Bend in the Weather

How time flies.

Tomorrow (2^nd May) Pauline and I will have been married for 10 years!
It only seems like yesterday that we were two scared kids wondering what the hell we were getting ourselves into.

We can honestly say that it's been a great 10 years. Whilst like every couple we have our ups and downs, we generally have more ups then downs. We've both grown together and stronger as individuals.

This year, is a big year for us. We are building our first house, and potentially may start a family after that. So life moves on, always throwing more challenges and adventures.

To celebrate the milestone, we're heading away for the weekend.
I'm taking a few days off work to extend the stay. We're not heading too far, but enough so that we're out of mobile phone range and the hum of computer power supply fans for a few days.

We've decided to head up to Healesville. For those unaware, it's located North-West of Melbourne in the Yarra Ranges.


View Larger Map

There is tonnes to do there, and we indeed to make good use of our time! We're hoping to get to Healesville Sanctuary (Pauline is an animal loving nut - this is a must stop for us!), The Hedgend Maze, The Yarra Valley Railway (time permitting), as well as visiting a bunch of wineries in the region (Map here) (I wish to stock up the ever diminishing supply of good Australian Red/White wine I have.)

It will be good to get away for a quiet retreat and leave computers, mobiles, television and most of the usual suspects that distract us.

As I've already blogged, I got Pauline an eternity ring to mark the occasion. Pauline returned the favour by surprising me today with my own present!

She came home with a lovely watch. My existing watch had been banged up quite a bit and was in need of a new battery (though it did tell the time correctly twice every day!).

She couldn't wait to give it to me (she was planning on surprising me on the day and had to show me straight away!

It is indeed lovely, it's quite easy to read, balanced beautifully and quite an attractive piece of jewelry. I'm extremely happy with it. (I would of personally picked something like this - she has got my taste down pat!).

It's fantastic, we now both have something lasting to remember the milestone.

So we've packed our bags, getting the dog looked after and heading out early tomorrow. (Friday).
The camera has been thrown in so we will hopefully take some photos of the picturesque country that is the Yarra Valley.
Pauline's selected a lovely apartment for us to stay in, and it's been furnished in a lovely traditional Japanese style. I'm looking forward to staying there, as it looks divine.

I won't be near a computer or Internet access for half the week, so I suspect the Email will still keep rolling in.
For those of you wanting a response, please SMS me (I'm not sure when we'll have coverage), or wait for our return.

Whilst the weather forecast isn't ideal, it is strangely very similar to the weather we had on our wedding day! In any event we have a number of indoor and outdoor activities planned so I'm sure we'll have a blast.

Well I turn the big 3-5 today.   I'm starting to feel old... well not young anymore!

I've already been spoilt...  Pauline has given me my pressie and I just love it.

I have so many geeky 'toys' that I really wanted something non-geeky for my b'day this year.   Another geeky toy just means I'll be spending more time on the computer... and I do enough of that already!

We saw some artists painting several months ago and in passing I mentioned to Pauline 'I'd love to do that as a hobby!'

You know the drill, away from the computer, out in the country-side taking in some sun and fresh air.

Well it looks like it will become a reality now! Pauline bought me a French Easel Art Set.

We have all grown up thinking an Atom bomb is a bad thing!

I've since learnt that you can indeed get a 'good' Atom.  My bomb helps take the hassle out of the gardening.

I purchased an Atom Edger (well I got it for my birthday!) The thing is incredible! We have very tough buffalo grass that has just taken over in some parts of the yard.

However this little marvel is an Aussie invention that takes the back-ache and pain out of doing your edges.

Similar machines are almost double the price, and with their Australian and World-wide patents on the 'wheel-barrow' design they are exporting it around the globe.

In recent time, Atom Industries have been advertising on Australian TV.  The model listed is their 2-stroke, 31cc petrol engine version.  It's a pleasure to start and extremely easy to operate. 
I've tried using a whipper-snipper previously but found the buffalo grass was so woody in parts that I just couldn't cut through it.  I spent more time feeding the reel than actually cutting!

Not now!  This device makes life a breeze when it comes to keeping the edges looking great, whilst keeping the grass at bay.

