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Gunns pulp mill protest
2007-11-21 08:17:00
I think this is funny. I'm not trying to make a political statement here ( I used to hold Gunn's shares and I was at  the anti pulp mill protest last weekend so I've had a foot in both camps so to speak) I just find this amusing. There must be more to this guy than meets the eye. {youtube}sns4h1mPCWE{/youtube}  
More About: Protest , Pulp

Scared old lady
2007-11-05 11:25:00
I have to share this photo. I feel a bit like that lady some times!    
More About: Lady , Scared

Janice of Wyoming
2007-11-05 10:41:00
I got to spend some time with my brother Stuart and his wife Sharon on Saturday. It was great to catch up and very civilised as well since we met at Sal's in Salamanca and had a very nice lunch and a few beers whilst our children did their thing at the market. Aren't mobile phones a wonderful thing! Our mate Mel came around for tea that night and we tried to cook spinach and ricotta ravioli from scratch (as in we made the pasta as well) but it was a bloody disaster!  I just couldn't get the pasta right and I didn't have some stuff so we ended up eating sometime after 9pm. At least the wine that Mel bought was good. It was a Spring Vale Pinot Gris from the Freycinet area on Tasmania's East Coast and it was most yummy. Are you wondering who Janice is? My desk at work is on the 7th floor over looking the Derwent River. The view is awesome and this morning the most amazing yacht I have ever seen in Hobart came up the river. It's called Janice of Wyoming and ...

October 2007 Share Update and other stuff
2007-10-29 01:50:00
Another month has gone by and yet I can still see last months share update on the front page. That must mean I've been a bit slack updating this site lately. There has been a bit happening. Brad has had a Birthday (I've already mentioned that) and my Dad has one coming up. I borrowed E&B for the day on Thursday and we went to the Royal Hobart Show. It's been years since we last went but it didn't take long to be reminded why! The place is full of people munching on those disgusting dagwood dogs. They have to be the worse things known to man and just the sight of someone eating one makes my stomach turn. For you non Aussies the dagwood dog is a huge sausage like thing that doesn't have any sausage meat in it. No one knows exactly what is in them, but I think it has something to do with offal. They are wrapped in an inedible red skin that will stain your clothes if they touch it. I reckon the dye they use in the skin is the same stuff they use to paint roo...
More About: Stuff , Update , Share , October 2007 , October

Happy Birthday Brad
2007-10-21 09:34:00
Happy Birthday Brad ! He turned 12 a few days ago. Your last year before becoming a teenager is pretty big. You are in grade six and looked up to by the "little" kids, but next year you go to High School and become a "little" kid yourself again. Donna and I worked together to buy Brad an electric guitar as his main present. He has been playing an acoustic this year so he isn't a complete beginner, but it is still very different. The strings are all metal for a start, so the ends of his fingers are almost bleeding! He found the overdrive button on the amp on Saturday as the neighbors will attest to. Speaking of neighbors, Brad had a sleep over party in our tent in my backyard last night. Jake, Mitch, Ross and Brad did the whole PS3, Guitar, PC, soccer, junk food, pizza (home made!), movie thing before retiring to the tent for "sleep". Before we get to the "sleep" bit, a funny thing happened in the afternoon. There was a party going on a few ...
More About: Happy , Happy Birthday

The smoke escaped
2007-10-20 07:23:00
Tasweb flipped out today. The ISP that hosts the Tasweb server in New Zealand had a power failure. I re pointed everything to my development server, but I hadn't done a backup since August so it was a bit old and since it sits in my garage on the end of my home ADSL connection it was a bit slow as well. The Kiwi's have plugged the power back in now so everything is back to normal.
More About: Smoke , Esca

waving coffe beans
2007-10-13 13:20:00
If you think this picture is a movie or an animation, then just concentrate on one bean and you will see that it's not moving at all    
More About: Beans , Waving

