I've long been enamoured with small, highly portable computers, back to the days of a programmable Sharp calculator. My last couple of notebooks have been very thin and light, perfect for carrying around in a normal backpack. So far nothing has been able to beat the flexibility of a full PC.
The notebook serves as a tool for copying and uploading photos from the camera, for looking up information and checking into flights, for typing blogs and fixing up issues at work.
However, with these carry-on luggage only cheap flights ever gram and every centimetre counts. And phones are becoming even more capable. My Sony Z2 has the same number of screen pixels as my ultrabook. The same as my full HD television actually. A USB port, a micro SD reader and many other features.
Sure storage is an issue, to be solved either with bigger or more memory cards (back to the old days of travelling with digital cameras) or using online storage as the only backup. Google's Android operating system integrates well with their Google+ photo service, naturally enough.
Chrome also mostly mimics the abilities of the desktop version.
The problem is the keyboard. Typing thousands of words on the small screen is tough. I bought one tiny bluetooth keyboard from Japan, but it's just too small and requires function key presses to get numbers and popular characters. So now I'm trying the Rapoo E6500 mini bluetooth keyboard. That's what I'm typing this on. So far, so good!
Wouldn't mind a mini bluetooth mouse though. Sure I can find one.
The keys are not as nice as my notebooks, all of which I selected partly for their keyboards (the VAIO P being a case in point - magnificent keyboard for such a tiny computer). But good enough to type quite accurately and quickly.
I'm sure that I'll still be taking the ultrabook on many future trips, but I'll give this setup some further testing to see if it suffices for those situations where space is at an absolute premium.
My love of Japan is a well known fact so I leapt at the opportunity when Alex's primary school sent out a call for local families to act as hosts to a group of visiting Japanese students.
Strictly speaking, this wasn't the first time for me. Twice when I was in my Central Queensland high school studying Japanese my family hosted Japanese exchange students. Neither worked out particularly well, but older, hopefully wiser, more familiar with Japanese culture and being a parent, I hoped that this time would be different.
Considering that Alex is in kindy (his first year of primary school) we were somewhat shocked to be told that our assigned students was female and fourteen years old. However upon meeting Miyu any fears were quickly dispelled.
She came across as shy and quiet. Questions were returned as single word responses. But through games with Alex like Uno and Twister her cheeky side, a quick smile and a little laugh, emerged.
The yukata was a gift from Miyu
We quickly discovered that she loved chocolate and she hungrily gobbled up snacks like lamingtons, Tim Tams and chocolate ice cream. She took quickly to Alex and B's new fad of loom bands, even though the instructional YouTube videos were in English.
On the first weekend we took her by ferry to Watson's Bay for a disappointing meal of Doyle's fish and chips. Miyu surprised us during that first week by sleeping for about twelve hours a night. She was kept up late one night by the need to meet a cousin from Singapore in the city for dinner.
Friday saw us meeting up with other host families to go bowling. It was fun to watch the normally placid Miyu chatting away with her friends and in high spirits with them at the McDonalds dinner afterwards.
For the second week we were joined by one of the teachers, the effervescent Machiko. We met up with other families at Stanwell Tops, then drove down to Kiama, stopping to watch the tide flow over the rocks at Austinmere and to get lost in Wollongong. That evening we too Miyu and Machiko to eat Malaysian food at Albee's Kitchen in Kingsford. We've seen very few Malaysian restaurants during our travels in Japan. In fact, I can only think of the place in Kanazawa where they serve "raksa".
Machiko and Miyu at Stanwell Tops
At Austinmere
We were too exhausted to go to Featherdale Wildlife Park with the others on Sunday, so instead we visited the closer Symbio Wildlife Park, where there were the ever popular koalas, kangaroos you could hand feed and a wombat that Miyu stroked to sleep. Interestingly a separate Japanese school group were also visiting. Machiko got her taste of meat pie at nearby Helensburgh, where we mucked around at the park, playing Miyu's sport obsession of volleyball.
The only time I've seen volleyball on television in Australia was during the Olympics, but we once spotted an Australia- Japan match in the latter country.
Miyu prepared us a very tasty beef stew for dinner, while the following night she and Machiko made us nabe, a Japanese hot pot dish. Both were perfect for the cold weather.
As the week wound down Miyu spent more time with us in the evenings. She showed me her house and school on Google Maps, so different to here.
We discussed a child's life in Japan, contrasted it with their experiences here. No outdoor lunches at recess, no canteens. Japanese students clean their classrooms twice a day, wiping the floors with towels. It's difficult to imagine something similar here. And they study so late, attending cram schools until 10 pm, barely interacting with their families.
No wonder they didn't want to go back to Japan!
Whilst we have spent at least a week or two in Japan each year and another few elsewhere for the last decade, in working Japan they get very little opportunity to take vacations. Apart from public holidays time off work is difficult to obtain. Rather than using the Japanese to decry the lack of Australian productivity in comparison, I prefer to highlight the contribution that leave makes to our travel and tourism sector, not to mention the psychological benefits.
