to Rio Tinto and Coal and Allied, owners of Mouth Thorley Warkwarth

This is an open letter to the owners of this mine. I am a member of the Sydney Photobloggers Photography group. On Sunday 30 December, we went for a Photo Trip to the Hunter Valley. Passing by your mine we saw some terrific photography opportunities and decided to stop to take some photos.

A man in a ute with a little yellow light drove past and stopped at the top of the hill. I guess that this was to get good line of sight communications. Is this correct. Was he reporting my vehicles number plate back to some central control room for instructions on the course of action to take? Or am I just being suspicious?

After some time, he came down the hill and advised us that we were not allowed to take photos from the road-side verge because it belonged to the mine. We said we were allowed to take photos from public property. He said that the verge was private property and that the fence was set back. Can you confirm that this is the case? The last thing he said before leaving was that your company does not like people taking photos of it's operations from their property (in this case the road-side verge. Is this correct? Is you company's policy to discourage the general public from taking photos? I would suggest that this is a bad policy. Is suggests that there is something that you want to hide from the general public that is clearly visible from he road side? I have added some photos to show what we took. A full collection can be seen at this location.

I would point out that I went to school here in Australia. I am quite aware of the trespass laws. Also I can read, and we read your no trespassing signs. At no stage did we trespass and at no stage did we intend to trespass.

"Australia NSW Bulga Mine 20071230 IMG_2919" by yewenyi [?]

"Australia NSW Bulga Mine 20071230 IMG_2915" by yewenyi [?]

"Australia NSW Bulga Mine 20071230 IMG_2905" by yewenyi [?]

"Australia NSW Bulga Mine 20071230 IMG_2914" by yewenyi [?]

SPB Road Trip IV

Apart from our run in with Australia's security aparatus, we visited a few places on the way for our trip. The route was Sydney - Windsor - Colo - Putty - Payne's Crossing - Singleton - Bucketty - Old Great North Road - St Albans, Wiseman's Ferry and back to Sydney.

Colo River

Putty

Paynes Crossing
"bridge" by yewenyi [?]

Singleton

"giant insect" by yewenyi [?]

"Red Zone - Restricted" by yewenyi [?]

layout managers

Downloaded netbeans 6.0 a few days ago. Spent a while fighting the layout manager. Changed the layout from absolute to gridbag (my favourite) still fought the layout manager. Gave up in disgust. Some time later, thought, I wonder if it is a bug. So went back, downloaded all the latest patches. Lo and behold! the layout manager is now doing what I want it to do. It had some kind of weird resizing problem.

doctor,

I went to the doctor this morning. There are many places, so I picked a likely one as I did not want to travel all the way to the one who had been recommended. This turned out to be a mistake and I think I have me the worst doctor I have ever met. This is sad, as my last doctor, who is now retired and is half way across town was the best doctor I have had. Now I will need to go again next week and try and find another doctor as he was unable, even unwilling, to work out what is wrong with my left arm.

Orphans' Christmas

For the second year in a row we had an Orphan's Christmas. This time we went to Taronga Zoo. We ate lots of food, with not a single piece of turkey or ham to be seen, and then had a photo competition, of which the results have not yet been calculated.

"Christmas day picnic" by Morgan Carpenter [?]


"A Bird" by yewenyi [?]

Thursday pre-Christmas drinks: The Colombian, Oxford Street, 6.30pm

We went down to the Colombian to sit on the roof and have some drinks. In the end we also had a meal. That noggin, Chris showed up. He started harping on and being unpleasant again. One of the things he was harping on about was the dishwasher emails I had sent to myself to remind myself to buy one.

He also said that not only did he once work for the police, but now he works for Telstra. So we had a discussion about how I no longer get a staff discount as the company I work for is 50% owned by Telstra. To get a staff discount the company needs to be 51% owned by Telstra.

One of the topics was how, the police, who stole Jame's film before the APEC summit had not made any attempt to return it or make recompense.

There was a heated discussion about macs vs windows which was just silly. Again he seems to be trying to make everything I do seem bad. A man had to come to his rescue. He sat at the table beside us and pointed out how when you install leopard your computer starts crashing, as mine has. (though I have removed most of the offending programs. I still seem to have a hardware heat related problem and have to remember not to push the computer too hard for too long.) Seems to me that they know a lot, but understand next to nothing.

Anyway they still won't say why they are being obnoxious. But they are and their attempts to say sorry will continue to fail. Though this is not the actual reason why it is failing.

