Author Archives: rohan

Can’t believe it was almost two years ago that the seed for our trip was first planted… and now there’s only two weeks to go.

Not sure how the subject of fear came up – probably something to do with Matilda’s morbid insistence that she’s going to either be bitten by a snake or spider, or eaten by a shark or crocodile! – but it got me to thinking if I had any of my own fears regarding the upcoming trip.

Probably only two (although the first is not really a fear, as such).

1. Every holiday I can remember – even the family trips to Queensland as a kid, leaving at two o’clock in the morning, lying across the very back of the station wagon wedged in with the bags, cases and other assorted luggage, looking up at the stars as we drove along in the early morning darkness – had a final destination. Whilst the journey there and back was a part of the trip, it was, for me, that final destination which really marked the start of the holiday.

This holiday is different though – there is no single final destination. The journey itself is the holiday. And I think it is this mindset that I need to grasp, fully, if I’m to get the most enjoyment from the whole experience. I guess I’m worried, too, that the girls may also have similar ideas and be expecting to arrive somewhere before they can start their holiday, and that would be a shame. (LOL, maybe my real worry is having to listen to “Dad, are we there yet?” every day for 9 weeks!  )

Anyway, this mindset adjustment leads nicely in to my other fear.

2. We are planning on covering a lot of ground in  the allotted time frame, and I fear that I’ll be overly conscious of making sure we see everything along the way that I’ll get to the end of the trip and realise I’ve not really seen anything.

However, I think if I can get my head around 1, then 2 will take care of itself and I will be more attuned to taking things in along the way.

Here’s hoping, anyway.

Oops, seems that un upgrade I did this afternoon has busted the layout. You’d think that in my line of work I’d know by now that “if it ain’t broke, don’t upgrade it”…!

*sigh*

Oh well, this one’s going to have to wait until at least next weekend before I can fix it up – got a busy week of work to get through.

UPDATE:

OK, crisis averted (to a certain extent).

In typical web developer style I have dived deep into the code and hacked the part that was causing maximum grief where Internet Explorer display issues were concerned.

As such, I am happy to leave the current design in place, albeit that users of IE8 (or earlier) won’t see this site 100% “the way it should be seen”. So, if you’re reading this using IE8 or earlier, you will just have to be happy with 95%** “correctness”. Or you could get yourself a decent browser, such as Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari or even, heaven forbid, IE9.

**No nicely rounded corners, some missing alpha transparency, and a couple of CSS3 goodies.

For posterity’s sake (and because of my disdain of all web-based Microsoft things), here is…

THE ORIGINAL POST:

Just spent a futile half hour or so trying to come up with the perfect word to describe my frustration, loathing and downright contempt of that piece of software that some people laughingly refer to as a web browser; for those who haven’t guessed yet, I speak of Internet Explorer. Of course, I couldn’t find a word that fits the bill… there’s obviously no word in the English language that’s that bad…!

It appears that there are some fairly severe glitches with the way this blog displays in Internet Explorer, specifically versions up to and including IE8*. Having tried for a fair chunk of the afternoon to try and overcome the problems, I can’t afford to spend any more time going down this frustrating path and feel I have no choice but to ditch the current design and start again. As such I’ll be putting something together this weekend, it’ll be simple but hopefully Internet Explorer friendly for those who still use IE8 or earlier.

Don’t know whether to laugh, cry or scream.

Might try all three.

*It would be remiss of me not to give a smidgeon of credit to Microsoft and their ability to develop web-based applications – after all, their current release of Microsoft Explorer is actually quite satisfactory when it comes to rendering websites the way they’re supposed to be seen. But for the life of me I can’t see how it could take them 16 YEARS & 9 VERSION RELEASES to achieve this simple requirement!

Hitched the van up to the Commodore for the first time yesterday and headed out for a bit of a test run.

All good.

…well, not yet.

But I did buy myself a new rod and reel today – reduced from $100 down to $30. Not a bad bargain!

Strike Runner 30 fishing reel

A brief stop in Ballarat on the way home, so that Emma could visit the local patchwork shop, then a fairly uneventful trip home.

How’s this for a useless factoid to end proceedings – after leaving Ballarat, we passed NO traffic lights until we left the freeway at Hallam North Rd (just 1.5 km from home). That’s just under 200km of uninterrupted freeway travel. Can’t complain about that!

So ends our first adventure in the new van, hopefully the first of many including, of course, the “big trip” we are planning for next year.

Total disatance traveled: 667km