Vacation photo roundup, Part I

I'm back from vacation: a restful time spent with friends Maria, Peter and little Ben, as their house guest over Christmas and the New Year.

The Macbook Pro came with me, although there weren't too many opportunities to go online, although the last three days gave me several long sessions using a McDonald's free Wi-Fi connection, and it was a good way to wean myself back into the virtual world.

Part I of my special holiday subset of the 365 Photos project:


Jack begins to suspect I'm packing for a vacation without him. 20 December 2009.


Leaving on a Virgin Blue jetplane. Taken at Sydney's domestic terminal, Mascot. I actually had to restage this shot at the end of my holiday because it was lost in a computer program malfunction. Image representing 21 December 2009.



Golden, foil-wrapped balls, supposedly Fererro Rocher chocolates, are all individually suspended from the Myer Centre ceiling. Brisbane CBD. I lost this shot in a computer program malfunction, but luckily had already forwarded the image to my Facebook page, via my iPhone. 22 December 2009.


My Brisbane hosts' new Christmas tree, a bargain eBay purchase. I also had to restage this shot because the original was lost in the computer program malfunction. 23 December 2009.


My Brisbane hosts' three year old son, Ben, who had a ball dressed as a Santa's helper elf to ride the Christmas Express miniature railway at David Jones, Brisbane CBD. 24 December 2009.


Christmas Day canine visitor: Meg, the dog with a hole in her head. "Thar she blows!" (All her other spots are grey.) 25 December 2009.


Christmas fruit mince pies on Boxing Day. The chef complained they weren't "Women's Weekly Cookbook" enough, but I told her they were "rustic". And delicious. 26 December 2009.


Gorgeous blooms in suburban Brisbane. 27 December 2009.


I told people this was from a preview of "The Enemy Within" remake scenes of the next "Star Trek" movie. Twin transporting Kirks in the doorway of JB Hi-Fi, Brisbane CBD. 28 December 2009.


A rather self-conscious usher completes this art deco shot at a Hawthorne cinema, screening "Avatar" in 3D, Brisbane. 29 December 2009.


Frolicking polar bear at Sea World, Southport, Queensland. 30 December 2009.


Dreadlocked dog in the doorway of an art gallery, Bulimba, Brisbane. 31 December 2009.

To be continued...

A virtual rainbow

Mirragan the quoll virtually reminisces about a home in the gum trees.

ICT learning curves

I feel like the whole day has been totally consumed by setting up my new tech devices. Thanks to the telephone helpfulness of my iiNet Internet provider, I was able to get the Time Capsule Wi-Fi thingie working properly with the new MacBook Pro. Now I just have to get the new printer talking to it properly, and I must master the art of using a mouse-less keyboard.

I went out walking this morning, on a break between the rain showers, and I took Jack with me for a separate walk this afternoon, again slipping it in between showers. While I was out on my own, I picked up a magazine about iPhones, so I can do some homework before next week, when I go back to collect whatever I end up with next Thursday.

Oh well, I'm off to set all the timepieces forward an hour; Eastern Summer Time - daylight savings - starts at 2am tomorrow!

Shopping for Apples

I'm just home from the Apple Retail Store in the CBD with my new laptop (and next week, I collect my iPhone!).



Well, the bank account wasn't looking too bad and, since I've spent a number of recent days uploading photos to Facebook, I'm hitting the "rolling beachball of death" way too often on my now-antiquated, lampshade-base iMac. I was told it'll be tricky (plus over $500) to get the memory upgraded sufficiently to take the latest operating system upgrade. And even then, no promises.

So... a laptop was becoming an essential requirement. It'll be able to handle all the new capabilities, and the iMac can take up the slack on simpler things. I may even take the even older PowerMac dinosaur into school/work and stick a few games on it for the students - we are a PC-only school. (Ick.)

Simultaneously, my first mobile phone is on its last legs; my original phone plan ran out last month, so I went for a double act today; I have a few days to master the laptop, before I collect the iPhone next week.

I also got a new scanner/printer, and the new-fangled "Time Capsule", which allows care-free full back-ups. Yippee.

