We got a lead on an animal park that has koalas and other native wildlife all in an enclosed space where you can easily see them, but that a) involved paying for the privilege and b) kinda sounded like it would suck the fun out of the whole thing.

My dad gave me a lead about the information centre, which should have some maps of walking trails and such and that he’d walked up one such trail when stuck over here once before. Sabriena googled the information centre and found that they apparently have a koala resident in the trees outside it every so often, so we searched those trees and came up empty handed.

We then walked up to the Porcupine Lookout, and bit off more than we could chew. After walking a couple of kilometres and not finding any wildlife to speak of (though there were some fantastic views of the plains), we returned to the car ready to admit defeat and pay for the privilege of my wife losing her koala-virginity.

Duncan didn’t survive the 8km trip or so out there, and was napping by the time we arrived. No problem, they close at 4pm and he’ll be up by then we thought. Unfortunately, it was not to be, and they apparently decided to close early while he was still napping. We hung out for the rest of his nap, and about 15 minutes more, in the hopes they were closing for a break or something – but it was not to be.

We then realized we were on the wrong walking track to have the optimal chance to see koalas, so we went around another track and walked probably a K all up before admitting defeat again. It looks like we’re just not meant to see any.

We did see a pack of kangaroos or wallabies from the car though.

Every time I flash something new to my phone and wipe the data off it, I have to remember to disable my two-factor auth on both Google accounts first. I’ve forgotten to do this before, which resulted in burning one of my one time passwords.

I wished for ages I could just set up Google Authenticator on two phones at once and be done with it -that easy I’d have a backup authenticator if I lost one phone, broke one, or whatever. Blizzard let you do this with their authenticator – simply put the restore code in on a second device and both start generating the same pass codes.

I thought about trying to back up the data from authenticator, but figured out this simple solution that note seems amazingly obvious:

1. Remove two-factor auth from your account(s).
2. Add a new Android Authenticator to your account, stopping at the part where you scan the barcode.
3. Scan the same barcode on both phones.
4. After verifying both phones are generating the same codes, enter the code to verify it and finish the setup.

I can’t believe I’ve been putting up with it for so long when the solution is so simple. Now if I could just figure out term life insurance without medical exam I’d be set!

Of course I already knew that, but we just got back the back ground check for me from the AFP, which I now need to forward to the immigration department for Sabriena’s paperwork. I’m still waiting on the reports to come back from the FBI in the USA, since we both spent a significant amount of time there.

We also got Sabriena set up on temporary Medicare, which while we’re hoping not to use it is still a huge load off our minds. It’s the first time as a family we’ve all had medical coverage at the same time, and I think that’s pretty terrible.

It took us two trips to Ballarat to organize the Medicare though. I’d called in advance to figure out what paperwork to bring in, and they basically told us to bring in some ID and the paperwork from Immigration. I was going to instictively bring our entire folder with all our “important papers”, but Sabriena hates that I carry our entire life’s paperwork around with me so I didn’t.

It turns out that they do actually need to see our marriage certificate too, so we wasted a trip out to Ballarat. Oh well, at least it’s over with.

We turned the TV on one day to find we have zero reception in any of the rooms, so I went up on the roof to have a look and the cable came apart in my hands.

I dug up the old antenna and stuck it over on the edge of the roof using some crap we had laying around, and then pointed the thing as best I could using the reception meter of one of the set top boxes, the compass on my phone, and the locations of the TV broadcast stations in Australia.

Surprisingly enough, because my parents live in a valley, two of the closest and strongest broadcast sites aren’t any use to us. Bendigo’s tower should be fantastic, but unfortunately there’s giant hills in the way of it and the signal just doesn’t seem to come in at all. I managed to get the thing pointed between the hills at the Ballarat site and the reception’s decent when there’s no storms, so that’s good.

I also took the opportunity to re-run the cabling – the splitter and most of the non-brand-new cable my parents were using was absolutely terrible quality. Re-running everything using a decent UHF-capable splitter and everything seems to work much more reliably.

The new Github loads fantastic for me, even given our really spotty connection here.

When the cat’s away, the mice will play!

There’s been a couple of piles of garbage wood sitting on my parent’s place for ages, and now that we’re into Autumn/Winter, it’s safe to set them ablaze.

The transit’s out of commission for the time being, but Dad’s picked up a few jobs here and there and Mum’s gone with him… which means we can have a good time with impunity! Yay for feeling like I’m twelve again. \o/

All juvenile jokes aside, it was a bit too cold for Duncan to be out too late, so we didn’t stay out with it too long. Luke and Jess did, to keep an eye on it.

