andrewlighten.com

In case you missed it, the new Chevrolet Camaro that General Motors are launching in the US of A was built locally on the VE Commodore platform.

It’s actually a half-decent looking car. Not as good as the new Dodge Challenger (my personal car de jour) but it’s not too bad. It’s available in V6 and V8 form, with the V8 branded the “SS”. I wonder where they got that idea from.

Buried in this article about it is a reference to the Pontiac G8. That looks kind of familiar. I wonder where I’ve seen that body before. It looks like a four door version of the Pontiac GTO.

The Kid and I had a little bit of an adventure this afternoon.

Because she’s in the Girl Guides she gets to participate in all sorts of community events. The one she was in today was a tree planting event as part of their participation in National Tree Day.

We went out to a local farm and planted something like 160 trees. They were a mix of half a dozen different species, and all were planted along the embankment of the Tullaroop Creek as part of the farmer’s efforts to replace native vegetation. The plot was chosen for two reasons: first, it will help avoid erosion, and second, the trees will form a barrier between the crop areas of the farm and the creek so that excess nutrients will be used by the trees rather than run off into the water.

And speaking of water: there was lots. We got into the area ok, but the car (well, all 8 cars actually) did squirm around a little on the dirt tracks. While we were there, though, it rained pretty solidly for an hour. The tracks that we came in on were turned to mud.

The first car that got stuck was a Camry that slid into a fence. The lone 4×4 Hilux pulled him out. The next casualty was a Falcon sedan that slid into the same fence. Again, the Hilux to the rescue.

I was on a fairly firm track, but unfortunately it had a little bit of camber because it was the beginnings of the creek bank. As soon as I moved off the car did the same as the two ahead of me, and the back drifted down toward the creek. I didn’t end up in the fence, but I was clearly going nowhere. The Hilux did the job for the third time.

When we finally all got out of the paddock we still had to get up one of the tracks that we’d taken down to the paddocks on the flat area near the creek. All the rear wheel drives went ok, but the lone [front wheel drive] Camry again got stuck. The Hilux was used yet again to pull him all the way up the track.

I should note that no-one had any recovery gear at all. A few pieces of rope were found but proved useless; they all snapped really quickly. We ended up using a long length of fencing wire, and that did the trick perfectly.

We probably spent just over an hour planting trees, and then almost 3 hours getting all the cars back out to the highway again.

Many of you know that we got The Kid a wii for her birthday earlier this year. We were fiddling around with it yesterday and got her all setup to send and receive email through it. She’s been having great fun sending me abusive messages. Apparently I’m a big mad plippy ploppy. Whatever that is.

The email system in the wii actually works pretty well. It recognises incoming MIME attachments so if you send her pictures she’ll get to see them.

If you want to be able to exchange email with her, and you’re not a creepy stalker or otherwise horrid person, let me know and I’ll get her to add you to her address book.

Remember a few days ago I said that when I needed to reinstall my laptop I’d consider a Kalyway (Mac OS-X hacked for the PC) partition?

Well, I lied.

The gods of hard disc reliability didn’t take kindly to me last weekend when they decided to kill the disc in my laptop. It was running fine all last week, but when I opened it up Saturday morning it was behaving very strangely. A reboot or two later and a plain, simple I/O error was all I got on boot up. Dang.

I didn’t lose anything of value but extremely inconvenient timing. I think the only thing I didn’t have backed up was the last few days of photographs – so I’ve lost maybe 50 shots.

Given that I have to be productive with this thing right now I don’t have the luxury of spending time working out hacked operating systems that don’t earn me any money. So, it will have to wait until next time. Right now I’ve reinstalled pretty much everything I need, although as usual, the next few days will reveal all those little things you forget about.

Small aside: Picked up a 250gb disc for $115 at CPL. Sweet. Much, much more room than before. The disc that died was 80gb.

Long time readers of my blog will know that I’m not exactly a huge fan of the American political machine. A number of my good friends (especially in the online world) are American, and they are all great people, but they are ruled by idiots. Most would probably admit as much.

Despite this, my absolutely favorite podcast is This American Life, produced by Chicago public radio.

If I were ever a guest on the long running British radio programme Desert Island Discs, instead of picking 8 recordings I’d like to be marooned with I’d pick this podcast as my number one and not even bother with the other seven.

Every single week, This American Life is interesting, insightful and extremely entertaining. It’s well written, the editing is tight, the linking of stories is perfect and the presentation is spot on.

It’s presented by Ira Glass, and here’s his take on why it’s so good.

Forgot to mention — I used the fancy-pants new Eastlink ring road yesterday. I came down to town after SES training last night. How long did it take to get from the city end of the Eastern freeway (Clifton Hill) to turning the engine off in Mum and Dad’s driveway? Twenty six minutes. Sweet.

Lisa’s kick-ass new Dell workstation arrived this week. They originally gave the 9th of July as an estimated delivery date, but as usual, they delivered much earlier than they said they would. The machine has been setup and done some light duty (web surfing, etc) but this weekend we’ll be installing the development tools that Lisa needs to get started with our latest contract.

The machine is a bit of a beast: quad core processor, 3GB of memory, 500GB hard disk and two monitors (a 20″ and a 19″ LCD). It came in at a shade over AU$1500. Nice.

My Inspiron 9400 laptop has been doing duty as the house PC for a few months now, but with the arrival of the new machine I’m able to carry it around with me again.

Because it will always be with me I’m looking into client-side email applications. I’m a big advocate of web based mail (and in particular, web based mail that’s independent of your ISP) but the overall web email experience isn’t brilliant. Gmail works really well in the browser, but I really, really miss some things when I’m using it. The biggest of those is the ability to drop an image into an email message (as you can in Outlook). For development work that’s really important. I’m a heavy user of SnagIt for screen captures, because there’s nothing quite like grabbing a quick screenshot of something and firing it off in an email to explain something. Gmail just doesn’t let you do that. You’ve got to save the screenshot to an image file then manually attach that image to the message, and it’s just all too hard.

Right now I’m using Thunderbird as an IMAP client pointed at my Gmail account. It seems to work pretty well. I still get all the benefits of ISP independent email that’s web accessible, but I also get some of the things I miss from Outlook: dropping images inline into the body of email messages, decent outbound email signatures, etc.

We’re about to switch our home phone over to an Engin VOIP service that sits on top of our broadband. I’ve had this setup in the office for a long time now, and to save money we’re going that way with the home line too.

One thing I don’t have is a spare phone. We’ll be using our existing phone (consisting of two wireless handsets) for the Engin line, but I’d like another phone as a backup.

Does anyone have a spare piece-of-crap phone (an old TF-200, even) that they can spare? Please ping me if you do.

Update: Doh. Stoopid me. I’ll just plug the fax machine into the phone line and use that. It’s got a handset (plus being able to send faxes is occasionally useful). [July 3rd]