U2!!!

I'm too tired to write much at the moment, but I got home from Sydney an hour or so ago, where I went to the first Sydney show of the Vertigo Australian tour!!! It was so good! We managed to get within about 5m of the walkway where Bono came to start the show, and throughout the night where all the guys (except The Edge :-( ) came down and played. Even the drummer came down to where we were for Love & Peace Or Else. They had a mini drum kit which was put there just for that song.

This isn't from the show we were at, but to just give you an idea of where we managed to stand, we were inside the green oval... :-)

Listen to ATC radio!

This is probably only of interest to those into aviation, but I found a link where you can listen to live streams of some of the Melbourne Airport air traffic control radio.

http://audio.liveatc.net:8012/ymmb.m3u

It really is live - I was listening to it, and was able to match up the flight numbers & weather info they mentioned with the Qantas, Virgin and Bureau of Meteorology websites.

Unfortunately you can't select exactly what you listen to - I would also like to hear the Melbourne Ground radio. Oh well. It's still kinda cool... :-)

When I was working at Sydney Airport last Thursday, I heard a bit of the Sydney Ground radio because we had a radio in the vehicle we were in.

The Concert

Well, I know it's a couple of weeks after the event, but I thought I'd write something about The Proclaimers' 40th anniversary concert.

For those who don't know, The Proclaimers is a gospel choir based at Rosanna Baptist Church. As you may have already guessed from the previous paragraph, 2006 is our 40th year. I've been in the group since 2000, and I am the current Technical Director.

On September 2, we held a reunion concert at the Ivanhoe Girls' Grammar Performing Arts Centre. The evening was divided up into eras, and each segment featured songs introduced in those years. The current group did a bracket of 7 songs, and then past members from each of the eras were invited to come down to the stage and join in for the songs they know.

My role was to organise the tech gear, design (& run) the lighting, set up (& run) the sound system, and obviously pack up at the end. I certainly didn't do it alone though. I had lots of assistance from (in alphabetical order): Amy, Andrew, Blaine, Bruce, Emily, Ian, Jessica, John R, John W (my dad. Also, thanks go to him for the photos below), Matt and Tim. I hope I haven't left anyone out. Apologies if I have.




The is the current group, with our Musical Director, Tim, out front.





This is the group from the first era of the choir (1966 - 1971). The soloist is Lindsay Summers, brother of the famous opera singer, Jonathan Summers. Jonathan was one of the original members of the group, but unfortunately was not able to be at the reunion concert.


The next era. We decided to associate a colour with each era (worked out from the colour of the uniforms at the time).


The colour for this era was supposed to be brown, so that orangey colour is the best brown I could make with just red, green and blue lights. It turned out ok I reckon!



The 'purple' era...hehe. This is actually different from the first photo - that is pink. Doesn't look much different in the photos though.


This is from the group of 'Classic' songs that span the whole history of the choir. Hence the colour here is white, representing a mix of all the eras.

There was also a 'green' era, but unfortunately I don't have any photos of that.


Here's the tech part. We had two mixers (one for live sound and one for the recording mix). That's me operating the live sound mixer on the left, and also (out of shot) the lighting console. On the recording mixer, we have a nice shot of Ian and his headphones.


The aftermath. Or part thereof. This is part of our tech gear. There was more spread across about 3 or 4 station wagons.

Here we have half of Blaine, Bruce and Ian. Bruce was able to borrow a truck from work to help transport the gear. Much appreciated!



All up, I had a 16 hour day from leaving home to coming back at night. Long day, but fun. The concert went really well, and everything came together nicely.

Apologies for the formatting of this post. When you're creating a post, what you see is NOT what you get...

Finally, something exciting!

Well, I finally have something interesting to talk about. Although I guess those who read this have probably already through other forums and stuff I'm in...anyway, here it is:


On the 18th of July, there was an incident involving an F-111 jet at RAAF base Amberley. The last of a group of 5 aircraft lost its rear left wheel on take-off, something that has never happened in 34 years of the RAAF flying F-111s. While this is interesting in itself, the more exciting part is that I was working on the airfield at the time, and I saw the whole thing with my own eyes! :)

I don't know what the odds are of me being there on the one day that this happened, but they must be pretty slim!

