Questacon Redux

Two months after my first visit to see the Lego, I went with the little brother on my birthday.

For another quacking good time hehe.  Definitely a much nicer experience going on a weekday rather than a school holiday weekend.

Questacon

Pretty lights

Sisyphus

Me and a big minifig

Tesla coil

Tesla coil

Can you see the cat?

David trying to beat the maze

Stromatolite

Stromatolite

Stromatolite

Drip

AI room

Beef Ribs

10.6.24

Yeah, so long ago I've forgotten pretty much everything. I'm pretty sure I used this recipe from RecipeTinEats (the website not the book), but I used beef ribs instead of pork ribs.

There was a dry rub

Beef ribs ingredients

Beef ribs rub

Beef ribs coated

Then a sauce

Beef ribs ingredients

Beef ribs sauce

After being cooked for a while

Beef ribs coated

Turned over

Beef ribs cooked

And done.

Beef ribs cooked

I do remember that they definitely weren't fall off the bone tender.  Definitely would need to have cooked them a lot longer and slower.  And there was a lot of fat which wasn't super pleasant.

Not sure if I'd bother again.

Ginninderra Creek

Went here the other day with EB.  But first up, a swing.  Not sure that I've actually been on a swing since the end of 2005.. hrmmmm..

Kaz swing

Ginninderra Creek

Ginninderra Creek

Purple flowers

Purple flowers

I hadn't been to the spillway since the end of 2010 when it was flowing.  And I walked all the way down the top of the concrete barricade.  Cause that's what you do when you've had a few drinks :)

Ginninderra spillway

Ginninderra spillway

Ginninderra Creek

Ginninderra Creek

Monday.  28th.  Cranky cause I was meant to do a time use survey over the weekend.  Except they mailed me on Thursday.  We went to Queensland on Friday.  I never saw the emails til Monday.  When the survey had closed.  With only a "noreply" email address to reply to.  "noreply" email addresses should totally be outlawed. 

The congo tetra that hadn't been eating had died.  I was also trying to fix the outflow to the 620T tank, and found the stone that I'd previously used to pin down the filter wool from flowing away had gotten stuck there.  Just trying to deal with all the crap and suddenly it's 8:40.  Sigh.  Catching up and dealing with crap all day.  Blogged last week.  Cooked some frozen chicken pieces I had in the freezer with some veggies for dinner (cabbage bake and brussels sprouts).  Watched Mazey Day on Black Mirror.  Another "low tech" one.  Another one where they can't keep the damned camera still.

Chicken and veggies

Tuesday.  Slept mostly ok.  Pissed off at one of my lovely poppy plants being knocked over.  I blame retarded cats.

Poppy disaster

So I brought the flowers inside.  As you do.

Indoor poppies

Bits and pieces day, mostly watching security talks. 

Poppy tenacity

Lemon flower

Leftovers and random stuff for dinner.  Demon 79 on Black Mirror.  Another "low tech" one.

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok (once I finally got to sleep).  Of note is that I finally finished uploading all my Queensland 2014 photos!!  For those of you reading along at home (hi Mum!) you can go back and see food and hotel photos.  Noone else will ever care, I'm sure.  Took an early mark and went with Neil and Tony to Herbert's to finally try the very last TRBC beer - a blood orange sour.

TRBC blood orange sour

Neil 1000 beers

The sweetie decided we had to have pizzas on a Wednesday since I'd be out Thursday night.. 

Pizzas

ISS

Thursday.  Slept mostly ok.  Stu thought it was Friday cause I'd been out drinking the night before and we'd had pizza for dinner.. 

The lake is very low at the moment...
Lake low

Crap all day.  Drinks, trivia night.  Heaps of trash, like a whole round on exec baby/kid photos, and some super specific stuff that if you worked in the right area you *might* know, or crap like when does a full moon next fall on Halloween (and when did it last).  ie, not a whole heap of actual real trivia.  The exec table won.  Yeup.

Friday.  Slept mostly ok although woke up very early.  Crap all day again. 

The poppies that I brought inside.  I didn't think the unopened buds would open but they did!  But with a delicate peach colour rather than the bright orange they'd normally be.
Indoor poppies

The neighbour's bamboo is making a break for freedom.. hmmmmmmm!!
Bamboo shoot

This can't be good!!

Lemon tree broken

Lemon tree broken

The sweetie ordered Dumpling Inn for dinner nom nom nom.  The National Anthem on Black Mirror (for some reason Netflix started me at season 6, so back to season 1).  Early night.

Saturday.  Slept mostly ok.  A day of All The Things.  Starting with the broken lemon tree..

All the lemons

Yeah .. 112 of them .. !!  I put 20 of them on the letterbox with a sign that said "free".  Only four left by the end of the day.

