Several weeks back, after driving home from my sister’s home in Cowra, my wife and I decided to stop at Mount Keira and take some photographs of the storm clouds out to sea. As we stood there taking in the view a storm blew in from the north. It was just before sunset and a specatcular rainbow formed. It was one of those rainbows that was clearly defined and quite bright. Managed to capture a couple of photographs before the rain reached the lookout. That is the Pacific Ocean in the distance. The city of Wollongong is also visible.

More photographs of Mount Keira over at the “Adventurers’ Club”:

Mount Keira Gallery
Mount Keira Adventure

How did I create this post? I took the photograph with a Nikon D70 and uploaded the image to the MacBook using a USB2.0 card reader. I backed up the original image and opened the duplicate in Adobe Photoshop Elements.  I used the Clone Stamp Tool to remove some imperfections in the image. My camera needs a clean. I adjusted the levels [Enhance > Adjust Lighting > Levels…] to bring out more colour, particularly in the sea. I resized the image to a width of 400 pixels and a dpi of 72dpi for display in this blog. I saved it as a jpeg using the Save for web… option in Elements. I then uploaded that saved image to my host using CyberDuck. Of course the blog post was created using Wordpress.

Shao Ping, Lucia and I drove across to the Nan Tien Temple this afternoon. Shao Ping will be conducting some Mandarin lessons at the temple commencing July. We checked out the projection facilities.

We then took Lucia for a tour around the temple. We have been there many times. It is the largest Buddhist temple in the southern hemisphere. I have photographed the temple before and the images are included in this gallery. The weather was brilliant today. Deep blue sky airbrushed with wondrous cirrus clouds.

How did I create this post? The photographs were taken with a Nikon D-70, uploaded to the MacBook with USB 2.0 card reader and processed with Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0. I resized each image to a width of 400 pixels and a resolution of 72dpi. I adjusted the levels for some of the images to highlight the light and shade. Sometimes digital images seem a little ‘flat’ and playing with the levels can alleviate that lack of ‘depth’. These processes are debscribed in a guide, step by step. Available in word or pdf format. Download the images referred to in the guide from this page.

This afternoon Shao Ping, Kelly and I paid a visit to Ruby’s at Bulli. It is located on the headland between Bulli Beach and the beach at Sandon Point. It is a nice place for a bite to eat or a cup of coffee. I went for a walk down to the shore to photograph the rock platform as it was low tide. Some of my snaps are included below. Photographs taken during a previous visit can be found here.

This afternoon Shao-Ping, myself and our two guests from Taiwan, Claire and Kelly, went for a drive south through the Illawarra, past my school at Albion Park and then up Macquarie Pass to the top of the Illawarra Escarpment. A new tourist attraction opened on the escarpment two weeks ago ~ The Illawarra Fly.

What is the Illawarra Fly you ask? A large insect of the order Diptera with dimensions not unlike the Big Banana at Coffs Harbour? Perhaps a massive opened zipper comparable in size to the Big Pineapple at Nambour? Well, thank goodness, the Illawarra Fly is not a kitsch piece of titanic tourist trash. It is a tree-top walk along the edge of the Illawarra escarpment.

We arrived at the ‘fly‘, bought our tickets and made our way through the temperate rainforest to the structure. It is quite high and I am not one for heights actually. Not sure why. I climbed Uluru when I was 14 and I have even been on two tandem skydives from 4000 metres but some heights still get to me. I ventured out on to the structure and began taking photographs. I will admit that I did not climb the tower. Perhaps next time.

The views north and east across the Illawarra escarpment are sensational. You can see all of the peaks conquered by my alter ego Larry as a member of the Adventurers’ Club. Mount Kembla, Mount Keira and Broker’s Nose are all there. The Illawarra looks like a nice place to live and work, eh? I car-pool with Diamond and Horse from the Adventurers’ Club.

Looking north towards Wollongong in the distance and the Illawarra Escarpment

Beneath us lay Albion Park and the Yellow Rock region. Due east is Shellharbour. The Pacific Ocean spreads out along the eastern horizon. The weather was perfect for the adventure.

Yellow Rock and Albion Park countryside

Following the tree top walk we made our way back through the forest and I took a few more photographs. I think I took 71 in all. I should create a new gallery.

A massive tree ~ I do not know the species…

Shao Ping, Claire and Kelly

After that we drove back down the mountain and through the dairy farms. Claire and Kelly jumped at the opportunity to photographs the cows in the late afternoon light.

Contented cows. They’re not thinking about joining a Diigo group.

This afternoon Shao Ping and I went for a drive along the northern Illawarra coastline. We had a coffee at Oskar’s alongside the recently renovated Anita’s Theatre in Thirroul. After that we traveled further north, crossing the Sea Cliff Bridge and then up the mountain for the drive back towards home.

On the way we stopped by Sublime Point Lookout and I took a few photographs of the northern Illawarra coastline. The Illawarra is located between the mountains and the sea and as you drive further north the coastline narrows until the mountains reach the sea. The scenery is quite spectacular and many of the locals take it for granted. We need to remind ourselves from time to time just how great the coastline is along the NSW coast.

