How bizarre. According to Wikipedia, a fainting goat is a breed of domestic goat whose external muscles freeze for roughly 10 seconds when the goat is startled. This is hilarious...
You have to wonder how Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection can explain this. Surely this is not a good tactic against a predator?
We nearly bought an house in Auckley. Even so, this is very close to where we used to live...
Even Meadowhall, OMG!..
I really don't understand this obsession with Paris Hilton in Australia. She's constantly all over the news here, much worse than in the UK.
At least one US newsreader agrees with me - Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC in the US....
The weekend is here!
I can't believe I've just completed my first full week of work in Oz and I've done absolutely nothing! The client I'm working for still hasn't sorted me out a PC or account to access the systems. Nor do I have a swipe card yet to get physical access to the building. I have to tailgate in every day, which doesn't say much for their physical security, or their security awareness training for employees as I haven't been challenged once yet.
The building is pretty nice though:
No one seems to mind that they're paying me to do nothing. They even keep apologising. I've been bored to tears to be honest. Hopefully things will be better next week.
I scared myself today. I caught myself saying yip instead of yes, just like the aussies. I was determined that I wouldn't pick up the accent but I guess it's inevitable when everyone around you speaks differently. I've already had to adjust some of the terminology I use at work. For instance here they pronounce the word Router like the Americans do, i.e rowter - row as in 'they're having a row'. There's a good reason for it though. Root and rooting, as we poms pronounce route and routing, means something very rude over here. Dealing with network security every day I obviously have to say router a lot and I cringe every time I say rowter, it just doesn't sound right to me. Like the yanks they also say darta instead of data.
I dread to think what we'll sound like in 5 years time from now. One guy I work with has spent half his life in South Africa and the other half in New Zealand before coming to Brisbane. His accent is well screwed up. He keeps talking to me about an application and because of his accent I can't tell whether the application is called Dennis or Dynis.
I luckily got to spend this afternoon at my employer's office, rather than the client's office where I'm based full time. It was much better. They've got a small team of about 20 working their in a cosy office. Everyone has a laugh and come 4pm they opened up the fridge and started passing around the beers in the office. It's so nice not having to drive home from work anymore!
It seems ironic to me that the man who has done very little for peace in the Middle East in his 10 years in power, worst still, the man who helped start a war in the Middle East which has decreased stability, not increased it, is now set to become the Middle East envoy for the US, Russia, the UN and the EU.
If I was him I'd put my feet up, write my memoirs and sit back and wait for the millions to roll in.
I'm glad we've moved. By the looks of it our old house in Doncaster could be under 4ft of water now! We've been looking at the photo's on the UK news sites and we're flabbergasted - we've never seen anything like it in South Yorkshire. It was particularly strange seeing the picture of the fish lying in the middle of the road on Brightside Lane in Sheffield. I used to drive down there to work.
While firefighters are battling to save power supplies in Doncaster, we had our own power outage yesterday. Shortly after Rach arrived home from work she heard a massive bang outside, and a second later all the power went off. It turned out a truck hard gone round a sharp bend too fast, about two streets away from our house, and careered straight into an electricity telegraph pole. The electricity company responded pretty quickly but the damage was that bad it took them a few hours to get the power back on. When I got home from work we ended up having to go out for dinner as the lights were still out. They finally managed to restore power about 9pm.
As for the rain, we've had a fair amount of it in Brisbane over the last few days and people are hoping it might finally bring an end to the drought. According to the Brisbane Courier Mail, grass has begun to poke through the cracked shores of Wivenhoe Dam. When the Queensland Government public broadcast comes on telly advising people that they need to hit the target of no more than 140 litres per person a day, and shows a pictures of a dry, cracked dam, I thought the pictures were simply graphics exaggerated for effect. I didn't realise it is in fact that bad.
Today's combined dam water levels for South East Queensland is at 18.04%. There's been level 5 water restrictions here since the 10th April because the dams have been consistently under the 20% mark. What this means is that living in a odd-numbered house we're only allowed to use bucketed water (not hosepipes) on the garden or car on Tuesday's, Thursday's and Saturday's between 4pm and 7pm, amongst other restrictions.
We seem to be the only people moaning about the rain in Brisbane. The natives here look at the pictures of the floods in England with envy!
I must remember next time I move into a new house not to tell anyone that I work in IT. When someone asks me what I do I'll have to say Business Analyst or something - nobody knows what they do!
Already I've had knocks on the door from 2 different neighbours to help them out with their PC.
