The MacAlba

Winter in New England (that’s the Australian New England) means, typically, days filled with clear, blue skies, and nights of cold, crisp, air and frost. It’s usually quite dry, cold enough for snow, but not wet enough. It wouldn’t be completely unheard of for the overnight minimum to get down to -15 degC (5 degF). We are over 1 km (3400 ft) above sea level after all.

Winter this year, though, has been quite mild - so far. The sun has hardly been seen these past few weeks. It’s been overcast and grey. I’ve had something in the rain gauge each morning to be able to add to the rain chart. Being the last day of June today, it was the day to total up the month’s rainfall. The tally was 82.6 mm (3.2 inches) with something in the gauge on 14 days. That means that June has had almost twice as much rain as the previous 3 months added together. Too bad it’s too cold to promote growth of feed for the neighbour’s sheep and cattle.

This sounded pretty good until I heard that the best (or worst, depending on whether you were flooded or not) was 550 mm (21.6 inches) in the past few days north east of here, at Mullumbimby, on the coast.

New South Wales - drought and flood at the same time.

I’ve just installed the latest version of Apples iTunes - v4.9. The obvious new feature in this version is the ability to subscribe to, download, and manage podcasts, and again obviously, the podcast feature can leverage on iTunes ability to load the audio file onto an iPod.

I have a long time interest in podcasting having first started my own, the lookANDsee photoblog podcast, on August 25, 2004. I have used a variety of podcast clients, most recently the one build into NetNewsWire. Whilst the latter suits me very well I was curious to see how iTunes copes.

There’s an immediate visual clue with a new playlist titled “Podcasts” with its own purple icon (at least on a Mac). Clicking this playlist brings up a typical iTunes playlist screen, and a “Settings” button. This button is a shortcut into the Preferences menu for Podcasts. Here you can set update frequency, how many podcasts to download if the feed is new, how many to keep, and which and how many to upload to an iPod.

Next, I went looking to find how to subscribe to a podcast. That had me stumped for a minute of so until, while I was methodically working through the menus, I found it under “Advanced | Subscribe to Podcast”. The podcast’s feed URL gets inserted here.

Then, perhaps anticlimactically, it operates just as you’d expect. the latest podcast is fetched, loaded into the playlist, and you then can listen via iTunes or upload to the iPod.

Being on a lowly dialup connection, I haven’t downloaded much as yet. The acid test is to take it on the road and give the iPod menus a workout. I don’t expect any problems though.

Some of the iTunes Music stores will also let you pick podcasts. The UK store doesn’t, but the USA store does, for example. My own podcast “lookANDsee” can be found using the search facilitiy and shows up in the “Arts and Entertainment”, “International”, and “Audio Blogs” sections. I clicked the “Subscribe” button, and, Voila!, it appeared in the iTunes Podcast playlist.

Update: The UK store now shows “Podcasts”.

On the downside, having noted that the URL for my podcast is an old “podkey” one, I went to update it via the “Publish a Podcast” button. I input my preferred feed URL; OK; I gave it my Apple ID username and password; OK; then it wanted me to register an iTunes account; bummer. Being in a country that has yet to get an iTunes store, I couldn’t get past that hurdle.

Oh well, for a version 1.0 model it’s pretty good. I await version 1.1.

It was only a couple of days ago when I wrote about small groups of kangaroos being seen while out on my early morning jog. Over the weekend I’ve become aware that the roos must be suffering the effects of the drought and are moving closer to habitation than they normally would, and in greater numbers.

This morning I watched a couple of roos a couple of metres away from my study window - then I saw a couple of ears hopping just above the bottom of the window frame - a young roo must have been hopping along the outside of the house. Minutes later a loud clatter came from the verandah. A large roo had decided that he was too close to us for comfort - he hopped off the verandah, knocking potted plants over, and caused potting mix to spill everywhere.

Walking with the dogs in the afternoons on our property, I’ve counted about 40 to 50 roos watching us approach, and hopping away. Likewise, further afield on the morning jogs, roos have been in greater numbers on the neighbour’s property - competing with the sheep for feed.

Where are they coming from? The gorge country? Or from neighbouring properties that have little feed left?

Does this mean that if Scotland were to suffer from drought, that the Haggis would begin to be seen closer to habitation than normal?