Random
2007-10-13 04:46:00
Someone left a comment on a story here saying that this site is "random". I'd never thought about it before, but she was right. It is kinda random I guess. There is no real theme, but then it's just a personal blog, it's not intended to solve the worlds problems or sell heaps of widgets. Speaking of problems, I had a few car related ones this week. The most embarrassing was when I parked my car in the valet parking section of the Market Place car park in town and then locked the doors. You are supposed to leave it unlocked with the keys in it so that they can shuffle the cars around as people start to leave. I've been getting over the flu so I'll blame that on the sudden attack of brain fade. Ali's son was a bit grumpy with me because they couldn't get into it. I asked if the other cars around were able to get out and he said "Yeah, we lifted yours with a forklift". I hoped that he was joking and rushed to level 8 to find my car out ...
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Dads new bike
2007-10-04 09:47:00
A funny thing happened to me the other day. I received an email to my gmail account that had been sent to the wrong person. There is nothing really funny about the email, however it opened up way too many opportunities for me to just leave it, so I sent them a reply. Read the original email below, and then my reply below that. The photo was attached to the orginal email I received. It's a few days on now and I'm still waiting for a reply. I do hope they saw the funny side of my reply!   Hi all I went out with Dad today to get his new bike - our Father's Day gift - since the online shop Michael recommended has a physical shopfront at Stanmore, and we got a terrific blue bike with semi-road-semi-mountain tyres (so not too easy to puncture but still good to ride on the road), as well as a puffy seat for his assss and a helmet and lock. He is now fully kitted out and ready for cycling action. I've attached a pic of him test-driving up and down the footpath...
More About: Bike

September 2007 share update
2007-09-29 09:04:00
Gosh, how things can change. There I was thinking it had all gone to poo, and now I have busted past the cash position and hit a new high! The guy I use for advice recommended selling one of my companies at a loss during the crash a few weeks ago, but I missed the sell order and decided to ignore it and hang on. That stock (Babcock and Brown BNB) is now the second best performing company that I'm currently holding. The best is a company (Resource Pacific RSP) I only bought 14 days ago. Earlier this week a take over was announced and their share value went through the roof. It has actually gone up 42% in only 14 days. That works out to 1095% annually which is a bit better than the banks 6.8%! I've sold half to grab the profit and will hold the other half to see if it goes any higher.    
More About: Update , Share , September , September 2007

Myer building destroyed by fire
2007-09-22 14:11:00
Amazing. Between Harris Scarfe and Myer they probably take up half of the main city block in Hobart and now both have suffered from major fires. Harris Scarfe was lucky that theirs was contained within the electrical switchboard, although they still had to shut for a week whilst the damage was repaired. Now Myer has caught fire and been completely destroyed. Yep, completely destroyed. The roof has collapsed and the floors have collapsed in on them selves. Unlucky me happened to be on call this weekend and I had no idea it was happening. I was pulling my hair out trying to work out why most of the major Government sites in the CBD were going off the air. Turns out Aurora were turning the power off to parts of the city as necessary to support the fire fighters. Most of the major Government sites have UPS (battery backup) power so it was weird as sites would die, then come back, whilst others would be fine only to die again later as the batteries ran out. It all means lots of recall mo...
More About: Building , Fire

Me Wah Restaurant Sandy Bay Review
2007-09-21 01:37:00
Last night I had a meal at the new Me Wah Restaurant in Magnet Court Sandy Bay. I have been eating food from the Launceston Me Wah Cafe ever since I was a little kid. I remember going in with my Dad and getting a pineapple hamburger. He still has some receipts from those old days which I will have to scan and post here because they make for very interesting reading (ie the prices have gone up a bit in the past 30 years!). Even back then they knew him well enough to send the food to our home in a taxi. I was a little bit worried prior to going in because the Launceston restaurant is probably one of the best places I have ever been to and it is definitely the best Asian restaurant in the whole entire world (at the least that small portion of it that I know!). I thought that I might be let down. The entrance impressed me for a start and we almost didn't go in thinking we were under dressed and under financed! Once you open the grand glass doors you find a floor to ceiling glass wal...
More About: Review