Our next door neighbour has just bought a new laptop installed with Windows Vista, and while he was running through setup he somehow managed to set the system language to French. While my French is not that great I at least was able to guess the translation for Control Panel and go in and change the System Locale settings. I changed everything to English (Australian) and rebooted but it still came back up in French. I messed around with different settings and the best I could do was get some of the applications to come up in English, but still Windows itself came up in French. Thinking the procedure might be different for Vista than it is for XP I went on the Microsoft Technet pages and followed their instructions to the letter but still it didn't work. It must be a bug in Vista I reckon. There's always problems when Microsoft release their latest and greatest OS. My advice is to wait until the first Service Pack before you even touch it!
The other problem I had to deal with was for a neighbour who had just bought a 3G USB modem so he could get online. Everytime he plugged the modem in to any USB port his computer blue screened. Again, I didn't have much luck with this (I must be losing my touch). It was obvious something was causing a conflict somewhere. I disabled the usual suspects (firewall, A/V, etc) but it didn't make much difference.
A few years ago I might have spent hours trying to figure both these problems out, as I hate being beaten. These days though I think sod it, if I can't sort it within an hour that's what technical support lines are for!
I may be a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer but that's on Windows NT4. Things have moved on a bit since then. You tell people you work in IT and they immediately think you're a PC whiz. Yet it's been years since I've had to fix a PC for a living.
If you want to know how to secure a PC I'm your man. Be warned though, I'll have to charge my standard consultancy rate!
Lauren visited The Gabba today while some of us had to work. The Gabba is Brisbane's cricket ground and home to the Brisbane Lions AFL (Aussie Rules) team. We're into the school Winter Holidays now and as we're both working we've had to put Lauren into Vacation Care with her school. It costs money but they've got a really good schedule of activities on. It seems every day they're doing something different and fun.
I can't say I had much fun at work today. As per usual when I join a company, they haven't got my account set up on the network yet so I haven't got access to the systems to actually do anything. So I've spent all Friday and Monday reading through technical documentation. My head is buzzing! I was bored to tears today - it's not exactly like reading the DaVinci Code!
I've been promised it will improve tomorrow and I'll actually be able to get stuck into some work. I'm not holding my breath that my accounts will be ready but I should at least be able to take some tasks and get some meetings going with the client to move things forward.
The project I'm working on is a Secure External Access project. I've had plenty of experience with this type of thing before but it's a little more complicated this time as it involves 3 different companies sharing a common infrastructure. So I need to create and implement security policies so that 3 different companies can allow their users to access the network externally over the Internet into the shared infrastructure, but it needs to be completely segregated so users from company A cannot access systems at company B. What makes it complicated is that there's lots of different components involved and for each component the 3 companies have slightly different requirements and different security models.
What makes it even more complicated, for me, is that I'm not just helping design the solution and advising on security as I have done in the past, I also need to physically install and configure the different components, and understand how everything works in case there are any problems and I have to provide technical support.
It's 8:30pm now and I'm ready for bed if I'm honest. I'm not used to these early starts. This morning was the first morning when we had the hassle of Rach starting at 6:30 so we all had to be up at stupid o'clock. Oh how I miss being able to work from home.
It seems Google are not content with just 'organising the world's information'. They're now branching into developing clean energy technology to help address climate change.
They're taking the Toyota Prius hybrid car as a start and further developing this by plugging them into solar charging stations, and then using Vehicle to Grid (V2G) technology to demonstrate how electricity might be transmitted back and forth between the plug-in-hybrid and the electricity grid.
The performance data so far looks pretty good. The plug-in-hybrid Toyota Prius is getting 73.6 MPG as opposed to 40.9 MPG for the standard Toyota Prius, and the CO2 emissions has gone down from 0.577 CO2e/mile to 0.376.
You can read all about it and view their performance data at www.google.org/recharge/
We finally returned the hire car tonight. The company we're buying the car off have gave us a loan car until we return with the bankers cheque and pick up the car which we plan to do tomorrow. In fact we've been surprised how good they've been. The car we're buying is only cheap, yet they've been fantastic with us.
When we decided to buy the car the salesman drove us to the Queensland Transport Office and waited around while we attempted to get our driving licences transferred (we couldn't actually do it then in the end because we didn't have a proof of address with us). He's also had the car fitted with four new tyres. We explained that it would take a few days to get the money transferred from the UK so in the meantime he offered us a loan car, even though we told him we had a hire car. The car he's loaned us, a fairly new Mitsubishi Magna, is better than the car we've bought. That was on Monday and now it's Friday. He hasn't rang once to check up on us to see when we're coming in with the cheque. So all week we've had two cars, which has been a godsend. Next week is when it will start getting tricky.
