Gdad:1927-2009

R.I.P gdad. you'll be missed.

KERS?

OK, am about two weeks behind on the F1 coverage what with getting the DVDs from the UK (thanks mum & paul - you're a lifeline!) but as have just watched the Chinese Quali's and the race is scheduled for tomorrow, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and put it on record:

"KERS = problem"

Not just the fact that only 3 cars out of 20 were running KERS in qualifying, but there's just something about it that doesn't seem right. Maybe I'm over evaluating it, but has anyone else noticed that the engines seem to over-rev when the cars are NOT executing KERS? Perhaps the FOM graphics are out of sync and the cars are actually using KERS when the graphics say they're not, but looking at Heidfeld's chinese quali lap, he used KERS on the BEGINNING of the back straight (which is pretty much the only place you can use it in China), then as he approached the end, the revs went down from 18 to 17, then back up to 18 as he braked towards turn 1 - and I'm pretty sure it wasn't a downshift.

Just doesn't sound right.

So as you lot are two weeks in front of me when it comes to breaking F1 news you may know more than me already, but am going on record to say that by September 2009, I reckon nobody will be using KERS.

Of course I could be wrong. That's why I aint betting on it :)

not much happening really

oh yeh, just this:

Steeevo is as excited as a 5-year-old at christmas...

Birthdays: You can keep 'em. Christmas: No thanks. Goosebumps and anticipation due to the start of two sports seasons in one weekend:



/me jumps up and down in excitement. Very sad really, but 10 hours of sport - its just like saturdays in england....

Arsenal - about bloody time

After 4 goal-less draws (yawn), can describe the latest arsenal outing in four words:
Yay, Boo, Yay, Yay.

Despite the video quality not being tip-top:

Yay:

Boo:

Yay:

Yay:


And man of the match for getting two:


hurrah!

February - Steeevo settles in

Well, been 2 or 3 weeks now, and am settling in nicely here. The aircon has been a blessing over the past few days, a bit of cold and rain last week but we're back to the usual heat now. eesh! Can't say as much for the UK.

Am getting used to fending for myself again; the trips to the supermarket looking for the cheapest products available (yes I am your typical tightarse pommie so-and-so...!) Stick to the tried and tested method: Cheapest possible version of food, if it's no good, move up a level. So far I'm a big fan of IGA's own label Teabags, Chips, butter, fish in breadcrumbs and sausages. Haven't tried the pizza yet but for $5.80 for 2 family size pizzas ya can't go wrong, even if they are horrible and I have to throw one out. The benefit of something being horrible is that it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth and you suddenly aren't hungry anymore, job done. Did I mention I was a tight pommie so-and-so? :)

Done a couple of shops and it looks like woolworths is the way to go for value over here (It's a bit like Tesco I guess, not woolworths in the UK. Well it hasn't shutdown so it's nothing like woolworths in the UK).

Am pleased with the internet feed here. Am on a quota so I can't download stuff willy-nilly like the UK and gordon's house. It's made a bit better though by the iinet freezone (doubt you can watch stuff from the UK but here it is if you wanna check it out: http://www.iinet.net.au/freezone )

Been watching The Bill, and some almost-live english footy. Arsenal West Ham was a bit pants, but have got Arsenal v Spurs to look forward to next Monday. The saturday matches are live (12am - 2am West Australia time) and the rest are available from 6am Sunday Aussie time. All the matches are available on-demand whenever you want to watch em. I think Arsenal play on Sunday so that'll be my monday evening's entertainment sorted..!

Dinnertime got a whole lot simpler: Oven on, chips and frozen item of the day onto the tray, cook for 30min, remove and eat. Too easy :)

Have also got the laptop hooked up to the hifi streaming quite a good selection of quota-free music (again, from the iinet freezone) which is nice.

To date, have not got a TV - think I'll wait for the AFL season to start before investing in one, it's about the only decent thing worth watching on country WA TV - we get three channels on terrestrial, and digital TV is the same three channels but a clearer signal. No free satellite TV over here unfortunately, unless my tenants from the UK wouldn't mind me popping over and riving the dish and the set-top box off the wall and re-tuning it!

So am happy with this place, especially now there's some internet to be had; was getting just a **little** bored playing minesweeper and spider solitaire...!

Hope everyone's OK, and not *too* cold from the 6inch of snow you've been having.

Steeevo out.

did I mention I love iinet? especially the "freezone"

no quota limits here... and it beats tvants :)

Check this out - me pad!

ensuite bathroom with washing machine (The only bathroom, but still ensuite!)



The 1 bedroom (Look! I got a brand new mattress! For free!)


Kitchen


Living Room.

January - Fire ban season enters its third month

Wonder why?

2009 - we continue...

