The photo I’m now using was taken on our trip to South America in Jan / Feb this year. Specifically it is a Firebush plant at Onelli Bay in the Glaciers National Park, near El Calafate in Argentina. There are three glaciers in the background, all fed by the Southern Patagonia Ice Field.

Here is the uncropped photo:

Fire bush - Onelli Bay, Glaciers National Park

That day was one of our favourites on the entire trip - not only was it a spectacular day (the previous days had been wet and miserable), but we also saw some amazing scenery of the lakes and glaciers, and got to see our first wild Andean Condors (6 in one day actually!). You can read more about it: Day 27 - El Calafate and Parque Nacional Los Glaciers

Working from home: Confessions from the third bedroom

The next time some well-meaning relative asks me how my ‘little’ business is going, when I’m getting an office, or, if I’m still ‘just’ freelancing, I’m going to chop down the family tree. It really gets my goat.

… (more)

I need to make my own confession though - I do have a Herman Miller chair in my “third bedroom” (actually it’s the sunroom*) … but mostly because I think the cost of the chair is still less than the physio bills for trying to fix my neck!

(*sunroom: nice in winter, horrid in summer)

We were in this vicinity back in February when we sailed on the Navimag ferry from Puerto Montt to Puerto Natales. I don’t think we got any photos of the volcano - I’m not sure you can see it from the water and it was late at night when we passed that area anyway.

This photo is a satellite image showing our GPS track from the Navimag and I’ve added a marker showing where the Chaiten Volcano is. Click on the image to see a larger version.

Chaiten Volcano Chile - satellite map

Lots of media coverage with photos of the volcano erupting:

In pictures: Chile volcano erupts

Thousands flee as Chilean volcano erupts

Chaiten volcano erupts

Tourists and locals flee Chaiten volcano

You can read more about our trip in our travel journals: South America 2008 … day 17 is when the Navimag trip starts.

I also love the Apple “PC vs Mac” adverts.

… so I was quite amused with this video of a promo for the show which takes off the PC vs Mac concept:

Earlier this week I was horrified to discover that somehow the font had changed for the display of some of the code display in the vBulletin admin area (specifically the template editor). It was now a fuzzy font - it looked like somehow the evil ClearType had been enabled for just that font.

I was dismayed - and could not find any settings that had changed or were different to my other laptop, which had no problems displaying the nice sharp fonts I prefer.

I thought perhaps that something had deleted courier new or some other dastardly deed, but those fonts still seemed to be there and worked okay.

It wasn’t until I found the time today to delve deeper into the code on that page and using a process of elimination to work out what part of the page was causing the font to change for that editor area.

I eventually found the line of code - it was the default stylesheet for the vBulletin admin area - and it specified that monospace fonts should try using consolas, ‘courier new’, courier and then monospace fonts in that order.

I had not heard of this Consolas - but after a quick Google I found that this is a new ClearType font that Microsoft has released - specifically designed for coding environments.

I was wondering where that came from - and thinking back I realised it probably got installed as part of the Compatibility Pack for Office 2007 which I installed earlier this week to allow me to read Office 2007 documents in Office XP. Sure enough, in checking my other laptop, there was no Consolas font installed.

I pondered this problem (for about 2 seconds), before deleting Consolas completely, and instantly my problems disappeared. I could have edited the stylesheet instead - but I really don’t want to see anything displayed using Consolas. Ever.

I find that ClearType makes it very difficult to read fonts on my 20″ 1600×1200 LCD screen - and very fatiguing to my eyes. That’s no problem, I can disable that in Windows. I prefer the razor-sharp fonts that work well on my DVI connected LCD.

I’m disappointed that Windows isn’t smart enough to detect that I have ClearType disabled and therefore substitute a more appropriate font for my display rather than showing a ClearType font. Oh well.

Mystery solved, and all is right with the world once more.

Rather than deleting or ignoring emails that are incorrectly addressed (as most email services would), I prefer to redirect them all to a postmaster account, which I check periodically for emails. Most of them are spam - randomly generated usernames and such sent to random domains - most of these are caught by the spam filters, and the rest I just delete.

