In The Days Of The Comet

Another overcast night in Melbourne and again I miss out on seeing the brightest comet in thirty years. Comet McNaught seems intent on eluding me. When I actually remember to go outside after sunset and have a look it’s inevitably overcast and I am thwarted in my attempt to be amazed at the celestial event of the decade.

I’ll try again tomorrow.

Melbourne’s Tennis Shame

Yesterday saw violence flare at the tennis during the Australian Open here in Melbourne between Serb and Croat supporters. As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I’m not into sport much myself, but we are all used to riots at the football, in fact it’s expected but, this is tennis, not the sort of game that engenders the pack mentality that male dominated football does, I mean old grannies might have spilled their strawberries and cream.. Is there nothing sports fans won’t come to blows over?

Today temperatures hit the forties again around Victoria; bushfires near Benalla took out a transformer which supplies electricity to the state from NSW resulting in major loss of load and subsequent power blackouts. Trains and trams are badly effected, many traffic lights are out and more than 100,000 homes are without power (luckily I’m not effected at this time so I can still blog). Major thunder storms and flash flooding episodes are forecast for tonight and the public are being told to stay indoors to avoid possible death by lighting and or hail stones…

You know, some days it just feels like the end of the world is nigh.

Zen And The Art Of Wireless Network Maintenance

OK – time for what seems to have turned into a monthly post on this blog. It may appear to be an easy to answer question (the answer being because they are not lazy like me) but where do people find the time to blog every day, or even every few days? Maybe I need to learn some self discipline.

Well the bush fires continue and we are still getting some days where the city is choked with wood smoke. Still, the damage to property and loss of life has been relatively minor to what it might been – but there are still months of fire season to go yet.

My main concern at the moment though is trying to get my home wireless network happening. All the literature, both supplied by the manufacturer of my new Netgear DG834G wireless router and that written by independent sources (who I guess to be nerds), claims the network is simple and easy to set up. I disagree - in the strongest possible terms. After nearly a week (on and off) of desperate fiddling with proxy settings and permissions it is still not working. Sure I can get the thing connected (eventually - and I am still not sure how exactly) to the net via the Ethernet cable, but getting it to run without the cable (surely the point of the purchase) is a different story.

The conclusion I must draw after all this time wasting and frustration is this; I am either stupid, or the thing has been designed by the type of nerd who’s idea of logic and ease of installation is not the same as those of us with even the slightest amount of common sense (which must cover most of ‘em in my experience). I tend to favour the latter theory, but that may just be vanity talking.

Apologies to Robert M. Pirsig for the title of this post.