And a happy new year to all. A pretty quiet one overall, watching some lightning and the occasional firework (I thought they were illegal over here anyway? hmm!)

Gordon Collette Josh Kate Paul and Paulene went camping on new year's eve, I gather they had fun, Josh brought back more bugs and a yabbie. Collette made the bugs into a rather nice presentation by sticking them on a rock with some glue. Was quite a challenge to actually kill them though - bugs are pretty darned hardy things you know - can take a few stabbings...!

Have updated the google web albums with some more pictures. Am trying to make a fancy flash slideshow but not quite mastered it yet, so for now, just click here and you can view them as google intended:

View Pictures

December update - part 2 - Dad and Shirl

So we roll into December. I'm not one to celebrate christmas that much (if you're interested theres some stuff on facebook) but the main event of this month was Dad and Shirl's visit. They've kindly agreed to some piccies being put online, so here we go:

Here's Dad and Shirl accepting some free cocktails at the Palace hotel, because we helped pull the storm curtains down due to an incoming strong breeze and some rain. Hooray!



We've been to a few restaurants and seen a few sights. Mainly been sitting by the pool chilling, or sitting in Paddy's Ale House (typical!) supping a few drinks.

Here we are at the Boulder War Museum:



And here's Dad and Shirl enjoying the view from Mount Charlotte (lookout point over most of Kalgoorlie):


After these photos were taken we were treated to a pretty fantastic lightning storm, unfortunately the piccies didn't some out too well on my little digi camera but rest assured it was a good view from Mt Charlotte..!

So Dad and Shirl are leaving these shores tomorrow (aww!) and I wish them a safe journey. Hope you arrive intact back in cold ol' mother england!

Steeevo out....

December update - part 1 - Mum and Paul

Well quite a lot's happened since the last update. Apologies for the tardiness.

Let's start with October - Mum and Paul had a visit to Kalgoorlie where we did some tourist stuff like visited a few mines, went underground, saw a couple blasts at the superpit and did some catching up. Here's a summary of their visit (Mum and Ste at the Mining hall of fame about to go for an underground tour):


And here's Mum and Paul with some gold:

(Alas they couldn't keep it but it woulda been worth something if they could..!)

So I think Mum and Paul had a nice time, it was certainly good to see them and we must thank the people at the All seasons hotel for accomodating us for the duration of their stay.

From the dictionary of steve...

Woo hoo: (adjective). Pron. "Woo" then "hoo". Similar to the expression made when one spends $1 on a trifecta bet and it comes in at the following price:



D'oh: (adjective). Pron. "doh". Similar to the expression made when by selecting one extra horse one could have won $10,000. Ah well, am nearly $400 better off than I was the day before... :)






















"woo hoo"

nice and warm

As mum and paul are winging their way to Kalgoorlie (I'm guessing they're currently somewhere approaching indonesia, with 4 hours left of the flight), here's the latest weather obbo:



35.6 aint bad for a blustery saturday afternoon. hurrah!

eesh, its quiet round here

Not updated here in a while, apologies. Have put aside a spare few minutes to update the readers on what's been going on down under.

Josh and Kate are fantastic, as ever. "Uncle Ste" got a tick in his 'looking after the kids' book the other day - I helped joshie pick out his pyjamas and get dressed. Add that to the other feats of childcare: making breakfast, putting a train set together, buckling and unbuckling the car seats, and fixing toys. Not yet been on toilet duty - am hoping that by the time it gets round to my turn, they'll both be old enough to look after themselves, heh heh..

Gordon and Collette are still great hosts, hats off to them for putting up with me for 6 months. Am still loving this house next to the racecourse, even if the online gambling is not yet making any profit. G+C are still happy with their 4wd - a Nissan Patrol. Now we have a UHF Radio which is great fun to listen on as anyone who knows me knows I love the whole two-way comms stuff. We've been on some pretty darned good off-roading jaunts. The favourite one at the moment is heading over to the quarry with the telescopes and Gordon's very fancy camera for some stargazing. Just far enough out of town to get away from the glare, and down in a big hole so all you can see is stars (and occasional shooting ones at that). Got quite comfy on a large tractor tyre looking up at the sky, only to get ridiculed when walking into the 24hr petrol station for a spring roll on the way back, as I was covered in black marks apparantly. Honestly, you'd think people would at least clean their old rubbish before throwing it in a quarry...

