Holidays in Brisbane

We spent Xmas week in Brisbane with Michelle's cousin, Jenny, and her husband, Dave. We decided to drive, since flying is such a hassle and expensive. The total distance was nearly 1000 km, so that meant a total driving time of around 12-13 hours. At first, we had the idea that we would slog through and get it overwith in one day, but halfway through we changed our minds and spent a night in Coffs Harbor. While other people on the road are generally polite, and the scenery is beautiful, the roads in NSW are about 10 years behind what they should be. The state motto for NSW should be: "Oops! We forgot the infrastructure!" The previous state governments have just kept the chairs warm for 4 years so they could collect their lifetime pensions, but the state is the worst in the nation for road quality and appropriate quantity for the number of drivers. There are several 50+ km stretches of road that are single lane in either direction, all no passing. Larger vehicles, of course, must drive a little slower for safety reasons, but this means in these no passing segments that traffic backs up extensively. This creates a very unsafe situation. Another interesting note is the NSW government's defense of the highest business taxes in the nation, saying the taxes are justified to fund all the new infrastructure projects. Yet, Queensland and Victoria have lower business taxes, and vastly superior infrastructure. The argument is crap.

One thing NSW seems to have an abundance of are speed cameras. While speed enforcement is certainly important for everyone's safety, it highlights the state's perverted priorities. The money used to lay out a sophisticated camera system could have been used years ago to widen some of the more dangerous stretches of road to a proper two lanes. By setting up the roads so that people can pass slower traffic more often than once every 50 km, more drivers would likely be able to maintain patience for the duration of the drive. But when masses of people are forced to go 20 km under the speed limit for an insanely long stretch because grandpa with his caravan can't be bothered to keep up -- it creates a situation where everyone's nerves reach their limits and people try to make up for lost time when the road finally clears up. Does anyone in the NSW government or RTA realize this? Or are they all just a bunch of idiots? (My guess is the latter, especially given that other states have done better with lower taxes.)

Now that I've got the whinging out of the way, the holidays were great. Brisbane was hot and humid, much like Texas. Winter there is like early summer here in Wollongong. We had a great time with the family and friends up there. Dave owns a bar and had a party for friends and family to celebrate the closing of the year. We got to meet up with Chris and Iris (whom we met at the wedding last year, and stayed with when we were down in Melbourne last November). It was nice to see them again. They had recently married, and were in the area doing some visiting as well. Xmas Day was spent at Dave's mom's house. While dinner was undergoing final preparations, Dave's mom had all the ladies doing some fossicking. That's where you sift through a pile of dirt for gemstones, gold, etc. -- although this setting was much tamer than a mining camp. There were various sapphires for the ladies to find, some cut, some rough. Michelle found a blue sapphire and a yellow one, plus a rough one. Dinner was followed by the gift exchange. Then, as is typical of such gatherings, people began to make a break for it lest they get stuck for the rest of the day. We took our cue after helping with some cleanup.

The rest of the time there, we did our own thing. Boxing Day is the day after Xmas. We decided to go shopping, and discovered that in the big cities, Boxing Day is akin to Black Friday in America. The stores were nuts! Although, for the most part, people are more relaxed while shopping on Boxing Day, perhaps because Xmas is over by then so there's no panic to buy things for other people. I found some nice items at an outdoors store that I can use on my next camping trip. We also found a few small items for our kitchen.

The stopovers in Coffs Harbor were very enjoyable. On the way up, we visited the Big Banana. It's a banana plantation where everything's bananas. Seeing the bananas on the plants in different stages of growth was interesting. On the way back, we stayed two nights in Coffs Harbor. The first day, we did a little shopping and walked on the beach. The second day, we did some fossicking for sapphires, following the experience of Xmas Day. This time, however, there were no pre-cut stones planted, just rough ones. We found several nice sapphires, some garnets, and lots of small, well-formed quartz crystals. It took us nearly four hours to go through one bucket of dirt. Once you find a few of the good stones, you cease to get trapped by the ordinary rocks and the sifting goes much faster.

It was a good week, but we were glad to get back home. We will be spending NYE by ourselves, taking it easy.

Our New Internet Connection Is Up!

Yesterday while we were out and about, I got a text message from our new ISP telling me the connection was all set up and ready. So when we got home, I booted up the modem and put in the new settings. Once I verified it all worked, I went upstairs to get our wireless router off off our neighbor's ADSL connection. The VOIP setup should be done sometime this week.

In the first day of testing out the new connection, we have been impressed with the speed. We are paying less money, but getting 2-3 times the download speed we had before. We also have a higher download quota, and all for about $20 less per month. We were really getting ripped off by the previous provider.

Miscellaneous Updates

Life has been quite busy since we've arrived back in Australia. We finally dropped our old ISP due to poor reliability and tech support only being available during weekdays. However, because this is Australia we are talking about, it's taking nearly two weeks to activate our connection with our new ISP. Fortunately, our neighbors have broadband, and we are borrowing some of their bandwidth (I just plugged our wireless router into their modem).

I've done some cleaning up of our tiny backyard, and started a garden. While we were away, we got a clover infestation in the yard, so I had to pull all that. Then I laid down eucalyptus mulch. The seedlings I planted a couple of weeks ago are ready to transplant. The garden this year will consist of tomatoes (traditional, black, roma, and cherry), bell peppers (called capsicum here), jalapeno peppers, Thai peppers, basil (Thai, Genovese, and purple), rosemary, oregano, cilantro (called coriander here), and yellow beets. That selection may very well grow (*groan*) if we have room for more, since the warm season here is 6-7 months.



We've got beneficial creatures in our yard to help manage the pests, too. Our resident blue tongue lizard was on patrol for awhile recently. In addition, there are also a few skinks about.

At campus, my project this year has finally come to enough of a conclusion that results can be written up, so I've been busy writing my next paper. These results are good enough that we are hoping the paper gets published in a fairly decent journal. On top of that, the director of our group is excited enough about what I was able to accomplish in Massachusetts that he wants me to build a similar printer robot system here. In fact, I've been able to source two distinct systems for a reasonable cost and will be ordering both. Putting these machines together and getting them working will be my first project after the holidays.

And getting to the holidays... We will be driving to Brisbane to visit Michelle's cousin, Jenny, and her husband. It will be nice to spend more time with them, as they were obviously quite busy last year for their wedding. I got us a decent (but cheap) stereo for the car that has an auxiliary port for an mp3 player or iPod. That way we have an abundant source of music for the duration of the drive.