Weekends are popular
2007-09-18 23:22:00
A while ago I added those little rectangular icon thingies (they are actually called chicklets!) down on the left hand side of the page. I did it because it's meant to be a great way of publicising your blog, but it has an interesting side effect. I have always been able to look at all sorts of stats and graphs and stuff to see how many people come to Tasweb, where they come from, how long they stay, which pages they view etc etc, but now you can all see some of those stats yourself. If you click on this link it will take you to Topblogsites and you will be able to view a graph of the unique visitors to Tasweb. I was looking at this today and noticed that it goes in waves that peak at about 200 visitors a day with lows of about 125 unique visitors a day. I wondered why this happened and then I noticed that the peaks were always on weekends. Looks as though all that talk about workers spending all day on the Internet may not be true!
More About: Popular , Pula

Caloundra view
2007-09-18 06:16:00
Here is the photo that Emma MMS'd me from Calo undra.    
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September 2007 holidays
2007-09-17 04:57:00
Well that's another school holidays over for me. For Emma and Brad it just keeps on getting better as they are in Queensland with their mother this week. Emma sent me a photo of the view from their penthouse apartment at Caloundra and it looks awesome. Whilst they were with me we went fishing twice. The first time we went down to Southport for lunch on the beach. Southport has to be one of the prettiest places in Tassie and the weather was beautiful. Mel was at a loose end so we took her along for the ride. She enjoyed my BBQ vegetable cob loaf thingy that I built, but bagged me out for not bringing any wine. E & B had a go at fishing from the beach with no luck so we moved onto the long jetty at the Dover pub only to find it locked up. As a kid I remember tying up there in our old boat and going ashore to get ice and beer, but that obviously isn't the done thing these days. We drove around to the fishermans wharf but we still didn't catch anything. There was a bogun...
More About: Holidays , September , September 2007

What not to do with a $2M boat
2007-09-08 14:10:00
Club Marine are boat insurers and they usually run an ad in the Saturday newspaper. When they do they have this weird little black and white photo that I just couldn't make out. It kinda looked like a boat standing on it's bow, but I knew that just couldn't be right. That was until I stumbled upon this photo. It is actually a brand new $2000000 motor yacht being loaded onto a cargo ship for delivery to it's new owner. Something went terribly wrong and it fell into the sea. If (like me) you still have your doubts about this photo, then look closely are the rear right hand side of the boat and check out the poor guy hanging on for dear life as he rides it into the water!    
More About: Boat , To Do

Nerdfest
2007-09-07 15:06:00
OK, I'm going to out myself in public. I went to a LAN party last weekend.  I guess it is a pretty nerdy thing to do, but my mate Randal who hosts these things is a good guy and they really are a lot of fun. There were only seven of us there, but you wouldn't want any more as it would be a bit hard fitting any more into Randals house. We all hook our computers up together and then play car racing games. It's a funny thing, but I just can't get into games like that at home, but when a bunch of friends are all competing against each other on the same track at the same time it is great fun. I actually won a race for the first time ever so I had a pretty good day!

Holidays Holidays Holidays
2007-09-07 14:42:00
Yay!!! I'm on holidays now and I have the two most important people in the world with me for one whole week! Emma and Brad are going to Queensland with Donna next week so we don't have a trip planned, but I'm sure we will find some cool stuff to do. Emma is going shopping tomorrow with Tegan and my money so she is already happy. About twelve months ago I came home late one night to find the power off to my house but the neighbors had power and the street lights were on.  I checked the fuses (they were OK) before I noticed that someone had turned off the switches in the fuse box. I can only assume some evil person wanted to see if I was away by coming back the next day to see if the switches were still off. Last night the same thing happened (or so I thought). I came home late to no power, but this time the switches were still on. To cut a long story short, I had to wait for an Aurora guy to arrive and replace the main fuse bolted up under the eaves as it was so ol...
More About: Holidays

