Scanning back issues of my fanzine

Inspired by all the online socialising I'm doing on Facebook, I've started scanning back issues of my fanzine WeberWoman's Wrevenge and making them available in PDF on my own website as well as two of the fanzine archive sites, efanzines.com and fanac.org. Plans for a brand new issue of the zine are fermenting in my mind.

Visiting cruise ships

Cruise ships large and small visit Airlie Beach regularly, on their trips up and down the Queensland coast. These two arrived on the 8th and 9th of December, coming in around 6 AM (soon after dawn) and departing around 6 PM (not long before sunset).

Demolition of a derelict house

A derelict house just below us on the hillside is finally being torn down. This is probably due to local government saying "clean that up before cyclone season or we'll do it for you and charge you a lot of money". Scientists are predicting an "active" cyclone season for Queensland, so there is a lot of pressure on the half-completed construction projects to clean up anything that can blow around -- before they close up for the 2- to 4-week summer break. And of course pressure on householders with junk in their yards. Removing the roof began 10 days ago. Using a chainsaw to cut the roof battens. No use of any of the required safety equipment is evident. Smashing down the weakened structure. Some cleanup of debris still to go, and some stubborn structure to knock down.

More travel photo albums now online

I've just uploaded the photo albums for our 2002 trip to Darwin and back in the motorhome. The trip report starts here. Look in the text of each installment for the links to photo albums.

I'm on Facebook

After months of resisting, I've finally got a Facebook account. Increasing numbers of friends are putting photos there and have been encouraging me to get an account so I can see them. I'm rapidly discovering hordes of friends, particuarly from the science-fiction fandom community, including many in my age group, so I can see a lot of time spent catching up with them.

Another Carlyle Gardens inspection

On Tuesday we drove again to Townsville, this time to attend a pre-Christmas pizza-and-pool party for new residents, and to inspect progress on the house. The weather was fine, sunny, and hot, though not excessively humid. We enjoyed meeting more of the residents (and collecting the latest gossip); the pizza was good too. Afterwards, we drove around the established part of the community (the "east side"), collecting ideas on window coverings and garden treatments. The next day we inspected our house, located on the "west side" (also known colloquially as the "far side"—a designation we quite like). We noted that driveway had been poured 2 days before, the kitchen cabinets were in, the roof ventilation and solar hot-water panel was in, final bits of tiling were in progress, and there was still no evidence of airconditioning going to be installed in the 2nd and 3rd bedrooms, as specified. I queried this point and this morning received a call to say "yes, it will be done!" Here are two more pictures. The first is taken from the other (eastern) side of what will be a landscaped park; the arrow marks our house. Projected completion date is now early January, weather permitting, but we're in no hurry.

Support Creative Commons

I'm a Creative Commons fan; I like their philosophy. If you're not familiar with CC, you can read about it here. Browsing around their website reveals much of interest, including notes on which organisations and individuals are licensing some or all of their output under one of the several CC licenses available.

Support Wikipedia

Wikipedia is fundraising.

Adventures with my Eee - Part 3

Wanting to get the Eee working with my mobile phone as a modem, I bought a USB-to-Bluetooth dongle. (More recent versions of the Eee come with Bluetooth built in.) Lots of internet research and mucking around later, I got it working. Hooray! (I'll come back here later and insert some links to web pages that helped me figure it out.) Unfortunately, after turning off the Eee overnight, upon rebooting this morning I found that Ubuntu doesn't "see" the dongle. So apparently what worked to get it going wasn't persistent. More research needed, but no time right now. Here are two photos of the device I bought. It's one of the smallest ones available. I got mine from the local Tandy store, but they are readily available on eBay and other online shops.

Schoolies week in Airlie Beach

This week is "Schoolies"—the week when graduating high school students, having finished their final exams, go to several popular places and party. Airlie Beach is one of the popular places. Many of the kids are not yet of legal drinking age (18) but most of them have no trouble getting supplies. Many extra police are in town to keep order. The last couple of years, Schoolies week locally has been noisy but not marred by many fights (or lots of illegal drinking), unlike in some other areas, such as the Gold Coast in southern Queensland. I'm using the hot, humid weather as an excuse to stay indoors with the doors and windows closed and the airconditioning on. This keeps the noise from their so-called "music" to a tolerable level. Unfortunately the local weather on several days has featured strong wind gusts and some storms—not so good for trips to the reef and other on-water activities that might take the schoolies out of town (and tire them out). Still, we got through the week with minimal problems, a testimony I think to the town's attitude of welcome and providing lots of things for the kids to do, plus an escort service for girls returning to their accommodation and safe places for people to go and chill out if peer pressure is getting to be a bit too much for them.

