Beast of the sky

A couple of weeks ago the first Airbus A380 entered service with a charity auction flight from Singapore to Sydney and back. I was there near the perimiter fence of Sydney airport to see the first landing, and the takeoff the next day. I’m a bit of an aviation enthusiast so this was for me a big and exciting event. Some pictures (taken by real hard core enthusiasts, and better than any I could take) can be seen here and on the pages following. Some even went to the lengths of tuning into, recording, and posting on the internet the chatter between the pilots and Air Traffic Control. Quite amusing I think, but at the same time interesting to listen to. The same plane, still the only one in service, now flies between the same two cities and back every day, so anyone in Sydney who wants to spot it can. Since I saw it yet again today on my early morning run, I thought it a good time for a post here about it. Quite a beast!

 

The Empire Strikes the Election Coverage

A very funny take on the blow-by-blow unfolding of events on election night can be seen here. No matter who you voted for, or how sick to death you are of politics now (aren’t we all?), it’s well worth a look since it is, as one of my companions on a cricket tour of India would say, COMEDY GOLD! OK, I promise something totally election unrelated for my next post. Stay tuned…

 

Proud to be Australian again!

In a completely civilised, non-violent process the government of Australia changes hands completely – a scenario people in many countries can only dream about. Kevin Rudd replaces John Howard as Australian Prime Minister. It’s a breath of fresh air to have someone with a positive vision in charge. The subtle jingoistic, xenophobic nationalism peddled by Howard made us a bit of a mean-spirited country in recent years. Howard stayed in power by playing on peoples’ fears and eroding some of our freedoms. Although he never directly said anything that could be called racist, he subconciously used peoples’ uninformed predjudices to generate fear and paint himself as one who could protect us. However, credit goes to him for the manner of his speech last night. Thankfully we now embrace a bright new future with, it would seem, international friendship rather than fear at the core of our ethos – which is what we are traditionally about anyway. There is cause to hope that we can once again say "welcome to the land of the fair go for all".

 

Agenda list for Kevin07 to get done ASAP:

 

• Apologise (on behalf of governments past) to and seek reconciliation with the Stolen Generation
• Ratify the Kyoto Agreement
• Take a leading role in the Bali negotiations
• Put George W Bush on notice that our relationship with the USA will now be one of cooperation instead of subservience
• Get our troops out of the ill-fated and ill-conceived American war in Iraq – but fight on in Afghanistan
• Bring the fair go back to the workplaces by ridding us of Howard’s industrial laws

That’s just the start. Thankfully he’s already verbally committed to most of this. Now is the time for action rather than talk. Let’s see how you go Kevin, and your team  – you’re on notice because the great thing about our democracy is that if you mess things up as much as Howard did, we can do to you what we did to him. But now, for an appropriate length of time (whatever that may be), judgement is suspended.

Do you live in a society, or an economy?

That is one big question Australians must ask themselves tomorrow – election day. The other question that must be asked is who will look after the disadvanatged – aboriginal Australians, refugees, people in hard financial situations, workers in poor bargaining positions, the people on Pacific islands who will have no home if the sea level rises – the "least of these" in Matthew 25:31-46? BTW the "right" and "left" in that passage have NOTHING to do with politics! Or will we all again just vote for what we think will put the most money in each of our individual pockets again? Come on Australia, we’re better than that!

Cricket Limericks

ABC Grandstand (Australia’s national radio sports program) has a cricket limerick competition running. Simply email or SMS your limerick to them and they may read it out on air, and if it’s any good there is some sort of prize for the best one which I don’t care to know much about since I’m not a realistic chance of winning. I dreamed up a 2 verse effort around the theme of Mitchell Johnson making his debut series, and Kerry O’Keefe (who despite, as a rule, having a tremendous amount of humour and wit on air) giving a most deadpan, serious, "unimpressed" assessment of his first spell of bowling at his state’s home ground in Brisbane. However Kerry has been known to really talk up any young New South Wales player bursting onto the scene.

 

Mitchell Johnson’s bowling is quick

His action, to me, looks so slick

He’s not rated by Kerry,

But Aussies are merry

When he re-arranges the sticks

 

This new Johnson could be anyone’s mate

But his bowling Kerry don’t rate

As the wickets keep falling,

This assessment seems galling

Could it be he’s just from the wrong state?

 

Did you hear it on air? If so, tell me! I had things to do and couldn’t listen to / watch the entire game.

 

BTW congratulations to the Aussies for winning today’s Test match against Sri Lanka, securing the inaugural series for the Warne/Muralitharan Trophy 2-0 and making it 14 Test wins in a row!

 

Welcome Alex!

…and thanks for the invite. Re my first blog post – on 2nd thought someone has to be the first and who am I to refuse such an invitation? Incidently something else has also changed frm the first post – I’ve worked out how to pick and choose what I show people so this site (minus the bits that could lead to spamming or identity theft) can be seen by everyone regardless of any permissions. Now to the rest of my "real life" friends, what say you?

