I was flying my freshly built Yak-54 foamie down the park, miles (ok, several hundred metres) from anything solid and upright.  Not long into the flying, during a gentle left turn the ailerons stopped working - not good with about 50% deflection and full-span ailerons!  Tried recovery with opposite rudder and a lot of elevator but no dice.  The damed thing went into an inverted spin and didn't recover.  Lucky for me, some kind farmer had left a line of star pickets with barbed wire to arrest the descent!!! Grrr.   Anyone got some glue???

 Right now I'm too angry to see straight!  My entire stock of fish in my marine tank are dying.  Let's put this in perspective: that's a breeding pair of clowns, two domino damsels, 3 blue chromis, a rainbow wrasse and a coral banded shrimp.  At risk are my anemone, and beautiful crop soft corals and about 50kg of live rock. All up about $1000 dollar investment. So how did this happen? Simple. I purchased the two damsels and a coral banded shrimp from a store I don't normally buy stock from, and lo and behold, they don't protect their customers from parasites, viruses and bacterial infection which subsequently ended up in my tank!!  The death toll so far (since Sunday):

• Tuesday: the rainbow wrasse and a damsel
• Wednesday: one clown with the other clown looking like he's circling the drain. Second damsel showing signs of distress.

Moral to the story: only buy stock from suppliers who QUARANTINE their new stock and treat them with at least some sort of copper solution prior to sale.  Apparently the mob I purchased from on Sunday don't care about their stock OR their customers!!  Hopefully the guy I normally purchase from, who's a top bloke and great supplier, might allow me to quarantine my corals and anemone in one of his quarantine tanks while I clean my tank up.  If not, add another $150 to the potential loss :(  Right now the only indications I have are some very fine white marks on the fish bodies then about 12-24 hours later, they die.  Whatever is killing my fish is FAST and it isn't "ich" - despite the white spots.  Ich doesn't kill this fast.  My guess is some sort of virus or maybe a bacterial infection.  It's too fast to be parasitic (which rules out ich).

Like I said - so angry I can hardly see straight!!

I received the following, tongue in cheek, obituary detailing the demise of Mr Common Sense.  This is a poignant reminder of just how screwed up our modern world is. 

Anyone who knows me, knows I hate the cold.  Let's just ponder that for a second.  According to the dictionary, "hate (verb) - to dislike intensely or passionately; feel extreme aversion for or extreme hostility toward; detest".  Indeed, if it were possible to get hostile with cold weather and make it retreat to be replaced with resplendent, balmy, mid-thirty celsius with accompanying humidity, I'd go totally Russell Crowe on today's offering from the Bureau of Meteorology!!  Alas, I cannot - weather just doesn't work that way.  So I will now officially enter my annual period of sulking, until the weather decides to bless us with warmth.

I hate the cold :(

 Go figure.  I have two Macs; a Macbook Pro and an iMac.  Both Intel CPU's, both with lots of hard drive and memory...life is good.  However, I thought there was enough water under the bridge to give Safari 4 Beta a run and the reviews about speed and features over Safari 3 were extremely enticing.  So given the Macbook Pro was the least critical of the two boxes, I upgraded to OSX 10.5.7 and made sure everything was peachy - it was.  Next upgraded to Safari 4 Beta.  Wow!  It's fast, stable, has a really cool "Top Sites" tab (that comes up when I open a new tab, and many other features you can read about elsewhere.

Next was the iMac's turn.  The OSX 10.5.7 upgrade went without a hitch, as did the Safari 4 install.  However, unlike the Macbook, Mail on the iMac now crashes when fetching RSS feeds (I use Mail as my RSS aggregator) and the box says "Hey don't blame Apple, it was GrowlMail's fault!!"...and it is.  I uninstalled the GrowlMail bundle from my ~/Library/Mail/Bundles directory, and everything is working again (except Growl notifying me of new mail).  I can live with that.

So it's over to the Growl devs (who normally respond fairly quickly to this sort of thing) - FIX IT!! :-/

 Call is fate, call it a disaster but my freshwater aquarium is no more.  Last night whilst cleaning up the study with my wife, I managed to move the table the ~1 metre (3 foot) tank sat on, just enough to crack it right down the back.  A few expletives were uttered, towels flew around my study like a tornado in hotel laundry and the fish went to swim with ducks in the pond out back.  More likely, the fish made an exotic treat for one of the many eels or tortises living in the pond.  But I digress; the fate of the fish was sealed when the tank cracked, sucks to be them.

Consequently, today I went out and hunted down a good price on a new 1.2 metre (4 foot) tank and stand to replace the broken one.  It will live in the lounge room, not the study from now on.  So with no fish stock to keep, and a box full of good tank gear, such as heaters, power heads, timers and canister filters (1200L/hr!) and lights I've made a decision.  The next tank will contain my first attempt at keeping a marine (salt water) ecosystem.  I've considered this a number of times in the past, but never been in a situation where I could justify the sacrifice of all the fresh water fish I already had.  Every time the tank was nearly depleted of fresh-water fish, I'd chicken out and restock with more fish...thus perpetuating the cycle.

After all the reading I've done the plan going forward is a simple one that according to the literature will result in a simple, stable and visually appealing tank.

