Stu suggested that I do a post entirely on the birds of Lord Howe Island.. I initially thought there wouldn't be enough to make it at worthwhile post. But as it turns out, I photographed at least fifteen different species of birds while we were there.

This is sort of in chronological order that we saw them.

White Tern (Gygis alba)
Seen all around the pine trees around the main settlement

Flesh-footed Shearwater (Muttonbird) (Puffinus carneipes)
Come in to land at Ned's Beach every evening during summer

Purple Swamphen (Porphyrio porphyrio)
We photographed this one near Old Settlement Beach

Blackbird (Turdus merula)
Also photographed near Old Settlement Beach, but found all around the main settlement

Lord Howe Island Currawong (Strepera graculina crissalis)
This one followed us partway up the walk up to the Goathouse on Mt Lidgbird. One even swooped on Stu on the way down. We had another one follow us between Malabar and Kim's Lookout

Woodhen (Tricholimnas sylvestris)
We saw one of these in the grounds of Blue Lagoon, and a few on the Goathouse walk

Emerald Ground-dove (Chalcophaps indica)
Seen around the palms/grass area on the way to Ned's Beach

Sooty Tern (Sterna fuscata)
All over the place - Ned's Beach, Blinky Beach, top of Mt Eliza, even top of Malabar

Brown Noddy (Anous stolidus)
Similar places to the Sooty Terns, but up the cliffs a bit not on the ground. This one was at Ned's Beach.

Lord Howe White-eye (Zosterops tephropleura)
Seen near the top of Malabar

Red-tailed Tropicbird (Phaethon rubricauda)
Seen off the cliffs of Malabar. They didn't really come close enough to get any good photos of them.

Australian Kestrel (Falco cenchroides)
Seen walking up to Malabar. We got an out of focus one of it looking at us but took off when we got closer.

Ruddy Turnstone (Arenaria interpres)
Seen at Old Settlement Beach

Bar-tailed Godwit (Limosa lapponica)
At least we think that's what it is :) Also at Old Settlement Beach

Buff-banded Rail (Gallirallus philippensis)
This bird was annoying to photograph because it would run off as soon as you got anywhere near it. Seen all around the airport, golf course, grassed areas. This one photographed at the lookout park near the main settlement.

We also saw these birds but didn't get to photograph them (or didn't choose to):

Sacred Kingfisher (Todiramphus sanctus)
Magpie Lark (Peewee) (Grallina cyanoleuca)
Welcome Swallow (Hirundo neoxena)
Hybrid Duck (Mallard cross Pacific Black) (Anas superciliosa x platyrhynchos)

Our last day was a bit of a nothing day.

We got up and got ready, packed everything up, paid the bill, and moved our stuff to the games room.

Headed down to Humpty Mick's for a long big breakfast, then came back and played some pool in the games room.

Around 11:30am they took us to the airport. For a 3pm flight. (!!) Even though the dude made two separate other trips to the airport that we could have come along with. Oh well. We watched two other flights come and go.

Apparently at least one of them was to Sydney. Even though the booking dude had said the day before that our one was the first Sydney flight. sigh. After finally checking in, we went for a walk down to the lagoon.

And then it was onto the plane and home. It was rainy and cloudy so the takeoff wasn't very exciting.

And we came straight in from the south on the main runway so the landing was even less exciting.

Then a mission to get to my parents place. Walked straight onto a 400, but *just* missed the train at Rockdale, so a half hour wait. When we'd been there twenty-five minutes, they announced our train was leaving from the other platform, so it was up and over. Then that train got terminated at Hurstville. So it took an hour and a half to do what should have been a half hour trip.

Dinner was a nice roast beef. Showed the parents the photos on the laptop. Then it was home. Except "going home" from my parents which usually takes fifteen minutes, took three hours. Still doesn't really feel like home though.....

This morning we decided to have breakfast at Humpty Mick's - bacon and eggs yummmmm.

Had a meandering morning, wandering down to the Environmental Tours mob to go on a glass-bottom boat tour. They took us to a couple of the "holes" in the lagoon. The dude fed some fish at one point which caused somewhat of a frenzy. When we go out further we got to go snorkelling with lots and lots of fish, and lots of very pretty coral. Well worth doing.

Came back and picked up our bbq chook for lunch.

Had a bit of a rest. We were going to go out snorkelling again at Ned's Beach, but I was not feeling like getting cold and wet, so we decided to just wade in and feed the fish. Got some pretty cool photos of them.

We ran into Sue and Keith again and we all wandered up the beach to see the sooty terns. So much fun those little birds.

