(snarfed from the Earth Edition of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or short H2G2)

Australia is a very confusing place, taking up a large amount of the bottom half of the planet. It is recognisable from orbit because of many unusual features, including what at first looks like an enormous bite taken out of its southern edge; a wall of sheer cliffs which plunge deep into the girting sea. Geologists assure us that this is simply an accident of geomorphology and plate tectonics, but they still call it the "Great Australian Bight" proving that not only are they covering up a more frightening theory, but they can't spell either.
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...the legend for some false-colour relief goes only up to 800m.

The Bureau of Meteorology, source of often misleading weather forecasts but otherwise providing a lot of very good services IMHO, now has a height relief for the live weather radar images. Very nice. This is the one for the immediate surrounds.

"Go to the supermarket and buy two home brew kits. ... Also buy at least a couple of bottles of Coopers Pale Ale, more if you like. Ignore the instructions. Cool and pour the Pale Ale, being careful to leave the yeast sediment behind. Drink the beer."

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...lousy chlorine taste of the Gold Coast water. The Hinze Dam is just not on par with the Eastern Austrian Alps where Vienna gets its water from.
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Medicare, the basic medical insurance for every citizen and permanent resident, doesn't cover dental stuff (except emergency procedures in a hospital), so it's PAYH.

Fortunately private health insurance isn't very expensive (yet), especially for higher income earners: you have the choice of paying an extra levy for Medicare for no extra benefits or you can take out private hospital cover.

For me, the extra levy would be about $650 p.a., and full-blown private insurance (not just hospital but also extras like dental, optical etc.) costs me about $900 p.a. Given the $200 I get for contact lenses every year and factoring in just one or two other doctor visits a year, my decision for private insurance was obvious.

Still, even private insurance leaves you with a gap between the benefits and the actual cost: for hospital stuff there's a safety net capping, but not for extras. So the visit to the dentist this week left me $50 poorer, still a lot better than paying $210.

It wasn't too painful (despite me being scared of dentists and their surprises) and didn't uncover any unexpected problems. I'll have two teeth taken out in a month but both were known candidates for 15 and 7 years respectively, so no real worries.

My father asked me to put some pictures and maps on the web, so as to show the lay of the land better. Well, stitching together panoramas by hand^Wgimp sucks so I didn't find the time to do it - until today.
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Rob knows a butcher somewhere on Brisbane's south side who makes Gselchtes, Kaminwurzn, Landjäger and Speck.

A small excurse for the colonials: This is "Speck". "Speck" translates to "bacon". But the "bacon" you can buy in the supermarkets around here is not Speck - and vice versa. At most they share the species of deader. Speck is fine for consumption as it is (raw but cured and smoked). "Bacon" is good for ham & eggs - at best.

Rob also transported the good stuff in a bag befitting the Austrian/German delicacy. That piece was actually a good 3kg, and cost me $53. Not bad at all, considering that it's almost as good as the one my grandmother made herself.

Apropos the nice bag, Aldi/Hofer stores finally have made it to QLD. Yay! I just checked: the closest store is at the north end of the Gold Coast. That place is called Labrador. I'm on the mid-southern end of the GC: in Miami. Whoever came up with the suburb names here was a horrible punster.

However, how to make Vanillekipferl is important in AU, too, even though christmas is in the middle of the warm (and this year, wet) summer.

So the Sydney Morning Herald, one of the few almost readable newspapers, ran this article with recipes today.

Two days ago I sent the churn request. This morning there was a five hour outage, then I got my notification via SMS and email and now the new ISP does the bit-shuffling: Westnet.

As it turns out, I had to ring their support for some fine-print info; less than a minute of waiting, a reasonably competent fellow on the other end and now things just work.

Their service is pretty good; things like port blocking (mostly of MS-junk and backdoors) can be disabled via the customer care webform, their status email list allows to select plain text or HTML crud, etc.pp. Connectivity is also better than with the other provider, and I've got free PIPE access again (mainly important for mirrors and usenet).

My reverse dns request (via email, close to the end of normal business hours on a friday) got answered and fulfilled within 20 minutes.

And they even have a kickd, so I feel very much at home :-)

Again: Dart, the ISP (mostly) providing net access at home has been bought out. The new owners are not exactly well-known for competence, and proved that prejudice very succinctly during the customer migration: they fucked it up big time, repeated outages up to 18hrs, less services, mad switching around of static-vs-dynamic IP addresses and so on.

Now they called the PIPE peering "non-viable" and terminated the peering agreement completely. No, not make the traffic cost us customers, just cut the access. Time to go somewhere else, but they were billing you $143 for service cancellation if you're within your contract period.