Here is a before and after view of the Atom in action.

I attempted to call the Highpoint DodoWorld store yesterday. I was supposed to receive a call the previous week to let me know the status of our return. This never eventuated...

You can't actually call the store... instead you ring head office who then have to put you through. Strange but true. When I asked if I could have the direct number I was politely informed that they can't give me the number and that it can only be given by someone at the store...

I was put through to the store, and spoke to another 'store manager'. (we've spoken to some 3-4 'store managers' now. They are more useless than the staff!) He had no idea, and I was lucky to find the original person we spoke to.
He ummed, erred and generally couldn't recall it. He finally remembered it was a product return after I went through the ordeal with him and he promptly put me on the 'returns guy'.

Simon (our returns guy), turned out to be the only person who actually knows how the process works...
After giving him the details, he quickly brought up the record and sighed.
"Yeah come in tomorrow, I'll swap it over for you", was the response. He also informed me to ask for him by name as no-one else there knows what is going on with returns.

I went in this afternoon... handed over the RA form and 5 minutes later had the replacement card in my hand.

Seems you can get it swapped over, though the general 'DODO' staff don't know it.

Whilst I'll never shop there again due to the poor service we received, it was refreshing to speak to someone who was competent and could actually assist a customer.

Kudos to Simon... you've returned my sanity.

To the other Dodo-World staff... thanks for nothing! This was a 90 minute round-trip I could have done without if you actually were competent!

I'm happy in the end... I now have a working camera in time for the upcoming birthdays!

Pauline's father's 70^th birthday is on Saturday, so at least I'll be able to take a bunch of photos there!

Dodo Internet is a fast growing ISP in Australia.

They have grown quickly do to a couple of reasons:

1. Extremely cheap Dialup Internet
2. Advertise heavily on television, so much so that their name and silly jingle is now a household name.
3. Next to none customer support.

In the ISP field they do quite well.. as the majority only want a relatively simple Internet account.

Recently the company expanded their business into Consumer electronics shores (similar to Harvey Norman, Tandy and Dick Smith). Called DodoWorld one can buy various computer, mobile phones or electronic gadgets from there.

We recently purchased a 256MB Secure Digital Card. The card comes with a 5 year warranty. Generally Sandisk are faultless, unfortunately we weren't so lucky.

We purchased the card for our camera and noticed whilst we were away that it was faulty. As the card went > 200MB in use... it took a long time to save.. It resulted in 'half-photos', and not being able to copy the files off the card.

We purchased it at at DodoWorld at Highpoint so we had to wait until we were heading back out that way. We thought this would be a simple exercise... swap over the card and away we go. How wrong we were!

Under 'Dodo policy' - we can only return a product it it is faulty under 10 business days. That's stated by their website, however in the store in person they will tell you 7 days.

We have basically been forced to hand over our sales receipt to them, fill out a form and told to 'wait'. The wait is due to the fact it has to go back to the manufacturer. That's fair, though it took us 30 mins to have the form filled out.
I claimed I'm disappointed to have a product that I can't use, and told it will 'take about 2 weeks'... Particularly as I have a bunch of birthdays coming up in February where I want to use my camera.

I have a photocopy of the return form, and what gets me is that they insist you sign a form stating that they aren't responsible if they lose it during the process.

The whole process wasn't straightforward, was painful and could be seen that it was not something staff wanted to do.

I find it frustrating that sales staff are quick to want a sale, yet think you are a leper if you ever need to return a product.

What is more frustrating is that the sales staff member left a note for the store manager to call me regarding the return . HE was supposed to call on Monday. It's now Wednesday and I'm still yet to get a call. This strengthens the belief that they can't be bothered dealing with me as a customer post-sale.

Ohh... and for the record. A Dodo was a flightless bird that lived on the island of Mauritius. They became extinct in the 1700's. The main reason for their extinction is due to the fact they were not afraid of the humans that hunted them!
Dodo took its name from the Portuguese word for "fool".

So basically they have called their stores 'Fool's World'. I certainly feel like one since shopping there, and after this experience it is likely I will never shop their again.

I recommend all readers to consider twice prior to shopping there... particularly if you would like some after-sales support.

