A Little On The Cool Side

The temperature probably struggled to about 22 degrees here yesterday with cloudy and showery weather. This is probably not my 'best' photo which Trish took just to show me up wearing socks with shorts. Today is a little warmer with more sun around. It should get to the mid 20's OK. Overnight showers and wet roads means I didn't get a bike ride in again this morning. I tipped another 10mls out of the rain gauge today.

Sometimes the car's brake lights don't switch off so it is booked in to be looked at next Wednesday afternoon. It may need a new switch or a 'stopper' (whatever that is).

The old PC still isn't doing its thing properly. Yesterday I started it 16 times and it worked perfectly on 13 of those startups. This morning it decided to turn itself off and I haven't been able to restart it. I will let it sit for an hour or so without the power lead attached and see if it runs again. It had previously started perfectly on a couple of occasions. Its behaviour is further evidence I did the right thing by having the new one built.

I popped into Aldi in Caloundra yesterday and bought a 11 fin oil heater for about $50. We need some heating here for about 6 weeks of the year from mid June through to the end of July.

I put another brew on this morning. I have a beer I am drinking at the moment which took well over the recommended time to brew which is between 5 and 7 days. This one took over 11 days which indicated something went wrong. It doesn't taste too good so I mix either lemonade or Stones Green Ginger Wine with it to make it OK. I have tipped a few bottles of the beer out as well. I think they have just about all gone now!

I will be bottle washing and bottling during next week.

Trish is at Quilter's this morning. Her laptop continues to work beautifully.

I Haven't Been Bike riding For a Week!

Consistent showery weather has meant it is now almost a week since I last rode the bike. The 1 ml of rain which fell early yesterday was just before my ride and made roads and pathways wet. The weather remained threatening for much of the morning.

15mls during Wednesday and overnight meant no riding again this morning.

After a investigating the old PC on Tuesday evening Scott believed the problem was most likely the computer ram. He removed two original sticks of 1GB ram and left the PC running the one new 2GB stick. It ran beautifully for him. I spent much of yesterday reformatting and setting up the PC again.

This morning I restarted the old PC a couple of times and all was perfect until .... it just wouldn't start! The photo left shows where it 'hangs'. I am beginning to believe the problem therefore may be on the mother board. But I am no expert! However you leave it sit for an hour, then come back and turn it on again, it starts up and runs perfectly!

The new PC runs perfectly!

We watched the footy on TV on Tuesday afternoon and my side eventually got up and won the match. Wednesday morning Trish went to Stitchers and today she is at the Tourist Info Centre again. I am at home turning the old PC on and off to see how it starts.

Already we are 100mls over the regular April rainfall average. Right now we are 600mls above average rainfall for this time of year, 1350mls and should be about 750mls!

Still Cloudy, Overcast And Cool!

It is about 22 degrees outside as I type. Almost cool enough for tracksuit trousers and socks! Overnight we have continued to endure cooler showery weather, there were 14mls in the rain gauge this morning.

The computer guy Scott called yesterday about checking out the older PC. He will come over tonight and run a couple of tests on it to confirm the problem is the hard disk drive. If it does come up as being 'sick' he will install a temp hard drive in the computer to give it a good test. Looks like I will be doing some reformatting on the old PC tomorrow and then we will see how it goes. If the problem disappears I will purchase another hard drive for it. I am not sure what I will do with it then.

Scott later popped in to collect a copy of the "loader" I use for Windows 7. After installing Windows 7 (you don't put any registration info in at all) you can have free access to Windows 7 operating system for 30 days. Just run this little program, restart your PC and check the Properties of "Computer" and it now tells you it is now a fully activated version! It now does official updates and everything.

Scott had a mate who was installing Windows 7 so he thought he would give the "Loader" a try.

Trish is doing volunteer work at the Tourist Information Centre this morning and we are both watching our footy teams play each other on TV this afternoon.