The only problem with our new jobs is that twice a week Rach has to start at 6:30am. As the pre-school child care doesn't start until 7am that means that I'll have to, with Lauren, drive Rach to work to be there for 6:30 (20 minutes drive), drive back and drop Lauren off at school (another 20 minutes). Then drive back to take the car to Rach at work (20 minutes). Rach will then have to come out of work and take me to the ferry terminal so she has the car when she finishes work.
When she finished work she'll have to drive to pick Lauren up for school and then later drive all way back to near her work to pick me up from the ferry.
It's only twice a week that we'll have that hassle but I can't see it being long before we consider getting a second car. It just seems a waste of money having to buy a second car when we'll only really need it twice a week. Especially when we need to be saving our money for other importing things - like clearing our remaining credit card debt and saving up for a deposit on a house.
I'm sure we'll get used to it. It's quite hard at the moment because neither of us are morning people and as it's Winter here we're having to get up in the dark - and it's really cold in the morning. When the mornings start to get lighter earlier and the weather hots up again I'm sure it won't be a problem. We'll be up at the crack of dawn even on weekends like all good Queenslanders!
Anyway we both have Queensland driving licences now. We bought the maximum 5 year licence. See how confident we are that we're staying here!
People often tell me that I'm lucky. I'm starting to believe it may be true. Things just kind of work out for me. I have a completely laid back attitude to life - I very rarely get stressed or worry about things. I take the odd risk now and again and it near enough always works out well.
Take this emigrating lark for instance. After selling our house and paying off our large mortgage we didn't actually come here with much money at all. We had no jobs lined up and no assets to speak of. We new that without some income it wouldn't be long before we'd start to find ourselves in dire straits. Yet within just 4 weeks we both now have good jobs, we quickly moved into a nice rental in a nice area, even though many others on BritishExpats.com are reporting that they're finding it a nightmare. We've sorted out a car, and a school for Lauren with pre-school and holidays child care. And when it comes to my job things couldn't have worked out better.
I came out of work today, hopped on the CityCat, and as I was cruising down the Brisbane River slipping quietly under the Cook Bridge passing the riverside mansions on either side, watching the sun set over the city, I couldn't help but smile.
Normally with contracts, they're paying a large day rate so they expect blood in return. They usually set deliverables and expect you to quickly deliver, with very little supervision and certainly no training. They expect you to provide the skills that they are missing.
In this case, I've been given a project which is highly technical, involving systems that I have very little experience with, and certainly no 'hands-on' experience, even though I was completely honest with them in the interview and told them that the technical side of the project was outside my expertise. And yet they're completely fine with it. They're providing me with full training, which will enable me to add a skill to my CV that's extremely sought after in Brisbane, and for which if I was to take a professional course to learn would cost me $$$$, and all they expect in return is a little help with documentation and operational procedures.
I've even been lucky with the documentation. The project mirrors another project which has already been completed, and for which full documentation has already been produced. All I really need to do is amend the existing documentation to relate to the new solution. I'm struggling to see what's in it for them. OK, I will be expected to take charge of the solution for two weeks in August while the guy I'm shadowing is on leave, but 6 weeks is more than long enough for me to be fully up to speed with the technical side. It feels like they just want to keep me on their books. Fine by me!
I've felt that guilty at work today being paid to simply learn new skills that I even offered to make contributions that aren't in the project plan - mainly documentation that I would expect if I was the client. Stuff they hadn't thought of. They seemed pleased with that so maybe it might delay them coming to the realisation that they don't in fact need me.
The location where I'm working couldn't be better (unless of course I could work from home). I'm working out of the client site in one of the big skyscrapers overlooking the river, right across from Eagle Street Pier, and only a 2 minute walk from the ferry terminal.
This contract might only last a few weeks before I'm out of work again but while it does I'm certainly going to make the most of it.
I've got a job!
On Monday I received a phone call from an agent I've been dealing with telling me that while the Security Consultancy he's been speaking to about me are impressed with my CV, they don't have any work for me at the moment. 24 hours later I received another phone call saying that they'd like to speak to me as they have a project which they think I can help them with.
So I went in this morning for an informal interview, and this afternoon they've rang up and offered me a contract!
