elvis, who? i don't think there are many people left who care about that guy anymore. lots fewer will care about the fact that i, too, have left a building...and a town, and an area.

4 weeks and 4 days ago my house went up for sale, 4 weeks ago i signed the contract and today i've left both house and gold coast behind, for good. 16 years in the same house was enough.

until i find a new nice place for sale near my new workplace (archerfield and/or carole park) most of my stuff is staying in rented storage, an i'm staying at a friend's place...not quite a hobo :-)

..but just maybe they might mellow a bit, can't hurt.

i just read that the ACT has decided to legalise personal cannabis use; one of the odd things here is that the ACT is the last state you'd expect to make such a move, with a demographic dominated by politicians and governmental agencies.

the other odd thing is that the legalisation means not much, apparently, as you could still be charged under commonwealth laws. oh the convolutions!

i've just returned from a four week road/bush/camping trip not quite halfway around australia.

the plan this time was pretty mininal: let's travel to and through central australia! (off the boring main roads where possible.)

the idea was that i'd go at least as far as alice springs following the outback way, and bail out there if i didn't enjoy the trip; otherwise to continue on to WA via the great central road, and back from there somehow, either via the australian bight or the far north. clearly not an exceptionally precise plan; more an example of making it up on the go.

as you can see on the map above i did reach WA eventually, then opted for looping via the far north and got to broome and the timor sea, thus covering both sunrise and sunset beaches.

read on for some musings from my travel diary and some photos.
click here for the rest of the story...

last year they printed 400 million 'new and improved' banknotes with a typo on them. nobody noticed for a few months, but then who cares about responsibility (or spelling).

i also suspect that there aren't that many companies outside the australian market that would proudly call their engine starter spray "start ya bastard" and market it for a target audience of 'frail people who are not strong enough to pull a start cord quickly enough'.

the last time i had to use a similar product must have been about 30 years ago, helping my dad to convince one of his his citroen gs/gsa to start...all of which were indeed bastards to get started.

apropos nothing: other australian things.

...is that there's lots of space.

we've got 25 million human inhabitants, but less than 500 000 live outside the coastal areas (the yellow area on this map from amazing maps)

you don't have to drive very far inland to get away from everybody.

for somebody like me who can stand humanity in small doses only that's a pretty good thing.

for me A$970 paid for all of a three week, 4922km, camping/hiking/sightseeing/road-trip south along the great dividing range.

2/3 of that went for 420l of diesel (my car is reasonably economical even with the brake parachu^W^Wroof top tent in place), and the remainder covered (national park and other) camping fees, some grocery shopping and a few coffee and cake breaks. i mostly camped in cheap or free places and somehow i can't bring myself to eat out even when i'm on the road (at least when travelling solo), which should explain the low cost.

i've long wanted to see more of australia. being off work right now makes this the perfect opportunity to travel, except that the season is not ideal for visiting central oz (late summer/early fall is both hot and normally the rainy season); furthermore the current drought makes the inland regions a bit less appealing than usual (ie. many creeks and rivers are bone-dry, fire bans in many national parks and so on).

so i decided that i'd tag along the great dividing range towards the south, visiting most of the higher areas on the way - for the views, the hiking and a bit of cooler weather. the tentative plan also included visiting the victorian alps and possibly the great ocean road as well, but that part of the plan went up in smoke - lots of nasty bushfires in victoria, pretty much exactly where i wanted to go - so the eventual southernmost goal shifted to mt. kosciuszko, the highest hill in oz.

here is the whole trip as a single track; read on for photos and more details.
click here for the rest of the story...

well, this is australia so it's not edelweiß but flannel flowers. the leaves have exactly the same texture though! these were observed at yuraygir national park, on a hilly headland maybe 500m from the beach.

as you might tell from this i've been camping a bit; read on for some more photos and a bit of a report.
click here for the rest of the story...

today i did a little time travel (a 15 min drive across the border to NSW, where the timing sucks but the alcohol licensing apparently doesn't), and bought austrian beer at aldi:

it's quite obvious that australian beer prices are mostly driven by very high taxation, when aldi can make a profit selling the far travelled egger märzen not that much dearer than local(-ish) beer: the egger goes for $5 per litre, whereas aldi's nice kiwi low-carb goes for $4.42 per litre (that's aldi prices, the other booze 'discounters' are nowhere near except for headache generators like xxxx gold...).