A Damp Anzac Day

After some sensational weather over the last week, today we have overcast and grey skies. We also have some "Melbourne Rain", the kind of rain where it falls for an hour and there is a mere 1 ml in the rain gauge.

Today is Anzac Day so this morning everything is closed. Most things have been closed for much of the weekend around here with Easter and Anzac Day occurring on the same weekend. Large supermarkets in Caloundra were closed Friday, Sunday and will be closed today (Monday) and tomorrow Tuesday! Our smaller IGA Supermarket here on the estate is open for all of those days except for Good Friday. Penalty rates for workers have meant most stores are not opening at all over the Easter Break.

Our phone service hasn't skipped a beat since removing the faulty wall filter plate. We have had an occasional problem previously with our voip phone service as well. We will leave the wall filter off for a few weeks and see if the voip problem also disappears. Already we have swapped the cordless phones over, tried two separate modem/routers but the occasional voip problem has re occurred. Maybe the occasional fault was also caused by the faulty wall plate filter?

I had an interesting computer problem with a member at Computer Club on Saturday. She had bought a Telstra Broadband Wireless dongle on Thursday but she couldn't connect to the mobile broadband service. The computer is meant to get the driver software off the dongle itself, self install and then connect to the internet via the mobile phone network. Each time she plugged the dongle usb into her computer it thought it was her printer! So it wouldn't install the dongle software.

I had something like this happen before. Eventually I found another version of the mobile broadband install software on the Telstra website. That isn't an easy site to find out what you want to know on. Things are hidden and you really have to look hard to find stuff. The website however is very good at telling you what it wants you to know though! We downloaded and installed the software via the computer club's web access and ran the install program. We were then prompted to plug the dongle in and eventually got it to work. She was a pretty pleased club member as she needed the dongle web access over Easter as she was visiting her daughter.

My new computer continues to run perfectly. Some jobs it handles very quickly, the benefit of a top processor, sufficient ram and a great video card. The old PC wouldn't start on Saturday and took a couple of hours just to get going. I need to transfer some files off an external HDD I have and the only computer that would recognize it in our house was the old PC. Trish's laptop as well as the new PC wouldn't load the external hard disk drive. It is about to be thrown out too! Things looked drastic when the old PC wouldn't start up.

To get it running again I totally removed all power (removed the power lead) and let it sit for a hour or so. It started OK when I reconnected the power and restarted it.

The movies available for download recently have been all horror stuff or movies with ridiculously low scores. I have taken to looking at UK TV Crime series such as Silent Witness and Waking the Dead to supply our movie needs. I have now discovered a couple of other new series which get good reviews such as DCI Banks, Zen and a new one due to be available soon called "The Body Farm". The last series is a spin off from Waking The Dead.

We tripped into Caloundra yesterday to a couple of markets. One we hadn't been to for some time so we thought we would give it a look again. It is twice as big as it used to be with heaps of cheap locally grown vegetables. We will be going back there again! The 'big' market in the main street was very crowded with holiday makers coming to Caloundra for the Easter break. We didn't stay in town too long after that, it was too crowded!

We are enjoying plenty of footy on TV this weekend. Our teams play each other tomorrow, Tuesday. Two great matches are on today which is great.

A Glorious Day For Good Friday

Our home phone service has been working perfectly. The internet has been rock solid and several home phone calls have been received and worked perfectly, all without the Wall Phone Filter being attached. The offending item can be seen here to the left.

I have been speaking with a mate, Barry from down in Melbourne who used to work for Telstra. He commented that the problem I experienced was not unusual and that type of internet filter in particular can be very touchy. Scott (the guy who put the new PC together) also believes the wall phone filter was most likely the culprit.

As the phone is now perfect, so too is the weather today. There is hardly a cloud in the sky. This photo was taken this morning on my daily bike ride. It was a stunning morning. It is expected to get to around 27 degrees this afternoon. I even managed a swim this morning, the pool was just under 24 degrees.

