Above: Widened road with roundabout at main road to Shute Harbour.
Above: Apartment complex with marina pilings and walkways just visible behind it. Marina area is now partially open to sea, so boats can enter.
Above: View more to east, showing marina area and apartment complexes.
Just published by Prentice Hall, Technical Editing in the 21st Century is the title of a new textbook I co-authored with Nicole Amare and Barry Nowlin. ISBN 978-0131196773. Available from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk (where the title and the description still include obsolete subtitles) and other sources.
This is one of the most exciting open source projects I've heard about.
From their website: "The OpenLuna Foundation seeks to return mankind to the lunar surface, first through robotic missions, followed by manned exploration, culminating in an eight person permanent outpost, and to do all of this in a way that it is accessible to everyone. Our research and technology will be open-source, we are privately funded, and one of our specific goals is to reach out to the community and educational systems to spread interest, enthusiasm, and involvement."
Yes, I joined, you bet. Makes me nostalgic for my NASA days, though of course that was government funding and got cut back. I'm an enthusiast for non-government projects and have been for many years.
Some pictures of the water left by today's hour or two of heavy rain: back of house, side of house, drainage ditch (normally empty). Three men in suits inspected the flooding near us; they now have very wet shoes. Must be city folks; locals would go barefoot, as I did. We hope the suits now believe residents' claims of drainage problems. And this wasn't really bad rain: heavy but not many hours, so far. No water into houses but some unoccupied places are very close to getting flooded. We're still okay.
On Monday two men from Townsville Blinds & Awnings installed new curved metal awnings on the front and the eastern side of our house. Already we have noticed an improvement in blocking of both sun and rain. This is the same company that installed our other blinds, awnings, and interior coverings for some windows and the patio door. We've been very happy with their products, their work, and their friendly, on-time service.
Eric took this photo early one morning (6-6:30 am) with his Kodak Z740 digital camera on full 10x zoom. These are just a few of the birds in the flock wading in the drainage ditch near our house.
After consulting the bird identification book, we've concluded the closest match is the Crested Whistling Duck, although these don't show the very small crest and are a bit darker than the one shown in the book (which could be at least partly due to the low light conditions).
Thanks to goodies from Eric's gadget box, I was able to rescue some files off a 500GB drive with a broken connector. (The drive was otherwise in good condition, as was the data on it.)
