October 2007 Archives

Alex is out somewhere "Trick or Treating" even though we don't actually celebrate Halloween here in Australia. He thinks of it as an opportunity to get a bag full of goodies, and who can blame him. I'm really annoyed with him, he's meant to sleep at his father's house tonight and it's 8.30 pm and I haven't a clue where he is! I cooked tea over an hour ago and it's getting cold, but he'll be eating it anyway.

Remember...
The future depends on what we do in the present.
....

Early tomorrow morning I'm off to Albury again for another two days of intensive training. Actually it's more like information overload; learning all there is to know about building inspections and processes. I realized at 6 pm that I hadn't even booked the motel room, and was so relieved when they had a spare one. Talk about a last minute rush.

Carly is staying at her Dad's tomorrow night only, he doesn't have an internet connection there and I'll be home around 6 pm Friday. Monday I'm off to Sydney with Alex for two days for the Schoolboy's Touch Championships. It doesn't seem like a year since we were last there, but it was Melbourne Cup day they played and will be again.

I had a very hectic few days at work, trying to get the end-of-month stuff out of the way this afternoon, and emptying my in-tray. Four days away from work will produce a nightmare amount to do by next Wednesday. I'm not going to even think about it now until next week when I walk back in the door. There's really no point stressing about it.

The painters have nearly finished the house, and it looks great. I'm so broke now after cleaning out my bank account yesterday so I could pay them. Just as well tomorrow is pay day and there'll be some more going in the bank. Something else I've resolved not to worry about. I took this photo two weeks ago after the paint started to go on the house. See post for before photos.

At last, it's raining!!! Thursday we got a decent bit of rain too, soaking rain that is so good for the garden and lawns, and since we have water restrictions and can't leave sprinklers on, it was very welcome. It's cooled down somewhat too. Yesterday was stifling hot, cloudy and perfect burning conditions, but the weather for the Junee Show yesterday turned out to be perfect to attract the crowds.

I told Alex there was no way he was going unless he got in there and cleaned his bedroom, and it took until 5 pm yesterday to get him to do it. He did a good job and the floor is spotless, so we both went to the Show for a few hours. Carly went with a friend (after me telling her she wasn't allowed), and although she had no money she managed to have a good time. It's the 3rd show that Carly's been to in the last month, and I'm not the Bank of Australia! Something she doesn't seem to comprehend!!!

The fireworks display was spectacular last night, and went for quite a while. We left around 8:30 and watched the end of Thunderbirds, followed by Terminator 3 - Rise of the Machines was on TV when we got home. Arnie looked pretty good back then and Alex was impressed with his muscles.

Daylight Saving started last night and so it was actually an hour later when I went to bed at 12:30am. I hate missing out on that hour when daylight saving starts. I know you catch up eventually, but it's just not the same. Next year we're having a lot more daylight saving time. Daylight saving for future summers begins at 2 am, Eastern Standard Time, on the first Sunday in October and ends at 3 am summer time on the first Sunday in April. This means that residents in New South Wales have an additional three weeks of daylight saving at the beginning and one week at the end.

It was a real family day when we went to visit my grandmother and my mother, my daughters and grandchildren all came too. It was the first time Nanna had her great-great-grandchildren all together and we had lots of photos taken, with a few of the five generations of women in the family.

Before going to Cooinda Court where Nanna is, we went to the Licorice Factory in Junee and had lunch. Daniel , Lauren and Zeke, Emily and Scarlett, and Alex and me. It's a fantastic place, they make licorice and chocolate, and used to be an old flour mill until it was gutted by fire way back when. It's been kept to the original exposed beam style, with old wooden tables and chairs and lots of old memorabilia and it was a bonus for us, because there were 3 young guys jamming with guitars and keeping the visitors entertained.

We left there after lunch and met my mother at the hostel, and went to a lovely "quiet room" where we spent a couple of hours with Nanna and took lots of photos. Zeke was a hit with all the residents when he kept calling each of them "Nanna". He'd say, "Look, there's another nanna."

The five generations of women in our family

From left: Emily, Lillian (sitting), Carly, Toni (holding Riley), Pat (sitting with Scarlett), and Lauren holding Zeke

Scarlett with her great-great-grandmother and great-grandmother

The three sisters: Emily, Carly and Lauren

The Salmon Family: Lauren, Daniel, Zeke and Riley

Today is the last day for junior cricket signups and my last free Saturday morning for a while to come. Every year it's the same thing, and as much as I love the kid's sport, I also love my days at home. Alex will only be allowed to play another year in junior cricket so I go along knowing that next year I might have my Saturday mornings to myself. Alex is pretty excited about the season starting, he has a new helmet this year to go with the kit that I bought him last year, and his batting has improved considerably. Their school cricket team has won every game so far and they've been all over playing one school after another. Alex started one game as their opening batter and scored 22 runs, his best score yet, and he stayed in for most of the game. He was rapt.

Touch football has been going for about 5 weeks now and that's held in Wagga on a Saturday afternoon. In past years we've had to rush from cricket over to touch but as the kids get older the games are played later in the day so we don't have to rush any more.

We've been very lucky with the weather, there's been no rain to spoil any sporting events. The local farmers wouldn't call it luck though, they're losing crops all over and would dearly love to see some rain, and my gardens are screaming out for some too. We've also had water restrictions and the back lawn is looking brown and sad. They haven't had a good soaking for some time.

