Micks' Musings

Have you seen the latest anti-magpie gear? The echidna or porcupine or hedgehog bicycle helmet!! An enterprising lady cyclist in Canberra has used cable ties to transform her bicycle helmet so it has plastic spines pointing in all directions. I cannot vouch for its effectiveness as the Magpies have always left me alone (or never flown close enough for me to notice).

Yesterday I brought two aerosol can fire extinguishers, one for the kitchen and one for the hallway cupboard, next to the laundry. On Saturday night I was sitting in the lounge room watching the end of "New Tricks" when there was a smashing sound from the other end of the house. Down in the bathroom one of the heat globes in the light unit had failed, overheated and set fire to the plastic surround. The globe had then fallen to the bathroom tiles and shattered. When I walked in molten plastic was dripping on to the floor and flames were flickering inside the heater / light unit. I watched the fire go out. I had not replaced the old fire extinguisher after we had the house extended (it was one of the things that was thrown out). I considered using a wet towel to smother the fire, getting a bucket of water, using a dry towel but decided to wait and see. It went out without ever becoming a danger leaving behind splashes of plastic and broken glass.

The Twenty20 world cup just finished, the Rugby World Cup is nearing the quarter final stage (at last, the group stage seems to have gone on for ever) and the Womens' World Cup Football final is this weekend. On top of all this there are several Cricket Tours starting next week (England in Sri Lanka and Australia in India), the English Premier League (and even many other leagues in England) is in full swing, the AFL and NRL Grand Finals are this weekend and then there is Golf and American Football... It is a good think I don't watch Golf, Basketball, Baseball, Motor Sports or American Football because I would never get to bed!

England against India is on Foxtel tonight and it started being shown at about 10.45pm. However the match started several hours earlier. This is one of the things that annoys me about live sport. Why delay the telecast when what was on was prerecorded and old sports shows? And if they must delay the telecast then why not just show a quick highlights package of about five minutes and then go to live coverage? I would rather get to watch two or three hours of live coverage than the full match if it is delayed. Live sport is what I want!

We have all finished the Deathly Hallows. When will we ever see anything like Harry Potter again? Will people ever queue up again for a book like they did for the final Harry Potter book several saturdays ago? I am reading the Philosophers Stone with Christopher. It really is a magical (pun intended) book. We are all better off that it was published and we got to travel with Harry and his friends on their journey. It made children read, what can be more magical than that?

I queued up for an hour to pick up the last Harry Potter book this morning. Some people were actually upset at the length of the queue and asked how to complain. If the queue had bothered me I would have waited until the afternoon however as I had pre-ordered and wanted the Hedwig toy I was prepared to queue. An hour wasn't very long and most people were happy to wait even those with little muggles in their arms! We won't see Ellen for a while!

Actually a few things have happened in the last week. Mum and Dad returned from their jaunt around Europe, I have had a weeks holiday and it has rained for most of the week. People are starting to complain about the rain! Canberra is still on level 3 water restrictions and the dams have only crept back up to about forty percent of capacity but after about a month of rain (not all the time or we would be having floods like they have had in other parts of Australia) it would be nice to see some sunshine for more than half an hour at a time. It is also cold so that adds to the misery!! The bad news about my parents Europe trip is that my Dads new digital SLR (camera) was stolen two days before they were due to return. Unfortunately he had a single large capacity memory card so he also lost all the pictures that he had taken. This has made me rethink getting a really large memory card and to stick with smaller cards for when (Louise would say "if" at this point) we go on holiday....

I had to build a new computer when the motherboard in my personal computer developed a few faults and is being replaced. So I have been trying out Windows Vista. I must admit to being underwhelmed. Different versions of the Video drivers have caused lockups at inconvenient moments (is there a convenient moment ?), the Aero effects are nice but I turned them off as every time you run a non-compliant (with Aero) program the display flicks off and on (annoying!!), the explorer directory window will not show the total size of the files on the status bar unless you select all the files and the details view has had all the items changed and about 500 extra items added. Duration is now called Length, Dimensions is now two items and so on. Installation is improved over XP but it really depends on your hardware. I could not get all the hardware supported for an ASUS A8S-X motherboard until I installed XP first and upgraded to Vista. Trying to install XP drivers for the motherboard and othe...

