New car

On Monday we drove to Townsville (300 km north, about 4 hours with rest breaks) to get the car serviced. It was very overdue for a service, though it hasn’t been used that much. The log book shows that in a typical year we drive around 5,000 km; even with the around-Australia trip in 2004 contributing nearly 20,000 km, our total distance for a bit over 5 years is under 45,000 km. The tyres need replacing (turns out the tread was worn to an illegal level), but otherwise the car’s in great shape. But it’s reaching the age where things are more likely to go wrong, and its resale value is plummeting, so I wanted to test-drive the new models (Subaru Forester X), which sounded great in the reviews and in the specs on the Subaru website. And with the Austra­lian dollar at or near its highest value in many years, the cost of new cars is about the same as what I paid for mine five years ago. So I test-drove the car, liked it, dickered a bit with the salesman, consulted with Eric, and bought the demonstrator car (for a small discount off the nominal price). A bit of phoning and faxing later, I had arranged with my credit union to transfer the money from my account into the car dealer­ship’s bank account, so by the following day we sorted out the last of the paper­work and I was able to drive the car home. The trip home was delayed (predictably) by the dealership not having it cleaned and ready to go by noon (as they had promised), but by 3 PM we were on our way. Less than 10 km down the road, my mobile phone rang; the salesman sheepishly said that he’d forgotten to put the registration sticker on the car. Oops! So back we went, got the sticker, and set off again. By then we had no chance of getting home before dark (which is around 6 PM at this time of year). We don’t like driving at dusk because of the increased chance of running (literally) into wildlife on the road, but fortunately that didn’t happen.

Medical update

Medical update: When I saw the physio on Wednesday for a monthly checkup, he seemed reasonably pleased with my progress, though it's obvious to both of us that I still have a ways to go. He then had me do some new exercises (with an exercise ball, one of the big ones you can sit on) and seemed a bit surprised that I did the first few quite easily and well. So he immediately put me onto the intermediate series of exercises, some for strength and others for balance, and on the way home I bought an exercise ball to add to my extensive collection of equipment. I liked them when I was going to the gym. I also bought a new electric jug—this one with a covered spout, to discourage geckos and other wildlife from falling in.

Marina construction update

Although I complain about the noise and dust from the marina construction, it's often very entertaining. Yesterday was better than a 5-ring circus. In addition to the usual collection of diggers filling trucks with dirt to be taken from one part of the site to another, we had: a series of trucks delivering drainage pipes, sand, gravel, rolls of plastic, large boulders, and other constructions materials; two large diggers creating a big trench in the previously-flattened area and other equipment planting drainage pipes in the trench; trees being removed and preparations made for shifting the site offices to another part of the site; and—in the center ring!—the display and sales office (about the size of a 3-bedroom house) being moved several hundred yards to its new location. The latter process took all day and included 8 or 10 helmeted people peering intently under the building as it was jacked up and a huge flatbed truck moved underneath it, then a heavy tractor was attached by a chain to the front of the truck and hauled it part of the distance (probably a slight slope was involved and the truck couldn't cope on its own), after which the truck drove the rest of the way and made a complicated 5-point turn to get the building oriented as they wanted it, and finally—just before sunset—it was moved into position. This morning they reinstalled the jacks, removed the truck, and have now lowered the building to rest on concrete pads under the stumps. We have photos of the whole process; I hope to get them into an album and online soon.

Geckos beware

Yesterday started off with a shock: I boiled my tea water in the electric jug (similar to an electric kettle) and then discovered the jug contained a (now boiled) gecko. Apparently the poor creature had fallen in through the spout sometime overnight. I don't know whether it had drowned before being boiled, but either way—the incident really put me off the idea of tea for the day. I think it was the same critter that had fallen into the honey container a few weeks ago. Sigh... I'm planning to get a new jug; I can't bear the though of using the old one, even if I clean it thoroughly. Meanwhile, the microwave oven boils water just fine. Eric took photos of the deceased, but I won't inflict them on you.

