Storms and flooding rains (and the internet)

 We had a storm early this morning.

No real damage, except that just after the sun  came up, the power went off.

Well, we're an all electric house, so we went to our emergency plan - electric storm lanterns in place - it was really dark, at one point our solar system was generating a massive 58w, normally it manages a kilowatt or so when we have normal cloud cover.

Fortunately while it was windy and very heavy cloud, it wasn't raining seriously meaning I could get out our old gas camping stove on the back deck and heat water for tea, and later on make some breakfast coffee to have with our muesli and yoghurt.

We sat on the back deck and listened to the 8AM news on the crackly AM Radio National signal on our emergency radio  - there had been heavy rain to the west of us and we were next in line for a drenching.

Of course we had the perennial problem that when the power and the internet is out we lose a phone connection - by some quirk of geography our house is located in a mobile blackspot, and we have nearly non existent 4G or 5G coverage.

Before they turned off the 3G service we could get a grudging half a bar of 3G, but now we might as well be on the moon.

Day to day it doesn't matter, wifi calling means we can use our phones normally, but when the power is out. no.

Texts usually get through eventually, which means that we do get the automated message from the power company telling us our smart meter has gone offline and they are investigating, but there's no way we can check on the progress of our trouble ticket via their website. 

We just have to be patient and trust that they are working on it.

So, it was a quiet morning reading - too dark to read a paper book, but backlit screens on tablets and kindles are fine, and some tomato soup and bread for lunch.

As we were tidying up after lunch the power came back.

As always, we waited for fifteen minutes to make sure it was really back on, and then started resetting appliance clocks etc, and while doing this I noticed the wi-fi enabled cat feeder's status light was blinking. 

Sure enough the internet had not come back - well it had, sort of, but the modem was trying to use its backup 5G connection in place of our fibre optic connection.

Now, given our poor 5G coverage, as you might have guessed, the 5G backup connection is as much use as a chocolate teapot.

I thought we might have had a race condition whereby the modem had booted up faster than the fibre optic box  and finding no working fibre connection had defaulted to the useless 5G backup connection.

So, I restarted the modem by pulling the power cord out, singing 'happy birthday to you' - takes about 30s - and plugged it back in.

That seemed to work, except the internet TV and radio connections kept dropping out, and sure enough, every so often the modem would flip over to the 5G connection and then flip back to the fibre optic connection.

And then I remembered to slightly odd conversation I'd had with a Telstra engineer when I was in FNQ and he wanted me to restart the fibre optic box to fix a connectivity issue after a power outage while we were away.

Now at the time we were nearly 3000km from home, and consequently unable to do anything, and anyway the internet was working perfectly when we got home, so I'd kind of forgotten what he told me to do.

But I remembered the gist of the conversation so I popped the case off the fibre optic box and pulled the power cable out, even though the diagnostic lights all looked normal, we had optical, we had ethernet on the correct port, and no panic light.

I did the happy birthday thing again, watched it boot up and the lights that should be green were green and those that should be orange, orange, and that all the others were off.

Then I power cycled the modem again, again doing the happy birthday thing, and this time when it booted up it found the fibre optic connection and gave a solid signal, and stayed solid.

The internet radio worked. We could watch the internet only TV channels and importantly the cat feeder had connectivity.

So, lesson learned, restart the fibre optic box if, after a power outage, the internet's iffy ...

Second hand books, the purchasing thereof

 I am an inveterate buyer of second hand books.

Sometimes from Australia, sometimes from overseas.

And I do so for a number of reasons, because it's cheaper, because it can be better for the environment - although when the book is bought from retailer in the UK and airfreighted halfway around the world, perhaps not - and sometimes in the case of history books published in Australia their notoriously short print runs can make second hand the only viable option.

And like most people buying second hand I resort to AbeBooks, which of course is an Amazon subsidiary and does its pricing in US Dollars, irrespective of where you live, or where the bookseller is located.

And while the post Trump gyrations of the Australian dollar are a pain, I use a low fee debit card with highly competitive exchange rates to take the edge off having to pay AbeBooks in US dollars.

And the market can be quite weird at times - sometimes due to the comparatively high cost of postage within Australia, it can be cheaper to buy from overseas - go figure.

However, in the case of Australian second hand books, they are usually only available from Australia and occasionally New Zealand second hand book sellers.

