Old Musings - October 2001

Official 'New Look'! Well, just different colours really. Hope you like em.

Good Morning, Afternoon, Evening or Easter. If you are just like me then you probably have trouble keeping track of timezones and daylight savings at the moment. To make things difficult, Australia didn't start daylight savings until three weeks after NZ, which meant that for a while the difference was 3 hours. (For the record, Wollongong now is two hours behind New Zealand again). To make my life (and, of course, yours), I have configured a customized link to timeanddate.com which will show you exactly what time it is over here.

The rest of my week lately has been pretty busy. Work is rapidly approaching deadlines - but I'll worry about those after they have finished the layoffs. Nortel world-wide declared another 10,000 layoffs a couple of weeks ago, and unfortunately it does not look like our lab will get away unscathed. Just hope that the number of people that get re-vectored (the latest management buzz-word) is kept to a minimum.

The social club is still pretty active. They organized a camera day at work, where everyone was encouraged to bring along a camera and do a day-in-the-life photo exposé of the lab. I decided to take a photo roughly every 30 minutes, showing what I was doing. (I just hope I took enough photos to convince everyone I worked 7.5 hours).

One of the things you might notice in the 'day-in-the-life-of-Gerard' sequence, is that there was a bit of pool playing. This is because the social club (again) have organised a pool comp. Despite losing the first round, I have made my way into the semi-finals of the second (read : 'losers') division.

Other stuff I did last week :

• Went scuba diving at Bushrangers Bay (off Bass Point / Shellharbour)
• The usual games of Squash and Soccer
• Bike ride down to Warrawong (~12k south of Wollongong)
• Bought a portable air-conditioner. It is starting to get warm around here again - currently 25°C and rising - and I thought it might be wise to prepare to bunker down for the summer.
• More cooking - again the flat smells 'interesting'

Feeling lazy today. Stuff I did in the last couple of weeks :

a) try a bit of cooking. Made some Aioli sauce (garlic mayo) - place reeked for days
b) Had a visit from a friendly arachnid. He stayed for a couple of days, then just took off. <Not for the squeemish>
c) Chris & Yvonne celebrated their first anniversary but having a good old fashioned BBQ.
d) Eddy had a flat-warming last night
e) Bought some more DVD's. I figured it was about time I list them all.
f) Going-away shin-dig down at the local watering place for John. He's had enough of the awful climate down here, and is moving back to sunny England.
g) Damien, one of the guys from work who headed to Sydney when when got 'right-sized', popped down after work last Friday, and a group of us decided to pop into town and celebrate times past.
h) updated website <g>

Wow, what a great weekend! I got bored of Wollongong and decided to pack my bag and go visit the capital of Australia - Canberra. Jeff and Angela were great sports and came along on the trip. Travelling is so much more fun when you are with good friends.

Anywho - To start the trip off, I hired a car for the weekend - a nice dark green Toyota Corolla Seca this time. Unfortunately I didn't get upgraded this time. Last time I asked for the smallest car and they gave me a Holden Commodore! But never mind, we still had plenty of room for the three of us.

Day One

After picking up the car, I popped round to Jeff and Ang's place where they treated me to a delicious cooked breakfast.

After breakfast, and a bit of a messing around hooking up a CD player to the car's stereo, we finally departed on our merry little way around 10ish. We decided to take the inland route as this was quicker and would allow us to do some sightseeing in the afternoon. There is a coastal route, but that would probably have taken an extra hour or two - maybe I'll try that next time I head south.

Our first port of call was Goulburn. It was time for lunch so we found ourselves a supermarket and we did the family 'special' for lunch - Fresh bread rolls, cheese and salami - yum... I went slightly overboard and scoffed down a tub of New Zealand ice cream (I just couldn't resist). After a nice relaxing lunch break we headed off again, only to stumble across what Goulburn is famous for - the world's largest Merino sheep. Why did they make it I hear you ask? I have to be honest and say that I didn't stick around long enough to ask. Apparently you can climb up inside it and look out of its eyes. Let's just leave it at that.

We finally arrived in Canberra just after two. We hadn't organized any accommodation yet, so we popped into the visitors' centre where a nice lady managed to find us a nice quiet hotel for less than the price of a backpackers' hostel. We also took the opportunity to stock up on brochures for all the stuff we wanted to go see and do.

By 3 o'clock we had dropped our stuff off at the hotel and were keen to do a spot of power-tourism. We had prioritised everything according to location and closing time and were ready for all that Canberra had to offer.