Click on either photo for a larger view, then click on "Back" to return to this page.

The new PC works very well indeed. I saw one with similar specs for sale from Dell at well over $1500. Mine was well under $900. However the Dell PC came with a warranty and Windows 7. I have my 'own' copy of Windows 7 installed on it. The Dell PC also has a 12 month warranty. Scott will be back later (probably after Easter) to look at the old PC and try to get it working nicely again. He still strongly believes the problem is the hard disk drive in the old PC.

Phone Has Not Been Working

I first noticed it late Monday afternoon. My internet connection dropped out. It had never happened before so good has the service been. Scott was coming around to build the new PC and we needed the internet so I reset the modem and was glad to see everything was fine again. Tuesday morning I noticed the internet dropped out again. Strange I thought. Throughout the day it dropped another couple of times as well.

Then Trish's mobile phone went off with a message saying someone had tried to ring us but couldn't get through, so they had left a message on our messages 101 service. After picking up the wall phone we couldn't hear any dial tone! That also explained the internet drop outs, there was a phone line fault somewhere.

A call to Telstra was put in to report a fault. With their help we pulled out all the phone connections from the wall while they did tests (or so we thought we did). The fault was still there so a tech would be out to check our home on Thursday!

Come Wednesday morning and overnight the internet had dropped again. However about 9 am we noticed the phone service had come back on. Great, the fault had been found and repaired. I rang Telstra to report all was OK.

Trish headed out while I began to play with both computers. Looks pretty impressive doesn't it! Then at about 11 am I noticed the internet connection had dropped out again. Again there wasn't any dial tone on the phones!

Back I went to report the fault to Telstra. Again I was told to pull out all the phone connections and they would do a test. On the phone connection to the wall phone (see above) we have wall phone internet filter plate behind it. We had worked out how to remove it (and it isn't easy, you need to use pliers) so this time we actually pulled out everything! They did a quick reset from their end and we had our phone service back. It appears the problem is most likely the wall plate filter for the wall phone is faulty and requires replacement.

We will monitor the situation!

New PC Up And Running

I received a second email yesterday morning to say the parts for my new PC were ready to be collected (and paid for) from the store in Maroochydore. After Trish arrived back home from her meeting we headed to Maroochydore with credit card in hand to pick up the packages.

The weather was very ordinary, grey, overcast wet and windy. (I tipped 32mls from the rain gauge this morning.) We did a couple of other errands and picked up the PC parts. As I had promised, I contacted 'Scott' and said don't rush around, wait a couple of days and we will build it in due course. I think he was a keen to get it up and running as I was. He arrived at 7:10 pm last night and was on his way home by 9 pm. The PC had been put together and within another 20 minutes or so Windows 7 Ultimate had been installed. It is a powerful machine.

Needless to say I was up early this morning (well before light) updating software. All has gone fairly smoothly. It is a 64 bit machine and doesn't have the same version of software as many other programs have. It has taken a little messing around to install a couple of things but Windows 7 is great at going online itself and finding the correct drivers etc it needs.

There will be a few programs I will have overlooked but I know where I can update them OK.

The biggest problem right now is updating the licence on my anti-virus. The company which owns the program is making things tough!

More rain is expected throughout today with a max temp around 22 degrees! There isn't too much sunshine on the Sunshine Coast right now!

All Bottling Is Done!

I have had two lots of bottling the last two days. Yesterday I bottled a dark ale and this morning I bottled some alcoholic Ginger Beer. I put the Ginger Beer into 'stubbies' which therefore took me heaps of time to wash the bottles and then to bottle the brew. I also have to use a 'capper' to put the crown seal tops on.

I have already had an email saying all the pieces for the new PC are ready to be collected. I had thought it might have been ready tomorrow but nowadays they store a lot of stuff in their Maroochydore premises. I think their big Brisbane warehouse may have been flooded so all parts had been moved out to their smaller 'sub' stores.