It's only for 1-2 months initially working on a big Queensland Government project, but after explaining my skills and experience they reckoned it could lead to other work, as my experience crosses both sides of their security practice - technical and compliance.
I told them that I'm available immediately and they took that literally as they've asked me to start tomorrow morning! The problem is we haven't properly arranged child care yet. With both myself and Rach now working 8 hour days we need to arrange pre-school or after-school care. I also need to go and change my driving licence over to a Queensland licence before I can pick up the car (they're very strict here in QLD). So I rang them and asked if I can start on Friday instead. They said that they've already lined up a meeting for me with the client. We discussed it some more and as they've set the expectation with the client we agreed to a compromise and I'm starting tomorrow afternoon.
I'm not sure where I'll be based yet - at their main office or the client's office. If it's the main office where I went today it's slap bang in the middle of the Central Business District (CBD - which is what they call city centres here). As we live the other side of the river Rach can drop me off at the CityCat ferry point near her work and I can get the Catamaran to work everyday. Not a bad way to start work each day!
After a busy couple of days I packed my two girls off ready for a day of firsts this morning - Rach for her first day at work and Lauren for her first day at school.
Now that one of has got a job we decided it was safe to get Lauren into school. We hadn't done it yet because we worried we may have to move to
We went and enrolled her yesterday in our local primary school, just less than a mile away. They were really friendly and welcoming. They showed us around the school straight away and answered all of our questions. Luckily, they have pre-school and after-school care which I’m sure will become a necessity when we’re both working. They also have activities going on every day during the school holidays. They said she could start straight away or wait until after the school holidays - they break up for a two week winter break on Friday. We gave Lauren the choice and she was adamant she wanted to start straight away. I think she's been a bit bored and lonely the last few days and fed up with traipsing after us everywhere. So I'm not surprised she's desperate to start school.
It’s been a bit weird for me today. After spending 6 weeks together as a family every day, this was our first day apart. I didn’t know what to do with myself! I’m sure I’ll get into a routine. In fact, what with the cleaning, washing, daytime cookery programmes, etc, I’m not sure if I’ll have time for a job!
Some good news - Rach went for her second interview (not for the same job) this morning for a Branch Manager position for a Home Services company. The company provides carpet cleaners, upholsterers, that kind of thing. She came home from the interview feeling that it went pretty well and after learning more about the role she was quite excited. This afternoon she got a phone call from the General Manager - she's got the job!!
It sounds like a great opportunity for her. Apparently they've had a succession of bad managers over the last few years and they've gone from having 7 technicians to only 3. Rach has got the opportunity to get the branch in order and build up more business. It's 35 hours per week, and once she's settled in it's flexible working - she can choose when she does the hours. It sounds really good. She starts on Tuesday.
We've also received an e-mail to say our shipment will arrive in Brisbane on the 13th July. It wasn't originally due to be here until August. It will take about 7-10 days to clear customs. I just hope we don't get stung for import duty. Apparently they pick shipments at random to check so it's a complete lottery whether we have to pay or not.
I've been doing a bit of research into some business ideas I've got. I'm torn between what to do. I don't really want to back to working for someone else again yet I could do with getting some experience working for a big Australian corporate so I can understand the differences between here and my experience in the UK. I think the best option would be for me to get a 6 month contract. This would force me into starting my own company and wouldn't tie me down to a permanent position. I'd also be able to pursue some of the non-security related ideas that I've got. I've been exploring some ideas for online magazines and web 2.0 sites. I could start the magazine straight away but when it comes to the web 2.0 sites I'd need to get up to speed with AJAX which may take some time. There's plenty of people who are running successful internet business' from home these days - I don't see why I shouldn't be one of them! Watch this space...
I’ve just finished reading this extraordinary autobiography from Michael Buerk. What a life he has lived! The book was funny, insightful, moving (especially when he is recalling his time in Ethiopia), and also acts as a good historical reference for some of the major events over the last 30 years.
The book opens with him recalling how he cheated death when an ammunition depot exploded in Addis Ababa in June ’91, killing 800 people including a colleague of his, and nearly killed him. This set the tone for the book. From one war-zone to another; in Sri Lanka, El Salvador, South Africa, Zimbabwe, etc, he faced death on nearly a daily basis reporting for the BBC.
Although we know him as the face of the Nine O’clock News on BBC1 throughout the 90’s, it’s funny to read how he despised being a newsreader. He says anybody could do it – “it looks stressful and difficult but news casting is a doddle... little more than reading out aloud,".
