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From April 10 to 13 this year was the Easter long weekend. This is a time when many people go on a holiday, often camping or in a caravan. Wan, Brenton and I went camping the Flinders Ranges, a large set of mountain ranges in central South Australia considered the start of the Australian Outback.

On Thursday Wan and I drove from Kongorong to Adelaide (about 5 hours), picked up Brenton from his work about 3pm, organised our camping gear and supplies at his house, then drove another 2 hours north of Adelaide to Clare Valley. This is a good place to stop on the way to the Flinders (which is another 3 to 4 hours drive, not because it is one of Australia's many popular wine regions, but because our friends Rob and Meg live there and we get free camping. We set up our tent at their place, enjoyed a BBQ dinner, and got on the road again by about 11am Friday. [Rob and Meg have a nice simple setup on their 100 acres, and about a week after visiting them they had their first kid, Willow. Check out their journey).

We drove via Jamestown, Orroroo, Carrieton and Craddick to Hawker and then arrived at Wilpena Pound (the heart of the Flinders Ranges) about 3pm. There are two caravan/camping parks: Wilpena Pound and Rawnsley Station. Both are pretty good - this time we stayed at Wilpena Pound for $27 per night (unpowered site, 3 people). You can also stay in the National Park, especially in places like Brachina Gorge, which is much more peaceful bush camping.

The weather was perfect for the trip. Everyday was about 28 degrees, with the occasional cloud. At night time it was not too cold, especially with the fire. What did we do there? A lot of time was spent relaxing with a beer at the camp site. On Saturday we went on an easy 3 hour trek up to Hill's Homestead and then to a lookout with a great view of Wilpena Pound. On Sunday we drove up through Bunyeroo and Brachina gorges, and then back towards Wilpena via Stokes Lookout. There are plenty of other places to go and things to do, but this weekend we all wanted to relax a bit. So after a couple of boxes of Coopers and half a dozen bottles of red we made our way home to Adelaide on Monday (and then back to Kongorong on Tuesday).

Photos are available in the Gallery, as well as at Brenton's Facebook page.

The Red Ochre restaurant in Adelaide serves modern and native Australian food to a very high standard. I've been there several occasions, including dad's 60th birthday party and most recently to celebrate Wan's 30th birthday.

The restaurant is located on the northern side of the Torrens river, with a great view of North Terrace including the Convention Centre, Casino and high rise buildings. There is not much immediately surrounding it (golf course, park lands) so it is best to get a taxi there. A taxi will cost about $10 to $15 from most places in the city. Note that the Red Ochre restaurant is upstairs - there is a cafe/cheaper restaurant downstairs operated by the same people.

The main attraction of the Red Ochre for many is the unique food: it serves Modern Australian food made with many native Australian ingredients, especially herbs, spices, fruit and vegetables, combined with Australian meat and game: beef, lamb, kangaroo, emu, crocodile, pigeon and more. On all occasions I've been there, the food has been delicious. This time, with both of us being small eaters, we ordered some bread for starters and then went straight to the mains. I had the kangaroo fillet and tail, while Wan choose the duck with riberry sauce. As with most Australian restaurants and pubs, the servings were quite large and we were both full and satisfied at the end. We didn't order extra salad or vegetables (knowing that the mains would be big enough) but in hindsight we should have just to mix things up.

Being a Thursday night in Adelaide, the restaurant was not full but there were still quite a few people in there. We had a corner table by the window overlooking the city lights. The atmosphere is hard to beat.

You can find a couple of photos of our food, as well as other food we ate in Australia, in the Photo Gallery.

Such good food and service is of course not cheap. It set us back $160, however that included two bottles of wine: a big Cab Sav and a refreshing Moscato after dinner. For a special occasion, it was worth it.

Wan and I stayed at the Country Comfort Adelaide motel at 208 South Terrace when we arrived in Adelaide. This was one of the cheapest motels I found on the Internet within Adelaide CBD and Mum and Dad had said it was ok in the past. Before flying out home we spent another two nights here. Although there is nothing special about the rooms and service, we found it a great spot for what we wanted to do in Adelaide.

First, don't get confused with the many Country Comforts around Adelaide and suburbs. This is the Country Comfort on South Terrace. It is owned and operated by the same people running the adjacent Grand Chifley Hotel and the Chifley on South Terrace. That is, there are three different places all next to each other: two hotels and a motel. You actually check-in at the reception of Grand Chifley and can make use of their facilities. We had breakfast included for one night and that was at the Grand Chifley.

On our first stay the room was $100 per night, and the second stay just $80 per night (booked on wotif.com). This is without breakfast. I booked a room with a double and single bed, since there was a possibility a Brenton would stay one night with us (it turned out he stayed 3 nights. There is supposed to be a $30 charge for the extra person, but we didn't say anything about him staying and no-one asked so that was free).

