The US war on tourism was in full force and apart from their difficult on board requirements, this year they have a online form to fill in before you can leave. This must be done 72 hours before leaving and no-one reminds you of it. Luckily, I had read something about it and filled it in.

It seems, a Visa is a document telling you had permission to enter a country, the USA and Australia participate in the visa waver program so this means you don’t need one. That sounds great until you realise what a visa does for you. It gives you permission to enter the country, now we don’t have it at all.

So, weeks ago, i fill in an online form with passport number, flight number, date of entry, date of exit and address where I will be staying. This could have been a real time saver but no-one apparently reads this form.

On getting to the airport I discovered that they didn’t know about my form and asked me to fill it all in again at the check in. Oh well, it only 5 mins and not too hard. My docs were all organised and not too hard to setup.

I always find it annoying that the little green form you need to fill in to leave the country is only provided when you get to the airport so this had to be filled in also.

Anyway, After all this, I was sitting in Qantas club charging the laptop and phone up feeling quite good about it all.

The Flight was annoyingly long (although obviously expected) and during the flight, we were given a blue form that asked the same questions again. I thought, as others had, that we didn’t need to do this as we had filled in one online and one at checkin. Well the crew made a PA announcement saying that this was needed regardless of what was done online. I was also annoyed at this point that Qantas doesn’t give you one of those as its a dedicated USA checkin desk and they should know whats required.

On getting to LAX, I was a little pleased to discover they have about 50 little cubicles readily to rapidly process the incoming traveller and send them on their way.Unfortunately, on loser inspection, only about 5 cubicles had people in them. Bugger.

25 mins later, I was told with a little sense of ‘understanding’ by the staff that I also needed a green form and I needed to go back and start again. This had the tone of ‘why is everyone getting this wrong today’

Well, in a very Douglas Adams moment, I found the green forms in a drawer. There were no signs on it saying ‘beware of the leopard’ but it might as well have.

Filling in this form, with the same information they had from online, checkin, and the blue form, i waited 25 mins more and got through immigration only leaving them with the required left hand, left thumb, right hand, right thumb fingerprints on the scanner and a nice new photo of me.

My bags were dizzy from going around and around and after I was sniffed by the puppies, I walked out without further interruption. I think the customs part of it all is working quite nicely now, it was really painless at that stage.

The car rental documents I had said wait for a car labeled ‘JohnnyPark’. 20 mins waiting was aparently enough because it finally decided to turn up and took me to the car rental place.

On getting there, I noticed it looked pretty dumpy. They didn’t believe be I had paid and it took a while to work out that I had only paid insurance.

Well, I thought this would have been quite simple as when I ordered online I clicked all the insurance boxes.

Well, Aparently I hadn’t ticked the not offered fourth party insurance, swamp insurance, doorknob tax, foreign accent and foreign licence tax, internet booking fees and a ‘oh, you actually want the car you ordered’ fees which updated me to the car they had available.

It was nicely already dented and scratched so that saves me the worry of having to do it later.

Luckily the guy wasn’t there to see me getting in the wrong side or there would have been a ‘the steering wheel is missing’ tax. Ok, I was a little tired.

The Garmin satnav i took with me had the usa maps on it and after the 10 min warmup time when it looks at all the music files on the SD card to make sure they haven’t changed, it started telling me what direction to take out of LA.

About an hour later, I stopped at a Wal*Mart and decided to get some breakfast and coffee. I also picked up a AT&T prepaid card (after doing lots of research on the net) and some recharge cards for it. I also picked up a cradle to charge the phone (I forgot to bring the car charger) and I was set. In the car, I spent 30 mins on the phone to AT&T working out that the iphone cannot be used in the USA. After I told them that I was wrong, it wasn’t an iphone, it was a nokia, they processed it and told me they can’t do it on the phone, I needed to go to an AT&T store and work it out there.

Giving up on that, I started driving again. With 5 hours of driving, i needed to get moving to get there on time. about 2 hours later, an impromptu lane change encouraged me to pull over and get something to keep me awake. I pulled into a carpark of a service station and thought I would just get an hours sleep. The ads on the TV in australia telling me that nothing beets a little sleep is working I guess.

After about 15 mins of sort of sleeping, I overheard someone talking. In my dazed state (trying to sleep really hard) I started to make out words and realised they were talking about me. Aparently the 911 operator was interested there was a body in a car in a car park. I then got up (much to the surprise of the person calling) and went into the service station and told them I was going to have a sleep in their car park.

This worked far better.