I certainly have. The rain has been my key preoccupation for a couple of months now. This week our region had record rain once again. It seems to be a regular event.

Water entered the ground floor of our split level home via an upwelling around the piers as well as from around the concrete slab upon which the ground floor rests. It is not coming in via the doorways or garage door. The water is seeping up through the clay and soil. I assume the water table has now risen following the end of several years of drought. What to do?

I was up all night on Monday through to Tuesday morning monitoring the water levels downstairs. I spent the rest of the evenings this week catching up on rest. If I was on the Internet I was probably checking in on the Bureau of Meteorology web site and its excellent radar. It is raining as I type.

The image above was captured after the previous full stop. I have not been able to make the time to blog or to sift through the posts in Google Reader this week. This morning, I managed to get some time to go through the posts. There were more than 400. I marked all of the posts from the commercial blogs as read and focused on the K-12 and other education blogs. There are only seven unread posts now. The rain is still coming down. Sigh.

One year ago we were crying out for rain. Now we need a break from the rain.

During the last few weeks Shao Ping and I have been re-organising our home. Following that downpour in December we decided that it was not such a good idea to have so much stuff downstairs. Our neighbour Dale who helped us to quickly move a lot of stuff upstairs agreed. We had created a rather nice study downstairs where we had our books, records, CDs and files. It was a nice place to escape. There was a sofa and a good desk.

But when that water started flowing in and we had to start shifting all the stuff closest to the floor upstairs it was essentially a pain. Now, we really do not want to go through that again so the books are coming upstairs. Maybe that downpour will not happen again. Maybe it will. Given climate change I am not willing to take that risk. I am yet to sort out the records. I am going to sell some on eBay. Many of them are bootlegs by David Bowie.

Yesterday I went through boxes of old files. I even found stuff going back to my days in the ANZ bank as a young bloke. My training assignments, notebooks and guides were all there. I ended up in the audit department and that was quite enjoyable as I was able to travel far and wide as myself and other auditors inspected groups of branches in diverse regions. I would find myself in one horse towns that normally I would not get the chance to visit.

I thought I had cleared out most of that material before our move to Singapore years ago but there it was. I spent all of yesterday going through the files and most of them went into our paper recycling bin. Even old assignments from university, and paper work from my time at the Interactive Multimedia Learning Laboratory at the University of Wollongong. Time to let go. I kept a few files that were either typical or special but that was it. About 6 packing boxes of stuff was reduced to a small box. The rest will be recycled. I still have two more filing cabinets to go. Some of the old newspapers and historical documents I will take to school.

At one stage I was employed by the university to train at least two teachers from every school in the region how to use the Internet. The trained teachers would be the Internet Contact Persons for that school. Every Tuesday and Thursday a group of teachers would come to the university and I would teach them how to use Netscape, Alta Vista, gopher searches, etc and the various ways one could go ‘back’.

Now, you may find this difficult to believe but I always carried a back up of the Internet with me on a number of floppy discs when my training took me to sites other than the university. I had used the software WebWhacker to completely download some web sites including Volcano World, The Nine Planets and a couple of others. I copied the folders to a set of floppy discs. Of course I could not do that today as these web sites have increased dramatically in size. Back in 1996 and 1997 it was possible.

I was conducting a training session at the University of Wollongong’s Shoalhaven campus at Berry on the south coast of NSW. We were using some Windows PCs running Windows 3.1 if I remember correctly. Might have been Windows 95 but I doubt it. There was a great storm and a lightning strike broke our connection with the Internet.

We decided to have a tea break and I placed the contents of the floppy discs on the server. The participants copied those folders to the computers and they simply clicked on the index.htm file for each web site’s folder to explore that web site. As a result they could learn how to use the Netscape browser. They could learn all of the buttons and most of the menu items. They could still learn how to download images and text. Just about the only thing they could not do was conduct a search.

Later that day the connection to the Internet was restored and the participants could learn about searching the Internet using Alta Vista, WebCrawler, Infoseek and others. I always enjoyed showing the teachers how to filter and refine the Internet searches. Another neat trick was showing them the power of exploring directories by altering the url of a site. The workshops were always enjoyable. The only time I was reasonably distracted was when one participant insisted on using the mouse “upside down”. When they rolled the mouse towards themselves the cursor went up the screen and vice versa.

I found some old publications from back then. Later today I will scan a couple of them online and write a quick blog. I hope you will be amused, enlightened and perhaps a little intrigued.

I would love to read some of your stories from the early days of the Internet. Ten years ago is really not that distant but in terms of the Internet it seems to be ages ago.

This afternoon, my sister’s husband Kieran will be coming around to help us shift the bookcases upstairs. Then we shall all retire to the pool in our backyard and later a barbecue. Isn’t life good?