Medical update

Eric and I drove to Mackay for my routine checkup by the orthopedic surgeon. As expected, he says all is well regarding my hips. I just have to keep practicing walking properly until I get it right. All the hints he gave me about walking are the same as the physio's instructions (though the physio added some specific exercises to the list), so my biggest problem is impatience. I’d probably improve faster if I following my exercise regimen more thoroughly, I must admit. And losing the weight I gained last year would no doubt help a lot too. As for the knee pain, we'll revisit that issue in 6 months at my next checkup. He says it's quite possible that the problem will resolve itself when my walking gait improves. I hope! Otherwise, he thinks it's more likely something that can be fixed with "keyhole surgery" instead of something more invasive, since the x-rays show no sign of bone wear. I've been reading a bit about the marvelous things they can do with artificial cartilege and/or fixing tendon/muscle attachments—whatever the actual problem might turn out to be. After my appointment, we did some shopping but I ran out of enthusiasm before we got through the whole list. We did find several small items that we've been hunting for some time, so we considered the day a success. I did most of the driving, and I'm delighted to report that nothing hurt or cramped up or went numb or any of the other annoying symptoms I sometimes get from being in the car for too long. When we got home, I immediately fell on the bed and slept for two hours—I'm definitely lacking in stamina after so much inactivity over the past year.

Scanning old slides

Today I finally started on a project I've been avoiding for years (because of the volume of work involved): scanning all my old slides into digital form. Several years ago I bought a scanner than handles slides and film, and I used it a bit but then got distracted by other, more interesting, projects. I have around 4,000 slides dating back to the 1960s, covering travels in Europe, North America, New Zealand, Australia and possibly North Africa. The quality of the scans isn't great, but in many cases this is because the colour in the slides has deteriorated over the years. Perhaps I'll use The Gimp to turn them all into sepia so they look even older.

OpenOffice.org 2.4 has been released!

OpenOffice.org 2.4 (the free, open-source office suite for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and other operating systems) was released yesterday. It includes some great new features, which are described (with copious illustrations) at the OOo Ninja site. To download the program, go to the OpenOffice.org website and click on "I want to download OpenOffice.org". The page should detect your operating system and provide a large green button to click to start the download. There is a link just below that to click if you want to download a copy for a different operating system or a different language. If you have visited the OpenOffice.org website before, you will notice the greatly simplified new design of the home page and the cleaner, more modern overall look of the top banner and sidebar of the whole site. Good work, OOo website team!

Eric takes an "aerobatics" flight

Eric had received a gift certificate for an "aerobatics" flight in a Tiger Moth biplane operating out of our local airport, so today we drove out to the airport so he could take his flight. We see (and hear) this plane several times a day, most days, doing its stunts (rolling over, spinning around, etc) over the bay near our apartment. Eric says the flight was great and the stunts did not in fact feel like riding a roller coaster, as he had expected. Although he couldn't take photos during the stunts, he got some good photos on the flight between the airport and the bay (a few km). A photo album is here. The photos of the plane in flight were taken from our balcony on a different day (without Eric in the plane). It's very difficult to give an idea of the stunt flying without using motion photography. Perhaps we'll get a video sequence one day.

Jean buys an Asus Eee PC

The local computer store is having a sale. We went there today to buy a scanner and came home with a multifunction scanner/copier/colour-inkjet-printer to share, a terabyte USB hard drive for Eric, and an Asus Eee PC for me. It's cute, weighs less than 1kg, runs on Xandros (Linux) and has most of the programs I use every day, like Firefox, Thunderbird, and OOo all set up and ready to go. It's also set up to access Google Docs, Wikipedia, Gmail, and a bunch of other things with one or two clicks. The keyboard is a bit too small for me to comfortable type more than short things like the occasional email, and the screen is very small (but clear and readable). Could be a useful travel machine. In the photos below, picture 3 shows the Asus Eee on the lower left, my Dell XPS M1210 (12.1-inch screen) on the right, and my 24-inch monitor displaying what's running on the Dell. Picture 4 shows the Eee's display mirrored on the big monitor—great for showing something to a group, or for someone with poor eyesight who needs things enlarged a lot. (I am a bit in that category myself; on any high-resolution device, including large-screen computers, I usually need to enlarge the fonts a lot.)