But, lo and behold, the public bitching, complaining and pestering of the new owner fools has helped: the cancellation fee is waived.

So I've fired the churn/rapid transfer application to WestNet yesterday; these fellows have been around a while, seem to thrive, were the other alternative last year when I selected ISPs and will cost me a few bucks less a month for a bit more service.

In the beginning, long time ago...dammit, I'm really a fair bit behind with blogging...when I moved in a year ago, I decided that the kitchen would have to go eventually.
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With the upcoming kitchen replacement I've had to re-evaluate a lot of todos and got a bit of a push to shorten that list.
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I like my house. It's old (for Gold Coast bungalow standards, at 17 years), but in fair shape and close enough to work for me to walk there in just 11 minutes door-to-office. With the car the trip takes about 9 minutes because of the huge detour involved, so walking is really a good option.

These are pics of the view from just outside my garage to the west, and the workplace from the park outside the complex (I had a panorama of that view, too, but chucked it as being too lousy. Will do again.)

However, there were a few bad spots on this appl^Whouse. One is that it's real close to the wild hill and termites abound. There's some in the retaining/decorative walls around near the fence, and in the forest for sure. The building inspectors last year claimed some old damage evidence, too. So I had a chem barrier done when I moved in last year, but you never know.

The inspection later last year showed none, and on the 26.8. I had the pest guys in again, for an inspection and a general spray. They didn't find any crawlies, and the fellow crawling through the roof klonking on the trusses didn't turn up anything bad. Very reassuring, and they weren't expensive, either.

Another problem is the kitchen being ready for replacement. Well, that's being taken care of right now, with the bathroom scheduled for next year or so.

The last problem I found was a nastily sagging ceiling in the living room. I realised this when I painted the ceiling early last November. Being a Wellconditioned European, I was very much worried by this: when a ceiling is sagging in places where houses are built, not just nailed together, this is a doomsday sign.

I feared the roof trusses themselves having sagged and didn't even as much as look into the roof cavity so that I wouldn't be shocked by the potential badness there. (I'm a big pessimist and avoidance is one of my skills. I'm good at both, occasionally too good.)

In short I dreaded that the house I've enslaved myself for to the bank would fall apart before I'd finish paying it off (which, after doing some non-panicky simple calculations, would still leave me with a living place for not more money than renting would cost me), and I didn't want to uncover any nasty surprises (which I was awaiting anyway) - thus the avoidance of certain tasks. So much for history.

After the pesties were gone I was feeling up and ready to tackle a couple of the DIY tasks I've had on the todo list for a year. First item was to buy matching replacement ceiling fans and mounting them. One fan had a grumbling main bearing that heated up badly, and another was totally unmatched, with a horrible non-recessed controller unit on the wall - super-ugly.

The fans were cheap, $52 each for the ones with light and $42 or so for the lightless one.

Item two was to resow the lawn in the back, which had a couple of very dusty bare spots where the jungle had been cleared earlier. Now, after two weeks the grass is growing beautifully. Very nice, indeed.

But back to technology (Oz-style). A day after doing the backyard and buying the gear, the weekend was there and the wind was too strong for flying. So I decided to do the fans.

Two of them were easy to mount as the old mounts were conveniently located beneath trusses to screw the anchor to. The electrical stuff I had to redo completely, with new controller panels etc. Cheap bastards had only twirled the protective earth, put some solder on it and then wrapped it in isolating tape. Assholes!

The third wasn't anywhere near a truss, and hung from a big hook which I couldn't use for the new ones anyway.

So I finally relented and realised I had to get into the roof. As the pesties had been spraying just two days before there wouldn't be any (live) critters up there.

Donning my dirtiest clothes, I entered the manhole in anticipation of the very worst.
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But there wasn't anything to be afraid of. The replacement of the fan was simple, just had to improvise an anchor for it resting on the closest two trusses (easy-peasy).

And my worries about the ceiling also were unfounded. OZ construction is nail-only (as much as I could see anywhere so far). The ceiling plasterboard is simply nailed to the underside of the trusses. That's all that holds it up. Naturally, after 17 years, a fair number of those nails had loosened and the ceiling drooped where the biggest stretches are.

So I've got another item on the todo list: push the ceiling plasterboard up and screw it in place properly. I'll do that with the kitchen work as it'll be dirty.

While crawling through the roof I also decided that now would be a good opportunity to move the speaker cables for the rear speakers in the living room into the ceiling (instead of having them tacked underneath it). For once, Oz construction actually has advantages beyond just being cheap: take a screwdriver, extend arm upward, poke a hole, and thread the cable. Finished. :-)

The next projects: replacing the kitchen, new antenna on the roof, a whirlybird roof ventilator, and neatify some cabling. Ah yes, and finally get a safety switch installed (which unfortunately means I'll have to replace the switchbox as the dumbasses installed a tiny one with not a single slot left...grrr.)