A few thunderstorms crossed the Illawarra this afternoon. The day had been warm with temperatures reaching about 30 degrees Celsius. A severe thunderstorm warning was issued by the Bureau of Meteorology at 3:31PM. The warning indicated that there could be flash flooding, hail and damaging wind.

The storm arrived about 4.00PM and there was heavy rain. About 25mm fell in the first wave and that was accompanied by hail. I managed to capture a short video and a few stills as the hail hit the back deck.

It was not as heavy as the deluge in December but I kept a vigil on the area underneath the home. We still have one more stormwater diversion drain to build on the northern side of our home. I checked the Bureau of Meteorology web site again and a second warning had been issued at 4:20PM. The weather radar indicated that we should expect a second storm front. 

There was a break in the storm and a second thunderstorm crossed the region with quite a few lightning bolt and more heavy rain. There was some squally wind but it was not that bad. Overall we received more than 50mm of rain and our pool was topped up as well.

One would gain the impression that Australia must receive a great deal of rain but much of the continent is bone dry. The map below indicates the position of the Illawarra on the continent. The clouds associated with the storm are evident yet as you can see other than the seasonal low pressure systems across Queensland and the Northern Territory the continent is largely dry.

Shao Ping and I have spent the last few days shifting furniture and preparing the home for repairs. The carpet on the first floor was ripped up yesterday and the old pine floors were sanded. We were intrigued to see that the original pine floorboards had once been polished. They were quite a different colour to the pine floorboards in the rear of our house. We thought given the shifting of furniture and everything else that has been happening we might as well use this opportunity to go back to the original pine floors on the upper floor of our home.

They hammered the nails down with a hammer and punch and filled each hole and crack with putty. The sanding then begun and later that afternoon that was followed with the first application of tung oil.

My wife and I have been staying in the spare room at our neighbour’s home. Tomorrow the floor specialists will apply another coat of tung oil. We will not be able to walk on the floors till Friday.

I will probably not be able to make a decent post till this weekend. Following this work I will clean up some more out the back of our property. Part of the garden in the top part of our yard was washed down to  the southern boundary and made quite a mess and with all the rains new weeds have sprung up. We lost two trees and a stormwater pipe was broken in our backyard.

With the drought for so long we were really in need of rain but to get nearly three inches of rain in one hour was probably too generous. That was back in December and now that we are on holidays we can really get stuck into tidying things up around the garden and in the garage.

Our backyard looked like a little creek during the storm and when the water came up around the piers and the main slab on which the ground floor was built and then entered the ground floor of our home from within the structure it was all a little too much there for a while. Given that the ground floor was tiled and there was concrete in the garage no damage was sustained although four holes were drilled in the southern brick wall of our garage with a masonry drill to assist with the run-off of the water.

We have to get an engineer to have a look at the place to make sure that there was no hidden erosion beneath the property. I have no idea how that will be verified. Cracks have appeared in the concrete floor of our garage. The water came up through tiny gaps between the walls and floor in the laundry and around the edges of the tiled floors of the study as well as the walls of the garage. It was a strange sight. The water bubbled up like small water fountains. Perhaps the clay on which the houses in our street were built is not that deep and we are in fact just above solid sandstone and the water table just rose to the surface as the huge amounts of water could not get away quick enough.

The study where I kept my books and LP records is no longer and that will be shifted upstairs to our living room once the flooring is finished. Not too sure how to use the free space downstairs now. We quickly moved all of the threatened books, CDs and records upstairs as the water rose during the deluge. Two neighbours came into help. That day one neighbour brought in lunch for us and that evening three separate neighbours brought my wife and I some dinner. We have an excellent neighbourhood. Priceless neighbours.

Some furniture including bookshelves, filing cabinets and a desk got wet but that was dried out. One old cupboard will have to go. How we use this downstairs space will have to change. Who knows when the next time a rain event like this will happen?

The bureau of meteorology said the storm was an one in twenty year event but given our peculiar weather of recent years and the impact of global warming on the climate I am not sure about that figure. We had a major storm in 1998. I will never forget. 17th August. Two low depressions settled above the Illawarra and it rained non-stop for almost 24 hours. They called that a storm an one in three hundred year weather event. We ripped up the carpet downstairs, sealed the floors and tiled everything after that. A new stormwater drainage system keeps the water out. It worked fine this time but what do you do when the water finds its way in via your construction piers underneath the upper floor of your home home and from beneath the concrete slab of your garage? We are built on a slight slope.

 So during the next few days the blog will be a little quiet. As I mentioned we are staying with our neighbours during the work on our home as we wait for the tung oil to dry and do ist wonder with the pine flooring. Tonight we are having dinner with my sister and her family so I thought I would jump on their computer and write this note.

Last September “Diamond”, “Horse” and myself went on a bush walk along the Mount Kembla ring track. Mount Kembla forms part of the Illawarra Escarpment. Our bush walk was an expedition of the Adventurers’ Club. I should update that web site now that I am on a break. This is also a good chance to try out the Pic Lens plug-in for Wordpress as alerted by Tim Lauer in his blog. [piclens-lite-link]