The book is a tad too long at 432 pages (in very small print) but it’s worth sticking with. His account of the dynamics and changes within the BBC over the years are particularly interesting, but it’s his insight into South Africa during the last few years of Apartheid, as well as his account of his reporting in Ethiopia during the famine of ‘84/’84 which set off what was perhaps the largest ever international humanitarian effort, that makes the most compelling read.
At the end of the book he revisits some of the places where he’s travelled over the years. On South Africa, where he spent many years as the BBC’s special correspondent for Africa, until he was kicked out by the South African regime for reporting the truth, he talks of the contrast between then and now. His description of South Africa during the apartheid years was just like reading an account of the Nazis during the ‘30’s. Like the Nazis, they institutionalised prejudice and racism by writing it into law, effectively making blacks persona non grata in their own country, even though they made up nearly 80% of the population. Any resistance to the laws, even by foreign journalists trying to report what was going on, was swiftly and brutally dealt with by the vicious army and police.
On returning, he saw two sides to the country. He went to the beaches which 20 years ago were whites only. Now whites, blacks, and Indians happily play side by side. Yet all this has come at a cost. South Africa now has the highest rates for murder and rape in the world. And the country is ravaged with AIDS - it is reckoned that nearly 20% of adults have the disease.
In Ethiopia, the aid over the years has made some difference. The difference being that not as many die of hunger now. They’re still completely dependant upon foreign aid though. As he put it “We seem embarrassed to let them die but incapable of helping them escape this slide into dependence and international beggary”. Ethiopia is the largest recipient of relief aid per head in the world, but gets less development aid than any of the needy countries. The population is growing yet the fertility of the soil is falling; there’s a disturbing symmetry – the population is growing at nearly the exact rate that the topsoil is being washed away off the hillsides, nearly 3% per year. Obviously this is unsustainable and it can’t be long before we see a repeat of the tragedy of 84/85.
This book was published in 2005, before the Live8 concerts and the last couple of years where Africa has been more prominent in the agenda. Yet it seems to me that unless we get major reforms of the World Bank and IMF we’re unlikely to see any real improvement in our generation.
From my review of this book you may think that it’s fairly maudlin and a difficult read. Not so. Yes, he does recall in great detail many accounts of war, death, and destruction. But there’s also many funny stories as well. Like the time he got locked out of his hotel room stark bollock naked!
If I take anything from this book, it’s an even greater admiration of the BBC. At a time when the world is dumbing down, and after the American news networks have all but abandoned reporting on foreign news, it’s good to know that there’s one broadcasting organisation in the world that continues to maintain impartiality and integrity, and report on issues that matter, not just what the ratings analysts think we want to watch.
We've just realised that it's the end of the financial year here which may account for why it's so slow in the job market at the moment. When we came over in January there were tons of opportunities but I've hardly seen any this month. I'm just hoping it will pick up in July with the start of a new financial year and new budgets for IT departments.
In fact, the end of financial year is quite significant here as most of the shops have 'end of financial year sales' on.
Rach went for her first interview yesterday. She says it went well although in total they were interviewing 20 people for the role so she's not holding her breath. It would be great if she got it though as it's a marina and shipyard - she might be able to get us discounting mooring fees for our future yacht (I suppose I ought to get a job first - little details!).
We've also sussed out the car market. We extended our hire car for another two weeks hoping that I maybe able to start work so we can afford something better. We originally decided to budget £2k for a run-around until I started work. The plan being I'd get a good job with perhaps a company car, or we'd buy something decent, and Rach could use the run-around. The problem is you can't get anything here for £2k. Because of the climate, cars aren't prone to rust and other types of deterioration like they are in the UK so don't depreciate as much.
It looks like we're going to have to increase our budget as it doesn't make financial sense to extend the hire car much longer. The hire car is due back next Wednesday so we're going to look around at a few cars over the next few days.
We bought Lauren her first bike today. Pink, of course! Where we live now in a gated community is the perfect place for her to learn to ride. It has got stabilisers on for now (although it still didn't stop her from falling off and banging her knee). I'll give her a few days to get used to it with them on before I take them off and teach her to ride properly.
We had our first taste of aussie sport last night watching the annual State of Origin.
The State of Origin is an annual set of 3 Rugby League matches between 'the maroons', representing Queensland, and 'the blues', representing New South Wales. It's one of the main sporting events of the year and the aussies take it very seriously, especially here in Queensland where they're passionate about Rugby League.
