Rhonda Bracey: At Random

Some long weekends are just about relaxation; others are more productive. My Anzac Day long weekend was a bit of both — and the relaxation and productivity actually went hand in hand… it’s not hard to do something if you’re enjoying it! The weather was fantastic, so that helped.

Some of the things I accomplished this weekend, very few of which were on my ‘to do’ list:

• Updated personal and business accounts (not so pleasurable, but it has to be done).
• Did some gardening — mostly clearing out the leaf litter near the now-exposed fence.
• Installed Atlassian’s Confluence wiki on my PC — this was a pretty painless process (yes!), and I’m very impressed so far with the capabilities of Confluence and how it overcomes a lot of the issues associated with previous wikis I’ve worked on or with. I was also impressed with the deal — $5 for a 5-user system!! (Sorry, the deal’s finished now, in case you wanted your own.)
• Made a luggage tag from an image in my mind of one I saw my friend Sue had at the conference. Documented and photographed the process, then wrote up the full instructions in a pattern, tested the pattern by making another luggage tag based purely on the instructions. I’ve now added this pattern to my Etsy store.
• Packaged an Etsy order for a friend in Connecticut.
• Watched a thriller of a football game on Anzac Day between Collingwood and Essendon — Essendon won at the death knock (sad).
• Did some cooking, and visited a friend.

All in all, a relaxed stress-free weekend… There should be more of them!

I’m the only one in our household to receive the $900 “Stimulus package” cheque from the Australian government, and it was all spent on Friday before I even received it!

We had to get 4 new tyres for my husband’s car and 2 for mine (there went $750+), and my husband has to have new prescription reading glasses (another $400+). We got home from getting the tyres fitted and there was my $900 cheque in the day’s mail. I had hoped to buy a new stove with it as the oven on the old one doesn’t work properly and can’t be repaired. But the tyre fitting people and the optician ended up being the recipients of Kevin’s largesse.

BTW, you don’t find out until later that there are a LOT of people who are NOT eligible for this $900 “Stimulus Package” payment. For example:

• Self-funded retirees living solely off their retirement funds — even if those retirement funds are small — who don’t have a taxable income and therefore don’t pay tax (i.e. those over 60, and some under 60 whose Superannuation fund is tax free)
• Pensioners and other welfare recipients (they don’t have a taxable income either)
• Anyone under 18, even if they have a taxable income
• Anyone with a taxable income over a certain amount ($100,000??) for the past tax assessment year
• Anyone who didn’t submit a tax return last financial year

That eliminates a lot of people!

And I wonder if the $900 Stimulus Package was really just a con to get a helluva lot more people filing overdue tax returns. The media reports indicate that accountants and tax agents have been inundated with people trying to file before the deadline — in some cases, they haven’t filed a tax return for 10 years or more. No doubt many of these people have now filed so they can get their ‘free’ $900, but they haven’t received their tax bill or overdue penalty from the Tax Office yet. There could be a few nasty surprises in store — surprises that cost far more than the $900 they might or might not get.

The cynic in me says this was a very handy way for the Tax Office to ferret out all those people who have been lax in submitting a return, and all those younger people who just haven’t been bothered submitting a return since they started work. I suspect the Tax Office’s database (and therefore net) just got a little bigger…

A good friend of ours, Dave Gash, is a JavaScript guru amongst other things. Dave’s tried to teach me JavaScript and while I can understand what a function is trying to do, I can’t write the stuff!  Anyhow, when I was in southern California prior to the conference we both spoke at in Seattle, I asked Dave if he could make a thingy (technical term!) for my website that showed snippets of some of the testimonials and recommendations I’ve received from clients, conference attendees, etc. He said “Sure!” and a few days after the conference was over he had emailed me a prototype. With a little tweaking on my end to make it the right size, use the right font etc. it works a treat!

So I ask Dave for an invoice, and this is what he sends me:

Scouring DynamicDrive.com looking for code to steal modify: $0
Approving nods at original author’s ingenuity: $0
Frowny faces at original author’s sloppy-arse code: $0
Reformatting code so I could frigging read it: $0
Ripping out and throwing away about 90% of it: $0
Merrily tinkering with it until it did what I want: $0
Adding ‘random’ feature original author didn’t think of: $0
Smug self-assurance that my version is way better: $0
Doing something nice for one of my best mates: $0
=========================================
Total cost: One (1) outstanding lunch at Tip Top Meats [German restaurant in Carlsbad, CA]

…and would you look at that, you’ve already paid in advance! 🙂

Thanks Dave! I owe you one.

If you’re looking for someone who can get very techy with web stuff, Dave’s available for hire for long or short projects or even little bits like he created for me. His background is computer programming, but don’t hold that against him! He can work anywhere in the world via the internet (I’m in Western Australia and he’s near San Diego). You can contact Dave via his website: http://www.hypertrain.com or email him at dgash@hypertrain.com.

We think our lives and our time frames are important. However, we are but a speck in comparison to some of the world’s oldest trees. Take a look at this 20 minute video of a talk by a chap called Richard Preston to get a different sense of perspective:

The local bushfires in January followed very soon after by the catastrophic bushfires in Victoria in February got me very spooked and fearful, especially as there’s a really big bush block down the hill directly behind our house. I’ve taken steps with the local authorities and have been assured — in writing — that the bush block behind us will be control-burned over the winter months this year to reduce the 15+ year fuel load from the forest floor.