Eric buys a MacBook Air

After resisting temptation for over two months, last week Eric bought a MacBook Air. It arrived today. I must say it's the most elegant computer I've ever seen... as well as being ultra-thin and lightweight. The top photo below is us testing one of the marketing gimmicks from the MacBook Air announcement, where Steve Jobs slides it out of an envelope to show how thin it is. We had to find an American-sized envelope for this to work, as Australian ones (designed for paper of narrower width) didn't quite fit.

More travel photo albums (WA)

Since my last post on this topic, I've created several albums of photos from the Western Australian part of Eric's and my 2004 around-Australia trip. The latest album, featuring photos of Karijini National Park (also known as Hammersley Ranges National Park) starts here. The narrative that goes with this album is on this page, from which you can navigate to other parts of the trip report. Creating albums like these (using JAlbum) is very quick and easy—the most time-consuming part for me is selecting the photos to include. Between us, Eric and I take a lot of digital photos; including all of them would bore everyone. Then I want to crop (and, sometimes, enhance) some of them, which takes yet more time. Did I mention that I use The Gimp (a free, open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop) for photo manipulation?

Easter, bilbies, bunnies, and chocolate

Not being Christian, I don't participate in the religious aspects of Easter, but I've always appreciated the 4-day holiday we enjoy in Australia at that time. This year the most conspicuous aspects of the holiday are a blissful silence from the very noisy marina construction site below us, and a lack of chocolate bilbies in town, since the chemist shop that normally stocks the Darrell Lea variety was flooded in January and still hasn't reopened. I mentioned bilbies, both the live and the chocolate varieties, in last year's post on the topic. One can get chocolate bilbies from places other than Darrell Lea, but Darrell Lea is the only manufacturer that gives part of the profits from each sale to the Save the Bilby campaign. In addition, the Darrell Lea bilbies come in four varieties (milk, dark, white, and sugar-free chocolate) and their chocolate tastes better than interior brands. Lastly, Darrell Lea chocolate bilbies look much more life-like than other brands'. Why bilbies? Because they are a native, endangered species that looks a bit like the imported 'bunny' rabbits, which have caused considerable damage to Australia wildlife. But what do bilbies, or bunnies for that matter, have to do with Easter? And what's with the eggs (chocolate or otherwise)? Eric (and About.com have reminded me that the rabbit—or more accurately the hare— was the symbol of Eastre, the Saxon fertility goddess. Eggs have been symbols of fertility since the ancient Greeks and Romans. The early Christian clerics took over more lively celebrations when the pagans wouldn't give up their Spring festival, so eggs and bunnies got incorporated into Christian 'Easter' celebrations despite having nothing to do with the resurrection of Christ. All of that is most relevant this year, when the date of Good Friday happens to coincide with the Equinox (start of Spring in the northern hemisphere), a traditional time for pagan celebrations.

One writing project leads to another

I'm using the OpenOffice.org 2.x Writer Guide as source material for much of my new book on self-publishing, reorganising parts of it and adding new material more specific to my target audience. Parts of the Writer Guide have not been updated in over a year, so I'm finding lots of little (and not so little) mistakes, including info that became obsolete some time ago but was never spotted and updated. Since I'm updating that info for my own book, I feel obligated to update the Writer Guide itself (both the source files and, in some cases, the wiki version) as I go. I'm also referring to the new edition of the Draw Guide (which has been translated from German and not fully edited and published yet) for tips to help me create some graphics for my new book. Of course I'm spotting editorial corrections needed for the Draw Guide, and distracting myself from my main task by making those corrections. None of these are very onerous tasks, but they do mean that one writing project spawns several others, all of which take some time. It's amazing how a day can disappear on what started out as a small, apparently simple, task.