Flickr Stats

Fickr have introduced a new stats page. It shows some interesting results. For instance, in the last month I uploaded an image from my mobile phone of Ned Kelly in the town of Jerilderie. As they were having a festival in 2008 for the famous Jerilderie letter, I put said letter in the description of the image. Then in the last week, Flickr introduced a stats package that shows where the viewers came from. Interestingly this image was getting a lot of traffic from Yahoo. Here are the top 25 searches that people used. They are hysterical.

1 dog in a cadge
2 right to a speedy,fair trial
3 dogs that live with another animal and do not…
4 putting hand under the rain
5 i dont believe god brought me this far just…
6 turkeys bad people
7 animated right use of medicine
8 appearance of an aids patience
9 turning of the wheel of truth
10 dropping something off
11 back future town clock
12 animated money pounds
13 right to speedy, fair trial
14 dr. king getting arrested
15 cut your own pine tree
16 fencing jacket
17 colonial paper maker
18 fair, speedy, public trial
19 victorian poor people
20 dogs blowing their coats
21 6 mile gang signs
22 reach down to help a person
23 evidence of victorian coming to reading
24 i want to hang myself by the neck
25 farmers keep them eating

and the image:

"poor ned better off dead" by yewenyi [?]


oh and the next and last 24

26 british signs articles of piece
27 animated lazy person
28 blood hand signs street gang
29 religion people always shove it down your…
30 father and son cattle drive
31 anything war can do peace can do better
32 blood gang signs
33 strapping boy
34 two+people+having =+a+conversation+or+a+fight
35 the writing on liberty bell
36 cutting tree more than required
37 back business suit
38 one tree hill season five
39 animated dog laughing
40 save the earth posters
41 human body from toe to chest
42 first aid for cuts on hands
43 every little bit can make difference
44 working your finger to the bone
45 woman handcuffed
46 animated drive by shooting
47 rich victorian children at school
48 blood gang hand signs
49 images showing cruelty to bull

birthday

we went up to Terrigal for Pete's 40th birthday. It was a lovely day, with full sunshine and a strong on-shore breeze. I got mild sun-burn.

"flying a kite" by yewenyi [?]

"bangers and onions" by yewenyi [?]

Medicare Grrrrrrrrr

Well I needed to change my address. When I went to the web site I saw that you can change it online. So I sent off to be sent a password to set up an account. I set up the account, created the 60 billion questions you have to have to prove that you have a poor memory for such things and cannot prove that you are yourself. I then had to log back in and lo an behold, they have not enabled the address changing feature. Liars. Anyway now I need to go to one of the overcrowded offices to change my address. What a waste of time.

is the lunch time cruise boat

this is an old sydney ferry. At first it was cramped but acceptable... but...then the rain came and the boat leaked. They used the plastic table cloths to redirect the water. they had to close all the doors and windows but the engine compartment was open so there was an oliy smell in the air. we could not go upstairs as there was another party up there. Outside a bolt of lightening hit the shore only a few hundred meters from the boat. I do not know what it hit, the rain was too heavy, but whatever it was lit up much more brightly that the bolt of lightening.

In this midst of all of this, my burgler alarm went off forthe first time and I was called by the alarm company. But I was out in the middle of the harbour. We decided not to call the police. They would call me back if another sensor was set off.

so when we arrived at the warf to let the upstairs party off I made a quick exit, as did half of the company, and quickly went home to check all was ok. There were no problems. Seems I left a window partly open and there had been a big gust of wind.

is the lunch time cruise boat, originally uploaded by yewenyi.

Recovery

Well, finally I got the broken computer back, fixed and with a new HD to boot. It took about 2 hours for time machine to back up the boot drive. How lucky was I that I installed it 2 days befor the computer died. I have yet to update the windows part. I do not think I will install a boot camp partition this time. Rather I will use parallels to install windows. All the emails I read during November have become unread again and now there are 500 emails in my in box. That also took hours to download and resynchronize.

"restoring" by yewenyi [?]

A photo walk around Marrickville

We went for a walk from Sydenham station up to Marrickville.

"brian embraces the child within!" by Jarod_Is_Childish [?]

"storm water basin" by yewenyi [?]

Lighthouse - Proteaceae Adenathos

Well I cut out one of the plants in the planter box and replaced it with another native. And then it rained lots, over 5cm. So the plant is very happy.

"the new plant" by yewenyi [?]