Changed the nameservers for kazza.id.au over to CloudLoop.  Did some hosting tidying up and clearing stuff out of Vodien.  

Same plant, two colours...

Bottlebrush

Bottlebrush

Leftover Dumpling Inn for dinner.  Watched an episode of Donna Hay's Christmas special from 2022.  Found her house in Avalon in a few minutes.  Although I guess it could always be some family/friend's house.  Fifteen Million Merits on Black Mirror.

Sunday.  Slept ok.  Another day of All The Things.  And still didn't get nearly enough done. 

Now what

Put another 10 lemons out on the letter box.  All gone by the end of the day.  Still have like 70 on the family room table...

Finally posted my dramas with Vodien over August/September.

Also this little bastard nearly dropped on my head.  I heard it go *thonk* right next to me as it fell down from the roof!

Spider drop

Hot today.  Like 31.  Gross.

Dear Vodien, 

Here's a bowl of petunias:
Bowl of petunias

Tuesday 27.8.24.

I went to update my blog because I realised I'd forgotten to add a photo from last week's entry. Loaded the blog interface but got this:

Got an error: Connection error: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)

Loaded terminal through cPanel. Which luckily worked (no CageFS errors this time). Ran my test perl script which connects to SQL and got this:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
DBI connect('db:localhost','<user>',...) failed: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2) at common.pl line 18.
Cannot connect: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)

In phpMyAdmin in cPanel I got:

mysqli_sql_exception: Access denied for user '<user>'@'localhost' (using password: YES)

Fricken great. Just what I need. Feeling like I should be buying a bowl of petunias for Vodien.


Wednesday 28.8.24.

I remembered that I'd had the phpMyAdmin error before, and the fix was to just reset the cPanel password. So I did that. Great, phpMyAdmin loads.

Except.

My MySQL database had been reverted to a point in time from last October!!

!!!!

AGAIN!!

Yeah so the exact same problem as in June where they reverted it back to the same spot in October. In June, after a week or two of yelling at them, they restored it.

So of course I yelled at them.

I didn't send them a photo of a bowl of petunias. I should have.

Now before you ask, yes I do have recent backups of my database, having learnt my lesson from last time, but that's not the damned point. In fact I'd taken a backup the Sunday before, so I was only missing one entry from my blog. But as it turned out, having my own backup was not going to help. But we'll get to that later.


Thursday 29.8.24

Vodien ticket escalated (supposedly) to the sysadmins.


Friday 30.8.24.

Still no response from Vodien about the database restore.


Saturday 31.8.24.

Still no response from Vodien about the database restore.


Sunday 1.9.24.

Still no response from Vodien - three days now. Started a new ticket. Which they promptly closed.

I changed the permissions on mt-comments.cgi so noone could post any comments. They would either fail because the entries don't exist, or break the site with a republish. And I didn't want more mess to clean up.


Monday 2.9.24.

Vodien provided a restore of the database in an .sql file and said here you go. But it was the database at the "bad" restore point from October last year - so it didn't have any recent data in it.


Tuesday 3.9.24.

One week in.

No progress getting Vodien to restore the correct database for me.


Wednesday 4.9.24.

Vodien basically keep telling me I have to restore my database myself. Which I was considering doing, assuming I actually had the right data. I did end up getting a copy that was taken a few days before they broke it, but I decided to keep pushing for the whole thing.

Then I went to my blog interface to check it and got

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator at webmaster@<domain> to inform them of the time this error occurred, and the actions you performed just before this error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

And logging into the terminal in cPanel I got

cagefs_enter: Error entering cagefs jail: Unable to mount /var/cagefs/35/<user>/home2 -> /usr/share/cagefs-skeleton/home: Too many levels of symbolic links.

So either they were trying to fix it or just making it worse.


Thursday 5.9.24.

Slept like crap. Stressing about my website. At least the cagefs file system on my website was working again in the morning. But the database is still bad.


Friday-Sunday.

Long weekend in Port Macquarie.


Sunday 8.9.24.

Checked my mail when we were near home. I shouldn't have, because the lack of useful response was just making me more and more depressed.


Monday 9.9.24.

While not getting to sleep last night I wondered if maybe there were two database servers on the server. It always used to be MySQL, but the restore they did recently (and I think I might have noticed this previously) was from Maria DB. Same only different. My latest theory is there's actually the old MySQL database server still on the host, and for whatever reason the pointers for Perl and phpMyAdmin have been pointed back at it (again). I mentioned this to them, but their only response was "what's the URL of your blog entry manager?". Yeah right like I'm going to let you into that. So I gave them a command line command that they could use to query my address book database, which has also been impacted by this whole drama. That was in the morning. No response by evening.


Tuesday 10.9.24.

Two weeks in.