It will be interesting what becomes of this all. I'll keep you informed.

What a day!
I headed down to Geelong first up to pickup our new coffee machine. Pauline stayed home as we were expecting the delivery of John's (her brother) replacement machine to turn up, and she was going to build it.

So off I headed... on a very nice, extremely hot and windy day!

I Emailed the buyer late last night to say I was coming tomorrow (hence Friday) but as he didn't read it til Friday morning he understood it as Saturday!


I just rang Pauline to tell her it was a no-go after knocking on the door 3-4 times (in case they were out the back) when they pulled up in the car! I managed to pickup the item as a result.

I dropped by my folks on the way home just to say howdy. Didn't stay too long as I needed to get cracking on John's new machine.

By the time I arrived home, Pauline was putting the finishing touches to the machine.

It was over to me to install the OS, drivers and patches.

I tried our original version of XP with John's CD-Key... no go.. couldn't find the SATA hard-disk. No drama... put them on a USBKey and read them. Windows picks up the drivers lists them, but can't install them (for some brain-dead reason they need to be on Drive A:).
The problem was... we didn't have a floppy drive in the machine.

After many hours of trying various options.. even Slip-streaming Windows XP Service Pack 2 into the CD... we still couldn't get it going. (More of SlipStreaming tomorrow!)

Pauline scrounged around and found a spare floppy drive.. so we stuck that in. That's when the fun began... sometimes we would see the drivers to select, then they would refuse to install, sometimes we couldn't see them at all. After several hours of mucking around... we ditched that floppy drive and stuck in another.
Worked first go! Seems the first floppy drive was faulty.

It took about some 4 hours.. but I was finally able to start the Windows install.

Lesson: Always have a floppy in a machine... no matter how little you use it. It's bound to be required when you don't have one.

The good thing is that I had Service Pack 2 on the install CD.. which saved me installing that seperately.
I added Office 2003 to the build and then applied the Office 2003 Service Pack 2 Updates to the Office build (I had them on CD).

Now... Windows Update... It seems our newly build machine needed some 39 critical updates for Windows and 4 for Office!

I got a bit smart then... instead of just downloading them... I took note of their KnowledgeBase numbers and downloaded the lot from the Microsoft Download site.

This will mean in future when I build another machine, I can just use these instead of wading through Windows Update and chewing up my valuable download quota!

Some 250MB worth of updates later and it's fully patched!

I've now burnt a DVD-RW with all the updates one needs to bring a SP2 machine upto a fully patched state as of 20/01/2006.

Now... to learn to automate applying them directly after SP2 and it should really cut down the time to deploy a machine. (I know with some of the automation tasks for admins this is possible... just never needed to do it!)

John's machine is now ready and raring to go! I think we'll probably drop it over on Sunday for him if he's free.

As for the coffee machine, it comes with a coffee grinder so we can bu real beans and grind them. Pauline's still playing, but we've had a few coffees already and it's quite good! It's much quieter than our last machine, though it seems to take a little longer to heat the water. All in all it was really cheap and ensures Pauline's able to make her froth again (our frother was broken on the old one... and they wanted $60 to look at it).
It's worked out not much dearer buying a new one.. that includes a coffee grinder. Talk about a throw-away society!

Yesterday Pauline and I went in search of a lawn edger.

We have buffalo grass that loves to creep over anything.

We thought we could get a petrol lawn edger for ~$200-$250. Seems we were quite wrong!

The Atom apparantly is 'the best'. Everywhere we went people recommended the Atom. It's an Aussie invention and has patents world-wide. Whilst it's the best it's also one of the cheapest and most reliable.

If you've never seen one before they do look weird! It's like a wheel-barrow with 1 wheel and two handles that you use to push it along. The others brands (and more expensive) work like a lawn mower with a blade sticking at right-angles to the ground. These 3-wheelers however are not the easiest when cutting around curves (which our footpath has a lot of!)

We rang around and visited a bunch of mower shops yesterday in the vain hope that we could get a cheaper edger. There were attachments that fit onto whipper-snippers however everyone cautioned against them for two reasons.
1. Not easy to use.. and gives you back-ache after some time using them.
2. Are notorious for breaking down.

