Now that's Aussie

In celebration of everything Australian, Australia Day long weekend just passed and all - I bring you the Beer Thong - yep, you can knock the top of a coldie with the inbuilt bottle opener.

Complete with an ace beer drinking wench slouching over her Corona.
The only thing more Aussie would be bitch'n about kiwis and throwing a few koalas on the barbie.

You could have your very own Pet Goth

This is just odd.

Mum commented on my blog !!!

It's taken two years, several show and tells during visits, a edit to the blog saying [mum click here to comment] and a click by click phone tutorial whilst she submitted it but she finally did it.
Ok, so she commented in the wrong post but hay - WAY TO GO MUM !!

Modifying the $X$, sorry, that's 4X4

Yes I drive an obnoxious 4X4, get over it.
The 02 95 series Prado 3.4 VX auto sits like a monster in the uni car park beside the students clapped out bugs and mopeds. Closer inspection would reveal the three child seats in the second row and pram the boot making it look more like mum's taxi than a Tarago.
We are planning to modify it a little to make it safer and better equipped to use for camping and touring and perhaps towing a camper trailer.
To date we've got the car fridge (Waco 60) and roll around on All Terrain Tyres (cooper ATR's).

Planned modifications include:
- roof basket to carry more stuff
- cargo barrier so we don't end up with a fridge in the back of the head if we have to jump on the anchors
- Second battery so we can still start the car in the morning after running the fridge all night
- Bull bar because hitting a roo hurts but mostly because you need one to mount a winch and spotlights (so you can see the roos and hop-fully not hit them), To date I've hit a horse, a cow, several roos, several owls, an eagle, a goat and one very cross emu that ended up in the back seat of a ute with minus its legs. Anything I can put between me and the queue of beasts like that which assembled before Noa's Arc on the road ahead of me is money well sepnt.
- Spotlights / driving lights bright enough to be seen from Venus
- Stiffer suspension and rear poly air bags to make the suspension adjustable for towing variable loads.
- Winch to haul our sorry asses out of a hole
- Snorkel because engines don't run too well when they are full of water
- UHF radio

There are a few other odds and ends that will make life a little easier like a better mapping solution than the stand alone GPS and paper maps or extended range fuel tanks to extend our already ridiculous 1000km range but ultimately we drool after one of These
quero mucho

Spotted in the garden

An eastern brown snake.

Appearance: any colour from brown to black to orange, with or without black stripes - want to test your luck identifying it?

Distribution: every damn place except Tasmania but including the Lance Cove River National Park, which is on the other side of my back fence.

Is it dangerous?

In Australia there are about 3,000 snake bites per year, of which 200 to 500 receive antivenom; on average one or two will prove fatal. About half the deaths are due to bites from the brown snake; the rest mostly from tiger snake, taipan and death adder. Some deaths are sudden, however in fact it is uncommon to die within four hours of a snake bite.

- Good to know that it is uncommon to die within 4 hours.

The snake wrangler came to catch it and was all "oh fark" when he saw that it was not a common python as he believed it to be. He spend his time futzing about and patting his back pocket to make sure his compression bandage was still there. He didn't manage to catch it but I'm not sure that I blame him. At least it wasn't one of these.

Back at work today

I've been looking after the kids but they went back to child care today, so daddy goes back to work.

276 emails

23 phone messages

15 days to recrute a Perl programmer / sys admin / web admin who lives and breaths LDAP

3 months of purchace orders to do (I really should have doen them last year)

1 new boss

1 less direct reports