No response from Vodien. Eventually they responded with something that didn't make sense, so yelled at them again to put this through to a senior sysadmin.

As an aside: if you Google "Vodien is trash" (I literally did this) you'll get links to review pages that have page after page of people ranting about how utterly trash Vodien is. One star reviews all the way.


Wednesday 11.9.24.

Awake from after 3. Vodien sent me a database restore. But restored from 19 August which was before my last backup anyway.

Tried to reload my blog index, but I got:

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator at webmaster@kazza.ciapics.cia.com.au to inform them of the time this error occurred, and the actions you performed just before this error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Turns out they've blatted all my cgi scripts permissions to 644 instead of 755 or 744. Every single one of them.

WTF?? I mean seriously, WTF???

So now what. Do I take their database, restore it, and hope they don't flip over to the other database at some random point (which I couldn't even find out from them if that's what had happened). Or do I just give up and take my clean backup to a new hosting company. Ok I'd pretty much made up my mind I was going to move. They've broken my site multiple times in the past few years, and it always takes days or weeks of yelling to get it resolved. I'm sick of it.


Thursday 12.9.24.

Apparently they've restored a database again.


Friday 13.9.24.

Tried opening my blog interface and got this:

Got an error: Connection error: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (111)

Yet my Address Book scripts still work. Ok, gave it some time and it came back. But database was still from October 2023.


Saturday 14.9.24.

Resolved myself to spending my entire weekend sorting out this mess.

Step one: find a new hosting company.

Back in 2020 I tried VentraIP. It looked to have everything I wanted and was a good price. I talked to them online before I joined and said I had a Perl/MySQL setup and they said that was fine. But when I went to get it going I found they didn't have the DBD::MySQL perl module and my blog wouldn't work. So that was a complete waste of time. So I wasn't going to try them again.

Had a look on https://www.productreview.com.au/ and someone recommended CloudLoop and they had excellent reviews. So had a look. $10/month for a basic plan which would cover what I needed. They didn't have an online chat, so I emailed them asking about Perl/MySQL. This was fairly early on a Saturday morning. They responded in MINUTES! I was impressed. So I joined up. Pro-rata til the end of the month it was only around $5, so even if it didn't work out I wouldn't lose much.

After the account was activated a short time later, I logged into cPanel only to find they don't have Terminal enabled. Fricken great. So set myself up an SSH private key to try and use ssh. But Internode blocks ssh doesn't it. Fricken fricken. So tried to log into Internode, but their MFA is trash and I had to log off/on a few times before I could finally get in. Also, Stu's phone number is out of date, but we can't update it because:

Your contact details cannot be changed at this time
Unfortunately, your contact details cannot be viewed or changed online at this time. Please contact us to update your details. We apologise for any inconvenience.

Thanks Internode, sorry iinet, sorry TPG.

Anyways, eventually got in and turned off the firewall, now to wait and see if it will work.

In the meantime I emailed support about Terminal in cPanel. Again they responded in minutes. They said it was not available for security reasons, but they enabled ssh access and I had to whitelist my IP address in the firewall. Which I couldn't actually find.
But.
Terminal now showed up in cPanel! Great! That's really all I need anyway. Let's do this thing!
(I think they may have mixed up ssh/cpanel terminal - so ssh is disabled which is fair enough, but the terminal in cpanel had been enabled which is all I needed anyway).

So first step is to make sure Perl will work with MySQL. I imported my address book database (it's only tiny) and tried out one of my scripts.

Can't locate CGI.pm in @INC (you may need to install the CGI module) (@INC contains: /usr/local/lib64/perl5 /usr/local/share/perl5 /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/lib64/perl5 /usr/share/perl5) at quickie.cgi line 3.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at quickie.cgi line 3.

Turns out CGI.pm hasn't been around since Perl 5.22. Vodien has 5.16. CloudLoop has 5.26.

So I get CGI.pm from CPAN. Add a line to my script to use lib and the path of the file. Works!

Next up my blog script (mt-check to start with). It wanted Util.pm so copied that up as well.

But then it wanted FCGI.pm. Got that too, but this time I got this error:

Can't locate loadable object for module FCGI in @INC

Which I think means it needs to be properly installed/compiled for binaries, which I can't do. hmmmmm

Ok so then ran mt-check on the web. It actually ran! It complained about a bunch of modules, but then it complains on the old site as well. It loaded enough that I might be able to work with it.

So next I need to get my database imported. I still didn't have the most current database export from Vodien (their exports are a different format to mine), so I used my own backup. But I was running into all sorts of problems. phpMyAdmin wouldn't import the file, giving sql errors when importing the "blob" data. And the file is 50MB so trying to edit it and cut it down to just do individual tables was proving problematic. Now I didn't have these problems when I tried VentraIP a few years back, so I'm guessing there must be some versioning problems or something?? But I was getting super frustrated with it. I did have a go at using Vodien's sql file and that one did import, albeit with old data.


