Verrrrrry Strange.....

Heres something you don't see every day.
Can you figure out who it's addressed to? Perhaps it contains the book of invisibility mentioned in the ebay listing below.....

Ever wondered how to become invisible? Or how it feels to be a wombat? Check out ebay item 140012370936

All will become clear my young Padawan.
UPDATE!!!
It 'appears' that the item mentioned above was so effective that the book literally made its own listing disappear. A real pisser this one. heres some of the original text in the book...

BECOME INVISIBLE! Imagine! Complete, REAL Invisibility! Stand unseen among people or cameras... even when totally surrounded. Not even a shadow! Not a hint of your true existence. Even when you are naked.


Seriously funny stuff, but it is truly tragic to 'see' that this is a serious listing that someone might actually pay for. Thank god cows don't have wallets. Now that I mention it, if cows did have wallets, what would they be made of??? Not leather surely...




Today's job took me to a little place called Iona. Apparently, farmers in Iona drive their cars and trucks until they stop...And that's exactly where they stay. I assume that a lot of farmers do this as it takes care of the logistical problems normally associated with psudomechanical agricultural machinery. This is the environmentally and photographicaly friendly method we sometimes call the 'Idontgiveatoss' or 'whatchagonnadoaboutit' method of biomechanical disposal. Wow, I was going to bore you to tears by banging on about feral animals but that is the subject for another blog. Hope you like the pics and see you on the next episode.

This is taken near Kilkunda. Cool day for fishing me thinks.

Same old thing.

It's been rather quiet and all the jobs I have had of late have been somewhat boring. Sorry folks, but thats the way it is. I hope to give you an exciting blog soon though. I will keep you posted. In the mean time check out Broken Yellow

Interesting website... Cya later.

Tagged as well

Tagged
I have been tagged by the amazing Amber so here are my answers.

Four jobs I've had:

1. Working in a supermarket
2. Security guard at a 'Lethal Dose' Concert
3. Working as a carrot packing dude.
4. Working as a baked bean shovelling trades assistant for a fitter and boiler maker.

Four movies I can watch over and over:

1. Star Wars :Episode 3.
2. Bloodsport (well it is a classic)
3. Mr Belvadere? The talkiong cat.
4. The Matrix.

TV shows I love to watch;

I don't watch a lot of TV, but i do like...
1. Top Gear
2. Mythbusters ( kari byron hubba hubba )
3. The Contender
4. Crime Scene Investigations

Four important things to me:

1. My Valiant and Amber.
2. My Computer.
3. My electric blanket.
4. My Valiant.

Four tunes that play in my head:

1. Shake Everything You've Got - Maceo Parker
2. Chop Suey - System Of A Down.
3. Alien Ant Farm - Smooth Criminal
4. Gimme Some More - James Brown's Funky People

Four favourite food dishes:

1. Tikka Masala.
2. Roast Lamb.
3. Chow Mein
4. Pizza

Four websites I visit daily:

1. Ebay.
2. www.scraptothemax.com.au
3. coolvaliantdrivingdudeslikeme.com
4. tomshardwareguide.com

Four scrap companies I like:

1. BasicGrey ?
2. Heidi Swapp ?
3. Kelly Panacci ?
4. tomshardwareguide.com

Four colours I like:

1. Brittish Racing Green
2. Bronze
3. Blue
4. Factory black

Four people I am tagging:

1. Mark
2. The dude that bid 3 dollars on my classic 70's Val
3. Amber
4. The Devil

More photos on a great day.

Believe it or not but you are looking into a mirror. A data mirror that is. A mirror is refered to by data geeks as RAID 1. Without boring you too much, a mirror is two disks that have identical volumes of information. This is because data is written to both drives simultaneously. 'Why?' I hear you ask. Well redundancy, Holmes. If a disk fails, data is automatically and instantly accessed on the other drive. Its the ultimate backup for the layman.

Pictured above, you can see my PC in the operating theatre. It's hard drives were disected, initialised and ready for transplant into the Hard Disk Drive cavity. Not for the meek or uninitiated, RAID controllers and their various functions are typically difficult to understand, thus tending to be the domain of hardcore geeksters. The blue LED glowing in the picture is a Voltage Regulator Module(VRM).

This PC has Two mirrored 160Gb Seagate HDD's (each with 8mb Cache) and Two Striped (RAID 0) 80Gb Seagate Cudas.' There is also one 200Gb Seagate for backup storage space. They are a mixture of SATA and IDE Interfaces.
With 5 HDD's in this PC, it is surprisingly quiet. The fans are noisier than the Disk Drives themselves. I actually have only 2 system fans. You can see one 80mm fan in the picture, but there is also one 120mm fan in the system cover.


Oh well, until next time, adios amigos!

Hump Day is Over

Well, no pictures to upload for you today, but what an interesting day... Because of the nature of my job, I unfortunately get paid to sit and do nothing from time to time. People will pay me to do the seemingly impossible too, people will pay me to do the impractical, the extraordinarily difficult and the mundane as well.

