Tonight I watched the thirteenth and final episode of Against the Wind.

This show was aired on Australian television in 1978.  I was five.  I have memories of watching it on tv as it aired.  At least I thought I had memories of it.  I thought I watched it and enjoyed it, but when I think about what my bed time would have been back then I just don't know.  Maybe Mum might remember?  

Anyway, I certainly remember it being on, and I remembered the theme song.  

Recently I was scanning Dad's slides of our trip to Old Sydney Town, and it must have been that that triggered the memories of the series.  So I Googled that crap.  Some kind soul has uploaded the whole series onto YouTube!  So over the past few weeks I've been watching through it all.  

As it turns out, the series is, in fact, awesome!  I really enjoyed watching through it all again.  Although as I've said previously I did quite often get distracted looking up the people and events depicted.  Maybe I got taught some of this crap in school, but I certainly didn't remember it.  Did you know Bligh of Mutiny on the Bounty fame was governer of New South Wales for a time?  Until he was ousted in Australia's only military coup.  Must have been a bit of deja vu for him!

Brilliant series, go watch it!

Twenty years ago today I headed down to Melbourne with Luc and Cynthia.  I've hardly got any photos, so therefore I have hardly any memories.  It's hardly worth putting into the Australian Holidays blog, as we didn't really do anything touristy.

I'm pretty sure we went down so that Luc and Cynthia could buy an apartment off the plan. 

I imagine we went down on the Friday, as there's a photo taken at Ettamogah Pub in the afternoon. 

I'm pretty sure this was in Crown Towers, taken on the Saturday.

Then we must have gone to see the developers.  I remember taking the photos there.  I think maybe this was going to be the location of the new building and this was the view?

Pretty sure we had dinner in Southbank that night.  I remember having some very nice wine and Luc (my other friend Luc) told me I should have taken note for future reference).

Then I imagine we came back on the Sunday.

Backdating, story of my life ;)

So where were we?  I'd been sick.  Starting Friday afternoon, most of Saturday in bed or sitting in the car.  On Sunday I felt a little better although super tired on account of very little sleep.  I decided it would depend how much sleep I got whether I would feel up to going to work on Monday.

Monday.  I actually slept really well - and for nine hours!  I was feeling a lot better, so thought I'd go to work, and go have a lie down if things got too much.  But I was actually ok all day so that was nice.

Had all my UK photo labelling done before dinner which was good.  Had a bit more of a think about hosting and gallery apps.  Had a serious meltdown because I was feeling underappreciated for all the cooking and cleaning I do.

And the kitchen light fitting caught this epic centipede.

Tuesday.  Woke up at 3:30 and never got back to sleep *sigh*.  Did a bit of UK photo labelling but stopped at Stonehenge - because a couple of hundred photos will basically just be a copy/paste so will be very quick to do.  Instead I was looking at cameras (mmm Sony A7C) and playing with Geosetter (see Geosetting for Fun and Pleasure).  

Wednesday.  Slept well.  Seems I can only sleep well every other day.  Got myself a gmaps api key (see previous geosetting link).

Thursday.  Slept well.  Two nights in a row!  Went into work for the day - six months to the day that I started working from home.  Went up to Pot Belly for drinks after work.  Watched the second episode of the Netflix show "High Score" (watched the first one the other night, not sure when).

Friday.  Woke up at ~1am til well after 4am *sigh*.  I'd planned to take a random day off, which was going to be a bit sucky to be so tired through.  Had a bit of a slow start then got stuck into my day.  I thought I'd do some fish tank stuff in the morning, then maybe some tax stuff in the afternoon.  Well the fish stuff took All. Day.  I started with the upstairs two foot (and managed to smash the lid in the sink when I was cleaning it :(:(:( ), moved onto Chrissie's tank after a break, then the angel tank (with no angels in it), and finally the downstairs two foot.  With an hour at work in the afternoon for a meeting.  I had plans for the other tanks too, I just ran out of time. 

I also took photos of the new bracket David installed out the back for the clothes line.  This way you can extend the line only half way out - where it's all under cover - so if it's going to be rainy it'll stay out of the elements.  Have I ever mentioned I have the bestest brother ever?  And this was after he mowed the front lawn as well.  He's just too awesome :)

Caught a bus into town (second bus in six months).  Met up with the sweetie and Damien who were having a drink, then we went to Happy's for dinner.

Came home and watched third episode of High Score.

Saturday.  Slept well!  Hurrah!  I didn't think I would on account of all the meat I had for dinner at Happy's.  Stu was still sick though.  He had a full week at home off sick, then all this week he was still coughing and spluttering, but his work would still rather he went to the office than work from home and keep his germs to himself.  Silly people.  

