A fine place for a village

We have a friend who lives in Wangaratta. Although he is close to the Ovens River, he is high enough for his house to stay dry.

Now, Wangaratta sits at the confluence of the Ovens and King Rivers. Is it really a good location for a town? Not only do two major rivers meet, but

Fifteen Mile Creek,
Croppers Creek,
Middle Creek,
Boggy Creek,
Stony Creek,
Black Range Creek,
Rose River,
Dandongadale River,
Black Range Creek,
Meadow Creek,
Hurdle Creek and
Reedy Creek
all pour their waters into either of the large rivers. Then poor old Wang floods, yet again.

Photo from the Rural City of Wangaratta.

Tokyo Two Sentenced

The Greenpeace activists, the Tokyo Two have not been been imprisoned and for that we should be grateful. However they did receive suspended gaol terms. Sorry Japan, while I like you and your country, this case should have been thrown out of court. It is a bad mark against Japan in my mind.

Wunderkammer Window

Just giving you a taste of what you may find in Wunderkammer.

Melbourne Bicycle Scheme

There is no doubt that bicycle helmets save lives and heads from injuries. Like wearing seatbelts in motor cars, it is a no brainer.....oh, not an intentional pun, especially as I have a brother with an ABI, Acquired Brain Injury, and yes it was it bicycle he was riding when he rode straight across our Highway 1 without looking, possibly a suicide attempt. He can't recall. No, he was not wearing a helmet and the lack of could have caused more brain injury than he had been wearing one.

However, Melbourne's bicycle scheme is going to fail or at best being a large impost on City of Melbourne ratepayers, because the law says that cyclists must wear protective helmets. I would argue for an exemption for bicycle scheme hired bikes. The riders would generally be experienced and know the dangers, or be very occasional riders and be very cautious. The distances would be short. The is traffic generally slow and non aggressive, well better than some places. There are many paths for exclusive cycling where there is little interaction between cars and bicycles.

As per usual, I write this with some self interest. A rack with bicycles has appeared nearby to us, adjacent to the park on Kingsway we call the Little Sandy Desert.

Sunday Bits

Did twittering birds greeting the dawn waken you this morning? I was woken at 4am by the sound of what I think is a giant fire exhaust fan running somewhere nearby. It is still running. The noise has to be pretty loud to penetrate my bedroom, but it certainly did. I thought I'd gone to bed with the window open.

What terrible devastation in Christchurch. Many historic buildings have been damaged and the city sounds to be in a chaotic state. It is remarkable that more people weren't hurt. Not so remarkable was the looting that started soon after. There is a special place in hell reserved for those who take such advantage of people's misery. The least of many people's worries, but the trams and tram line are ok.

I am sure I'll get the football name wrong, so I will just say Storm is playing today with admittance for $1. Irresistible to Sister, so here comes Little Jo for the afternoon.

Antique scientific and medical instruments
Orreries
Fossils
Quality shells
Butterflies, insects and spiders
Taxidermy
Mineral samples
Wildlife and botanical art
Barometers
Storm glasses

And that is less than half of what you can find at Wunderkammer. It was my first visit to shop/museum in Lonsdale Street this week and what an extraordinary place.

Quoting myself in the midst of our recent severe drought, 'Don't worry kiddies, there will be floods again one day'. It has come to pass. Damn.

A friend has just bought a stunningly beautiful new town house in Caulfield. R saw it yesterday and is quite jealous. The friend bided his time and show no anxiousness to buy the place. A few months later as the construction neared completion, more than $100,000 came off the initial price.

Might go to South Melbourne Market this morning, once a certain person gets out of bed. I haven't had a dim sim for ages.

Phone Bill

Present bill.
My mobile $20, $15 free calls and 50 free sms.
R's mobile $20, $15 free calls, free call to a nominated mobile, mine.
Home land line rental, $30, cheap regional calls, to Mother and to Sister, $2 cap on STD calls. Discounted rate for calls to Telstra mobiles.
Caller ID, $6.
Hard to work exactly but high speed cable seems to be $100 for 25GB discounted to $50.

