as a lover of unnecessary knowledge, this website appeals to me…
Monthly Archive for July, 2008
While in Perth we spent a day out on Rottnest Island. The island was named by the Dutch, meaning “rats nest” after the local Quokkas. Here is one hiding from me as I tried to take a photo…
Quokka
The rest of the photos are here.
While in Perth we rented a car for a few days and cruised up to the Pinnacles. It was cloudy so we missed seeing their shadows as the sun set, but it was still very pretty…
Pinnacles near Perth
The rest of the Pinnacles photos are here.
As part of our WA trip we drove across to Karijini National Park. Near Tom Price, this park has canyons in the middle of the desert. Water comes out of the water table, keeping them nice and wet while it’s desert up above.
Heron in Karijini
There are also some really cool bits of canyon where water has been flowing for a very long time. There are beautiful pools and channels
Canyon in Karijini
The rest of the photos are here.
I’m getting behind… I still have to post several legs of the WA trip, a trip to Wagga at the weekend, and my amazing ability to balance a schooner on it’s side without spilling a drop…
If you don’t use garageband on your mac, you can remove all the files in /Library/Application Support/Garageband and get about 2Gb of free space.
Instead of deleting mine, I shifted it to an external hard drive. Next time I started Garageband, it asked me to point to the new location. From googling the issue, it’s not clear whether you can reinstall the files if you delete them permanently. There appear to be some versions of Leopard that came with a second disk that has the files. My Leopard came on a single DVD.
So the day after the conference finished, we flew up to Exmouth to search for whale sharks, sun, and a break from the Canberra winter. We found it.
Saturday we went out on a boat with 3 Islands Marine in the hope of swimming with a whale shark. The morning was spent with a nice dive on the Ningaloo reef. I got to test out my new Olympus 1030SW, supposedly waterproof but as yet untested (aside from a bit of testing with a water glass). Turned out it works beautifully, and takes really nice photos.
Ningaloo reef
We then moved on outside the reef to find big fish to swim with. The company uses planes to spot their fish, and had to call in a second one when they hadn’t found one by lunch time. On the way we saw some humpback whales on their way north.
While we were watching the whales, the whale shark call came, and we and the other boats raced down to the spot. There was only the one whale shark that day so we had to share with some other boats. We got several swims so I didn’t feel like we missed out at all.
Come swim time we dived in and split into two groups so the fish could swim between us. It dutifully did so and was extremely cool…
Whale shark
My camera worked nicely too, as you can see.
Having tired ourselves out, we headed back. We met some more humpbacks on the way, these ones much more playful, showing a bit of tail for us to photograph.
Humpback
An awesome day, and probably worth the $350 or so it cost us. The rest of the photos are here.
The ASA conference ended nicely. Well worth the trip over to check the place out.
Apparently someone said “He always looks like he just got out of bed, but seems to know what he’s talking about” when I got up to advertise my poster. Best praise from a stranger I’ve had for ages…
Holiday time!
We waited for over an hour in the rain for a taxi after the conference dinner. Not happy…
After the day of talks we went out for a few beers and dinner. I paid over $7 for a schooner, and over $8 for a pint. Ouch. It was nice sitting outside at least…
