Another Win

On Melbourne Cup Day we drove down to Bega. Our horse was running there, and it's always a good excuse for an outing.

The only downside is the 3 hour drive to get there.

The upside is:



and

Surprise Visitor

This was not the sort of visitor that I expected to be lurking at the front of my house this afternoon.

Hawaii - First few days

After a year of anticipation, we finally got to Hawaii. It was just as good as we remembered from 25 years ago.

We stayed at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, which we still reckon is the best place to stay in Honolulu. Here is the view from our room.



I wish I was there now. Outside it's only 10 degrees and raining.

The Hilton is about a 15 minute walk to downtown Waikiki and an equal distance the other way to the Ala Moana shopping centre. So you get the benefit of being away from the main drag in a more peaceful area without also being too far away from the excitement.

Waikiki is a very busy place, with a lot of hotels crowding one another for a piece of beachfront. The beach was surprisingly small, with only about 30' from the buildings to the water. In fact, while I was standing there taking a photo one day, a big wave came in and swamped some people sunbaking on what they thought was safe territory.

You can see from the picture above where the sand is wet - to the left of the girl. She was lying on a towel and got hit by a wave. I read in the paper that locals are concerned about the loss of sand.

We didn't do anything in particular for the first few days, just enjoyed being away from work, and explored the Waikiki area and got our bearings. And drank lots of cocktails. I'm not a big drinker, but it just seems to be the thing to do there.

Hawaii trip approaches

Only 5 sleeps to go before our trip to Hawaii.

I’ve just got a new camera for the occasion, a Canon 450D with a set of 18-55 and 55-250 image-stabilised lenses. This camera is quite different from by previous 38-380 Kodak digital camera as there’s a lot more to worry about in the settings department.

And now I have to decide which lens to keep on as default – the short or the long range one. Murphy’s Law says that whenever I have the short-range one on, I’ll need the telephoto one on. Mark reckons that when travelling in Thailand recently, he just kept the short-range one on.

I went to the botanic gardens this weekend to try out some high-contrast photography. A few months ago I went to a rainforest (with my previous camera) and I was disappointed at the quality of the photos that I took – in the rainforest it is dark green with the occasional splash of intense sunlight – sometimes reflecting brightly off leaves. The Kodak camera didn’t handle low light-level situations well. Most of my photos ended up being either too dark, or overexposed where there were patches of sunlight. So yesterday I took myself off to the rainforest area of the botanic gardens to try again.

I guess that it was a learning experience, without much to show for it. While the camera handled the environment better, I still wasn’t able to capture that dark rainforest look with a million shades of green all around. For Father’s Day today Matt gave me a polarising filter that I think might help with the reflected light off the leaves. Surprisingly, the best ones were taken when I used the flash. And the ones where I got the camera settings right were the ones with the worst compositions. Anyway, as I said, a learning experience. After we get back from Hawaii, I’ll try again with my new polarising filter.

I hope to be able to take a lot of shots in Hawaii. I’m taking a large USB drive to copy them on to. Karyn’s taking her netbook for me to use to upload and store the photos. I don’t know what the hotel charges for internet access – certainly up in Sydney it was too expensive for casual browsing. It’s probably costed for business people who can just add it to their accommodation bill.

Today was Father’s Day, so Karyn and I went to the Bella Vista restaurant on the lake at Belconnen where Matt works. He was working there today because of Father’s Day. As usual the food was terrific. Karyn had lasagne, and I had a prawn and calamari entree and a pasta dish with strips of veal, mushrooms, chilli, olives, and other yummy ingredients. We washed it down with a lovely bottle of sparkling shiraz. Karyn finished off her meal with a dessert made from champagne blended with lemon liqueur, cream, and lemon sorbet. With 3kg left to lose on my diet, I gave dessert a miss.

A welcome addition to the kitchen

We finally gave in and bought a new coffee maker this week.

It's bad enough having a teenager who complains all the time, but it's even worse if he has a job making expresso coffees and then has to come home and drink instant coffee.

Normally I drink plunger coffee, but apparently that is too hard for him.

So we bought a small expresso maker to replace our aging one. It was on special at Aldi's and was a very good buy for the price. It has quite a few interesting features and one strange one. I don't understand the water hardness adjustment - but then our water is pretty pure in Canberra and maybe this is a problem elsewhere.

One ongoing problem that I can forsee is having to make Karyn a cappuccino each morning before I go to work so that she can enjoy it before getting out of bed.

I'm sure that this gadget will get a lot more use than some that are in the cupboards.

New ISP

It feels great to be free from Telstra broadband. We've now switched to TPG.

Despite Telstra Bigpond being the dominant provider in Australia, they seem to offer the worst deals. You can't fault their system reliability, but you certainly pay for it. I was paying around $100/month for 25GB - now with TPG I pay $60/month for 75GB.

The straw that broke the camel's back was when Telstra decided to get rid of personal web pages. Or rather, you could start paying an additional $10/month for the priviledge. All the other providers still allow you a small site for free. I have a site that shows my family genealogy, and I want to keep it to share it with others and to allow other family members to find me. It has worked well for me for many years.

So finally Telstra forced me to look for an alternative supplier. It seems that they are more interested in getting new customers rather than keeping their existing ones. I was genuinely surprised when I called to cancel my service and the operator made no attempt to get me to change my mind. Maybe I was just one of thousands.

But let me tell you, it's hard being without the Internet for a week. It's like having no electricity or no TV. Fortunately Matt's iPhone can be used as a modem, so Karyn could plug it into her laptop to check her email. Lucky Matt has a 1GB download allowance for his phone.

Karyn rang me at work on Monday with joy in her voice as she said that all 3 lights were green on the modem, meaning that we were back online.

Mum's Birthday in Sydney

Last weekend we went to Sydney so see Mum for her birthday.

We now have a love/hate relationship with Sydney - we remember the great time that we had when we lived there, and it's a good place to visit, BUT we're glad we don't live there anymore.

When you visit Sydney, you are struck by the scene of a modern city flanking a beautiful harbour. The main focus of the city is Circular Quay, busy with ferries shuttling people from the rim of the harbour to the centre. Circular Quay is flanked by the Harbour Bridge on the left and the Opera House on the right. It's hard to think of politicians today making the same decisions as those of the past that resulted in such striking landmarks.

But then there's the traffic, and the people. And worst of all are the strange traffic diversions that take you in directions that you don't think that you want to go, which then force you to turn into tunnels that do take you where you want to go. And you have to be so careful to be in just the right lane so that you can take the right exit to move to another lane to take another exit to end up in the right street. Make one wrong turn and you could end up anywhere. And forget your GPS - you have to keep your eyes on the street signs.

We stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel at Circular Quay. I would recommend it to anyone. Good rooms, great views, excellent gym, but wi-fi far too expensive for the casual visitor.

On Saturday night we went to Doyles at Circular Quay for dinner with Mum, Richard and Lynne. (I forgot to take a picture of us all). The food was good and the view even better (see photo below). The only problem was that I reckon that they turned off the heading at 9PM to make everyone leave.


On Sunday morning we went for a walk to the street markets at the Rocks (a stone's throw from the Quay) were Karyn bought a new vase/water bowl/decoration-filled-with-water-that-you-float-things-in.


All in all, a very nice weekend.