...to be here in Australia, and watching interesting foreign movies in the original language. Yesterday SBS played Levottomat, a fun Finnish film - in Finnish, of course.

Tonight they'll run Taxi, in French of course. Oz is really a multi-cultural country, and I love it for that trait.

As an excuse I claim that the difference is minuscule at check 0.03125mm... damn metal threaded screws just don't DWIM. It took me two extra trips to the hardware store to learn this crucial fact.
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On the bright side:

..[The Film Classification Review Board] decided last night to retain the [R18+] rating, rejecting appeals by the Australian Family Association and the South Australian Attorney-General, and merely toughened the consumer advice for the release. It now says Anatomy of Hell includes "actual sex, high-level sex scenes and high-level themes".

Common sense apparently prevailed. A real surprise. But, on the other hand there's this piece of news, too:

[he] is making Australian legal history as the first extradition case under copyright law.
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The US had appealed against a decision by magistrate Daniel Reiss to release [him] from jail in March, after he found there was no extraditable offence.
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It is not claimed that [he] ... made any money from the alleged piracy.
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While the US can now proceed on the extradition process, it was unsuccessful in its application that [he] pay its costs - estimated to be about $20,000.

So let's get this straight: the US claims he's a copyright infringer who hasn't even made any money from the alleged activity; they get him arrested on foreign soil (bad enough already), try to get him extradited to the land of the shrub (really brilliant judgement), AND want him to pay them for having the privilege of being extradited and prosecuted? Bastards. Fascist stiffnecked loonies.

Quid pro quo: I want to see the murkins hand over one of their grow-your-dick-fast spammers to a fundamentalist country!

Link to the Censorship article
Link to the Extradition article

Almost a year after I've moved inty my house, I've finally found the time and willingness to prepare a couple of images.
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You'd think so. And you'd be wrong.

Case in favour: yesterday the TV news (SBS, my favourite TV broadcaster here) showed the latest, earthshattering, really important piece of Austrian news: that a boat in the Seegrotte had capsized and a couple of tourists had drowned.

The commentator had a slightly hard time pronouncing "Hinterbrühl", but apart from that this is nothing short of amazing (it also tells you something how much interesting Austrian news items there are).

"And now the weather: Gold Coast 23° with a low of 6°."

Winter's here, indeed. And together with the Gold Coasters' preference for glorified shacks^W^Wbungalows the next some weeks are going to be chilly. I've pulled the space heater from the cupboard this evening.

I thought so. In Europe you'd find these things only in nursery homes for pre-zombies but lots of Aussies (and assorted fools^Wfashionistas elsewhere) find these abominations good enough for public display.

Not all Aussies, though; at least one couple among my friends is split over uggs by gender: he wears them in public, she can't stand them.

Australians have a proper sense of humour and don't take themselves too seriously, so wearing uggs is understandable - they're warm, they do the job. But how the fashion fools would deal with the fact that "uggs" stands for "ugly boots", I wonder.

Driving back from Killarney monday evening I saw:

• one echidna. It walked slowly across the road and I braked and waited until it had finished passing.
• some rabbits
• lots of frogs
• a small roo or wallaby
• and some kind of owl-like bird sitting in the middle of the road. I managed not to hit it.

Backcountry roads here (and about everything 50+k out of Brisbane is backcountry) commonly consist of one single lane of asphalt/bitumen, and a bit of dirt, grass, rocks and/or potholes on both sides. When there is some oncoming traffic, both have to pull aside into the dirt (and hope that there's nothing hidden in the grass that your car can't take at 80+km/h). There's bonus points for doing this during the night.

"Highways" on the other hand, consist of two lanes of bitumen. Often there's a middle line, but not necessarily - and there are some "highways" that have single lane areas as well.

(I love this place. Really. But I'll have to get me a 4WD soon.)

(german only)
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These are late but better late than never. Cornelia spent from early July to late September 2003 with me here. The first few weeks Barbara was here, too, but the majority of the time we were on our own.
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A kilo of blade steak: $4.80.
250g of Camembert cheese: $6++

Sigh.

In the beginning of 2001 the opportunity to move to Australia presented itself - and got taken, as I had been longing to at least visit this continent once for ages. The opportunity involved a job offer and nice benefits for the move itself.

Without too much fuss I god rid of some of my stuff (motorbike, flat etc.) and on August 10 2001 I reached downunder - for the first time: I hadn't been to Australia before, so it was a bit like navigating uncharted waters.
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