Writing another OpenOffice.org book

Although I “retired” at the end of 2007 from my role as lead editor of a group (OOoAuthors) writing OpenOffice.org user guides, I still have a lot I want to say about using the parts of OOo that I use everyday and think I understand fairly well. So I'm self-publishing again. My first project is a book with the working title of Self-publishing using OpenOffice.org Writer. The book is for beginners to intermediate users of OpenOffice.org Writer. It concentrates on the needs of people writing a book-length document such as a thesis, a novel, or a software user guide, including people who want to self-publish their book using one of the on-demand printing services like Lulu, Booksurge, or Lightning Source. I'm publishing the draft on one of my websites (Taming OpenOffice.org), using WordPress. This has been an interesting learning experience, because I wanted to make the navigation sidebar for the book’s pages different from the sidebar for the rest of the website. The simplest solution I could find (that I could understand) was to create and use a second page template, so that’s what I've done. I’m sure there are other ways (such as a conditional PHP statement) to make the sidebar show what I want, but at this point I don't want to distract myself too much from the writing by trying to learn enough PHP programming to get that done. I intend for the book to be available eventually in HTML, PDF, and printed forms. And when that's done, I have several other books in my mind, eager to get out.

Learning to walk again

Although I was able to walk again fairly soon after my second hip operation, four months later I'm still not walking well. I have a very noticeable limp or lurch, which is much worse if I'm not paying close attention to what I'm doing or if I'm a bit tired. So, a few days ago I finally got around to visiting a local physiotherapist to see if he could suggest anything I could do to improve my walking. He didn't tell me much I didn't already know, but he did tell me some specific exercises I should be doing (or doing differently than I'm doing them now) and he pointed out a few things about my walking that I didn't know (because I can't see what I'm doing or feel just what the real problem is). One of his suggestions was to exercise in a swimming pool. I said that was an excellent idea, but the chances of my actually doing it were very low. (Me: "I could say 'okay, I'll do that', but I gotta be honest: I won't. Anything that involves getting dressed, out of the house, down two flights of steps, and driving or walking somewhere... it won't get done. So let's talk about stuff I'm likely to actually do.") I was wearing my "Grumpy Old Woman" t-shirt, just for his benefit. Eric and I had been investigating treadmills, and the physio agreed that using one was an excellent idea, especially after I assured him that I DO ride my exercise bicycle, because it's right there next to my desk. Last week the local Sports Power store (where I had bought the bicycle and some weights and various other odds and ends over the past few years) had not had in stock the treadmill that I was interested in, but some arrived yesterday, so we went in and bought one. The ever-helpful Wayne from Sports Power delivered it later in the afternoon and unpacked, assembled, and tested it. My room is now rather crowded, though fortunately the treadmill will fold up to free up a bit of floor space if needed. Here are some photos.

Document Freedom Day

A news release from the folks behind Document Freedom Day (DFD) says that 26 March is "a global day for Document Liberation with grassroots action for promotion of Free Document Formats and Open Standards in general. The DFD was initiated and is supported by a group of organisations and companies, including, but not limited to the Free Software Foundation Europe, ODF Alliance, OpenForum Europe, IBM, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems, Inc." If you'd like to advertise this event, the DFD website has some nice banners and wallpaper.

