Random Ramblings

I've just been made aware that the Stirling CFS is doing a fund raising appeal.

To quote their website:

::

Stirling CFS attended 318 incidents in 2010/11, this follows a long-term trend of increasing numbers of incidents. The most significant area of increase is around vehicle related incidents, with the continuing population growth in the hills area coupled with the M1 freeway between Glen Osmond and Crafers, bringing large increases in traffic volumes passing through the Stirling area.

If you are interested in the number of incidents over a longer time, the bottom of this SACFS (South Australian Country Fire Service) Promotions Unit page has a list of the last 13 years incident counts.

If kickstarter.com can get people almost double their target for a board game, or nine times their target for electrically noisy speakers, then I hope someone out there (you perhaps) is able to help the CFS hit their goal.

The CFS is volunteer group who train hard and take on a lot of responsibility to help their community. I hope they are able to reach their targets so they can keep helping us all out - as they have done for over half a century.

This is a purely informational post to make sure everyone knows I've changed the GPG key I use with my email, signing with caff and Debian packaging.

New key: 52AC 76F8 7316 B87E 98F6 A8C1 FAE9 7097 6C09 7260

Old key: 1C28 D928 F435 0FCD 367F C208 8480 7380 27FC F12E

I will try and start moving other services/projects over as I discover them.

After spending most of today updating posts on my website, I'm feeling much happier about its quality - even thinking about opening it up to robots.

Almost every single post was updated in some way, in many cases complete rewrites occurred. A couple of stub posts (which were just whinging anyway) were deleted, with another half dozen drafts tagged (they will no longer appear on the site).

If you've looked at this site in the last month or so, please have another browse - hopefully this time you'll get a better impression ;)

Edit: This was written in the first 24 hours. While I remain less then impressed, its probably not as dire as my ranting implies.

We are in Melbourne for Drupal down under 2012, and the official hotel of the event is the Jasper hotel At the moment, all I can say is just stay away - a long way away. Its expensive, the service is poor, our room - on the 6th floor - is noisier then the lobby, and the staff are rude.

(As a side note one wall of the bathroom is made of folding blinds. Weird.) Took 30 min to get 4 groups checked in when we arrived at around 7pm last night. This morning at breakfast we felt we had to go and ask for our table to be cleared for some menus after people who arrived after us were attended to and shown to a table (We were waiting for over 15 min, we didn't walk in the door and have a tantrum). Thankfully it wasn't all bad - the breakfast (when it arrived) tasted quite nice.

Edit two: Day 2, and feeling much happier. The only real what the !? moment today was the staff being unwilling to put the keynote speaker up the breakfast food order queue after ignoring him as he waited for someone to take his order.

We just had a short sharp rain, which has caused flash flooding in some parts of town. (Trying to find references after the fact, and I'll be buggered if I can come up with anything. Whats wrong with the news that all the references to a flash flooding in a capital city disappear? :/).

Here are a few photos of it.

Front gutter overflowing:

Water leaking through the roof (Our power transformer sits at the other end of that pipe!):

Gutters on the verge of overflowing (The water running down this street flooded the local supermarket):

A perfect shade of grey, all across the sky:

Thats not the bead curtain, its water falling off the back 'verandah':

Our very own stream (made from our path and our shed):