Canberra CODA Conference Thursday 4 October

Didn't sleep well last night - dreaming about Gillian and dentures ???????!
Breakfast kinda set the tone for the day with Danish pastries and muffins for breakfast - where's the cereal?
Spent a mostly dull day in a small room where the seats were squashed close and which got very stuffy listening to people warble on about some deadly stuff. Only about two speakers, both in the afternoon, were interesting.
Had lunch with Moira, my former supervisor at HealthLink Directories/Westmead Hospital. She's now working at a theological library in Parramatta and it was nice to catch up with her.
Am currently writing this (in diary at the time) in a couple of hours hiatus before we go to the War Memorial for dinner.

Canberra CODA Conference Wednesday 3 October

Today is the 1st anniversary in the job of Support Services Officer.

Set off early for Canberra. Took Ishbel to Tanderra - she pronounce the Prius officially cool - and then headed to Blaxland to collect Gillian. When I got there realised I'd left my suit at home and we had to go back up to Springwood again - a bitty scenic tour to start the day (watch/read carefully and you will see a pattern emerge).

Enjoyed driving the Prius for a while before Gillian took her turn. I tried to teach her how to use the cruise control but she couldn't get the hang of it and after a while of 'take your foot off the accelerator', 'flick that stick up' and 'flick it down now' she gave up and concentrated on keeping the car on the road as it was buffetted by very strong winds.

We arrived in Canberra just before 1pm and had a little bit of lunch and a visit to the Tourist Information Office. Look at what we saw in the car park.

We arrived at the hotel just in time to join a library tour organised for the conference goers. We hadn't time to empty the car or check in or anything, we just jumped into the bus. Libraries to be visited included the Parliamentary Library in the new Parliament House, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Canberra Institute of Technology and Civic Library (public library in the Canberra suburb of Civic).

We thought the Parliamentary Library would be very interesting but was in the end very disappointing. They'd run short of time because it'd taken a while to get us issued with security passes. Instead of showing us the library though, we were hurried down lots of corridors (past the man playing Solitaire on his computer - so THAT's where our taxes go!) and into a darkened room where we were spoken at for 10-15 mins. then back down more corridors (not past Solitaire man) and out and on to the bus again.

When we got to the library at the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the librarian was in awe of us having visited the Parliamentary library. Her favourite place she said. Had we seen . . .?, No. Had we seen . . .? No. Had we seen . . . ? No.

The highlight of the tour, after having suffered another dull talk, was the AIATSIS library. We walked into a beautiful two storey room with lovely windows giving on to Lake Burley Griffin. Bags I the office with the window.

We had a short break before we headed off to the National Library for a welcome reception. It took us a while to find our way - the girl at the hotel reception had circled the National Gallery, not the National Library and it took lots of driving back and forth to work it out. Luckily Canberra is built with lots of roundabouts so if you go wrong you can just drive to the next roundabout and turn back. Another plus is that there are hardly any cars on the roads so you can dither without upsetting anyone.

Neither Gillian nor I eat meat so we'd ordered veggie meals for the conference. The reception was serving finger food but not a lot of options were vegetarian so we were pretty hungry. We stayed long enough for politeness the headed back to the hotel where a sticky date pudding and hot chocolate dealt with my hunger pangs and off we went to bed.

Canberra CODA Conference Preparations Tuesday 2 October

Had to change the password on my work PC this (Tuesday) morning and ran into trouble shortly thereafter. Long story short, my password used for several library applications and one was spitting my new password out and I had to try again. However, after getting the password working in one bit I found I was locked out of my council account, unable to access the internet, save files or otherwise do my work which included making sure the monthly and quarterly statistics were done before I went off to the conference next day. And we had to collect a car from the depot in Katoomba.

Contacting our IT department, I found they were at the Katoomba depot which I'd been trying to ring since getting in that morning so we could arrange to collect the car. Shane sounded rather harrassed and would get back to us later he said. So, not being able to do anything else without my computer working, Gillian and I headed up to Katoomba to see if we could get the car.

On arrival at the depot we found it was like the Marie Celeste - it took us quite a while to find a person from Stores who could help us. He wasn't having a good morning either; not only was their phone and computer system out of order, someone had put a padlock over their padlock so they couldn't get into their yard, making accepting deliveries a problem.

