Travel Itineraries

Way back in the past we had paper printed air travel tickets that we had to guard carefully, keep dry, prevent from being crushed or soiled or lost or damaged in any way. These had your travel details on them which was always a ready reference.
Of course there are many ways to achieve this, a diary or notebook, print out the itinerary, calendar or notes on your phone, on your PC etcetera. But I don't like doing things the smart or sensible way, all of the above can be lost or damaged and become unavailable. Not to mention that you have to carry them.
At the moment I have trip details on my personal e-mail calendar, wall calendar, my phone and my work e-mail. Plus copies in e-mails and no doubt I will print them before leaving.
What I wanted was something accessible via the internet, easy to get to and easy to manage. For the moment I have settled on tripit. It links to my LinkedIn account also Google and others, I haven't explored all of those yet. Naturally it is available as a web page. One of the great things is that I can e-mail my travel confirmations and it will extract the relevant information and create a travel plan including flights, airline, times and dates. Neat. It has trouble doing that with Hotel reservations, many of the larger hotel chains will work, but not the smaller ones that I typically use. I can manually add those however.
There are several competing sites, but this one works for me so far.

With a number of trips coming up I have been considering how best to manage my itineraries so that I don't miss flights.

A labour of love

The backyard has recently been transformed from this

into this.

It's been a slow process with lots of hard work, the best part of 3 months work on weekends. A long time because I am slow, I am unfit, I was juggling weekend courses and playtime so I have not had lots of free time to dedicate to the work and I am learning as I go along.
I started out by clearing the vegetation away. This went quickly as the plants did not have deep roots. That left me a bare area to start working on.

I left a few plants there as I didn't have the heart to pull them out and believed that I could work around them. I wanted some vegetation to grow back afterwards under the tank to stabilise the ground.
Marking out the ground was more difficult than I thought, I didn't have a helper and was working with water levels and hindered by my lack of experience. Eventually however I had the site marked out and a string guide that I could use as a reference point.
I decided to dig the holes by hand and ran into my first of many problems. The ground was hard and I didn't have the right tools, I was also not fit. After purchasing post hole diggers and crow bars I was able to dig the post holes. It was hot work, often done in the full sun and I soon found that my fitness level could only achieve one hole per day. As I went on I muscled up and while I never achieved more than one hole per day I was able to do other things as well without the need to collapse in a chair. In all I dug 9 post holes.
The ground turned out to be a layer of top soil on top of shale. As I dug down through the top soil I encountered lumps of shale until eventually I encountered a layer of shale that I could simply not dig through. Fortunately this was at about the depth that I wanted to go to anyway. As I was going to be concreting the posts into the ground this was in a way comforting as I know the tank is effectively resting on bed rock or at least a layer of rock so strong that it will be stable.
Concreting in the first post was difficult as I had no alignment marks and reference point but it was done. For the next 2 posts I used the first as a reference and suspended the posts in their allocated place and then poured concrete into the hole until full. The picture below shows the left most and middle post hanging from the beam after I had filled the holes with concrete.

If you look carefully you can see that I misaligned the middle post. I still have no idea how I did that as I measured and checked measures and calculations several times.
I Started on the next row and the left hand side next. The left and middle centre posts are in place and I have roughed in the right hand side post. It is being held in place and upright ready for concreting. I have also placed the bearer on the left hand side. The lower most post of the bearer is actually suspended as I was given a tip to suspend the post at the level I wanted it rather than trying to place the post and cut the timber upright to shape and size. This worked remarkably well.

Aligning all of those posts was the challenge. Even with string lines and multiple checks I never quite got it right. Maybe I am a perfectionist or there are other tricks that I have to learn.
The bearers were heavy and I struggled to carry them on my own. I am guessing each one weighed close to 100Kg. Drilling the bolt holes straight and in the correct position was also a challenge with a hand drill. Still not sure what the correct procedure is.
Eventually I had the bearers in place and much to my surprise remarkably level and stable.

Next came the joists and I was able to rip through those, I used a wood fixing arrangement to hold them in place. This added stability and prevented them moving.

The difficulty here was getting the joists straight as they all had small curves and would not sit evenly across the bearers. Eventually it occurred to me that if I arranged them so that the slight curve was up towards the middle, the weight of water in the tank would tend to flatten them out. Suddenly it was a design feature to compensate for the weight.
The council regulations are that wooden tank stands must be made from hardwood, so all of this is done with structural quality hardwood. There is about $800 of wood alone in this stand. The stand is over engineered and could support a much larger tank, that is an option for the future. The current tank is 5600 litres I could easily go to 10,000 litres.
The final step was to get a deck on top of the joists. I was lucky here as I happened to walk into Bunnings one day and they had a batch of suitable hardwood decking at a good price and almost cut to size. I didn't need to transport longer lengths and cut them in situ, I could simply buy the amount I needed and trim the excess of when finished.
The shot below shows part way through the process. The boards are nailed in and I predrilled each hole first and sometimes had to use a nail punch to keep them flush with the deck boards.

Once nailed down I was in a rush to treat the boards with a preservative before the tank was delivered. They received several coats of a 50:50 mix of linseed oil and Mineral turps. At the end of this the deck looked fantastic, if slightly sticky from the oil that had not yet seeped in to the wood.