It's called State of Origin because players are selected to play for the state in which they played their first professional rugby match. So in some cases club players actually get to play against each other in the State of Origin match, much like Premiership club players get to play against each other when they're representing their country. The first match was played in Brisbane on the evening we arrived here (Queensland won), with the second match last night played at the Telstra stadium in Sydney. We watched it on telly at home but we could have gone down to South Bank Parklands where it was being shown on a big screen. Before last night's game, the stats showed that competition was surprisingly close over the years, with New South Wales winning 38 matches and Queensland winning 39. More extraordinary still, the points difference was 1260 to 1261.
Anyway, in the end Queensland won 10-6 last night making the third game, to be played in Melbourne, academic. Being good Queenslanders we were cheering on the maroons of course, although they don't know how to say maroon here, they pronounce it morone for some weird reason.
I've just realised, for the first time in many years it's the middle of June and I'm not sneezing my head off with my eyes streaming due to hayfever!
After discovering Coon Cheese, and the Holy Sheet bedding company, today we passed a florist called Give Her One Tonight!
Knowing that the traffic would be bad yesterday as it was a public holiday (just like in the UK on a Bank Holiday Monday), and taking advantage of the fact that we’re both unemployed bums at the moment, we had a lazy day on Monday and decided to go to the beach today instead.
We drove down to the Gold Coast. What should have been a 50 minute drive down the Pacific Highway took nearly two hours because of an accident and roadworks.
When we got there we did something we talked about doing the last two times we’ve been to the Gold Coast but never quite got around to – we went up to the Observation Deck of the Q1 building in Surfer’s Paradise.
At 322.5 metres tall, the Q1 is the world’s tallest residential tower and offers awesome panoramic views of the Gold Coast. It also has one of the fastest lifts in the world – going from the ground floor to the Observation Deck on floor 77 in 42.7 seconds.
The view was indeed spectacular.
Views northwards towards Brisbane:
After a couple of days of torrential rain and then an unusually cold day, we’re finally back to business as usual – clear blue skies and warm sunshine!
You might have seen on the news that a cyclone has hit New South Wales, including Sydney, and killed a few people. I think we caught the edges of it here. In fact we couldn’t believe how cold it was yesterday. The houses here aren’t prepared for cold weather; they’re built to keep the inside cool and many, including ours, doesn’t have heating. Well I think it might have, just we haven’t figured out how to get it working. The A/C unit is supposedly one of those reverse cycle ones where it can kick out warm air but whatever setting we tried it just seemed to be set to ARCTIC.
Today couldn’t have been more different. It was like a different season never mind a different day.
It’s Queensland Week this week, and with this weekend also being a long weekend due to a public holiday on Monday for the Queen’s birthday (funny how there’s a public holiday for it here yet not in Britain), there’s loads of stuff happening all over Brisbane this weekend.
Today we started off by going to the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre on the South Bank for what was billed as the world’s largest second-hand book sale. There were over 2 million books for sale, starting for as little as 20 cents. We bought a stack of paperbacks and hardbacks, some fairly new, including DVD’s for a total of only $50 (£20).
We then drove over the river to Roma St Parkland where they were holding the Big Queensland BBQ. It’s the first time we’ve visited the Roma St Parkland and we were really impressed. It contains the world’s largest urban sub-tropical garden – and it’s absolutely beautiful.
The Big Queensland BBQ was completely free and there was plenty to see and do (besides eat of course). Lauren loved it. Hi-5 were performing on the main stage, and all around there were tents with different acts and fun for the kids.
More new photo's on flickr.
One of the things I love about this country is that there are always things happening, places to go and things to see, and most of the time it’s completely free. Today, even the parking was cheap.
In other news… (this is the BBC from London).. Rach has got herself a couple of interviews lined up. One next week and one the week after. They’re both for office manager type roles. I’ve proposed the idea of her working full time and me staying at home, writing a best-selling novel or working on my perpetual motion invention, but she’s having none of it. At least if she does get a job it takes the pressure of me a little and will at least pay for the roof above our head. What I’m starting to realise here is that because everyone’s so laid back, everything takes ages to sort out. In the UK, I’d submit my CV for a job in the afternoon and then be following it up with a phone call to the agency the next morning. It doesn’t work like that here. It seems it takes them a week just to check their e-mail.
Patience my dear boy..
We went out for a drink last night at ‘our club’ with our new neighbours Paul and Julie, from Coventry. Paul drove and parked his car underneath some trees brimming with Lorikeets. When we came out the car was absolutely covered in bird shit! It was that bad he had to take it through the car wash there and then, and even that didn’t get it all off. We did laugh!
