The MacAlba

Today was one of those days when I felt sorry for people who have to, or chose to, live in cities.

Today I:

• Photographed a kangaroo and joey next to the house
• Watched a snake-necked (0r long-necked) turtle laying eggs next to the “big dam”
• Saw the first hyacinth orchid of the season emerging
• Saw some donkey orchids I’ve never seen on the property before
• Watched an echidna root around for something to eat in the rain-soaked undergrowth

One of the dogs has an injured leg so instead of going for a jog this morning we went for a walk around the acres. Sitting a little less than a kilometre from the house is the “little dam”. Thanks to the recent rain it has some water in it at the moment so the dogs insist on their morning paddle. And there, not far from the dam’s edge was a small, solitary, terrestrial orchid – a Caladenia. The first one sighted this season – Spring is here.

I’ll have to pay it a visit with my macro lens this weekend and record the event for my photoblog (assuming that nothing’s eaten it by then of course).

Update: now photographed and published.

I see many bloggers apologise if they don’t blog on a regular basis, or are going away for a few days. Personally, I trust that people use aggregators to pull content to them when there is content to see. The fact that I’ve not posted anything on this blog for a month is not a major issue for me.

A major project at work (replacing 9 PABXs supporting 5000 handsets) tended to take the edge off any spare time. This project was 18 months in the making and will still take a few weeks to wrap up all the small leftover issues.

Next, a wireless network rollout, then a campus network upgrade. Life is never dull.

I have bookshelves filled with books, manuals, and guides purchased over the past decade or more from O’Reilly Media. In many cases I have several editions of the same book. I currently have two more newly-published O’Reilly books winging their way to me from Amazon in the USA (it’s cheaper than purchasing them locally, even when you include the substantial freight costs – but that’s another story). So, I think I can call myself a fan and a repeat customer.

BUT… the thing that annoys me, having purchased a book which has supposedly been passed by a large number of pairs of eyes, is the number of typographical (and other) errors contained therein. Other books, by comparison, have fewer errors. What’s gone wrong here? (To be fair, I’m not talking about hundreds of errors, just enough to be noticeable and annoying).

Are steps being missed out such that a deadline can be met? Or have people just become more careless? I’m not going to stop purchasing from O’Reilly, but it can make learning something new even more challenging when sample code and illustrative examples are just plain wrong.

… mentioning the surprisingly unexpected, mid-winter strawberries yesterday was all that was needed to tempt the God of Frost. The overnight temperature dropped to -7 degrees C (19 degF). The poor strawberries looked aghast this morning.

On leaving the house, on my way to take the dogs for a jog this morning, I stopped by the mini-max thermometer to see what the overnight temperature had been. The thermometer said it had dipped to -1 degrees C (30 degF). That would explain the slight white sheen to the otherwise browned-off grass down the slope. I had noticed on previous mornings that the frost-bitten strawberry leaves of just a few weeks ago had now begun to be replaced by fresh green leaves.

Then I saw the strawberries. Surely not! It’s mid-winter. The rain and slightly higher temperatures than is the norm at this time of year must have fooled the plants into believing that we’re further into the growing season than we should be. Oh well, there are still several weeks of winter left. Time enough to stun the strawberries back into their normal winter rest.

My Aunt sent this from London. I hadn’t seen it before, but it appears online a few hundred times. It appealed to my sense of humour.

Tony Blair is visiting an Edinburgh hospital. He enters a ward full of patients with no obvious sign of injury or illness and greets one. The patient replies:

“Fair fa your honest sonsie face,
Great chieftain o’ the puddin race,
Aboon them a you take your place,
Painch, tripe or thairm,
As langs my airm.”

Blair is confused, so he just grins and moves on to the next patient. At his greeting the patient responds:

“Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it,
But we hae meat and we can eat,
So let the Lord be thankit.”

Even more confused, and his grin now rictus-like, the PM moves on to the next patient, who immediately begins to chant:

“We sleekit, cowerin, timrous beasty,
Thou needna start awa sae hastie,
Wi bickering brattle.”

Now seriously troubled, Blair turns to the accompanying doctor and asks “What kind of facility is this? A mental ward?”

“No”, replies the doctor. “This is the serious Burns unit.”

Winter in New England (that’s the Australian New England) means, typically, days filled with clear, blue skies, and nights of cold, crisp, air and frost. It’s usually quite dry, cold enough for snow, but not wet enough. It wouldn’t be completely unheard of for the overnight minimum to get down to -15 degC (5 degF). We are over 1 km (3400 ft) above sea level after all.

Winter this year, though, has been quite mild – so far. The sun has hardly been seen these past few weeks. It’s been overcast and grey. I’ve had something in the rain gauge each morning to be able to add to the rain chart. Being the last day of June today, it was the day to total up the month’s rainfall. The tally was 82.6 mm (3.2 inches) with something in the gauge on 14 days. That means that June has had almost twice as much rain as the previous 3 months added together. Too bad it’s too cold to promote growth of feed for the neighbour’s sheep and cattle.

This sounded pretty good until I heard that the best (or worst, depending on whether you were flooded or not) was 550 mm (21.6 inches) in the past few days north east of here, at Mullumbimby, on the coast.

New South Wales – drought and flood at the same time.