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Falling all overSometimes life is less than planned, more than an adventure |
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November 15 Aussie Jingle BellsBecause my kids sing it. Dashing through the bush Chorus Chorus Come the afternoon Chorus October 19 Mass grave unearthed - World - smh.com.auThe advantage of being kidnapped by the “Allied forces” is that they don’t kill you. You just get hidden away from society for 1 year or so if you’re lucky, or if unlucky you can serve the rest of your ‘natural life’ as a ward of the state in luxury hotels such as Guantanamo Bay?
April 21 Rah Rah - WaratahSo, what do you do on a pouring / raining afternoon when you've got a million and one things to do and another long day ahead of you?
Well, you get on the train and get yourself over to the nearest park to watch 'the game!' We treated ourselves this afternoon and took off to the Sydney Football Stadium to watch the HSBC Waratahs (oops, NSW Waratahs) in their Super 14 round game against the Lions. We went together with Lita and thoroughly loved the experience of not only watching the 'big game' live, but loved the atmosphere.
We got great seats (obviously there were better for offer, but what we got was pretty good) and we were close up to the action. The Sydney Football Stadium is way cool, with a real great buzz in the atmosphere. Totally forgot about taking a shot of our view, but here we were just beside the 22 line.
The forwards had a great game, and Vickerman / Mumm continued their strong efforts. Tatafu Polotanau had a strong game as the run-on hooker, with great impact play by Adam Freier when he came on late in the 2nd half as a replacement.
Alfi Mafi and Tatafu Polotanau came over to our half of the ground to pass out little Waratah Rugby balls for the kids. And there were a lot of the older kids hanging around asking for balls too. O4 grabbed a ball, but gave it to a thankful young Waratah fan who was standing behind her. Fortunately, there were plenty of balls to go around so we ended up having one each for the kids to bring back. It was great to see Tatafu after the game spending so much time (in the rain) signing autographs for the young Rah rah fans. All the players and officials had gone in from the rain but he was still out there signing signatures and standing with patrons getting his picture taken. I'm sure the above normal fans can spend time with their choice of players at the after-match piss-up, but for all young fans, that isn't going to happen. The only time they'll get with the players is the few moments after the game when the players are willing to stand around. We were seated 13 rows from the playing field, and didn't get the roof cover protection so we enjoyed the Sydney rain along with the game. Unfortunately, we gated through gate "H" which just happens to be right around the backside from the entrance, quite a long walk when you're going to the game with a pregnant woman (not O4, but Lita.) Fortunately, whilst the girls scampered back up the stairs, one of the "true" fans, gave us a hint that the easier route out is to just walk around the oval on the inside (same rain as walking around the oval on the outside) except the walk is shorter. The Waratah crowd is a little sedated, which may be the influence of the wonderful beer culture we have here in Australia. Mind you, the younger stallions seem to behave more excited with more chemicals in their blood so there were a few vociferous moments as the crowd poured out of Sydney Football Stadium, but thankfully everyone seemed to be enjoying the atmosphere. At half-time, the girls sent me on a run to get a raincoat for O4, being as we totally forgot the umbrellas in the car, and O4's jacket didn't have a hood. I came back without the raincoats to greetings of inquisitive eyes with the question: you didn't bring any chips? Girls, there's lines everywhere at these things, the critical ones being the lines for the toilets so we'll leave that one until we get back to the train station. Aside from that, the patronage here is most interested in the foamy stuff passing around (alcohol.) Wall to wall bars with a few smatterings of places where you can actually get food. A wonderful time at the game, and I've already been told to book for the next home game. October 26 Reflections of TongaCheyenne Morrison has again brought us up-to-date on seeing Tonga around the world. He has published 2 pages in the "Asia Pacific Tropical Homes Magazine, issue 4.4, October 2007" Kingdom of Tonga Island Dream for Sale (PDF). He also found Tonga being spotlighted in the following recent releases of:
National Geographic Magazine