Sunday 15.9.24.

So with some actual blog data in the database I next had to get an eighteen year old release of Movable Type working on a modern server. Yes yes I know I should update to something else. But newer versions of Movable Type are $499USD. PER YEAR. And I've seen the dramas people have moving to WordPress. Stu has threatened to spend his retirement moving it to a more modern platform heh. But in the meantime, I just want my blog to work.

So first up I try running mt.cgi on the command line to see what sort of errors I'd get.

[user@server MT-5.2.2]$ perl mt.cgi
Possible precedence issue with control flow operator at lib/MT/App.pm line 1821.
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Got an error: Unescaped left brace in regex is illegal here in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/{{ <-- HERE support}}/?/

Yeah so now you need to escape {} characters in regex strings. Think I fixed that.

So then did a test post and that actually worked!! (using a hosts file entry on my computer so I could test it out on CloudLoop before changing DNS anywhere)

Well that was good enough for me to commit to moving the site across.

Tarballed my directory up on Vodien. ~2.5GB. !! Downloaded it to my computer, extracted it, saved into a number of smaller zip files, uploaded them one at a time, extracted them. Uploading large files must be a bit upsetting for Internode, and I kept getting dumped out of FTP because our IP address kept changing. Have I ever mentioned how trash Internode has become since they got bought out by iinet then TPG? Also I have a 5GB size limit on CloudLoop. Anyways, got there in the end.

Now all that's left is to get a proper copy of my database from Vodien. They did have a restore file taken on the morning of 26 August - the morning after my last blog post. But the files were owned by root and I had no read access. After a few chats/emails back and forth I realised there were actually two copies of the files, one in the root and one in my website. So got them. And they were perfect! Well, they had my latest data in them anyway.

Right, so tried to use phpMyAdmin to import it, but got errors again (didn't record what). But then I found this command

mysql -u database_username -p database_name < file.sql
from this site https://support.hostinger.com/en/articles/4536306-how-to-import-a-database-over-ssh
And that worked perfectly.

But it was at this point I realised that the export sql file was full of funky characters. Somewhere along the line "special characters" from foreign languages lost encoding and were broken. Tried doing search/replaces in vi, but it didn't want to play. So put that aside for now.

Tested posting some blog entries and they worked, so hopefully the database is working well enough.

But I was getting SSL certificate errors - saying it was self signed. I changed the DNS A record in Vodien and waited for it to change over, but I was still getting errors on https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html#hostname=kazza.id.au

Emailed CloudLoop support again. Once again I got a response in minutes. And then sslhopper was picking the certificate up properly. Not sure if they did anything or not, but I was blown away by the responsiveness and usefulness of CloudLoop support. It's like a breath of fresh air after dealing with the faceless Vodien.


Monday 16.9.24.

Before all these dramas started I'd already been meaning to fix up my blogs properly. I'd fixed the style sheet on my main blog to be hardcoded to https, but I hadn't published it to everywhere, comments were still broken on https, and I wanted to get all my holidays blogs using a consistent design. I also wanted to replace the defunct Google Analytics scripts with the new ones. So after dinner I spent ages working on my holiday blog templates - fixing everything so it all works in https, fixing style sheet locations etc. I picked the Americas 2023 blog (the last one I did) and made sure everything worked properly, then made a Theme from it.


Tuesday 17.9.24.

Working through all my holiday blogs using the updated theme/design. The special characters in my Turkey blog were proving problematic :( Some of the characters I can do a search/replace in the blog interface and it'll go through and change them all. While this works for some characters (eg umlauts) it wouldn't work for some of the characters in the Turkish language :( I also found and fixed a time zone setting in my blog that has been annoying me for twenty years haha.


Wednesday/Thursday/Friday

Work on fixing holiday blogs.


Saturday 21.9.24.

Finished fixing up my holiday blogs (including the Australian Holidays blog which has a slightly different config to it, although have since found a couple of problems I still need to fix).

So then it was onto my behemoth of a main blog. There's over five thousand entries in it. The last time I tried to publish after design update it took over a day. Look I even took a screen shot! Blog publish

So I was dreading the pain it was going to cause. I'd taken notes during the fixing of my holiday blogs design, so it was pretty quick to repeat the changes in the main blog. But before I committed, I wanted to test the design with a test post to make sure it picked up everything ok.

Took a while and then BAM..

500
Internal Server Error
An internal server error has occurred.

The good news is the entry did actually post. Although not properly, and it was intermittent. Like it'd mostly update the entry page, but then not the archives page etc. So thinking there might be resource limits. I didn't see any real spikes/errors in the cPanel Resource Usage thingie though.

