Below is a picture of a photo we saw in the Asia Bookroom next to the Dumpling Inn.  They weren't exactly sure of the owner of the photo album - it was some businessman who worked a lot in Singapore.  They'd done a bunch of research and apparently they'd even identified some of the people in the photos.  The whole album was very well labelled.  I think my parents' photo albums will have plenty of historical value in the future since they're all so meticulously labelled.  Mine.. hrmm.. well I'm trying .. :)

But anyway.  This picture.  I showed it to Stu because he's been wanting to setup some sort of reading space somewhere.  We still haven't figured out where.  But if he decided not to have his desktop computer setup, we could turn that corner of the study into a little sitting room like this.. could be cool.. if it didn't get turned into a dumping zone.. and if we could find homes for all the stuff Stu has on his desk...

I entered all of those flights into an excel spreadsheet, and then kept going, digging out all my old boarding passes, photos and blog entries to figure out all the flights I've been on in my life.

They'd been landing from the north all morning, but the wind changed and all the flights started coming in from the south.  So we went to Tennant Street Fyshwick which afforded an awesome view of the plane in flight.  My brother made it in time to go to Brindabella Business Park.  We thought about going there too, but were too worried about crowded roads and closures, so decided not to fight the masses and stayed where we went.

We had about 3/4 hour to kill before the plane arrived so took photos of planes, flowers, birds, bugs, and helicopters.  And listened to the F/A-18s flying around somewhere way above the clouds.

Windy was listening to the Air Traffic Control on his phone, and we heard the pilots of Air Force One!

Isaac was the first to spot Air Force One in the distance.

Incoming..

 
It got pretty close!

It's gonna hit the ground!

So yeah.. super awesome!!

We decided to go up to the airport to see it on the ground.  Bit of a mistake.  We timed it badly and had to sit on the Monaro Highway for about fifteen minutes while the motorcade left the airport.  Doh.  Saw it from the Costco car park.  Not a great view but traffic was so bad we decided not to go down to the Brindabella Business Park, and went back to work the long way around via Majura Road.

Nanette and the kids were lucky enough to see the motorcade outside the Hyatt later on while we were stuck in traffic.

I can still hear the jets! :)

It was pretty much a case of the usual - eating junk food, eating pizza, drinking beer (and a sparkling shiraz), going to the shops for the paper, going to Myrtle Beach for a swim, jigsaw, wii, crosswords, kenkens, and of course, going in the spa :):)

Also had a play with the new Eee PC and got some stuff setup on it, including the GPS software so that made me happy.

On the walk to the shops, I took my new "random" camera to have a bit of a play with it.  Generally I'm happy with it (especially for macros), however its noise reduction is very aggressive, to the point where it almost looks like one of those "paint" filters in Photoshop where big gloops of colour are the same and picture quality is lost.

(this one looks better at higher res - irfanview is pretty sucky at saving big blobs of red)

On our drive to Myrtle Beach we had to stop and wait for the bridge over the Clyde to open/shut.  But we were so far back in the line of cars we didn't get to see it :(

A nice walk through the trees to the beach

We were actually worried that we were going to get rained/stormed on at the beach - this big storm was brewing to the west.  However it moved to the north and the beach stayed in the sun.  

These are some of the clouds on the way back.

After playing sports resort on the Wii if you just leave it it goes around the various sports locations and shows your Miis hanging out.  Weird..

We had three small pizzas - a meat lover's, a ham and pineapple, and a putanesca for the sweetie

The jigsaw I did

A weird but kinda cute concrete chicken that's appeared in the house since last time.

Aftermath of our beers

Of course the suckiest part of going down the coast is having to clean the entire house before you leave.  All my dreaded tasks (cleaning toilets, vaccuuming) and no way to escape.  Especially when it's so humid.  Blah.  Jumped in the lukewarm spa at the end to recover.

Also the boys both had colds which means I'm pretty much screwed... 

But otherwise, a lovely weekend.

Another little Eee PC (the first one we got three and a half years ago between our wedding and our honeymoon).  While the first one was adorable, it was too underpowered to work with the photos off my new camera, getting photos off it was a pain (you had to do a cp -p to preserve the timestamps on the files), the screen was *tiny* and difficult to use Firefox on, and the final nail in the coffin - it runs Linux, but I need Windows or MacOS to run my GPS software.  

I wanted an SSD for it, but they're really hard to get in netbooks (apparently people want more space so they can use them for downloading holiday photos).  The Macbook Air certainly looked pretty swishy, but at three times the price, and the pain of me having to learn a whole new OS and find replacement applications put me off.  I decided I just wanted something reasonably cheap that wouldn't be the end of the world if anything happened to it while travelling.

JB HiFi had the R051PX for $397, Dick Smith had it for $399.  So Phil looked up MSY and they had it for $299.  So out to Fyshwick I trekked this afternoon :)

Haven't played with it much yet, just doing lots of updates.

Not sure what we'll do with the old one (which we paid $500 for - ouch!!), maybe give it to the kids for Christmas or something..??  

And I still have that old 98 laptop too - and it even still boots!  But couldn't get the GPS software working on that either - it installed ok but then wouldn't actually run :(

Had a pretty busy day doing lots of bits and pieces.

Productive evening doing washing, cleaning the pool, yummy lamb leftovers for dinner, "life" paperwork, photo sorting.

And discovered that there really was a system change made to the web host for this site - as evidenced in a changed format of the log files from that night back in September.  I replied back to the last mail, dunno if I'll get any response.

Here's a couple of miscellaneous photos.