Adventures with my Eee - Part 2

In March I bought an Asus Eee, one of the models with a 7-inch screen. In October I replaced its operating system with a special Eee version of Ubuntu. Here is what its interface looks like. This week I got around to trying to use the 24-inch Dell monitor as a display for the Eee. This turned out to be somewhat more complicated that I had expected. It had worked easily with the Xandros that came with the machine, so I had not been expecting problems. However, if I plugged in the monitor before starting Ubuntu, the display (on the Eee as well as the monitor) went completely berserk. The Eee's display was apparently attempting to fit the monitor's resolution (so most of the display didn't fit into the available area), and the external monitor was completely unreadable, with horizontal lines of colour jumping around. After much mucking around, I found a sequence that works for me:

1. With the video cable (to the external monitor) disconnected, turn on Eee, boot Ubuntu.
2. Connect the video cable to the external monitor.
3. On the Eee, go to Preferences -> Screen Resolution.
4. Click Detect Displays. Set Resolution to 800x600.
5. Click Apply. Answer "yes" to "Keep settings?" External monitor will come on.
6. Close Settings window.

So far I haven't found a way around having to do this each time I try to use the Eee with the external monitor. However, I don't often want to do this, so it's not a big drama and I'm not going to spend a lot of time on finding a better way. The next upgrade of the operating system may change it all anyway... or perhaps I'll try out one of the other flavours of Ubuntu for the Eee. Here's a photo of the Eee running the big monitor.

Good medical news

Yesterday we drove to Mackay for my one-year post-op checkup with the orthopedic surgeon. He said the x-rays looked excellent (pointing out various technical details) and told me that that he didn't need to see me again for checkups, though of course if I developed problems (especially pain) I should get in touch with him or someone else. He also said I had no restrictions on what I can do, though he advises against high-impact activities. He reckons the implants are good for at least 20 years, and probably 30, though nothing's guaranteed... depends on a lot of variables.

Carlyle Gardens update

We had arranged to inspect progress on the house and pay our deposit on Tuesday. On the way into town on Monday, we stopped at our credit union (MECU) at James Cook University to pick up a cheque. MECU has recently purchased UniCredit, a smaller credit union with a branch office at JCU. We are delighted, because for 10 years our nearest branch has been in Brisbane! Not that we can't do all of our normal banking over the internet or at the post office, but for rare occasions it would be a bit more convenient to go into a branch office. But I digress... regarding the house: the brick siding and metal roof are on, the interior walls are in, the windows are all in place, and the major bits of floor tiling are done. But the bathrooms and kitchen still have to be installed, and all the plumbing and wiring connected, as well as the interior painting done. One of the salespeople said they'd be astonished if the builder managed to complete it all before 19 December, the projected completion date (and the last day before the builders leave for their 3-week end-of-year break). The project manager said he was leaning on the builder to preferentially work on the houses that have been sold, instead of doing them sequentially down the street. We told everyone that we were not in any hurry, so if it all slipped into next year, no problem... and we'd be overseas for all of February, so handover in March would be okay. We don't want to move in high summer anyway. While we were there, we met some of our future neighbours, who told us a few things. They had moved into the new section (two streets away from our place) in early September, and say they really like it, but there are some "issues" -- not with the community's management, but with other services. For example, the phone company still hasn't managed to get their landline connections working. They aren't too concerned because they have mobile phones, and they are not being charged for their non-existent landline service. They also cheerfully noted that the electricity company hasn't got their meters working yet, so although the power is on, they aren't being charged for what they're using. Here's a photo of the house as seen on Tuesday. See also this post and this photo album.

Rat damage fixed

We drove to Townsville on Monday and put the car in for service first thing Tuesday morning. Fortunately we were planning to stay over until Wednesday anyway, because we didn't get it back until mid-afternoon on Wednesday, although we were promised the car back by 5 PM Tuesday. The service people didn't even start diagnosing the problem until mid-afternoon on Tuesday, so they had no hope of finishing the job that day once they discovered it wasn't easy. Apparently the technicians eventually had to pull out the dashboard and then the back seat before they finally tracked the problem to its cause: insulation chewed off the wires near the fuel pump. Then after fixing the wiring they had to put the car back together again! On the plus side, we were pleasantly surprised at how relatively low the repair bill was, considering how much work had been involved. Meanwhile we drove around in a cute little Mazda supplied by the dealership at no charge to us, doing some shopping and visiting Carlyle Gardens again (see separate post).

Houseguest and birds

Mike, a friend from Canada, was here for 10 days. He's the perfect houseguest: good company but doesn't need entertaining, tidies up after himself, and doesn't get in my way. Many days he was off on snorkeling trips to the islands or the outer reef, so we only saw him in the early morning and the evening anyway. Three species of birds came by our balcony to be introduced to Mike (and fed by him): cockatoos, lorikeets, and a young kookaburra (with its nervous mother hovering around nearby). Here are some photos. Cockatoo has close encounter with Mike—several others are on the rail, just out of the picture. Rainbow lorikeet—one of a pair that visited. Kookaburra—his blue underwing feathers are visible but not obvious in this photo.