Normally I find house gets very stressful, but Miyu and Machiko were an absolute delight to have around. Very helpful, courteous, neat and tidy and independent. I felt quite sad when the last night of their stay arrived.
At the school farewell assembly on the Thursday before departure I was so proud to see Miyu amongst the three selected to speak in front of everyone. She did a wonderful job and probably spoke more English words than during her stay with us!
Then a final morning tea and sad goodbyes on the Friday as a coach drove to the city for a couple of nights.
I hope that we are in a position to take on a student again when they return in 2016. And of course we want to see them during our annual (or more frequent) visit to Japan next year. I can't wait!
I recently had to migrate a large chunk of content from a Windows server to Linux. Linux's file system is case sensitive, Windows is not, so I ended up with a lot of broken links. A solution is to use Apache's mod_speling. I only wanted to use the capitalisation capabilities of mod_speling, not the spelling variations. I enabled the module, which is off by default, and entered the configuration in the virtual host conf, the site conf, the .htaccess file, but nothing seemed to work.
The trick was that you need both options to be on, not just CheckCaseOnly. So for capitalisation only you would put the following in your .htaccess file.
<ifmodule mod_speling.c>
CheckCaseOnly on
CheckSpelling on
</ifmodule>
The last day of the mid-year school holidays and I wanted to spend some quality time with Alex. We had a wonderful time. Slept in, walked down to a local reserve with its recently rebuilt playground. Explored the riverside along a small track, past mangroves and a dead fish. Kita the dog was off his leash and decided to enter the freezing cold water, splashing around.
Walked back up the steep stairs to get a lunch of banh mi from the bakery, then gave Kita a shower to wash off all the river grime.
Later in the afternoon Alex laughed with delight as we encouraged lethargic Japanese trains to run around the n-scale layout downstairs. In taking the models out of the cupboard Alex discovered my old yellowed Star Wars toys, so we ended the day with space battles.
For over a decade I've used Ilisys to host my allrite.net and allrite.com.au domains. Price rises finally meant that it was no longer economical to continue to host with them and I consolidated my domains with Webfaction, who have a very developer friendly setup.
Migration was quite a painful process, mainly for the fact that I had so many files on the old site. I did a lot of culling. Many of the tools were written in old versions of PHP and are now superfluous so there's no point in rewriting them. I discovered the site must have got hacked at some stage with a trojan lurking somewhere on the site. I'm not surprised, the site was neglected and I know there were security issues at one stage before I locked it down further.
Ilisys has been involved in a few mergers and consolidations and it's sad to see how the service seems to have declined since the early days. I waited almost an hour on the phone for some support and got a bad IP phone connection when I finally got through. Used to be simple to call the knowledgeable owners when they were based in Western Australia and get a familiar and friendly response.
I'll have to do more with the sites now, though sometimes it's not fun to continue your day job at home. Back to work.
There is something about fairgrounds and carnivals. Despite their bright and happy exteriors there is a lurking sense of mystery, of menace, of secrets hidden behind the flashing lights and constant noise. The owner with the LOVE tattoos on his knuckles, what does he conceal?
It's just my imagination, but there are few things as evocative as a near empty fairground at night. Not that this fairground was empty.
It's our first school holidays as parents, so we took Alex to the Sydney Royal Agricultural Show at the Olympic Park. The first thing he wanted to do was go on the rides. Near the entrance are the child friendly rides. He splashed down the Jungle Adventure flume ride, slide down the very tall slide, both with Mummy and then, by himself, span round in a miniature biplane on the Red Baron.
We had brought sandwiches for lunch, then he was mesmerised by a wildlife show featuring lizards, a tree frog, tawny frogmouth and a frozen mouse.
There was much amusement outside the Hollywood Horrors. A zombie prowled the area, but Alex was eating a Zombie Guts ice block. Then there was another man dressed as a scary chair. One kid leapt out at it, blasting the chair with his high powered toy weaponry. Alex ran up and tapped the chair, not scared at all, unlike some adults.
Agricultural produce and food were next, eating samples and snack and Alex colouring in. Some very impressive displays made out of grains, fruits and vegetables, including one from our local high school.
He didn't really know about the whole showbag thing, but he cuddled his Despicable Me minion tightly and wore his minion cap once we'd encouraged him in the right direction.
Outside the showbag hall were some of the scariest rides I've ever seen. I have no idea why people want to drop down so fast from such great heights, especially after my recent turbulent flight home. Madness.
We rested at the dog show for a while, watching overweight owners put their terriers and weimaraners through their paces.
Farm animals took up the rest of the day. Performing horses, sheep shearing, spitting alpacas. Alex just squeezed in to the cow milking but was more excited by the mechanical milking apparatus than by his manual attempts. We all loved the baby animals, especially the ducklings.
A dagwood dog and an ice cream were needed to convince him to see the animals and when we offered to take him into the dinosaur exhibition he simply didn't care. Not interested in growing grains, but was interested in processing the oats and then in making pasta from dough. So mechanical, our boy.
We departed as the sun set, walking past the brightly lit kids fairground rides, so mysterious, so evocative. A great day.
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