The Boot Is Now On The Other Foot

On December 31st we were in Melbourne and my blog entry headline for that day was "Melbourne Freezes While Caloundra Boils". Today the boot is well and truly on the other foot. Here at Caloundra we are expecting a relatively pleasant 30 degrees while in Melbourne they are expecting another 43 degrees to follow on from yesterday's maximum 43.6 degrees (110+ degrees in Texas!). They are expecting 40+ degree days also for the next two days! This photo is from a Melbourne online newspaper, The Herald Sun. Read more about the current conditions in Melbourne here.

Evaporative cooling is the most common means of cooling a home down there and this usually keeps the temperature up to 10 degrees cooler than outside (18 degrees Fahrenheit). So if it is 43 outside, it is 33 (91F) inside! However several really hot days in a row makes the 10 degrees difference unachievable. Units such as the one here are placed on the house roof and direct cool air to all rooms and they only work in areas of Australia which have low humidity.

While we complain about how hot it is here, Sweetwater Texas had sleet overnight last night and awoke to temperatures of -10 degrees. I think there are some people who would swap with you Lou Ann!

Since my last post I have done a bottling. The photo shows 1 teaspoon of sugar being added to each bottle before being filled. This sugar completes the fermentation and gives the beer it fizz and head. Trish did a half day at the Tourist Info Centre as a volunteer. Then on Wednesday she went to Stitchery. She has her Quilting session tomorrow and I have Computer Club on Saturday. In between it is watching the cricket or tennis on TV or grabbing a swim in the pool! My computer gets some time devoted to it too.

As with many older people we have quite a collection of slide photographs. We lashed out and bought a small slide scanner which converts slides into digital pictures on your computer. The coloring isn't always that good and as these slides are now over 30 years old they are beginning to fade anyway. It turns out a good quality slide copies well to the PC, a poor slide (too dark, color faded) doesn't copy well. This is a scene from Telok Bahang (a fishing village) when we lived in Penang 30 years ago!

Router Problem Solved

I had told my computer (via settings I had made) that whenever it wanted to get on the internet it had to do so via the Billion Brand router and had to go through a certain 'address' or 'gateway' (the address of the Billion router is http://192.168.1.254/).

Most computers are set to go to whichever address or gateway is available. Therefore the D-Link router wouldn't connect to the internet because the address or gateway is different. The D-Link is http://10.1.1.1/

Once I changed addresses to 'automatic' everything worked fine.

To give a computer its 'own' address rather than automatically find its address is needed for P2P file sharing!

Australia Day

The weather has remained hot and humid the last few days with some welcome rain overnight and into Friday morning. Then on Friday night the weather radar showed this small heavy shower of rain right over Caloundra. This obviously developed as we had quite heavy rain overnight Friday with a very welcome 31 mls (about 1 1/4 inches) in the gauge Saturday morning. With a day which was always going to be hot and humid, this overnight rain made for an exceptionally sticky day on Saturday. For much of the day the humidity level remained in the 70's.

We had been promising to go out with new neighbours for a few months and out we all did go on Saturday night to our favorite "Spirit Of Tibet". We all enjoyed the night, the food and the company very much. The weather was perfect (quite warm) for sitting poolside and enjoying a few more drinks when we arrived back home about 10 pm. It did not take long till the warm weather and the alcohol gave way to the lure of the pool. It was sobering to hit the water at about 11 pm as you can see. Andy is enjoying a relax in the pool.

Trish had warned me about mixing drinks etc Saturday night and this was the case on Sunday. I hardly budged from my chair in front of the tennis on TV.

I bought a new router early November last year. It has been running for nearly 3 months now and is as solid as a rock. However we continue to have a couple of hassles with the Voip phone calls when people ring us. Just after I installed the new router I updated the firmware on the previous router, a DLink. You can adjust the settings in routers through Internet Explorer or Firefox. This was possibly the first time I had restarted the old router from 'cold' with the new upgrade and I can't get into it to adjust settings. Right now it won't let me get on the internet either. Possibly the upgrade didn't work properly so now it may have to go in to DLink to be reformatted.

Today is Australia Day. It celebrates the day Captain Arthur Phillip landed at Botany Bay with the First Fleet in 1788 and claimed Australia (New South Wales as Capt Cook had named it) for the British Empire. It has become a day of immense national pride with celebrations all over the country. However not all Australians celebrate Australia Day, the indigenous aborigines see it more as Invasion Day when they lost their country to the invader. In this country aborigines have only had the right to vote for about 40 years. There is some talk of changing Australia Day to another day of the year so it truly reflects a day of celebration for all Australians.

Today is also a big National day in India.

Back On My Bike

With my head cold well and truly on the improve it was time to get back on the bike. Currently the weather here is from the north east, right off the tropical Coral Sea. Therefore it is full of moisture and rain is forecast over the next couple of days. January is usually the wettest month of the year for the Sunshine Coast but this year has been relatively dry by comparison. However the humidity made for a hot and sticky 11 km bike ride this morning so the pool was great to come home to.

I got another dozen or so movies off a mate the other day, now I have 90 to see! I don't know if that will happen!

With tennis (The Australian Open) and cricket on the TV, it is hard to find time even to have a swim. It must be near time to bottle my home brew too again I guess.

TV in Australia was full of the inauguration of the new US President Barack Obama. The coverage was on at 2 AM here so most of us did not see it live. However it was the main headline story on all the news coverages.

My RR (Regular Reader) from Texas sent me this email. I hope she doesn't mind me printing it here but I think it reflects the views of many of us downunder. It will be a pleasant change not to see the first response to an issue be heavy handed and use force. The world may well be a safer place from now on.

"I plan to stay home all day and be semi-glued to my television. This is a most historic day in our country, and I want to see all of it that I can. There are many of us in this country that hope that things will become better for us and the world from this day onward. In my 74 years, I have never seen the United States held in such little esteem by the rest of the world. Our patriotic spirit has been beaten down. We now have some hope for the future."

Thanks "Texas Lou".

Trish and I have booked airfares for a trip down to Melbourne for late August to enjoy a 60th birthday with a good friend. Because we booked so far ahead we were able to get incredibly cheap fares. Total cost for both of us to fly down to Melbourne and then back to the Sunshine Coast is $226!

These are with Tiger Airways a local budget airline and subsidiary of Singapore Airlines. Check out their website and fly up and stay with us for a while!

TV Sport

My head cold has greatly improved with now just a few sniffles and a bit of a blocked nose. Sunday was remarkably cool here for this time of the year. Most of the day was around 24 degrees and overcast. Today it is back to sunny and it is about 28 degrees outside. Yesterday it was cricket on TV, today (and for the next couple of weeks) it is tennis as the Australian Open moves into full swing!

Today was a bottle washing day after I put a brew on recently. I wasn't brave enough to head out for a ride this morning with my head cold.

There isn't much more news, the weather is great, the tennis is tempting as is the pool for later on this afternoon.

Tomorrow is a movie swapping day with a mate bringing his hard disk drive around. He has about a dozen or so movies he has downloaded which I will get from him. He will go through my stuff and grab anything that he thinks he might want.

Some of yesterday was spent on the phone as our daughter Kim went from shop to shop looking for a big screen TV. Eventually she bought a full HD 32" Samsung LCD with which she is delighted! The picture quality and 'extras' are just incredible!