Micks' Musings

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 ...