After about 30 mins of real sleep, I went back to the service station feeling I should buy something after using their carpark, I bought some ‘energy drink’ thats only about 60 ml. The packet says its 5hrs energy and you should take only half at a time. I took it all and that, with the sleep I had, had me feeling great.

3.5 hours or so later, I was in Glendale (near Pheonix) and checkin into the hotel. Aparently theres a cisco conference here at the same time so the world nerd population could be in real danger if there was a natural disaster here.

I then went out to find an AT&T store to get this phone thing sorted. When I arrived, I explained that the phone person told me that it had to be done in a store. She called the call center and in 10 mins, had it working. I guess the store part is nothing special, you only have to know to ignore them when they say its not possible.

Anyway, I now had a phone (working for voice) with a revolving 100mb data plan. If I used my Optus card, this represents $2000 of data, locally its $20. I know the $2000 is AUD and the $20 is USD but it still seems cheper to me.

After getting some pizza to eat, I tried the data part and realised it was not working. Maybe I really can’t use an Australian iphone here with data. Again, Bugger.

I called tech support and after a while, realised I was being passed from AT&T to Apple and back again many times I gave up. I setup the laptop up with the wifi in the hotel ($10 USD per day) and googled it. Right, I needed to update the carrier file. After plugging in the phone to iTunes, updating carrier files and realising it didn’t work any better, I had to then start playing with the phone more seriously.

The WIFI here gives you a /30 address range and even with the phone and laptop both connected ($10 USD per day EACH) I couldn’t ssh between them as they weren’t on the same subnet and they were blocking port 22.

I then setup both the laptop and phone to VPN back to the office (other side of the world, via 2 translations, over PPTP) and finally they were on the same subnet. I could then SFTP in, get the carrier file, edit it manually on the mac here, re-send it back, reboot and WOO HOO, data works.

Apple (ok, optus) turns off the APN settings for a phone so that users can’t break it. It means that we also can’t fix it (and they can’t either) so the change I made tuened on the settings screen where I could type in the right APN and get it all working.

So, its now 23:30, the energy drink seems to still be working (I can’t sleep now after about 2 hours earlier) and decided to write stuff that is a) too technical and b) not interesting.

I also got the virgin mobile internet working for the laptop so I have connections everywhere now.

AT&T seem to block port 5060 so sip doesn’t work over 3G but I can live with that i think.

Anyway, tomorrow the Asterisk (astricon 2009) conference starts and I’m really keen to see what its like. I just hope I get some sleep soon so I don’t have to sleep in class.

On getting into the room, I had to setup the wireless internet access (had to use Optus as 3 network sucks here) and re-configure the 3 laptops to use it. The kids have to share one but I think having 4 laptops here would be overkill. It is a holiday afterall.

So, with 3 laptops, 2 iphones, 1 ipod touch, 2 ipod shuffles, 2 nintendo DS, 1 wifi 3G router and an amazon kindle 2 we seem ready to be on holiday.

Its morning now, Christy is still asleep, each of us has his/her face buried in a laptop adn the TV on in the background I’m about to show Amy how she can use google chat with me so we can at least communicate while on the couch.

Originally, Libby was going with me but a few days before leaving, she decided not to go. I ended up going with John and Gordon and sharing a room.

On the friday morning, we left the office (our normal meeting place) about 0730 and the three of us went straight to Berry. there we met up with the larger group (I know via Jim) and we had about 10 bikes.

Well, those guys ride fast. We ended up splitting up into two groups and somehoe I was in the front group. This required me to decide if i was going to keep up or get lost. I decided to keep up but it was an effort.

When we got to Narooma, we had lunch and I decided to go with the B goup. This was easier but I ended up with the A group after a while (I don’t know how) and after not wanting to go the same speed as the others, was lost after Brown mountain.

We had to stop for a motorcycle accident as there was a helicopter on the road. It took about 40 mins to clear and the people who had gone up to sticky at it, told us the guy was not dead so that was a good thing. If he had been killed, I imagine the guys would have ridden slower for a bit but they didn’t.

After re-meeting up just before cooma, we then went on to Thredbo. From Jindabyne to Thredbo, it rained (quite heavily) and everything got wet.

During the night, the rain was constant but just in time, at about 0830, it started clearing. We decided to go riding and found the weather just got better and better. Jinndabyne  was the first stamp stop and we made time for breakfast in the cafe there. Then on to Dalgetty. This year, we took the direct route and it only took 30 mins. Last year, when I wasn’t navigating, they found a much more interesting way that took about 90 minutes. Maybe next year Ill work out what they did.