Bill works out to be between $145 and $160 per month for the lot.

Telstra seems to be desperate for customers to keep their land lines, hence a rather good new deal.

Mobiles stay the same, although we could get new phones and better deals if we agree to a two year contract. I hate being tied to contracts but we have gone with a two year one for our home phone and internet.

Total price $158
Includes 2 mobiles, as before, $40
Includes land line rental
Free local calls
Free STD calls
Free calls to Telstra mobiles.
Cheap calls to all mobiles for the first 20 mins.
Cheap international calls to 48 countries.
Caller ID.
100 GB high speed cable internet.

The 100 GB internet was the clincher. We have only just had our allowance increased to 25 GB from 12 GB, but because the internet is working faster, we download more and now are coming perilously close to the 25 GB. 100GB seems excessive, but I expect we will be chewing through in no time at all. R can listen to internet radio without restriction and I can watch ABC's Iview without a worry and see all the You Tube clips I want to. I ain't sayin nuffin about what else may consume bandwidth.

Ubunto Friends

Our Brother Friends will readily admit how ignorant they are about computers. I know nothing, as they fling their respective palms upward into the air.

Their computer had a virus. I could not fix it. I told them to bury deep in files any questionable content they may have on their computer and take it to their local computer shop. A mutual acquaintance had a bad experience at one such place, who told him to never return to the shop because of the filth he had on his computer.

They bided their time with their computer only working in safe mode. Eventually the spied an ad in the gay press by someone who fixes computers for a set fee of $100, parts not included. It took two visits of five and three hours and their computer is not only fixed, it is now running on Linux Ubuntu or whatever it is. They plied the repair person with coffee, cakes and kindness and he enjoyed their comfortable home and many of their saved pictures. While I found their new system a bit puzzling, they are very happy with it and have also upgraded to ADSL 2. I gave Ubuntu a shot once, working only off a cd. It did not work for me at all. I don't like change. For all intents and purposes, my computer is set up very much like it was when we first bought a computer with Windows 95 installed. I did eventually embrace Firefox though. In early days I gave Opera a shot. I knew little about file associations then and my computer became thoroughly Operared. How dare they take over everything. I am not at all tempted to start Chroming and I don't get tabs at all? Around nine browser windows can open on my task bar. Aren't they the same as tabs except they are at the bottom of the screen?

This home visit computer repair person sounds like a very useful person to know. They felt guilty that he worked for eight hours for $100. He explained that he wins at times and loses at other times. I get that. Some people's computers could be fixed in two minutes, an easy $100.

So, one of the Brother friends, the particular one who is the first to say I know nothing about computers, has managed to find on the work sales computer a list of what is sold each day, week, month and year, what is paid for stock as against what it is sold for. He knows for standard sales there is about a 200% mark up so he is much less worried about the business closing and losing his job now. But still he will say, I know nothing about computers.

Good god, now they are talking about getting a mobile phone. Henny Penny, the sky is falling.

Tokyo Two on Trial

You could argue that the world does not need beef to eat, in fact most meat. You could argue that the world does not need fish to eat, but I think it does. Yes, you could argue these points. What you cannot argue to me is that the world needs whale meat to eat, or specifically Japan.

But this is not particularly about the rights or wrongs of whale hunting. Pointless preaching to the already converted. This about the Tokyo Two, two Japanese Greenpeace activists. Yes Virginia, such people do exist.

Toru Suzuki and Junichi Sato are in a spot of bother. David McNeill from Japan Times tells what is happening to them. This was written back in 2008.