So it was with a great deal of disbelief that I found out that the next door neighbour nearly took our house (and hers) out today with a fire! I had gone into town around lunchtime to collect the mail, etc. I was maybe gone 30 minutes. When I returned, my husband got me to sit down (he knows me well!) then told me that the 80+ year old woman next door had decided to rake some dead/dry leaves in a pile in the corner between our properties and pour oil (!!) on the pile and set it alight. Under a dry overhanging eucalypt tree. Next to a dry, rotting wooden fence. Down the slope from our property. And on a 30+C day after some weeks of fairly high temperatures for this time of year. It seems there was also an old car tyre in the pile too…

By some extremely fortuitous circumstances, the son of the neighbour across the road and his mates were outside her house having just finished some whipper-snipping of that neighbour’s property. They were talking and one said he smelled smoke, another said he heard crackling. The over-the-road neighbour immediately realised it was a fire, then she saw the glow and the smoke. So the young lads raced across the road to our place. They didn’t bother knocking on the door — they just hightailed it to the back of our house, grabbed the hose that was there and proceeded to put out the fire.

According to my husband, one of them tried to stamp on the fire (but it had oil on it and his pants got a bit burned as the fire went up his legs a bit), another split his pants scaling the fence. The fire started to go into the overhanging tree, but fortunately their very quick thinking meant they could get the water on to it in time and put it out. They also put out the main fire at the old lady’s property and the small fire that started on our property — some 10 feet or so from the house — when an ember flew into some dry grass and leaf litter.

I was away all this time and missed the ‘action’ — thank God. I don’t know what I would’ve done. My husband said that he didn’t have time to even think about putting on some protective clothing — it was that quick. But the boys actions were incredibly quick too — without their clear-headed, quick response, I hate to think what I might have come home to.

It seems that the next door neighbour thought that she could light a fire today as she thought the fire bans had been lifted (they don’t get lifted until April 26 — and then only if the conditions warrant it). But what was she thinking, lighting a fire in hot dry conditions in a corner of her block that adjoins another property, that is surrounded by dry vegetation, a rotted wooden fence and overhanging trees, and putting oil on it to get it started properly?? She also has a wooden house and a wood pile on that side of her house, for goodness sake.

After I got home and my husband explained what had happened, we went over to the neighbour’s house across the road and talked it over with her. She knows some of the old lady’s family and will call them to let them know what happened and to find out if they think the lady is mentally fit to care for herself (I was ready to report her to anybody who would listen!).

We also offered to pay for replacement pants for the guy who split his, and offered our heartfelt thanks. My husband had thanked the boys earlier, but it seems they took off pretty soon after saving our house and potentially our lives and that of our elderly neighbour.

There were so many ways this could have been much worse — only last week while I was overseas, our gardening guys came through and finished clearing all the overhanging branches from our side of that fence, including some very large dead and dry branches from the eucalypt tree that caught alight briefly. Also, where the embers came on to our property is where there was a lot of wild undergrowth and bushes that they cleaned out last week. Had that not happened, this fire may not have been so easy to put out.

The lads just happened to have finished working across road at the time of this incident — if they’d still been whipper-snipping, they wouldn’t have heard the fire, or perhaps even smelled the smoke until too late. With the slight wind blowing in the direction it was going, my husband, who has a VERY good sense of smell, hadn’t smelt a thing. The first he knew something was up was when he realised someone was fiddling with our hose out the back!

I think my guardian angel will get an extra big hug tonight!

While I was waiting at Hong Kong Airport for my flight, I realised that I was branded by Adobe! My carry-on was the conference bag, which had the Adobe logo and name plastered all over one side; my laptop roll-on bag has a metal luggage tag, branded with Adobe (I think I got it at last year’s conference); and the power adaptor set I was using is also branded with Adobe (I got it at this year’s conference).

I don’t work for Adobe, though I do use a couple of their products — namely Acrobat Professional and Captivate.

One thing that always amazes me at Hong Kong Airport is the variety of airlines that come here. Pretty much all Asian and Pacific airlines (including many from North America), as you’d expect, but also European airlines (British Airways, KLM, Lufthansa, etc.) and Middle Eastern airlines (Emirates, Saudi Arabian).  Perhaps the only airlines that don’t use Hong Kong would be those from South America and Africa. I can’t see any from there at the moment, but that may just be the time of day or week.

I grab a bread roll and a small bowl of Minestrone soup at the Cathay Pacific lounge in Hong Kong… and spot the name of the butter! Then I see that it’s a US brand. Is that right???? I’ve seen plenty of ‘sus’ brand names from Asia that don’t translate well into English, but this one from the US was a surprise.

For some reason I’ve really noticed the odour of methane on this trip. I know people cannot control their gaseous emissions when they are asleep, but boy, every so often the smell would waft through the cabin. Not pleasant.

Oh, and the toasted Reuben sandwich — with sauerkraut — that Cathay Pacific served as a snack halfway through the flight from Vancouver to Hong Kong? It didn’t help…