I tried clearing out the entire activity log. This cleared nearly 9MB out of the database. But it didn't help. I tried a few other Movable Type config options as well with no luck.

So I emailed CloudLoop support again. Once again I got a super quick response. And a stack trace. And they looked while trying to reproduce the problem themselves. This was all well and truly above and beyond the level of support I would have expected. I was astounded. But a definite possibility was the Assets. Since Movable Type 4, whenever you upload an image it would save it to the database as an asset. This annoyed me when it first started because of all the extra clutter, but I did like it simply because it'd read the image and put height/width info into the html. But after sixteen years, I had 14000 assets. !! So I deleted them all!! (well, firstly I tested what would happen if you did. I found it would delete the asset and the image itself, but it left the html alone. So all I needed to do was restore the images once I'd deleted the assets, and all would be well).

Then I did a test post.

It published.

In SECONDS.

!!!!

After a bit more testing of posting and commenting I was ready to release the hounds. I republished the entire site. I did it in chunks, but it was all done in under ten minutes. And search results are returned super quickly too now. My blog hasn't been this fast in YEARS!!!

The only real remaining issue now is the foreign characters. I download the mt-entry table (16MB) and did some search/replaces and was able to fix a lot of it. But there's some characters that I just can't publish because it won't talk to the database. There might be a way to fix it. Something about telling perl to talk to MySQL with the right version of utf-8. But I'm too dumb for that sort of thing. Replaced a good chunk of the bad characters. Almost accidentally blatted the .bak table because I forgot to change the table name in the insert into lines (yay for it not importing duplicate entries). Had to redo the whole thing again because I didn't escape ' and " characters. Then republished again. Nine minutes, fifty seconds. I should probably republish all my holiday blogs too.


Sunday 22.9.24.

Spent most of the afternoon blogging entries from the past month.


Monday 23.9.24.

Wrote up this post so far.

I still haven't changed my mail or DNS configs over yet. Or the websites for my subdomains. I'll do that first before I post this.

I haven't decided what I'll do with johnson.id.au or trainman.id.au. I'd actually prefer to keep trainman where it is, because then I'd be able to email David again (currently using my account as an SMTP server, which intercepts mail for trainman.id.au and delivers it to me instead of David).

I also need to figure out how to backup my database properly. I'll have to do some testing of exporting/importing the data on the same version. Otherwise I'm going to need to figure out a better way to backup the blob data in the database. If I hadn't been able to get the Maria DB dump from Vodien I would have been a bit stuck as I wasn't able to properly import my own database backup, which is quite upsetting.


Tuesday 24.9.24.

Started going through and documenting everything in my Vodien cPanel setup. Found a place for mail forwarding, so tried setting trainman.id.au to an external MX record to see what would happen if I sent mail there from my account. It hasn't bounced back to me, so maybe it did deliver to David. This is good to know if I end up moving trainman.id.au to CloudLoop. Also found another backup section which lets you download MySQL databases. This has the same format as what Vodien sent to me. Interestingly the Vodien export is full of trash characters, while the CloudLoop export is fine. This is good news. Dropped my TTLs on mail to 300. Setup my mail accounts on CloudLoop. Tried them out in Eudora. TLS errors to start with, but easily fixed by setting TLS to Required, Alternate Port in Eudora. So changed the DNS for mail.kazza.id.au to point at CloudLoop. So inbound mail all working. Had a look at migrating ciapics over. But it's half a gig. And I only have five on CloudLoop. Considering leaving it there, but I really want to take all of kazza.id.au off Vodien. Next up - SMTP. Got it to auth and send ok, but now to battle with the SPF record. Adding the IP address of my host didn't help. Or adding relay.mailchannels.net. hmm. On a lighter note, cPanel and DNS are actually integrated on CloudLoop which is nice.


Wednesday 25.9.24.

Tested mail again and my SPF record has propagated around so that's nice - can send to gmail now. Although this is all likely to be moot once I switch the nameservers across and use CloudLoops DNS which already has all this stuff. While clearing stuff out of Vodien I discovered that at some point they'd actually fixed the ownership of the db restores. Lolz.


Friday 27.9.24.

Setup johnson.id.au as a domain on CloudLoop.  Copied over the content (there's like, one page).  Then changed the nameservers from Vodien to CloudLoop.  Tested email once DNS propagated.


Saturday 2.11.24.

Been on CloudLoop for like six or seven weeks now. No issues. Today I changed the nameservers for kazza.id.au to point at CloudLoop. Pointed a few A names of my photo subdomains back at Vodien. They have a lot more storage so keeping my photos sites there.


Sunday 3.11.24.