I call this a labour of love, but the reality is that it is a form of therapy and has been used to develop Deck building skills. I have a dream of a large deck at the rear of my property. I know that I can do the deck now.
The tank was delivered December 2nd and plumbed in the following week. Now I sit and wait for rain. This week it has been cloudless blue skies, temperatures in the 30's and no chance of rain. Storm season is behind us it is summer here.
The Bludger

Water, water - nowhere

According to our local newspaper we have not had "consequential" falls of rain for 128 days. My garden and the gardens round my area are certainly showing the effect of this. Grey and straw are the primary colours, green is all but gone as a colour on the ground. The trees with deep roots still seem to be growing well however.
The 128 days without rain blows all of my calculations for buying a rainwater tank out of the water (if we had any). I have placed an order for an 5600 litre tank. Primarily I intend to use this for watering the garden and growing vegetables. A bit of self sufficiency. As far as the tank size goes, I am constrained by money and space. My calculations go like this. If I use 100 litres of water from it a day then it will last 56 days, I am a long way short if we have a drought and I need to rely on this water. I got the 100 litres from my current consumption. All domestic use of water plus garden use was just over 130 litres on my latest bill.
The sad thing about this is that it cost me well over $100 to have water available but only $18 of actual usage. At this rate the water tank will never pay for itself. If I took an economic view of using rainwater in preference to tap water the dollars simply do not add up. The sacrifices that we make for protecting our environment.
This ramble is due in part to the fact that I need to prepare either a concrete pad or a tank stand to install the tank. The concrete pad was not feasible, due to the sloping ground that I am on. So for some weekends now I have been building a water tank stand. I decided to do this myself and it is hard work. Nine post holes to dig in ground, that is extremely hard. I wanted to say as hard as concrete, but that would be an exaggeration. Still it is hard work and pushing keyboards at work is not sufficient muscle development for digging holes.
In practice I find that I can dig no more than one hole a day. Possibly I am soft. But I am getting harder. Possibly I am stupid, because a professional post hole digger would have done all the digging in less than an hour.
So the status is that I have 5 holes dug, 4 posts embedded in concrete, and a lot more to do.

Octoberfest - Ocsober

One of the radio stations in Brisbane has been promoting "Ocsober". The name meaning to stay sober in October, in fact to cut alcohol out of the month altogether. While I didn't sign up to Ocsober, I did decide to cut back on booze and have been pretty faithful to that. To be honest I prefer February to be the sober month. It is shorter and straight after the Christmas/New Year period when one must punish oneself for one's excesses. (I think that I got all of those "ones" correct.)
This weekend Brisbane put on Oktoberfest. Oktoberfest in my youth was always an excuse to get pissed, but I do like a good German sausage, a pile of Sauerkraut and some German Beer. While the Nutritionists may cringe at typical German fare, it is tasty and to my mind always a pleasure to indulge in German food. When I lived in Sydney one of my occasional pleasures was to go to the German Hofbrauhaus in the Rocks and have a good plate of Sausage with 3 types of mustard, Sauerkraut and a couple of Steins of Beer.
However the weekend proved to busy and tiring to get there. Plus there was the issue of drinking and driving if I did go. While the Brisbane Show Grounds are walking distance (a longish walk), quite frankly I was a bit tired after a walk in the morning and digging yet another hole to form the foundations of my water tank stand. So I never got there.
While out shopping for groceries, however, I decided that I could do my own Oktoberfest at home. So I picked up some German Sausages, Brockwurst and Knackwurst, and some Sauerkraut from the supermarket and detoured via a bottle shop and loaded up with a few German and Bavarian beers.
I found a great recipe for Sausages and Sauerkraut online, which I am about to start cooking, and I am half way through a nice German Pilsner.
I Guess that Ocsober is over for me.

Feeling good inside

People are the only really important thing in life. Well after Maslow's physiological needs have been taken care of i.e. drinking, eating, shelter, keeping warm etc.
I will explore Maslow and my need for Self Actualisation another day.
In the mean time my good humour has been prompted by a 17 year old girl who told me that she misses me. I miss her too. I guess she brings out the fatherly instincts in me that I have never fulfilled. In her case I don't know. I like to think that we are both nice people even though quite different in ages.

The Bludger is offline for a while

Sorry readers, my blog site has had "issues" and I have not been able to restore it to it's former glory.
Yes I did have backups!!!!
I will be re-configuring and restoring as I can. Maybe it's time for a new look and feel.

The Bludger

The beginning of the end of free Social Networking

Maybe the title of this post should be something like "someone has worked out how to make a buck out of social networking and it is likely to bring it all down around our ears".
What has prompted this train of thought is a recent foray onto Linkedin. After logging in, the web site usefully told me that 16 people had recently viewed my profile. When I searched for more details, it then, in a non useful manner, told me that "somebody in a Law firm in South Brisbane" had viewed my profile. If I upgraded my (free) account I could find out who. Well I had a look at the upgrade options and they wanted AUS$ 19.95 per month to show me these viewers. Well quite frankly Linkedin is not worth $240 per year to me. So I think that Linkedin may soon fall off the radar for me.
It reminds me of one of my first forays into the world of the internet. I found a site that offered "free e-mail addresses for life". I duly registered and nick@inorbit.com was born. (Don't bother sending to that address it is now defunct.) This account worked well for a couple of years. Then they introduced paid e-mail accounts with different domain names. Then they started adding adverts to the bottom of e-mails that I sent, and I could pay to have them removed. Then the advertising got so over the top that a free e-mail address for life was not worth the effort. So that went also.
I don't mind paying for premium services, if they are useful and represent value. But I will be choosy about where I register and what Social Networking sites I use. What annoys me most is the erosion of features and functionality that was originally free. By paying more you can get the same services, in many cases more.
Hey this is the same technique that drug pushers use, get someone hooked and then jack up the prices. I am not the first to comment on the degradation of the Internet as the Corporate's and Entrepreneurs move in and try to make a profit off it. No doubt I won't be the last. Neither am I "with it" enough to fully understand how to use Social Networking, you should hear me swearing at Facebook, "what is the benefit in Poking someone?". So I guess that I will sign off here and see how much it costs to log onto MySpace.
the Bludger