We found that the 2-stroke Atom retails for $429.00 though we located a store in Essendon that will do it for $399.00 with next day delivery.

It's a lot of money.. and whilst it will make life much easier we have to weight up if we really need it.

Currently I use a whipper snipper, but find it's a slow and painful job. I normally find it takes 45-60 minutes to do, and the job is not a clean, straight cut. I also use a lot of whipper-snipper reel and the buffalo grass isn't the easiest to get through. There is some areas I just can't get through at present.

If we do get it ... it will be my birthday pressie. Though I'm wary of spending so much money on it.

Pauline was up early today and headed out to go shopping with her Mum. That left me and the wide spaces of the house alone!

I started working on the project I mentioned yesterday, and did pretty well on that front.

At 2:15pm I picked up a bit of a bargain on Ebay. Our coffee machine has busted as the frother hasn't been working.. so I picked up this Coffee machine instead!

That will make Pauline happy... as she misses her frothy coffee!

I then got a call from Pauline, to say she rang into a person yelling 'Excuse me' rather rudely.
She was about to tell them off, when she turned around and saw it was her sister!
She had run into Christine, Vanessa and Mitchell. They were there with a friends doing some shopping. So they sat down, caught up and had a coffee. (This coffee is becoming a theme).

Pauline arrived home around 4:30pm from shopping (I really don't know what secret business women do when shopping!)
Pauline had just finished unpacking when the phone rang. It was Merrilyn. (Her soon to be sister-in-law). The two chatted for a while and we invited ourselves over there for dinner.

So we bundled into the car, grabbed a nice bottle of red (Banrock Station Chrimson Red Cabernet - one we bought back from Stanley Winery from our recent Mildura holiday) and headed over there.
I 'supervised' John rewiring a car for a few hours, whilst the girls caught up and drank coffee (more of that coffee thing).

We ordered in take-away and had a good yak. The girls had chicken parma whilst John and I had a pizza.

The chilled red went down lovely and we were all looking at an empty bottle soon... John cracked open a bottle (only a lovely 2003 'Red label' Wolf Blass Cab Sav) and we took a dash from that... by then Pauline had moved on to Jim Bean and Dry.

Finally we were thrown out around 11:30pm and headed home.

All in all... quite a good day!

Jason, one of the guys I worked with at Telstra wished to sell his notebook.

Pauline and I have been in the hunt for a good notebook for some time... after our old one had the screen die on us. That notebook was going to cost us more to repair than buy a new one!

So we jumped at the opportunity! It's only approx. 6-9 months old and at $700 with all the goodies included it was a bargain! So it's gone to a good home!

The computer is a Compaq Presario V2157AP Basically it's a widescreen, 1.4Ghz Mobile Celeron, with a 40GB HDD and 256MB of memory. Comes with a 802.11b/g wireless connection, 10/100 ethernet port, a built in modem, firewire, USB2, Dual-Layer DVD ReWriter and a 6-in-1 digital card reader! More than what we need.

Basically we'll use it for photo storage and able to watch xvid movies whilst on holidays!

Here are some pictures of it in action. Click to see larger versions.

My camera arrived today.

Though it seems that whilst the listing stated nothing about it coming from overseas it has indeed.

Pauline opened it up to discover that the AC battery charger is made for the Asian market and not the Australian market.


Looking at the auction item, there was no indication as such.

I've Emailed the seller but who knows if we'll hear back. In the interim we need to get an AC converter just so we can charge the damn thing.

The whole manual is in Taiwanese.. though that's not much of a concern, as I can download the English one from the website.

I really dislike when sellers don't provide information like this... Sure they import it cheaply into the country, but let us know it's not for the Australian market.

It has taken the shine off my Christmas pressie a little... and poor Pauline is now running around attempting to find an adapter...

Looks like I'll be extra, extra cautious now and have to Email EVERY seller to confirm EVERYTHING in future... though one would feel that buying an item in MELBOURNE on an AUSTRALIAN Auction site that it would be suited for the AUSTRALIAN Market!

Whilst we'll sort it out.. it's not the inconvenience we need just prior to Christmas.