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Had some fun with the camera after dinner. Nice shot of the little one:

Big Girl had a pool party with the Girl Guides today. It was a Hawaiian themed party, so Lisa took her to the junk shop first to buy a grass skirt and some flowers.

The obvious next step was for me to wear them. Not a good look.

Most of these were taken with the reflective umbrella I picked up the way home from work. It works really, really well. Beautiful soft light. The only thing I don’t like – and I guess this is just a matter of awareness – is the catchlight you get if you shoot at the wrong angle.

The September 2009 challenge set by Jeremy and Trevor over at photochallenge.org is to shoot one black and white photo per day. I’m really enjoying black and white right now, so this came along at a perfect time.

Hopefully I’ll make it through the month, but I am already a day or two behind. I just don’t get enough time to shoot these days. Too many other things going on (primarily work). I’m going to make a real effort for this though.

We had a fairly simple father’s day today. While Lisa’s Mum has been overseas her Dad has been living on a dreadfully healthy diet with lots of vegetables and sensible food, so today he figured that a hamburger would make a perfectly good easy lunch. As well as Lisa’s Dad, Fred and Sue came up, Peter and Eve were here, as were Peter and Diane.

It’s a good day when you’ve got a healthy family with two kids who adore each other. Don’t really need anything else.

I did get a few nifty things though. The Kid made me a key ring at school, and she got me a book with 500 different pizza recipes in it. I also got an organiser for the back of the car.

I’m constantly dismayed at the quality of mapping data that’s available to the general public. I have no idea what’s available to those in the know (military, etc) but what we’re fed is pretty bad.

The Kid was trying to describe a park she wanted to visit today, so I bought up my default map of choice – Google maps. While we were looking, I noticed something odd. Maryborough Hospital is apparently run from someone’s house.

If we look at where Maryborough Hospital actually is, we find it’s actually labelled as “Maryborough Community Health”:

Also notice that the mapping resolution has dropped. There’s a huge gulf between the resolution in the west half of Maryborough and the east half:

Oh, and while I’m at it, notice how there’s a cemetery in the middle of that area of public parkland? Actually, there isn’t. The cemetery is about 5km south east of that — and it’s marked correctly, so we apparently have two cemeteries and a crematorium.

We’ve done some SES vertical rescue training in the parkland that cemetery is shown in, so I know there’s nothing there but scrub. It’s off the back of the Bristol Hill Tower carpark, as you can see if I zoom in closer:

EDIT: Brad Costelow has pointed out that there is actually a small cemetery in the bush there. I’ve never seen it, nor have I seen any signage for it. I’ll have to investigate further.

Next I looked at Microsoft Maps Live Maps Bing Maps to see if that was any better.

Nope. Epic fail. The map view shows no landmarks in Maryborough at all, and the satellite view is less than useful:

Ok, maybe Yahoo! is better? Let’s look using the highest resolution that they have for Maryborough:

I’m not sure that this is useful to anyone. With this lack of detail you might as well say “nah, sorry, can’t help” the way Bing Maps did.

So, in summary:

• Google is the best by far, but has the hospital in someone’s house and we have a second cemetery plus crematorium in the middle of the bush.
• Bing Maps fails totally.
• Yahoo! fails totally.

I know we’re just a piddling little country town, but really, is it that hard to get this stuff right?

As a final test I’ve looked at Google Earth. I figured it would use the same mapping data as Google Maps but possibly has different landmarks. I was right. The imagery has the same east/west difference in resolution, but the landmarks are very different.

Here’s a close up of the homes where Google Maps says the hospital is:

At least this time there’s no hospital marked there. The place where the actual hospital is shows up but at poor detail:

No landmark for the hospital, but at least one of the local restaurants is there. Kind of.

Last night’s SES training was focused on road rescue. We occasionally have access to old cars that we can cut to pieces and last night was one of those nights. I gave Lisa a call and asked her to come out and take some photos of the training. She did a great job and took a whole lot of fantastic photos. Here’s a few.

Jaws of life

The term “jaws of life” is kind of a bit of a media term. In our SES unit we’ve got what’s considered to be a heavy rescue kit which consists of a series of hydraulic components that each do different and distinct things.

We’ve got:

• A set of spreaders that can be used to either open up a gap or crush something. These are probably the most often used component of the kit. They’re incredibly powerful and flexible. You can put them in a 10mm gap and open it up to 830mm, so you can easily pop a door off its hinges, for example. At first glance it might seem counter-intuitive to crush a component when you want to open a car up, but it’s pretty useful. If you crush a front guard, for example, it will pull the trailing edge away from the door so you can then use the spreaders to open up the gap and pop the hinges.
• A set of cutters that can be used to cut through metal. These are used to sever metal pieces – cutting through car pillars, for example.
• A set of rams that can be used to push two pieces of metal away from each other. If the front of the car has moved back into the passenger compartment, for example, the rams can be positioned between the bottom of the B pillar and the top of the dashboard and then used to push the dashboard forward.
• A pump that will run three of the pieces of kit at the same time. Hot pluggable, too. You can uncouple components and change them over on the fly with the pump running full speed delivering 720 bar (that’s 10,442 psi) of hydraulic pressure.

As you can see, there’s more to it than just “jaws”.

Photos

The spreaders being used to open up the gap between a door and the pillar it’s attached to. This will effectively pop the door off its hinges.

Another view of the spreaders being used to open a gap. This time it’s the trailing edge of the door, so it will break open the door latch.

This time the cutters are being used. You can see the door has been torn off its hinges so the cutters can then be used to shear the bottom of the A pillar. The pillar and windscreen offer no resistance at all.

Thanks to Lisa for braving the cold to come out and take photos. A very useful training aid for us.