A quick note about Canberra first though. Ages ago, it was decided that Australia needed a capitol city, but they couldn't agree between the two most significant cities at the time, Sydney and Melbourne. So what they decided to do was to put the capitol city bang smack in between the two (or there abouts). They found an appropriate location and held a competition to design the city. So right from the start, Canberra had a grand plan for where parliament, the town centre and all the roads and buildings where to go. This means that Canberra is a very structured city. Despite this, getting around is not very intuitive and you end up relying heavily on traffic signs dotted around the place.

Our first port of call was the Royal Australian Mint. You should all know I like money by now, so this was the perfect place to start off (even after I found out they weren't handing out any free samples ). They had a really interesting gallery on the history of coins in Australia, dating back to the times when they were still relying on English currency. This was also the place where they made the medals for the Sydney Olympic games, so there was also quite a bit of information on how they made them and where they got all the gold for them. (Interesting note : the silver and bronze medals are solid, but the gold medal is only gold-plated). They also had a machine all set up so that the public can make their own $1 coins (for a $2 fee of course!). Even though I know that it is just a gimmick, I still couldn't resist. I am now the proud owner of a $1 coin minted by myself - and I am the only person to have ever touched it <g>. 

Once we had done the Mint, our next target was Parliament house. Luckily for us, the date for the next general election has just been declared, which meant that all the politicians had deserted Canberra in favour of getting some good old fashioned electioneering done. (Actually, because it was a Saturday they weren't going to be there anyway, but my way of telling it is a little bit more interesting). Parliament house is very modern (I would have to say perhaps no more than 10 years old) and is pretty much the focal point of the city. The building contains a number of large halls, as well as two large rooms where all the politicians do all their bickering (On for the House of Representatives and the other for the Senate). All up, the building was very impressive, with (modern) artworks as far as the eye can see.

Parliament house closed at five, and so we made our way to our last stop for the day - the Telstra tower. This tower looks a lot more impressive than it actually is, because they decided to build it on a hill. From the city you expect a 900m monster tower, but when you get to the car-park at the top you find out that it is only 167m tall (which includes some 60m of antenna on the top).  Despite this, it was well worth the visit. We timed our visit so that it would coincide with the sunset and we were given a great view of the city. It was just a pity that it was too windy (and cold) so that the top observation deck was closed. (As a side note, just like every other tower in the world, there is a restaurant / cafe up the top with sky-high prices to match).

Once the sun had set, we headed into town for some food at O'Malley's, the local Irish pub. Finally, once were were watered and fed, we made our way back to the hotel for a well deserved rest. (For those of you really interested, one of the TV stations had a Star Trek theme going this weekend, so we ended up watching Star Trek : Insurrection and Start Trek : Generations in bed although I fell asleep during the second movie - it had been a long day).

Day Two

We woke up reasonable early (7.30ish) and after some initial confusion about whether or not daylight savings had occurred during the night (it hadn't), we checked out of the hotel and headed for our next spot on our tour - the Australian War Memorial. This was another amazing building with lots of great architecture. Outside there were a number of huge guns / canons - from frigates and tanks (?), whereas the inside was more serene, with plaques of names, a eternal flame and a chapel to remember the fallen soldiers from the various wars that Australia had been involved in. One thing that particularly caught my eye, was the lists of names. Next to some of the names, friends and relatives had places poppies. A very sobering reminder that they are still being missed.

We didn't stay at the war memorial for too long - it was outdoors and Canberra's weather had turned to cold and windy - so we moved onto the final thing we wanted to see - Questacon. Questacon is Canberra's equivalent to Science Alive and it is GREAT fun. I got to play with all kinds of stuff - big balls with liquid in them, simulating the giant gas planets, a colon without enough fibre farting and burping all the time (it's a long story), heaps of magnets for all sorts of things, *huge* holograms (about the size of an A0), wave makers, telsa coils generating lightning, a guillotine, bubbling mud and even and earthquake simulator.

Unfortunately, all things must come to an end, and so we headed off home. Despite originally planning to come back via the coastal route, we went back through Goulburn. I think that we were all too tired to do much more for the weekend. Anyway, this way we would have another chance to check out the world's largest Merino sheep again

It has now been over a month since my last update. My apologies. I hope make updates a little more frequently from now on.

I have just come back from a week in NZ (Sorry to those who I didn't have enough time to catch up with), so I have a few more photos in the NZ section.

I've also got an interesting new conspiracy that I am pursuing at the moment. It involves a time-travelling bank of all things.

Films

Gotta love the uni movies! One, sometimes two great movies for only $3

Tomb Raider - Great err, um, action. Not much plot, but who cares?
Raiders of the Lost Ark - All-time classic.
Evolution - Agent Mulder mooning - need I say more?

Web Update
Plenty of stuff : more photos, a new conspiracy and a new wallpaper.