Archive
First RCR
Attended my first road crash rescue this afternoon. It was a single vehicle accident — a Tarago van rolled (and rolled, and rolled) in a 100km/hr zone. It wasn’t in good shape. Six occupants, two of which were taken off to the Alfred. Not good. Given the state of the front of the vehicle, however, they’re actually pretty lucky to still be alive. I am so not going to buy a Tarago.
Update from The Age: Six people were taken to hospital, including two with serious head injuries, after their mini-van rolled in central Victoria just after 3pm (AEST). [June 22nd]
Pointless
In the really early days of the web there was a site that provided you with a big red button in the middle of the screen. Pressing it did nothing. Can’t remember what the site was called; something imaginative like The Big Red Button That Does Nothing. Lisa will remember.
Anyway, here’s something similar, although it does a little bit more than nothing. But not much.
Oh, and another.
The dullest film in the world
3am. Can’t sleep (cold, cough, sore throat) so I’m catching up on some photo processing. I’m also watching the dullest film the world has ever made.
No Swimming
This picture pretty much sums up the sad state of Lake Eppalock. There’s no water for miles around.
The lake is around 5% full according to the camp staff. When I was here as a kid the water was just below the tree line here.
As I said in an earlier post, I have no memories of the camp itself, but do remember there was water here.
Java programming book
I’ve got an oldish (Java2 era) Java programming book that I cannot find anywhere. If I happen to have lent it to you, dear reader, can I get it back some time?
Map and Nav
The weekend just gone I did another SES course. This time it was Navigation in Urban and Rural Environments, more commonly referred to simply as map and nav. It was all about map reading and navigation.
The course started with a two hour theory session on Friday night, and that was continued on Saturday morning. Saturday afternoon we hit the bush to work through some basic navigation. Saturday evening we were given the first part of our assessment – the theory side of it. That was fairly straightforward, and most of us finished it fairly quickly before heading outside to the campfire and a cold can or two.
Sunday morning was the practical side of the assessment. We broke up into teams of two and were each given a series of coordinates that represented points in the bush we had to navigate to. At each point was a marker, and we had to record some details of that marker. When we got back the instructors uploaded our track from the sealed GPS we carried and verified that we had taken the correct path.
My new chum Steve and I walked about 5.4km and hit every marker pretty much spot on. We only had trouble with one of them, and that was because we misjudged the distance from the previous marker and started looking about 100m short of where it actually was.
I was already fairly familiar with lots of the mapping work that we did, but I didn’t have particularly good bush navigation skills. I passed just fine though, so I must have learnt something. 
The weekend was held at Camp Yumbunga at Lake Eppalock. That’s the Ferntree Gully and district school camp, so having grown up in that area it was the Lake Eppalock camp I went to in primary school (many, many years ago). I didn’t remember anything of the place at all.
No photos up yet (haven’t had a chance to process them) but I’ll get them up in the next day or two.
Girl Guides
Last night The Kid went to her first Girl Guides meeting. The local guides are broken into two groups, depending on age. Because she’s at the young end of the scale she’s a ‘Golden Guide’. Her first night was great fun, by all accounts. She was raving about the pirate treasure hunt they did. She’s completely sold on the idea, and can’t wait to go back next week, when she has to dress as a famous person.
Friday week (the 20th of June) is a big day for the local guides. They’re having a winter sleepout in support of homeless people, and they’re using the event to raise funds for Open Family Australia and Kids Help Line. The older guides will be sleeping outside, but the Golden Guides will sleep in the guide hall. It’s a gold coin donation to attend, and they’re having a sausage sizzle along with a guest speaker from Open Family Australia.
The kids are encouraged to get other people to attend (hint, hint), so if anyone is able to be here that Friday night between about 7pm and 9pm let me know and I can forward you a copy of the flyer that I scanned. The Kid got two copies of it and after dinner last night we drove to a few of her friend’s houses to invite them, so hopefully some of her friends will be there, but if any family and/or other friends can get here too it would be great.
Color on the ball
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything on flickr. Most of the photography Lisa and I have done for the last few weeks has been of the kids; they’re growing up so fast, especially The Baby.
Anyway, today I broke that flickr drought. After work last night I dropped into the Montrose Soccer club. One of the people I work with plays there and trains the juniors, so I took a few photos of the training session. It was pretty much dark except for the ground floodlights, but they weren’t particularly bright, so it was ISO1600 all the way, even at f/2.
The result was some fairly grainy shots (the D80 does show lots of grain at ISO1600) but by post processing them to play with that grain rather than hide from it I got some shots I was reasonably happy with.
Grunge textures
If you’re into playing with background textures in photoshop, check out the gallery here. Fantastic stuff.
Who said what?