I'm getting the house repainted, and painting begins this week. These photos are for posterity's sake, so I'll have something to compare it to once the job is finished. It looks worse now, more paint has been removed in the preparation period, and nearly two dozen tubes of gap filler has been used. You'll have to stay tuned for the outcome. I'll post the photos when the front is finished.

I've spent the last few days upgrading my site to Movable Type 4.01. It wasn't as daunting as I first thought, but it did take a long time because I have 8 blogs on this site. That meant going through the templates on each blog to see what was and wasn't compatible with the new version. I had to uninstall several plugins, upgrade several others, and installed quite a few of the newer ones that have been developed just for this version.

I changed all the comment forms to take advantage of the new MT4 commenting features. I read a great article by Tami called Retrofit Your MT3.x Templates With New MT4 Comments that was the clincher for the upgrade. After reading all I could about upgrading (instead of a clean install), and was satisfied that my pages wouldn't be changed in any way, I took the plunge.

Uploading everything to the server and weeding out the obsolete files was a slow process. Movabletype.org has a section explaining the changes in MT4 and a list of the plugins to be removed in the upgrade guide. There's another great article about upgrading your MT3 templates but I preferred to keep my old look and just change a few bits and pieces.

There's a couple of formatting issues that I need to look at on Toni's Corner of the World, these templates are older than the rest of the blogs, going back to version 3.1, and with 3.2 the templates got a major overhaul and many of the div names changed. Adding the new commenting features turned out to be quite tricky because I couldn't just cut and paste, and I've lost the formatting on the comment forms. It's was 1:30 am last night and I couldn't get my head around the stylesheet so have had to leave till I can think straight.

It's been a long couple of days but I've been putting this off for a while and now it's done.

Last night Alex and I went to a friend's house for a BBQ tea and helped celebrate their son's 18th birthday (hello Sean). We had a lovely night. It's always nice for someone else to cook and as usual the food and company was excellent.

It was about 10:30 when we got home so we watched the 1986 Jim Henson classic "Labyrinth". David Bowie plays the Goblin King, and it's about 15-year-old Sarah who accidentally wishes her baby half-brother, Toby, away to the Goblin King Jareth who will keep Toby if Sarah does not complete his Labyrinth in 13 hours. Bowie has been a heart-throb for me since I was 14, and since this movie is over 20 years old, it brought back lots of good memories.

Today I tried listening to music while I was using Vista, and was so dissappointed with the way the surround sound worked I went back to XP. I downloaded the Vista Visualisation Pack and now my XP looks like Vista but actually performs better than that operating system. The surround sound, the printer and scanner all work perfectly, and I get the new look. I've had to change the grub bootloader options to set XP as the default OS, so reboots won't put me back into Vista. The whole Vista experience has been a disappointing one. Certainly security is better in Vista, but there was no performance increase, and doing ordinary tasks took longer because of the extra screens popping up to ask permission to do something.

Alex came home from the skate park earlier, hardly able to walk. He had a major stack on his scooter and has done something to his tail-bone. He has a nasty bruise near it and has been complaining all afternoon about how sore it is. That skate part is the cause of so many injuries around this town, but to be expected, when it's concrete. There's nothing forgiving about it. Alex has a couple of scars to prove how dangerous it can be, as do many of his friends.

The flights are booked and the kids are excited, and it looks like we're off to Queensland at the end of January. All paid too so there's no turning back. We'll fly out on Australia Day, and return home on February 3rd, a Saturday, so we can get back to normal on Sunday for school and work on Monday. The kids will miss the first three days at school, but that shouldn't create too many problems. This way, I'm hoping the lines won't be so long at the theme parks (they're sure to want to go) and the airfares were cheaper. You wouldn't think a week would make that much difference but when it comes to money, any saving is a good thing. By the time January comes around, my credit card should be paid off too, so I might even have some spending money.

We'll drive to Sydney and leave the car at the airport, and Carly is excited that we may have time to do some sight-seeing there before we need to be at the airport around 5. What with the time-difference, it looks like the flight takes only 20 minutes, but we'll actually be in the air for an hour and a half.

The return flight gets us back in to Sydney around lunch-time, so we should get back home around 6pm. That's without stops of course, so it might be more like 7pm. It's 4 months away but I'm already thinking about what to pack. I must be just as excited as the kids.

I'm using Vista all the time now, and have most of the hardware updated with new drivers. Alas, I lost my surround sound, and although I've installed new drivers from the manufacturer, only 4 of the 6 speakers are working. This seems like a downgrade from XP, because they all worked beautifully on that version. But it's better than the single speaker that was working on the initial Vista install. Perhaps in time the driver will catch up with XP and it will sound the same. Still no printer or scanner, but for the moment I can live with that.

The best way to enjoy Vista would be to buy it with a new system, that way everything would work and you wouldn't go through the frustration of looking for updated drivers. I came across one site that suggested it had updated drivers for lots of the hardware, but I had to pay to download them, and decided against that. Forums have been the best resource for problem solving, and in the case of the sound driver, there was links to an update (unfortunately not compatible with mine).

I haven't noticed any performance improvement at all. The cosmetics are nicer in Vista, and plenty of help is available online for tweaking and customisation. Once you know where to look for the settings, it's not so different to XP.