A nice sunrise the other morning

Cadbury Screme Eggs, seen in Coles Belconnen

A poppy in the front yard

Dramatic lighting of trees next to Belconnen Way

I'll have a bit of fun with some maps at some point, but here's a starter to show why my last day took about a week to geotag.  This was about thirty hours of travelling, around 18000km (slight deviations around China).

Source: Great Circle Mapper.

So Friday afternoon I left work super early and headed off into uncharted territory (Lachlan Valley Way - which I don't think I've ever been on in my life before!) and headed north.

It's a three and a quarter hour drive to Parkes, but amazingly pretty (compared to the Hume Highway to Sydney which is quite boring for a lot of it).  Had the road to myself for a lot of it, and the sweetie had given me some podcasts to listen to, so was a great drive.

Well that is until the bugs got so bad I couldn't see out the windscreen anymore..

Ha!  That's where the bogans come from!

I arrived at my motel at 6:40pm, and had to wait while they tried to find the room key.  Had just barely enough time to dump my stuff and go to the loo before Tony and family picked me up to go to dinner.  We went to Bellas in town which had good reviews.  And we all agreed, the food was delicious.  Although I did eat too much and it meant I took forever to get to sleep!

"Pollo Insalata" - proscuitto line chicken breast served on baby spinach and sweet roasted pumpkin with roasted hazelnut butter and crumbled fetta

Fountain next to my motel, by night

Watched a bit of The Mummy Returns while waiting for dinner to settle.

Saturday morning it was foggy.  The motel also had a couple of police teams staying the night, apparently to cover the roads to Bathurst.

We were going to have breakfast at Tony's motel, but they don't do breakfasts on weekends.  (?????????)  Lame. So went into town and found an open cafe, and I had bacon, eggs and a hash brown.  It was bigger than I expected but did keep me going all day.

So off to The Dish!!

It was still foggy, but that made for some cool photos.

We wandered through the visitors' centre and joined the queue for the telescope tours.  I think we had to wait maybe three quarters of an hour?  The queue length really didn't change the entire day.

They did have astronauts on segways, classic cars arriving, and Einstein to keep the crowds entertained..

The tour was pretty cool.  

We got to climb up a temporary staircase on the outside to the outside platform.

Here's a view you can't see every day!!

Then you climb *into* the top of the dish support.

And down into the control room!

There were even some real astronomers doing some real observing.  Well so they say, I don't know what sort of results they would have gotten with all the people around with mobile phones and video cameras, and moving the dish around all the time..

And finally out the front door

Next we had a wander down the train tracks past the old Kennedy Antenna (not in use anymore)

A quick look back at The Dish at a different angle

Past the earth-air heat exchanger.  This is where they take outside air, then pump it underground for eighty metres to get the air to a constant temperature and into the twelve metre dish they have setup for testing for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).

Twelve metre dish setup for Square Kilometre Array testing

A Lego version of the SKA (not accurate - the real thing will be a lot more "random")

Then headed back up and had a look around at the classic cars.

One of them gave us quite a surprise - it had wallaby joeys in it!!

The dish from another angle

Then it was time for the official ceremony.  So they brought the dish down till it almost touched the ground.  So low in fact that it nearly took out a bottlebrush tree as they swung it round.

They attached a banner to The Dish and raised it up during the official speeches by Prof Phillip Diamond (head of CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science) (I think) and Dr Megan Clarke (Head of CSIRO).

They also had one of the sopranos for the night's opera lead a chorus of Happy Birthday (Helen Barnett I think)

Then Jess went off to make some Sandtastic art, so I wandered around and took photos as the sun was coming out.

This is Jess' sandtastic art - it's just a sticky bit of card with all these stencils you pull off one at a time and cover with coloured sand.  Sand sticks to the card and you shake off the excess.  Way cool!

I didn't play cricket on The Dish..  I think maybe I shoulda bought one of these! :)

Another wander while Jess made a paper SKA

Jess and her paper SKA dish

There were a bunch of people there from the Central West Astronomical Society, some of them with telescopes pointed at the sun.  Which has some super awesome sunspots going on at the moment!

Then had a look in the receiver room.  I never realised that they actually change the receivers all the time!  Takes them a few hours to change them over.  Dad would have loved all this stuff - he would have understood what the dude was talking about :) These are some of the receivers actually in use at the telescope!

Finally we headed back through the visitors' centre to have a look at the displays.

This is a panel that they made up for the movie The Dish (2000) and donated to CSIRO afterwards.

It's only a model! Shh!

We stopped at a couple of lookout places on the way out.

Then into Parkes to see the War Memorial.  It's supposed to be a lookout, but it was all locked up and nothing there to say it ever opened.  What's the point of a lookout if you can't go up it?  Too many trees around to have any views of the town, so that was a bit fail.

Then headed to Forbes for a late lunch.  There were like two places open in the entire town, one of them being Subway, so that's what we had.  Then filled the car with petrol and headed home, arriving a bit before 7pm.

So yeah a super fun day away.  Pity the sweetie bailed (still feeling too sick).  We might have gone to Dubbo for the Sunday, but those plans had to be cancelled.  Thanks Tony/Heather/Jess for putting up with me! :)

That's how many photos I took in a 27 hour trip to Parkes and The Dish (open day)

Which was awesome!

One day soon I'll get some photos online...

This year the flowers were arranged into patterns, but you'd really need to see them from the air to actually see those patterns.

Finally a bit of a wander before heading home.

Real orchids encased in resin

I'd really love a string of these... really!! :)

Mobile ATMs!