"My Grandma Lived In Gooligulch" was very good. Well worth seeing. We went to the Kingston Miniature Railway and had a good time. Auntie Anna was there for a short while but went home to bed as she was not feeling very well. Chris, Louise and I went for a train ride on Bunyip, a miniature steam train, and Chris and I went for a ride on the Santa Fe. Later Chris, Louise and I went for a ride in a full size diesel railcar at the Railway Museum. Whose birthday was it? Mine or Christophers? Arabella thanked me for linking to her blog. Arabella is my niece. She is 9 and three quarters and a blogging veteran.

This weekend we have a number of things planned for the new teenager in the house. On saturday we are all (if we can persuade the two oldest teenagers to come) going to "My Grandma Lived In Gooligulch". This is a stage adaptation of the Graeme Base book. Then on sunday it is party time at the Kingston Miniature Railway. Great fun for a steam train enthusiast as the little trains are all (mostly?) steam driven. I reckon Chris and I will get a all day pass each!

It rained again yesterday. It was my first day back at work after being sick with a cold/cough from friday to monday. Not the best way to get a long weekend. I was the last one to get sick - all the others had been sick or were recovering which meant I could "enjoy" it without having to look after sick children! I now have "that silly little cough" as my mother always calls it. I know it will hang on for weeks. Tomorrow is Christopher's birthday. All the children will be teenagers (actually they are already as it is after midnight now). Last month I bought the eldest child his first legal beer at the Debacle Pub in Braddon and the month before that my daughter turned sixteen.

How quickly we forget. Rain has fallen in torrents over the last week or two in different parts of Australia and no one is saying the "D" word at the moment. In Canberra it has been raining on and off for the last couple of days and, probably because it is cold, everyone is cursing it. Not long ago no one would have dared complain about rain. We shouldn't now either. The drought is not over. A week of dry, sunny (even if cold) weather will have everyone thinking about it again! I saw the road on the news the other day. You know the one. The one where when we heard about the car being swept away many of us probably thought "How Silly, fancy driving into a torrent like that". If the road had been where it was supposed to be then the car would have driven into an inch or two of water. The road and most of the ground where the road had been had been swept away and the poor people in that car never had a chance. When I saw the news footage of the road and the gap tha...

It's the Queens Birthday long weekend in Canberra and that means several things. It is not the Queens Birthday (as she was born April 21 1926), monday is a public holiday and we get to buy fireworks! We are not allowed to buy rockets or firecrackers (also known as bungers) but we can still get some pretty impressive fireworks. There are ones that shoot sparks up into the air, several times higher than a man, there are others that fire a parachute up into the air and, hopefully, it will land in the neighbours pool (who we dislike intensely) and there are others that fire a projectile that explodes. June in Canberra is getting cold. It is dark by about five and when we set up the fireworks we are normally feeling cold and miserable. A few years ago my eldest son found a way to warm up. He was setting off one of the projectile emitting fireworks and he had backed away a short distance when it started to fire the projectiles. The tube fell over and explosives were fired all over the ga...

I was used to the language that we had developed with the many races and cultures at school in Singapore. Malaysians, English, Chinese, Indians and more all mixed and managed to communicate. It was an Australian expression that finally managed to surprise me. Across the road from the school, at the cafe at the HDB Flats (Housing Development Board), was a popular destination in the evening. We would head off to the cafe and eat roti chanai and drink kickapoo joy juice or other beverages that were popular. One evening I went over with an Autralian roommate and he announced as we entered the cafe - “I'll Shout!”. I looked at him and said “Why?” and was about to elaborate by saying that the waiter would be over any moment when he explained that he would buy the drinks! I now live in Canberra and have heard the expression “My Shout” or “I'll Shout” many times. It still means the same thing as it did the first time I heard it.

Everyone has to start somewhere. For me it was Lusaka, Northern Rhodesia (now called Zambia) where my parents were living in the bush, my father plying his trade as a geologist whilst my mother looked after my sister and I in a tent. I went to school in Singapore at the United World College of South East Asia from 1975 to 1980. That makes me one of the class of 1980. Many years on, University and College study done and dusted, I have now been working for twenty one years for the company I joined when I finished my Computer Science degree. It has changed names and owners several times in the last few years but is still essentially the same company with many of my co-workers having been around for nearly as long as I have. Only my boss has worked there longer. When I started working the average time spent at one company or in one job in the computing industry was quoted at being about eighteen months. I wonder if that figure has changed at all. We recently started setting up a Bangalore ...