August 2007 share update
2007-08-31 11:46:00
What a crazy month it's been in the world of shares. The bottom dropped out of everything I was holding. I sold some taking small losses and held some others that had dropped so much that it wasn;t worth selling them. Things have recovered somewhat over the past two weeks, however I'm still well below where I would have been if I had just left the money in the bank. Still, it's a long term thing, so I'm not too fussed.  Emma's netball team (the Aviators) finished up second on the ladder and were odds on to play Taroona in the grand final, but unfortunately Tegan tried to slice her finger off with a scalpel in the science room and the school theater production clashed with the semis meaning they were missing a few players  (including Emma) and they dipped out ending up in third place. Brad's table tennis team are pushing into second place on their ladder with a few games to go. They were moved up a division after winning the trophy for first plac...
More About: Update , Share , August , August 2007

Bloody banks
2007-08-22 06:20:00
I thought I probably should bank my first Google cheque before the silverfish turn it into dust, so I took a walk to the Credit Union today. I queued up for ages waiting for a customer "service" person to become available (it was lunchtime and there were only two people serving). When it was finally my turn the pretty young girl (person number one) took all my details and entered it all into her computer, but when she hit the last button it went "bing" with an error. Turns out that cheques in US dollars need to be done at the enquiries desk. How stupid of me, why didn't I realise that myself! I wandered over and waited in the queue at the enquiries desk (only one person serving here). The guy (he wasn't at all pretty - person number two) saw me waiting and pressed a bell that made a sound a lot like the ding of the pretty girls computer and that made me a bit anxious. Another lady  (person number three) came out and told me that we had to go behind a...
More About: Banks , Bloody

Another game update comming soon
2007-08-19 08:00:00
I'm working on another update to the high score games. I have heaps of new games to upload and some cool new features and bug fixes as well. I've got them installed on my development site and all looks good so far. Expect an update in the next few weeks, and remember that you need to create a Tasweb account and login before your scores will be saved.
More About: Update , Game , Ming

Shares suck
2007-08-16 11:35:00
When you look at the ad for the Big Mac you know that it's nothing like the photo, but when I decided to start trading shares I went into it thinking that no matter what happened I would make money in the long run. That may still be true, but geez, no one told me it could be this bad. The share market has gone mental and every day seems to break the previous record for the biggest loss in a single day. All of the stock I'm holding has dropped well below the price I paid for it and at the moment I'm loosing almost $1000 a day! I've sold most of my shares, but the ones remaining are trading so low that I'm just going to hold onto them in the hope that sanity prevails soon and they head back towards the black. I guess the only ray of hope is that this opens up some buying opportunities as the prices at the moment are ridiculously low. Good companies announcing record profits with huge potential have lost value like crazy all because of some stupid lending practices ...
More About: Suck , Shares , Ares

Spider Pig Animation
2007-08-05 13:08:00
My beautiful daughter Emma found this funny animated gif thingie of Homers very cool little Spider Pig. If you have no idea what it's about then you need to go see the Simpson's movie!
More About: Animation , Spider Pig , Imation

July 2007 share update
2007-07-31 13:04:00
Another month has gone by so I'll post another share trading update. I don't know if anyone else is interested in this stuff, but I want to document it anyway because I'm sure I'll look back on this one day and laugh. I just hope I'm financially comfortable when I do the laughing! This hasn't been a very good month, but I'm still well ahead on where I'd be if I'd just left the money in the bank. I bought shares in Mine Makers (MAK) and Anglo Australian (AAR). Both are mining companies, but Minemakers is interesting because they have discovered Uranium in Tasmania! I sold my Gunns (GNS) shares for a loss this month. I had to put my own personal thoughts aside when I bought Gunns shares and now I wish I had let my heart speak a bit louder than my calculator. Other than the Gunns loss things were going OK until the American market took a big dive last Friday. The Aussie market followed suit on Monday and has struggled to recover all week. I lost over...
More About: Update , Share , July 2007 , July