Trish is at a meeting this morning (Fair for the Arts Association) so I have to wait until I get the car to drive to Maroochydore to pick the pieces up ... and pay for them!

The sky is grey and the temperature is in the low 20's. Showers have been on and off all morning. Heavy rain is expected overnight. Some warmer sunnier weather is forecast for later in the week. Easter should be a little showery.

All Is Ordered

Scott, the guy building the new PC for me popped in here at home late yesterday afternoon and we ordered all the parts online. If all goes to plan, the parts should be available for pickup Tuesday afternoon.

He will pop around here at a suitable time and we will build it together. We did the ordering on the 'old' PC and he could hear the disk drive whirring away and not sounding too healthy. He is even more convinced that the problem with it is the hard disk drive. A new one will cost about $60!

However he wants to run a diagnostic test on it first and then perhaps put a temporary drive in and see how the PC runs afterwards.

He seems to know his way around the PC and I believe I am getting a pretty good deal.

We watched some pretty good footy yesterday afternoon and evening. My team were on a 30 minute delay on TV here so we kept up with scores via the internet. Knowing that my team had won made watching the last quarter on TV pleasurable! Trish's team had a good win too.

We were expecting rain yesterday but didn't get any. About 10 pm the sky opened up and there were 55mls in the rain gauge this morning. More showers are expected today and heavier rain Monday and Tuesday. Already we are up to our April average and we still have a couple of weeks to go.

A little noisy around here with school holidays on for Easter.

Our new neighbours have settled in next door and we rarely hear them.

Lou Ann in West Texas is experiencing very dry weather and windy weather. Humidity is around 5% - 15% and there are severe bushfires in their area. Incredible place this world isn't it?

A Very Busy Saturday Morning

I have been flat out all yesterday and today. Yesterday was all stuff to do with the 'old' PC in getting stuff back onto it so it is usable. Today has bee an extremely busy morning at the Computer Club.

The main PC still isn't 'right'. Every now and again it goes into overdrive and the red hard disk activity light on the front of it just goes ballistic. Anything which is happening on the computer just freezes for about 30 seconds or so. The hard drive activity light stops and everything returns to normal. This happens possibly a couple of times each hour.

A couple of times when I have turned it off the blue 'power on' light stays on. This too isn't right. I spoke with a guy last night and he believes the most likely cause is a hard disk drive which is about to die!

I contacted the guy who said he would build me a new PC for a 'case of beer'. He still seems keen to do it and he has sent me a couple of quotes on costs. The deal is I buy the parts (he tells me what parts to buy) and he will put it all together for me. The part buying will be done online. They are delivered to Maroochydore. I pay for them and pick them up. He collects them and puts it together. I give him a bottle of Boubon Whisky as payment!

It means the new PC will ready to go possibly Wednesday of next week. It should be built from quality parts and therefore save me money!

Today has seen me flat out with Computer Club. I feel like I have been through a wringer when I set off to drive home today. It is go, go, go!

This afternoon it is footy on the TV and I will sit back, enjoy a few beers and watch the footy!

Easter Comes Early

This time this post is coming from the 'old' computer. It has risen from the dead and running OK at the moment.

I tried to reformat it yesterday with both Windows 7 and Vista and neither install program would work! I reckon I tried about 15 times but each time without luck.

I turned the thing off in disgust and went and watched TV instead!

First thing this morning I thought I would have one more go and .... voila! It installed beautifully and all is go again.

However the power light remains on at shut down which indicates all is not right with it. But as this photo shows it looks to be running fine right now.

I am in the process of ordering an upgraded tower. This incident has given me a bit of a scare and it is only a matter of time until the intermittent fault becomes a full blown disaster.

Most of the day has been spent reloading software and getting things sorted!

The guy who is building me a new one is due to pop in shortly with a quote so I had better run!

The Worst Thing Imaginable!

