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Contact The Owner

I had an interesting experience trying to report a fire that was deliberately lit on a roundabout near our house. The fire had been deliberately lit the kindling was still there as were the matches that had been used. The fire itself was put out by 0ne of our neighbours.

The next day I attempted to report the incident to the police. After I explained the above they asked me if this occurred on my property. I explained that this occurred on a roundabout! On an intersection. The upshot was they would not take a report. However if I let the “owner” of the propery know then they could be able to make the report. The owner of the property is of course our local council. When I asked if the police keep crime statistics the mantra was repeated.

I was not expecting a massive CSI style investigation or indeed and actual attendance but simply to report the incident. I can only conclude if the police don’t take the report then the incident never

occurred and therefore keeps the stats in shape. We do however live in an area where there are regular of grass fires toward the end of the school year.

A photo of the “property” for your viewing pleasure

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Whales at Middleton South Australia

Spent Sunday afternoon at Bashams Beach , which is near Middleton, South Australia. The whales in the photos were only about 30 metres offshore. They were to use the language of the local whale watchers “loafing”.  The whale closest to the shore had a calf swimming around her.  In all there were 5 adult whales in the vicinity.


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A Small Site Update

Have just added a Facebook and Twitter icon to the side bar which will take you to my twitter and facebook pages. All this social media is about intergration.

Might consider a new theme , I am getting a little bored with this one.

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Spring Has Sprung Early

All the climate change worriers out there should be good and worried its expected to be 27 degrees today. If we get there it will be a  new record high for 15th August in Adelaide. What most people overlook is that we only have actual records for the last 100 or so years. So today maybe the highest recorded temperature for this day who knows what the actual highest temperature was  is is too come.

The hayfever sufferers certianily know that the northerlies are blowing today………sniff sniff

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Katoomba

Well have just returned from Katoomba in NSW. Fantastic place , went for the Yulefest. That’s like Christmas in July. Surprisingly affordable with a nice range of eateries.
The natural beauty of the Blue Mountains is spectacular the ” three sisters” a natural formation of sandstone columns, which has strong aboriginal story attached.

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View From the Office via Iphone

Well here is a photo from my office taken on an Iphone with the third version of the OS installed. I used the WordPress application that is available from the Itunes store. The whole thing works well enough and I suppose its kinda cool being able to post to the net,  or is that web,  from a truly hand-held device. The touch key board isn’t too bad even for my chubby fingers. What will it be next tweeting form the Iphone , heaven knows where it will all end.

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First Impressions with Win7

Well I have been running windows 7 32 Bit RC since the day after it was released, Mostly it has been good. I like the the interface and  it  is certainly better than Vista. Although my personal opinion on Vista is that it was  underwhelming in relation to the hype rather than truly bad.

I have been experiencing  a lot of freezes and I think this may be related to the touch pad on my ASUS laptop (PRO31P).  I have downloaded the latest drivers for this from synaptics, not sure if this is  a major step forward.

However my biggest issue to date happened after I installed an network printer over a standard TCP/IP port. I lost the print server spooling function . After repeated attempts to use the various recovery functions within Win7 I had to resort to using windows restore point.  Dont know if this is  bug in Win7 or just a mishap.

I have however been having some problems updating the virus checker , Kaspersky Internet Security  2009. My laptop at home connects  via wifi using a Dlink DIR-635 router. I have a second network set up Using a Dlink DI-824 VUP+ which works fine, and on several otehr networks for that matter. Additionally another machine, running XP, connects to the same DLink DIR-635 and updates without any problems.

Other than that all seems to work well, certainly happier than Vista.

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Drug Rehab Serbian Style

I saw an article on BBC world news about a drug rehab program on in Serbia. You can see the original article by clicking here including a video. A man is seen being beaten with a shovel. The article goes on to say that this centre is being run by the Serbian Orthodox church. These religious backed centres never ceases to amaze me. In the name of religion every perversion imaginable is perpetrated. The press has been full of countless stories of excesses committed in the name of any deity you care to think of.

This is however an new take on rug rehab. Do these people think that they can beat drug addiction out of people? It makes almost as much sense as a good exorcism.

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Test from Iphone

Well this fabulous photo was take on an Iphone and uploaded using the WordPress application within the Iphone.
I must say that it couldn’t have been easier,it might be the reason that pushes me to actually get an Iphone. I might however wait until the new model arrives.

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Windows 7 RC 32 Bit

Well this is my first post from a fresh install of Win7 RC 32bit on my laptop which is an ASUS PRO31P. Because I was having problems with Word 2007 that I couldn’t fix I was thinking of reinstalling Vista, but Win7 RC appeared at the same time so I thought what the hell. I did an upgrade install. The process was rather painless but it took several hours. In the end the machine booted without incident all I had to do was reactive my antivirus software Kaspersky 2009 and I was off.

The installer inspected my machine and identified three programs that I needed to uninstall prior to upgrade. One was a virtual CD Rom Magic ISO the other OCR software Finereader, I can’t recall the third but it must have been something that I was not using. After the install all my settings files etc were there including my cheesy background image.

Since I have had the laptop I have never been able to upgrade the graphics drivers (GEFORCE 7300) seems that neither NVIDIA nor ASUS had any particular interest in the graphics chipset for Vista. This has not been an issue as far as I was concerned with the exception trying to run Google Sketch Up. As soon as the machine was running I tried this program and too my amazement it ran without incident. There had been a Google workaround which I had to use to fire this application up on every occasion. This was with the Geforce Go 7300 driver that was in the installation package! There was more and update for the video driver as well. The only other issue was running Pinnacle Studio 12 this did not seem to fire up readily and when it did the GUI seemed screwed up. I was able to run this in Vista SP2 mode (interesting as Vista SP2 isn’t generally available) and seems to be OK but I have not extensively tested it yet.

I have been running Win 7 Beta on A Pentium 4 machine since it arrived and this did increase my confidence to install the release candidate. I have been underwhelmed rather than disappointed with Windows Vista so a move was on the cards. However I do think that my next laptop will be a MacBook as we already own one have had no problems to speak of with it. Then again Win7 may put all that to rest.