Then the guy couldn't find the key for the office where the keys for the fleet cars are kept and had to call on someone else to help. Gillian and I are getting a little hysterical about all the time we are wasting by now.

The car we've been assigned is a Toyota Prius, a hybrid car and it has a few differences from normal petrol cars which the fellow tried running us through. He ran into difficulties showing us how to reverse the car - it owuldn't go. He muttered something about how it'd played up when they'd taken it down to Canberra (also our destination). Gillian and I were begging him to give us another car. Please!

Finally he worked out the car wasn't working because he had the door open. Worked fine once he'd closed it.

As you can see from the picture, we're not going to this conference anonymously.

















Anyway, we got back to Springwood without incident and, computer problems meanwhile having been resolved, I was able to complete all my work by close of business.

The zookeeper's war by Steven Conte - ISBN: 9780732285166

Berlin during WW2 and Australian Vera is married to German Axel who is also the director of the Berlin zoo. The story tells of their struggle to save the zoo animals following the bombings, their struggle to survive themselves with friends embroiled in the attempt to assassinate Hitler and a neighbour only too happy to dob Vera in as a foreigner. An affair and a real twist at the end made this an unputdownable read.

Walk to Faulconbridge Point

Today we went for a walk with Karen and Ben and Ishbel’s little pal, Zanny, to Faulconbridge Point. It was a warm, very windy day (first official day of the fire season and several fires around the state already) and it was hold onto your hats as we went and we had to abandon our hats as we ate our picnic lunch at the end of the 6 km approx. track. And then back again . . . Robbie striding out in front with Ben and Jamie in his wake, Karen raced up to the front leaving Ian and I to try and hurry up the stragglers – with very little effect!

Anyhow, we got some nice photos.

The motoGP

For a few weeks now dad and jono have been planing to go down to Philip Island for the motoGP. For those who don't know the motoGP are the 800cc motorbike races and this year Australian Casey Stoner has won the world championship. Any way they were going to ride down and thus Robbie and I would be unable to attend, but today we found out that Jono would be unable to ride down so we had to take the car letting Robbie and I come too. Hip-hip Hooray.
So hopefuly we will be able to witness an other victory for Stoner and possibly a good crash.

Jamie

here is the official website for the motoGP
http://www.motogp.com/en/motogp/index.htm

Canberra here we come!

Next week I have to go to Canberra with my colleague, Gillian, to attend a conference for customers of a particular library management systems vendor.
We are leaving the mountains about 8am on Wednesday and are hoping to be down in Canberra for about 1pm in time to join a library tour - one of the libraries to be visited is the Parliamentary library. We will be there for the rest of the week, starting back home on Saturday morning. Moira, my supervisor from when I worked at HealthLink will be there too so I'll try to catch up with her and her husband, Roland.
Gillian and I have spent a lot of time this week arranging things, including over an hour this afternoon 'doing' our CSTARS for next week before we go - the online clocking on and off thing we have at work. With dinners and breakfast meetings and being away on Saturday, we have worked out we have racked up almost 2 days time in lieu. We've also been confirming hotel bookings and making sure it can all go on the company credit card, arranging a car - we'll have a fleet car which we have to pick up on Tuesday sometime and generally fiddling. I certainly didn't get through the pile of cataloguing I'd set myself.

Google Earth shot of our house

Google Earth shot of our neighbourhood

year 12s 2nd last day at school

year twelves 2nd last day is generally the "muck up" day. On this day it is almost traditional that the year 12s throw eggs and water bombs etc. Today wasn't different. As i was arriving at school today, at the round about in front of the school, 3 year 12 boys had set up a table with 2 seats . The table had a white table cloth and 2 of the boys sat at the table while one was the waiter. There was a 5-pronged candle stick in the middle of the table and the table was set as if in a fancy resturaunt.
The year 12s also set up a bunch of garden gnomes all over the school like on top of the walk ways and on top of the canteen and ledges around the blocks. Unfortunatley a group of mentally challenged people, the "lads" who are actually a bunch of idiots who think they're "fully hardcore bro" took it upon themselves to steal and then smash these gnomes for no particular reason. How does smashing a ceramic gnome prove that there cool or tough???

Anyways thats my little rant
Rob