I’m getting the hang of the language by the way. It’s simple. You just abbreviate everything to the first 3 letters and then add an o. For instance, your car registration over here is rego, an ambulance is ambo, etc (you get the picture).
I also love some of the shop and brand names over here. I particularly like Coon Cheese and the bedding company - Holy Sheet.
I've updated our photo's on Flickr, including the LA photo's. I've also copied the post about LA into my Yahoo Trip Planner and included the photo's. I was going to update the LA post on here with the photo's but it's a lot easier to do it with Yahoo Trip Planner. Not surprising really as Flickr is owned by Yahoo.
You can view the LA trip here
You can see the rest of our photo's, including some we've taken since arriving in Brisbane here.
I'm finally up and running on broadband again. It wasn't straightforward though. I went back to 3 on Monday with all the necessary I.D. They spoke to their accounts department and explained my situation. In the end the accounts department just needed some proof of recent income. So I had to go to the Carina Leagues Club (henceforth known as "my club") to use their internet room, which has a free printing service when you purchase the internet card, and print off proof of my income from contracting over the last few months. I took the paperwork back to 3 and eventually, late Monday, I got a phone call from them to say their accounts department had accepted me. Thank god!
I took the new broadband data card home Monday evening and of course - it didn't work.
I rang their technical support line who told me I had to wait 24 hours for the service to be activated. So I waited and tried again late Tuesday.
Come Tuesday it still wasn't working so I rang them again. They told me that the web surfing package had not been activated on my account, they would activate it now but I'd have to wait between 4 and 24 hours before I could use it. So I waited again.
I kept trying all morning and nothing. I rang them up this afternoon and would you believe it, just as I started talking to them I got a blue flashing light on my data card to show their was a network available.
I'm all up and running now, finally, and what's more I'm getting a decent speed - nearly 1Mb. I've also got a 2Gb allowance which is twice what I had with Telstra although not nearly enough for me to download music, podcasts, or movies; or watch Liverpool FC matches streamed on Liverpoolfc.tv, or even use Skype with my webcam, etc. I could, but that would eat up my allowance in less than a week.
Funnily enough, at just about the same time as my mobile broadband started working, so did my landline. We're now up and running on a home phone number so will be calling home over the next few days (we promise not to call in the middle of the night, honest!).
I've just had a call from a recruitment consultant who told me he's working on setting me up an interview with a large security consultant, possibly next week. It doesn't sound like they're recruiting at the moment but he said they were interested in my CV. It could be one of those where they set me on on the basis that I go out and win some business for them.
On Monday we got ourselves enrolled for Medicare. Hopefully, when I'm working full-time we'll be able to top this up with private medical insurance. I still need to read up on how it all works but from what I understand we use our Medicare card to claim back a percentage of any medical fees incurred. Medicare covers 75% of the schedule fee for in-hospital services, 85% of the schedule fee for out-of-hospital services, and 100% of the schedule fee for out of hospital GP attendance items. However, the schedule fee is a fee for service set by the Australian Government and not necessarily what the doctors may charge. A lot of people have private medical insurance here to cover the remaining fees. In fact, the federal government penalises those that haven't. According to a government website:
Lifetime Health Cover is essentially a financial penalty imposed on people over the age of 31 who do not have hospital cover. If a person does not have hospital cover on 1 July following their 31st birthday and decides to take out hospital cover later in life, they will pay a loading of 2% on top of the base premium for every 1st July that has occurred since their 31st birthday.It looks like it's going to be a bit more expensive for me.
All was going well with the new wireless broadband USB adaptor for my laptop up until Friday when I broke it! All I did was pull it out of the USB port and the thing came apart on me. I took it into the shop I purchased it from Saturday morning and they told me they couldn't replace it there, I'd have to ring up Telstra and ask them to send me a replacement. So I rang up Telstra and eventually get through (the phone services over here are even worse than in the UK, even worse than BT in fact) only to be told I'd have to wait 5 days for a new one. That's completely unacceptable, I can't afford to wait 5 days especially while I'm looking for work. Anyway, I told them to cancel my account. And I took the adaptor back to the shop and got my money refunded.
I was back to square one - no internet. I then went in Vodafone to sign up for one of their packages but of course I didn't have my passport with me or any other form of identification that they would accept. By this time the shops were shutting up so I knew I'd have to wait until Sunday. So I went back this morning with I.D. and applied for the Vodafone package, only to get refused because I failed the credit score.