Anyway, Dalgetty was as much fun as last time (heaps of bikes to look at) and John wanted to go to the steam engine show at Bombala. This involved 20km of dirt roads but he was insistant. So, an hour and a half later, including 20 mins of dirt, we arrived at Bombala and the Steam engine show. It also contained heaps of Diesel and Kerosine engines so it was lots of fun. Lunch here (sausage sandwitch) and then onto Cooma and Berridale for more stamps stamp and hand in the cards. We also got some supplies (read chocolate, ice creams and milk) and headed to the ski tube entrance for the mass ride. There, we saw the girls that we had seen along the way a few times and I got a photo. I think Libby would like one of these and i have a card to order one.

The mass ride, while seeming like a good idea, when riding it is no different to riding in a small group because you only care about the few bikes infront and behind anyway. It was still worth doing at least once so I probably won’t do it again next year. John had his video camera out and we got some video of the ride.

At Thredbo, we went to the presentation (and didn’t win the bike) adn then had pizza for dinner. After that, I was tired and decided to go to bed.

Sunday morning was a decision point for me, I had paid for sunday night at Thredbo (it was a three night minimum) but didn’t really want to stay another day. I decided to go home and the other guys wanted to do Charlotts Pass. So, onwards on to the pass and then out again. It was quite a nice rde and I was pushing it a little trying to lay the bike over a little more. On looking at the tires, I still have about 20 degrees to go but I can’t see myself getting there. It feels like you are leaning so far when in reality you are prety upright.

We headed to Canberra on the main road (which is still quite a fun ride) and then on to Bungendore (Stop for lunch) . This road takes you back into Golburn and is quite a nice ride. On getting to golburn, John decided he had an idea to get more interesting roads. 30 mins later we were lost and they asked me to use the satnav to get us out. I should have used the force for all it did for us as I had, on ,my last trip, told it I don’t like U-turns. It took us on dirt roads and after 25 mins of crappy roads, we got back to where we started and then progressed to Marulan. John had another idea but we decided to stay on the highway until the illawarra highway and then, its an easy trip via Macquarie pass to home.

Once at home, John decided it was time to get on one wheel so we got some photos.

Overall, we travelled 1500km in 3 days, saw snow and tons of bikes. Aparently about 2980 registrations for the ride were there so I imagine there would have been about that many bikes also.

Heres some images from the trip.

heres the bike all loaded up. Notice nothing strapped on the seat. I’m getting better at this.

First fuel stop.

Helicopter on road stopping us getting where we were going.

Dalgetty stop. This is looking only one direction but theres lots of bikes all around.

The engine show after the dirt riding.

Girls with funny hats. Libby will want one of these.

John after 3 days hard riding letting off some steam.

To get OSX to work under in vmware windows, add
ethernet0.virtualDev=”e1000″
to the vmware  (whatever the name is).vmx file (This lets the ISX client os see the ethernet card)

and to the

/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist

add some keys like
<key>Graphics Mode</key>
<string>1280x1024x32</string>

This should get it working properly.

Tonight however, I was distracted and sudden’y noticed myself getting annoyed. This happens sometimes when in the car and I discover someone has changed the radio station away from Local ABC to some silly teeny bop station. Anyway, I looked up and noticed that I was sitting in front of “Today Tonight”. I feel so dirty, I’m sure when I shower the water won’t be hot enough to wash it all off.

I wouldn’t really admit this sort of thing but was hoping someone could help me get rid of this depression I now feel.

I really can’t believe how crappy that show is.

Just thought people might like to see them.

Also, I always assumed that seeing your life partner in a group of people was always easy. This was some inate ability than when someone was so important to you that you had them imprinted on your head in such a way that you could always recognise them.

Well, as it turns out, I was wrong. Often now I’ll be looking for Libby in a shop or similar and will often look right past her. As it turns out, I think I was always able to see her just because of her size. Now however, after losing heaps of weight, I have to look more carefully for her. It still seems strange when I see photos of us together that we are not huge. I can also now not only put my arms around her and touch on the other side, I can touch my elbows on the other side. We have lost about 80kg between us and I think the key words are ‘between us’.

Life is good.

I decided to simply count the number of times the word “sex” appeared on the home page. I didn’t really want to spend too much time on this obviously so that appeared to be the simplest. So, heres the results over the last month.

we peaked at 17 (with 13 visible to users). The Green represents the count of the word sex in the html, the blue represents whats actually visible to people (ie, not in links)

I tried to look for patterns like a day of the week, time of day etc but couldn’t. It seems like they just go through sexy moods (sic).