I was there to work on the lighting regulators for some of the approach lighting, and we were waiting (and watching) for the 5 F-111s to take off before I turned off the lights to start working on the regulators. We were a little surprised (to say the least!) to see the wheel come off and go hurtling down the runway, across some grass and then behind some buildings. The pilot was informed straight away, and declared mayday.

Our schedule for the day was disrupted as the whole base went into lockdown. I was able to finish that part of my work (it only took about 30mins), but we were stuck out on the airfield for a couple of hours while the aircraft circled overhead. Eventually we were instructed to vacate the airfield, and went down to the control tower (where I had to work on some more lighting regulators).

From the base of the tower, we were able to see the aircraft safely complete an emergency landing (with no landing gear). They used the arrester hook & cable to bring him down. It was quite spectacular. The pilot did an incredible job keeping the rear of the aircraft only a few feet off the ground for quite some time as he approached and snagged the cable.

Here's the aircraft still sliding on the ground after catching the cable:



So, all in all, it was a much more dramatic day than I had been expecting when I woke up!

Untitled

After about 5 months, I guess it's time to say something. Perhaps. I don't really have anything to say though, and I don't know if anyone evens reads this anymore anyway.

Hmm...well I'm out of ideas. Sorry. I might be back if I think of something. Don't hold your breath though. :-P

Westpac - Greedy, fee grabbing scum

Man I hate banks. I just got a letter from Westpac today telling me that the monthly account keeping fee is going up from $5 to $7.50. What a rip-off. How stupid do they think we are? As if it "costs" them that much to keep an account. It is pure greed, nothing more. Scumbags. I am so tempted to just close my accounts with them and tell them to piss off.

I've already shifted virtually all of my savings to ING, and boy did that feel good. Good because I actually get decent interest, and good because Westpac have much less of my money.

To the directors of the bank: You are just greedy bastards who don't give a crap about your customers and just want more money for yourselves. Pathetic. You should be absolutely ashamed of yourselves. You poor babies only made $700m last year. I guess you can only get 4 new boats each this year instead of 6. How awful for you.

I'm home

I'm back from Queensland. I had to go up there (to Amberley RAAF base) for work. Being on the base was an interesting experience, but the work part of it didn't go so well. It was a minor disaster in fact.

But work aside, I got to see quite a few aircraft take off and land (including F-111s, Caribou troop transports, Boeing 707s, Cobra helicopters). Like our own mini air show.

The F-111s sound pretty cool when they take off. VERY loud, and you can actually feel it through your clothes (they were taking off with the afterburners going).

Mobil-Quix fuel "discount" rip-off

Here's something I thought worth posting. Anyone who's considered using that Quix (Mobil) petrol "discount" offer, don't! It's a rip-off. You can't win.

For anyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about, they have an offer where if you spend $5 in store, they give you 4c/Litre off fuel. The first catch is, to make up that $5, you'd have to buy 125 Litres of petrol (more than even a Falcon or Commodore fuel tank).

$5.00 = 500c
500c / 4c/L = 125L

The second catch is, the fine print says the offer is limited to 100L of fuel! That means that as a best case, you lose $1.

RIP OFF!!!! Boycott the offer!

...

Just so there's something new here, guess what? A couple of days ago I got a laptop through work. It's just a hand-me-down, but hey, a laptop's a laptop right? Although if I had a dollar for every time I've had to reboot it while setting it up, I could just about retire.

I love the smell of burning resistors in the morning

Actually I don't (it's a foul smell, and probably toxic). But I got to smell it few times today. As I mentioned in a comment on the last post, I'm testing airfield lighting regulators (or constant current regulators - CCRs) at the moment. The one I did today had a wiring fault in it that took a little while to find, so in the process I burned out a number of resistors. You get a nice little plume of smoke as they fry...hehe

I managed to finish all the main tests today, and it's doing a full load (10kW) heat run overnight tonight, and I'll have to go in tomorrow and take some thermal photos of it and then turn it off.