Christmas

One thing about living over in Australia is the nice fact that Christmas is slap bang in the middle of Summer. As a result the traditional Christmas lunch is just a little daunting a prospect. Where as in England the lunch is something warming and heartily filling, over here the heat of summer means that Christmas lunch consists of barbeque and salad. It’s just more appropriate.

However back in the 80’s a group of Irish backpackers started having a Christmas lunch in the heart of winter. They chose the coldest month and thus the Christmas in July was born. As this weekend happened to be the 25th July we decided that we would also honour the concept of a winter Christmas. I have to say that the Australians are happy to promote the concept, the snow fields are leaden with nearly a whole inch of snow and most of the ski-lifts are running skiers up hills to take advantage. A snowy Christmas is an advertisers dream and Australian resorts offer lots of Christmas themed events in the not so Alpine region.

Christmas Decorations

We agreed that we would each buy a secret Santa ($10 maximum) and have a party round at our friends house. We arrived early in the morning and drank a traditional Christmas beer, Boags as Duncan is Tasmanian. They had tastefully decorated although the use of a Palm rather than a real tree was a little unorthodox. Lights strung around the room and baubles hung over the window. Settling down to start traditional festive activities (i.e. watch movies on the TV) they then decided to introduce us to the newest member of their family.

Tassie is a 12 week old tabby kitten, who loves to chase things and dig her claws into furniture, plants and people. She had been collected in the middle of the week and was getting used to her surroundings. This was more like it, Christmas day with a mad little one playing with their new toys. Yes she did get a present although not from us as we had no idea she existed. She has two small black marks above her eyes that resemble devil horns hence the name, Tassie as in Tasmanian Devil. Of course the two girls were smitten by the bundle of fur and this meant they were kept busy during the important movie fest, sadly no Bond but we can always wait for December for that. Gifts were exchanged, we received a coffee maker and gave elephant clip (not to be used to hold real elephants), DVD and Toblerone (a whole meter of it).

Moira and Tassie

Lunch consisted of Duck, roast with all the veggies and roast potatoes that would be requisite on any European table. I got to carve, although actually hack would be a more appropriate turn of phrase, never got the hang of slicing meat off poultry so instead I just remove as much of it as possible from the carcass. More drink, including a delightful Plum Pudding beer, very festive, then we retired to the lounge for more TV. Doctor who, now that is Christmassy. We played games, smart ass – a game rather like Going for gold (old TV program in Europe), and discussed the year we have had, well we played games anyway. All the while a frolicking kitten playfully chased things and deftly tried to eat our food.

Finally we sat down to watch our beloved team beat the Western Bulldogs to take their unbeaten tally of games to an impressive 17. Seventeen rounds and still we are the only unbeaten team left in the competition, only five more games to go so we could end the year unbeaten, which would be great.

The only slightly nagging thing about the whole day, apart from it being the wrong month that is, was the simple fact that even in Winter here in Australia the sun was still blindingly strong through the window. There was no real sense of dark and cold evenings, although it does actually drop to a depressingly low temperature overnight here and sometimes there has even been mist and frost outside in the morning when we are setting off to work. No as we sat watching the doctor save the world we had the strong distinct shadows of the sun shining brightly through the blinds covering the windows. It may be Christmas in July but it is definitely not Christmas in England, thankfully!

Finally my favourite sight in Australia so far, St Kilda vs Geelong final score:

Winning

The computer is fixed, well as near as can be. We have internet and we also have a version of office, ish. So life can continue at a nearly normal pace.

Well unfortunately we were not the lucky one’s.

Last night saw the Oz Lotto prize money climb to an unprecedented $106 million. The highest ever prize in the country ever, as a result the lotto outlets were doing a storming trade and plenty of syndicates were sprouting up at work. The promise of untold riches was just too alluring and we bought ourselves a ticket. After all $90 Million, this is what the estimated jackpot would be, is an incredibly large amount of money in most currencies.
What would we do with the spoils though, this was the topic of conversation as the draw counted down. Moira suggested giving $50m to charity. Very noble you may think, but wait, that’s my money as well. Now I am not entirely without some egalitarian motives and would honestly donate a sizeable sum to charity. Without asking for any foundation or grant be named after me to boot. However giving away over half the money, now that just sounds a little hasty to me. Sure, once the house in London is paid off and the new house purchased in Oz then we would be having difficulty spending the rest, well actually no we wouldn’t. After the houses come the boats, one speedy little number for the fun in the sun days, then a second gin palace style mobile home. Of course these will incur Marina charges so we have to put some money away there.

So houses, boats and ultimately car. The car would have to say something about us, so would probably have to be the greenest car in the world. Let’s not destroy the planet just to get between the house and the marine here. Some electric or hybrid model will do. Although I would also just love to have a V8 muscle car, on standby for when the hoons (mad hooligan drivers) are in the neighbourhood. Just for show you understand.

After cars I suppose there are the holidays and what better than a small holiday home in New Zealand, close to the slopes and just a small cheap flight away. I would not consider buying a jet as this is just more money than it’s worth, especially when the service on commercial airlines is so, well so, so crap! The details with owning and running an aircraft would just bore me and also give someone an opportunity to siphon off funds. So no plane!

Now there are the incursions back to old blighty and also bringing people back to Oz on regular visits. My parents wouldn’t fly so they would have to have some kind of extended cruise, and they would have to do this with friends so there are quite a few people on this boat, luckily we will be able to meet them at the dock in our own gin palace. After all if you have just won $90 million you cannot tell people they have to pay to visit, because we gave it all away!! No trips arranged for anyone that wants one, on the double quick smart.

