Old Musings - February 2002

Not much to report this week. Work has been hectic - as usual. I'm on-call this week, supposedly to provide 24x7 support, which means that I'm carrying around a pager and a cell-phone till Monday. Unfortunately this also means that I have to be able to get to the Lab within 30-40 minutes at any time, so no diving, camping or any of the other fun stuff out there :(

I'll also be losing my broadband internet connection at the end of the month. An occasion I am quite looking forward to. Ever since I since a contract with Telstra, the service has been sporadic,  help-desk anything but, and worst of all, they have been changing all the terms and conditions every couple of months. With their latest change, I would be on a different plan with a different speed, a download cap and all this would end up costing me more money for the privilege. So when they offered the opportunity to opt-out without penalty, I jumped at the chance.  This means I will no longer have the bigpond.net.au email address any more - but that's OK. You use my @vsoest.net account, don't you? (Check the 'Contact' page for details).

You've been a bad, bad boy, Gerard. Yup, that's right. Even though I've been trying to be a bit more frugal recently, I've gone off and purchased another 7 DVDs this month. With another series of the Simpsons due out next month this could become quite an expensive habit. 

Now excuse me while I go watch some of them...

Routers, WLL - Wollongong was struck by a devastating earthquake at around 12:30am, early Friday morning. The epicentre was estimated  to be 15km west of Wollongong city. The earthquake, which measured 3.2 on the Richter scale, has sparked a massive outbreak of civil unrest and the prime minister has stepped in with an offer of support to all those affected. "My staff tell me that hundreds of people we woken up by the shake. Our office will be providing assistance wherever we can. There is nothing more important than a good nights sleep. The people of the Illawarra have been particularly hard hit recently and my heart goes out to them. They have had to suffer drought, fires, flooding, the New Zealand bonus point saga and now this".

OK. It might not be that bad, but we had a (tiny 3.2) earthquake here on Friday morning, and that is all that people seem to be able to talk about lately. Personally, I am a bit intrigued by the fact that we are nowhere near a fault line around here - so where did the quake come from? I am starting to suspect underground nuclear testing, but can't prove anything yet.

And, yes, I did feel it. I thought that it was a freakish just of wind and went back to sleep.

Residents have been warned to prepare themselves for aftershocks.

Web Update
Added a new Ixus website to my repertoire. I hope to capture all the little tricks and hints here for other users.

Had a good weekend. The rain stopped just long enough for me to get sun burnt. I also went go-karting, snorkelling and camping down in Jervis Bay (and oddly enough, Jervis bay forms part of the ACT). We also saw Skippy and some of his mates again!

Not much more to say - just go take a look at some of the photos :)

Urgent update : Wohoo! NZ just made the cricket finals!

Web Update
Start of a new month - Ramblings for January archived away.
Added photos of go-karting.
Added photos of Jervis bay - camping.
Added photos of Kangaroo, Kookaburra and possums to 'Flora and Fauna' section.