Now I guess someone will complain that sex appears 4 times in this entry (including that one).

It was the first decent ride I had done on the new scooter and I had a great time.

Friday
We left Friday morning at about 9am, then had to immediately stop to get everyone fueled up and tires checked. It was decent weather but as it had been raining all week, we were prepared for some rain. Because of this, we decided to go out via Picton road rather than up Macquarie pass as we normally would. The plan was to just get out of the coastal areas as soon as possible and the weather should be better inland a bit.

Well, It started raining while we were on Picton road and got progressively heavier. The scooter is good as its somewhat protected but I was still wet. Only your pants really get wet as the jacket is water proof, and the helmet fits nicely over the the collar. I had gloves on and heated hand grips to it wasn’t too bad. By the time we got to Golburn, we stopped for fuel and something to eat (breakfast).

John didn’t arrive (I was only with Aldo) and after a few calls/messages we discovered he had gone further to eagles nest and we would meet him there.

This was also the first ride where I had setup my helmet comms (normally just blue-tooth for phone calls) to also play music from my i-pod. It was fantastic and made the whole weekend much more fun. I normally listen to audio books but while on the bike, needing to concentrate is important so music was the only sensible choice. Many people ask if its harder to hear traffic etc with music on and the answer is pretty much ‘you haven’t been on a bike much have you’. Once in the wind, you can’t hear much anyway and at slow speeds, where traffic is important, you can still hear it.

After meeting up with John and Marina, we went on to michaelago for more fuel (for John) and then on to cooma to pick up our passes and get some lunch. It was quite cool to see all the bikes everywhere.

We then made the short leg (60km or so) to Berridale and went to the pub there for a while. When gearing up for this leg, the sky looked menacing so I was thinking about putting on the wet weather pants. ‘How wet could it possibly get’ I said quite stupidly. Well, on that leg, we were riding through the heaviest rain all day and lightening was hitting all around us. I was thinking about how much worse this could get then noticed the rain started to hurt (my elbows stick out). On looking down, I noticed hail stones hitting my arms and hands and bouncing off and sitting over the instruments on the bike. They were only about 1cm long but they still hurt. My pants were very wet.

Once at the Pub, I decided to get fuel (the 20km fuel on reserve meeter said I’d done about 10k) but due to the weather, they had no power. We rode to Gabes farm to see if he had spare fuel but found out he had none. He was just loading his tank (yes a tank, you know, the army things) onto a low loader to take to the cooma auto show the next day. He also had a very nice open fire going so we could dry out some gear (like gloves, helmets, jackets, boots, and pants)

After a while, the power returned so we left and went back to Berridale to get fuel. After this, its only a short trip (another 60k or so) to Jyndabine where it was still raining (so much for the weather forecasts). We picked up our keys for the accommodation and went to move in. Its kind of nice with only what you can carry as its easy to get everything organised. I had the under seat storage, top box, 2 saddle bags and another bag where the pillian passenger would sit. With this, I had so much room I could still put all bike gear away when we stopped.

We went out for dinner and to a pub for some drinks then walked home.

Saturday
In the morning we went back to town for some breakfast then started the ‘snowy ride’ component. We decided to only do a few stops and the weather was fantastic. The riding all day was great, heaps of bikes around but not too many and not having any time pressure was great. In the afternoon, we had to go to Thredbo to put in our cards (stamped at each checkpoint) to win the goldwing. I took the chair lift up to the top to get some photos (see below)

After coming back down, We had coffee in a local cafe and decided to get back out of Thredbo before all the other bikes. On leaving, we were apparently the last out before the ‘mass ride’. This ‘mass ride’ goes from the ski tube entry to Thredbo but only about 350 bikes decided to do it (with police escort). It was great to be going the other direction and see them all.

Then, it was just back to Jyndabine for dinner, live music and then back home again.

Sunday

On Sunday, we had decided to get up early and head over to Gabes farm for breakfast. This was quite an easy leg and the weather was still great. After a nice relaxing breakfast, we started the ride back (This time, John was staying down there so it was only Aldo and myself). We took some back roads etc and had a great ride. It was about 1600 when we got back to Kanahooka (Aldo lives at Dapto) and then had to unpack and get everything clean. It would appear that all the rain encouraged the bugs to come out and at almost every stop on Saturday and Sunday, we were cleaning helmets of bug guts.

