Quokkas and fur seals

 As I've said elsewhere we've been on holidays to the south western corner of WA.

Perhaps not the best time to go travelling, but we had no problems filling our little rented MG, the weather was good (more or less) and we had a good time.

As always most of what we did was really only of interest to ourselves, but I'd certainly recommend a trip out to the west of the west.

We flew to Perth and spent a couple of days adjusting to the time difference before picking up our rented car and driving south to Margaret River.

We didn't stay in Margaret River, but in the small coastal community of Gnarabup, which while touristy - a couple of good swimming beaches - is not over run with backpackers and campervans.

While in Gnarabup, we had a day trip to Busselton, stopping for coffee in Cowaramup where the locals have done this whole cow thing installing fibreglass cow sculptures on the main street

and souvenirs such as fresian patterned bucket hats and t-shirts.

Busselton has a decent art shop, which allowed J to stock up on art materials for the trip. While there I had a gander at the anomalous post box - it's very much a nineteenth century New South Wales post box

still in use and made by the Paragon Foundry in Pyrmont - how it ended up on the other side of the country is a bit of a puzzle, especially as pre Federation WA post boxes are a simpler hexagonal design as in this example by J & G Ledger from outside the outpost of the WA museum in Augusta

From Busselton we drove back via Cape Naturaliste and its lighthouse - Virginia wasn't in - and where we had a little bushwalk through the coastal scrub and I realised that I knew nothing about the plants and animals of WA.

Sure there were plants that looked like what you would expect in any windswept coastal ecology, and doing the jobs you expected, but when you looked closely, they were different, in some cases very different from their east coast equivalents.

After Gnarabup we moved on to Pemberton, looping down via Hamelin bay where the stingrays come in to the shallows to interact with these funny pale skinned bipeds on the beach and Cape Leeuwin, where the lighthouse is hidden behind a fairly ugly chain link fence, and then on to Augusta, before heading inland through the Kari forest to Pemberton, once a logging town, then a centre for the Orange People, and now simply a town trying to adjust to a changing economy.

While we were in Pemberton, I turned seventy, and to mark that event we had a ride on the tourist tram that runs on a section of the old railway line

Cheesy and geeky, but fun to let my inner railway nerd out, and what better a time to do it than on my 70^th.

From Pemberton, we spent time in D'Entrecasteaux national park before driving along the coast to Denmark which was in the news a few years ago when an emperor penguin washed up on the coast, but is basically just a relaxed surfy kind of place.

While in Denmark we doubled back one day to Walpole for a high octane ecological boat tour - The guide, Gary Muir, talked at about a hundred kilometres an hour for the whole tour, about how the local quokka population had developed a natural resistance to the 1080 bait used to control fox and feral cat populations, about microplastic pollution, the impact of chytrid fungus on native frogs, and much more besides.

From Denmark we moved on to Bremer Bay, a little township on the edge of the emptiness, before heading back to Perth via Katanning.

Katanning has a reputation as a vibrant multi cultural centre with a substantial Cocos Malay population.

Not on a Sunday. The town was closed - perhaps the fact it was also Eid didn't help, but all the interesting ethnic restaurants were closed and we ended up with a very nice pizza and a couple of beers in the hotel bar.

After dropping the car off in Perth, we got the train down to Fremantle

 

where we stayed in a short term business apartment for a few days, which allowed us to have a day on Rottnest island, a swim, and to see the quokkas

not to mention some New Zealand fur seals

characteristically sticking their flippers out of the relatively warm water to keep cool. And the water was relatively warm, allowing us a final swim at Little Armstrong Beach.

And then our holiday was over, and there was a cyclone threatening. The day before we left it was blowing half a gale when we walked to the shipwreck museum to see the hull of the Batavia

On the morning we flew out it was pouring with rain - like serious cyclonic rain - and the plane was over Esperance before we left the cyclonic weather system behind. It had been raining so heavily when we boarded the airbridge was leaking and there was a man standing by the leak with a strategically placed umbrella to deflect the worst of it...

And we're back

 

Several mammoth test and diagnostic sessions later including crawling on the floor and plugging an old Linux laptop directly into the fibre optic transceiver (needed a wired ethernet connection and new slimline laptops often don't have one), and running followup tests the next day, we seem to have a fast and stable connection.

It's actually quite a bit faster than shown above, the screenshot is from an Android tablet, never the fastest device.

So, moral of the story, make sure you have a device with an ethernet port AND a spare ethernet cable in case you need to play at being a technician.

I do wonder what people who are not technically astute do...

