I’m officially legal in Australia now

I went to Melbourne last week to get my passport ‘evidenced’ at the Immigration offices. It took all of 2 minutes to do – they swiped my passport, printed a sticker, and that was it. Pretty easy.

Since the trip to Melbourne is 3.5 hours by train (only $62 first class!), I figured I should make the trip worth it and spend a little time wandering around. Being lazy, I spent a fair amount of time sitting in coffee shops watching people and listening to my book, but I also walked a ton. I traversed the whole downtown area several times. It’s pretty much the same as other big cities – lots of tall buildings, swarms of people and cars, people all dressed up, a few homeless, etc. I took one pic of some of the buildings, from across the Yara River:

I also went to the Melbourne Aquarium, which was pretty good. It focused on saltwater species, but it had a few displays with local freshwater fish. The showcase of the aquarium is their ‘Oceanarium’ which is a massive circular tank that you can walk through. It has big manta rays, a few sharks, etc.

I took my camera with me, but after I made it through the first set of aquaria, the batteries on my flash died. Being a person who thinks ahead, I had spares with me. Unfortunately, my spares were dead too. So, most of the pictures I have are of the freshwater fish. I was able to get a few shots to turn out using the on-camera flash, but most were pretty shitty.

This picture is of the Murray Rainbow, the only species of Rainbow fish found in southern Australia. It isn’t one of the really colorful species. The ones from northern Australia and New Guinea and outstanding (to see some of the other species, browse through the images here, especially this one, this one, and this one).

Also saw some kind of tree frog (for some reason, when I resize my images sometimes they get all weird looking. Any ideas why?)

One of the coolest fish I saw was an anglerfish:

Anywho, that was my trip to the Aquarium.

I’m off to Brisbane tomorrow for 10 days for a conference, so I probably won’t post anything until I get back.

It’s a house, and I live in it

I finally got my own place to live. As much as I enjoyed staying with my ‘hosts’, I definitely needed a place to myself. I signed the lease on it last Wednesday, but I had to go to Melbourne for Thursday and Friday, so I didn’t actually move in until Saturday. It is quite a private place because it is located behind another house on a property (quite common here). It’s a two bedroom bungalow with a good-sized kitchen, a dining room, a living room, an attached garage, and a little yard with no lawn to mow or waste water on.

Thanks to several generous people around the department, I got a free fridge, futon, microwave, portable air conditioner, and desk. I also hit up the second hand shop and bought a bed, a couch with two chairs, and a coffee table, all for $60! The couch is pretty hideous, but it works.

Once, I moved in, I realized I didn’t have any gas though – the electricity was turned on, but they didn’t turn on the gas. After calling the company again, the gas finally came on Monday afternoon. Unfortunately, I have a gas water heater and stove, so I had to have cold showers and food all weekend. I also blew a fuse the first night in the place and wasn’t able to get a replacement until Monday, so I only had power in half the house for the first few days.

Anyway, here are some pictures of the place:

From the front

Congrats to Master Ashley!!!

Just in case any of you didn’t know, Ashley successfully defended her Masters Thesis last week!  Now, she is having a relaxing vacation in Budapest before she has to go to a bunch of meetings and start a new job.

Ok, maybe I went a little overboard on the computer rant

I talked to the IT department yesterday and found that I have more flexibility in what I can and cannot install than I was initially led to believe.  The only real limitation is that I cannot use Linux because they won’t allow dual boot systems.  I can live with that, I can still use Linux on my laptop and at home.

Speaking of home, I have moved into my own place finally.  As per my experiences in Australia so far, it was a bit of an adventure.  More to come later… (and pictures too).

I hate corporate computer policies

Rant #1 

I finally got a computer account at work today (I have have been here for 3 weeks now) and am happy and frustrated at the same time.  I am happy that I no longer have to wrangle someone up every morning to log into my computer for me, and now I can at least save bookmarks.  However, I got exposed to the corporate mentality of the IT department at La Trobe.  I have to use Windows XP – they do not support any other operating system, not even Macs!  If you didn’t know, I am a Linux fan because it is free and I find it faster and easier to use for most of my daily work.

Not only do I have to use Windows, I have to use Internet Explorer 6, Outlook (no Thunderbird or Evolution), Office (no OpenOffice.org), etc.  Internet Explorer is by far the worst web browser available. It’s user interface is horrible, the same it was in the 90’s.  At least in IE7 they took note from other browsers like Opera and Firefox and implemented tabs, and they have at least tried to catch up in meeting the web standards set out by the W3C. But…. we can’t use IE7.

