Toni's Corner of the World

 

I finally accomplished something while I've been home on holidays. The shelves have been sitting around for six months waiting to be put up. First, no-one could find the charger for the portable drill, then when Alex found it I still procrastinated. I really wish I could work on that. Not to worry, they're up now and they look good.

Carly and I went to Wagga after I picked her up from school yesterday and we bought clothes to wear to Nanna's funeral today. This morning I went to the hairdresser and had gold tips put in my hair and it was so lovely to have a head massage. It makes me want to go back every week. The hairdresser here in Junee is lovely and she remembered Nanna from her visits to Cooinda Court to cut all the residents' hair.

My Uncle is coming down from Queensland for Nan's funeral. It's the first time he's back to Wagga in over 10 years so I'm glad he'll get to see everyone again. He hasn't met any of my grandchildren yet, and my sister hasn't seen him since he left. I'm picking Christine and her son Matt up around 2.

Dad's back in hospital too. I received a shock email on Monday night telling me to ring the Tweed hospital and I thought "heart attack" initially. I didn't think I'd even be here to make the funeral, but he'll go home later today. He's having breathing problems and had a bit of a chest infection so they kept him in to pump him full of antibiotics. I didn't get to speak to him and all the hospital staff sounded very positive, so I can only assume that everything's alright.

Carly and Alex are back tomorrow after over 2 weeks of school holidays, but Wednesday they'll be having the day off to attend their great-grandmother's funeral service.

I've seen very little of Alex during the break. He's up early and off on his scooter or bike, and comes home when he's hungry, then gone again. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be a 13-year-old who's biggest worry is being allowed to have friends sleep over. Carly is home more often, and has had friends stay every other night, but she also helps to keep the house tidy and that's usually cleaning up after Alex.

Mum dropped around today and she's in much better spirits. We talked about the funeral arrangements, who would drive who, and what we needed to do afterwards for the wake. It will be held at Warren and Julie's house and we'll organise the food and drink beforehand.

Little Riley has been very sick too. He spent Friday and Saturday nights in hospital, with Lauren sleeping in the chair next to his cot. He has a bacterial infection in his chest. When I looked after him last weekend I told Lauren he was very rattly in the chest, but her doctor wasn't too concerned and kept telling her to give him pain relief. She took him to a different doctor on Friday afternoon who sent them both straight to the hospital. We called in yesterday to see them, and Riley is very pale but as usual he had big smiles for everyone. Even when he's sick he's still a calm, quiet child. After this course of antibiotics we'll probably see him thrive. I hope so, anyway.

Emily has only 4 1/2 weeks left and 2 more weeks of work. Then we'll have grandchild number 4. She's organised a birthday party for Scarlett next Saturday at Noah's Ark in Wagga with lots of other little 1-year-olds. Alex is rapt, he loves Noah's Ark, and is already talking about taking Zeke on the big slides. Football is in Junee next weekend so we should get there on time.

Yesterday at 2 pm my grandmother passed away. She'd been in and out of hospital quite a lot this year with breathing problems, and Mum and Reg were with her yesterday when she passed.

I'm so glad we got around to getting the 5 generations on camera, we talked about it for a long time before we actually all went up to the nursing home where Nanna was. I remember she had a wonderful time with Zeke, he went around the place saying "Hello Nanna" to every old lady he saw and they were all so taken with him. Nan especially. Every time I visited her after that she would ask how Zeke was.

As fate would have it, I never got to the hospital to visit her this time. The nursing home rang me last weekend to say that the doctor had admitted her, and no-one could contact Mum. I caught up with Mum after lunch and she said for me not to worry about it, she would go up, which she did when I left her house. Then later in the week as I drove past the hospital I thought that I should call in, but didn't get around to it. There's always something that you regret when someone close to you dies.

Nanna lived most of her adult life in Sydney, and worked at the Strawberry Hills Mail Exchange for much of that time. In the early 90s she sold her terrace house in Redfern and bought a unit in Wagga to be close to Mum. We saw quite a lot of her then. She moved to the nursing home in Junee in early 2007. I remember our trips to Sydney and staying with Nanna, and she always had bread and jam on the table after every meal. When we got older she'd take us to the South Sydney Leagues Club which was just a couple of blocks from where she lived. She didn't mind a drink or a flutter on the pokies.

Many kids turned out for the skate comp and there were plenty of entries.

The talent shown by these kids is incredible. I'm sorry there wasn't enough prizes for everyone who entered.

Yesterday's skate competition was a huge success with entries in all categories. The day was miserable with a biting wind and misty rain, but it didn't deter the kids, they ran the day and were fair with judging.

We gave out something like 28 prizes, all from the new Enigma skate shop in Wagga, and I'm sure they were all happy. Alex came third in the intermediate BMX and he won a hat, which he swapped for a scooter wheel, plus a couple of other things. There is always lots of swapping after the prizes are handed out.

