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I've just been on the phone to some friends back home who have lost everything when one of the fire fronts ripped through their suburb. One of those friends knew there were fires close to his suburb but usually if houses are affected it's because they are surrounded by trees backing onto bushland. In his case his house was 3 streets back, the suburb was ringed by a road and there's a decent break between the trees on the other side of the road and the road itself.
Canberra is Australia's capital city and after a year without decent rain everything is tinder dry. It's called the 'bush captial' for good reason, being surrounded mostly by grassland and eucalypt forests. Check out this image. The suburbs of Canberra are shaded orange. The red blurry line shows suburbs affected. The blue circle is the suburb where my friends house was.
Yesterday the temps were up around 38C/98F and the wind was so strong that trees were being uprooted. The fire had broken through the containment lines and the first thing my friend knew was when he was in the shower late in the afternoon and the water pressure dropped to nothing. He looked out and the sky was black and full of smoke, but there was no sound of police cars or fire engines. His neighbour had grabbed a garden hose and was trying to wet down his house but without water pressure it was no good. Besides - they were streets away from any bushland so he didn't honestly think there was too much to worry about.
Within a couple of minutes sparks and live embers started raining down on him and the house, carried hundreds of metres by the wind. His neighbour yelled out that he was outta there, so he raced inside to grab his dog and man-handled her into the car. Soon after leaving, the houses across the road from his went up, then jumped across to his house and continued on into the suburb, eventually taking out a petrol station, an animal hospital and a fire station. It's weird - I know that suburb well and the petrol station is deep in the middle of the suburb surrounded by roads and concrete. It's the last place you would expect a bush fire. It's so suburban.
All afternoon and into the night the local radio station had been in emergency warning mode, sounding a siren every 15 minutes and relaying a list of suburbs to be on stand by for evecuation. Everyone was told to get home to their houses, remove dry leaf litter from their roof gutters and property and be ready to put out any spot fires caused by embers.
Police placed roadblocks to stop people getting into the affected areas and people weren't allowed back to their houses for any reason - not even if they wanted to grab precious items or save family pets.
Two other friends of mine stayed up until 3am listening to the reports, bags packed, angry pet cat in arm. They lived on the edge of one of the suburbs named and even though they didn't feel they were in too much danger they'd been told to prepare so there was nothing to do but sit and wait. Two suburbs over, just up the road from another friend another spot fire had sprung up and taken out more homes just up the road from them. The houses are on the other side of a 4 lane highway that backs onto grassland.
The next morning my friend went back to survey the damage and there was nothing left. It was earily quiet and already hot, and as they waited by one of the road blocks a resident came running down and shouted something at the police. They followed him back to one of the raised houses and minutes later an ambulance roared past after them.
All up 388 homes have been lost, most of them in the same are that was devastated last year. So much forest had been lost last year that it seemed that the cycle of fires had done their duty for another few years at least, but a friend told me on the phone that the fires last year - the worst we've ever witnessed - were a weekend barbeque compared to this.
Just before I left Canberra a week ago to come back to Toronto I drove through the parts that had been burned last year and I remember thinking that in one way it was good the fire had happened since it meant the houses near the remaing trees would be safe. Obviously I should not be trusted for fire safety advice.
It's now 11 am back home and the temperature is again expected to soar. The Weather Bureau expect that conditions will remain the same for a few more days, meaning slim chance of getting the fires contained any time soon.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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Wednesday, Jan 22
A few flurries
High -18°C Low -18°C Wind 20 km/h N P.O.P 60%
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Chris Maunder wrote:
High -18°C Low -18°C Wind 20 km/h N P.O.P 60%
*shog does quick conversion to real UOMs in his head*
A balmy 75° with a light breeze?