The university has their standard image for every computer and they have to stick to it. I understand the need to have standarized systems for security reasons, but their policies are preventing me from being able to work effectively.  For alot of my work, I need to have MySQL and a server installed on my system, and I need to have several different web browswers installed for web design. Frustrating.

Bah, pisses me off.  I am gonna have to write some emails and see what I can do.

A rose for my Mom

My Mom loves roses and she can grow them like no one else.  People in Australia also love roses because everyone wants to have a little English garden. Roses get huge here, some of them have stems as bigi around as my forearm. So, to make my Mom happy, here is a picture of an Australian rose:

 In other news, tt’s getting hot here.  Today is it supposed to reach 39C (102.2F).  Damn hot.

Also, I finally got my own place!  I get to move in tomorrow afternoon and am quite looking forward to it.  I will post some photos once I move in.

A visit to the wildlife sanctuary

I had a nice and lazy weekend.  Most of the time I just played video games and pulled weeds in the yard.  On Sunday afternoon, however, I went and visited the Oz.e.Wildlife Santuary.  It’s a little local sanctuary/zoo just north of Albury that has a modest selection of Australian wildlife.  It’s a bit dodgy – the enclosures aren’t the greatest, but the animals appear to be well cared for, and they rescue many animals. Anyway, here are a few pics of what I saw there.

The sanctuary has Eastern Gray Kangeroos running around all over the place, and they are rather friendly and demanding of attention.  Here is a pic of me petting one (I chose this picture because of the joey sticking its head out of mum’s pouch, and also because you can’t see my bald patch).

And the cute little joey:

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A Wallaby:

Pics of the Albury Wodonga area

Just thought I would put up some pictures of the Albury Wodonga area so everyone can see where I am.

East of Wodonga showing a valley and rolling hills, pretty much all pasture land:

The purple flowers in this one are an introduced weed called Patterson’s Curse.  It looks nice, but cattle and sheep won’t eat it so it is usually controlled.

If it’s yellow, let it mellow

If you haven’t heard, Australia is mired in a horrendous drought. Here in southeastern Australia, farmers are unable to feed their livestock or grow many crops. Because of the drought, most cities have implemented water saving restrictions such as scheduled watering days for home owners.

There are also neat water saving features to home appliances that we don’t regularly see in  North America.  For example, the toilets have smaller tanks and two flush buttons – one is a half flush, and the other a full flush (one for pee, the other for poo).

The water-consciousness of the society has also given birth to some interesting colloquialisms, such as “If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down”.  I think it’s a great idea, but I know some find it rather revolting.

The low flow in the local rivers has really hammered people. I recently visited Lake Hume, on the eastern edge of Albury-Wodonga. When I saw it, it was at 27% capacity. Here is a photo of one of the marinas/yacht clubs in a bay at this level:

Notice how the boat ramp doesn’t even reach the water anymore, and that is a damn long boat ramp!  What is worse, the water collecting season is over because it doesn’t rain in summer.  They expect that the water level of the lake will drop to 7% by the end of summer.

Another pic of the lake at 27%:

  Yes, those are trees sticking out of the water.

The trip from Hell

Even under ideal circumstances, travelling to Australia from North America is a hellacious trip.  It is a bloody long way.  My trip…. was less than ideal.

It started out pretty good.  The Ginger (aka Ashley my girlfriend) and I got up nice and early, read our books for a bit and then finished up my final packing. We then met with the Anarchist neighbours and went to our favourite (or at least closest) coffee shop for breakfast and were pleasantly surprised to find that our breakfasts were free because it was my last day on the continent. Thank you friendly Java Roaster people.

Ashley and I drove off to the Airport in Indianapolis, about a 1 hour drive, and arrived at lunch time.  After checking in and a teary goodbye between Ashley and I, I went through security and sat and my gate.  And then I sat there for a bit longer, and then a bit longer.  They kept on delaying the flight because there were mechanical problems with the plane and people were starting to get pretty pissed.  Not only was the flight being delayed, but the gate area was bloody hot.  It was so hot, one guy actually collapsed and they had to call in the EMT’s.  After two hours of waiting, they finally had a plane available and we were on our way to Chicago.

