Christmas...Arrrrgh!

I just collated the christmas presents I've bought for this year. Andrea's is about the only complete one (and I have her birthday present for next year done too. Everyone else is a bit spotty...though I do have a theme idea.

A first for today

I was down the back cleaning up all the dropped mangoes (mainly eaten by flying foxes) when I noticed the awful smell...Dead flying fox in the back yard. We've had trees for 40 years, had flying foxes visit and eat them for almost as long and this is the first dead one. I'm a little dubious given the spreading Hendra zone this season. It could be natural causes, but I aint picking it up with anything but a long shovel straight into a pit.

New power supply!

My old supply died last night in spite of technically being above the level required for my new card. My computer guy put in a new one for me without labour fees since he'd just put in the video card. Its a gigabyte superb 720 (which gives me some wriggle room for other upgrades). He also suggested I get a bigger case, mine's a bit old and not really designed for big gaming components and max airflow. Since he has a similar set up, in a similar not air-conditioned environment, I'm thinking hew understands what I need best. He suggested I look around and find the one I like most (he'll do the swap over if I want). I was going to get a couple of suggestions off him today but I forgot.
Anyhoo - I have a power supply replaced with something nice in about 2 hours with no labour cost. I like my computer shop :)

now off to reading up on case brands :D...I may wait till another couple of pays to buy one.

new card!

I just replaced my old Geforce 8800 video card with an Asus gtx560Ti. With no load, its running over 20oC cooler! Now, lets start up LOTRO....heh 25oC cooler than it was - and the fan had to be on 100% for the other one. This one is on 44% speed tops!

So far, so cool.

Incorrect assumption

There's a book in my cupboard that Andrea gave me in 2000. Spindle's End by Robin McKinley. Every time I've been thinking about reading an old book, I've brushed past it thinking "thats the one with storyline X" I'm not in the mood for that. I pulled it out the other day thinking..mmm.. storyline X, that'll do. And its Not!
All this time I was mixing it up with another book - which I'll now have to find. Its also been so long since I read this one that the story was completely new to me. It didn't ring a bell at all!
I like Robin McKinleys books, so its not that I skimmed through it and didn't actually read it...I think I must have read it only once however and somehow got my brain wires crossed...perhaps its been written over in my long term storage because I lost the link to it.

checkout the new link

funny - on the places to go list

Apparently this is not unique

I have no dial tone on my home phone, but my internet works. I've spent a couple of days with looking for the fault and so far no dice. Wednesday they come and check the lines in my yard. I finally thought to google "no dial tone but internet works fine" and lo, I am but one of many. Apparently one line can break and the other will carry the internet (or something like that, I choose not to understand any more than that) but both lines are needed for a phone call. Alternately, some sort of connection at the exchange may have lost contact with my phone line but still be contacting my ADSL. I'm expecting the former since a tech has already apparently looked at the outside my home things. I've tried 3 separate phones and combination of direct into the wall and in via the internet splitter - so its from the wall onward somewhere. I know theres an old line under my house that we don't use, but its split off after the main entry point (I think) so I'm hoping thats not interacting with it.

Wildlife carer! - not!

As I drove in my driveway today I noticed a car swerving up the street & something white and pink on the road. The next car also swerved and I thought... that looks like a galah - why isn't it flying away. Then a car backed out of the driveway right next to it and it did a weird - my wing is broken-flail to avoid turning into a recently deceased parrot. They didn't even see it. So I walked up the road thinking - "I should have got a box and a towel - this is going to hurt - large, injured wild bird with big beak - but there's too much traffic - I'll just shoo it off the road and then come back".
Another car saw me walking towards it and just stopped on the road to give me time to get there. When I got there it let me walk right up to it and just edged a bit away, then it let me touch it, so it was either really badly off or a tame bird.
I picked it up and carried it off the road and it only bit me gently before it got out of my hands. Then it made a "I've learned human speak noise" and I picked it up again more stably. The lady drove off and I thought "great, now I'm going to have to deal with an injured bird and find the owner" (at least I have some big empty cages at the moment).
Luckily a guy walked out of a yard before I had a chance to walk home and said it belonged to a neighbour who lets it wander. Apparently the wing break is old. Anyway I handed it over and it walked up his front onto his shoulder, so he took it home to care for until the owner came home.
If he hadn't I would have had to take it to a vet to check on the wing & there aren't many bird savvy vets here. (plus I expect they would have charged me).

The owner is very lucky the backing car didn't go right over it.

Ye old family reunion

I'm going to a family reunion this weekend. In anticipation, mum has had me scan some (many, many, many)old letters that she's had in storage (handed down from her mother and her grandmother). Its been an interesting experience putting them in order and getting some of the back story on bits of them. They were prolific letter writers.

It was an eye opener seeing how poor one side of my family was. I had been told, but seeing the letters saying that James was off looking for work or one of the children who are off working is sending money orders home, really emphasizes things.

Theres also a series of letters from an uncle who went off to Canada and then signed up for WW1 - he died in France. I was able to read about his life from 1906 to 1916 when he died & the letters afterwards from the military, informing his family of his death.