And owning these boats, houses and cars means we will finally have space for dogs, cats and maybe horses, although I have to admit this is strictly for the house, I am not sure that Horses can drive or are particularly good on boats. I like horses but again they are a drain on resources. Vet bills, housing, feeding and training all take their toll on the funds and we need to bear this in mind.

Give $50 million away, sorry I don’t concur with this at all. I suggest an initial payment of maybe $10million to assorted good causes and an ongoing appropriation of funds into other good causes. This will prevent charity organisation suffering from Mining Donkey syndrome, where a charity is so rich it could even buy Dave Stewart form the Eurhythmics. In addition it allows for the careful application of funds to the enjoying the rest of my life process I am looking forward.

However as I can unfortunately report, the jackpot was shared between a man in Adelaide and a couple on the gold coast. Not that I really play the lottery and never really give any kind of thought about what I would do with the money if I ever did win something of that magnitude. Well not much anyway.

Saints go head to head with Geelong on Sunday, both teams are unbeaten and, given that a draw is the least likely result in Aussie rules matches, it is being touted as the match of the season. We already have tickets and are gearing up for a day of sport, as Wimbledon closes on the same day. It will not make too much difference who wins on Sunday as both teams are looking like finalists at this stage of the competition but it will give the supporters plenty of bragging rights. Go the saints! Oh yeay and go that Scottish kid who plays for England in the tennis thing!

Disaster

Well all has been quiet on the western front for a couple of weeks. Has he stopped writing I hear you wonder!

Well the answer is far more serious, I have had a small disaster at home. Nothing physical and both myself and my wife are in the best of health. No this disaster is in the virtual world.

Recently we decided to buy ourselves a Webcam, join the Skype community and start video phoning our families back home. All simple enough, we bought an inexpensive camera and connected everything up. Downloaded and installed Skype and arranged to contact the in-laws (who we knew had already got a camera). When we connected we found that the connection was not very good, our machine ran so slow that whenever we tried to make an adjustment to the sound or video the whole thing froze and took forever to start up again. Eventually we gave up as it all seemed to be too difficult to actually run Skype through our connection. Not one to give up easily I began to think about what could improve the speed of our machine. Initially I removed some of the software we never used anymore. Cleaning off old phone manager packages and utilities for digital camera’s we no longer own. It took time but I managed to free up quite a lot of hard drive space by cleaning off things I no longer used. Still the machine was slow, I have to point out that this machine is approximately 6 years old and is laden with specialist web development tools such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash Authoring software. Thousands of pounds worth of specialist software actually.

So after cleaning the machine up as best as I could it was still running a little slow. I thought again about what I could do and remembered the disc de-frag tool. During the day to day use of a computer files get split up and spread across the hard disc, this utility actually pieces these files together and clears up the hard drive, thus speeding the computer up. I will do that then, I tell the wife I have a solution to our slow computer and start to navigate to the De-frag tool. On the way though I notice another utility listed “Disc Clean-up”. This is even better! This sounds like exactly what I need, so I open the tool and tell it to clean everything I no longer use. Remembering that the de-frag can take hours to complete I set the utility going and return to drinking beers and watching Aussie TV! Several hours later the computer switches itself off and we go to bed, me and the wife that is, I don’t sleep with the computer!

Next morning Moira want’s to check facebook and so starts up the computer, well tries to anyway.

“Disk read error, press CRTL, ALT + DELETE to restart”

Except that it doesn’t, restart that is! WE have a serious problem. I even try turning it off and on again. Same message is burned across the screen, my IT skills may not have been spot on yesterday, I think to my self. Trying to boot the computer from a different drive has no effect and when I try and list the contents of the C:drive in windows there is the message again. This really is serious!

I start to look through the few discs we remembered to bring with us, “Beatbox creator”, no! “Video director”, no! “Drawtool”, definitely not! Windows! YES! There in the pile of old discs is the windows install disc that was supplied with our computer. I tentatively place it in the CD draw and close it. The computer then promptly tells me there is no windows installed on my machine, what the hell did the utility clean, everything apparently, even the operating system!! Why would Microsoft write a utility that deletes everything on the disc??

I stare at the message for a few seconds, know what little I do about computers I now realise what is about to happen! Click here to install windows, I really appear to have no choice! So I click and see the message I was dreading.

“Drive not formatted, Format drive? Y/N”

Everything is gone! Wiped, I have no choice. (To any tech heads out there who is saying “Before doing that I would have tried….”, just button it OK)

Y

So our computer reformatted it’s hard drive and installed windows and I realised just how hard it is to get a computer back to the state it was when it was alive. Norton let me download our virus protection again without having to pay. Drivers for sounds and printers have to be found and installed, luckily there are utilities that you can get that will assist in this process. Slowly everything is getting back in order. Luckily when we shipped the computer over we took no chances with our personal files and backed them all onto disc. In addition we also put all our digital pictures onto a USB drive to show on our Digital Photo Frame, so between the USB drive, 3 discs and the Camera we actually have all our files safe. Even Itunes lets you copy your bought files from your ipod onto a machine authorised for your ipod so we are not losing everything.
Well that’s if you do not count all the web authoring software you mentioned, I hear. Gone I am afraid. As is Office 2000, although this isn’t a big shame really. The discs for the software are probably in the loft in London, we only brought a few with us. I thought if the computer was damaged during shipping then having the discs wouldn’t be that much use anyway, it was a simple miracle that I brought the windows disc.

The upshot of my tinkering is that we now have a very clean machine which runs quite fast compared to how it used to. We are now going to be using Star Office from Sun Microsystems, as it is about one tenth the price of MS. We have skype, and we spoke with in-laws yesterday over video phone with no problems

Just don’t ask me to build you a website!!