In Limbo

Today started out well enough, a pleasant if sticky and sweaty pre dawn bike ride - we’re sliding down the hill into autumn and sunrise is now a little before seven.

I forgot to take my phone with me so I’m not sure of my performance, but it’s probably on a par with the previous week’s.

And then I spoiled it by contacting Telstra, our ISP.

We’re supposed to have a ridiculously fast 500Mbit/s connection - complete overkill but that’s what they upgraded us to in the last round of service improvements. Before that we had had a humble 100Mbit/s connection.

A few days before we went down to Mornington and Gippsland to see family, I’d run the Ookla speed test app on a whim and noticed we’d dropped back to 100Mbit/s.

In practical terms, it made no difference to our internet use - perhaps pages were imperceptibly slower to load, and we could still watch the tv shows we regularly stream, so I left it.

When we got back on Sunday it was still sitting at around 100Mbit/s, so I put contacting Telstra on my to do list. Unfortunately, that's about as far as I got - as we all know adding things to to do lists are substitutes for action.

That was probably even more of a mistake, because yesterday morning I noticed that pages from the Guardian were slow to load, and when I ran the speed test app we were sitting somewhere between 15 and 20Mbit/s.

So I ran Telstra’s self help test routines and yes, we had a slow connection. Only download though, latency (ping) and upload were fine.

Telstra’s automated self help routine flagged this as odd and said it would automatically rerun performance tests over the next twenty four hours.

Well, when I checked my Telstra app this morning there was both a request to message them, and a note to say that it had been flagged as a possible cable fault with NBNco.

(NBNco is the government owned corporation that owns the physical infrastructure - Telstra, like every other ISP in Australia, simply provides the services that runs on top of NBNco’s cables and allied infrastructure.)

So I contacted Telstra and spent an hour messaging one of their techs back and forth while they tried to fix the problem.

By tweaking port configurations they managed to get near enough to a 100Mbit/s connection, but when they tried the configuration changes for a 500Mbit/s connection it all fell in a heap, and our modem defaulted to the emergency backup 10Mbit/s mobile connection service Telstra provide.

 

10Mbit/s is the original speed of ethernet, and you can email, browse the web and even listen to an audio stream - we have an internet radio and that kept happily playing Radio National in the background, and files could be saved to the cloud, if a little bit slowly.

Just about everything worked, except for TV streaming.

You could even watch little video thumbnails - not surprising, the original cu-SeeMe video calling tool ran happily on typical 1990‘s internet infrastructure, even if the image size was pretty small.

So while we’re not exactly disconnected from the planet, we’re not exactly connected either...

Time out for family stuff...

 Instead of my usual Friday cataloguing up at the Athenaeum, this weekend we took some time out to go and touch base with family members (and their cats).

What we did was good fun and probably of no interest to any one else - like a surprisingly good dinner in a country RSL, or a visit to a farmer's market in Gippsland, but in the middle of the trip we stopped off at Port Nepean Quarantine Station.

It's a large site, and strangely, neither of us had been there before, and on a hot dry Friday it was almost deserted apart from a school group who weren't there for the history, but to learn to ride bikes

We didn't really have time to explore the site properly, and it would most definitely repay a proper visit ...

It's Tuesday, it's another early morning bike ride

 Up well before the sun at around six this morning for an early morning bike ride

setting off in the almost dark, and glad of my second higher power headlamp for the first half of the ride, dodging bin trucks and the 0630 bus to the train station in Wangaratta, but very rewarding to see the clouds gradually turn pink as the sun came up.

One advantage of riding before it's fully light is that there are fewer early morning runners and dog walkers on the bike path - one curse is people with ear buds - they simply don't hear you if you ring your bell politely, meaning that I have to bellow 'behind you!' as loudly as I can to attract their attention.

Mind you I always say 'thank you' when they move off the track and always give oncoming runners as smile as well when they move off the centre of the track - after all we're all here on the same planet and we have to try and make this social cohesion thing work.

A little bit slower than last week, but that's because I stopped to talk to a carpenter on the way back to see if he'd be interesting in replacing some rotting weather board on my toolshed.

And then home for a shower and a cup of tea with what would once have been the morning paper, and is now a tablet computer and the Guardian online... 
 

So, Sunday

 Earlier this week, after my early morning bike ride, I went down to Wangaratta to collect a new ink jet printer - our old Epson workforce printer had decided it just wanted to be a scanner a few years ago and J's colour Pixma had decided to die just before Christmas.

As a sensible solution we decided on a new shared colour Epson workforce printer.