When you enter the big Apple Store (in the CBD) intending to buy, they sign you up for "personal shopping" experience. I was booked in for two appointments: the laptop purchase, which I could do immediately, and the iPhone purchase, and I elected to make the iPhone appointment for next Thursday. It would be too bamboozling to buy too much hardware at once!

Now I have time, theoretically, to investigate the various plans available, and to find out how many ID points I'll need, since I don't drive and my passport has expired, and I can never prove who I am - even to post a parcel overseas - these days.

I'll probably buy the iPhone outright, but at the Apple Store they have an upstairs area where all the providers (Telstra, Optus, etc) are available to help you switch into a new plan when you buy the phone.

NSW Premier's Typing Challenge

Where have I been?

Well, on September 1, it is the closing date of the NSW Premier's Reading Challenge for school students and, since I've apparently done too good a job promoting the Challenge to the 400+ students I teach, I have lots of last-minute reading records to upload to the PRC website.

The organisers had been having a bit of trouble working some bugs out of their new system, so I gave the site as much time to recover as I dared, to make sure that when I did start entering data I didn't lose anything. To their credit, the organisers have made the site accessible to the students, under their own user names and passwords, this year. Our school doesn't have sufficient free computers (as in, our computers are constantly in use by classes) and of sufficient download speed, to make this an equitable shortcut, or much of a time/motion saving.

Therefore, I've been doing the data entry myself - but my clerical assistant took pity on me and spent many more interludes than her allotted library time to ease my burden. So far we are only a few off reaching last year's record of 313 completed Challenge booklets!

So here I am on the last Saturday, still cross referencing names manually with class lists to ensure I haven't missed anyone - and I note that we now also have all day Monday to keep entering data if necessary! Whew! I do have a few queries and now I have a reprieve, and can chase up missing student records on Monday.

In fact, I shall reward myself to lunch and a movie tomorrow! I'm off to meet up with my old friend, Andrew Mercado (producer of the upcoming, eagerly-awaited "Number 96" DVD boxed set) to see the documentary "Not Quite Hollywood" at Fox Studios Australia. It's the story of Australian so-called sexploitation films, including... "Number 96".

Disaster averted!

A huge thank you to The Other Andrew and Sephyroth, who just nursemaided me through a blogger's ultimate nightmare:

I ended up with a weird glitch in my Blogger template last night. I tried to fix it ("cleverly" taking a copy of the HTML from another window I happened to have open - but it was only of one recent post) and, of course, everything looked perfectly fine when I previewed it. Then I've realised I'd managed to cause a logic loop of some kind.

Following some advice, I managed to do more of the same (ie. with more archived posts showing up, but the page itself was still "static".) Every link in my template kept me (and any readers out there) looping back to that same small sample of blog entries.

Time to seek out some HTML experts! (Surely, I kept telling myself, two years of earlier entries couldn't have been wiped out by one small coding error. I mean, I never pressed "Delete". The old posts must still be stored somewhere, even though I've seemingly severed all the old links?)

While waiting (im)patiently for an answer to my pleas (Sephy's on US time), I started grabbing Google caches of various "important pages", retrieving the HTML of my two annual indexes (so at least I had the titles of two years of entries). I started to imagine that, over time, I could rebuild the whole site from Google's cached pages. But, did I even need to? If it was just a minor HTML correction needed in the template I'd rather do it that way...

Then, at about 4.45am this morning, Sephy came to my rescue. Thanks everyone at Aussie Bloggers for all your good vibes, and especially thanks to Sephy, kathiemt, Snoskred and The Other Andrew. I could visualise what needed to be done, but that little voice in my head kept telling me I'd created a mess that wasn't fixable.

Essentially, all that was needed was to restore the Blogger template back to the one I was using, as it had all the specialised tags that Blogger uses to make posts appear (which the HTML I pasted in, in my panic last night, didn't). Then I just had to find all special code I'd so bravely added over the years (the sidebar, Sitemeter, etc) from the code in the static page I still had, save that to my computer, and then put it back in where it needed to be in the refreshed, but now-generic, template.