They weren't very helpful at all. I explained the situation - it's hard to pass the credit score when I've never had credit in Australia and when I haven't yet got a job. I told them I was willing to pay for 12 month usage in advance but they weren't having it.
I then made my way to the 3 shop to give their package a go. They have different rules and couldn't accept the passport - they needed to see something with my current address on, and it can't be the tenancy agreement. The thing is, we haven't had any bills yet to our new address so I thought I was stuck.
I went home extremely frustrated to say the least. Anyway, luckily, our first bill arrived today for electricity. So I'm going to try again tomorrow. It could still be a problem though with the credit check. I explained to them that while I haven't sorted out employment yet I'm still officially a director of a UK company so hopefully that could be taken into consideration. I guess I'll find out tomorrow.
So to summarise, I still love Australia but they really need to sort their telecommunications out. I'm still without a landline - we've been told it will be fixed on Wednesday. It took us days to activate our mobile SIM's because Vodafone was going through an IT upgrade that seemed to last a week (I don't think much of their change control!). I can't get ADSL to the house, and I'm not having much look with wireless broadband.
Besides that everything else is good. Rach did a good days work yesterday. She was originally only going to work in the morning helping set up for a wedding reception but she got asked back in the evening to help out. I'm not sure if she'll be doing it again though. She didn't mind setting up, or even helping the soux chef in the evening, but she draws the line at washing pots. I don't blame her - we're not that desperate. Yet.
I'm typing this from the Carina Leagues Club, which we've just become members of. Think Phoenix Nights but less Northern UK. The beer is cheap, so is the food. There's a live band on (sorry, 'turn'), and there's a kids club for Lauren. What more does anyone want from life! I'm going to have to get to grips with the language though. I asked for a beer and they asked me whether I wanted a skooner or a pot. Pot sounded larger so I went with that. I got an half! Skooner is the pint glass.
It’s officially the first day of winter here today. You wouldn’t know it. It’s a bit weird actually. All the clothes shops are stocking jumpers and other winter clothes and yet it’s 25 degrees outside!
We’ve spent the last couple of days getting into the ozzie lifestyle. We had Kangaroo steak for dinner last night. Very nice indeed. A bit like beef. It’s red meat but apparently it’s extremely lean and quite good for you. There are 53 million Kangaroos in
Talking about parks, we had a walk around the parkland near our house yesterday afternoon. It’s quite beautiful. There’s a nice walk around a large lake in the middle (although the lake is mostly empty due to the drought), and there’s lots of off-shoots to picnic, BBQ and children’s play areas. It’s going to be my local jogging spot starting today. Yes, me, jogging! Rach is starting a Body Pump class tomorrow (Saturday) down at one of the many fitness centres here.
Nothing going work-wise for me yet. I did get one phone call from an agency asking me if I’d be interested in a contract, but unfortunately it was in
Rach has been given some work. A friend of Cath’s has offered her some casual cash-in-hand work helping set up for weddings. She’s got a few hours on Saturday so at least there’s some money coming in. Myself and Lauren are going to have a look for a car while Rach is working.
The daylight hours here are taking a bit of getting used to. At the moment it’s dark by 5:30, and it gets dark really quickly – not much of a twilight to speak of. From the minute it starts to go dark it’s pitch black in less than 15 minutes. And then the sun is up and shining again about 5 in the morning. The only problem is that as soon as the sun is up, so are the birds - at 4:30am. You wouldn’t believe the sound of the birds here, it’s like living in a tropical aviary! In the
I’m still really peeved about this broadband business. I’ve only had it a few days and I’ve already used 150Mb. That’s just general internet use, without multimedia or downloading. There was a number of podcasts I used to download in the
We were supposed to have our landline connected yesterday but it’s not working. I’m waiting for the phone company to get back to me to tell me why it’s not working. Technology doesn’t seem to work very well over here.
The TV is also doing my head in. I can’t wait until we get Foxtel (Sky) so we can forward through the adverts. They have adverts every 10 minutes here. Honestly, in a 30 minute programme there’s 3 lots of adverts, it’s ridiculous. I used to moan about the licence fee in the
It looks like I’m going to miss the
These are only little things in the scheme of things though. We’re here for a change of lifestyle so I’m secretly quite pleased that we’re being forced to watch less telly and use the Internet less. I’m adapting quite well I think. Although I’m not going to be able to live without the footy for too long.