The Council put the orange mesh up to stop kids from jumping the rail on their bikes, and one kid managed to jump the mesh as well. I got my boss to make an announcement about it when he came down to check on it, and no one else followed suit. The Council is worried about someone hurting themselves badly at one of these competitions, but so far we've been injury free. Usually jumping the rail is every contestant's finale, seeing who can go over the highest and still land right. Not this time though. The one boy who went over yesterday jumped to the ground and just let the bike go.

Last Thursday I put Carly and Alex on the train to spend 6 days with their father at Cowra, and today I'll pick them up from the train. I don't know where the days have gone because it only feels like a couple of days since they left. They'll get the bus from Cowra to Cootamundra, then the train from Coota to Junee. I rang Carly when I got home from work on Thursday to make sure they got there ok and they were at Peter's safe and sound.

I started two weeks holidays on Friday, and Saturday Lauren and Daniel brought the boys over to spend the night with me. The were so good and I had no problem at all although I was a little worried, because usually Carly and Alex are here to keep them entertained.

Saucepans and wooden spoons are still a favourite with kids. Zeke and Riley had a great time making lots of noise.

It's been cold and raining, and apart from a visit with Mum and Reg, I've spent the time at home, and yes, on the computer. Reg got me to look at his computer while I was there and it is so slow. After checking I saw it only had 128 MB RAM, so I offered my old computer to them, which I will add another 512 MB stick, giving them about 1 GB of RAM. They'll be thrilled. That's something I can work on in the next week.

Friday is the skate competition that the Council runs during the school holidays, and with Nikki (Council's Community Development Officer) on maternity leave, it's up to me to run it. Last week I did two movie bus trips for her. Monday was the senior kids, and there were 26 of us. Wednesday was the littlies with their parents and there were 64 of us. I got to watch movies on those days, and had no problems at all with the kids, they were all great. Today I got out of taking a bus to the Handstand Factory in Wagga and one of the other girl's from work is taking them. Friday will be full-on, with setting up and taking entries, but two kids came in to work last Friday and asked to do the judging and commentating for the skate comp so that's one less thing I have to worry about.

Yesterday I received an invoice from Getty Images for $1,320 AUD tor using a copyright image on my Junee Magic website. I was in shock for most of the rest of the day.

I gave Junee Magic an overhaul a couple of months ago because I don't want to offer web design services, my life is too busy these days, and the image is long gone. However, the invoice came with a snapshot of my site (God knows how old it was) and the image was a 72 x 100 thumbnail of a head. Not only can I not afford to pay that sort of money, I refuse to pay that sort of money for a tiny image. I found the image using Google Search about 5 years ago and didn't consider copyright. I know I should have and I'm conscious of that these days, but back then I was just looking for an image to fit the content.

I sent off a quick email to Getty, congratulating them on finding the image, because nobody ever found the website to offer me any work and I made zilch from the site as a web design business. These days I have a real job that pays real money and I'll be damned if I'm giving that hard-earned money to extortionists.

When I got home from work last night I found plenty of forum discussions with lots of people who had received the same letter of demand going back to 2005, though each one quoting different copyright laws depending on their particular country. Most of the advice said to immediately remove the image and ignore the demand. I had already removed the image before I received the demand, and will do my best to ignore it, though I imagine down the track there will be a debt collector harassing me for the money.

I have 21 days to pay the $1,320 and no excuses will be considered. I believe it's common practice to first send a "cease and desist" letter before asking for compensation but that didn't happen.

Here's a comment I found on another site:

I wish I hadn't been so quick to reply to them and am still not 100% sure whether to be worried or not.

I read an article last week that had me worried about both the girls in Wagga who have already refinanced a couple of times in the last couple of years.

Those home owners feeling the pinch from rising interest rates and living costs need to put their house on the market now because things are about to get much worse, Wizard Home Loans founder Mark Bouris said. He said inflation pressure and rates rises had made the repayments calculations people made when entering into a home loan only a few years ago were now not worth the paper they were written on - and urged home owners to "get their heads out of the sand" and realise the trouble around the corner.

I have plenty of friends who have taken advantage of bank's easy lending of late and have done those renovations they've always wanted, or got that reverse cycle air conditioning throughout the house. (Something I wish I too could get done at the moment.)

The Daily Telegraph reports rising inflation has gouged $86 a week out of the average household budget, meaning that the tax cuts would have to be $34.61 a week higher if they were to leave a typical family with the same disposable income they had when the cuts were announced on October 14 last year.

If that family drives two cars they will an extra $18.50 a week on top of that to cover increased petrol bills. The paper's calculations show the three interest rate rises that occurred after the tax cuts were promised have cost the average family $38.25 a week.

