French Island

I'm going to back-date this post to when I should have posted it. And I'm going to make it short since I seem to be running out of time for everything at the moment. I made my first trip outside Melbourne city last weekend --- to French Island, 70km south east of Melbourne. To get there, N. and I took the train to Stony Point ($3 for a weekend ticket!) and then the ferry over to the island. About two thirds of French Island is national park. The rest is farmland. The main feature of the island is its booming population of koalas who are doing so well that the population has to be managed by taking koalas from the island to areas on the mainland where the populations are not doing so well. The second feature of the island are the 90 or so people who live there. They seem to be mostly mad to one degree or another. Our tick-list of wildlife we saw, apart from koalas, included echidnas, pelicans, lizards, and a large copperhead snake. Oh, and from the train to Stony Point we saw bogans and gangs of youths on scooters (the sort you push with your foot).











More photos in the Picasa gallery.

09-10 French Island

Dinosaur Comics and Hilbert's Hotel

You're one wacky dinosaur T-Rex!

No news is good news?

"No news is good new" they say, but in my case, no news just means no free minutes near a computer over the last couple of weeks. The last week of September, I was in Adelaide at the Australian Maths Society annual conference. It was a big one, with about 400 people attending. I tried to take some pictures of Adelaide but, even at 10 am on a Sunday moring, I had to go half an hour (by tram) out of the city, to Glenelg, and a beach, before I could find anything more interesting than four lane streets and drunks leaving the pub. (There's something wrong with a city where it's significantly easier to find a morning beer than a morning coffee.)







Though, back in the city, in front of the Adelaide Oval, I did find a larger than life statue of Sir Donald Bradman the "statistically" greatest sportsman in the world.



The following week I was back in NZ to defend my thesis at my oral exam. Apart from some nerves at the start of the exam, the experience was pretty good. The whole thing took a little over two hours but it didn't feel long at the time, whatever that indicates. Anyway, I now have a large list of small corrections to make to the thesis before I can hand in the final bound copies and start confusing airline staff by calling myself a doctor.

Rainy Friday

It looks like I won't be getting home dry today. 13 km to ride and this is the latest rain radar image for Melbourne (from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology).


(Melbourne is in the centre of the image.)

A good address

09-09 Ian Potter Gallery

A photo story

It's Saturday evening, I'm not quite feeling motivated enough to write anything about the day, so I'll let the photos tell the story. though I should explain that the first photo is from the Collingwood Childrens' Farm where there was a farmers' market this morning.























More photos:

09-09 Hair

Carrier Pigeon faster than ADSL

It's what I've always suspected was true of broadband in New Zealand; it's faster to transmit information by carrier pigeon than by ADSL. This article from BusinessDay in South Africa reports on a trial where a carrier pigeon carried 4GB of data over 70km in a pinch under 2 hours 7 minutes, during which time only 5% of the 4GB was downloaded over a Telekom ADSL connection.

New Flat, New Flatmate

I moved into my new flat last week. It's right in the centre of Fitzroy with all the associated cafes and restaurants (there's a pub right across the road). It's a three-and-a-bit bedroom apartment, which I share with three others, in an old chocolate factory. And today we got a new flatmate:



He's a 12 week old Burmese called Chocolate.





Here he is meeting Mette for the first time.

Alpha Queen

Not nearly as good as Epic. No where near as hoppy either, despite the, (I thought), rather grandiose, claims about how many hops were used. The balance of the hops didn't seem quite right either --- not enough bitterness to balance the fruity flavours, and even they were seemed a bit, well, thin, I suppose. Not that I'm saying it was a bad beer, and full credit to the people who brewed it; or rather, arranged its brewing, but at $20AUD for a six pack, I don't know if I'll be buying it too frequently. At least not while there are other new beers out there to try.

Glass blowing at Abbotsford Convent

A few photos of the glass blowing that was going at the Abbotsford Convent last Saturday.

09-08 Glass Blowing