A small collection of photos from 2007. Maybe in 2008 we’ll take more photos and get out and see more interesting places. If we do, there’ll be more photos in the 2008 highlight album 
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For around 18 months now the air conditioner in our car has been on the blink.
It worked fine when I bought the car, and continued to work fine for most of our trip from Hobart to Brisbane. It showed the first signs of playing up on the drive from Sydney to Brisbane, where it just turned itself off for no reason. I turned it back on, and put it down to one of those things.
A few months later it started doing it more often – at least once/day it’d just turn off, and some days it was hard to even get it to come on in the first place. After a bit of digging with the multimeter, I figured it was probably the switch on the dash that was the problem and put “buying a new A/C switch” on the list of things to do one rainy day.
Well, the other day on the way back from Noosa the bloody thing played up the whole way back. This morning, determined to not go through summer without reliable air conditioning in the car, I decided to pull the switch out of the dash and replace it temporarily if I had to. A bit of googling revealed how to get the dash apart without destroying it (hint – look for articles on how to fit a car stereo – it’s much the same process).
So I start pulling the dash apart and find there’s a two small PCB’s behind the A/C & demist buttons. Removed those and traced from the switch to get an idea of what was happening and found a nice dry solder joint on the A/C pin of the connector block that connects the PCB to the car wiring loom. Re-soldered that, and a few other joints along the way, and now I seem to have a reliable air conditioner again
Katie – approx 1 day old.
All going well, Mum & daughter will be home from hospital today. Hooray!
Last night (June 11th, 2006) at 8:43pm, Katie Norene Purdon was welcomed to the world weighing 3930 grams and measuring 50cm. Mother and daughter are both doing well.
Photos in the usual place
Well, we made it to Brisbane a few weeks back and are settling in. After spending a about 3 weeks in an apartment we managed to find a rental property, get our belongings delivered, and move in. We’ve got 4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, double garage, solar hot water, and live a quick bike-ride from the train station.
The house is still a bit of a mess, but we’re slowly sorting it out. Our new dining table, sofa, beds, new desk, and baby stuff has all arrived and we’re getting it all setup.
The kids scored an XBox and are enjoying that – it’s an older model, but it’s more than capable of keeping us all amused.
Photos of the whole shebang will be in the normal place in due course
Found this promotional price ticket in a local supermarket a few months back. Unfortunate choice of ticket for this product
Don’t you just love software that doesn’t work – either at all, or is just broken enough to be damn annoying?
Stay far away from Debian Linux ‘unstable’. Don’t get me wrong, I love Debian Linux (the ’stable’ one), but an application I wanted to run needed ‘unstable’. Well, the name unstable should have given it away right from the start. Crash and burn, filesystem corruption, devices that just didn’t work.
So, I come to my other PC to do some research on this problem, only to find Mozilla has gone up it’s own backside. It runs fine as a browser, but don’t dare read mail with it – it’ll lock all Mozilla windows up tight as a drum. Worked yesterday… Sigh…
In desperation I upgraded Mozilla on my machine at work today – randomly, about twice/day, the delete key stops working in the mail client, so I can’t delete all that lovely junk mail I get (which outnumbers the real mail about 4:1 these days). Time will tell if it fixed the problem (and what else it broke).
…oh, and don’t think it’s just free software that breaks. …run Windows lately? You know the one – where you pay a crapload of money to have an operating system that craps itself.
This sort of crap has just about driven me to the point of leaving the IT industry and doing something completely unrelated.
While I was in the US, I bought a couple of DVD’s – as you do. They were region 1 discs, as you’d expect – but that’s cool, I’ve got a region free DVD player.
Well, all bar one of the discs worked just fine in my DVD player (a Philips DVD711), but there was no way I could get it to play the discs in my West Wing box set. Seems it’s got slightly smarter code to check for region free players (I’ve played RCE discs on my player before, so it must be something different again).
So, I used it as an excuse to buy a new DVD player – an LG DV7711. It plays the West Wing box set just fine and is also a region free player.
What was most bizarre though, is that the region 1 box set WOULD play on a region 4 player (which it shouldn’t), but won’t play on the Philips player when it’s set to be region-free.
We’re back!
We left San Francisco on Friday evening. They certainly take their security seriously over there these days – all of our bags were x-rayed and more than half were opened and manually screened. Their damn x-ray machine though – it launched the bags so violently that it smashed the corner out of one of the plastic containers we had stuff in. They taped it up (after we asked), but it never was quite the same…
We arrived in Los Angeles about an hour later and went in search of the international terminal that Qantas leaves from – gate 101 was us. I think ‘101′ means it’s ‘101 miles away’ coz it was a LONG walk.
When we got to the gate we found they have probably 200 seats, shared between two gates (in an international terminal). One gate was us, and the other was a Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong, so there was probably 800-900 people (two 747’s worth) in a gate-lounge with only about 200 seats. Hooray. Oh, did I mention the air-conditioning didn’t seem to work (it was *hot* – at 11pm).
Fortunately we got our preferred seats in row 70, which made the 15 hour flight slightly more bearable (at this point, the longest non-stop flight anywhere in the world).
We arrived in Melbourne at about 10am Sunday morning – a bit late – but no problem as our connecting flight was still over 3 hours away. But, this is where the “fun” started.
Half of our baggage came out on carousel #2, and the other half on carousel #1 (despite the monitors saying it’d all be on #2). We checked in 4 bags and 4 plastic containers. What we got though was 4 bags, 3 plastic containers, and a plastic bag 
They’d been so rough on one of the containers that the container was totally destroyed, hence the contents (and the remnants of the container) arrived in a plastic bag.
Fortunately the customs guys were VERY helpful and gave us a brand new cardboard box, helped us re-pack everything, and taped it up really well.
So, we went in search of where we re-checkin the baggage for the trip to Hobart. At the baggage counter they sent us to the special baggage people, who couldn’t help (but were ever so conveniently at the other end of the terminal). They sent us to the closest domestic checkin counter, but they couldn’t help us either, referring us to counter #17 (at the other end of the terminal). That was helpful, except there were no staff at counter #17. The security guy nearby told us to get in the Qantas Club line, where they finally took our bags – except the plastic containers, which we took back to the special baggage desk (at the other end of the terminal again).
On closer inspection, we found they’d damaged two other containers – smashed a quarter of the bottom out of one, and the corner of another. 3 miles of duct tape later and we handed the bags over.
Sitting in the gate lounge we watched them loading the luggage – it’s amazing the effort the baggage guys go to in order to LIFT your bags 12 inches above the conveyor so they can DROP them onto it. They went easy on the remaining plastic containers – probably because they knew if they broke, they’d have to clean it up…
2:30pm Sunday we landed in Hobart, and after two trips home (to get all the bags here), we were finally home. I’ve seen enough of airports and planes for this month…
Today was a ‘field trip’ to Fry’s Electronics.
It’s huge!
I suspect they had more CD & DVD’s than all the music/video stores in Hobart combined, they had home appliances, film cameras, digital cameras, video cameras, telephones, computers, and shock horror, they even sold electronic components. If it was electronic, or had electronics in it, they sold it.
Black CPU fans – and white ones, clear ones, fluourescent ones, flashing LED fans. …and then the chrome fan covers to suit, in various designs. Oh, and fluourescent coloured power splitters. These guys had stuff I didn’t even know existed…