So, once home, I started to set it up. This turned out to be more of a trial than I expected. 

For some bizarre reason, if it was connected to wifi, none of our computers could see it, although you could happily email a document to it, and it would print it.

I have no idea why. The work around seems to be to disable wifi on the printer and connect it directly to the back of the router, at which point everything works.

Our ISP recently upgraded our router's operating system to DUMA OS which seems to have various rules segmenting wifi into various virtual networks, and I did wonder if that  was what was getting in the way, but I don't really know.

Life was certainly simpler when you had a single simple flat address space.

So, having got the new printer working, this morning I took our old printers to the e-waste centre, along with an old bread maker, and a pile of odds and ends, dead batteries, the twenty year old halogen bike light I finally took off my bike, and a couple of old media streamers that we don't use now we've invested in a smart tv.

This does leave me with the problem as to what to do with our sixteen year old tv.

One part of me suggests hanging it on the wall in the studio as a run through device of rehearsing presentations, and the other part of me tells me not to be so stupid.

We'll see.

My other Sunday task was a temporary repair of our old weatherboard toolshed.

The structure is sound enough but a couple of planks on one wall where it catches the weather have begun to split and distort, and probably need to be replaced.

Our recent spell of very dry hot weather hasn't helped, with the planks drying out and starting to warp.

It's one of these jobs that a skilled tradesman could probably knock off in a morning, but would take me two or three days and a considerable part of the English lexicon of obscenities to do.

We also need a couple of other little bits of carpentry work done, so rather than have a go myself, I thought it best to do a temporary repair that would last the winter, and if we can't get anyone, I'd have a go myself in the spring.

So up and down ladders I moved the distorted planks back into place as well as I could, and pinned them in place with woodscrews. In the process I found the one of the weatherboards was rotting and definitely needed replacing.

This left some quite large gaps, which I filled, along with the cracks, with some window sealant - the stuff they put round frames when you have a new window installed. It's by no means a bit of quality sealing but it should keep the weather out and move with the wood when it starts to rain again.

Like I say, if I end up having to do it myself, it'll probably be spring, and I think my temporary bodge will hold till then.

Up at the Athenaeum, I had a morning's cataloguing  after last week's hiatus, which was fun.

Among other things, I turned up a sticker on the back of a 1930's crime novel that had been bought in from somewhere else that explicitly mentioned fumigation, which I think neatly closes the circle on hygenic libraries.

The prayerbooks have come back to haunt me, we've decided to add them to the catalogue as historic items because of the graffiti, and we've been donated an English dictionary dating from the late 1800s which seems to have been published by Edward Cole, who was known as a seller of new and second hand books at the end of the nineteenth century.

I've found no evidence at all, but I wonder if the Athenaeum committee were buying their second hand books from Edward Cole.

While we don't have the accession records, we do have some of the late nineteenth century minute books and financial records, and it's just possible that they might record payments to Edward Cole...

 

Another early morning bike ride

 Today was promising to be another hot day, so I was up and off before the sun came up for a ride round my little circuit.

Again I had my lights on, and in the process discovered what the little red led on my front light meant - that the battery was getting low.

I've never been a serious after dark rider, the one time I regularly rode after dark was when we first moved to Canberra, and tried to be both environmental and economical by only having one car between us.

Being Canberra, most of my ride in to work was along unlit and not particularly well maintained bike paths, and when riding after dark it was more a case of needing a heavy duty lamp to see the track and scare wildlife, rather than alert cars and trucks to your existence.

I didn't ride all the time, fortunately the number 217 direct bus (as was) to the CBD used to run past our house, meaning I could wimp out if it was wet, cold, or if it was a day when I needed business attire.

In those days LED lights were not a thing and the best choice for trail riding was a halogen light and you lived with it chewing batteries for breakfast.

In the event my front light dying on me didn't matter, the sun had come up sufficiently by the time my front light gave up the ghost, and anyway,  amazingly the old halogen Cat Eye light that I used when I used to ride home from work in Canberra, and had never got around to taking off my bike, still had some charge left in the battery despite not having been used for nearly twenty years.

However, I had an excellent ride, shaving five minutes off my recent average, swooshing along under trees and being rewarded with a wonderful orange red sunrise.

Everything was dry as the proverbial dead dingo, and later, I went down to OfficeWorks in Wangarratta to collect a new printer I was amazed just how dry, tawny dry, everything was. Not a spot of green to be seen.

It's obvious why we've been having continual fire ban warnings, one spark and these paddocks would catch light.

Basically, we need a day or two of soaking rain...