Cleaned out most of kazza.id.au off Vodien, including my blog database. Left an entry in my addressbook database and make sure the scripts were working to access it. So I'll be able to tell when Vodien break it again.


In conclusion.

I knew as soon as Vodien broke my database AGAIN for the second time in three months that I was going to have to finally move my blog. This was reinforced over the next few weeks by being impossible to get anyone who actually cared or had the capability to look at the issue and fix it. No matter how much pleading and yelling I did I just couldn't get anywhere. It made me seriously depressed for weeks. I was also upset that the backups of the database I'd been dutifully taking weren't necessarily going to work properly.

On the flip side, the support and responsiveness of CloudLoop (Karthick) was utterly outstanding. They definitely deserve their five star reviews.

In the end my blog is a lot happier. The holiday sites are consistent in design and everything works properly in HTTPS. The culling of the assets out of the database means my entries publish in seconds. Every new year I'll clear out the previous year's assets to keep it trimmed down.

Let's hope I don't have to write another one of these posts any time soon...

Sunday.  20th.  Kiev and veggies for dinner.  Loch Henry on Black Mirror.  Far out I wish they'd keep the camera still.  

Baby dill

Kievs and veggies

Went out to find the comet (Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS).  I only knew where to look cause David posted a photo the night before.  Of course I couldn't actually see it.  I'm blind and there's too much city light.  And I couldn't be stuffed taking my cameras/tripod.  So I took some crappy photos on my phone.  As you do.

2024 comet

2024 comet

Monday.  Slept mostly ok.  Didn't get to do my doco clearing cause All The People wanted All The Things.  Had a long lunch to do bank and tax crap.  Tax was surprisingly painless.  I was stunned at how much is automatically populated by the ATO.  David dropped in for meat and veggies for dinner before heading home again.  Watched Beyond the Sea on Black Mirror.  You just know things are going to go Very Badly on this show, although I didn't quite pick *how* it would turn out.  When she said "What if.. what if you let him use your link?" .. you can already see where this is going..  heh.  But keep the damned camera still!!!

Tuesday.  Slept ok I think.  Mostly finishing up decom doco at work.  Mum photo picking in the evening.

Wednesday.  Slept ok I think.  OMFG windoze is so trash.  Like, for most of the time I've had this computer I can't actually shut it down.  I tell it to, but it just logs me off and stays at the login screen.  I have to actually reboot it and turn it off half way through the reboot cycle.  Had a scheduled power outage.  The Solar Edge system dutifully kicked in and kept all the fish tanks running.  But it didn't charge the battery at all.  This was totally not what we were sold on.  Had an early mark and went to Herbert's.  I was on a mission to finish the Ginja Ninja so they'd put on the dessert sour.  Alas, I couldn't do it.  But they were likely my last ever Ginja Ninjas.  Unless someone buys out and continues running TRBC.  TV dinners for dinner.  Have I mentioned how trash windoze is?  This time, after turning on my computer and backing it up, it refused to eject the disk.  Even though I had pretty much nothing running on account of having just rebooted.  I could hear that *something* had the disk open.  But even leaving it for ages it wouldn't let go.  Ended up rebooting again to clear it.  Hate windoze.  Hate hate hate hate.

There's something you don't see every day - a two leaf clover!!!  And a four.  But I see those all the time ;)
2 leaf and 4 leaf clovers

HFC (healthy fried chicken) Chipotle burger from Grill'd (went with Neil at lunch)
HFC Chipotle

Possibly one of my last ever Ginja Ninjas :(
Ginja Ninja

Thursday.  Dunno.  Two of the baby gak gak birds are still alive..

Baby gak gak birds

Pizzas for dinner.

Pizzas

Friday.  Queensland!

Saturday.  Wedding!

Sunday.  Home! 

John has been building a retaining wall on our bit of the land next to the driveway.. and he very kindly left the epic dandelion there (cause I asked :) )!!

Retaining wall

Epic dandelion

Got upstairs and found the 620T fish tank was *very* low.  Like a good five centimetres lower than it should be.  Uh oh.  Had a look and sure enough, the water was backed up enough that it was dribbling back over the back of the tank where the power cables come in.  Sigh.  So dried up what I could and put a small fan on it to try and dry things out.  Bit of a lost cause though, the backing (made of compressed sawdust) was even more badly swollen than the last time this happened.  Whoever thought that chipboard and sawdust fish tank stands were a good idea should be shot in the head.  TV dinners, Mash, early night.

Scrivener Dam Tour

A day before Scrivener Dam's 61st birthday (of the opening) they had an open day.  Tony found it online.  I was totally THERE.  So went with him and Jo.

We all met up outside then went inside to the "upper gallery" for a bit of a chat, before we went downstairs.

The path under the first bit is a little crooked.