*shog vows to stop doing UOM conversions in his head*
---
Shog9
The siren sings a lonely song - of all the wants and hungers
The lust of love a brute desire - the ledge of life goes under
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test
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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Don't you hate those cold and flu tablet commercials where someone on death's door takes a cold and flu tablet and 10 minutes later is busy climbing Mt Everest or competing in the Boston marathon.
achoooo.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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Absolutely! What about the pain and misery I'm going to be in for the next week or two? Why must they lure me in with a false sense of hope? "Oh yeah! If I take this pill, I'll be better by tomorrow." Riiiight...
Are you alright Chris? You aren't sick are you? If you are, don't go anywhere near Bob or the servers unless they have the proper PChealth measures installed.
I don't know whether it's just the light but I swear the database server gives me dirty looks everytime I wander past.
-Chris Maunder
Microsoft has reinvented the wheel, this time they made it round.
-Peterchen on VS.NET
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I've been pointedly, painfully healthy while everyone around me has succumbed to some kind of soul destroying bug that turns people into quivering piles of phlegm. I got back from Redmond and immediately turned into said pile of phlegm. Life has a sense of humour.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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I think I have a big bit of paper on my back with "Will listen to anyone's life story. The longer and more gruesome the better".
I was standing at a bus stop waiting in what must have been -100C for, obviously, a bus. An old guy comes up to me and asks me what I'm doing on this fine morning. I looked at him, looked at the ice forming on my fingers, and even watched in a meaningful sort of way a frozen pelican tumble from the heavens just to make it clear that 'fine' was something I wasn't willing to concede just yet, and said 'just waitin' for a bus'. He then tells me about his life as a professional snooker player and marble sculptor, and his new hobby of passing on his wisdom at his local church. It was truly fascinating.
About 2 hrs later I'm at a subway stop. This time a guy from San Salvador starts explaining to me in great detail how deep the subway's in Toronto are and how often Toronto has earthquakes. So far, so good. He then tells me about his life 25 years ago where he watched 12,000 people in his city die in a volcanic eruption. He was trapped in his house for 3 hours and he painted me gruesome pictures of people half buried in the rubble and landslides - or more often, the remnants of bodies after they'd been tumbled along with the slides.
Two glimpses of strange lives from total strangers. It was great.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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Chris Maunder wrote:
how deep the subway's in Toronto are and how often Toronto has earthquakes
That is like a safety inspector telling you off handidly two hours into the Nuclear Power Station Tour that this particular power station has the highest leakage incident record in the country...
Chris Maunder wrote:
"Will listen to anyone's life story
You should add " for food, booze or a ticket to a warmer climate" to the end of the paper...
You must just have one of those friendly faces Chris.
Paul Watson Bluegrass Cape Town, South Africa Colin Davies wrote:
...can you imagine a John Simmons stalker !
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Chris.. how the hell do you attract these people???? Seriously though. Get Dave to see if there is a piece of paper back there...
Regards,
Brian Dela
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if a pretty girl talks to you, you don´t want to check your back, right?
;);)
sunny
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I also live in Toronto, but you seem to have a much brighter view of this city than I do, that's for sure. WHY on earth did you ever leave Australia??
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jpercival wrote:
WHY on earth did you ever leave Australia??
For Code Project. For us.
Paul Watson Bluegrass Cape Town, South Africa Shog9 wrote:
Everybody just wants to be naked and famous, Paul.
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Paul Watson wrote:
For Code Project. For us.
ROTFLMAO I love the way you put that
Regards,
Brian Dela
"There should be an amendment to the constitution, that every president must be examined for paranoia before moving into office." - peterchen
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Paul Watson wrote:
For Code Project. For us.
Hu? But we live in the World Wide Web!
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funkycoder wrote:
Hu? But we live in the World Wide Web!
Yes but servers and sponsoring companies do not.
Paul Watson Bluegrass Cape Town, South Africa Paul Watson wrote:
"The Labia [cinema]... ...was opened by Princess Labia in May 1949..."
Christian Graus wrote:
See, I told you it was a nice name for a girl...
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What's it like being in a snowy city? Wonderful. Wonderful tending to slightly inconvenient.