1. Get new tank (done) and clean all bio-matter from the old equipment (yuck...but necessary).
2. Assemble the canister filter, protein skimmer and power heads etc.
3. Put in a sand bed about 4-5cm thick and fill with salt water.
4. Add live rock once the salt and pH are right.
5. Watch the NH3/NO2/NO3 levels until the NO3 is close to or equal zero and the NO2 and NH3 levels are zero (this can take weeks to months)
6. Add some soft corals and maybe upgrade the lighting to accommodate it.
7. Again, watch the NH3/NO2/NO3 levels like a hawk and if all is good, add 2-3 crustacians (Lysmata amboinensis) and a small algae eating fish (Salarias fasciatus)
8. All going well, after a week or two, I should be able to introduce some more exotic fish like a pair of clowns and maybe a blue tang.

All things being equal, this process will probably take 4-5 months.  But as they say in the field of marine tanks: nothing good happens quickly!  So, expect some photos, and a few updates in the coming weeks as I put all this together.  According to the best advice I can find, the new tank will be about 90 US Gallons, and should be able to accommodate 4.5 inches of fish stock.  So that's either one fish 4.5in long, or 4 1in fish with a pygmy 0.5in fish.  Not a lot of fish for a "fish tank" but in a marine tank, the corals, invertebrates and other organisms are almost as interesting, if not more so, than the fish alone.  Stay tuned!

Found this in today's news from Fairfax media:

"January 11, 2009 Eamonn Duff

USERS of the Cross City Tunnel have been warned of the risk of needles being dropped by drug addicts who frequent a Sydney suburb directly above.

Syringe signs have been installed along the southbound ramp connecting the tunnel and the Eastern Distributor.

A tunnel spokesman said the signs were erected because an area in Darlinghurst directly above the partially-roofed link had become "a hot spot for injecting".

"Syringes are frequently disposed [of] in this area, causing a potential safety hazard," the spokesman said.

The laneway, between Palmer and Bourke streets, has attracted users since it was created as a result of the tunnel's construction in 2005.

At night, drug users congregate along the dimly lit path to inject drugs including heroin and ice."

Original source (opens new window).

 

I can see it now, some poor bastard on a motorbike (more likely a scooter) innocently meandering their way through the catastrophe that is Sydney's 24hr traffic madness, happens upon this stretch of road.  All of a sudden, BAM!!!  They have a used needle sticking out of their neck.  In this situation, I wonder who is liable?  The council? The tunnel operators?  The police? All of the above?  None of that really matters when the scooter rider lucks out on their way home at dark o'clock and now has to deal with potentially any, and every, known nasty bug that courses through the collective veins of drug users.

 I'm glad for 2 things after reading this:

1. I don't work in Syndey any more, and
2. I don't ride a motorbike anymore

...although I do miss my bike :(  Take care out there people, next the whole drug addict will fall from the sky, and they tend to annoy car drivers as much as motorcyclists.

New year, new job!  I think I've hit the jackpot in relation to Wollongong employers; I now work for Australian Health Management (ahm) as the Senior Systems and Network Engineer for the Infrastructure group (yeh...that's a real mouthful eh?).  This has been a long time coming and I am thrilled to be given the opportunity to work in Wollongong for such a large and successful company.  The people I work with are just wonderful, and the culture is a privilige to be part of.

Although it's early days (my first week) I really believe I can make a valuable contribution here and my skills are genuinely valued.  I don't want to sound like a roving advertisement but I'm just so excited to be working here!!

With the advent of the Easter long weekend, (yay!) the NSW government have continued their love affair with double-demerit points for driving offences. This is a weird way to ensure safer driving, in my opinion, as statistically, public holidays are no more dangerous than any other time to be on our roads. However, after driving down the freeway into town this morning, I couldn't help but make some observations now that double demerits are in force.

First of all, everyone (except maybe idiot P-platers) were doing the speed limit give or take a few km/h. That isn't surprising in itself but the effect it had on traffic flow was remarkable. Strangely, the usual bottle-necks around the Kanahooka and Kembla Grange on-ramps (north bound) were flowing smootly with now hold-up at all. Why? Simple, with everyone doing roughly the same speed, traffic was spaced evenly and the right lane was practically empty; thus people already on the freeway were able to move into the right lane and make room for the merging drivers. Surprise, surprise, "keep left unless overtaking" actually results in better, less stressful driving for everyone! Duh.

Secondly, in town people weren't running the gauntlet at round-abouts and intersections and actually seemed to be a little more courteous than normal. Amazing.

Of course, the half-dozen or so provisional license holders (aka. P-platers) were the exceptin to the rule - or so they think. Why is it, almost without exception, they spend more time talking on their phones, playing with their stereos, doing their hair or talking to passengers than they do actually driving?! Maybe that's why they are so disproportionately represented in the road toll?

Have a safe and happy Easter folks, and if you're on your provisional license, take extra care - you don't have the experience or the 5k1LLz to dick around behind the wheel :)

Having resisted the pressure from friends I finally caved in and joined Facebook. Yeh, yeh, I'm now a web 2.0 (sic) whore and all that. The good thing is that I've made contact with some long-lost friends from high school and other people who I worked with the aviation industry etc. Whilst this website is good for posting my personal thoughts and happenings, it's rather "isolated" in that I'm the only one here. I'll continue to update this site and it will still be my main outlet but for those less important notes and ramblings, head over to Facebook.