It is somewhat interesting reading about Tonga, presumably taken from the point of view of the someone who is just scanning across the pages and wants a little 2 second peak into the story. Unfortunately the article doesn't seem to have much substance although I'm sure the author has some finer work. If you want some interesting reading on the Prince/King and general issues then you may be better served with less glossy photographs at Jennifer Kahn's The Very Modern Prince over at Wired. The article is weird in that the author acknowledges that this is his first trip to Tonga but then begins to espouses 'truths' about things in Tonga as if he is a veteran of the isles, let alone the Kingdom of Tonga. There are some serious factual errors with the article, independent of the pseudo-political analysis. Thought provoking nonetheless. ABC TV Australia - Foreign Correspondenct
Obviously never saw this one,
October 03 Where to put those photosWe've obviously been having a few problems with http://www.nomoa.com, which was good enough an excuse into really trying out some of the other public sites for spelunking on the World Wide Web. We've wandered through a few sites, and are actually contemplating paying for access, except connectivity from Tonga over the past couple of weeks has been so horrible that we can't really do any useful evaluation. http://gallery.sf.net Gallery2 is what we're using at http://www.nomoa.com but we can't get onto it at the moment. This nonetheless is the baseline, or what I have used and variously expect in a minimal service. Key features I use a lot: Captions, Sub-Albums (Albums within Albums), Remote Client. Features I would like: Tagging/Keywords (It would be nice to have an artificial connection between different images apart from their static folder/album layouts. For example, I have separate wedding photo-albums, but it would be good that if I label/tag all the photos of my father, that I can just click the tag for my father and have a virtual album of all the photos which is tagged as such. I currently do most of any caption work using the Gallery Remote client (on my desktop before loading) and what i would prefer is that desktop tool. http://tonga.spaces.live.com is a Live/Spaces account with its supported gallery/photo upload. Some nice features, but limited if you want to put more than a few photos. Does not support sub-albums. http://samtaufa.fotki.com is a start for using the http://fotki.com service, the paid service looks promising, and I do like the fact they support using FTP (but again, we're having serious connectivity problems from Tonga.) I really like the way that you can set up sub-folders etc. Once a collection grows, it is useful (in my mind) to be able to pre-empt some categorisation and folders have a nice history. Great: Various Offline Tools, FTP upload, suck down from other websites etc. Poor: Captioning and Tagging are possible but only web page/per photo. http://flickr.com The big player in the market, and owned by Yahoo! but unfortunately the free/trial version is so limited I put a few pictures up there and then never really looked at it much further.
http://www.zooomr.com/photos/17804@Z01/ is my lifeline at zooomr (note the use of THREE "o" s) but I haven't really put up much there.
I'm just trying this out but I already like their upload page (although I haven't found the Desktop/Offline app yet. On my set up, selecting multiple files goes through the mechanics of uploading, but seems to result in only one of those files getting accepted. Although, you can manually upload the files and upload separately and successfully. Love their "People" button which lets you select people and tag them within the photo. Looks like a great way to tell/spam(?) people that you've put their photos online. February 06 I hate dellor at least that seems to have been the tone of previous messages by me, so it seems opportune to praise one part of Dell's service. I bought a used Dell box a couple of months ago, and was initially locating it for OpenBSD (which nicely detected all things onboard and enabled them.) Unfortunately, the family finds an older machine is dieing so I have to un-Unix myself from this box and reinstall Windows. Now, I've got legitimate licenses around, such as the dieing box so I just installed Windows XP to find it did not configure the video card, or the sound device. The video card ended up being an Intel 845G Graphics Controller but the beauty of the DELL sites are that you can login to their support pages, grab the "Service Tag" from the machine (a serial number that's printed on the machines) and you go to a page with all the drivers for all hardware released for your machine/build. Coool. So, an hour later, I have a fully sound, video working setup. Ohhh, Antivirus/AntiSpam ? http://free.grisoft.com, http://www.clamwin.com stay on top.