Suits Talk and Food
2007-07-28 12:22:00
I received an invitation to attend a special announcement by David Bartlett the Minister for Education about the new Kingston High School that was held yesterday at the Kingborough Sports Centre. I wasn't too sure what to expect, but I assumed he would just re confirm his Governments commitment to the project and announce the actual location within the Sports Centre grounds. When I arrived I was confronted by more "important" people in suits than I have ever seen before. All of the television networks had cameras there and there were heaps of newspaper photographers as well. There were even radio people there with microphones and recorders. There were names like Michael Hodgman, David Bartlett (of course), Kevin Harkins and Nick McKim as well as the Mayor and a heap of councilors. The Minister, the Mayor and the Principal all went for a walk across the grass for the benefit of the cameras and then we moved inside the soccer club rooms out of the cold. There were a heap...
More About: Food , Talk , Suits , Suit

Most popular Google search keywords
2007-07-28 10:19:00
I don't know about you, but there is a little part of me that is kinda curious about what other people might be searching for on Google . I have no idea how I ended up there, but today I stumbled upon a way to find out. What's more, I was very surprised with some of the results. Which Tasmanian town do you think would be the most searched for of all time at Google? Yep, it's Kingston! Devonport is second and Hobart is a distant 5th. If you don't believe me then see it for yourself by clicking here. Other search engines give you even more information. AOL for instance let you know that the hottest search keywords at the moment are OK! Magazine', Skip Prosser and Oscar the Cat. Google have another site with a really freaky name that says these are the most popular Australian search keywords at the moment; i killed the prom queen, krispy krem, My Chemical Romance, sophia bush and cirque du soleil.
More About: Search , Google Search , Popular , Keywords

AMD Dual Core optimizer patch
2007-07-26 07:29:00
When I built my own funky new computer the video card came with a free game. It was Peter Jackson's King Kong and it sucked. The first thing you had to do in the game was climb some rocky stairs and enter a cave. Try as I might I just couldn't do it because the graphics were stuffed and the character would jump, stutter, go black and generally misbehave. Once or twice I did manage to enter the cave, but then you had to protect yourself against a heap of crabs, but because of the stuffed graphics you couldn't see the crabs and I kept dieing. When I built Donna's new computer Brad told me that Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) would go weird sometimes with his character changing to a different colour. He also had trouble with Knights Of The Old Republic (KOTOR) and Mount and Blade. When you do a Google search for these issues you find heaps of other people with the same problem, but it's really hard to find a solution or fix. Here it is (warning, techy geek talk com...
More About: Dual Core , Core , Patch , Opti , Optimizer

Virtual makeover game
2007-07-21 11:41:00
Well the masses have spoken and it seems whilst many of you love the two virtual hairdresser games, there were just as many who wanted something else. I have been sent the makeover game below via email. It's a large download so it may take a few minutes to load. If you are reading this on the home page then you will have to click the "Read more" link below. Give it a go and let me know what you think via the comments form. {mosgoogle}
More About: Game , Virtual , Makeover , Virt

Nature Nic
2007-07-20 13:22:00
There was a good news story on Southern Cross TV tonight about a student at St Aloysius Primary School in Kingston Beach. His real name is Nic Bonnitcha but apparently they call him Natur e Nic. He has raised a heap of money for research into the facial tumour disease that is killing off the Tasmanian Devils. It's the noisy little furry devils that I'm talking about, not the football playing ones, I don't think even Nic can save them this year! Schools all over the state of Tasmania have been holding events to raise money as a result of Nic's work. I have a copy of the news story for you to view here (I hope this doesn't create a copyright issue). If you look closely you will see our mate Tamsyn and it's also another chance to see the lovely Jo with her new hair extensions!

The power of the sea
2007-07-14 06:21:00
People who have never sailed at sea before often have a very distorted view of what it is really like. Sure it can be just like in the postcards or on the movies, but it can also be very very scary. Whilst I've done a bit of off shore sailing on extended trips, I have never seen anything like the photo below, and I hope I never do. It was sent to me amongst some others via email and the subject claimed that it was the Pasha Bulker just before it ran aground at Nobby's Beach in Newcastle. That would make a great story, however it's actually a bulk carrier originally called the Selkirk Settler. The photo was taken by the second mate during a wild storm in the North Atlantic in February 1987. The ship was on it's way from Florida to Belgium with a load of phosphates. It didn't sink!    
More About: Power