Did quite a lot of stuff on the todo list - which worked out to mostly fixing up slide scanning (the dust and scratch filter is sometimes a bit too enthusiastic and blats out real details, so have to redo those with no filter), photo processing, and blogging.  We felt like wedgies for dinner, so that's what we had!  With lots of sour cream and sweet chili sauce.  Watched the fourth episode of High Score, then Spirited Away, which I first (and last saw) in 2005 in Brisbane.  I had no memories at all of it.  Hurrah for dementia.  Hrmm.

Sunday.  Hurty kept me awake for hours in the middle of the night so that sucked.  Bit of a nothing day in the end.  Did a bit of blogging.  

David brought home a packet of Dinner Winner, so I had to make that for our dinner :)  Watched a documentary on Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the evening.

Thirty years ago this week apparently was a church weekend away - to Collaroy Conference Centre.  

I have no memories of this weekend.  

I always thought it was odd they called them House Parties since they weren't at houses.  Especially when I went to House Parties in the late 90s and they were nothing like these ones ;)

Mum took a bunch of photos, including the two in this post taken thirty years ago today.  Apparently there was a medical theme and I had an amputated arm and Dad was in a mental asylum...

Twenty years ago today a bunch of us celebrated Nana's birthday in Paramatta Park.

Even though I was there (there's a photo of me there), I have no memories of the day.

Forty years ago today our family headed off for a week long stay at Shoal Bay.  I have very few memories of that trip.  I do remember the kookaburra though! (and chasing the duckling)

A few of Mum's prints (from Dad's slides) are on my Australian Holidays blog.

Our family bought this little Datsun 120Y in March 1978.  Getting it was one of my earliest memories.  Even before we got it I remember going on a preschool excursion and driving past it in the car yard (we'd already decided on it but just hadn't picked it up yet).  I learnt to drive in that car (well officially my first drive was in a Volkswagen Passat and I drove 80km around the back roads of Condobolin in a Land Cruiser before I got my licence), but all my learning was in Red Car.  I bought my own car at the beginning of 1997, and about a year later my parents got a new car, and they gave? sold? Red Car to David.  He had a couple of years but kept it parked in the front yard because there were already two cars in the garage.  Then one day and old tree trunk fell on top of it :(:(  David had it repaired, but it was never quite the same - the chassis was probably slightly bent and he kept burning through tires due to bad wheel alignment.  In the end he got rid of it, and one of the Bargwanna sons took it to be a rally car.  

Twenty years ago tonight Mum took one last photo of it before it went away forever.

Early in 2000 I started looking for places to move out of home into.  Primarily I was sick of the commute (an hour driving each way), and I wanted to be closer to my friends in Kogarah, and CIA in the city.  So I was looking for one bedroom places around Marrickville and suburbs around.  I'm pretty sure I looked at a few places, although I only have memories of one of them (possibly in Belmore??), which was ok, but not great.  Then I saw this place in Marrickville.  I had a look around, then walked out.  But I hesitated.  There wasn't anything too glaringly wrong with it, so I indicated to the Real Estate agent I was going to have another look.  So I did.  And thought it could work.  And it was only (!) $135/week.  It was at the back of a big old building that had been split into four flats.  It had a living area with kitchen, then a bedroom, then a bathroom behind that.  I decided I'd see if I could get it.

This would have been on the Saturday.  Two days later, on the Monday night, I have photos of the flat with Mum in it.  Presumably I must have asked the Real Estate agent if I could go back with my Mum for another look.

So yeah, twenty years ago tonight I took these...

More of this story to come.. ;)

In other news.. it was six years ago that Dad went and carked it...

So last Tuesday after battling for two nights with Apple, and blogging, it got to 21:30 and I still needed to wash my hair.  Le sigh.

The lake was a little fuller after the hail storm.

Thursday was a bit of a crazy day.  There was a bushfire near the airport, so people were distracted monitoring that (it originally started in trees that I'd noticed on the way to the club just last weekend were dead because of the drought).  And then it took out some good chunks of our network because an Optus location lost power and they didn't have generator backup there.  And there was a water bomber plane crash.  Sadly it was the same C-130 we saw taking off out of HMAS Albatross last year.  Sad times.  And then they closed the airport (well most flights were cancelled), stranding people in (and out) of Canberra for the evening.  I really couldn't concentrate very well on work that afternoon.  In the evening I was going to watch Coco by myself (finally caught up on all the Pixar movies I started watching a year ago, with just Toy Story 4 to go now - which is coming soon!) but the boys were ok for me to watch it on the main tv and they watched it too.  Was pretty good.  Well except for the whole I issue I had that photos have only existed for the past hundred or so years, so what did people do before that?  Paintings?  hrmm

Friday I went over to Chrissie's and we had some champagne for her birthday and had Chinese takeaway and just chatted which was really nice.  Her car was damaged in the hail.