There are also a bunch of WW2 letters from several brothers. Wow, they are interesting (and some have bits cut out)Lots of "somewhere in France" addresses, or desert areas. There's also telegrams from the military with messages monitored from Japanese propaganda radio, purporting to be from them saying they were alive and well in POW camps, and similar from private individuals monitoring radio after the camps were liberated (they listed names and who to get the message to).

What I should do - if I could find some time - is collate them properly and find out some of the surrounding information & then epublish them. I could call it "The Chalmers Letters - snapshots of 3 generations of Australians"

Minor Plug

I just remembered to add Autumn Write to my places to go,people to see list. One day I might update it to separate comics from other interesting and useful sites....but not today.

Shameless plug for putting links on your blog - when I lost my bookmarks on my computer, at least I had my favourite comics linked and didn't have to go searching.

Maybe I should spend the time and put a whole list of lists on here :)

The downside to owning a Kindle

When you've found a CD full of books and decide to read the series on them, its very easy to keep reading. My vain "I might go swimming this afternoon" thoughts were abandoned and my "I might have an early night" was thwarted. Must...develop...more...discipline. I feel tired and un-exercised. And I over-ate on the weekend. Bleh.

On the upside, I'm getting to read all the Honor Harrington books in order one after the other.

reading glut

I just remembered I had a cd of BAEN books that I got as a freebie at world con last year. I hadn't read them as I didn't have an ereader and I just don't like reading on computer screens. I just downloaded them to my Kindle Or at least all the Honor Harrington ones - the rest can wait till I'm through these. I put them all in a file (in the right format) on my computer, so its easier to transfer them. I've also gotten online at Baen and found a couple of other books that I'd like to get. Maybe next weekend. My reading has gone up a lot with the ereader. I'd slowed down because of
1. Lack of space to put new books (and I don't like to assume I'll read once and give away)
2. Price of books - if I'm not sure whether I'm likely to want to reread, I'd rather not pay $100 for only 4 books.

Zombies...oh wait, just the reporter not understanding what the words mean

I was cooking my own mix of glass noodle, seaweed soup, roast chicken slices and fried egg strips tonight and overheard the following from the TV in the other room;

"The hospital was over run by dead bodies"

What they meant to say (I think) was that a lot of bodies had been found stored at a hospital.
Of course my mental image immediately went to the other place.

oh - that computer issue I talked about?

It was a ram problem - Bad RAM! Bad! Sit!

I have loaner ram while my lifetime warranty ram is away being replaced... though I only have 4 gig not 6 atm - so I'm wondering whether one popped out - the easiest thing to do would be to open the box....but I cant build up the enthusiasm right now.

new technology

I'm being involved in my first webinar. Its very cool and actually seems to be working! Yay. Though all I'm going to do is listen.

My kindle has arrived.

I am most pleased,though I haven't done an awful lot with it yet. The cover is blue.

And my first typing of kindle was knidle - perhaps the K should be silect.

coming up for air

I have been silent for a while as the thought of being even half way coherent on my blog was beyond me. This was mainly due to setting up for a 2 week intensive subject I ran, followed by a 4 day conference. I've now had a week back "in the office" and my brain has settled down again. The course went well. I had lots of complements. The conference went well. I think I've finally figured out how to get something useful out of going to a conference. I'm now dealing with trying to get reday for semester which is only a week away and 3 days of that will be spent in another courshttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gife that I'm a student in.

In other news,
Somewhere in there I had another birthday & we've been eating birthday turkey for 8 days so far.
My computer is getting weird again. I'm downloading the latest video card driver to see if that imporves things. I have doubts about my power supply though since my DVD drive is "vanishing" on occasion. In an unrelated matter, my headphones died too - I had a new pair and plans to change over, but I wasn't expecting to do it just then. Or maybe it was the computer port playing up too. The new headphones plug in differently.
I finally bought a kindle - it hasn't arrived yet. I did the easy thing and bought from Amazon with a case with a light - so many colour choices. I chose blue. Pink would show the dirt, I don't like orange, green seemed a bit off & I seem to by everything in red, so this was a novel colour for me...As soon as it turns up I'm buying Andreas novels - all of them - in a great glut. Speaking of which Thanks for the tea, I'm off to have some momentarilly.
Ok. Off to install a video driver. This could be a long night. The tea will help.

Long weekend?

I don't have time for a long weekend. I had plans that involved me coming in on Saturday at least. And plans for working Monday. Hmm maybe I'll come in anyway. At least no-one will interrupt me.

Oh...really..that was unexpected

Yesterday I went to see an ophthalmologist about an itchy eye that hadn't really gone away for a year. I was concerned that I had something in my eyelid scratching my eye. I can also see a strip across my eye when looking down a microscope. The doctor couldn't see anything and thought it best to refer me on to someone with better equipment. The expert told me I have an allergy response, that might not be to anything specific & I can take drops. He then had a look for the strip and didn't find it, so its probably floaters or something like that.

Oh, and by the way, while looking he also found the tear in my retina, a precursor to my retina detaching. so 1/2 an hour later I was sitting in front of a laser having laser eye surgery to fix it!

The phrase "dodged a bullet" was mentioned.

everyone is sick

It seems that I'm surrounded by the unwell...and not just the usual colds. Nooo; suspected pneumonia, fighting 3 separate influenza strains at once, whole families going down together. I feel threatened by it all - I can't afford to get sick right now.