Our first house at Porepunkah
The first house we ever owned was at Port Pirie, South Australia. We bought it for $45,000 in 1993. We sold it to my parents when we moved to Eden.
We bought a house again when we moved to Porepunkah, Victoria. It was a small three-bedroom hardiplank home on a delightful block in Seamer Street, and cost $81,000. A few years later we moved two doors up the road to a much bigger house, which cost $184,000.
The picture shows the last heavy snowfall at Porepunkah. I think it was in 2000. I remember it was a Sunday in May. We don’t have many other pictures of the little house, and I regret not taking more photos around Porepunkah on the day of that snowfall.
Phone tone rage (PTR)
A Kalgoorlie Miner columnist, Kitty Prodonovich, wrote today about “phone tone rage” (PTR).
It is quite amazing how the repetitive tones from an innocent little phone can incite so much anger and frustration, but they do. And it’s not just the phone rings; you can also have different sound for message alerts and other thing. One of the guys I work with has an extremely loud whistle every time he gets a text message, which fools me every time. And yes, it does bring out the PTR in me. I basically just want to smash his phone each time it whistles.
Kitty admits to variously having Barry Manilow singing Copacabana and WHAM’s “Wake me up before you go go” driving her friends and colleagues mad. Read more
Vice-regal visit
The Governor of Western Australia, Dr Ken Michael, has been visiting Kalgoorlie-Boulder this week. We had the honour of hosting him for a tour of the Kalgoorlie Miner building.
He seemed to enjoy it, especially meeting the staff and seeing the old machinery. He suggested we should work towards establishing a newspaper museum, which is a very good idea.
Back on the bike
I haven’t ridden the bike much this year, in fact not at all for the past few months until today.
I’m gearing up for the Balzano Barrow Race this weekend when I’ll be one of five people in a team pushing an aerodynamic wheelbarrow 21km from Kanowna to Kalgoorlie. We’re supposed to finish in about one hour, which means about 40 short sharp sprints each. Pure madness.
Anyway, I thought I should check out the route, so rode my bike to Kanowna and back today. It was a 50km trip from my place in Hannans.
I was riding into a strong wind in both directions. The sun was baking hot and there were trucks aplenty. The road goes past the Ninga Mia Aboriginal settlement, Loongana Lime and the rubbish dump, so it’s not exactly the tourist part of town.
Kanowna itself is an historic gold mining town, which once had a population of several thousand. Today there’s nothing there except some signposts and the modern Kanowna Belle gold mine of Barrick. There’s a cemetery, where I felt like dropping in for a rest.
At least the route is flat. Here’s hoping for cool weather on Sunday.
Online data storage
A recent development in the constantly changing world of the internet has been the proliferation of data storage services. Placing documents, pictures, music or videos online used to involve a convoluted process of file transfer using specialised software and it required the user to have their own domain.
That led to the creation of social networking sites such as Flickr and YouTube where people could easily upload and share their files.
People who wanted to confidentially save personal files online still had to use their own domain, or more sneakily, set up a gmail account for that purpose and take advantage of Google’s generous email data limit.
Today there are quite a few services offering large amounts of space free of charge. It’s easy and intuitive to upload whatever you like through a web browser.
I’ve looked closely at three of these services in the past week. One is called MediaMax, another is Box.net and there’s also Protectmyphotos. Read more
Pink Ribbon Day
It’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month and one of my female staff persuaded me that the Kalgoorlie Miner masthead should be pink on the big day, Pink Ribbon Day (October 23).
We organised a photo of the general manager Mandy Howlett and myself to explain what it’s all about. It’s a worthy cause, so why not!? It’s one way of promoting information.
Citizenship test
There has been a lot of discussion in Australia about plans to introduce a citizenship test for immigrants. This PDF document is a beauty. I found it at FWDitOn.com, a web site for people to submit funny emails.
I love the question: Which Australian Prime Minister held the world record for drinking a yardie full of beer the fastest? Bob Hawke did us proud.
Zoho virtual office
I’m typing this in ZohoWriter, a web-based word processor. It’s similar to Writely, but offers a complete suite with online equivalents of desktop programs for spreadhseets and presentations.
Funnily enough, I’m writing this on the day that Google formally integrated its online spreadsheet application with Writely to create Google Docs.
I like the look and feel of Google Docs, which is minimalist in the Google tradition, but Zoho is also impressive. I’ll continue to experiment with it and give some more impressions here later.
Wireless network
One aspect of technology that I’ve never been all that savvy with is networking. I’m doing well if I manage to get an ethernet connection up and running on one computer.
In our house at Kalgoorlie there is only one phone line with just two extensions. There was no way I wanted to install an extra line, or even another extension, to give the kids internet access. The solution was wireless.
The learning curve involved firstly buying a wireless router and setting it up on my laptop. I succeeded with that and made sure I enabled 128-bit security.
Dude’s computer doesn’t have an in-built wireless card, so I had to ponder a solution. I tried the cheap $25 option first, inserting a desktop wireless card. For whatever reason I couldn’t get the computer to recognise the hardware.
I could have persisted, but being time stressed I spent $100 instead buying a USB network card. It was much easier to install and it worked out of the box.
Fantastic. Dude and I are both on the internet now at the same time, using the same connection.
My blog is not for sale
This web site is basically worthless, according to the Sootle valuation tool.
Apart from a bruised ego, because I think this site is priceless, the quoted figure is meaningless. Of course, if my site had been valued at upwards of $64,000 like some others I would be hailing the result and looking for a buyer.
That said, the valuation tool is based on how many other sites link to this one. I’m only aware of two and even they probably think they should axe the link given my lack of updates over the past nine months.
A blog exists for the writer to share personal thoughts and observations. It may develop a readership beyond friends and family, but it remains an essentially personal writing space.
Trying to value one is like estimating the price of your grandmother’s grave.
Update (February 24, 2007): Six months after writing the initial post my blog is now valued at $2600. I think it was about $400 at the beginning.
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