So, I've adopted the following strategy when searching for and buying second hand Australian books - I'll first of all search on AbeBooks and see if the book is available.

If it's available from an Australian or New Zealand second hand bookshop and they have an online shop - some don't and just tell you to use AbeBooks, or occasionally Biblio.com - I check to see what their AUD or NZD price is including postage.

Sometimes buying direct is fractionally cheaper, but in truth it's usually within a few cents of going via AbeBooks or Biblio.com.

However, by doing this, even if I'm not saving money, I'm helping support local second hand book sellers as they are not having to pay commission on sales to an overseas book listings site which should make them a little more viable as a business.

There's also an environmental benefit from buying locally.

Chances are, unless the book comes from FNQ or WA, my book will travel in an Australia Post semi trailer, which while they're not exactly pollution free are probably less damaging to the environment than having the item air freighted from overseas ...

Moderately productive

 Down at Lake View, I've finished working on the dining room and am now working on the dining room, which is mostly a case of inventorying and documenting the furniture,

but the furniture did include a seemingly intact 1867 Britannia sewing machine, made in Colchester in England.

I must admit that I hadn't really thought about sewing machines, but like railways and bicycles, they were transformative - making mass produced clothes possible - and incidentally leading to a standardisation of clothing sizes, it also simplified the business of making clothes at home.

The mass production of clothing of course lead to the need to have places to sell them and indirectly to the development of department stores.

Up at the Athenaeum I actually did nothing this week, but we did have a very productive meeting with Molly from the Burke museum, who has agreed, as part of cross shire support, to come in and help deal with a collection of rather tatty bibles and prayer books we have inherited from various deconsecrated churches, and use them to test our collection and disposal policies.

I've also blogged about jrnl, a command line journalling tool for Linux and friends.

Having played with it on a couple of machines I've decided that it would probably be useful addition to the lightweight research machine, to capture a day's activities.

However, it's not all been serious, it was a warm sunny day yesterday, and we played hooky, driving over to Bright for a walk along the river and lunch in a cafe, before driving back the long way via Mount Beauty and Yackandandah...

The US election

 We'd been steadfastly ignoring the US election, but, eternal optimists both, we'd been hoping for a more liberal America, rather than one which at times seemed to be increasingly governed by people from some alternate reality.

Well, we now know the result, and it doesn't look like what we hoped for.

So last night, we turned the tv off, got a bottle of chilled pinot grigio out of the fridge, poured a couple of glasses and sat out on the deck watching a storm roll in from the west ...

Back to some sort of normality

 After our mad dash out west last week we slipped back in to a more normal routine this week, with a productive day down at Lake View working on the books used to 'dress' the sitting room and the anecdotal observation that works of devotional literature were far less worn than the popular literature of the day, suggesting that they were far less read.

I took advantage of my work with the Athenaeum's heritage book collection, which reflects the actual tastes of reading room subscribers in Stanley in the late Victorian period to suggest that sensation novels and the like were far more popular than more pious literature.

As I pointed out, this can present a curatorial problem when 'dressing' a house for display - it is tempting to produce a display featuring well preserved items of devotional literature than the battered and tattered copies of 'Little Women' and 'The Woman in White', which more closely reflect the literary taste of the times.

I also mentioned last week that some of the items I'd catalogued at Lake View included some moral works by Hannah More that appeared little read.

While certainly the case there's possibly an interesting story here.

The books in question were printed by Thomas Tegg in London, and I'd vaguely assumed that they'd come out as part of an order from a London bookseller in a sort of nineteenth century version of Amazon, but they could potentially have been sold in Sydney, as Thomas Tegg's son, James Tegg, was a bookseller (and later a printer and publisher in his own right) in Sydney, and I'm guessing that James Tegg bought them from his father as stock for his bookshop,

After last year's possum trouble, I started off my tomatoes on the enclosed part of the back deck used as a cat run, and planted them out this week as they'd grown to a possum proof size.

This has left me with a problem - the first part of October was cold and I held off buying zucchini plants, but when I went down to the local hardware store earlier this week to see if they had any left they were completely out, so I've ended up planting some standard commercial seed in pots in the hope they'll germinate and I can plant out some late zucchini early next month.

