Skip to main content

A trip to Burnie

Today I discovered the Fossey river.

Perhaps I should write it “the FOSSey River”?

It’s north of here, near the Wey River and the Hellyer River and in the Waratah-Wynyard Council.

I also discovered that people do make strap-on antennas for mobile ’phones, & that you can buy one (modulo some ordering time) in Burnie.

Burnie is a kind of odd town, struggling to make big-cityness. It has parking meters & parking buildings, one-way streets, stacks of traffic lights, a sea-tainer-handling port, something which anywhere else would be called a freeway, bundles of shops (some of them tied to the parking buildings) & scads of little facilities. It’s sort of like a chunk of big city excavated & dropped into a medium-sized seaside town.

The drive there was kind of pleasant, with many bucolic cows, some fancy hedges, even the odd road-house or two. Oh, yes, & heaps of hilly curves. (-:

I also discovered that Tasmania does indeed have crows. They feed on the road-kill. Happily, they don’t appear to have discovered Tullah yet.

Tullah appears to have a second unofficial boat-ramp-like facility tucked away to the south of the water processing plant. This has a dry-stone wall or two and a quiet, pretty aspect. In fact, the place seems over-endowed with such little facilities, the problem being that nobody seems to know how they work or how to get access to them. One of the features of this place was a pair of quite good working horses (appearing vaguely Clydesdale-like in style but not as big or solid).

We also saw a wallaby sitting alongside the highway, watching us carefully, & a little runny black bird, water-hen-like, sprinted across the road in front of our car.

We really must make the time (& fuel) to go & visit Cradle Mountain sometime soon. Visiting all of one’s local tourist attractions could become a lifetime occupation.

To my stunned amazement, one of the local photographers reckons there’s very little to point a camera at. Hello? Turn left, turn right, there’ll be a lake, a tree, a mountain or an animal of some sort there! (-:

No satisfying some people, is there?

Comments

I would definitely recommend Cradle Mountain as a view point. Even getting up to the mountain, there is some awesome scenery for good photos! I stayed over in the cabins as well to add to the experience.

The only thing I would recommend against is going South via the great lakes. There is virtually nothing around them and the roads are predominantly dirt. Nothing special and you waste a good part of day getting around them.

Popular posts from this blog

An Open and Shut response to Darl McBride

Hi, Darl. I see you’re being dishonest again . It’d be really nice if you could shoot straight for a change, but I think Kerry’s Dad will be selling snowplows in Hell first. Three years ago, when I first joined The SCO Group, we focused the company on the area that was most profitable and provided the most benefit to customers, investors, resellers, developers and employees: UNIX No, you focused the company on suing people, which was most profitable to lawyers and provided some golden parachutes for your buddies. People thought we were crazy. They were right. But since SCO owns the UNIX operating system The SCO Group does not own UNIX® in any sense of the word. The Open Group owns the UNIX trademark, definition and other rights , The SCO Group does not. The SCO Group doesn’t even own the UnixWare® or OpenServer® code, the rights to those are held by Novell and TSG use them only by permission and under certain conditions — which they have violate...

5x7 text dot-matrix in five minutes...

This is a fairly primitive toy I threw together today for a specific purpose, published in case it’s any use to others... feed it a list of words as command arguments, which it will then display as a 5x7 ASCII dotmatrix with ‘#’ as a dot & ‘_’ as a blank. /* * display text using a 5x7 bitmap font in ASCII letters */ static unsigned char font [] [5] = { { 0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00 }, // 0x20 32 { 0x00,0x00,0x6f,0x00,0x00 }, // ! 0x21 33 { 0x00,0x07,0x00,0x07,0x00 }, // " 0x22 34 { 0x14,0x7f,0x14,0x7f,0x14 }, // # 0x23 35 { 0x00,0x07,0x04,0x1e,0x00 }, // $ 0x24 36 { 0x23,0x13,0x08,0x64,0x62 }, // % 0x25 37 { 0x36,0x49,0x56,0x20,0x50 }, // & 0x26 38 { 0x00,0x00,0x07,0x00,0x00 }, // ' 0x27 39 { 0x00,0x1c,0x22,0x41,0x00 }, // ( 0x28 40 { 0x00,0x41,0x22,0x1c,0x00 }, // ) 0x29 41 { 0x14,0x08,0x3e,0x08,0x14 }, // * 0x2a 42 { 0x08,0x08,0x3e,0x08,0x08 }, ...

Citizens Augmenting Government Waste

So here we have Microsoft-funded “ Citizens Against Government Waste ” (CAGW) heavily criticising Massachusetts’s switch to an internationally accepted and open document standard (not open source, open standard — but I seem to remember a large monopolist who frequently confuses the two when it suits them). I remember CAGW, they were the organisation who had dead people writing in to support Microsoft in court a few years ago — thanks to sbergman27 for the link — is this “the dead hand of CAGW” at work again? Let’s follow the money and find out. Who stands to lose the most money and control if Massachusetts switches to an unencumbered document format? Big surprise, it’s CAGW sponsor Microsoft, through their dominant MS-Office suite. Why did CAGW list Microsoft’s suite last, after two other much-less-dominant examples which are waning anyway? If you’re inclined to wallow in additional irony, consider that at leas...