Anyway, heres another photo of Dalgety (the bridge that seems specifically designed to annoy riders)

Obviously, with these photos, I was playing a little and shot them all in HDR.

Heres some more general photos from the trip (not done in HDR obviously).

My scooter (Yamaha T-MAX 500) in the middle amongst real bikes (Thats Aldo’s on the left)

John and Marina on the Ducatti ST3s (1000cc)

Aldo on his Suzuki (900cc)

I think I’ve decided to try to do a longer ride and this will require a new bike. Currently I’m thinking of a BMW RT1200.

Heres the current plan….
Doing the great ocean road, then on to Adelaide, then on the Gahn to Alice for a week. Then ship the bikes home and fly back.

the following year, fly to Alice (get the bikes shipped to Darwin) and get the Gahn to Darwin (I’ve always wanted to do the train trip) pick up the bikes from Darwin, Ride across to Cairns, Townsville and then on back down the coast.

Mr Howard says a Labor victory would deliver a big change in the Senate and the Greens would be likely to have the balance of power.

He seems to be saying that this would be a bad thing. As much as I don’t want the Greens to be in power I think them having far more power would be a good thing.

If the greens controlled the world we would (from what I understand)

• Close Lucas Heights (I believe this is silly because its small, safe and provides real medical products)
• Probably legalise marijuana (Which I understand is mostly harmless but is still not safe)
• Want to change society too quickly. As much as I agree we need to change, it needs to be managed so that economies don’t fail. We still need a strong economy to help new industries and provide ‘training’ for people like coal miners etc.

I don’t particularly like most parties we have available to us but I think a Labour/Green mix would be the least crap for now.

Now, about 50 or so books later, I thought I should share the idea and tell others to try it.

If you know me (and only people who know me read this :-) ) you should come and get some books from me to listen to. Just be sure to bring them back so someone else can borrow them after you. Or, if you want them in mp3 format, just tell me when you are listening to them so I can ensure no-one else is at the same time. I wouldn’t want to break any laws.

Anyway, If you pass the time just listening to rubbish on the radio, try some books.

If you ride motorcycles (or even just sit still for long periods of time) This is really cool. While riding, anything over about an hour or so starts to get very uncomfortable. With the Airhawk on the seat, its still comfortable after 3 or 4 hours (and probably longer but I’ve not been on the bike for that long yet).

This would have won the ‘coolest thing ever award’ for this year but the remote just beat it.

It turns out that most children look to parents, teachers and people of authority for examples. So in order to help the children more and to indicate what a great job he’s doing, he today pronounced “Childrens do learn.”

I’m struggling to think of a way to make this funnier but I don’t think I can.

“There is not a place on the planet where Mr Simpson could go where people would not recognise him,” Mr Galanter said.

Do they really have such a view of the world that  they think he would be recognised everywhere ? This seems to be yet another case of Americans believing that they are the only place in the world.

Maybe he means that if OJ and his friends were put anywhere on the planet, they would still be able to recognise him. Yes, that must be what he meant. It would be unimaginably retarded to not have meant that.

This is a term I’ve been using for a while and quite like it. I was stupid enough to think it was something that only a few people used and was somewhat local.

It turns out, as it generally does, that nothing i think about is new and its all been done before.

Anyway, If you haven’t used this term in normal conversation, its about time you did.

I wonder if my blog has jumped the shark? or maybe my life.

This morning my wife asked me to setup a seperate blog for her as some posts she didn’t want on her blog. On discussing this further, I discovered that she simply wanted some categories to be there,but not visible on the home page.

Thinking that she can’t be the first person to want wordpress to do this, I discovered the plugin Advanced Category Excludeder which, like typical WordPress plugins, installed easily and worked prefectly.

Its so nice when people write well designed extensible software.

I can’t help wondering what sort of percentage we can reduce the risk by simply removing babies genitals rather than just mutilating them.

Maybe if the catholic church was even slightly less retarded, they might allow people to wear little rubber thingys to do some good. Instead, they seem to just spread mis-information about them to people who are trusting and too impoverished to get decent information.

1. Type about:config in the url bar
2. Search for browser.tabs.tabMinWidth
3. Change it to 0 (thats a zero)
4. Restart firefox.
5. Be 83% happier.

As there are already 4 people in the family, I didn’t want to have a fifth because none of us speak Chinese and it just wouldn’t be fair on the new child.

On the other hand however, I also saw on the television you can feed some people for $0.30 per day so it would be quite economical…

How are we supposed to decide ?