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.