Easy! (When you're thinking straight, and have wonderful Internet friends to support you.) Yes, I did get a few hours of sleep overnight, but not enough.

Oh well, it's breakfast time...

Magic Circle WOW!

I promised to tell you about my recent (though expensive) success on eBay...

a 1965 program to a stage production of the "Magic Circle Club", surely my favourite Australian television show from my very early years!

This purchase arrived on Monday, by registered post, but the notification card came to my home address instead of to work, where I wanted to be able to sign for the package. I was finally able to collect it today.

Wow!



Godfrey Philipp's "Magic Circle Club" was a national children's television show, which I watched on a then-fledgling Channel TEN-10 in Sydney (from 23rd January 1965 till 1967). The channel was so new we had terrible reception. It ran for 550 thirty-minute episodes and had its roots in live pantomime and classic fairy tales. The show was the talk of the playground when I was in Year 1 and Year 2, and featured amazing song and dance production numbers and original songs by none other than John-Michael Howson.

Being a Sydney boy, I hadn't heard of this particular version of "Magic Circle Club" before: a specially written episode called "The Stolen Smile". It was performed live on stage at Melbourne's Tivoli Theatre (from December 27, 1965 for the summer school holidays). In this adventure, evil Sir Jasper Crookly and Gaspar Goblin had banished Clocko the chief clown and Spangles the trapeze artist from a circus - and had also taken away Clocko's smile. Appearing on stage with Max (Max Bartlett) and hostess Nancy Cato were Fredd Bear, Fee Fee Bear (John-Michael Howson), Mother Hubbard, Curley Dimples, Crystal Ball, Hep Cat, Montmorency James Rabbit and bird puppets, Cassius Cuckoo and Leonardo de Funbird, all played by the regular TV cast.

One of the reasons I was so determined to obtain this program was for the cast and crew names that were sure to be mentioned. Although my memory was fairly good, I had many gaps - and so do (or did) places such as Wikipedia. For example, this production was stage managed by some now well-known Aussie names: Sue Nattras, Simon Wincer and Jim McElroy. I'd also forgotten that Leonardo lived inside the IKAN (Instantaneous Knowledge Accumulation Network) computer. (In 1965? Surely a zany computer to predate the Bat-computer of TV's "Batman"!)

Here's an excerpt from the program, featuring the three characters and performers I remembered the least about:



More excerpts soon!

When programs crash...

Success! For the last fortnight, I've been trying to think of sneaky ways to out-think an old, corrupted BB Edit Lite program, which is installed on my old iMac computer, because all the original files for my various fan web sites are stored on the iMac's hard drive and they need the program to open. (It didn't matter if I tried to open the file I needed to change - which used to open the program automatically - or, now, even clicking on the program itself, which used to work up until a few months ago.)

An old Internet contact had emailed a few weeks ago to ask me to remove their name from my website; their new job meant that they no longer wanted to be associated with fannish trivialities, and their name on my site was coming up as the top entry when theirr employees Googled the boss's name! Try as I might, I couldn't access the files to make the requested deletion. But I just now realised what to do: I simply duplicate and rename the .html file I need to change to a .txt file.

It worked! Now that I've come into BB Edit Lite via the back door, as it were, I can make the changes I need to make and upload the new version of my site to the Web. Be back soon!

Who needs a computer guru these days?

Note to self: "Ummmm, me?"

The magic of eBooks

Every time someone on TrekBBS or Psi Phi mentions Star Trek eBooks (ie. downloadable electronic publications), there is a backlash of angry, resistant book readers who malign them as unwanted, unreliable rivals to "dead tree", hardcopy, paper versions.

The ranting never seems terribly IDIC (as in "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations", to quote Spock's Vulcan philosophy) and, while I haven't embraced eBooks wholeheartedly to the extent that I'd dispose of my personal forest of dead trees, I really don't see them as evil, either.

How is computer file corruption any different to one's dead tree collection suffering from mould, tempest, flood, silverfish, carelessness or a light-fingered houseguest?