This is coming to you from Trish's laptop!

It appears the big PC has died. It was doing some strange things yesterday and i thought I had contracted a virus. All scans however said everything was fine.

Just in case there was a virus the best way to get rid of it is to reformat it.

I tried this morning but the re installation of Windows 7 just got so far and stalled! The same happened when I tried to install Vista.

I am still trying, it seems to almost fully install then on the initial run through it says Windows 7 is starting but then there is a quick blue screen and Windows crashes.

I will continue to try to get it up and running. Luckily I backed everything up before I tried the reformat.

More news in a day or so!

Lovely Sunny Days But More Rain On The Way

We have had some glorious weather the last day or so with temps getting to above the mid 20's and nights in the high teens. The pool gets to around 25 or so after the sun has been on it for much of the day. However some wet weather has been promised for us over the weekend. We did get a very brief shower of rain this morning, enough to make the roads and pathways wet and to deter me from my daily bike ride.

Trish had 'meetings' for the Tourist Information Centre and Arts Association all Monday.

We have found a restaurant in town here which Malaysian written on the sign. I couldn't see any Malaysian dishes on their menu but we thought we might give it a try last night. We then read on the sign stuck in their window that they were closed for the Tuesday night, the one night we wanted to go. We headed over the street to a small Indian restaurant and ate their instead. The food was OK, the environment spartan and not a cheap meal by any account.

It was nice to try something different for a change.

Trish is at Stitchers today, has Tourist Information Centre on Thursday morning, Trivia Thursday night and finally Quilters on Friday! I got most of the Community Association Newsletter done this morning and I hope to get a bike ride (and follow up swim) in this afternoon. I squeezed a mow of the lawn in yesterday afternoon.

I have a Computer Club presentation to do on Saturday. The topic is "Internet and Listening to the Radio". I listen to radio from Melbourne during the footy season all via the internet. So I will do something on this on Saturday Morning.

You can actually buy a radio which connects to the internet via your wireless modem/router. This enables you to listen to any radio station which is online. There are well over 15,000 stations available! You can buy a reasonable quality Internet Radio for around $200.

I always like to start my presentations with a joke to get people interested. The joke for this Saturday is in the post below!

6 Degrees Of Blonde

FIRST DEGREE

A married couple were asleep when the phone rang at 2 in the morning.

The wife (undoubtedly blonde), picked up the phone, listened a moment and said 'How should I know, that's 200 miles from here!' and hung up.

The husband said, 'Who was that?' The wife said, 'I don't know, some woman wanting to know if the coast is clear.'

SECOND DEGREE

Two blondes are walking down the street. One notices a compact on the sidewalk and leans down to pick it up. She opens it, looks in the mirror and says, 'Hmm, this person looks familiar.'

The second blonde says, 'Here, let me see!' So the first blonde hands her the compact.

The second one looks in the mirror and says, 'You dummy, it's me!'

THIRD DEGREE

A blonde suspects her boyfriend of cheating on her, so she goes out and buys a gun. She goes to his apartment unexpectedly and when she opens the door she finds him in the arms of a redhead.

Well, the blonde is really angry.

She opens her purse to take out the gun, and as she does so, she is overcome with grief.

She takes the gun and puts it to her head.

The boyfriend yells, 'No, honey, don't do it!!!'

The blonde replies, 'Shut up, you're next!'

FOURTH DEGREE

A blonde was bragging about her knowledge of state capitals.

She proudly says, 'Go ahead, ask me, I know all of them.'

A friend says, 'OK, what's the capital of Wisconsin ?'

The blonde replies, 'Oh, that's easy: W.'

FIFTH DEGREE

What did the blonde ask her doctor when he told her she was pregnant?

'Is it mine?'

SIXTH DEGREE

Returning home from work, a blonde was shocked to find her house ransacked and burglarized.

She telephoned the police at once and reported the crime.

The police dispatcher broadcast the call on the radio, and a K-9 unit, patrolling nearby was the first to respond.