(Normally I buy some plants from a local nursery plus try some organic varieties grown with seed bought online, with mixed results - the organic seed can have a low germination rate, possibly due to our tendency to have decidedly cold nights well into spring, while the bought plants initially struggle, perhaps because I don't properly harden them off.)

I didn't plant any potatoes this year, which was possibly a mistake but our dill, basil and chives are doing well. The broad beans took a terrific battering during the dress rehearsal for Ragnorok a couple of weeks ago and have not recovered, so I'm afraid we're going to have a fairly meagre crop this year.

Still, that's gardening ...

Furniture and a trip out west

 The last couple of weeks I've been working on the sitting room at Lake View, documenting the furniture - furniture's not really my thing, and I have to keep referring to various guides to nineteenth century chair designs to correctly describe the styles, but in among the props used to dress the house I was amused to come across a set of volumes by Hannah More, a nineteenth century conservative Christian moralist, that had evidently been given to a young woman, a Miss Webster, as a Christmas present in 1841 (or possibly as a school prize as the handwritten dedication says that  that it was given by the Misses Harding in recognition of her industry and good conduct - unfortunately I can't trace an early school run by any Misses Harding) looked more or less unread, with the bindings still tight ,,,

It's moments like these that make you wonder if Miss Webster, like Jane Austen's fictional Catherine Morland, would have preferred something a little more gothic...

Up at the Athenaeum, we've been discussing data  management with no real conclusions other than it's a good thing and trying to put together a little event based around the 1925 commemoration of Hume and Hovell's 1825 journey  from Sydney to somewhere near Corio in what is now Geelong.

In 1925 they built various monuments to commemorate the centenary of the trip and carted various worthies, including the Governor, to dedicate the cairns.

However, my morning at the Athenaeum was cut short by worsening weather - what had been heavy rain turned into a mini Ragnarok, battering the garden, and of course the power went out,

We'd had the sense to start cooking a vegetarian stew for dinner just after lunch, meaning it was more or less done by the time the power went out.

By early evening we were still in the dark (literally) and dug out our old gas camping stove to heat our stew on the covered area of the deck outside. 

As it was still raining we reckoned we'd probably better  eat before the sun went down, but just as we lighting our battery storm lanterns the power came back and stayed on.

Fortunately the bad weather had cleared by the next morning as we had booked a skip, so for the next couple of days we did nothing but work solidly on clearing the inevitable accumulation of junk left over from renovations and so on from the converted garage which will eventually become a second studio for J to do smelly things like oil painting and also give me a second work area for genealogical and other miscellaneous nineteenth century research.

As if that wasn't enough  I've been down a bit of a rabbit hole about serious crimes on railways in the nineteenth century, and traced the story of a railway crime in rural Scotland which occurred not to far from where by grandparents and great grand parents had a farm at the end of the nineteenth century,

Oh, and we played hooky this week and had a mad dash out west to look at Lake Tyrell and the salt flats...

Finding Irene ...

 Trying to find Irene Lily May Hoggan's death record got under my skin, so I decided to do a little detective work - otherwise known as brushing up my genealogical research skills.

I backtracked my searches on Victoria's Births, Deaths and Marriages website and there was definitely no death record, nor was there a death record for her husband, Arthur Burge.

And even though we are looking at a time when divorce was rare and expensive, most people simply making their own informal arrangements, I checked for a divorce record, and there was none. 

In a moment of frustration I simply tried a google search on her full married name, and strangely that worked - I stumbled across an Ancestry list of family trees and there she was, living in New South Wales.

Ancestry of course obscures most of the information unless you sign up.

 

I don't have a subscription to any of the family history giants any more, but what was not obscured suggested that Irene Lily May may have died in New South Wales.

At this point I could, I suppose, have waited to Monday to use my local Library's Ancestry subscription - you can only use the subscription from one of the Library desktops - to check further but I had enough bits of puzzle - having a slightly unusual name helps - to track her down online using open source materials.

 

A quick search of NSW's BDM site confirmed  that she had died in Manly in 1958 almost twenty years after her husband, who appears to have died in 1939.

The fact that this was relatively straight forward is a tribute to how simple it is to carry out basic genealogical research using open source materials - despite what the glossy ads tell you you don't need a subscription to one of the behemoths for basic research given so much is publicly available online.

If you are doing a lot of work in this area, a subscription to the behemoths can be worthwhile, if only to reduce the cost of access to copies of original documents, and even then your mileage may vary...