Thanks Dell February 05 If mobility were the priority and money no problemI'd probably drop on a Fujitsu P1610 or an Asus R1F. Mind you, this is probably looking like my plunge into the Apple Newton Messagepad 2000 or the first Compaq iPaq. Are these just geek toys, or do they provide more than their money's worth ? On the other hand, at the same price I'd probably be looking at a screaming desktop machine, so we'd better finalise what life's got ahead for us. Meanwhile, I'm seriously looking at getting O4 a UMPC considering she can't get much time to lock herself in the computer room, but she'll have plenty of time in the bedroom so there's time on and off to relax a little, check mail if that is possible. Links: Tegatech - Australian supplier of tabletpc umpc [approx. $1,500 ~ $2,200] (including the Fujitsu P1610 approx. $3,000) Asus R1f (approx $3,700) July 12 In the market for a new laptop / tabletpcI've been drooling over a new laptop ever since the only solution for using my current laptop (still with a lot of grunt) Dell Inspiron 5150 P4 3.2Ghz 1G Ram 60G HDD is to have ice-packs ready on hand for those moments when the machine just decides to lock up from overheating. I avoid most problems people of the 5150 have, by simply not using the laptop as a portable device (i.e. I will have saved a lot of money just buying a normal PC with the same grunt.) It has turned into one of the most expensive desktops I know of. This thing sits on my desk and remains there. I guess one feature of the desk bound laptop is that it is easier to move when I go from house to house. Unfortunately there are just too many 'sensitive' things about it to make it worthwhile as a laptop. You can't use the DVD drive for very long or it overheats and shuts down. You can't run CPU intensive programs for too long (like converting large WAV files to MP3) or it overheats and shuts down. You can't run a full spyware scan with spybotsd or it overheats and shuts down. The work-around is to run each of the 10 scans separately (meaning your lose a day of useful work sitting around waiting for each run to finish, change the settings, and re-run) You can't run CPU intesive programs such as MSN Desktop Search 2.x because it doesn't throttle when the CPU is in heavy use thereby causing overheating and shutdowns. Where am I going ?I've now bought with my unearned money laptops from the major brands (whereas I've been living with desktops from cloners and refurbished sites.) I've owned middle of the range or top range laptops from NEC Versa, Gateway Solo, Toshiba, and now DELL. I've hated ALL their service agreements in that I'm pretty screwed when in Tonga and seemingly even when I'm in another foreign developed country. Now, I'm interesting in getting another laptop and I'm really interested in the TabletPC range with a preference for the following:
The Toshiba Screen.Now I'm drooling over the Toshiba Portege M400 although I can't recall the experience of the 12.1" screen (I think my NEC Versa in 1994 was a 12" with Windows 3.1/Windows 95) but I've been happily living on this Dell 15.4" @ 1600 x 1200 resolution. I might be able to downgrade to 1400 x 1050 on a laptop but I'm not sure about going down from 15.4" to 12.1". The Portege M400 has an option for a 12.1" with 1400 x 1050 which seems to be the highest resolution one can get for TabletPC. The released in America, not available in Australia Toshiba Tecra M7 seems to be fitted with the same features, except that it is using a 14.1" screen at 1,440 x 900. More strangeness is that the Tecra M7-117 European Specs include an NVidia Graphics card, which is infinitely mush better than the Intel Graphics Media on chip offered in the US version although after looking further, you can customize the machine to use the NVidia card after all.. The scary thing is the bad news reviews I've been reading about Toshiba's support arrangements in Australia, which is alleviated to some degree by the fact that I would buy the optional warranty service from my preferred computer supplier in Sydney http://www.ht.com.au Wow, my Customised tabletpc Toshiba Tecra M7 (with mostly most powerful features) comes in at USD$2,400 which is somewhere around the same price I paid for this brick of a laptop from DELL. Unfortunately, Toshiba USA don't ship to Australia and I don't have anyone ready to carry the thing across the waters for me. After all, if you're not going to get decent local warranty service anyway, why bother buying it local ? Ho hum. Visit bTonga |
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