As the K-9 officer approached the ho use with his dog on a leash, the blonde ran out on the porch, shuddered at the sight of the cop and his dog, then sat down on the steps.

Putting her face in her hands, she moaned, 'I come home to find all my possessions stolen. I call the police for help, and what do they do?

They send me a BLIND policeman.'

Half Time Of The Footy On TV.

I hope this entry finds regular Blog Reader Russell happier.

It is Sunday and disappointingly my footy team is not being covered on television this weekend. They are playing the game as I type and I am able to listen live via the internet. I visit a few 'daily specials' web sites and found these cheap wireless headphones. I bought them last Sunday and they were delivered Friday. I plug them into my PC 'speaker' connection and I can then listen via the headphones in most rooms of the house. They are cheap so the range isn't too good but they serve the purpose and work OK.

I put a brew on earlier this week but this time it is alcoholic "Ginger Beer" rather than a standard beer I usually make. The alcohol content is quite low being a touch over 3%. It will make a pleasant change to what I usually brew.

I am not looking forward to the bottle washing though! I am putting this brew into 'stubbies' so I have about 50 or 60 small bottles to wash, sterilize and dry tomorrow.

We have had over 80mls of rain since I last posted! Most of it was overnight on Friday into Saturday. Today is a lovely sunny day.

I have been riding most mornings and got almost 13k's in this morning. I can vouch that the pool has cooled off after a very quick and crisp swim after the ride this morning. It was between 22 and 23 degrees in the pool this morning! My swim after a ride days may be almost over for this season.

My media player isn't working properly right now. The screen goes all pink! I will ring Western Digital tomorrow to arrange to have the unit 'sent back'. I will probably need to post it to Singapore and then they will send me the replacement.

A lovely sunny 27 degrees today.

A Cool Week

We have had a couple of showers most days with a cool S/E breeze. Temps struggle to get to the mid 20's making for an extremely comfortable week weather wise. I have been riding for most mornings this week. This morning I pulled up a couple of kilometres short as a very dark cloud blew in from off the ocean and dropped a heavy shower of rain.

We went out to a local Pelican Waters Tavern for a 'seniors' lunch on Tuesday. It wasn't too bad actually. I had fish and Trish had a steak. We both had a drink and got out of it for just over $20. We visited the Chiro Tuesday morning before the lunch and then I grabbed some cheap socks from "Rivers" getting ready for the winter months!

Trish has been busy further fine tuning her website for the Caloundra Arts Association while I have been updating the local Community Association one. We had a BeCA meeting on Monday night so it took a couple of hours to get stuff sorted out from that and put it all online. I enjoyed every moment of it.

Trish has Trivia tonight while I have three AFL footy panel shows to watch while she is out.

Last night we watched a movie called "Spud". It is a South African movie and tells the story of a young lad in his first year of boarding school. It is a comedy and also stars John Cleese. We enjoyed it as much as we have enjoyed any movie all this year. It is one of the best movies we have ever seen.

So keep your eye out for it. It was a pleasant surprise to get a great movie as there is so much horror rubbish around right now for download.

Firefox Version 4

I use Firefox as my web browser.

A web browser is the program you use when you are accessing websites on the internet. I prefer it to Internet Explorer mainly because I can use numerous add-ons so the program does exactly what I want it to do. It is easy to change the appearance, to open various pages and to do all sorts of things. Many of the features that Internet Explorer has included in recent versions first came from Firefox.

There are a few web browsers available for people to use, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera just to mention a few. Internet Explorer is the most widely used as it comes automatically with every copy of Windows be it Windows 7, Vista, XP etc.

However Firefox is beginning to catch up with about 30% of people using it as their preferred internet browser. Safari is the program you get with a Mac computer but there is a Windows version of it available too.

Recently the latest version Firefox 4 was released and automatically updated on most people's computers. As with many new internet programs it may have some hassles and things which don't work properly when the new version first comes out. We have already found a couple of these things.