There was a period, not too many months ago, when there was what seemed like a never-ending stream of media reports from Australia, the UK, and the USA about ever-increasing percentages of the nations’ populations, and especially their children’s, being categorised as obese. And if not obese, then most definitely overweight.

I was, at that point, about mid way though my own weight reduction regime.

Over the years I’d been slowly but surely putting on weight. This was a combination of exercising less than I used to, and eating more than I needed. I would say that I was eating reasonably healthily, but simply eating too much. My BMI (Body Mass Indicator) was 27.7 meaning that I was mid-range “overweight”.

Towards the end of October last year I decided, one Sunday, that enough was enough, and that I would rectify the situation - beginning that day. My “secret” was, simply, to eat less - not differently. I steadily lost just under 1 kg each week (2 lb) for about 12 or so weeks, then, strangely, the weight loss dropped to about 0.5 kg (1 lb) each week (give or take a little) for another 12 or so weeks. The end result being that after 7 months, I’d lost a little over 20 kg (45 lbs). My BMI is now 21.5. This puts me at mid-range “normal”.

Without any conscious intention or effort, as of about 3 weeks ago, my “walking the dogs” each morning has become “jogging with the dogs”. I certainly work up a sweat - and that’s with the temperature dipping down to -6 degC (21 degF) around sunrise. I’m not looking forward to finding out what jogging’s like if we get down to the lowest winter minimums of around -15 degC (5 degF).

To be honest, I can’t say that I feel any different - before my weight loss I wasn’t feeling short of energy, or feeling tired, or ill, or suffering in any noticeable way. The only difference is, as noted above, that I’ve started jogging again. I’ve even had my mountain bike serviced and am looking forward to doing some cycling again.

The tricky thing now it to find the level of food intake required to maintain my current weight - and not put it on again. To assist here I continue to record and graph my weight on a weekly basis - any trend (whether up or down) should become fairly obvious.

Oh, I nearly forgot, one bad (and good) aspect of losing so much weight is that I now have to purchase new clothes. I’m still wearing my old jeans around the house - when I undo my belt and hold the waistband out to its former location (in front of my stomach), there’s a rather large gap It reinforces the benefit of what I’ve done to think that not so many months ago, that air gap between my stomach and the jeans was once filled with fat!

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[With thanks to Dave Slusher / Evil Genius Chronicles, and Mark VandeWettering / Brainwagon, whose talking about their own weight reduction programmes got me thinking about mine ]

For the past several mornings now, as I’ve been jogging with the dogs, we’ve seen many more kangaroos than in previous weeks. As we head down the track from the house to the road, about a kilometre, we see about 25 to 30 ‘roos, in two or three groups. They’re mostly females with a young offspring at foot, and many have joey’s in pouch. One or two solitary adult males can be seen amidst the trees.

Solitary swamp wallabies can also be seen, but usually within 100 metres of the house where there’s more tree cover.

I wonder if the drought has them congregating on our property because there’s more feed here than on neighbouring properties (as we’ve no stock that would compete for feed), or if it’s just that the tree cover provides greater shelter from the winter overnight temperatures (lows of -6 degC (21F)).

Do you sometimes get SPAM email that isn’t intended to be SPAM (although that’s always debatable)?

On a sadly more and more frequent basis I receive emails from reputable companies telling me that I’ve been selected to receive a free subscription to something or other - usually a magazine, an audio book - or special discount offer. I usually ignore these emails (if my anti-SPAM filter hasn’t already consigned them to the Junk folder) as I’m wary of such offers in the first place.

Of late, though, I’ve fallen for a couple of freebie offers - the magazines and source emails and web sites given are, after all, quite reputable. So to the crunch. Remembering that I’ve been personally selected to receive the goods (as if), I go to sign up — only to be told at that point that the offer is only valid in the USA. Don’t these guys get a clue from my work email address, the one with the .au on the end, that I’m not in the USofA? Haven’t these reputable companies gone to the trouble of filtering the country codes from the data they’ve already collected from me? I can only assume that they’re lazy - it’s easier to just blast email at everybody than actually do some work and remove those addresses that aren’t part of the target group.

I do the only thing I can — I remember the due consideration they’ve (not) given to me as a potential customer and reward them by not purchasing anything from them unless I really have to. A small gesture, I know, but at least I feel a bit better.