Saturday I did a bunch of research into how I was going to morph Ryan's donut photos.  One person said use "face movie" from Picasa.  My version of Picasa was pretty old and didn't seem to have it, so I downloaded the latest off the Wayback Machine.  And it was magic.  Saved me hours and hours and hours of effort.  Well, I still need to get some final photos from Luc to finish it off but I suddenly found myself free for the weekend.  

In the evening was a party for Aquila's 60th.  Stu wasn't feeling up to socialising but he came and stayed anyway which was nice.  And we didn't have a late night.  There was a lot of food.  Food spam to follow ;)  After the jigsaws!! OMFG!!

Sunday.  OMFG I hate Apple.  Ever since I got my XS, it's never synced my Google calendar with the phone.  I've tried all sorts of suggestions but nothing ever worked.  So I gave up and downloaded the Google Calendar app which works just fine.  But it's also stopped syncing my contacts.  Which is more annoying because I often update my phone, but I want Google to be the master.  So I went hunting to see if I could try again to fix Google sycning.  Someone talked about using iCloud.  So I logged into iCloud to find my contacts aren't synced there at all!!!  Even though it's set to backup contacts.  What a retarded piece of crap.  I complained on Twitter, as you do, and they actually responded.  Not with anything useful of course.  I haven't tried the last thing they suggested, because I was completely over it.  I'm going to go back to my old 1999 perl/mysql database as my "master", making sure I have a full backup of everything, then try some more to hack away at it.  

We were originally going to go to the club Sunday afternoon but Stu wasn't feeling up to socialising, so we just stayed home.  Which suited me just fine as I was having fun geotagging my USA 2000 photos, and listening to the Classic 100 Music in the Movies, Rescreened, which I listened to the entire weekend which was awesome.  Did a bit of jigsaw as well.  We watched Quantum of Solace in the evening.  Man, that movie made me dizzy just looking at it.  Such a frenetic pace in the action sequences - editing of shots less than a second each.  Madness.

Monday I woke up at 3:30 and never got back to sleep (well I did for about half an hour at 6:30).  Hurrah.  Spent the day geotagging photos.  It was fun reliving my trip to New York from 2000, with more fresh memories to reinforce it all from a year ago.  I was sad geotagging the World Trade Centre photos though - I found it somewhat strange/disturbing that I could still geotag those photos with complete precision.  I was even able to geotag just about all the photos fairly accurately in Disneyland.  It's amazing how much has stayed the same over the past twenty years.  Managed to manually geotag the entire set of photos in one weekend.  Ok so there were only 727 of them, and about 70 I'd done the other week.  

On Monday afternoon a bushfire started near Orroral, where Stu, Kit and I did the Granite Tors walk a few years ago.  We could see the smoke from our place.

We watched the first episode of Picard in the evening.  

Got a much better night's sleep on Monday night.   Tuesday the Orroral fire got much much worse.  We could see the pyrocumulus clouds from work.  I got some pretty insane timelapses of it.

Tuesday night I backed up my phone.  It only took 32 minutes and about 8-10 reconnects of the phone to get the photos and the half dozen regular videos, not counting getting two timelapses I got via Google Drive earlier in the day.  Then another 15 minutes to process them (every single video had its timestamp changed), minus the few minutes I ran outside to see the sky on fire..

Today I worked from home.  Last Friday David had gotten sick enough of our slow internet upload speeds that he called Internode to see if they could fix it.  Today an NBN dude turned up and went off to fix it.  Turns out there was a broken connector, resulting in exactly half the speed we should have had.  So he fixed that and our download speeds are now back up to 20mbit down, 4 up.  Not quite as fast as it was before, but still twice as good as recent times.  Hurrah!  So at least that was a win.  Smoke from the Orroral fire blew north and the sky got a really eerie green/brown/yellow colour for much of the day.  

Tonight was just going back into the photo labels I'd done for the USA 2000 trip, and giving them a bit more detail and tidying it up.  I also redid all the panoramas.  Back in the day I used a program (Panavue?) that you had to manually set linkage points for it to line them up.  It worked pretty well for fairly horizontal panoramas, but not so well if the camera was angled.  So I redid them in Microsoft Image Composite Editor.  Sometimes Microsoft comes up with amazing software, and this is one example.  Works like magic.  

Case in point:

In all the crazyness of the world right now I can't help but be inspired by these flowers growing in our front garden.  They've basically had no water all summer, except during the storm last week.  Yet here they are, in full bloom, smiling at the world.

Stay safe everyone!

Thirty years ago today, Mum and I picked up Nana and did a day trip to Canberra.  I was studying for my Ls at the time, and remember using the trip to read the road rules book I had.

First up we went to the New Parliament House, which was not quite two years old at the time.  Apparently we did a tour, but I have no memories of it.

Then I spent four hours at the National Science and Technology Centre (Questacon), which I thoroughly enjoyed.  It had only been open for a little over a year in its new building.

Then we came all the way back to Sydney, dropped Nana off, and I got a photo taken with the letterbox I designed.