 10 phones she's had are all nokias, so we can re-use the chargers and stuff, but she's keen on the new Motorola L6. Looks ok, but I remember she tired out a Moto once before and we couldn't work out how to retreive a phone number from the address book. Hopefully they've got a bit better now. At least the Motos will sync with her address book, it has USB and Bluetooth, so we won't have to spend hours typing all the names and numbers in again.

Rick came around to day with Sharla and his new car. He traded in the CRV for a Suziki Swft. Nice car.

SNOW!!!!

Looks like that crap weather for the last few days has paid off - Its snowing at Mt Hotham and Mt Buller:

Eli Kicks a Goal

Eli had a great day at AFL today. The parent/kids game went well with the parents managing to get a couple of good goals. But after staying up late last night to swat up on the rules I think I would have been better off to have an early night and have got up early to practice my catching!

With so many kids there today, some of us parents got inducted as coaches - In my keeness I forgot that I played soccer at school - I was good at kicking, but could catch a ball to save myself!

Anyway fun day was had by all, Shelley managed to get in a few cups of coffee with some of the other mums and even did a few laps round the oval.

Rain

Its raining today - absolutly pissing down!
Took nearly two hours to get home tonight, and even then I had left after the peak flows. It seemed like there was an accident just about every few K's on the Monash.

Eli has his second day of Auskick tomorrow. Shelley and I were meant to study up on the rules for the Kids vs Parents games, but with no time this week I think we will be seriously giving some points to the other side.

Sooo busy again

Ahhhhh. Just when you think that its time to put your feet up on the desk and catch up on my podcasts, work gets busy again!
This week I've had to train a new operator on everything from the ground up - luckly he's got a strong IT background so understands what routers, switches and Sun Boxes are (at least he can point to them!).

Eli has become very proficient at playing Bugdom 2 - he can easily get through the first level by himself, but is challanged trying to get past the snake on the second level. Everytime he trys to get past the little windmill he gets nocked off the baseball.

I was so impressed I had to get him a gamepad this week - that, and I got sick of trying to clean chocolate of my powerbook's keypad. I got a Macally ishock - quite cool. It's a bit bigger than a PS2 gamepad, but a simular layout (I guess they all are). It is very configurable, so works with heaps of programs that don't normally support game pads as you can program the keys to match keyboard keys.

Excuse the grainy photo, it was taken on my phone.

AFL

Man, a busy week again!
Eli had is first game of AFL (Australian Rules Football - www.afl.com.au) on Saturday. We had been hoping to get him in to soccer, but there does not seem to be a big following for anything other than AFL in Melbourne, so AFL it was.
It's not too bad really. The coaches are really energetic, and they had a couple of players at hand from the parent club, the Hawthorn Hawks. The first part of the time is spent practising ball skills, kicking, passing etc and Eli surprised us with his ability to kick the ball correctly, especially since this was the first time he had played with an oval ball.
After some different games it was time to split all the kids in to two teams for a quick game. That was good to watch - some of the kids were really good with one boy in particular able to kick the ball quite a distance.

Next week is Kids v's Parents, so Shells and I had better swat up on the rules!

Possum

Eli took this photo of a Possum in our front yard. It's quite unusual to
A) get so close to one with out getting hissed at or your arm ripped of. and
B) to see them during the day. But apparently this one has taken a liking to sunbathing on our garden shed. When we found him he was happy sitting in one of our trees.
Normally they just make boots upset at night by running up and down our roof.

Another Day, Another Dollar

Quite day today - an unexpected delay from a customer has meant that I have lots of time on my hands lately. This meant that for the first time in ages I was able to get home in time to have dinner with the rest of the family - no microwaved salad for tea tonight! The short weeks really are great when your not so busy. Normally I would have to work twice as hard to make up for the days off.
I also got to beat Eli at Monolopy for the first time! We brought him the game in the weekend, along with a few others, and spent most of Anzac day playing Monopoly - which he managed to beat me at every time. But tonight my luck changed and it was I who had all the houses on the board.

Caffene Free

Today is the end of my first week of being caffene free! Other than a constant headache since day one, it hasn't been too bad. Shelley and I went out for our usual Saturday morning breakfast, but we both had decaf flat whites today (Usually I 'have' to have real coffee with my poached eggs).
So I'm pretty confident that I can pull this off this time. I tried it once before when I was in Singapore, but it was too hard to resist "Kopi" time in the afternoons.
This time I've got it sussed. We've always had decaf at home (since last time I tried to quit), now I've got decaf at work and lots of herbal teas at home.
Got to admit I'm a lot more tired this week. It's only 7:40 and I'm already getting ready for bed, usually I wouldn't be tired till after 11. But I have been sleeping a lot better - so it's got to be worth it!

Water

We got our first water bill today for the year. We use an average of 376 litres of water a day! How can that be? Eli and I are away for most of it. It's bloody near impossible to get him into the bath, and he never flushes the toilet after him. Were not drinking that much. I'd be lucky to get my 6 glasses of water a day.
So where does all this water go? According to the nice chart that comes with the bill, we're slightly higher than the efficient 3 person family, and less than the typical 3 person family (at 458 litres per day) That assuming that we don't water the garden, which we do on occasion, and the dog gets a good hose down too.

Easter Bunny

Well Easter has gone now, but there is still a heap of chocolate in the fridge. Eli managed to catch the easter bunny in the process of dropping a few easter eggs on Sunday.

The Little E

This is the first blog on this site dedicated to my son, Eli.
Over the last few years since Eli was born, Shelley, Eli and I have moved from New Zealand to Singapore, and now we are in Melbourne, Australia. Who knows how long we will be here. I like Melbourne a lot, but we've only been here for less than a year now.
Eli has seen a lot in his short life so far. Ever since he was a small baby he has been bundled in to airplaines, hung off mountians in the Southern Alps of New Zealand and ridden on elephants in Indonesia and Thailand. Now that he is getting ready for school, things have slowed down a bit, but I'm sure that there will still be plenty of adventures to come.

About Us

After spending 7 years travelling around the world, I met Shelley on the way back from Scotland. She had just returned to New Zealand from the UK. It was love at first site, well for me anyway. She took a bit more convincing. A year later we were planning our wedding. I stayed at home long enough for Eli to be born, and then the travel bug hit again, Shelley was itchy first, then a job offer came up that sounded too good to be true so we sold the house and said goodbye to NZ.
The problem with things that sound too good to be true is that they usually are. After 3 years of consant travel around Asia, we headed back to the Pacific, this time on separte countries (for a short while) so Shelley could work on her degree while I worked 18 hour days.
After 6 months of 2 hour phone calls at weekends, and the occasional long weekend in NZ we were all back together in yet another country - this time Australia.