Scrivener Dam

This is a movement sensor or indicator between the sections (14 is the last section)

Movement sensor

This sensor measures the incline in all directions.  The dam bends a little upstream during the day and back again at night.

Incline meter

A longer view down the gallery

Scrivener Dam

There's five big hydraulic gates.  This is the control panel for gate 5 (on the eastern end).  They've only ever had all five gates open at once, and that was in 1974.

Hydraulic gate controls

Each of the five big gates has four hydraulic jacks.  These catch any water/oil drips so they can keep an eye on how well the seals are holding.

Drip catchers

Another one of the controls for another gate.  The big blue tank at the bottom is for oil for the hydraulics.

Gate controls

This is controls for one of the three sluice gates

Sluice gate controls

Another shot of the gallery

Scrivener Dam

One of the lake level sensors.  During flooding events the team will be in contact with the operators of Googong Dam, as well as Burrinjuck.

Lake level sensor

This is the emergency exit at the western end of the dam.  It wasn't there when the dam was built so they had to core through the concrete later to put it in.

West end emergency exit

Got crack?

Got crack?

A parting shot looking all the way west along the gallery.

Scrivener Dam

This goes up to the road above.  This is where they can hoist up/down equipment.  Next time you're driving over the dam have a look out for it.

Equipment hatch

And the entrance.

Entrance

We then went down to have a look at the front of the dam up close.

Scrivener Dam

Scrivener Dam

Scrivener Dam

Scrivener Dam

Scrivener Dam

I didn't know that they have a huge bulkhead they keep parked in the lake that they can butt up against one of the gates as needed.  This way they can seal off water to do maintenance/testing on individual gates without letting water out.  Very cool.

Fantastic tour, loved it!!  I wish the world wasn't the way it was so these sorts of things are so rare...

Sunday.  13th.  Tuna bake and veggies for dinner.  

Tuna casserole

Monday.  Had an early night, slept ok.  Spent most of the day catching up on decommissioning tickets that have been accumulating for the past three months.  Storm rolled across in the afternoon but it wasn't too bad.

Leftover lasagna for dinner.

Tuesday.  Went to bed relatively early.  But then didn't get to sleep til like 2am.  For no good reason.  Sigh.  Should have had a drink or two earlier in the evening.  So a zombie day.  Blerf.  Mostly decom work prep.  Leftover lamb and veggies for dinner.  Hating on Eventbrite which FORCES you to setup an account just to retrieve your tickets.  Fortunately I'd saved off a copy as I was registering so didn't need to create that account.  Screw you Eventbrite.

Wednesday.  Went to bed early.  Like 20:40.  But then didn't get to sleep til well past 22:00 cause my feet were cold.  Sigh.  Had like an half an hour of doing real actual work all day.  First there was the Scrivener Dam tour I went to with Tony and Jo which took up most of the morning.  Then a long lunch which included voting.  Then a stoopid 1.5 hour meeting in the afternoon which I had to do most of the talking for urrggghhh.  Tony was at Herbert's so I went and had a beer or three.  Mash, computer backup, washed hair, bed.

Thursday.  Okish sleep I think. 

Poppy porn

Poppy porn

Deleting stuff at work. 

Saw this stuff at Aldi.. was very tempted!!
Aldi Christmas noms

After drinks went into town and met up with David who was in town with his colleague Jamie (they brought in a train of rocks).  Took a tram to Dickson and met up with Shane and Jess and went to Kimchi for dinner.  Epic Korean bbq!!

Kimchi Dickson

Kimchi Dickson

Kimchi Dickson

Kimchi Dickson

Kimchi Dickson

Kimchi Dickson

Kimchi Dickson

Kimchi Dickson

Ice cream after at Spilt Milk.  The queue was out the door and down the path.  Only one lady there and she was smashing out the orders.  Apparently they did have someone else on, but they were doing a delivery (!?).  Of course when they got back the queue had completely disappeared.  heh.

Spilt Milk

The key lime pie and biscoff caramel were quite nice.
Spilt Milk ice cream

Tram/bus home.

Friday.  Awake for hours in the middle of the night.  Sigh.  Super runny bowels.  I blame eating the lettuce that was under all the meat.  Yes it was cooked.  Sort of.  hmmm.  Busy busy day deleting All The Things.  And there was another storm.  Between my upset bowels and the storm I really didn't feel like dressing up.  I didn't even really feel like going out.  But got a lift in after work with Geoff/Tony/Jo for Neil's birthday drinks.  Ok not really, but we still celebrated that.

Social club noms

Social club band

Neil and me

omfg those goats cheese in parmesan cups were amazing!
Social club noms

Ended up being a pretty chilled evening.  Enjoyed it.