after reading my recent post about my new car one of my austrian friends asked for more details; not exactly surprising as utes like that are not exactly common in austria.

so here are some more photos and phacts.

for comparison here is a photo of my old subaru outback, an average length station wagon ('kombi'). the colorado just fits into the garage, ie. iff i drive up to and carefully bump into the wall. stock length is 4.9m, add about 25cm for the bull bar on mine.

stock weight is about 1920 kg (cf. 1460 kg for my previous car, a forester), but this one lugs around a bull bar, winch, canopy and dual battery; installing a lift kit is very much in planning.

it's got about 120 kW and lots of torque thanks to the turbocharged diesel; agility is...well, this is not a race car. it doesn't feel underpowered but there's the inertia of 2 tons of car.

i'm now driving what might conceivably be called a chick magnet car -- with the understanding that the magnetic attraction is confined to within the cabin, and the repelling forces work all over the outside. net result: it'll take a woman of superhuman persistence to actually come close...
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i don't watch much tv. never have, likely never will. ("not much" is no more than half an hour a month.)

i definitely watch no live tv at all as that amounts to cruel and unusual punishment; instead i use my fairly old twin-tuner topfield disk recorder which does time-shift pretty well.
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i had to laugh when i saw the caption for the top photo on this current news story about politicians having sex: harold holt, curiously misplaced prime minister, and his fishy "mistress (not pictured)".

...finding that photo. i still find it pretty funny.

I don't know why I'm so reluctant to document or write about trips; do and see and sponge up experiences and enjoy: yes, absolutely. photograph stuff and write up: not really. So it's no surprise that I've been back a full week already before writing this, and haven't got too many photos to show.

Anyway, to the story: this year I booked three weeks of vacation in one go, with the aim to hit the roads and dirt tracks westwards and see what I can see and wander around until I run out of time or energy. One tentative aim or pivot point, so to speak was to be Cameron Corner, where the borders of Queensland, NSW and South Australia meet in one spot.
click here for the rest of the story...

...is pure hardship, just plain horrible.

The British Isles have a reputation for being a culinary wasteland (pickled eggs, offal pie, absolutely dead mashed vegetables combined with meat red enough to hop of your plate, etc. pp.), but I guess this here might be an example of colonial one-upmanship:

This Australian wooster sauce boastfully claims that it's made from 50% recycled plastic. I'm not quite sure whether I want to know about its other "premium quality ingredients".

I find it very interesting how Stiegl is increasingly present in the Australian beer market; a few years ago you'd find it only in very very very special beer pubs, but that's changing. In December I had a few here on the Gold Coast, at the Bier Cafe in Broadbeach. (On tap, not bottled.)

And now even Aldi has it - except that for silly hysterical raisins most of Oz still requires totally separate bottle shops, and in QLD Aldi's booze branch is mail-order-only for that reason.

With the also ridiculously high alco taxes factored in, the lovely Stiegl costs about 50% more than the decent local brews; $7.6/litre vs $5/litre. No surprise that lots of Australians do home-brew; even I do it every now and then.

While I intensely dislike the City of Salzburg (it's the anus mundi as far as I'm concerned), I wholeheartedly endorse the products and/or sevices of the Brauerei Stiegl :-)

...but the local weather sucked nevertheless: still 86% humidity at 2100.

Today is also the day on which I gave in (to a recommendation by a friend) and spent $249 on a Rowenta DH4120 dehumidifier (on special/clearance at Hardly Normal, RRP $590 or so). It's now been running since 1730 and I just emptied out 4l of water, and the relative humidity inside is now 68%, not qute perfect yet but not as dripping wet as earlier.

We'll see how the thing does over the next few days, especially whether it's big enough to handle the 200m^3 of my place.

"Gold Coast Show Day" - das ist ungefähr so weltbewegend als wie ein Kirtag in der Provinz irgendwo hinter St. Blöden.