Six months ago Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki were ordinary men looking after young families. But in June they were arrested by a large group of uniformed police, taken to a detention center in Aomori Prefecture, northern Japan, and held for 26 days. They were granted bail on July 15 after paying ¥4 million each (AU$52,000), but their release, after an unusual decision by an Aomori judge to hear their case, is highly conditional. Neither is allowed to freely meet or talk to work colleagues, leave home for extended periods or travel abroad. Both are watched by detectives and followed. They can only talk to journalists, separately, in their lawyer's office. Any violation of these conditions will land them back in jail.

It is alleged than whalers on whale hunting ships get to pick the cream of the crop, so to speak, and post it home in parcels where it sells for mega yen on the black market. There are no controls over it whatsoever. Greenpeace wished to expose this, suggesting that some whalers were sending home twenty to thirty boxes with a value of up to US$3000 per box. What a marvellous profit, from taxpayer subsidised whaling expeditions.

Greenpeace decided to intercept one of these parcels to prove their point. It was presented as evidence at a press conference and then handed over to police. And guess what, Sato and Suzuki were arrested for theft and so started a government campaign of harassment of Greenpeace.

This is an absurd over reaction by the Japanese authorities to what is essentially whistle blowing, something that gets some protection in Australia. The Tokyo Two were effectively exposing embezzlement of public money. Why are they being pursued with such zeal by the Japanese authorities?

A court verdict is due on September 6th. Check them out and give them support at their Facebook site, http://www.facebook.com/TokyoTwo Greenpeace Japan (English) is here.

Toru Suzuki


Junichi Sato

Flash Mob at it again

Say Cheese have been at it again, this time in Sydney's Queen Victoria building. I don't suppose I will ever be lucky enough to witness a live performance. What great fun! Well done all.

Ballast Point

One wonderful feature of Sydney Harbour is the 'points'. It has so many jutting out into the harbour and many of them are parkland, although many are not and have houses built on them for the the lucky few.

Julie suggested I take a look at one such park, Ballast Point. I had no idea where it was or knew anything about it. Right, Birchgrove. The last time I looked at Birchgrove was to see Rowntree Street where the tram used to travel. The Birchgrove tram diverted off the more important Balmain line, that is more important if you did not want to go to Birchgrove. The Birchgrove tram was replaced by noisy smelly buses in 1954.

Hmmm, Ballast Point appears to be a construction site with googly satellite. Near Map has a recent photo, but the site still looks raw.

I better look elsewhere. Ah, the park only opened early this year, or officially last year. It was an industrial site. I suppose chunks of the point were cut out and used as ship ballast. There must be bits of Ballast Point in England!

It just occurred to me that at some point there would have been a change whereby instead of adding ballast to a ship for its return journey to England out, the ship would be loaded with Australian exports. Maybe that did not happen in sailing ship times.

Ballast Point had been private land from 1800 until about 1930 when it was bought by oil giant Texaco to be used as a fuel storage depot site and was used as such until the 1990s.

Caltex, the renamed Texaco, sought to make a killing by selling the land to a property developer who also would make a killing, but one of those pesky little activist groups was formed, Save Ballast Point. A no doubt disappointed state government was no longer going to make a killing too compulsorily bought the land in 2002 and the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority started making plans. Sites like this always need a lot of expensive decontamination, and this was no exception. $16 million was spent on the clean up and creation of the park.

The park does sound quite spesh. Now, who is silly enough to put photos up on the net for me to steal?

This photo from Landscape Solutions.


So what is there? There is this sculpture to remind us of the park's oil tank history.


Oh, Harbour Bridge views, by Jeremy Hills.


The park has a wetland area to filter its drainage water before the water runs into the harbour. and eight wind turbines to generate electricity. It has all the usual things that a park should have, shelter, barbecues etc, nice walks, local native plantings. I would say it was money well spent.

While doing some research for this post, I came across another point park at Balls Head, proclaimed in 1925 by the Lang government. How progressive. Also from my reading I have learnt a bit about the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority and I am very impressed with what it has done over time. Maybe I should learn about what it hasn't done.

A couple more photos by Julie.