Saturday.  Slept mostly ok.  Wrote up a todo list for the weekend.  I reckoned it would take all week.  Sigh.  So yeah super busy day.  Sausages and salad for dinner (my nod to a democracy sausage which I forgot to go get).  Mash (into season 11), Amazing Race, Black Mirror.

Gladiolis

Looks like someone threw a grape in with these tomatoes..
Grape tomatoes

Democracy sausages?
Democracy sausages maybe

Sunday.  Took like an hour to get to sleep but then mostly slept ok.  Another busy day of doing All The Things.  

Baby dill!!
Baby dill

Epic dandelion coming soon!!
Epic dandelion

Bougainvillea

Maple or something

Poppy porn

Poppy porn

Gotta love these paver weeds...
Paver weed strawberries

The Black Mirror quotes from Joan is Awful were a bit naughty so you just get the title instead :)

Monday.  7th.  Labour Day.  Slept mostly ok I guess.  Woke up ~6.29.  Fish and gardening stuff all morning.  Then setting up and fighting with the new printer (needed another driver to print double sided).  Then trying to sort out tax stuff.  And getting stressed at everything.  Adulting is hard :(

Climbing roses

Lamb roast

OKI printer

Tuesday.  Slept mostly ok I guess.  Catchup day at work really.  Shine Dome talk in the evening. Prof Nanda Dasgupta talking about the research of Prof Mark Oliphant, and Dr Ed Simpson talking about his work with particle accelerators and making new elements. 

Shine Dome noms

Shine Dome talk

NFSA art

Dinner at Badger&Co after.  Talked into buying more food than I wanted.  Like a LOT more.  Oh well, leftovers.  Hurrah.  Also Badger is pretty hit and miss, and more misses with the specials.  Like the "crispy" pork belly bites that weren't crispy.

Badger and Co garlic cheese pizza

Badger and Co pork belly bites (not crispy as advertised)

Wednesday.  Awake from before 1:30 til after 4.  Hurray.  Zombie day.  Did go to the Crepe Cafe for lunch to avoid the food court in school holidays.  Hadn't been since pre covid.  Except they're the Aussie Crepe House now.  I had the stroganoff crepe (up to $17 now, ouch).  It probably had a bit more cheese filling, but the beef was TOUGH.  

Aussie Crepe House stroganoff crepe

Cooked cheese kranski chipolatas for dinner, and the kitchen smelled wonderfully of them for the next 24 hours or so!

Chipolata cheese kranskis

Thursday.  Ok day I think.  Herbert's after work for a final TRBC tap takeover.  Tim came which was nice.  He might be looking for IT work in Canberra, although his wife is not keen on them leaving Tumut.  

TRBC at Herbert's

Herbert's gems and kiev balls

Tim Martin at Herbert's

Friday.  Crap sleep.  Ok day.  Kept a bit late at work and then had to race down the hill for a bus, which I only *just* caught, to go out to Cypher for Wello's birthday drinks.

Irises

Strawberries

Cypher beers

Cypher beer paddle

Cypher chicken caesar

Saturday.  Slept mostly ok.  Busy day trying to catch up with life.  Stu was also too stressed with life so we didn't go to the club working bee. 

Water damaged paper art

Gecko

In the evening was a Rocky Horror night at Rob and Fiona's.  I did a very half-hearted attempt at Eddie (couldn't find a wig or vest, or borrow a saxophone, but did find a scarf which matched and made a slingshot).  

Rocky Horror night

The sweetie went as Dr Scott.

Dr Scott

There were frank n furters, meatloaf, and rocky horror road.

Rocky Horror noms

Meatloaf

Ian even let me have like one of the last ever TRBC beers I'm ever likely to have!

Bad Mofo

Ended up staying up wayyyy too late, but it was fun.

Sunday.  Got like five hours sleep.  Cause I wake up early no matter what.  With sore throat.  Spent the day continuing to catch up with life.  Managed to get all my Queensland photos online, only a month late.  Also went and did food shopping.  Tuna bake and veggies for dinner.  Early night.

Queensland 2014

Ten years (and one month) ago today my mother and I went to Queensland for an Outback Spirit tour of Queensland.  

While it was a very well organised tour, it was STOOPIDLY expensive - like a thousand dollars a day for the two of us.  This totally left a bad taste in my mouth for a lot of the trip.

I was going to post this link last month on the ten year anniversary, but Vodien broke my database (again) and it literally took weeks to sort out.  So it's a month late.

It's also funny how much of the trip I'd forgotten.  I was going through and choosing photos and labelling them and there were chunks I didn't remember at all, even when seeing the photos.  Stoopid dementia brain.

Anyway.. here it is!

With food/hotel photos still to come.  And by hotels, I mean like campsites.  Because a thousand dollars a day with Outback Spirit will get you picnic lunches and campsite accommodation.  Hurray.