The Great Australian Unattainability?

There is an interesting article about the Australian housing unaffordability crisis here. Interesting to see not just the debate about whether to live further out and spend so large a part of your life stuck in traffic or to mortgage your whole life to live an acceptable distance from work, but also should one "compromise" and get a unit instead of a house. This is a very relevant topic for me right now. As I see it, if I want to live in my current area which is not way out, but certainly not "in the city" either, there is simply no thought of getting a house! This from a position of being single and on an above average wage with plenty of disposable income. Lucky for me, this singleness means I can happily live in a unit as a whole house is not essential. Can’t imagine what it must be like for families. How times have changed from when an average wage could realistically buy a house, yes a house not a unit, for the previous generation. This used to be just a Sydney thing but it seems now most of the other capital cities and even regional centres have caught up! I’m still trying to work out at the moment whether the market for local units which satisfy my criteria is just within reach, or still just out of reach. Meanwhile interest rates have gone up again…

 

Many other things have come down in the last 2 or 3 decades as a ratio of cost to wages, the most obvious example I can think of right now being airline tickets. For this I’m eternally grateful, living in a different city from all my close family. The brief visits to that other city basically whenever I like were certainly not possible when I was a kid. However, when the most expensive item most peope will ever buy costs 3 times as much in real terms as in the past, how dare Prime Minister John Howard say to us all "you’ve never had it so good"?

 

What is the solution to the housing unaffordability crisis? There is no shortage of opinion on the blog I’ve linke to in the first sentence above!

 

Hang Gliding – 18 days away!

I’ve wanted to do this for years – since I first knew what it was as a small boy. Last year I did a tandem flight at Stanwell Park, which only made me want to do it more and more. There is a picture of this very event on this page, as you can see. Finally the time has almost come for me to learn properly how to do the closest thing possible to flying like a bird. This will start from December 3rd in Newcastle (a bit north of Sydney). It will last between 7 and 10 days, depending on how long it takes to get me fully competent and rated as a "Novice" pilot. This has been a long time coming, from much searching for people who can teach me effectively given my time constraints, and clever roster juggling from the people at work to get me the time off work at the right time. You can be sure that an account of my experience of the hang gliding course will turn up on the web somewhere. If not here, then I will post a link.

My web name

I thought I should add a quick explanation of the name I picked to be displayed as on this site. The first part is the nickname I was christened with at Wesley College, Sydney University when I lived there for 2 years studying, as you might guess from the name, astrophysics. In the year 2001 I graduated from Sydney Uni with my degree. So there you have it. I’m doing meteorology at work now – not much in common with my degree apart from the fact they both look in the same direction, up .

 

I still love Astronomy, among other things. No doubt I’ll get round to adding an interests section some time.

Look – a new blog!

Hello world – or should I say – "Hello Messenger contacts". This page is a bit of an accident really. One moment I’ve started looking at what I can do with Windows Live Messenger (which I think is equivalent to MSN messenger – hmmmm) to a greater extent that before and the next – hey presto – I’ve created a new website, without even trying really. So it seemed a good idea (or maybe just a fun thing to do actually) to see what it could do. Naturally I haven’t yet explored the entirety of that territory but what you see is the start of it. "You never know…", I thought, "…this might be a great new way of communicating with certain advantages over others that I currently have.

 

Note that this is not my first presence on the web by any stretch. As you can see there’s not much here yet so if you really want to get to know more about me, go to my current homepage here. But this blog may well become much more regularly updated than that page and the linked web diary – that wouldn’t be hard!

 

Probably the first question that needs addressing is why can so few people actually see this page? The answer is, basically, that I don’t want to get spammed. When first using Live Messenger I made my Live Messenger address the same as my email address – serves me right for jumping into stuff I had no idea about. So whoever can see this page (including evil spambots trawling the internet for email addresses if I let them) can see my Live Messenger address and therefore… (you know the rest of the story). I just hope no such spambots spotted this page before I changed the viewing permissions from the default "Anyone on the internet" – WHAAAAT? – to "My Messenger Contacts". So if you want to see this page, send me your MSN address so I can make you a contact and so – no wait, I should be putting these instructions somewhere else shouldn’t I? – D’OH! Well, maybe I should just say that hopefully many more people will be able to see all this in the future – people that I choose to let see it.

 

Now to the next obvious question – do I really have no friends? NOOOOOOOOOOO, I don’t not, or perhaps to put it more simply yes, yes, yes I have some great friends! However as you can see I currently have no list of friends here. Hey, give me a break I’m new to it. When I have a long list of contacts, I’ll probably invite some to be "MSN friends" or whatever they’re called. It would look a bit strange to just have 1 or 2 or 3. OK, end of long verbose 1st post.