As we were wandering back I saw a sooty tern hobbling up the beach looking not too healthy. I went over to it and it didn't fly away, so I picked it up. It was trailing its right wing and was quite weak. Decided we couldn't leave it there to starve to death, so decided to take it back to civilisation to see if someone could take care of it. Part way up the road we found a couple in their ute, who turned out to be locals, and they said they knew where it could be taken, and said they'd take it for me. So hope it'll be all right. Or if not, it could at least be put down quickly.

At this point I have to mention Stu's pun .. he said the dude I gave the Sooty Tern to probably used it to make sausages - he took a tern for the wurst .. get it?? ;)

Went to have a look at the sunset, but there were too many clouds, so it was back to watch the mutton birds come in. Lots of fun. Got to touch a couple of them. So soft!

Yet another meal at Humpty Mick's - this time the Jaques Del Mer pizza, with a great big salad. Was all very delicious.

And so ends another day.

Oh, one tragic thing about today - the arrival of the A380 in Sydney for its first commercial flight for Singapore Airlines. This is one really sucky thing about living in Canberra - not getting to see this sort of thing. Not that I could have seen it even if I had been living in Sydney, being off the mainland and all. They're doing daily flights from Monday, by which time I'll have gone home - doh!

So after brekky we headed down to Humpty Mick's for a coffee and to try and decide what to do today. Which was somewhere between wanting to *do* something and wanting to *sit*. Which proved to be frustrating for both of us. We ended up doing more sitting than doing.

Eventually we headed off to the island museum which was very interesting.

They had an internet kiosk there for $2 for twenty minutes which wasn't too bad, but it was very slow, especially for cia mail. We had lunch at the Coral Cafe.

Came back here and did some more nothing. Well Stu did. I went down to Ned's beach to photograph the Sooty Terns which were nesting. Well nesting is exaggerating it a bit. They just lay their eggs on the ground. And chirp agitatedly at you when you come near. Very cool. Took an awful lot of photos of them.

Next we wandered down to the lagoon and dodged some raindrops to go out snorkelling. Completely spectacular. The coral was a little dull in the bit of the lagoon we went to, but we saw plenty of amazing fish.
We stayed out for nearly two hours and only came in when my fingers started to go numb from the cold. I'd like to go out on one of the cruises that go out to the outer reef where the coral is more spectacular.

Then had another go at getting my card-reading cd burner working. It's an Apacer Steno, and is a great idea in principle - a stand-alone cd burner with inbuilt 6-in-1 card reader. Except that it doesn't read two out of the three brands of memory cards I have. Not particularly useful. Maybe that was why it was returned to Ted's and why I ended up with it second-hand. blah. stoopid thing.

So off to dinner - this time at the bowling club for their fish night. We sat with Sue and Keith, who we kept seeing - first on the plane, then outside Thompson's Store, then at dinner last night. So that was quite pleasant.

And so ends another day .. must be about bed time :)

Well woke up and it was all cloudy, so lay in bed for another hour or two.

Eventually we got up and had breakfast, then went down to Humpty Mick's for a coffee. Then we wandered up towards Old Settlement Beach and had a look at the Catalina crash site, and said hello to all the cows.

Wandered down to the beach and decided we wanted to come back to do some snorkelling later. Then went up to a bit of a headland which has a nice view of the lagoon and a little park area.

Went on a mission to Joy's Store to gather supplies and wandered back to our room to have lunch.

Then it was on to the base of Mt Lidgbird to do the Goathouse walk.

Via a nice view of the lagoon..

Oh. My. Goodness.

It was very hard work. We got very hot. And sweaty. Took about two hours of intense and not so intense climbing, some of it with ropes.

The view from the top was pretty impressive. Although Stu didn't go to the Goathouse itself as it was literally on the side of a cliff. Took a whole stack of photos.

Then headed back down again. On the way down we got some cool photos of some woodhens. One of them was happy to scratch around us, letting us take lots of photos.

Just when we thought it was all over, we still had a half hour bike ride back :( I actually stopped on the way back to take some sunset photos.

Then it was off to dinner, once again at Humpty Mick's. We still haven't been anywhere else :) I had a vegie lasagna (I was having veggie cravings) and Stu had salt and pepper squid. We also had a couple of beers each. It was all very yummy. Then back here to crash.

ok so I've been using Vista for less than a day now.

It completely and utterly sux.

I should have listened to everything I've ever heard and gone with XP.