Some days, people will pay me to do all of these things- all in an hour or two.
But today was different, today they paid me to do an ordinary job... The long way, and the most boring aspects of my job were amplified ten fold. Like a network administrator (I feel sorry for you guys) with nothing to do but watch traffic, I sat in pure unadulterated boredom. The progress bar on the file transfer meter inched (or should I say millimetred) along at an agonisingly painful pace. I was there so long that somebody mistook me for a piece of the furniture, and yet another employee threatened to give me jobs to do if i stayed much longer. I sat there, staring at the blue background occasionaly glancing up to see the regular stream of punters entering in and out of this well known government institution. The blur of white writing and slowly creeping progress bar barely keeping me conscious: It's funny but you get used to seeing this. After a while it can become almost surreal. It seems to become a part of you, but is separate at the same time. Like it forms part of your background conscience, providing some semblance of warmth in this otherwise cold and meaningless digital matrix of information that they call work.

In the movie ‘The Matrix’ there is a scene where Neo drifts off to sleep behind his PC. The computer screen drops to a command prompt and mysteriously, type is entered in the display… ‘Wake up neo’. This scene resonates with me, like a Cello resonates with an orchestra. As harmonious fountains of data are heard gently ticking and pinging away on hard disk drives all around me, I feel a sense of peace. Even as the tap, tap, tapping of keyboards threaten to drown out the unceasing read/write operations of all of this wonderful data. I see it day in and day out the same data. There is a pattern, and like Neo, you are alerted when the pattern is broken…Almost instinctively by the change in the regular whirring of the fans, or by the luminosity of the display.

Before I drifted off to sleep, I thought I’d better get up and go for a walk. With at least ¾ of an hour of relentless (but unattended/automatic) software loading to go, off I went. Aimlessly walking, with the sole intent of killing time, I wandered about the street, breathing in the cool and refreshing (non-conditioned) air. Upon my return and to my satisfaction, the rectangular window of the Novel Login screen greeted me, indicative of another job well done and yet another public servant put back to work (insert sarcastic comments here).

Well, I hope tomorrow is a little more lively!

Lazy Sunday

Well, not much to report today, other than what follows...
Shopping mostly sucks: big time. Normally I forget stuff that is clearly marked on my shopping list, but today it wasn't that I forgot things at all. It was actually because the supermarket was out of stock today. As Murphy accurately predicted, the things that are crucial to your menu are always either out of stock, or not in the place they were the last time you looked.

These photos have nothing to do with my adventures today, but they do give me a sense of peace in knowing that dinner was a success afterall, despite my lack of ingredients. A little improvisation went down well amongst the troops.

Well thats all I have to report today, oh by the way dinner was a lovely roast lamb and vegie dinner. Succulent lamb, with crispy vegies co(well kind of -mostly) cooked in a light satay sauce. I still haven't mastered the roast meal, but I think the oven is part of my battle here.

The fast and the curious

Wow, today after taking these cool pics of the railway bridge and the tree in front of the wall, I was amazed to witness the most full-on police blitz I have ever seen. I passed about ten squad cars over a distance of about 50km. There were divi vans, sedans and pursuit cars everywhere... Very interesting.They were obviously looking for people speeding as I will gratefully contest to in a minute.

After seeing so many police and arriving back at the workshop, I finished my paperwork and headed back out the door to make my way over to Tom's work. It was getting dark, so naturally I flicked on the lights - or so I thought...
Oh crap! No lights. Oh no. With all these cops around too! Naturally, I would be discrete and obscure amongst all the cars with shining headlights... Crap, crap, crap! Man. Now I don't know much about cars, less about auto electrics, so I did the logical thing. I drove to Tom's work. You see Tom is a mechanic. Well at least he used to be, and he knows a lot more than me or my boss (who suggested that i follow him as a solution to the problem) Now I'm not sure how he thought that that would actually achieve anything, but I decided that a dash along the side streets would be the best offensive. So with only parking lights dimmly illuminating my path, off I set to pick Tom up (and beg for his help).

With a sigh of relief, I pulled in the driveway and hopped out- searching for my mechanically minded brother. There are many subtle, yet complex (some deeply technical) and precise mechanics involved in the workings of our automobiles. Some profoundly scientific in nature, others theoretically simple, but nonetheless too hard to get your head around in practical application. With this in mind, Tom set about fixing my dilema. He looked hard at the lifeless headlamps, instructed me to flick the high beams. Then with all of his technical finesse and refined scientific understanding of the inner workings of this vehicular wonder, he raised his hand and...Thump. The light came into being once again. Pure genius I thought to myself. It actually worked. He thumped the light and on it came! Pounding the other light however (seemingly into submission) proved fruitless. "Well" Tom exclaimed, "at least we've got one light working."

Damn. Now with darkness well and truly upon us, I had to run the gauntlet of police vehicles returning from the area in which I had passed them earlier. You wouldn't believe it! Even before I had made my first turn, there sat a highway patrol car on the side of the road dead ahead in front of me. Crikey! Fortunately he was far more interested in speedsters than vehicles with only one light. Phew! Two more police cars past by us without any problems and so ended yet another interesting day.