Once most of the sticks had burnt down and there was only coals left, Luke came up with the brilliant idea of doing a camp oven as well. It turned out really well, though his oven’s a bit small for the number of people we were trying to feed.

Given the amount of wood that goes into a decent sized bonfire, it’s probably easier just to check out something like GrillsDirect.com grills rather than build a bonfire every time you want to cook something, but when the occasion strikes, it’s fantastic.

The local Ford guy still has to wait for a few more emails and read more on the technical bulletins to try and figure out what’s going on, but it’s looking like the problem may not be fuel related at all and may in fact be the pedal sensor (it’s drive-by-wire).

The good news is I passed the course with flying colours - I basically 100%ed the exam. There was one multiple-choice question where I picked two of four potential answers and only one of them was correct, but apparently I wasn’t penalized. I think that’s pretty neat, and it’s funny that in my thirties I finally have my first qualification and it has absolutely nothing to do with IT.

We passed up another job through SA, this time going across the Nullarbor, because of the shitty condition the van’s in. It turned out for the best, as Dad picked it up instead. He also knows the driver and the other pilot (who’s the driver’s wife), and then to make things even better Mum went with him.

I have absolutely no concerns about our chances of getting another crack at going across the Nullarbor and that’s not really the area I wanted to take a sick van anyway.

In our downtime, I’ve managed to get quite a bit of stuff done on MumbleDog, things that I’d been procrastinating for quite a while. I’ve made a flurry of commits to our new “beta” admin panel (unfortunately one of which breaks support for “non-beta” servers, but that’s okay as I want to phase those out anyway and I don’t think there was anyone using that panel with those servers), fixing a ton of bugs and just generally making things look and work a lot better.

It’s good to be back doing what I’m good at, but man I’d really like to go out and see some shit again.

1) Activate the preview pane for Gmail.

2) Block the sidebar with the ads and shit in it.

Arne’s post says it works in Firefox, but it worked for me in Adblock for Chrome as well. I’ve found it a ton quicker to go through email that way.

The kid absolutely adores chocolate, and his eyes pretty much lit up when he saw it. Basically it’s a chocolate cake, with chocolate frosting, chocolate chips on the side and chocolate Cadbury Creme Eggs on the top, with chocolate drizzled all over it. Yeah.

The cake itself turned out fantastic, which much to my surprise (and a little bit of relief) Duncan ate most of. It was so incredibly rich that I found myself in an eyes-bigger-than-stomach scenario pretty quickly.

Duncan got assorted presents throughout the day – mostly Cars related stuff, because that’s his new thing again, along with a couple funny tshirts and that sort of thing.

Duncan takes great delight in being parked up at Roadhouses. Me, presuming internet access is available, I’m more happy to park out in the middle of nowhere as long as there’s a working toilet. Duncan on the other hand prefers to wake up to a sea of trucks – or “toot toots” as he calls them, perplexing, because he’s said the word “truck” before.

Port Augusta Ford (who are also an Isuzu dealer) managed to squeeze us in the next afternoon, but we went over there first thing in the morning to try our luck, simply for lack of anything better to do. It worked out pretty good, because we ended up with a loaner car for the morning. I stuck $10 worth of petrol in it and we went off to take a look around.

After spending some time at the “esplanade” and walking around in a giant circle, I got the shocking memory that I’d only intended to park the car where I did (on a gravel pull-in near the yacht club) for a few moments to look at the bay/gulf/whatever. We decided to get back in the car, and go check out the botanical gardens.

There’s not a whole lot to see there, unless you’re really into arid flora, but if you drive all the way through it to the rear-most car park there’s a pretty spectacular view of the narrower part of the Spencer Gulf. Apparently it’s somewhere around the spot some early adventurers gave up the idea that they’d found a water-course navigating straight up the guts of Australia, but the really interesting thing for us that day was a couple of Dolphins playing out in the bay, which I think we manage to take a good picture of.

We ended up taking the loaner car back just before 1pm, when the mechanics were supposed to be able to look at the van. We sat around for a few moments, then they took off with the van. At first they were thinking fuel pump (which is what I was dreading, because it’s an expensive operation and we’d be out of commission for a while), but after a quick test-run they didn’t think so.

The cheap scan tool they had wouldn’t read the codes off the thing (apparently Transits are picky like that) and the Ford one was at their sister dealership and wouldn’t be back for a few days. They cut the fuel filter open for a look, which was pretty much inconclusive, and then we were on our way home.

The van started really acting up (shuddering really hard, one of the side effects of novatest?) around Ouyen, Victoria, so we stopped for some lunch and so Duncan could play. We finally made it home around dinner time, and now we play the waiting game to figure out what’s going on with the van.