Problem 1: Crap backup

You don't get NTbackup anymore. You get some other homegrown Vista backup. Which is crap. You can't actually choose a folder to backup. You can just choose the type of files to backup. Completely and utterly useless. Apparently people have complained so much that Microsoft has made ntbackup available for download for Vista. Unfortunately it only does restores of XP files. To do actual backups you still need to grab ntbackup from an XP machine. This of course doesn't let you do system state. Presumably one of the other recovery options lets you recover the actual system if it gets lost. Haven't read up too much on that.

Problem 2: Moving Files

In every other (Windows) operating system released by Microsoft, moving files on your hard drive was a simple drag and drop and would be done in a split second. Now when you move files it sits there and *calculates* all the files you have to move. WTF???? I aborted a move of about 10gb of files after it said it was going to take 90 days to complete. Only to find it had moved about half of the files after about 5 minutes. Did the other directories piecemeal so that I could watch them go. What a piece of frigging crap.

Problem 3: Mysterious Permission Denieds

When I was moving some of my files, at one point it barfed and said permission denied moving the files. No explanation why. I moved on and did other directories and came back to the problematic one later. I tried moving the subdirectories themselves, only to have it finally say it couldn't move the putty directory because it was in use (I was actually using putty at the time). Why it couldn't tell me this when I was doing the upper level directory I don't know.

Problem 4: Stoopid views

If you have a directory with mostly images, it decides they're photos and makes stoopid views accordingly. Like with tags and ratings and "date taken". Give me standard columns dammit!! So I set my views back to the way I like them and say reset folders. Except that it won't do that to *all* folders, only folders of the same type was what I'm in now. Picture folders are their own type and you have to do them separately. So I try going to an upper level folder and going customize and setting all subfolders to be this type and CRASH EXPLORER!!!! Strangely enough, it seemed to actually reset all the sub-folders to the default style I'd set, even though it had crashed.

Problem 5: Memory

Vista is bloatware to the max. To the point of only running it for less than 24 hours and it had completely run out of memory. I have 3gb of physical memory. You'd think that would be enough. Apparently not. It seems you need to reboot every six hours even with 3gb of memory and not actually *doing* anything. When I got back from dinner it had gone into powersaving mode and couldn't be recovered. The hard disk was churning away, but nothing would come up on screen. No frigging idea what it was doing. Ended up cold booting the bastard.

Problem 6: Weird IE translations

WTF? Every time my mouse hovers over a word I get some weird translation of what it means in some other language?? Huh??? What is that? How do I turn it off????

Really really pissed with Vista (and James). I should have listened to my heart and gotten XP.

Some photos that got banked up during my last weeks of work.... (lots more to come in later posts :) )

Four "generations" of Blackberries. The last two are technically the same generation I think. There's a 7290, an 8700, 8800, 8300

Best opening ever in Spider Solitaire

The massive pile of crap we chucked out at work the other week. And that wasn't even everything, there's still much more to be tossed.

Look mum I can see my house from here! Well perhaps, but maybe just the roof

The pile of paperwork I tossed from the filing cabinet on my second last day

My 2cm long finger nail! It broke yesterday. It has been growing for about nine months

Happy .. something .. !

Had our "internal" farewell at lunch today - just a trip to the pub. But it was so much nicer and more relaxing and I had a couple of beers and John came and it was just so much better.

Threw out about 50cm of paper today. Emptied out my old boss' filing cabinet. Most of the stuff in there was filed in around 1999 by an admin temp we had at the time. Virtually nothing had been filed since. So I tossed pretty much all of it. It was an awful lot of fun :) I also tossed 3/4 of the stuff I had in my personal filing drawer. Very liberating :) And in two years time someone will say "whatever happened to xyz document?" and I won't be there to say I tossed it .. mwooohahahaha. I'd post a photo but Stu is about to call (have a mounting pile of photos I need to blog .. one day...)

I shut down conspiracy today. Well the website is still active, I just moved its dns and files elsewhere. But I finally turned off the box that it's been running on for about 6-7 years. This computer happened to be my second computer, that I bought in 1996. ! A pentium 166 running NT4. They wanted the rackspace back, turns out that rackspace is more expensive that disk space nowadays :) The whole reason I set it up in the first place was not clutter up godzilla with all my photos. Now they don't care that I'm taking up a few gig on one of their servers. I should probably move my blog across to it also (it's 289mb all up including logs), to keep all my websites in the one place, all managed through a funky cPanel interface.

Just another good thing coming to an end this week..

Only driving past this another 14 times (well 28 really, plus whatever extra trips I may need to make...)

My Finger, Pull

Blind Man Driving

I stole the minifig's cap

Minifig capless

Does anyone know what these are?