Firefox 4 doesn't always want to upload my photos from the computer into my blog page and Trish is unable to access our online banking. This is easy enough to fix because I have added the "Open This Page In IE" add on. I just right click on the page in Firefox, select "Open This Page In IE" and Firefox then does it. A few seconds later Internet Explorer opens at the page I need to use.

You will find a few updates for Firefox 4 in the next few days as these small hassles are attended to.

Now I have to find a Firefox picture using Google Images and upload it to this blog post!

Well I have done it at last after a fair bit of drama. It turns out the problem is within Blogger itself and not within Firefox 4. Blogger has new way of writing posts (Post Editor) and I had switched to the new editor. As soon as I got into my Blogger settings and reverted back to the old version of the editor, the picture upload process worked again. However it doesn't make the uploaded pics as small as they used to be.

I tipped 5mls out of the rain gauge this morning from those passing showers. I rode my 12.5ks again this morning but decided to give a swim in the pool a miss.

Last night we watched "The Way Back", a story of a trek to India made by a group who escaped a Siberian Gulag in the early 1940's. It gets 7.4 but I reckon it was a great movie and worth more than 7.4!

A Quiet Sunday Afternoon

I had been warned about a 'new' member at the Computer Club and was told to beware of her.  I think I found her yesterday.  She has little previous computer experience but wants to learn everything about the computer and all of it in one day!

She half gets onto something but then suddenly wants to do something else.

It has been my experience one or two things on the computer in a day is good progress.  It made for an especially big day for me yesterday.  Previous Saturdays had been quiet, yesterday made up for it all.

The footy match on TV right now has a 10 goal difference just after half-time.  I am listening to the 'other' game via the internet radio as we don't get any TV coverage this week courtesy of Channel 7!  We get 7 of the 8 games live on TV so I can't complain!

We have new neighbours! The house to the left as you face our home has been empty for over 3 months.  A team of friends turned up yesterday to help a young couple move in.  She is 'very' pregnant (about 4 weeks to go).  He has ear rings, tattoos, and a motor bike!

I had a chat with him yesterday and he seems a delightful guy!  Friendly, quiet spoken, well mannered and said "You won't get any noise out of us!".  I was impressed.  And on top of everything he is the first tenant in there for 3 years who owns a lawn mower!  A great sign I believe.  He is a refrigeration mechanic but previously was a electrician.

Trish continues to fine tune her website.  I have updated the Caloundra Arts Centre Association weblink (on the right hand side of this site under Les' Links) so feel free to click on it for a look.

A shower or two overnight but a lovely sunny morning.  The weather was OK for a ride and I did about 13 kilometres.  I was hot enough after the ride for a quick swim.  The pool is a little under 25 degrees so not too cold just yet despite the weather cooling off, especially overnight!

This afternoon though is a little chilly, low 20's with a shower scudding through every now and again.

Didn't It Rain!

The first quarter of 2011 is over.  Brisbane has had floods and the northern area of the state has experienced cyclones.  It has been an time of natural disasters for Queensland.

And the Sunshine Coast has been extremely wet as well. 

We are now at the end of the first quarter for 2011 and my unofficial rainfall figures are quite spectacular.  Our total for the year until April 1st is 1087mls.  That is in excess of 43" of rain in the old scale.  Our average amount of rain for the first quarter is usually around 586mls or a little over 23".  It must be remembered that this is the wettest time of the year in this part of the world.

The average annual rainfall is around 1600mls per annum or 64".  So we are well on the way for another extremely wet 2011.

Trish's website is now 'online' and you can access it by clicking on the link http://www.caloundraartsandcrafts.org.au/

Needless to say she is very proud of her efforts and rightly so.  It has come up very well.  Trish is now in the process of setting up email accounts to go with the various co-ordinators of the many different groups and all this is done via the website.