However, I am still surprised at the number of valid but badly addressed emails that get through! I set up email aliases for them so that future emails will get through.

I thought I would post a list of the aliases I’ve had to set up - it’s getting long enough and strange enough to be funny now! My friend’s name is Jacque (usually pronounced “Jack” or “Jackie”).

jack
jackie
jackue
jacky
jacqe
jacqueline
jacue
jaque

I’ve also had to set up sale, www.sale, and www.sales as aliases for their sales email address too!

Have a look through the blog entries from South America 2008 to see the map info - I’ve uploaded them as images.

If your screen resolution makes the map and satellite images look a bit fuzzy - try viewing the “original” file so you can zoom in to full resolution.

I have been experimenting a bit with Google Earth .kml files - if you would like some kml files so you can do your own exploring of the areas we visited - let me know in the comments and I’ll upload them.

The main task I have left is to geocode all our photos with the GPS data. Only problem there is that there are over 5000 photos and lots of GPS tracks - I’ve got to match them all up!

We had originally tried to do a walk through this region back on boxing day - but Leanne had trouble with her feet blistering (read my entry Traffic and trekking for more details of that frustrating day of fighting traffic!). Our hiking boots were still quite new at that point and not fully worn in - and Leanne hadn’t started wearing blister blockers. But now with 6 weeks of almost full time activity in the boots (although we hardly wore them for the first week or so - our Teva’s saw most of the action!), we decided to give it another go.

Davidson Park, Sydney

We got there fairly early to avoid the Sunday-lunch crowds and headed off along the trail upstream. The track is very flat and level to start with - and is easy to walk. Eventually we reached a point where a rock bluff blocks the way forward along the waters edge and the track winds its way up the hill a bit before continuing along at a higher level. After our hiking in Patagonia, this climb seemed almost trivial - I can see we’re going to need to search further afield to find some decent hills!

Davidson Park, Sydney

We turned around after a while and headed back to the picnic area for a bit of lunch … we had packed vegemite sandwiches - no more “jamon y queso” (ham and cheese) sandwiches for us for a while - we’re quite sick of them!

We did a short walk back to explore the area around the boat ramps on the other side of the Roseville bridge before heading home - around 3 hours all up. It wasn’t overly strenuous, but it was good to get out and stretch the legs for a bit. I’d like to explore more of the areas close by like the Lane Cove river and such - but we should also head down and spend some time in the Royal National Park too - although it takes an hour or so to drive there from our place.

I took the GPS data logger - here is the track on some maps and satellite photos:

Map of walk - Davidson Park, Sydney 20080903

Satellite view of walk - Davidson Park, Sydney 20080903

Satellite context of walk - Davidson Park, Sydney 20080903

… I have similar data for our trip to South America - I just have to work out the most effective way of presenting it. I’ll be going back and adding GPS info to our photos and putting more maps in the blog entries from the trip.

I have a Topfield TF5000PVRtMPB (5000 Masterpiece) digital set top box and PVR, and apparently this model has a known problem where the power supply sometimes puts out a much higher voltage than it is supposed to (not sure why). This will on occasions cause some components on the motherboard to be damaged - in my case, it fried the digital tuners. The symptoms were that when I went to upgrade the firmware I could no longer scan for new channels - it simply didn’t find anything because the tuners no longer worked.

I called Topfield, they suggested I bring it in so they could check for me what the problem was and give me a quote on repairing it. They are only over in Lidcome, so I drove over that afternoon.

They confirmed the fault and offered to replace the motherboard and the powersupply - which they did in about 15 minutes and charged me $220 for including labour. Given that it would cost me around $500 to buy a replacement for it - I thought it was worth spending the money to repair it.

The only problem now I have is that there is a known bug with the version of the firmware I’m using where it sometimes fails to fire the timers for recording shows. I’ve already had problems with this once (very annoying - I missed the final of Scrapheap Challenge on ABC2) - so I’ve uploaded a hacked version of the firmware which may (or may not) help with this bug - I’ll have to keep a close eye on things to make sure all the timers are working.