And now for some geeky stuff, if the folks at Agilisys/CCC are still reading here that is. The last 6 weeks or so has seen my time monopolised by a rather large server project. There's still a few things to iron out, but we can now consider ourselves at the end of the project.
Before: 3 separate, disjoined domains run by steam-powered boxes I wouldn't even use as a smoothwall host :)
After: 6 brand spanking new serv0rs spread over 3 sites with a WAN infrastructure to make Patty and the comms team extremely jealous.
The DC at the main site is windows 2008 64bit with exchange 2007, running DHCP, DNS etc. The file server is also 2008 64bit with a few terabytes of storage and an LTO-4 backup drive. There's also a couple of win2003R2 boxes- one running SQL, the other running ISA.
At each of the other two sites there's one Win 2008 64bit DC, joined and replicating to the same AD Domain as the DC at the main site. These boxes also have a few gigs of filing on there as well as the local site users' profiles.
Doesn't sound like much, but starting from scratch it's been quite a lot of work. We've had major fun with Server 2008 and Trend - lots of conversations with Microsoft & Trend Micro and plenty workarounds tried out by both parties, just to come to the conclusion that we can't backup the system state on a 2008 box with Trend installed. Boo for trend. We keep getting promised that a fix is around the corner, but we're still holding our breath on that one.

Still on an IT-related theme, I passed the first of my MCSA core exams last month. Am now studying for the second of eventually 5 exams to hopefully obtain MCSA status. 3 More windows 2003 exams, one exchange 2007 and probably ISA 2006 to finish off with. So that'll be eating up what little spare time we seem to get round here.

Not long now till the family will be visiting. Mum and Paul are heading over mid-October, and Dad and Shirl are coming over mid-December. Don't even think I'm prepared for the Australian summer heat yet and I've been here six months, so not sure what coming from the UK climate straight into 40+/30+ (max/min) temperatures is going to do to us pommies. We look forward to finding out though, tee hee :) Cold beer on standby, steaks on the barbie. It's hard life but someone's gotta do it.

Work has given me a new phone - well second-hand cos the previous owner left - but it's still new to me. Only thing is the camera's not brilliant so until I remember to take my Canon ixus I5 (thanks to Neilos for the recommendation in buying it - it's still great!) around with me, there's not too many new photo's to post. I bet you're getting sick of nice sunsets and sunny weather anyway. Or jealous? :)

Well, if you're still with me, reading this far, thanks for your attention. Not heard from many of you recently but I do still think about the happy days in the Northern Hemisphere - Lorne farm, Thomson St, Agilisys, Five Live Sport, Match of the Day. Oh, and (just to remind you Andeh) Hed Kandi and Pubwatch. Still a Fan :)

Steeevo, signing off.

Now THATS a steak.

Ste gets a pound and a half to himself.

Yes its sunday (town deserted) and yes that's a tumbleweed...

Posh-ing it up at the races

Free beer and free food. Some wins on the gg's too :)

And he's on the.. um... BROWN I guess?

HOW many reminders?

This is what happens in outlook when you synchronize your mobile phone with your mailbox for the first time... (clue: Look at the top title bar)

Thank goodness for the "Dismiss All" button :)
<

Quick update

Just a quick update to say am still alive. The horse racing season is in full swing now, so for the next few sunday arvo's we'll be watching the GGs from the balcony after spending a portion of the week's hard earned in the bookies. I'm trying to act professional and make it look like I know what I'm doing by studying the racing paper and putting little pen-marks on particular horses. Gordon and Collette have much more luck than me by picking the mystery bets.. hm!


Every week at work, $5 of our wages goes into a social club fund. We've got quite a large pot now so for a treat we agreed to meet at the bowling alley for a few games. Collette was a bit under the weather so she didn't go, and for some reason no bugger else did either, so Gordon and I had a couple of games (we each got a strike - yay) then went to the country club for a couple games of pool. Still got quite a bit of dosh in the pot, which we'll put towards nibbles and pop for a Sunday afternoon's cuddy racing shortly.

Am actually sat writing this with my jumper on, as it's turning a bit chilly in the evenings now. Still warm during the day but down to 12C at the moment, a couple of minutes before midnight. First time the wooley pulley's been out so far though :) Let's have a look at a nice sunset to make us feel warmer:


So not much to report recently. Things ticking over nicely - work's hectic but fun. I bought a computer desk today for $45 (should've been $70). Managed to get it all put together myself too - and only broke one cam bolt. New record!

So I believe the english premiership is all over and done with. United and Chelsea fans can stop gloating any time they feel like it. Still, as my interests move from footy to horse racing, third is OK - shoulda put a place bet on Arsenal finishing in the top three :)

So enjoy the FA cup final if you're watching it. Can only just find a semi-decent formula 1 feed over here, so no chance on the footy. Damn!

"So what did you do today?"

...well duh! It was horse racing all afternoon, and formula 1 in the evening. Nuff said. Belter!

The clouds are gathering..