Childcare fee rises due this week will cost a family with two children, one in long day care, another in after school care, $23.40 a week extra if they use three days care. Grocery price rises are costing families a further $6 a week.

I'm feeling the pinch too and our fridge isn't looking too healthy lately. Gone are the little extras that once it was nothing to throw in the shopping trolley. Now I'm telling the kids to put things back. Every week it's something else that's gone up, especially petrol.

I updated the backend of this site months ago when MT 4 was released, but never took advantage of the new templates. This site dates back to 2005 and so my templates were heavily customised. The new templates for MT4 were completely different and the job of updating was just too daunting at the time.

I've been using the new templates on a site where I talk about MT4 called Babble On, and it's been a steep learning curve with widgets and modules and things I'd never even heard of before. The MT documentation explains what modules and widgets are as follows:

Now, a year later, I felt confident enough to finally do it, but not without some trepidation. The first task was to back everything up so if I stuffed up, I had something to fall back on. I created a new blog, with new templates, and imported all the entries from here. So many things were different, even the way that MT named each entry with a hyphen instead of the underscore. I applied one of the default minimalist templates so that when I set about re-doing the CSS, there wouldn't be that many major changes.

I added a fluid style, instead of using the default 940 wide layout; added the tabbed navigation, set up my background and header image and link colours. It was a slow process, because I did each thing separately to see how it would look before moving on to the next thing.

I created widgets for all the old sidebar code and created a couple of widget sets. These make life so much easier if I decide later to add or remove items. You might also notice a few new plugins I've added: Action Streams, Joomsayer and Sociotags. They all add a little more personalisation to the whole page.

I thought about a complete change for the look of the site but in the end decided that this site is "mine" and I wanted to keep it that way. It's a style that visitors are used to and is not so different to the old style. Check out the Quotes tab to compare the two. Since I've integrated the quotes blog and my photo gallery into this site it seemed only sensible at this stage to keep as close a look to the old style as possible. So after 5 days of coding and refreshing pages and rebuilds, I think I'm finally there and can concentrate on adding something to read rather than something to look at.

Hope you like it...

Yesterday I received an email from a friend asking if I could play an mp3 that his computer had disabled. It was Rex Hunt going off at a cricket match and it played perfectly. I zipped it up and returned it by email to my friend.

Later, when I was in Firefox, I noticed that YouTube videos were taking an extraordinarily long time to load, as did web pages. I fired up System Explorer, a brilliant program for information about Tasks, Processes, Startups, IE Addons, Uninstallers, Windows, Services, Drivers, Connections and Opened Files, to check what I had running that shouldn't have been. System Explorer lets you check running files online at Virus Total to analyse them, and I found a file called svghost.exe that got the thumbs down from 11 of the 33 virus checkers they use.

Removing it was quite easy, just stop the process and delete the file. While searching for the file I came across a couple of other suspicious looking file called msupdte.exe and 17PHolmes1749.exe. I searched online for references to them and discovered they were associated with a rootkit virus, and the site recommended downloading a little program called SDFix to check system files in safe mode, which I did, and after a couple of hours of running various virus and trojan checkers I got a clean computer again.

Videos still wouldn't work though and I read that using MS Update would solve the problem, and after updating it did. Everything is now back to normal.

I'm running Spyware Doctor with built-in anti-virus on it's own now after AVG8 warned me about installing it with another anti-virus program installed. I should have ignored the warning and ran them both, because looks like the "Doc" missed this one.

It was bitterly cold at football again today but the Under 13s had a fantastic win against Gundagai, 52 - 0. Alex played fullback and scored a try today too. He was in the play alot today and I thought he was away earlier in the game, he was running for his life in front of the pack but got pulled down. Good effort though.

After football we went to Wagga to buy Riley his toybox and a birthday present for Zeke. Lauren had organised a party for 2 pm so we didn't have much time for browsing. Alex picked a pair of over-sized "The Hulk" boxing gloves that made a roaring sound when you hit something for Zeke. He was thrilled when he got them and all his other presents were forgotten while he ran around after the other kids.

The house was full of kids and their parents, Daniel's mum and sister, friends and family. We were getting hungry too by the time we got there and Lauren had little party pies and sausage rolls that didn't last long. Lauren made two excellent-looking cakes that tasted as good as they looked.

Zeke is a "Thomas the Tank" nut at the moment so his cake had Thomas on the top. Riley is Lauren's Riley Bear so his was a bear covered with coco pops.
 

Carly and Scarlett.
 

Daniel with Zeke. It's Zeke's birthday on Tuesday.
 

Riley turned one on Monday and he loved his party.
 

It was 2 years ago today that Graham died and I remembered him tonight with a few songs that he loved to listen to. Lauren and I had a bit of a chat about it today, but I'm glad I had the birthday party to go to because my new word for the day would have been maudlin.