Another day.

Today was very busy and seemed to be a comedy of errors on the part of other people.
Time was wasted by simple mistakes that could easily have been avoided. Ah well, here are some pics from the areas I was visiting today.

It's always interesting to look at things in a slightly different way. Taking photos surely puts your mindset in another place. It's a little strange, but I am actually observing far more beauty in things than I ever have before. The sunset for instance, I could not take my eyes off this beautiful sunset today.

And the silhouette of the trees, cast by the brilliance of the golden sun was mesmerizing. This time of the year is fantastic. As the rain approached, I could see the mist enveloping the landscape shortly before the rain hammered down on the windscreen. Wow... The whole sky was dark with thick cloud except for a band of blue misty sky enlightened by the setting sun.


It's a short and sweet blog today. I don't have too much to say but, this last pic is of a strange looking shed that the picture does not really do any justice. It is strangely curious, Oddly shaped and transparent in parts due to its slatted structure. On the right angles, you can actually see right through it as every board is preceeded by a gap that may be 2 inches or so.

I think these sheds were used to store nuts or cotton or something in the fifties. This one has been repaired several times by the look of things.

Anyway, times up. Gotta go now. Cya on the next post. Bye!

Reflections in the mirror

Seems that everyone likes looking at other people's blogs. Yeah I know. But before you stop and think that it is a little strange, stop to think that when you pass people in the street, they may be thinking about you... How do you know what they are thinking? It could be nice, it could be positive, it may also be something weird or perverse too. But if we worried about this sort of thing all the time, we would be too paranoid to even walk out the door in the morning. Instead, we worry less and less about what people think of us; as the world keeps spinning around; regardless of our individual existence... At least thats the way I see it. By this I don't mean that I don't care about other peoples feelings, of course I do care. I don't wish to harm anyone in this world. What I mean is that I think that as I am getting older, I realise that I am becoming less and less responsible for the feelings of others (with the knowledge that I don't actually have control over other peoples thought processes). If we have the best of intentions toward other people, I feel that we can all rest assured that we have done our best. Other people may have varying standards, but if we are genuinely good people in our hearts, we can't go far wrong.

So like a reflection in the car mirrors, our positive thoughts and intentions will shine back at us just the same way as the negative ones will also. This is the way of God and the way of our universe. We can see the light from stars that have long since extinguished. Our galaxy is full of debris and particles from what once existed in the form of things like us and our planet, but have been recycled perhaps - and are now seeking to form new planets and galaxies. I believe therefore that we are immortal in a way. We are born, we live and we die. We are recycled back to the Earth for another life to begin. People die all the time. People are born all the time. people are living at every moment of every day, but in the scheme of things; on a universal scale we are no more or less important than any other being on this planet, or any other being on any other planet. We are just another piece of the puzzle that is. We owe it to every part of the universe to nurture and care for our fellow man and indeed our world.

Cool stuff I reckon. We all have a big responsibility, but all it takes is just a little more care and thoughtful consideration to make the whole world a much better place. I know it all sounds too easy. I am a bit of a philosophical idealist at heart, and so the world to me, by my fundamental understanding of it may be nothing like your view of it. Life is a funny thing, and the more that you think about it, the less it makes sense... and perhaps the less sense I make in trying to convey my understanding of it to you. The thing I really like about life is the whole concept of perception. When I look into the mirror (of life), I may see things that you never dream of. Conversely, I may never see things as you do. I may never realise the dreams that you have come to know.

Wow, even winter looks great!

Wow, firstly let me say that yesterday presented some spectacular opportunities for photography. As I am supposed to be working though, I am met with the constant moral and professional responsibilities that one is obligated to consider whilst travelling during working hours. I think that it is important to note that it is acceptible to take short breaks during long trips to refresh oneself.

There are obviously some exceptions to this rule, such as the beach shots and inside shots of data centres and computer equipment. But the point that I am trying to make here, is that these places are easy to see without going out of the way to find them. I have never travelled more than 6km off course to take any of my photos. This is why I love our region so much. There is so much to see here in Gippsland.


Whilst working, I never go far off course from my intended destination for a photo (or for anything else for that matter) due mainly to the constraints of time. Yes there is always work to be done and so little time in which to do it. Therefore, the majority of my photos are actually taken from the drivers seat either out the drivers side window or directly through the windshield (usually whilst the vehicle is stationary). Now, to tell a little about these photos... The first is from a hill overlooking the Orbost region. The strange curving structure to the left is actually a trestle bridge for an old disused rail system that runs the lenght of the floodplains where this picture is overlooking.

The next two photos are of a little place called Lake Bunga in the Gippsland Lakes region. A great place to visit. Lovely place and a good spot for kids to paddle too.
The last photo is actually the same rail line viewed at a different location sort of south-west of Orbost. It is currently under a traffic management project that sees new viewing platforms being constructed by a local contractor who was hard at work at the time of this photo.

Well, back to work tomorrow and I hope this blog sees everyone in good spirits and happy and healthy. Cheers till next time :)