But just in the meteorological sense: **Steve switches camera to panoramic mode**


A quick dust storm later and the sun's shining again:


And now its getting dark and the storm's passing to the north (Radar from weatherzone.com.au):



As far as storms in oz go, this is bugger all. But it's still exciting for a pommie who gets to see about 4 lightning strikes a year in the UK :)


Looking forward to watching some more displays of lightning from the balcony - Monday was fantastic - night sky being lit up all around. woot!

only g33ks will get this...!

and like a proper l33t law-abiding citizen temporary resident I pulled over to take the picture :)


...unlike this one where I couldn't be bothered to stop to witness 138000 kms!:




Geek out!

April update

So three weeks has gone by, sorry for the lack of updates - am still getting used to the way of life here - All. That. Beer. jeez what a hard life :))

There was one little surprise (well quite a big one actually) waiting for me at the bottom of my beer bottle one night. See below:-



MMMmmmm - cockroach flavoured beer. Actually the poor little guy looks a bit pissed - flat on his back in the bottom of a bottle. What a way to go!

(Disclaimer:) The Cockroach climbed in AFTER I finished the beer, and is still actually alive - a full two days after it got in there. Nice one!


Work is rather enjoyable - I get to travel to different sites performing routine maintenance on the kit and making sure everyone's happy with their systems. Three days out of five I travel to Kambalda (50kms south of Kalgoorlie), and once a fortnight to Coolgardie (about 30kms west), so I'm not stuck in the office all day. When I'm not doing scheduled maintenance checks, I'm looking after other problems that people ring in with, ranging from slow networks, to virus checking, to PC/laptop rebuilds.

So things really are working out here, it's a great place to live, and it's really nice to see Gordon, Collette and the kids. We've got them tonight (Tuesday), right through until next Friday (I think), so that'll be good fun.

It's ANZAC day here on Friday, which I don't really know much about. What I am looking forward to though, is the horse racing in our backyard at the racecourse again, and now that my TAB online account is somewhat active (I have to undergo a 100-point identity check in order to be able to deposit over $1000 - I wish! Some small $10 bets will do nicely thankyou) we can bet straight from the computer, then nip out to the balcony to watch them storm past. This is the life!

Hope life is treating you well in the UK (and in NZ if you're reading this A, J and PJ! Nice to hear you got your stuff after all that waiting..!).

TTFN

...and they're off! (did I mention this was our BACK YARD?!!)

Steeevo bets on horse number 9, which was leading after a few metres, then fell back. Bugger! $2 down the drain. Oh well, at least there's another 4 races to go...

BTW, betting in oz is dead easy. The card looks exactly like a lottery ticket - mark your venue, race number, horse number and amount to bet. Piece of the preverbial :)

Paul: You jealous enough yet? :)

Looks like rain :)

Evening dinner in Kalgoorlie

Kalgoorlie - all the 'king horses!

Quite a lot's happened since the last update - there was little or no internet in Esperance (in fact the mobile networks and the internet went down for about a day for everyone..!) so am updating from the place I'll be calling home for the forseeable future. And I have no reason to leave here - no pictures can do this mansion justice but check this out:




..and that's just the front of the house from the outside, and the downstairs playroom for the kids. I'll put some more pics from here in the picasaweb album soon.

The flight from Perth on Friday was fun - 48 minute flight time during which the stewardesses ran round serving breakfast, coffee and tea as fast as they could - we'd only just finished going up and we were coming back down again..! Better than a 9-hour drive anyday :)

Once we hit Kalgoorlie we packed the cars and headed south to Esperance, along with half of Kalgoorlie as it turned out. Seems to be a popular long weekend destination! Gordon and Collette kindly sorted out rooms for us all (10 of us in total - Collette, Gordon, Collette's mum + Stepdad, me, Mat, Josh, Kate, a girl who works with Collette's mum, and her boyfriend).

Once there we spent the weekend knocking about Esperance, bit of shopping etc, and some fishing. Gordon and I caught a couple of tiddlers but that's about it. We weren't fishing for hours on end, just basically for a few hours after the kids went to bed.

I'd forgotten it was easter until we were woken Sunday morning by two small easter bunnies by the names of Josh and Kate, wearing fluffy rabbit ears. They were bearing chocolate eggs and a chocolate rabbit which was nice.

So we drove back on Monday and now it's Tuesday morning. Mat went back to Perth last night - was nice to see him. I need to sort a few things out today visa-wise for work, and then I can hopefully start tomorrow. I basically started working last night when trying to talk on Skype and the bloody internet router kept rebooting. Bah! You'd think the boss of an IT support company would have half-decent kit wouldnt you? :)

Just looking out of the second floor window right now at 9am with the sun beating down, and watching the horses train on the racecourse. It's literally over the fence from the balcony. This is gonna be a prime seat come race day! Paul, you'd be very jealous! Here's some evidence taken just now:



I hear you had snow for Easter in the UK - and thanks for the evidence in a movie Neil!

So keep an eye on the picasa albums - will be putting a few online shortly. Hope everyone's keeping OK.

Laters!