Getting Started with OpenOffice.org 3

I've been spending a lot of my time recently working on the Getting Started guide produced by the OOoAuthors group, especially the printed edition published by the Friends of OpenDocument Inc. through Lulu.com.

Getting Started with OpenOffice.org 3 (October 2008); a free download is available from the same page.

A version of this book, formatted for onscreen viewing of two pages side-by-side, was published earlier and is available on the OOo Documentation Project's website, along with PDFs of the individual chapters of the book.

Rats revisited

We took the car to the auto electrician, who inspected it and said that he couldn't find any exposed wiring or other obvious problems, so the next thing to do was have it checked by the computerised system at—you guessed it—a Subaru dealer. Subaru doesn't make the necessary software available to other fixit places (at least not until a car model is at least 3 years old, which is when the basic warranty expires), so it's a dealer or nothing. The electrician said the car was safe to drive, but we of course could not trust any of the instrumentation. He didn't charge us anything for the inspection, either. The first chance we'll have to get the car looked at is the week of 17 November, so that's when we're going to Townsville; we wanted to go there anyway around that time. After we left the electrician's, we stopped at a service station to top up the fuel. It took very little, thus confirming that the fuel level was what we'd thought it should be. Of course, the gauge is still showing empty. Meanwhile one of our neighbours gave us some rat poison to put in the engine compartment. I hate rat poison, because some animal or bird might eat the dead rat and be poisoned in turn, so I'm reluctant to use it.

Rats!

When I returned on 9 October after a week away, I discovered that the car was showing an "out of fuel" light and the gauge was at the completely empty end of the scale. I speculated about whether it really was out of fuel or if a sensor had failed; and if it was really out of fuel, why that might be: a leak? thieves? I knew that we'd not driven enough since the last refuelling to use even half a tank. Well, after Eric got home from his travels (a week later), we put another 10 litres (2.5 gallon approx.) into the tank, but not only did the light not go out, but other warning lights came on. Scary ones, that the owner's manual said meant "contact Subaru immediately". So of course we didn't want to drive it anywhere. Today, Monday, I called the service department at the Subaru dealer from whom we'd bought the car, and he said "can't tell without putting it on to the computer; you'll have to bring it in to a dealer, but probably best to go to the closer one in Mackay" (only 150 km away instead of 300 km). So I phoned the Mackay dealership, who said much the same thing, agreeing that with no idea of the cause, they couldn't say whether driving it would be safe or not. They suggested calling the auto club, which I had considered doing in the first place. So I did. The auto club bloke arrived, checked fuses, hmmmm'd a bit, opened the bonnet, took one look, and immediately said: "There's your problem: rats!" showing us a piece of chewed insulation (teeth marks clearly visible). "If you don't drive it a lot, they come down the hill and build a nest in the car, often on top of the fuel tank, and chew the insulation on the wiring. We see a lot of that here." He said the car was safe to drive, but there was no need to take it to the dealer as the local auto electrician could deal with it. So I phoned the auto electrician, who laughed ("We see a lot of that here!") and made an appointment for us to bring it in on Wednesday. I guess we should drive the car more often!

OpenOffice.org 3 is here!

OpenOffice.org 3 was released today. It is much improved, with some great new features, although its appearance hasn't changed much. I am among those who are really happy that it has only minor changes in the user interface (related to functional changes in the program) and not cosmetic changes to make it look more "modern"—but others disagree. You can get OOo version 3 from the OpenOffice.org website. Take it for a test drive. If you like it, keep it! No license fees or other charges. Thanks to OpenOffice.org Ninja for a summary (with screenshots) of new features.

Ubuntu on the Asus Eee PC

In March I mentioned buying an Asus Eee PC running Xandros Linux. Today I replaced the Xandros with a special Eee version of Ubuntu, the Linux flavour that I run on my main laptop. A member of the Ubuntu Australia group kindly sent me a CD with the operating system on it (so I didn't have to download it), along with instructions for putting the program on a USB stick so I could install it (the Eee doesn't have a CD drive). This involved downloading some small programs and running them, to make the USB stick bootable and unpack the Ubuntu program files. Unfortunately, I couldn't install from my USB stick (it kept giving error messages), and I didn't have a spare one to try, so I used the same instructions to put the files on an SD card and it then installed with no problems. I'm much happier with the Eee now that it has a more familiar (to me) operating system on it, and the screen seems more readable to me, so I'm playing around with it quite a bit more than I did before. I've got an 8GB SD card in it to supplement the 4GB that comes with it. While at a science-fiction convention in Canberra over the weekend, I spotted two people with 7-inch Eee's (the model I have). One was running the supplied Linux, but the other had an alpha of Ubuntu 8.10 on it.