I'm sitting in a cafe sipping a coffee, listening to Louis Armstrong and munching on some sugar and butter thinly disguised as a muffin. Outside the snow is dumping down covering the grey pavement, the potholed roads, the trees, the squirrels and the SUVs. Pickups with snow plows attached to their front cruise around like eager puppy dogs looking for the perfect place to do their morning ablutions. The sky is grey - but not a dark oppressive grey of a drizzly day, but rather a light, bright day. Everything else is white.
If you've ever seen the movie 'A better life' there's a scene in the Angel Gabriel's office. Everything's white. The stairs, the floors, the furniture and the clothes. It makes an area look bigger, cleaner, and slightly surreal. That's what Toronto is like at the moment. There are no shadows since the light is reflected from everything.
It's the first real snowfall this season so everyone's kind of excited and kind of unprepared. Drivers slip around the icy roads like little cartoon cars and taxi drivers haven't yet become bored of finding piles of slush to drive through in order to spray as many pedestrians as possible. At least I know enough now to wear dark pants if I'm going to be walking outside. The people are walking around with a 'at least it isn't raining' kind of demeanor mixed with what seems like a little suppressed excitement. Maybe it's my imagination, but when there's 6 inches of snow on the ground, Santa Clauses are out and about and Christmas lights start to appear then you know something's up.
I also find the snow insanely romantic. I'm as incapable as the next guy of getting in touch with my caring, sharing side but on a day like today all I want to do is curl up in front of an open fire with a bottle of wine and know that regardless of how warm and cozy I am inside, it's still reassuringly cold and white outside. Couples are walking along hand in hand, kids are throwing snowballs, parents are dragging babies along the footpaths in sleds and clumps of snow are falling off awnings and burying little old ladies.
The thing that amazed me is the sound that snow makes when it falls. I remeber reading a David Edding's novel where an old story teller was so adept that he could even mimic the sound of falling snow. Sound? How can something so light and soft make a sound? I finally heard it about a year ago. Imagine a large still pond on a very quiet day with a light drizzle falling. The rain as it hits the water makes thousands of tiny 'plinks' that together form a quiet kind of white noise. Snow is just like that, but replace the 'plink' with a 'tink', make it a little quieter, notch it up one octave, speed it up a little and change the lighting from grey to off-white. Now just stand still and listen. It's magic.
And then there's the slightly annoying bit. When it rains it usually runs off pretty quickly. Snow doesn't. It piles on your head, gets caught down the back of your neck and covers the paths in a layer of slick ice. Stepping off the path onto a road means a quick decision about the state of the anow on the road. Is it snow? Or is it a deep puddle of icy cold water with a thin layer of snowing floating on top? It can make a big difference to the rest of your day. The paths become narrower, traffic slower, and the snow on the roads quickly becomes brown and horrible.
And you know what's weird? I know I'm going to be sad tomorrow morning when I wake up and find it's stopped snowing.
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I love snow. I would like to live where it snows more but then it would be cold more often too. I would like to live in the happy medium 65-75 degrees (F).
How much snow do you get up there every year? Here in central Illinois I'd say we get about 20 inches.
Jason Henderson start page ; articles
henderson is coming
henderson is an opponent's worst nightmare
* googlism *
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Hi Chris,
This is so not fair. I am just about to count my blessings and brag about how we had a great outdoor soccer game (football for the rest of us) at 9 PM last night here in the medical city in Riyadh. And how artificial grass gives you carpet burns .
YOU HAVE TO make the white side greener, Don't you!!.
Cheers dude.
It is Illogical to define an inventor by his invention
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The best thing about snow is that when you see snow, you know that somewhere....
somewhere...
someone...
... is playing ice hockey.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
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cheers,
Chris Maunder
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Or that somewhere it is summer......curses.
In sunny ol england we don't have seasons, we have a climate. one that is is both crap and never changing.
We brought out this new and very similar version of our expensive software because the old version was......old....It's a good enough excuse for Microsoft so its fine for us.
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