Upon arriving in Chicago, I had only 5 minutes until my flight to LA left so I ran as fast as my blackened smoker lungs would allow to my next gate.  When I got there, the plane was still sitting there and I thought all would work out.  Not so.  They had already closed the plane door and would not let anyone else on. So, I had to catch the next connection to LA which left 2 hours later. Originally, I had an exit row aisle seat booked, which is pretty much the best seat on the plane outside of first class.  On the new flight however, they could only give me a middle seat, which is pretty much the worst seat to have on a flight, especially one that is over 4 hours long.  There was another guy there who also missed the connection and had the same thing happen to him.  He was so pissed he tried bribing the people working there.

I was pretty hungry by this time, so I sold my first born son in order to be able to afford some Airport Food and a coke….which I promptly dropped on the floor.  Rather than telling someone that I had made a mess and required someone to clean it up, I snuck away and ate my food in a corner. It wasn’t very good, especially since I didn’t have  a drink to wash it down.

My flight to LA was pretty uneventful, except that we left around an hour late - not a big deal because I had several hours before my flight to Melbourne.  I actually sat beside a woman who is a professor at a university in Sydney, so I was able to have some nice conversation about what I could expect in Australia. 

Once in LA, I had to switch terminals to the Tom Bradly International Terminal, which should simply be renamed The Chaotic Cesspit of Doom. It was a complete zoo.  Because it was so busy, I thought it would be wise to go through security early, get something to eat, and chill out until my flight left (11:30PM LA time).  It was a mistake.  The only thing to get to eat past security is hot dogs. You could get fancy toppings on your hot dogs, but they were still shitty ass hot dogs.  Oh, and I had to sell my second born son to afford them.

I think the people who plan the flights at LAX are retards. In the Chaotic Cesspit of Doom, each gate’s seating area has room for about 100 people, even though most of the planes are 747’s, which seat over 400 people, so the gate area would have been rather crowded to begin with.  To make matters worse, much worse, is that each of the adjacent gates had flights leaving within a half hour of mine.  So, there were 1200 people crowded into a space with seating for 300 hundred.  It was pleasant. 

Perhaps because of the milling mass of people, there were issues in getting the planes boarded.  In keeping with the spirit of my trip so far, we didn’t start to board until 2 hours after the planned departure time.  Boarding was interesting – they started boarding normally by calling for the first class people, but then they just quit calling people up, so no one had a clue as to what was going on and everyone just kinda got up to board randomly. Much to everyone’s surprise, we weren’t actually boarding a plane, but a bus.  For some reason, the planes don’t actually show up at the gates in the Chaotic Cesspit of Doom, but at some remote location that they have to send everyone to.  Weird, and annoying. By the time we actually got into the air, we were 3 hours late (2:30 AM LA time, or 5:30AM Indiana time).

The flight from LA to Melbourne is approximately 15.5 hours, which is a long friggin time to sit on a plane.  Luckily, I had these magic things called sleeping pillswhich knocked me out for about 4 hours.  The rest of the time I read, tried to still my restless legs, and watched some movies.  I know I watched Spiderman 3, or at least parts of it, but I can’t remember what else I watched.  By this time I was getting pretty tired.

I arrived in Melbourne at about 11:30AM, only to find that my future boss, Dr. P, wasn’t there.  I wandered around for a bit looking for him, to no avail.  So, I went to the information kiosk to have them page him.  As soon as I asked the person at the kiosk, she said,

 ”Oh, are you Jeff Webb?  Yeah, your ride isn’t coming.  They phoned and left a message to call them back, but I never wrote down the number. They said they might phone back though, so maybe you should just wait here for awhile”. 

So, I waited for an hour or so, and finally the admin assistant from the University called and said they booked me a flight to the Albury airport at 4. I had a couple of hours to kill so I went to the pub – I needed a drink.
Eventually, I arrived in Albury and was picked up by one of the professors with whom I had previously arranged accommodation. We went to her place and had a nice supper of ginger prawns on the barbie with her husband Geoff and son Max. It was a nice end to a long, tiring, and frustrating trip.

It turns out that the reason Dr. P didn’t show up in Melbourne was because he thought I was arriving on Oct 28, whereas I actually arrived on Oct 30. I had sent them my itinerary previously, but it turns out it only had departure dates on it, not arrival dates. I guess they saw Oct 28 on the page and thought that was when I was arriving.

Meh, shit happens. At least my luggage arrived.