Glamor event
Here’s a picture of Juliet and I at the Ronald McDonald Ball.
Coolgardie and the bush
I had my second three-day weekend and made the most of it. On Saturday night Juliet and I went to the Ronald McDonald Ball, a gala fundraiser for children’s medical services attended by 600 people in formal attire.
Sunday was recovery and Dude’s birthday treat: a visit to the Oasis indoor pool with some of his friends.
Today Juliet and I went with the twins to Coolgardie and browsed the excellent museum there. Coolgardie was once the capital of the Goldfields and still has some imposing public buildings as part of that legacy.
We then drove to Rowles Lagoon, about 75km north. It’s a rare freshwater lake, which had quite a lot of water after recent rain, more than in these photos I found on the web.
We drove back to Kalgoorlie via Ora Banda, where there’s a disused historic hotel (pictured) and a racetrack. Someone bought the pub recently and plans to reopen it.
Impressions of Esperance
I mentioned earlier that we were heading to Esperance, which we did last weekend, but due to work commitments I haven’t had a chance to post my impressions until now.
It’s nearly a four-hour drive from Kalgoorlie via Norseman. The countryside changes from forested scrub to farmland about 70km from Norseman, or 110km from Esperance.
We went from warm and sunny to cool coastal drizzle once we got within 10km of the town. People who have driven from northern Victoria to Melbourne will know the feeling! Read more
New image editor
There’s a buzz happening in the Linux world about a new image editor called Pixel.
It’s a cross-platform program that also works in Windows and Mac. I’ve got it running successfully in Windows XP and Suse 10.
It’s more intuitive and user friendly for Windows converts than the Gimp and has the added advantage for a print professional of working with CMYK color separations. Last I checked, the Gimp needed an unreliable plugin to do this.
It cost me $45 for a licence, which will turn off the open source brigade, but in my view it’s great value compared with Photoshop and others.
I haven’t fully tested it yet, but like what I’ve seen so far. The registration process isn’t all that simple and I’m still getting glitches. Apart from that it looks a treat.
Locked in the toilet
James locked himself in the toilet this week. It’s a trap for toddlers to only have locks on one side of a door.
He remained quite calm while we tried to talk him through the situation, but in the finish we needed a screwdriver to remove the knob!
Feeling sore
I went to hockey training last night and felt pretty sore afterwards. I’m reasonably fit at the moment, but sprints and sudden turns haven’t been part of my exercise regime for a long time.
I last played hockey about 16 years ago on grass as a goalie, so fitness wasn’t critical. I decided to have a run in the field this year for general fitness and Kalgoorlie is fortunate to have a synthetic pitch, which is much faster than grass.
My skills are pretty ordinary compared with the mostly younger blokes in the team and I doubt I’ll last a full 70 minutes when the season starts, but running around for a half or so should be good fun.
Back on broadband
I’ve reconnected to ADSL broadband for the first time since arriving in Kalgoorlie. I wasn’t sure initially if it was available, but it turns out to be in this part of town at least.
I was fairly satisfied with Curl at Porepunkah, but decided to go this time with our home telephone provider Primus.
I’ve opted for a super high-speed 1500/256 connection. It wasn’t too hard to get going and the speed is fantastic.
I’m on a monthly data limit of 5GB compared with 25 previously, but I don’t expect to be using it enough to exceed that.
Visiting Esperance soon
We’re planning to visit Esperance soon. It’s about 300km from Kalgoorlie and it’s where people from here go to escape the heat.
According to one blurb, Esperance is: The place you need to be if you are wanting to discover the best looking beaches with the most colourful, tranquil blue water that you will ever see in your life. The many bays around Esperance are absolutely stunning to say the least. The waters are calm and shallow and are great for swimming and snorkelling. The Rocherche Archipelago lies just off the coast consisting of over 200 rocky islands which is abundant with wildlife. The surrounding hinterland offers beautiful national parks and the town itself has a very relaxed feel.
Saving bandwidth
I’ve made some minor changes to this site to conserve bandwidth. I don’t have to worry about bandwidth that much on my hosting account, but in principle I don’t like huge amounts of data being transferred for no purpose and potentially at my expense.
The main offenders were search robots and spam. I’ve tried to block some of the spam and I’ve banned some robots from visiting.
On an ordinary day about 16MB gets consumed from my site. On days of robot/spam trawling this figure jumped out to over 200MB!
I used to think it’s great that Google was indexing my site, but now I don’t really care for it.
I’ve deleted all my photos as well. A robot visiting each image was probably the main cause of the massive bandwidth consumption.
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