Closed minds = Star Trek? Something's wrong here... For some, eBooks are an amazing, unrivaled convenience of the modern/futuristic world. Some hardcopy book lovers assume that the eBook files are never replaceable, but there are several circumstances where eBooks are safer than MMBs or hardcovers! Most eBook sellers allow you to download a new free version if your previous file gets corrupted, so the chances are an eBook collection may survive certain conditions better than a paper collection.

I haven't had to ever do it, but I know when Amazon was selling the Pocket eBooks, you simply accessed an online folder with your Amazon password, and entered the credit card number you used to open up the original eBook, to download a new version. (I did used to wonder what happened if you ever had to switch credit cards, and were expected to still have the old number on file somewhere, but I'm assured places like ereader allow this number to be updated easily.)

I have such a pile of unread dead trees here that I haven't needed to make Star Trek eBooks a priority. The eBooks I've bought are things I've needed desperately (eg. "The Magic of Tribbles: The Making of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Trials and Tribble-ations", which was an eBook exclusive; the "New Frontier: No Limits" short story anthology, which I couldn't wait to read, and bought it while my hardcopy was in transit; and "SCE: Where Time Stands Still", a TAS episode sequel) but I haven't had the time to read even these files more than once, as there's just so much else to read.

A bit of a later bloomer with eBooks, I was held back by my old PowerMac, which didn't like eBook versions being offered. And the firewall at work prevented my downloading eBooks to the work PC. But everything simplified when I bought my iMac.

I did notice that the last time I upgraded Adobe Acrobat, my eBook copy of "Where Time Stands Still" is now refusing to open, but I'm not panicked as the dead tree reprint is due eventually, and I always intended to buy that. When SCE ("Starfleet Corps of Engineers") started up, it was an eBook-only series of short novels.

In fact, I probably think of eBooks as more like a video rental. If you want to see a new movie, you pay for your discounted ticket at the cinema, or rent the video, and get entertained, but you can't necessarily keep it. But if you want to ensure you have a more permanent copy, you buy the dead tree (or DVD) version when it comes out.

If the plastic on a VHS cassette breaks ten years after buying it, would the manufacturer replace it for free? If you drop a new (or old) book into the mud, would the publisher just give you a fresh copy? If a DVD breaks in half through no fault of your own, would it automatically be replaced?

The eBook corruption that would cause me the most concern is if anything ever happens to "The Magic of Tribbles" by Terry J Erdmann, Gary Hutzel & Paula M Block, since there will never be a dead tree version. I don't really even remember which provider I used to buy it! (Although the old email receipt would still be on file, and I guess there's an "About" file connected to the eBook?)



I understand some company is working on a portable eBook reader that has a screen that resembles a sheet of paper, with black "print" that assembles itself on a white (or any colour) background. That sounds like fun!

The Wrath of Jim the Toad (and Spock the Gerbil)?

In the 80s, two fellow Star Trek fans were playing with a computer's drawing program, trying to keep their minds off the drudgery of preparing yet another issue of the Star Trek fan club's newsletter. In the wee hours of a weekend, they came up with the hilarious and silly "Adventures of Jim the (ugly) Toad and Spock the Gerbil".

Imagine my fascination tonight, browsing the piles of old sale books at Galaxy Bookshop, and discovering, for just $5: Commander Toad and the Voyage Home (Putnam & Grosset, 1998) by Jane Yolen, and illustrated by Bruce Degen. Mainly, it's a parody of "Star Wars", although the logical sidekick, Mr Hop, seems to have derived from a certain pointy-eared celebrity.

Campbelltown, turkey slaps and Schapelle Corby

Having been reminded the other day that I hadn't missed a day of blogging in ages, it was with a minor sense of panic tonight, racing back from the Hordern Pavilion (at Fox Studios Australia) to Central Station with only seconds to spare to get my train home, thinking I might miss the midnight deadline to post something.

Happily, I made it, but the review of Little Britain Live will have to wait because...


"COMPUTER SAYS, 'NO!'"