Mehr weltbewegend find ich das Feiertags-Faktum an sich; etwa so unglaublich als wie wenn in Wien alle frei hätten und alles zu wäre, weil's in Sopron den "Tag des Kukuruz" zelebrieren.

bundjalung n.p. was pretty nice, if busy and very windy. we had a good time nevertheless :-)

...für sonst nix gut aber immerhin brauchbar als Anlaß für Feiertage.

Bissl ein Kontrast: In Ö feiert man jeden noch so mickrigen Heiligen - hier in AU hauptsächlich die Scheinheiligen.

Start with this:

Minus all this:

Plus this:

Gives this:

It's somewhat obvious that I have spent a bit of money at subaXtreme, isn't it.

Weird coincidence: just a few days before the coffi^Wpallet arrived a total bimbo bumped into my car: I was waiting behind her in a right-turn lane, she committed to turning, successfully crossed the two lanes of oncoming traffic - and then suddenly decided, for no good reason whatsoever, to reverse back across those lanes...all the way into my bumper - thunk.

I guess the new bar will be pretty good not just for the silly roos but also for brainless suburban bimbos.

It's pretty obvious that 15.875mm is more than 11.1125mm. It's certainly not immediately obvious that 5/8" is more than 7/16".

(and by immediate I mean "at a glance, without mental effort".)

my father wanted to know what kind of car i drive; apparently the soobies aren't exactly common in austria? - at least that was his excuse for not associating my answer ("2006 forester") with anything. well, here you are:

the elevator billboards in the office building lobby have not shown the correct weather screen a single time during our four months there. mind you, the stock tickers are current down to the milli-cent, but the weather? "feels like undefined".

i on the other hand feel reasonably good about work, what i do and who i do it with. sure, the last five months have been pretty busy and occasionally quite stressful but that comes with working in a small startup.

it's nice to be able to make a difference; the downside is of course that you do make a difference, whether you want it (e.g. having a stroke of genius) or not (e.g. having a bad day slogging through hard-to-grok undocumented complex tangles).

but i'm not complaining, except that i'm often too tired come saturday morning to even consider going flying - and that, combined with the vagarities of the wind & weather isn't ideal...

sure, it's just an article in the local rag (quality: above Krone but way below derStandard) and they got a few minor bits wrong, but nevertheless not bad for opmantek.

With the new job I tend to do my bicycle runs much later, usually after dusk or at night. That time of day has its own special challenges: occasionally I get mobbed by bats and flying foxes, one of the trails is full of frogs or toads if I'm really late, and oh, there are lots of homo sapiens automobilis who are blind as bats.

Since the number of the damn saps who pass me much too close is a lot higher at night I decided to replace my dinky red flasher with a Really Annoying Red Light.

So I spent the grand sum of $22 on a set of "Tioga Dual Eyes", and the better light seems to help - it's really bright and obnoxious, might not be good for epileptics but that's SEP. Very much recommended.

On today's 26km cycling loop I had 4 swooping attacks - a new record :-/

Ten days ago I returned from a 5874km road trip that took us through the archetypical parts of the QLD outback and up to (but not into) the Simpson desert: starting at the Gold Coast we went west to Quilpie and Birdsville, then north to Boulia and Winton, looped back south to Charleville and on to Bourke, followed by a trip to Sydney and finally a solo drive back home along the coast.

Sorting through the pictures and notes was tedious, and I'm happy that the write-up of this travel report of sorts is complete (and I'd love to travel out west again any day).
click here for the rest of the story...

is upon us. Unfortunately that's also magpie swooping season - as I was reminded of today: two substantial attacks by two separate birds in two different areas (one I knew of from last year on Markeri Street, one new bird in the bushes off Bermuda Street). The first of those almost sent me in the ditch: no warning, just a thunk against the side of my helmet.

Damn birds. Neither of the two spots is easy to avoid on my 26km "standard" route, so it looks like I'll have to rethink the route for the next 2-3 months.

Alternatives: none, because the normal folk remedies do not work, riding without helmet is illegal here and I'm certainly not going to cycle with an afro wig over my helmet :-)