In addition, for those particuarly interested in promoting ODF (OpenDocument Format), Pete Harlow has produced a banner ad (see below) and a set of wallpapers for various screen resolutions. http://www.catnip.co.uk/ads/banners/addfdm03.png http://www.catnip.co.uk/wallpaper/thumbodfdfd001.jpg http://www.catnip.co.uk/wallpaper/odfdfd001-800x600.png http://www.catnip.co.uk/wallpaper/odfdfd001-800x600.jpg http://www.catnip.co.uk/wallpaper/odfdfd001-1024x768.png http://www.catnip.co.uk/wallpaper/odfdfd001-1024x768.jpg http://www.catnip.co.uk/wallpaper/odfdfd001-1280x1024.png http://www.catnip.co.uk/wallpaper/odfdfd001-1280x1024.jpg http://www.catnip.co.uk/wallpaper/odfdfd001-1600x1200.png http://www.catnip.co.uk/wallpaper/odfdfd001-1600x1200.jpg

Rain, rain, more rain

The wet and windy weather returned overnight, after a few days of intermittent rain while the storm went south 150 km and caused major flooding in Mackay. Then the storm turned around and came back to us last night. Actually, there's been lots of rain all up the coast and all the usual roads are flooded (again), so the truck with the Saturday newspapers couldn't get through and AFAIK flights in and out of the airport were cancelled (perhaps because people couldn't get to or from the airport, or perhaps because the runway needed repair after water damage earlier in the week). The good news is the electricity has stayed on, except for one 45-minute outage a few days ago. Our backup power supply kept the internet connection working and of course the laptop kept going, so I just carried on working. The phrase "surfing the Internet" takes on a new meaning when the weather's like this. Down in Mackay, they're cleaning up the mess. People are warned to stay out of the floodwaters because of the danger of crocodiles.

More wild wet season weather

Heavy rain and wind overnight on the 12th tossed yachts onto the beach and the rocks, here in Airlie Beach and at several other places on the coast and in the islands. Eric didn't take the camera out into the rain when he went on a futile quest for the morning newspaper (the truck had been delayed by the weather), but he said he counted at least 14 yachts on shore, most of them looking decidedly the worse for wear -- and that's just in the 500 metres of our town. This picture is taken a bit further along the coast towards Cannonvale. The newspapers did get here later in the morning, but then the roads north and south were cut by floods, as is usual folllowing heavy rain; this includes the road to the airport. We're on high ground and doing fine. Haven't heard if more landslides have occurred in the area, or how many trees are down. So far the electricity has stayed on. We actually had surf on Wednesday morning! Only a few feet high (perhaps as much as two metres?), but that's pretty exciting given that our "surf" is normally only a few inches high. People were out on surfboards. Today (Thursday) Eric and I walked along the beach and photographed some of the damaged boats. An album with a selection of photos is here: http://avalook.com/airliebeach/airlie0802/

A deadline met!

Around a year ago I was invited to join a group of people writing a book, to which each of us is contributing one chapter. I was (and am) enthusiastic because the contributors (most of whom I know, at least professionally) are encouraged to "write in a lively style, deliver lots of interesting content, introduce and analyze intriguing trends and problems, take a chance and prognosticate". Cool! Permission to be opinionated! The deadline for submission of the first drafts is the end of February. My goal was to have mine done by the first week in February. Today I sent it off to the book's editor. No doubt I'll need to do extensive revisions after receiving the editor's comments, but for now I'm heaving a sigh of relief. It's been fun, and I love writing books, but I find the process very time-consuming and mentally tiring.

Woman with attitude—and weights

While following links from another blog, I discovered a fascinating website done by a Canadian woman, Krista Scott-Dixon, who is into weight training and some martial arts, among other things. The weight training section starts here. It's full of interesting info and rants about various topics, and there's a blog. The section of the site about her was interesting reading, too. For about 10 years Krista was an academic (in women's studies), so the "academientia" section of the site includes items like her PhD thesis: "From webgrrls to digitaleve: the gendered practice of women's technology work and organization" (2002). She's also published a book titled "Doing IT: women working in information technology" (2004). Krista has an amusing writing style, and lots of attitude! I'd love to meet her. Maybe when I next visit Toronto...