The room was normal size with a table and two chairs, space for suitcases, wardrobe, TV, mini-fridge, iron and standard bathroom (including shower in the bath). It was an old room, but everything worked and was clean. The rooms were on the eastern wing, numbers 1, 2 and 17. Mum and Dad had a room with queen bed one night (on the western wing, number 37?) - this room looked a bit newer with a renovated bathroom (shower, but no bath).

Although not in the heart of the city (around North Terrace), the location was convenient for us. It is only a 5 minute walk to King William Street where you can catch a free tram through the city. Or you can walk for another 10 minutes to get to Victoria Square and Central Market (and another 10 minutes to the shopping and entertainment area - it is only 2km from one side of the city to the other!). There are a few pubs within walking distance (Brecknock, Kings Head, Gilbert Hotel), a small grocer/convenience store on Gilbert Street and a few nearby cafes for breakfast or lunch. Of course it is a motel so there are plenty of car parks. A bonus of the location is that Brenton works on the corner of South Terrace and King William - a 5 minute walk away. We caught up with him on several occasions after work, usually starting with a pint of Guinness or Pale Ale at the Brecknock.

If you are looking for somewhere cheap to stay so you can explore Adelaide, and don't require special service or fancy rooms, then I recommend staying here.

Wow, that was close! I decided to delete an old fat32 partition that I used to share data between linux (first Fedora, now Ubuntu) and Windows on my dual boot PC. Since Ubuntu supports NTFS partitions, I hardly ever used it. I used Partition Manager Professional in Windows to delete the partition. No worries.

However, I also decided to resize my /boot partition under Ubuntu. When I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04, the process was stalled several times because I didn't have enough space on the /boot partition (initially 100Mb). This was very annoying because I had to move some files from /boot and restart the entire Ubuntu upgrade (several minutes wasted each time). So I used Partition Manager to also increase the /boot partition to 200MB. No worries.

A nice site to browse for lots and lots of material is the National Archives of Australia. You can search or browse through the many collections, including government, military and other historical Australia records. For example, the records for Hugh Mckay Gordon, my grandfather, enlisting in the army for World War I in 1915 are available.

Chonburi (ชลบุรี) is a province in the east of Thailand.

I spent a weekend there in October 2006, staying at the Jomtien Thani Hotel (I think?), in Jomtien.

After buying a new Video Card for my PC, I still had some serious problems. When starting my computer, fans, the CPU, hard drive and other devices seemed to start, but nothing was displayed on the monitor. This was similar to what triggered me to buy a new video card - maybe I wasted 3000 Baht!

Over the past couple of weeks I had a very crude fix to this problem: when booting, it seemed if I continually pressed Escape (maybe also other keys), the computer would start, that is POST would complete and the operating system start. However this didn't always work. It seemed every day I had to try 5 or 6 times to get the computer to boot. Not good!

Today I tried a bit harder to fix the problem. After checking all the cables and connections, and checking a bit on the web, I think I narrowed it down to two possible problems:

1. The internal battery and/or CMOS RAM were faulty (I had noticed about 1 week ago that the system time was incorrect one day). I followed the ASUS motherboard instructions of resetting the RAM. Unplug the power from the PC; remove the battery; change the jumper from default to RESET for 10 seconds; change back to default; put the battery back in; and start the computer.
2. One of the RAM DIMM slots was faulty. At the same time as doing the internal battery check, I also removed a new stick of 1GB RAM that I bought at the same time as the video card.

Restarted after these two changes and the computer booted immediately, without any input from the keyboard. This looked good. I put the second 1GB stick of RAM back in and the old problems occurred (this points to the RAM/DIMM being the problem, not the battery/CMOS - but my gut feeling says it was wise to reset the CMOS as well). So then after trying the second (new) 1GB of RAM by itself in the first slot (this worked), and concluded the second slot may be faulty. Now I have both 1GB sticks in the two second (black) DIMM slots, rather than the two first (yellow) DIMM slots. Everything seems to be working ok, but lets wait and see after a few days...

Lets hope this is the last of my computer problems for a few months.

Some example costs of living in Bangkok, Thailand:

Just some of the food I have eaten (and in most cases, found delicious) in Thailand. Also check out the photos of Thai food.

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Chanthaburi is a province in the south-east of Thailand, bordering Cambodia. The province is best known for the gemstone mining and tropical fruits.

SIIT held their 2006 semi-annual meeting and New Years Party (see photos) at the Aek Pailin River Kwai Hotel (โรงแรม เอกไพลิน รีเวอร์แคว) in Kanchanaburi on 16-17 December 2006. We arrived by bus about 10:30am on Saturday morning, greeted with a welcome drink from the resort staff. As there was another function on the night before, we couldn’t check into rooms immediately (we also had meetings that started at 11am).

I first went to Kanchanaburi for an overnight stay for a SIIT meeting/party in December 2006 (check out the

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The gateway to Angkor Wat and the many other Wats of Cambodia.